Nocturama Fragments

Fragments from attempt to write first rewrite for Reverse Shot.

1. When Michael and Jeff first put out their call for symposium submissions, it didn't take me long to think of Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama (2016), which has vexed me like almost no other film since its release eight years ago. It was in many ways an obvious choice: I reviewed it not once but twice, in both capsule and full-length review form for Seattle Screen Scene, the website that gave me my start in film criticism, at a time when I was still finding my way into the festival and cultural landscape. Furthermore, my thoughts on the film shifted both between the two viewings that occasioned the reviews—at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2017 and at Film at Lincoln Center only two months later—and in the years that followed. What began as a warily appreciative appraisal turned somewhat more passionate; now, I consider it one of the signal films of the 2010s, a singularly daring and willfully contemporary work whose concerns—youth, terrorism, mass culture—mesh with Bonello's skill with thrilling procedure to produce something resolutely unplaceable, even phantomlike. Nocturama has what might be considered two signal images, the frames that leap to mind before any others:

2. But as I wrote those words, I found myself second-guessing the meaning of those words, and even whether they should be written at all. Much as one might try to conceal the process that goes into writing a piece, a "finished" work of writing bears the stitches of a Frankenstein creation, cobbled together from stop-start writing sessions, hasty passes, and the scalpels of several very fine editors. The process does not stop there of course: just as a film depends on what the viewer brings to the moment of bearing witness, so does a piece of writing come into a different light when confronted by the reader. I say these truisms to lay bare that, appropriately enough for such a complex film, no film piece has ever been more difficult for me to conceive than the one that you are reading right now. Part of this comes down to the length of time, and other obstacles that arose during the writing process:

3. One of the great, nebulous concepts that governs this ever-shifting realm we call film criticism in the 21st century is “the voice.” Any person seeking to make a name for themselves, to become established and respected by their peers, must at some point—preferably as soon as possible, maybe even before they really find their footing—carve out a particular niche that will serve as the signifiers of their zone of interest. These can be defined in near-limitless ways, at least within the confines of what films are available to be pitched and written about, but what matters is the critic's ability to group these together. Whether it's determined by country of origin, by a buzzy movement, or a more hazy shared "sensibility," the categories that the voice is premised upon are taken by the reader to be the critic's area(s) of expertise: are you an expert in Chinese cinema? In the modern avant-garde? In slow cinema? Whatever the critic settles on—whether through their own prerogative, their editor's assignments, or simply the screenings left over—becomes part of their branding, the thing for which they are known and encouraged to continue cultivating. Obviously, the voice is as ultimately illusory and simplified as any ironclad definition in the multi-faceted realm of art, even among those of us who try to argue for the validity of our take. There's many different voices that we carry within ourselves, often shifting from outlet to outlet and quite frequently not correlating with what we might believe on a given day. But the voice doesn't just

4. The illusion inherent in many film pieces is the coherency of perspective: a stable, authoritative, fixed critical vantage point from which the writer issues forth an opinion that, while it may shift to one degree or another as the months and years go by, is taken to be their authentic and unalloyed view at this particular moment in time. Inherent in this formulation is

5. And yet, in the months that have passed since I first started attempting to craft my own contribution, I have been faced with my own seeming inability to reconcile what I find to be a maelstrom of competing ideas,

6. In their typically eloquent introduction to the symposium you have been reading for the past few months, Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert noted that "so much film criticism is done in the heat of the moment, and all of it is always, usually unbeknownst to the writer, connected to the circumstance, age, and ever-shifting experience of the time of life in which it is written," a sentiment which has stuck with me since I first read it, in their call for submissions issued many months ago. The implication of passion dispelling self-examination, rushing past reservations to issue a vociferous take in praise or damnation of a particular work, is often a truer description of the way in which we engage with a work than the self-styled sober expertise and erudite insight that we may wish to project as a means of justifying our little alcoves in a film culture increasingly saturated with the cacophonous words of many. Theoretically, then, this symposium provided an opportunity to resist the predominant impulse to expound on an exterior work, instead turning the mirror back on ourselves through the portal provided by something that this mind, these hands produced all those years ago. There is an implicit assumption in that line of thinking: that such self-examination—or indeed, film criticism writ large—can be done from a more-or-less fixed vantage point, a single frame of mind that, all the fretting over sentences and details aside, represents a coherent thesis sustained through any given piece. I know that this is possible: a great number of the best current critics I know (and am proud to call friends) have taken astonishingly divergent and illuminating paths towards this invitation to delve into their past thoughts, whether it be Adam Nayman and Nick Pinkerton's questioning of their Young Turk days in this publication's infancy, Chloe Lizotte's evocation of her own adolescence through the unlikeliest of sources, or Jordan Cronk's clear engagement with the festival rigors influencing his viewing, among many others. But how do you write about the impossible? How do you capture the feeling, indeed the urge, to embark on a self-examination of self-examination, if the layers of thought are content to stop there? This is not and cannot be one of those cogent pieces, or at least not in the same manner. It arrives far behind its brethren, due in large part to exterior factors: the catastrophic loss of a nearly complete draft, the demands of law school, the

7. In an interview with Nick Newman for The Film Stage on the occasion of the US release of his new film The Beast, Bertrand Bonello mentioned that he had published a book of the scripts that he had written but not directed, entitled Ghost Films (Films fantômes). Casting the process of writing and preparing a film as a dreamlike obsession only exorcised upon the completion of the film, he wondered about those incomplete projects, musing that "they still live in you—they obsess you like a ghost." Bonello, among his countless strengths, is one of modern cinema's greatest purveyors of ghost stories, albeit not usually in the traditional, explicitly paranormal manner. Instead, his films all take the forms of hauntings, whether capturing the spirits of times long past or the precarity of modern existence. That the experience of watching them frequently invokes both pulse-pounding tension and languorous hedonism only enhances that feeling: the extremes of both sensations coalesce into an experience that weighs heavily on the mind, shapeshifting and burrowing deeper as the weeks and months since any given viewing accumulate. Obsession is, of course, one of the hallmarks of cinephilia, both within countless cherished films—everything from the

8. I've never been one of those film critics who has obsessed over every word they write. While I take pride in many of the pieces and reviews I've written over the years, and some have had much more arduous gestation periods than others, I generally attempt to embrace something verging towards spontaneity. Unfortunately, that comes with

9. How do you write about your own failings? This was never a piece about a single past instance of writing. It began, almost innocuously, as a consideration of two reviews I wrote scarcely three months apart in 2017, both for Seattle Screen Scene and about Bonello's Nocturama: from that June, a somewhat admiring capsule published during the Seattle International Film Festival; in September, a more substantial, positively inclined piece.

10. As I write these words, I'm staring at four tabs on my Internet browser and a Word document. 1. A capsule I wrote about Bertrand Bonello's 2016 masterpiece Nocturama for Seattle Screen Scene, published in June 2017 on the occasion of the Seattle International Film Festival. 2. A review I wrote about Nocturama for the same publication from that September. 3. A draft of a post on my blog, comprising close to 1,500 words from ten separate attempts (and counting) to make even some headway on this piece in the past few months. 4. The landing page for this symposium, containing insightful and surprising pieces from some of the smartest critics I know. 5. The complete first draft that I wrote for this symposium in November, dotted with Michael Koresky's typically helpful and comprehensive edits, only some of which I've resolved. They are the digital manifestations of the ghosts that have haunted me for the better part of a year, ever since Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert first put out the call for submissions to the symposium that this straggling, attenuated piece hopefully forms something of a serviceable coda for. They seem to be almost taunting me with their demonstrations of past failures, potential successes, and above all the massive mental effort that has gone into this piece still yet in the making, still unproven and theoretical. All of this could have been easily avoided, with this piece coming somewhere in the midst of its brethren, an innocuous bit of self-examination like all the others,

11. Words can't express the strangeness of contributing even a long-delayed, meager coda to this symposium. When Reverse Shot first began publication, I was five-and-a-half years old, still a decade away from even beginning to grasp the outlines of the film culture that I would soon find myself enmeshed in. I am not the very newest member of the RS roster in this symposium, but there isn't a great deal of time separating those of us relative newcomers. More important, of course, is the experience

12. If only I had read Bonello's words before choosing my film for this symposium. It should have been a simple task: though my relatively recent entry into film criticism limited the slate of reviews from which to choose, that still left a whole bevy of possibilities. I could have returned to my very first proper review with Cameraperson, revisited the personal dimensions of my assessment of Silence, even confronted the

13. On my blog, I have a draft of a post that has swelled to nearly two thousand words. It contains numbered entries ranging from a few words to numerous paragraphs, each representing a failed attempt to make headway on the piece that (hopefully) you are reading now. No one grouping of words is entirely alike, and they vary wildly in quality, insight, and coherence, but they each represent a different pathway, trying to grab hold of some aspect or the other of not just two disparate encounters with a film, but instead what it means to reckon with my history with a work of art.

14. But I feel much more strongly about Bonello's films now, thanks to the multiple viewings of a number of his films I've undertaken for this piece, up to and including his latest masterwork The Beast. In refreshing my memory and considerably raising my estimation of films like House of Tolerance, Zombi Child, and, yes, Nocturama, I feel that some aspect of his cinematic worldview has permanently affixed itself to my vision, or perhaps that the constant exposure has revealed a lens that was previously unconscious. As much as his precise, foreboding frames and synth-heavy scores, Bonello's films are defined by their focus on outsiders within clearly defined milieus. The eponymous fashion magnate in Saint Laurent, the quarantined teenager in Coma, the thwarted lovers across time in The Beast: all of these figures outwardly belong to social classes that possess a certain status, and yet they are all set apart from the people they interact with by dint of their particular psyches. In the collective yet isolated protagonists of House of Tolerance and Nocturama, this distinction is heightened. If I may be so bold: despite the geographical/temporal/sociological/etc. gap, I see myself in Bonello's heroes.