Igor Mantsov. Face

Face
Igor Mantsov

Date of publication: September 1, 2004

What is the film doing to us? How is he rebuilding us? It's not entirely clear. How will it turn out? Cinema is a lot of money and a lot of people; the author never fully controls the work. In essence, the film is a zone of uncertainty, a zone of weightlessness . What we will push off from and in which direction we will float depends on our preliminary installation. From our will. But also from the will of the world.

It seemed that the American blockbuster I, Robot gravitates toward the issue of “man and technology.” I came up with a text in exactly this vein before watching it, based on a commercial dedicated to the release of “Robot.” And it was the correct text that has the right to exist. However, already in the auditorium a struggle of interpretations began. Under the pressure of a new, living text, the correct one crumbled into microplots and died. Archaeological sites and minerals have been preserved, which are a pity to bury. Here they are, for starters.

For the film "North by Northwest" Hitchcock came up with the following episode. Detroit, Ford plant, Cary Grant walks along the assembly line with one of the workers. Long travel, the two discuss the absent master. Nearby, cars are assembled, part by part. Finally, the Ford, born before our eyes, is ready to leave the line. The admiring interlocutors open the door, and a corpse falls out. Most likely, the corpse of the very master they were talking about. “Where did the body come from? ” Hitchcock himself wondered. “ The corpse falls out of nowhere, you understand!” - "A wonderful example of absolute nothingness!" - his interlocutor Francois Truffaut admired Hitchcock in solidarity.

Hitchcock's surprise is noteworthy: it is unfeigned. The invariably attentive Hitchcock didn’t just invent the episode, no, he spied on it, logically deducing it in the same way as one deduces a meaning-forming formula in mathematics. The episode is forcibly dictated to the artist by the modern World. What is this Ford? Where does it come from? What is its nature? The two observers click their tongues in admiration. The head of the assembly, a man, turns out to be dead as soon as the car is born.

The episode never made it into the film. “The trouble is that it didn’t fit into the plot!” - Hitchcock complained. Does this mean that the plot is the privilege of a person who is distinguished from the “technical subject” by name and attendant fate, and that the triumph of the conveyor belt anticipates the end of the narrative? Of course it is; obviously. However, Hitchcock's unrealized episode is too exciting to be limited to such content.

Very soon, in the underrated film Zabriskie Point, Antonioni will finish what Hitchcock left in bewilderment. In the late 50s, the boundary between living and nonliving is still obvious. A convinced urbanist, Hitchcock still does not know what to do with the semantic gap, with the black hole, or otherwise with the triumph of the conveyor belt. In fact, at the center of all Hitchcock's films is the identification of the individual, the identification of individual content. "That man?" or “wrong person?”; the last humanist, Hitchcock, is concerned with difference. Hence his exaggeratedly “interesting” plot, which paradoxically comes to deny itself. The "extremely interesting" Ford car episode hints at the possible end of individual mythology.

Antonioni resorts to a deceptive plot: the end of the 60s, youth unrest, an imitation of a revolution. But this is not the real content of the film. A man senselessly hijacks a plane and dies: this is how the active masculine principle is actualized. In revenge on his killers, the woman mentally blows up the consumer society and, after crying for a while, goes in search of new pleasure and a new partner: such is the dreamy female nature.

The central episode of the film is a race in the desert, simulating flirting and copulation. While the girl is rushing in the car, the guy takes the “position from above”: at breakneck speed his plane performs unimaginable somersaults. That's it, unmediated love between two biological bodies, two individuals, is now impossible. The individuality of biological bodies, now firmly welded to conveyor-type things like cars and airplanes, is erased! Antonioni wittily emphasizes this with a mysterious scene in a canyon where hundreds of young men and women make love while rolling in the dust . It is common to understand the scene as a hymn to free love. Of course, such an explanation is nonsense. On the contrary, the scene disavows free biological love, which is always associated with mucus, moisture, and secretions. Antonioni is not a writer, but a film director, so he activates tactile memory. “Dry sex” is nonsense, profanation. Is it right to consider a girl in a car and a guy on a plane to be collective bodies - that’s the first question. Does the affirmative answer indicate the collapse of humanism and the beginning of the era of neo-paganism - here is the second.

From a recently shown TV movie about the Titanic, I was amazed to learn that several ships similar to the sunken monster were built at once! A certain "Olympic" was identical to the "Titanic", its length was smaller by a purely symbolic amount: by a meter or two! There is a version that before the ill-fated swim, the Titanic was replaced by the Olympic for certain financial and corporate reasons (insurance, etc.). By the way, the expedition that examined the sunken ship did not discover the name "Titanic".

However, I am interested in something else. "Olympic" (or is it "Titanic"?) was dismantled down to the screws in 1938 at one of the European shipyards. Why exactly was it dismantled, what kind of zeal? Is it right to consider the radical elimination of this “witness” as murder? Finally, an absolutely delightful question. Perhaps we can say that the bones of a deceased person remember who they belonged to. Most likely, bones are less durable than iron. In this case, do the screws, bolts and bells of the Olympic scattered throughout the world “remember” their “subjectivity”?

And yet, “I, Robot”: an average, but real movie , because it transmits its true content in a visual way, thus correcting literature with narration. So, thousands of rebel robots, egg-headed and uniform, with erased faces. Among them is one good one, essentially a “super robot”, named Sunny. He's a good guy, but outwardly he's no different from the bad guys, he's the same egg instead of a face. A poorly memorable heroine, expressionless men, and among this triumph of facelessness, the only expressive face is the dark-skinned Will Smith, who is truly interesting to look at .

That's it, the movie happened, and here is its true plot. The face is the only guarantee of human authenticity, a miracle . Intelligence? But already in 2038, when the action develops, robots have surpassed people in cunning, sanity and even nobility. Name? The Ford car and the Olympic motor ship are quite well called , and the Sunny robot even responds to good human words. Over the course of two hours, the picture presents hundreds of living and mechanical subjects, but the attentive viewer reacts with gratitude to only one of them!

The authors deliberately sacrifice the melodramatic line by choosing an inexpressive actress as Will Smith's girlfriend. So as not to confuse the cards and break the general line. So that we choose not between two living faces, but between a single living person and hundreds of erased, mechanical ones.

If in a literary text the authenticity of a biography is guaranteed by a name , then in cinema the function of a name is naturally performed by a person . Well, of course, in the films of the same Hitchcock, a name is nothing more than the name of a person ! Hitchcock, whose poetics go back to the English caricature of the 19th century, masks the real drama with sophisticated narratives: the drama of human difference , convincingly embodied in his symphony of faces.

Thus, Hitchcock was extremely dissatisfied with the work of Paul Newman in the film "Torn Curtain" . “He plays “by method”! ” the director grinned, referring to Newman’s passion for Stanislavsky’s system. “ Therefore, it is unthinkable for him to portray something neutral on his face. Instead of just looking at a knife or sausage, he played with passions . ” “Passion” and “system” are subordinate narratives, something conveyor belt, whereas Hitchcock demanded that the actor present himself as he is. To present your Being, and not fantasies on the proposed topic.

Watching how the Chinese beat ours for two weeks in a row in all the full-time martial arts of the Athens Olympiad, I remembered how developed the mythology of the individual is in China. Even the political victory of Mao Zedong over Chiang Kai-shek is usually interpreted there in a metaphysical vein. "A man with a woman's face" Mao Zedong was doomed to dominate the fight against the "turtle head" Chiang Kai-shek! And Marshal Lin Biao, who, due to the special mobility of the cervical spine, could turn his head without moving his shoulders, and therefore belonged to the “turning lion” subspecies, had no chance in the fight with Zhou Enlai, because the latter had a pathological addiction to a dish with a similar title.

Attention, this is serious business! Let the fools and saboteurs laugh. There are a lot of Chinese, but they are not robots. They have a cultural mechanism to distinguish each face . And on the contrary, the drama of modern Russia is that it is building itself based on the undemocratic noble, and essentially lordly, culture of past centuries! “I erected a monument to myself, not made by hands. The people’s path to it will not be overgrown . ” Why, it will still be overgrown. Hardly a patient people will die.

In my vengeful dreams, those who survived by 2038, that is, the happily arrogant racial elite, are once again appointed slaves by the victorious Chinese . The dejected, demoted elite learns to understand the peculiarities of narrow-eyed anthropology. He studies hieroglyphs and democracy. I wake up in a good mood. All goes to good. Everything will be fine.