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In 1968 film theorist Tom Gunning wrote a hugely influential article called ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’. In it he successfully re-thought ideas concerning early cinema, particularly its popular yet inappropriate labelling as primitive cinema. The terms ‘attraction’ and ‘the spectator’ alluded to in the essays title acknowledged the way in which early cinema, unable due to the length of film available at the time and the lack of recorded sound, created attractions that directly addressed the viewer. Before cinema became narrative there was no diegetic fourth wall between the audience and so directors were concerned merely with visual tricks, jokes, and illusion-istic spectacle. Of course these ranged from a train pulling into a station (see the Lumiere Brothers’ early efforts) to George Melies’ much more adventurous ‘A Trip To The Moon’ (1902), which used early stop-motion animation techniques to compound the idea of film as the ultimate provider of visual illusions and flights of fancy. As feature film running times inevitably became longer the ideas of more ambitious directors grew suitably in stature. Eventually this coincided with the advent of synchronised sound, and the feature length narrative of classical Hollywood cinema was born. Many theorists argued that cinema itself became a bastardised medium when it embraced sound and narrative as it began to draw on the mediums of theatre and the novel in order to provide longer story’s and inspiration for actors who now had to talk as well as move around on sets. However due to technical limitations and the constraints that war created in Europe, this advent did not happen on a simultaneous worldwide scale. Visionary European directors like Fritz Lang were still making films that took advantage of longer screen times but eschewed recorded sound.
Argentinian director Esteban Sapir’s ‘La Antena’ (2007) is a throwback to these times. It is effectively a silent film in that only two of its characters can actually talk (although they do so very little), it is in black and white, but has the post-Cinema of Attractions, pre worldwide synchronised sound running time of 90 minutes. However, the film also makes use of many of the devises and visual tricks discovered during the pioneering early days of cinema that Tom Gunning re-evaluated. It has a very clear and tight plot that almost transplants itself into the sci-fi thriller territory, but due to its lack of spoken dialogue it has to rely heavily on visuals. Thankfully, the film succeeds on these terms brilliantly. Either Sapir has tirelessly studied the work of directors such as FW Murnau, Eistenstien, Lang, and the Lumiere brothers (as anyone who’s studied film would have done), or he is a naturally gifted and resourceful director who has a painterly eye for shots and composition in the face of self-imposed restrictions. This is especially impressive considering that its many effects were achieved in-camera and without the use of CGI. Although the films narrative tension fades slightly towards its climax, on the whole ‘La Antena’ is a magical and spellbinding update of silent film techniques and aesthetics.
The film is based in a dystopia called The City Without a Voice, so called because its inhabitants have lost the ability to speak. but according to the introductory title cards, “no-one seems to mind”. Communication is still possible through some kind of wordless exchange: how this works within the fantasy world of the film is never really explained, but is represented to us the viewer as creative and inventive text and typefaces appearing on the screen next to the people who are speaking. This is a clever and visually arresting update of the kind of inter-titles that were used in the pre-sound days, the type directors only ever really use these days for comedic purposes. Sapir’s update on inter-titles avoids such contrivances but gives us a valuable insight into the characters motivations. The inhabitants have lost their ability to verbally communicate due to the shadowy rule of the dictator-like Mr TV. Yes, the naming is rather unsubtle, and it is not hard to detect Sapir’s allegorical sub-text, but any un-subtleties can be forgiven due to the highly visual nature of the film he has chosen to make. The city, shot in a classic high contrast black and white that recalls not only noir but early surrealism, is gloomy and strangely anonymous and it snows constantly, meaning it could practically be any city in the northern hemisphere. The heroes of the piece are a dysfunctional family unit who begin the story separated but are brought back together through their efforts to overthrow Mr TV’s sinister plot to eradicate words entirely from the population, making the already strained channels of communication an actual impossibility. The unnamed father is a TV repair man, an ironic job title as his intentions from the off are to bring down Mr TV’s media rain. His daughter is Ana (Sol Moreno), a resourceful and caring little girl, while his ex-wife, initially prickly and indifferent, eventually gets caught up in the ex-husband’s revolutionary cause and falls back in love with him in the process. Meanwhile a mysterious female simply called The Voice lives over the road from Ana and her mother, she is the only resident with the power of actual speech, aside from her own son who was born with no eyes. This lack of senses is a theme in the film- while only two characters are able to verbally communicate, the son lacks the gift of sight while his mother The Voice is a faceless character, her upper body concealed in a mysterious hood, much like the creepy dreamlike figure in Meya Deren’s also silent avant-garde classic ‘Meshes of The Afternoon’ (1943). The Voice and her son are seen as mythical saviour-like characters and they become key figures in the battle against Mr TV’s tyranny.
The plot and the characterisation are simple but involving enough and the characters are likable and as well sketched out as you can expect in a largely dialogue free film. Instead it is the visuals and the music that make up the film’s main pleasures. Every inch of ‘La Antena’ is beautifully designed and constructed, whether depicting simple conversations and exchanges or its more fanciful moments set in the cityscape, the film is consistently breathtaking. The sets, most of which look hand-built from various cheap materials, have the intentional falseness and charm of early cinema and the constant snow adds a wintry sheen that is magical rather than dour and unwelcoming. The lack of speech makes for some delightful passages aside from the already mentioned inventive use of text and subtitles. There are some great scenes of Melies-esque stop-motion animation, such as an early section when the pages of a letter are spread out on a table only to form into an origami-like image of a human that then performs a delicate ballet-like dance in front of an enchanted Ana. There is also a grimly amusing section set in a bar: in the absence of voices singers are left to mime to old records on stage, but when the record gets stuck the singer merely mimes along to the repeated phrase until someone gives the record player a nudge. On the whole though, besides the black and white and the snow, the main visual motif is one of spirals. The sinister TV station is represented by a drawn spiral that regularly appears on the screen and hypnotises viewers. All of the food the inhabitants eat is circular, being as it is manufactured by the same TV company, and in perhaps the film’s most blatant nod to Melies, the moon itself makes a few appearances as a human face surrounded by white rock.
Whilst the visuals are arresting the film would not be half as successful without its other major achievement, the original score by Leo Sujatovich. Just as in the days of silent cinema, when a live pianist would play along with the film in real time to add expression and emotion to the pictures, here a full orchestra scores the entire film. Apart from the occasional bit of dialogue from The Voice and her son ‘La Antena’ doesn’t concern itself with any notion of diegetic realism regarding sound and so the band seems to have been given full reign, resulting in a perfect synchronicity that is rarely achieved in movies today that focus almost exclusively on dialogue. The score is incredibly expressive, atmospheric, and perhaps more importantly given the lack of sound, hugely eclectic. Perhaps most impressive is the way the musical elements often directly stand in for sound effects: screeching violins denote the crushing of ice, while staccato one-note trumpet blasts represent car horns, and fast drums stand in for machine gun fire. The success of this makes one wish that perhaps more films eschewed speech and favour of musical expression.
As previously stated the film does drag slightly at the end in terms of plot and so may have benefited from being slightly shorter, as after around 70 minutes of such spell-bindingly beautiful imagery a kind of hypnotic quality takes over and the intended drama of the final scenes was lost on me slightly, although this didn’t scupper my overall appreciation of the films qualities which are mainly to do with the visuals, the musical score, and their resulting synchronicity. What Sapir is trying to say with his film is pleasingly never made fully apparent: an obvious distaste for mass-media television broadcasting and its numbing effects on the human population is evident throughout, although setting his film in a fantastical time and place makes such allusions purely allegorical. Still, using the visual and aesthetic tropes of Gunning’s Cinema of Attractions to denounce the small-screen world of TV broadcasting is a powerful statement in itself, and it’s not hard to see why directors and perhaps more often academics get nostalgic for the pre-sound cinema era. On this evidence it may be a good idea to place such technological restrictions on modern directors so that they may perhaps rediscover what the pioneering directors of the early cinema sought to capture- the power and fascination that brilliantly crafted images displayed on a huge flickering screen can have for an audience.
Country: Argentina
Budget: £
Length: 90mins
Filmography:
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, Maya Deren, (None)
Pub/2008
More like this:
'KM31', 2006, directed by Rigoberto Castañeda
'Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl)', 1929, directed by GW Pabst
'Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face)', 1960, directed by Georges Franju