#816
Post
by Sloper » Fri Oct 02, 2015 1:44 pm
Drucker, you raise an interesting point about the film’s attitude towards this isolated culture. You’re right about the way Borowczyk immerses us in this world, and I do think this often tends to forestall the kind of reactions we might normally have to such a dystopian vision – or encourages us to draw parallels between this world and our own, which is what dystopian visions usually do. I’m not sure I wholly agree with you about the benevolence of Goto III. His subjects’ mindless reverence for him, the insidious way he acts on his suspicions about Glossia, and his readiness to hire Grozo as an assassin (again, insidiously, without directly telling him to murder Gono) seem to mark him out as a ruthless dictator of sorts. At times I thought this film bore some resemblance to The Party and the Guests, which we were discussing precisely one year ago – but I must say that Goto III is a good deal less overtly sinister than the Host in that film. If anything, he seems as oblivious as the rest of the island’s inhabitants, caught up like they are in the way of life he’s inherited, and unaware that there might be anything amiss, with the island or with his own rule. The moment when he talks to the child taking food to his father in the quarry is representative of the ambiguity with which the film invests him. Is he displaying solicitous concern for this ‘pauvre être’, or is he interrogating him to see if he’s a subversive? Either way, the boy seems cagey and nervous, which might indicate something about Goto’s reign.
Like Nemec’s party guests, the Gotoans have all been assimilated into an absurd, barbaric mode of existence, and have simply made themselves at home in this context. We get a nice example of this at the start, when we see a stage covered with musical instruments, lying unused, while a man plays what he can of the Handel organ concerto on a wobbling saw. The prisoner, Gras, listening from the elevator, recognises it as the ‘andante larghetto’ movement. This is the version of that concerto the inhabitants of Goto are familiar with. They don’t ask why several musicians haven’t formed a group to play the whole thing, or why the next performer plays on a cello made from bits of scrap rather than the perfectly good cello standing behind him. They just applaud happily.
(It’s significant that when we hear Handel’s music on the soundtrack, played by the orchestra the film’s characters will never hear, it is associated most of all with Glossia, in the title sequence just before we see her making love to Gono, in that wonderful extended close-up when she watches the boat sinking, and at the end during her death scene. She dreams of a fuller existence beyond the island, but is still trapped fantasising about the one piece of classical music permitted on Goto. The hymn sung by the schoolchildren was composed by Borowczyk - does anyone know what the cellist is playing?)
And this weird musical prelude turns out to be the warm-up act for an even weirder staged execution. The two prisoners, having been brought up to the stage together by elevator, have to fight to the death: the stronger is put at a disadvantage by having a bag put over his head (the removal of which counts as a forfeit) and being left weaponless, while the weaker is given a stick to beat him with. Whoever wins will be pardoned, even if it’s the murderer rather than the binocular-thief.
We’re left to wonder precisely how this custom came to be established, although it’s not too hard to see the logic behind it. As well as being an entertaining public spectacle, this is also a clever way of avoiding the need to maintain a prison on the island: since the winner is pardoned, he can be reintegrated into society, and since only one prisoner dies the island isn’t de-populated too much. The contest in itself might suggest that this culture prizes physical strength above other virtues, but the way the contest is rigged in favour of the weaker combatant suggests that guile, cunning and even cowardice are even more valued – hence Grozo’s rise to power as the film goes on. So again, like Nemec’s film, or like Lord of the Flies, Goto seems preoccupied with the organic processes whereby principles and ideas – specifically those that benefit certain interested parties – become immutable, oppressive, but unquestioned laws.
The schoolchildren are taught that the isolation of the island since 1887 has allowed for the maintenance of old customs, and of the royal authority that has been passed down to the successive Gotos, but it’s comically obvious that most of what we see has been invented from scratch, probably by the unscrupulous survivors of the disaster (if there ever was a disaster), and that Goto I probably had nothing to do with the royal family who, as the precocious schoolboy puts it, ‘found their deaths in the abyss of the sea’. The clock/barometer has not simply been broken, it has had its hands ripped out, so that it is always both the 12th of January 1887 and no time at all. Notice the un-motivated close-up of the broken clock during the minute’s silence for Goto III, which isn’t really a minute; notice also how Gono tells Glossia it’s 11.40 when his watch says 12.15, an innocent ploy to spend more time with her but also another suggestion that time has lost much of its meaning on this island. I’m guessing that Borowczyk is alluding to Waiting for Godot in his choice of title and the naming of his characters, and there is something Beckett-like about the sense of timeless, mind-numbing (and often darkly comic) stasis in this isolated setting.
The fact that the film, its setting, and one of its main characters – or rather, two of them by the end, when Grozo has presumably turned into Goto IV – are all called Goto, and that all the characters’ names begin with a ‘G’, brilliantly encapsulates the mass-myopia that seems to be Borowczyk’s central theme. Everything and everyone is Goto, or a variation on Goto. The three-sided portrait underlines this idea, turning the three successive rulers into one. What does it mean when the teacher sadly puts this portrait away at the end? Is it just that some other way of representing the same idea will have to be found, since a four-sided portrait might not be possible? Or, as Drucker suggests, does the rise of Grozo represent a new, bleaker phase of the island’s development, and is this what the teacher (who clashed with Grozo earlier, and may expect retribution) is contemplating?
As well as painstakingly evoking the dilapidated physical condition of everything on Goto, Borowczyk also uses a shooting style that at times recalls early silent cinema, as though the film itself were stuck in the past. Some of those frontal shots, with action playing out almost two-dimensionally against spare 19th-century decor, could have been lifted straight out of an Edison or Biograph short: the staging of Goto III’s death-slump after he’s been shot looks more like something from 1908 than 1968. Of course, there are also a lot of strikingly modern close-ups, disorienting play with space, and so on, but in various ways I feel like there’s a deliberate ‘primitive’ quality to the style that harmonises well with the subject matter. Drucker, you make a great point about the soundtrack, and it seemed to me this had a similarly rough-hewn, barbaric quality.
What do people think is the point of the brief colour shots? They tend to draw our attention to objects rather than people: Glossia’s boot, Gras’s blood collected in a bucket, the pieces of meat being fed to the dogs, a quill and paper on a desk, some jewels that spill out on the floor, the women’s clothing strewn about Grozo’s bedroom. These are all fleeting moments, and maybe that’s the key to understanding them. It’s not just that the film is in black and white, these characters only ever see things in black and white, but for the odd fleeting moment their emotions or desires jolt them into perceiving the bright, luxurious colours around them, or just imagining those colours. The momentary flights into a realm of colour accentuate the sense of entrapment the rest of the time. Like the flies caught in Gomor’s elaborate trap, waiting to be washed away by salt water, the inhabitants of Goto are trapped in their intricately-made but constrictive dystopia, just waiting to be tipped into the sea (which ‘devours everything’) when they die. The film is about that feeling of entrapment, and the instinctive impulse to reach beyond it. Grozo’s machinations, like Glossia’s escape attempt, ultimately express a longing to attain something beautiful and transcendent beyond the limitations of his current existence.
Another question, for which I really don’t have an answer: why does Glossia open her eyes for a second in the final shot, before relapsing into death? Both Daniel Bird and Philip Strick, in the Arrow booklet, see this as a last-minute resurrection, but I think the fact that Glossia closes her eyes again suggests that she’s just doing a Desdemona. It’s a brilliant touch, but I’m not sure why. It feels ironic and poignant at the same time.
One final, related question for those who know this director’s work well: does Borowczyk have a thing about hearts continuing to beat after death? This is referred to several times in Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, and I think I noticed something similar in a clip from The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal – is it a sort of running theme?