Unresolved Stories and Open-Ended Narratives

[oscar jubis]

I need your help.

I have started doing research for a book on films which have open endings or fail to clearly answer a major question elicited by the plot. Consequently, these films deny the viewer narrative closure. Some examples of what I have in mind...You know how by the end of L'avventura we still don't know what happened to the socialite who got lost island-hopping and became the subject of a search, and how there's no way of knowing if the man and the woman actually met Last Year at Marienbad, and whether or not Vero ran over the boy found dead on the side of the road in The Headless Woman? This type of narrative characteristic can be found, to varying degrees, in the works of these directors: Hitchcock (Suspicion,Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds), Antonioni, Resnais, Haneke (as of late), Kiarostami, Lynch, Duras, and a few others.

Please share your thoughts and/or nominate any films you can think of that "fit the bill". Thanks!
*If you cannot post, e-mail me at o.jubis@miami.edu

[Chris Knipp]

Very large topic, Oscar. I think it best to take a few examples and analyze rather than try to make a comprehensive list. Unresolved plots in movies include a lot of bad movies as well as the artistic and famous ones you mention; keep that in mind and note the difference.

[oscar jubis]

The book will closely consider a relatively small number of films. However, I am beginning the exploration/research of the topic, a phase that will last about 15 months. It serves me well to be as inclusive as possible. A small sample can lead to problematic, narrow conclusions. Would you provide examples of these "bad movies with unresolved plots", please. Are these as common as you say? Notice that what I have in mind are movies that fail to answer major questions elicited by the plot. Thanks.

[Chris Knipp]

I see your point. I'll keep that in mind and let you know if I come up with new examples.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks. Please do.

[Chris Knipp]

I think it is a good idea for you to list bad movies that have unresolved plots just because they're bad, while the great directors you list such as Haneke, Antonioni, Resnais, et al. use the unresolved quality intentionally. However I doubt that i can come up with more examples than you can, and I'm not much of an expert on bad movies. It's just my feeling that bad movies often have plots that don't quite make sense.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks, Chris. There is plenty of good work on this subject but most of it comes from literary criticism. In fact, I will probably model my book on Marianna Torgovnick's seminal "Closure in the Novel" (1981) which has an introductory chapter in which she reviews the available criticism/research and chooses her terminology. It is followed by nine chapters, each dealing with one or two novels in depth.

I am just beginning but it would seem that I must include at least one chapter dealing with a film in which the lack of closure due to unresolved plot elements seems gratuitous or lacking in purpose or poorly executed. Bad, in simple terms. But there is only one such movie that comes to mind: the French/Uruguayan co-production Orlando Vargas. I sat next to actor Aurelien Recoing (Cantet's Time Out) at the American premiere of this film, by the way. Maybe I just forget bad movies.
And maybe Orlando Vargas will look better to me the second time around.

[Chris Knipp]

Literary criticism has been there before. It's ironic that I began my career as a would-be film critic with a college essay "The Film Critic's Hornbook," urging writers about movies to eschew a literary approach, but I've come to realize that one has to talk about film to some extent the same way one talks about literature.

I probably forget bad movies too, and forget good ones, though writing about them, I tend to remember them a bit better now.

At one extreme, it becomes almost meaningless, because modern stories are fragmented to reflect the modern world and so almost no films have the tidy endings stories used to possess. You could argue that a "sophisticated" view of the world requires a film maker to forge work that's unsatisfying and unresolved?

[oscar jubis]

It would be interesting for you to compare your writing in that college essay and your writing now and see how it differs, and whether that reflects changes in you as a person.

On the one hand, a review of a film that borrows exclusively from literary and theatrical criticism is problematic, as far as I am concerned.
But it would be a mistake for me to ignore the fact that literary criticism is often relevant to considerations of narrative in cinema. I am and will be reading not only film-centric writing but also literary criticism dealing with endings and closure. That's a lot of reading, mon ami: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Henry James, Forster, Frank Kermode, Barthes, Umberto Eco, Torgovnick, and several more recent works. If I end up with a book that makes a worthy contribution to the field, then it will be well worth it.

[Chris Knipp]

I think I wrote better when I was in college than I do now. However I may know a few things I didn't know then. At that time, I was particularly inspired to present my argument by reading reviews by a certain writer (and several others), which didn't reflect that the writing was about movies and coulld just as well have been about a short story or a novel. I think that probably remains true of most reviews today, but I'd have to study them to find out. Obviously a true writer about movies should never fail to take account of their "filmic" aspects, to use the word I used then. But in writing day to day reviews, I can see now from my own experience that it's easy not to, and my own training is in literary criticism.

It's interesting that in your declaration of faith as a film lover you talked about your great willingness to appreciate films that do not tell a story at all, and yet t you've chosen to focus on one of the most obvious narrative elements in films and to consider it as if it were a necessity and when it's absent, it's unusual.

Of course literary criticism provides the primary, and highly developed, language for talking about narrative.

I often forget how movies end. i tend to think the middle is more interesting and more important. But of course if a filmmaker doesn't know how to end the movie it's an obvious weakness. And fairly often the film has multiple endings, because they weren't satisfied with the first one, and have to keep tacking on more.

In my review of the Russian director Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy (NYFF) I quoted a paragraph from Mike D'Angelo writing for Onion AV Clu (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-10-day-seven,41323/)b from Cannes 2010. I like the way D'Angelo describes his viewing experience and the sense he may get of being betrayed or redeemed or disappointed; and he tends to have a keen sense of structuire, which is what narrative is. What I quoted is this:

"For about an hour I was sure I was witnessing an exciting new talent, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell was going on. Following a nondescript truck driver en route to deliver a load of flour, My Joy (WARNING: titular irony) initially has an engaging shaggy-dog quality, as the trucker's encounters with folks along the road — an elderly hitchhiker, a scarily young hooker — spin off into unrelated mini-narratives of their own... About an hour in, however, the film goes well beyond discursive and becomes almost completely random, abandoning the trucker entirely (in a startling way) and flitting around without even that vague semblance of a narrative skeleton."

That's what happens: Sergei Loznitsa abandons his viewer, switching from one narrative and viewpoint to another without warning and without point.

[oscar jubis]

I think I wrote better when I was in college than I do now.

Did you write less than you do now? I think you are extremely prolific.

It's interesting that in your declaration of faith as a film lover you talked about your great willingness to appreciate films that do not tell a story at all, and yet t you've chosen to focus on one of the most obvious narrative elements in films and to consider it as if it were a necessity and when it's absent, it's unusual.

Thanks for calling attention to it. I don't have it saved so I had to dig it out from an old thread here (which was not easy). Now I have it saved as a document :) Here's what I wrote in 2004:

*Cinema is a lot more than storytelling.
I harbor no contempt towards the average filmgoer who goes to the movies only to be told an entertaining story. However, I don’t make such requirements of a film. Plot and narrative can be dispensed with, in the service of characterization, mood, exposition of ideas, abstract beauty, etc. A film doesn't have to be inspired by a novel or short story. A great film can be akin to a filmed essay or poem.

What I had in mind were films like Godard output between '68 and '75 and the poetic contemplation of some Sokurov films like Mother and Son. The avant garde also. This is a small sub-segment of films I appreciate, but don't prefer to narrative films. As you point out, I am currently concerned only with narrative, fiction films of a very particular shall we say "modernist-as-opposed-to-classical" kind.

[Chris Knipp]

I saved your credo too though I might have trouble finding it on my computer (different computer than the one I'm on now so I can't check yet). That seemed to me one of the more dubious of your assertions--maybe just in the way you put it -- "Plot and narrative can be dispensed with." As it turns out they rarely can, though obviously they can sometimes. Tree of LIfe is a notable recent film that is not really out to tell a coherent story. And it may get across some emotional messages better as a result of that disregard. Polemical films like Godard's are not really chronological narratives, it's quite true. Sokorov's may be a lot like Malick's.

I don't know if I write more now than in college. Maybe so. I was an English major. That did require writing. But I was smarter and wittier and quicker then. Swift said of his youthful masterpiece The Battle of the Books, "What a genius I had when I wrote that book," and I know what he meant. We slow down. But hopefully (a word I would not have used) I'm more broad-minded and kinder now. One of my teachers wrote on a paper about Jane Austen's Middlemardh (which unfortunately I've lost), "Why don't you grow up and develop some literary taste. A+"

[oscar jubis]

That statement merely reflects an inclusiveness in my taste for film. I labeled the little piece a "disclosure". It is not meant to be polemical or make strong claims.

I took note of your comments about My Joy and decided I should try to watch it to try to make sense of the director's decisions re: narrative.

I write better in English now than when I was in college. What is interesting is that I also write better in Spanish than when I was an undergrad even though I haven't written a word of Spanish in 34 years. Then I took this doctoral-level course in Latin American Thought and was forced to write in Spanish again with very encouraging results.

[Chris Knipp]

I would say you write better here than you did eight years ago, and if your writing in both languages is improving, that shows it's worthwhile for you to be back in school. I think college was an opportunity to do what I had it in me to do.

[oscar jubis]

Thank you.

[Chris Knipp]

You're welcome. I'm sure it's true.

[oscar jubis]

I opened a thread in the Favorite Films section to discuss a film under consideration because of its unresolved story and open-endedness. It is TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

[Chris Knipp]

Good. I would like to see Two Lane Blacktop again on a big screen. I'm afraid Road to Nowhere was disappointing, and others seem largely to share that opinion.

Link to Oscar's new thread on Two Lane Blacktop. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3080-Two-lane-blacktop-%281971%29&p=26289#post26289)

[oscar jubis]

I am not dissuaded by the mixed reviews. I'm interested in Monte Hellman's work. Thanks for the link, Chris. Nice.

[Chris Knipp]

You're welcome.

Oh you will definitely want to see it, and it's quite unique. For an auteur one must see all, good and bad and in between.

[oscar jubis]

Almost two years since the first post and I've completed bibliographic research for this book project. I have also written the first draft of the Introduction and began writing chapter one, Antonioni, which will focus on L'avventura, Blowup, The Passenger, and Identification of a Woman.

The provisional title for the book is:

Resolution and Closure in Modernist Cinema:
Antonioni/Resnais/Robbe-Grillet/Duras/Haneke/Martel

[Johann]

Awesome. Congratulations!

[oscar jubis]

Thanks. One of the challenges involved is saying something new about filmmakers like Antonioni and Resnais because they have generated so much scholarship. All angles seem to have been exhausted. As I write in my office, I am banking on my interdisciplinary approach, a mix of analytic film criticism, narratology, philosophy, phenomenology, and history, giving me a fresh perspective.

It's less of a challenge to write about Robbe-Grillet and Duras because most of the criticism available in English is strictly from the perspective of literary theory.

I am re-watching all of Antonioni's movies. Currently I am trying to understand precisely why L'avventura was so hated (Monica Vitti cried "come una bambina" after all the sneering and catcalls at the Cannes premiere) and loved (voted 2nd best film ever in the 1962 Sight & Sound poll) when it came out. This is the film that most eloquently expressed the art and entertainment divide that goes back to the 1910s.

[Chris Knipp]

My father and I saw L'AVVENTURA in New York when it was brand new and we both absolutely loved it. I think those who "hated" it were not very sophisticated, like the people who "hated" Picasso or Matisse in earlier years, or perhaps the films of earlier great directors you would know more about than I do. Sneers and catcalls at Cannes reflected the lack of a conventional "narrative arc," obviously; the superficial judgment that "nothing was happening." In general, it doesn't seem that boos at Cannes first screenings are very revealing, except that they may be good publicity. I might add that my father had a "thing" for Monica Vitti, and I loved watching her myself, in anything.

[arsaib4]

So the site's resident plagiarist has written a book? Congrats, indeed!

[oscar jubis]

I'm all original Babe! Glad you've been checking us out.

[arsaib4]

No problem, Rebecca Bell. How is Leeds? It was good to see you at MUBI. I hope you enjoyed our conversations. How many other fake accounts do you have there and at other sites?

[oscar jubis]

Not me (must be some smart gal!). I posted a little as "OrsonLubitsch" on the TCM boards about 5 years ago. But that's the extent of my online writing. Of course I always use my name in print publications.

[arsaib4]

Which name is that?

I'm glad no one bothers with your "print publications." People know when they're reading something they've read before. Heck, you still copy from me!

It's amazing to me how utterly shameless you truly are.

[oscar jubis]

My father and I saw L'AVVENTURA in New York when it was brand new and we both absolutely loved it. I think those who "hated" it were not very sophisticated, like the people who "hated" Picasso or Matisse in earlier years, or perhaps the films of earlier great directors you would know more about than I do. Sneers and catcalls at Cannes reflected the lack of a conventional "narrative arc," obviously; the superficial judgment that "nothing was happening." .

The vitriol of the Cannes audience was unbelievable. I've read several accounts by people who were in attendance, like critic Penelope Houston. I would call this behavior philistene. But there were some reasonable critics (and moviegoers) who simply did not find it to be a good experience, and I think you're right to bring up narrative. The events depicted do not constitute what Aristotle called "a complete action", something that audiences then and now generally demand.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, but I would say that L'AVENTURA's not being "a complete action" is one thing, and the meandering, uneventful sequence of scenes, which confuse one's sense of time, is another, and is the distinctive and original element. Of course it's philistine, to react so negatively. However, it's only natural, and something we sometimes miss today, people being harder to shock, for there to be an adverse reaction to something stylistically revolutionary, though booing continues for one reason or another at Cannes. Penelope Houston's description of the L'AVVENTURA Cannes screening, if this GUARDIAN (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/jul/31/obituaries)obituary is what you refer to, isn't very detailed. Or does she expound further on it elsewhere?

Apparently jeering audiences at debuts of film classics at the French festival has led to BAM-cinematek just this month staging a series, "Booed at Cannes" (http://www.bam.org/film/2013/booed-at-cannes). It may be fun to contemplate, but if it's so common, it also becomes less significant or interesting. Surely the reaction you're interested in for L'AVVENTURA is that it induces puzzlement rather than outrage, that it's stimulating rather than a turn-off. Mike D'Angelo just recently commented during his 2013 Cannes tweets that booing when the director is present at a Cannes debut screening, which happened twice this year when he was present, is particularly rude and offensive (and insensitive) behavior. An account says that Antonioni and Vitti both "fled" the notorious screening, Vitti "in tears." It must have been awful for them; being present at a first screening always difficult for filmmakers and stars, like a play's "opening night."

Houston's account is that L'AVVENTURA rose very high very fast in the ranks of most admired films of all times, but then dropped, and now is so far below as to be "out of the money" (a crass way of putting it, by the way). This I don't quite understand. I still like the film. A marvelous film by a marvelous director, one of the greatest of all time, one of the most original and most truly "modern".

Whatever the particular audience reaction at that Cannes screening, the Festival awarded it the Jury Prize of course, for its "remarquable contribution à la recherche d'un nouveau langage cinématographique," "remarkable contribution to the search for a new cinematic language." A phrase that's as vague and puzzling in its way as the film, and therefore perhaps wonderfully appropriate.

Going by the BAM series, apparently L'ECLISSE, another marvelous Antoinioni film, was also booed at Cannes, along with THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, THE SOFT SKIN, L'ARGENT, TAXI DRIVER -- honorable company.

[oscar jubis]

There is another piece where Houston writes about the Cannes audience's behavior making it impossible for her to appreciate the film, until she watched the film again at the London FF and it was a revelation. She describes people yelling "Cut!" to complain about shots being held too long. Interesting to note that Antonioni's 50s films have longer ASLs than L'avventura or any of his more modernist films. I am consciously trying to acknowledge the challenges that Antonioni's films present to audiences and to really understand this thoroughly rather than think of them as lacking sophistication. I think insufficient resolution (about Anna's disappearance, about where Sandro and Claudia stand at the end, etc.) and scenes that don't forward the plot (there is a novelistic concentration on peripheral characters) are the main but not the only reasons why some people reject or don't/wouldn't like Antonioni's films.

[Chris Knipp]

I get it that you're interested in how Antonioni is hard to follow and not that people mocked or rejected the film. There are people like me who don't care that much about resolutions sometimes and are more interested in the process and style than the outcome or ending; in this case specifically I think it's obvious well before the end that L'AVVENTURA isn't going to be resolved and is more about the aimlessness of these people's lives.

Is the other more detailed Penelope Houston piece online? Anyway what is is called, what date?

[oscar jubis]

I found a long quote from Houston's original review in the book "Film festivals: culture, people, and power on the global screen
By Cindy H. Wong" page 107: http://books.google.com/books?id=-yLCRg9Zg2AC&pg=PA308&lpg=PA308&dq=cindy+wong+penelope+houston&source=bl&ots=apXtPd6h5O&sig=95cc3obVoHZ8huTVw4c4-ghEaGs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aaalUayDF5Cm9gTo14DwBQ&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=cindy%20wong%20penelope%20houston&f=false

So, may I say that the fact that you figure the theme of the film to be human aimlessness and that you realize that this theme is coherent with meandering characters, temps mort, and insufficient resolution provides a way to justify Antonioni's refusal to provide us with conventional, time-tested pleasures? Perhaps that this thematic completeness that you find in the film compensates for the lack of resolution, for the open-endedness of the plot? Can this thematic congruence evoke in you the sense of finality one usually get by having questions answered and conflicts resolved?

[Chris Knipp]

I hadn't worked it out that well but I'd say yes.

That looks like an interesting book (Cindy Wong) and one I ought to dip into. She says some nice thins about Cannes, I see. I'll have to hunt for the part about Penelope Houston's L'AVVENTURA experiences.

Your theme also makes me think of John Barth's book CHIMERA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(John_Barth_novel)), an ingenious work of metafiction from the early Seventies which grows out of the 1001 NIGHTS, and has the idea of a series of interrupted stories told successively to save Scheherazade from execution. These are "unresolved stories and open-ended narratives." In this the story-teller interacts directly with the characters, who have never heard of the story. Barth is not interested so much just in the stories themselves but in the genres of the stories, the function of the stories in relation to each other, and the relations between the teller of the tale and the tale and the characters. The storyteller uses (Scheherazade)the now famous phrase "The key to the treasure is the treasure." Which I associate with the idea that the journey is the destination. Or, to put it another way, the fun is not the result but the process.


By intentionally writing stories that deny the reader closure and that throw him/her back to the text, Barth places pleasure in the progressing rather than in the end of the process for the pleasure of getting lost in the funhouse transcends the need for a traditional or linear ending. --Abstract of a doctoral dissertation (http://ksu.edu.sa/Deanships/DeanshipofGraduateStudies/Abstracts/The%20Key%20to%20the%20Treasure%20is%20the%20Treas ure%20A%20Critical%20Study%20o.pdf)about Barth, LOST IN THE FUNOUSE, and CHIMERA.

[oscar jubis]

Right. You clearly understand what my topic is. Barth's book and Your comments about it are interesting to me. I also remember you mentioning your upbringing, exposure to arts and such, and your early receptivity to all kinds of culture. I am also curious about the resistance to works like Antonioni's, from people who may not be so accepting of experiments in cinema, which L'avventura certainly was 50+ years ago.

[Chris Knipp]

I do see what your topic is and it's an interesting one, though I don't quite follow the importance to your study of the negative reactions toward Antonioni's innovations.

[oscar jubis]

The negative reactions, and I prefer to think of them more as resistances based on the subversion of normative narrative expectations, are symptomatic of what Antonioni's films do that is truly innovative and one should pay attention to all the effects of what one studies, no?

[Chris Knipp]

I guess so, yes.

[oscar jubis]

I am also interested in "teaching Antonioni" some day. I am interested in figuring out how to prepare your average 19 year old college student to appreciate a film like L'avventura. Like the vast majority of film history teachers, I have found it easier and more convenient (because of duration) to show Breathless, or 400 Blows, or Hiroshima Mon Amour when covering modernist cinema in general film history courses. Besides it's a big world out there and there's limited time available to show films from the major national cinemas. And when it comes to Italian Cinema, we tend to show neo-realist films like Bicycle Thieves and Rome Open City. But someday I want to face "the Antonioni challenge".

[Chris Knipp]

I wonder if one can really teach people to like anything. To know all is to forgive all, they say.

[oscar jubis]

I don't think I can teach people to like anything. But I think I can find a way to show students why Antonioni is one of the great masters of the cinema, or what is it that makes him unique and innovative.

[Chris Knipp]

Jolly good. If they buy that, then how can they not like him?

[oscar jubis]

I think it is easier to appreciate the compositional beauty and poetry of Antonioni's images, the way he creates relationships or rhymes between characters and elements in the landscape, natural and man-made, that are truly visual metaphors, the editing of certain scenes, the way Anna dissolves faster than Sandro in the last scene in which we see her, etc. One thing is to show this to 19 year olds and teach them to recognize Antonioni's artistry; and another thing is to expect most of them to enjoy watching all 2 hours 23 minutes of it in one sitting.

[Chris Knipp]

And yet when I was a 19-year-old nothing delighted me more: that's what I mean by saying you can't teach anybody to love any works of art. Or you can, perhaps. This is why I have great admiration for high school teachers in public schools: they must "sell" their subjets. The assumption is that in college, which I taught -- only once high school, very briefly -- students come to your class open to your subject, at least if it is not a required course, relatively speaking, anyway. Mainly, I think, the thing to do is to awaken those who can love your subject to its manifold pleasures. Those who can't will have to sit quiet.