Blanco en Blanco is a great movie. One of those pictures you watch on the edge of your seat, not only because of the gripping narrative, but also because with every minute passing you grow more and more afraid of a little mistake that could, if noticed, destroy your entire experience of the near perfection you are witnessing.
I believe the – spoken in brought terms – better something is, the more fragile it becomes. A single brush stroke can destroy a masterful painting, while the same stroke might be indistinguishable from those in the painting of a less experienced craftsman. Maybe this is a very traditional way of looking at the creative working processes, maybe it restricts what can be called objectively good or bad, because it demands skill over creativity, but I am inclined to argue other-wisely.
Why would one notice a single stroke in a painting? Maybe the wrong colour was chosen, completely contrasting the colour scheme around it. Maybe a defined and characteristic subject, a human figure, a face or something else we know from our daily lives, has been disfigured. Or maybe the stroke’s thickness does not fit to the overall painting style. All of those examples regard pieces of art, that depict reality as we know it. How would this system work with, say, a non figurative approach? It seems logical: an abstract painting can’t be judged similarly, as everything goes and a brush stroke that stands out might be just as wanted, as one that blends in.
Well, I would argue abstract art can, even has to be judged with the same method, but the question should not be „Is this specific aspect of the painting appealing in the context of our understanding of reality?“, but „Does this aspect of the painting serve a distinct narrative function in the context of the painting itself“.
In essence this amounts to: A piece of art should not be viewed as depiction of reality, but as a narrative within it. Thus a single stroke on the canvas does not serve the purpose to depict, but to narrate and therefore should be judged by its function at conveying the artist’s idea.
When thinking of movies this way it becomes strikingly harder to distinguish between individual “strokes”. One way could be to think of every aspect of filmmaking as an individual colour. There is the cinematography, the narrative, the acting, the editing, the sound design, the production design and much, much more. But just colours aren’t enough, they also have to be put into a certain relation to each other.
One of the most common ways to do this when analysing a movie is to separate it into mikro and makro layers. The makro layer looks at individual scenes and separates between the aspects of filmmaking I named above, while the mikro layer puts scenes into relation to each other and examines the film as more than the sum of its aspects. Again using the metaphor of a painting this would mean that the makro layer looks at the individual strokes with different colours, while the mikro layer analyses the meaning of the figures that have been built up by those strokes.
The more cohesive the narrative of a piece of art is, the more likely it becomes, that small details are noticeable. But how can narrative be defined? Well I guess there are three ways to find narrative in art. There is of course the artist’s approach , then there is the individual approach and lastly the public approach. When an artist explicitly defines the narrative of his work, does this make his or her approach the only correct one? Certainly not. Even if the meaning of something is defined by its author it can still be read otherwisely. Once someone’s work is presented to the public it has to stand on its own. The artist’s opinion, his other work and overall public appearance becomes a part of the narrative, but does not define it. Lastly only individual interpretations matter. There is no singular narrative to a piece of work, as everyone will view it differently. This having been said, there is still somewhat of a public approach, the lowest common denominator among all individual opinions. The quality of someone’s work is often measured like this, although the public approach is certainly the weakest of the three ways to define narrative, as it excludes everything that’s not commonly agreed upon.
Returning to Blanco en Blanco: So when I say that this movie is a fragile masterpiece, this must sadly remain a personal opinion, although I wish it wasn’t. What can be said with certainty, however, is that movies that only serve the public opinion, that stay in the pleasure zone, and try to attract as many viewers as possible will never be able to have an as profound impact on the audience, as a movie that dares to be different. Blanco en Blanco is such a movie and therefore I am sure that others dislike it for its relative uneventfulness, while I admire every second of it.
I believe that the personal narrative we find in movies (or other pieces of art) is so fragile, that even the smallest details, even ones that cannot be controlled by the director contribute to its nature. I watched Blanco en Blanco – a movie I knew nothing whatsoever about – in the cinema I had never been to among strangers, as none of my friends wanted to go. In a way I was a blank sheet that evening, as I wasn’t exposed to any external prejudice. I don’t want to take this opportunity from anyone else and so all I will say is that the film’s story is set on the verge to the 20th century and follows a south-amerikan photographer who is called to a remote estate in Tierra del Fuego.
There is one aspect of the movie, however, I want to cover more closely. The framing of violence. Blanco en Blanco is a very violent movie, without it being visible at first glance. There are no action scenes, there is no blood splattering and the audience does not have to witness someone’s guts being ripped out. Still there are scenes that are simply unbearable to watch. I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that Théo Court, the director of Blanco en Blanco, does not frame violence from any characters perspective. The images shown are not polarising, they don’t ask for an interpretation. He frames violence as a reality, no cuts, no change of perspective, no movement. Théo Court frames violence through the lense of the protagonist’s camera. We see what the camera sees when the photographer frames his pictures and finds the right composition. We witness him giving directions, telling those he portraits how they have to stand and look. We witness the creation of pictures we all know. Old black and white photos framing the white man as some sort of kolonial hero who defines the supposedly wild native americans. We see him open the shutter of his camera and hear him slowly counting the seconds. But instead of a photo plate the audience is exposed to the images in front of the camera and with every second passing it becomes harder and harder to watch until finally the shutter is closed again. This approach to visual storytelling allows the movie to show the reality of how something as fake as the posed pictures during the colonization of the americans were created, without ever dictating how one has to feel. This extraordinary framing of violence takes the audience for full and allows them to build their own opinion.
The audience has to find the violence, the audience has to realise they witness violence and when they do, when they slowly start to grasp what they are seeing, the shock and disgust creeps in and builds up until it becomes unbearable. But what’s shown is reality and there are no cuts and no deviations from the image until the picture has been properly exposed. The audience’s memory becomes the photo plate.