Yvette Biro,
Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Translated by Paul Salamon).
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21965-7
US$22.95 (pb)
269pp
(Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press)
Yvette Biro’s new book, Turbulence and Flow in Film, is an excellent, well-written and very timely contribution to film scholarship. Biro, who is an esteemed emeritus film professor, screenwriter and essayist at New York’s University Graduate Film School has written an invaluable, highly perceptive and most welcome addition to the study of contemporary film aesthetics and theory. Moreover, it is a book that is enriched by the author’s manifold understanding of her subject from the perspective of screenwriting as well as from a self-reflexive approach to the theme of the problems of modern film time. Biro’s world-acclaimed oeuvre is notable for its unique combination of cultural and philosophical acuity and knowledge wedded to a markedly insightful negotiation of the conceptual, dramaturgical and film production complexities of film script writing and storytelling.
Biro, in her native country Hungary and outside it, has a well-deserved reputation and an established career as a highly sought after screenwriter who has worked with such luminaries as Jancso, Fabri and Makk. In more recent times, she has adapted Portugal’s Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft. Of her ten books the best known one in the Anglo-American world of film and media studies would be Profane Mythology (Indiana University Press, 1982). Biro’s oeuvre has been rightly translated into seven languages.
Let me say, at the outset, that Biro’s book shows the conceptual sophistication and pragmatic wisdom of her earlier books and in no way should one assign this noteworthy book to the more popular genre of “how to” script write your way into the inner sanctum of Hollywood postclassical cinema success. It is not one of those books – far from it – but please, dear reader, do not get the impression that I am dismissing in toto these kind of books that deploy certain popular “nuts and bolts” mythic approaches to storytelling for the cinema medium. They have their place under the broad church of film literature.
Initially one might think that Biro’s book is a more insightful example of these kind of books but, on the contrary, it is a first-class thoughtful and far-ranging philosophical analysis of the mutating complexities of how to theorise past and contemporary cinema on her particular subject “the rhythmic design” of films (including a very sharp appreciation of video artist Bill Viola’s ‘video-haiku’ [Biro’s apt term] artworks). Indeed, Biro’s subject is an extremely complex one in the context of the broad scope of the cinemas that she so deftly examines – European art cinema, avant-garde cinemas, Hollywood (post)classical cinema, independent American, Asian cinemas – and given the recent electronic and digital developments in film technology Biro’s subject matter is a very important one that needs addressing.
What exactly is Biro’s project here and how does it locate itself in the horizons of film aesthetics and theory and with storytelling as such? First of all, it is a book soaked in the cinematic, cultural and phenomenological wisdom of William Faulkner’s telling observation that “The past is not dead, it is not even past”. Secondly it is a book is concerned with the intricate and complex dialectic that exists between rhythm and tempo in film; it is a vexing theme that requires the utmost critical and empirical consideration. In this brilliant work Biro, time and again, demonstrates her abilities to perceptively and knowledgeably tackle such a subject.
To conceptualise the role of time in cinema requires a very intricate philosophical elaboration and Biro’s carefully argued ten chapters with their many fitting film examples indicates such a nimble, insightful and resonant mind at work, articulating a poetics of cinematic temporality for today’s accelerating cinematic and screen arts landscape.
From the outset Biro tells us that rhythmic design in film is not just a matter of the relationships that exists between slowness and fastness. Instead, she argues that the overall tone, nature and meaning of the film is critically impacted by its shifting pulsations and events and all the many related intricately intertwined devices, modes and patterns of storytelling that make up the film itself.
Hence, for Biro, the vital categories of “turbulence” and “flow” are at the heart of her masterly analysis of cinema’s rhythmic design of temporality and storytelling. These two fundamental categories of cinema have a profound mutual connection and interdependence, and are also critically enmeshed with each other.
One important premise of Biro’s book is her emphasis that the composition of film resembles that of music and that this important factor should be investigated when one is analysing filmic temporality. The notion of time and its intricate, multilayered structures in cinema makes more sense, according to the author, if one attends to its “musical” language which denotes things that cannot be expressed visually or narratively. Thus, form entails movement, something that has been commented upon by such great modernist painters as Paul Klee in his insistence that the spatial and the temporal cannot be separated, or by Sergei Eisenstein who suggests similar things in his revolutionary ideas on vertical montage, or by Ingmar Bergman’s observation that film is “mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous experience” (p. xi).
Biro is one of the most incisive commentators we have on what makes good storytelling in classical and contemporary cinema in terms of the many interruptions, detours, fragmentation, dreams, memories, odysseys, twists and turns, repetitions and bifurcations as an expression of temporal turbulence and flow. This means the acknowledgment of surprise, marvel and the unknown as much as the uneventful, the prosaic, and boredom in looking at cinematic expressivity and temporality. Biro wisely adopts Susanne K. Langer’s perceptive observation that cinema’s specificity relies in the eternal now thereby opening up a vast uncharted territory of differences, unions, antinomies and contrasts that need elaborate articulation.
Thinking about time is one of the essential core activities of the human condition and thinking itself. We speak of time’s aporia and how the nature of time has become progressively intricate and how our multiple micro worlds and macro worlds of life compel us to address the ever-present idea of complexity shaping the shifting contours and events of modern life. Consequently, we have also become more familiar with the varied rhythm patterns and feelings attune to living in a world of globalisation, mega-cities and migratory turbulence.
Our most acclaimed artists have the capacity to see and speak of the world and time comprehensively – whether it is Proust, Shakespeare, Mozart, Kandinsky, or Schoenberg – they all have articulated ideas, forms and things that science later on came to support. This is an essential fact of the arts and the sciences – artists dream of things, scientists verify them with the aid of technology and mathematics.
So what animates Biro’s thoughtful conceptual architecture is this premise and the realisation, after Bergson, that we understand the cosmos through the self: the macro through the micro. It is not a belief exclusive to Bergson for it can be found in the writings of the ancient Greeks and the Chinese, the Romantic poets, and the many literary and visual modernists and philosophers of the early twentieth century amongst others. Temporality and its laws centre on the to-and-fro that exists between stability and instability and this has accordingly been conveyed in cinema amongst other art forms. Our more sensitive, creative and challenging filmmakers are appreciative of the way time shapes the content and form of their films and that it lies at the foundation of life’s continuity. Life in all of its complex and inexorable processes.
Central to Biro’s approach to film’s temporality and its rhythmic design is her subtle contemplation of the varied relationships of change and permanence, the symmetry and asymmetry of time, and of profound imperceptible accumulation and its significant consequences. In her study Biro draws upon many modern filmmakers (Angelopoulos, Bunuel, Cavalier, Fellini, Hitchcock, Malick, Pasolini, Varda, Welles, etc), philosophers and thinkers (Bachelard, Deleuze, Guattari, Kiekeggaard, Lacan, and Prirogine to name just a few) and literary critics/semioticians, writers and poets (Bathkin, Calvino, Eco, Eliot, Kermode, Lotman, and many more) to establish her compelling reverberating insights into her subject.
Although narrative representation operates on the cardinal notion of time’s arrow – linear advancing movement – predicated on our Chronos definition of time: clock time, day by day, etc., the passing of time itself. What Biro is interested in is exploring how Chronos and Tempus (human time: our subjective impressions, experiences and thoughts) are locked in a perpetual undulating relationship with each other. And according to Biro, it is Tempus that might get the upper hand over Chronos in the arts (including cinema and the media arts) and the latter is immense and unforeseeable. Biro persuasively show us throughout her book how cinema’s polyvalent relationship between time, narrative, space and style is just as complicated as that shown by such great innovators of modernity like Borges, Joyce, and Proust in the way they define their stories through the multilayered kaleidoscopic character of time itself.
According to Biro, filmmakers as artists, gamesters, and storytellers are sculptors of time who not only work and think in time but they also always deal with time. After Paul Ricouer, Biro astutely shows us in so many fitting classical and contemporary instances how to time is made bearably human through narration. Yet one of the critical tenets of Biro’s book is that, whether we are treating traces of a past or creating stories that hinge on imaginary futures, they are always locked in the everyday field of the present.
In her stirring conclusion, Biro suggests that, while we are overwhelmed by our daily global diet of virtual and televisual data, it is high time that we learned to appreciate the aesthetic, cultural and existential benefits of slowing down. Seeing, hearing and interacting with this world of ours through cinemas that are alive to the many advantages that can be gotten through respecting that the plurality, openness and synoptic vision of our everydayness do not necessarily have to do with formulaic “special effects” fireworks of regular blockbuster type films.
Biro’s Turbulence and Flow in Film is a book that demands our own precious time and understanding as it is a finely wrought, informative and poetic contribution to a very intricate and extraordinarily important topic: how enchanting cinema storytelling depends on the “Proustian” current of turbulence and flow that meanders in so many complicated ways through cinema itself.
John Conomos,
Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia.
Created on: Sunday, 25 April 2010