Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida"

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks—I think—Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray (not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a small, white Polish sedan (is it a Trabant? a Syrena? I’d love to know) has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.

The 9/11 Memorial: Gopnik v. Filler

Adam Gopnik, in his "Stones and Bones" (The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2014), is critical of the fountains that mark the footprints of the North and South Towers at the Michael Arad-designed National September 11 Memorial, New York City. He calls them “crashing double sinks” (“The crashing double sinks seem unsuited to the necessary reticence of an effective memorial”). He says,

Although officially described as “reflecting pools,” they are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection. Wildly out of scale with the rest of the site in their immensity, they are subterranean waterfalls – two huge sinks spilling chlorinated water from their edges, which then flows up and over a smaller platform at their center, and down the drain, only to rise and be recycled. Their constant roar interrupts any elegiac feeling that the lists of engraved names of the dead which enclose them might engender.

Contrast this with Martin Filler’s effusive view, as expressed in his memorable “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero” (The New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011):

As one nears the pools, walking across the light-gray granite paving stones installed by Walker, the murmur of rushing water rises from the cascades that pour Niagara-like down all four sides of the sunken fountains. The sound becomes louder and louder, until it reaches such a steady crescendo that the noise of the surrounding city, even from the construction going on very close by, is drowned out completely.

The veil-like flow of water down the dark-gray granite-clad sides of the recirculating pools is a feat of hydraulic engineering achieved by the installation of weirs—downward-curving comb-like spillways—set all around the upper perimeter of the giant squares. Looking down into the equilateral thirty-foot-deep pits, one sees yet another, far smaller square recessed even more deeply at the midpoint, bringing to mind a simplified, monochromatic version of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. With that last, centered quadrangle, the water vanishes into nothingness.

The propulsive aural and visual excitement of the three-story-deep waterfall and its mysterious disappearance captures and holds your attention in a way most unusual for the static medium of conventional architecture. That distraction makes one’s next perception all the more shocking, as you focus on the names of the victims, incised into the continuous tilted rim of bronze tablets that surround each pool.

The initial perspective provided by the cascades mimics a technique employed in classical Japanese gardens, through which one’s gaze is briefly diverted by a change in paving, screening, or some other element to dramatize a coming transition. Here, after you take in the diaphanous waterfalls, you discover spread out before you at waist level the names, the names, the names. Nearly three thousand victims—not only those lost at the World Trade Center, but also those who died at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—are memorialized with their names inscribed in Hermann Zapf’s classic Optima typeface of 1952–1955 (an elegant, slightly flaring sans-serif font), with the letters cut through the bronze so they can be backlit after dark. This is a typographic tour de force.

Filler calls the Memorial “a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.” His beautiful piece inspires me to visit the Memorial and see it with my own eyes.

But even without viewing it firsthand, I think I see an error in Gopnik’s description. He says that the pools “are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection.” The above aerial photograph, used to illustrate Benjamin Anastas’s "Atrocity Exhibition" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 24, 3014), an absorbing account of Anastas’s recent visit to the Memorial and Museum (he calls the Museum a “mindfuck”), shows one of the Memorial pools beautifully reflecting a wedge of brilliant sunlight and the tops of at least two trees. This is reflection in the sense of a surface throwing back light without absorbing it. As Filler points out, the abstract nature of the pools also invites meditative reflection: “But of course it is precisely the abstract nature of Arad’s design, which eschews all representational imagery, that will allow visitors to project onto it thoughts and interpretations of a much more individual nature than if the memorial had been laden with pre-packaged symbols of grief.”

Who is right – Gopnik or Filler? Although the validity of Gopnik’s view is seriously undermined by his erroneous representation of the pools as non-reflecting, I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve seen the Memorial myself. I hope to do so later this year.

July 28, 2014 Issue

Reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s amusing account of her family’s “experience in Stone Age eating” (“Stone Soup,” in this week’s issue), I inwardly cheered when she finally delivered her dismissal of the kooky “pre-agricultural” diet: “From an environmental standpoint, paleo’s ‘Let them eat steak’ approach is a disaster.” “Yes!” I wanted to shout. And it’s a disaster from another, more basic standpoint, too – the pleasure of good eating. Kolbert quotes David Perlmutter as saying that “sandwiches are not just hard on the digestive system; they wreak havoc on the mind.” I read that it disbelief. Just the words “Schwartz’s smoked meat on rye” make me drool like a Saint Bernard. I love sandwiches.  And I love reading about people who love sandwiches. See, for example, Calvin Trillin’s delectable “New Grub Streets” (The New Yorker, September 3, 2001):

It was on the way home from one of those rambles that I stopped my bike on East Broadway and Forsyth, where street vendors were selling several unfamiliar items. What caught my eye was a sandwich, tightly wrapped in clear plastic. It consisted of an ordinary Western-style bun – what I assume the Chinese would refer to with some word that translates literally as “the sort of bread foreign devils eat” – and something green peeking out of the middle. I risked a dollar for a taste. Inside the bun was a chopped vegetable that have been bok choy or mustard greens, flavored with something that tasted like horseradish. I loved it. Whenever I was in Chinatown during the next few weeks, I’d pick up a few greens sandwiches and hand them out when I got back to the Village, like trophies from an adventure abroad. When a recipient of my largesse gobbled up the sandwich with great enthusiasm, I beamed with pride. When someone took a couple of bites, thanked me with elaborate courtesy, and carefully folded the plastic around the remains, I made an instantaneous diagnosis: wooden palate syndrome. It turns out that you don’t have to known what’s in a sandwich to feel proprietary about it.

Wooden palate syndrome – a perfect diagnosis for David Perlmutter.

July 21, 2014 Issue

Ben McGrath’s “Big Air,” in this week’s issue, an account of the 2014 Austin X Games, fizzes in the same delightful way that his sparkling piece on the 2012 London Olympics (“Medals and Marketing,” The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012), did. McGrath’s writing effervesces in direct proportion to the amount of exotic lingo generated by his subjects. The X Games is a cornucopia of action-sports argot (“BMX dirt mounds,” “the megaramp,” “Stadium Super Trucks,” “Big Air events,” “freestyle motocross”). McGrath revels in it. His avidity produces sentences that are, in their offbeat specificity, simply delicious. Take this line, for example:

Big Air events, for skateboarding and BMX, respectively, filled the prime-time slots on Friday and Saturday nights, bringing dope clouds to the hillside overlooking the megaramp.

Or this one:

I watched an Evil Genius pick up his backpack and head abruptly for the exit, so I followed him, catching him just in time to see him put on a pair of Ray-Bans with camouflaged frames, good for blending in with the fans arriving for Super Trucks.

“Big Air” brims with amazing, quasi-surreal word combos beautifully capturing both the allure and the “ad-hoc scruffiness” of X Games culture. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: A special shout-out to Sue Song for her wonderful “Heart,” particularly its inspired closing stanza: “Forgive those years I left you / pounding your Morse of grief, alone – / knocking against my sternum, / wondering if I was even there.”

July 7 & 14, 2014 Issue

Héctor Tobar’s “Sixty-Nine Days,” in this week’s issue, impressively applies a spare aesthetic to describe a complex event – the sixty-nine day ordeal of thirty-three miners trapped deep inside the collapsed San José Mine. Tobar’s style is rich in simplicity. Using short, plain, point-and-shoot sentences, he delivers us directly into the miners’ hot, black, blasted, seemingly doomed reality – the sound of rock splitting (“When he lowered the window, he was assaulted by a deafening noise: the rumble of many simultaneous explosions, the sound of rock splitting”), the miners’ oily water supply (“When they shone their weakening lamps on the water, they could see a black-orange film and drops of motor oil”), their hunger (“They could not defecate, and the emptiness in their stomachs felt like a fist pushing downward”). Tobar’s art is in his details, e.g., the miners make a fire “the size of two cupped hands”; one miner watches another miner “pick up a discarded can of tuna and wipe the inside with his finger and lick it again and again”; one miner’s legs and feet are swollen, “and to keep him off the muddy floor, other miners built a bed from wooden pallets, and he lay there for hours, staring at the ceiling.” One of my favorite passages in “Sixty-Nine Days” is the description of the “picnic” at Level 135:

Sometimes Acuña turned the camera and captured the light from one of the vehicles, but mostly the image was of a black space filled with Sepúlveda’s voice: “We’re going to show that we are Chileans of the heart. And we’re going to have a delicious soup today.” Sepúlveda served each man with a metal cup that clanked against the bottom of the air-filter cover, pouring the hot, murky liquid into plastic cups.

That clank of the metal cup “against the bottom of the air-filter cover” is inspired! Tobar is a master plain-stylist.