Green Filter

Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) was part of a discussion we were having in the course The Politics of Crime in 2008 to try to get under the idea of “random” crime. Most interpretations of this film focus on the apparently arbitrary nature of the protagonist’s murder of a taxi driver he does not know, and the mirroring of that murder in the depiction of his subsequent execution. There’s scandal in the fact that the apparatus of justice is not likely to make the viewer feel much easier about the death by hanging of the young criminal, Jacek (Miraslaw Baka). In the terms made prominent by biopolitical theories, Jacek’s death should appear as the ritualized legal death of a human with rights and responsibilities; but Kieslowski seems to attack the purported distinction between such a death and the “killing” of a body as nonhuman. Death with dignity at the hands of another, even if that other is the state, is played instead as a merely romantic notion, actually a contradiction in terms. Kieslowski makes this point in another, and if you think about it even more scandalous, way by portraying the taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) as such a cad that one is likely to feel most outrage on his behalf when, no longer able to take the sight of his sufferings, Jacek covers his face with a cloth. This conventionally dehumanizing, defacing gesture—as Jacek intends it to be—promptly increases the pathos and the difficulty, as though we were more prepared to defend the driver’s nameless and innocent body than his speaking and corrupt person. (A point made by Lucas Chan.) I believe this driver gains a name in the narrative—“Waldemar Rekowski”—only as the deceased in the trial.

These interesting reversals of certain biopolitical assumptions are well understood in the reception of the film (if not explicitly connected by critics to biopolitics). They leave aside the whole of the film before Jacek and the driver meet—a long stretch of aleatory scenes in which Jacek wanders the city and both Jacek and the driver perform strange acts of minor destruction: dropping a small rock into traffic from an overpass, or deliberately dividing a passerby from the dog she is walking, respectively, among other examples. These gestures appeared to us as intended magical gestures, pieces of reality testing in which the characters reveal, by reaching out of it concretely for a moment, the irrational fantasy of omnipotence in which they must always live. And where there’s omnipotence there is guilt, since if you’re omnipotent, why isn’t the world any better? This reversible, hazy egotism of unlimited aggressive power and unlimited responsibility may be another reading of the sepia miasma that permeates the film, achieved by a green filter, so they say. That atmosphere reminded us of the psychotic imagination of vigilante justice in the narrative of Pierre Rivière (I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jelinek [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982]). Eventually, the viewer understands that Jacek suffers from the kind of misfortune that disproportionately befalls the poor--the death of his kid sister, run over in the muddy ruts of his home village by a vehicle driven by his friend, in which he was himself a passenger: the sort of injustice for which no one is ever convictable. He feels not only grief but guilt; he goes to a photo shop with a picture of his sister and says, gently and apologetically, “I creased it.” (It may not be possible to erase the damage completely in a copy, he is told.)

Thus Jacek’s obsession with tiny mechanical possibilities that might (magically) add up to an overwhelming difference in the world. They belong to the series, “If he hadn’t had the last drink . . . if there had been more of a moon . . . if she hadn’t been tired . . .” It’s as if, after her death, it still was not too late for the world to be different. Jacek wills things to matter: he shouts at a bakery cashier that he wants that particular cream puff, not the one next to it (and why couldn’t it have been “the next one”? Why her and not another? Why, at other times, someone else and not me? So, the taxi driver plays the lottery). Plot is replaced by the characters’ associative testing of their sense of unbearable exigency against exaggerated dramas of agency, leading up to the existential act of murder.

As in Pierre Rivière, the final difference offered is Jacek’s suicidal sacrifice of himself. This outcome is not “random” but obviously entailed—only made easier by Jacek’s activating the machine that is the legal system, so that it can do its automated work. (Rivière also does this, as Foucault points out.) The machinic, abstract element makes it possible for the justice system to kill at all, and it is in this sense that it becomes quasi-automated that execution should be easier than murder, but it never becomes easy. The little acts of physical intervention into the world "take"--it does make a difference if you drop a stone from an overpass--but they can’t add up to the big difference hoped for, the exchange of death for life, sacrifice for redemption. Or perhaps Kieslowski thinks that offscreen--off the world screen, so to speak--they can. To the extent that this question can’t be answered in Kieslowski’s universe, he makes justice through law look merely mystified even as the still more mystical idea of justice through redemption remains possible. Kieslowski’s Christianity, like other dark versions, consists in the suspension (hanging) of this possibility over the miasmatic world. His view of the suspension of the film image is scarcely less mystical, as becomes clear when Jacek pauses at the window of the photographer, with its banal wedding and first communion portraits, as though it were a sacred place. Divided from it by glass, he enters, as he sees it, to submit his sister's body for restoration. He can’t see himself where we see him, hovering in Kieslowski’s frame. The alcove the images are in reflects the lightbox he is in, image himself. This fact itself furnishes at least the aesthetic substitution for grace, although only in the Kieslowski-universe. The division of labor between Kieslowski and his god: Kieslowski can arrange for things to happen and he can film them, but he can’t make them appear on film.

Malle and Postwar Murder

Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957), like much of the film noir it references, is structured by a criss-cross: a young couple joyrides in the car of a murderer, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), and winds up committing more murders under his name. What’s exchanged seems to be not only their names, however, but also possible motivations for killing more generally. The victims of both crimes are older men implicated in the legal atrocities of the postwar period: Tavernier’s victim, Simon Carala, is not only his employer and the husband of the woman he loves (Florence-Jeanne Moreau) but a global businessman at one point described as an “arms dealer.” Tavernier shoots him after turning in his last assignment as an employee, a dossier he has compiled labeled “Exploitation des gisements de Djelfa” (above). The principal victim of the joyriding youngsters, meanwhile, shot by Louis, the surly, Brando-esque half of the couple, is a sixtyish German “tourist” named Bencker. Bencker is old enough to have held high positions in wartime, and acts like a victor in the postwar. He drives a Mercedes, the official Nazi car, carries a gun, and enjoys a much younger girlfriend; he laughs off everything with bottles of champagne, and we understand that his false bonhomie is awash in creepy "economic miracle" cash. Following the highway drag race that throws them together, a champagne afterparty enacts the postwar’s compulsory democratization of criminality through economic complicity. The difficulty of extrication is explicit: “My dear Mr. Tavernier, you are my guest.” “I can’t accept.” “But you must--I am the sporting kind . . . and besides, we nearly died together.” These two singularly unapologetic victims, Bencker and Carala, are potentially linked by the name of Djelfa, a district in Algeria but also a town in that district where an internment camp was located. The transition of war into postwar transforms a camp into an oilfield.

A familiar plot device, then—using unattractive victims to allow the viewer to sympathize with criminal protagonists—pushes a little further, as though to ask to what extent apparently apolitical crimes of passion deliver messages of history ignored by by the formalism of law. Julien and Florence murder her husband to be “free,” as the saying goes (with his money too, though they don’t say that); Louis murders Bencker for reasons more difficult to express, yet these motivations are also forced to cross as though by some compensatory economy. By killing Bencker while calling himself Tavernier, Louis is also killing Tavernier, and he has a motive to do this because his girlfriend, Véronique, idolizes Tavernier and is basically always telling him he’s no Tavernier. And Tavernier in turn is implicated in colonial war not only by working for Carala but by having served in Indochina. If he seems disillusioned now, that’s mostly because he kills Carala—by killing Carala, he acts upon a disapproval that may be the audience’s incentive for not feeling sorry, but is not his own main motive. Louis satisfies a generational political hostility that is, this time, his own—he is even aware of it--yet which takes a detour through his contradictory admiration for the sports cars of his hated rivals. The joyride gone awry makes for inarticulate terrorism, and suggests the nascent political quality of crime set against, and itself corrupted by, the oblivion of living high in the postwar. Photographs of Florence and Julien smiling together, images of the freedom for which they kill, appear on the same roll of film that incriminates Véronique and Louis by showing them drinking champagne with Bencker—as though the desire to be “free” in the postwar could only be trailed by the whisper, free with criminal money.

My Grandfather's Prison Records

Pardon my preoccupation, but I’ve been waiting for my grandfather’s prison records to arrive. This would be my U.S. grandfather—should I say “of course”? I wouldn’t have known about this if it weren’t the case that the Washington State Archives are more than usually digitized. That allowed me to discover through casual surfing that this man I knew only by inference from family damage had been incarcerated for “carnal knowledge of a female child.” It took two years to get around to sending away for the file, I was so apprehensive about what it contained.

My father having been 48 when I was born, and his father having been 41 when he was born, there’s a disorienting effect of skipped generations, rapid transport to a distant world. The prison file begins in 1916, in an archaic culture of vanished occupations (blacksmith, duck farmer, confectioner). On the whole, its news, if hardly good, is better than I expected. The female child was about 14; “the rape was not a case of force but was rape by reason of the age of the female.” In November 1916 the county clerk writes to the prison superintendent, “we have the little girl, who was the victim of this man . . . and she is staying with us; she seems to harbor no ill feeling toward him, and says that he was always kind to her, and she seems to wish to write to him, and have him write to her.” Most of the file is taken up with the considerable efforts of the family and community to get him out early, and includes a petition signed by citizens, the sentencing judge, and the then prosecuting attorney of Cowlitz County (not the same one who proscecuted the case). They sound concerned about the “three children of tender age” effectively orphaned by his imprisonment, as the mother was dead.

They were right about that. What’s most alive about my grandfather today is his five-year absence when his children were 2 to 9 (nor did he ever entirely return, it seems), and what would turn out to be its effects in breakdown, mental illness, and failed social relations. I don’t think the community ever told the children why he’d been absent; they told them that he felt badly after his wife’s death and went away. They couldn’t explain the sexual content. Perhaps that made matters worse, as though his absence had been pointed neglect; or perhaps they weren’t really lying--perhaps it was a kind of disinterest that led him to do something so stupid in the wake of his wife’s death. The story, at any rate, does untie a knot in the narrative. It’s because I knew what happened later, long after his death, that I expected it to be even worse, a matter of more explicit violence and madness, where the locals who know him diagnose only “weakness of character and environment”--prosaic preconditions of disasters that may or may not unfold. As his children didn’t know what had really happened, my grandfather didn’t know what happened to his children, not even after some of it had started happening. The afterlife of things that never occurred to him has outlasted all of his thoughts.