Filming Melancholia

30/09/2026

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Despondent Dispositions

Melancholia is one of the oldest diseases or oldest of conditions, but now is more likely to be regarded as no more than a disposition, and that will be vital as we look at films, including Le Mepris, Anne and Muriel, Paris, Texas, Uzak and Eternity and Day. It was originally one of the four temperaments and linked to the four humours: phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine and choleric, matched by phlegm, black bile, blood and yellow bile. Hippocrates, according to Diogo Telles-Correia and João Gama Marque, saw “these states were clinically characterised by several symptoms, above all fear and sadness.” (‘Melancholia Before the Twentieth Century: Fear and Sorrow or Partial Insanity?’) Hippocrates’ ideas were followed by Galen, who reckoned melancholia was an instance of humoral excess and the temperament came from this overabundance of black bile. Galen saw that “along with depressive symptoms (‘all patients presented fear and despondency’), melancholic patients showed bizarre and fixed ideas (probably alike to what we call today ‘delusion’) and a behavior which was consistent with such ideation. (‘Melancholia Before the Twentieth Century: Fear and Sorrow or Partial Insanity?’)

Various thinkers through the centuries have advanced upon or modified what melancholia is, including Richard Burton in his massive The Anatomy of Melancholy, who pulled together various prior theories and believed “persecution, poisoning and jealousy” were amongst the imaginings of the melancholic mind. William Cullen (who first used the term neurosis), “uses the expression ‘partial insanity’ to define the monothematic delusion in melancholia, contrasting with ‘universal insanity,’ which he equates to mania.” (‘Melancholia before the twentieth century: fear and sorrow or partial insanity?’)  Freud’s contribution came mainly in his key essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, where he says, “Let us now apply to melancholia what we have learnt about mourning. In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object.” Freud notes however that “even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”  Many other thinkers have weighed in on the subject, and Diogo Telles-Correia and João Gama Marque offer a useful diagram of its meaning through history, as it was initially seen as one of affective symptoms, with abnormal beliefs added for many centuries, then in the 18th and 19th centuries focusing on abnormal beliefs, before returning to affective symptoms in the 20th.

In the filmic examples we offer, the emphasis will be on affective symptoms over abnormal beliefs, combining chiefly Hippocrates and Freud, and acknowledging the importance of temperament and the significance of loss. But Burton’s remark about the melancholic as fretting over persecution, poisoning and jealousy will be valid also — without thinking too much of poisoning as anything more than a poisoning of the mind rather than that of the body. In various instances one can see how an approach to the world, and beliefs about it, can poison the thoughts of protagonists, leading to a debilitation of that body which has nothing to do with Rasputin-like plots. Cinema’s approach to the melancholic has usually been much more psychological than that, and frequently focused on the male mind. While hysteria has usually been viewed in film as a ‘woman’s issue’, as if still associated with Hippocrates’ belief that it was linked to Uterine problems, melancholia has chiefly been a male preoccupation. We might, however, note instances of the melancholic in Marguerite Duras’ work, in adaptations like Moderato Cantabile and India Song. When Soren Kierkegaard wrote about “reflective sorrow”, women whose  “exterior is calm and composed, and deep inside, in its little nook, sorrow lives like a well-guarded prisoner in an underground gaol…” (Either/Or), the examples given were women. When Lars von Trier made a film, with the very title Melancholia, its central character was female. Nevertheless, the melancholic type has been as consistently male as hysterics have been deemed women, and so it is men and melancholia in film which will be our focus.

Writing on Francois Truffaut’s Anne and Muriel, Pauline Kael quoted its director Francois Truffaut: “Once a picture is finished, I realize it is sadder than I meant it to be.” (Reeling) But anyone who adapts, more than once, material containing the melancholic shouldn’t be so surprised. Both Anne and Muriel and Jules et Jim are from novels by Henri-Pierre Roche, while The Green Room is adapted from Henry James’ The Altar to the Dead. Truffaut shouldn’t have been so perplexed that they turned out so bleakly, contained as they are by melancholic tones or melancholic characters. Then there are Shoot the Pianist and Soft Skin, Truffaut films with reflectively sorrowful characters, and with a mood permeating the material, and that exacerbates the sense of loss. In Anne and Muriel, Truffaut’s narrator tells us that the central character Claude is invited over to Wales by the daughter of an old friend of the family. We see Claude fall in love with Muriel, eventually breaking off their engagement when he is back in Paris, embarking on an affair with Anne when she comes to study in the French capital, and where Muriel ends up in a deep depression after Claude insists that Anne tell her sister of their liaison.

It is a film about characters trying to live life to the full (at least in Claude’s case), but Truffaut films it as if Claude’s is always at least a glass half empty. Anne and Muriel doesn’t end with Claude contented with the completeness of his existence; it concludes with Claude no longer so young, and Truffaut’s voice-over in the epilogue tells us that, in the intervening fifteen years, Anne and Muriel’s mother has died (Anne having died during the main body of the story), the house sold, Claude’s letters returned, and it is after WWI: “France is full of corpses and shrapnel. Millions have died, few remember why.” The scene takes place at the Rodin Museum. It would have just opened (in 1919), and while Rodin didn’t depict the war (and died in 1917), the film’s voiceover captures, in the images of Rodin’s twisted and tormented figures, those who would have suffered in it. When moments earlier, before the epilogue, Muriel’s voiceover says “We recognise happiness only afterwards”, such a line must have resounded strongly with the millions maimed and those who lost loved ones during the conflict. But Claude’s loss seems to be his own, as if he visits the museum to find the despair he discovers in himself, rather than chiefly as a way of understanding the horrors of a war Rodin’s sculpture captured without representing it. At the beginning of the film, Claude is the one injured: he falls off a swing, and we see him on crutches, then later with a stick. But this is a temporary physical injury that quickly heals. Many others in the war weren’t so lucky, and Claude looks far more crippled emotionally than he ever was physically. It isn’t only that the past fifteen years show strongly on a face that seems wracked and disappointed. He sees various girls around twelve or thirteen playing in the museum’s garden, and wonders if any of them might be Muriel’s now-teen daughter, aware that one of them could have been his. The final Rodin sculpture we see in the garden is Rodin’s The Kiss, but no child came out of Claude and Muriel’s embrace. He tries to get a taxi, and when the driver says he has a fare, he looks at his reflection in the glass and says, “What’s wrong with me today? I look old!” It is the closing line and contains the film’s melancholy, alongside George Delerue’s plaintive, swelling and receding score.

Delerue might be the great melancholic film composer. Numerous scores are famous and take us instantly back to the work: Ennio Morricone’s music in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or The Battle of Algiers. Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, or John Williams with Jaws and Star Wars. But Delerue, who worked often for Truffaut and once so memorably with Godard (on Le Mepris), can take the viewer beyond the film into a past that seems to contain much more than a memory of the viewing experience. If Truffaut noted that his films came out sadder than he anticipated, it wasn’t only due to the source material — it also rests on the final stage of a film’s production, the music.  Delerue’s scores for Jules et Jim, Shoot the Pianist, Soft Skin, Anne and Muriel add enormously to the films’ reflective sorrow. Perhaps more than with hysteria and neurosis, music can convey very well a despondency beyond words that might also be somehow beyond the body’s ready manifestation as well. When Truffaut said Anne and Muriel was “not a film about physical love, but a physical film about love” (Truffaut: A Biography), we might puzzle over the statement, and resolve it in musing over how love becomes more than a physical manifestation, and that melancholy more than hysteria and neurosis exemplify this.

To understand this aspect, we can again think of Kierkegaard’s essay on ‘Shadowgraphs’. When Muriel says we only recognise happiness afterwards, Claude might respond that he recognises unhappiness afterwards, evident in the film’s conclusion. Muriel is married with a child; he is left wondering what he has lost. Kierkegaard notes that reflective sorrow “brings with it no characteristic outward charge; from its very first moment it hastens inwards and only a reasonably careful observer suspects its vanishing; afterwards it takes great care that the exterior obtrude as little as possible.” (Either/Or) He also adds that “what gives rise to reflective sorrow can lie partly in the individual’s  own subjective nature, partly in the subjective sorrow itself or its occasion.” Kierkegaard may be getting close to Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, but his interest is chiefly with women and love, and ours, melancholia more broadly, which is why Freud will be of use later on.  But the idea is that it remains representationally difficult partly because, for Kierkegaard, it is in constant oscillation. When he says “it does not lend itself to spatial specifications”, we might wonder if it lends itself to temporal specifications in the form of music.

We wouldn’t wish to pressgang Kierkegaard’s complex concerns into the narrowness of our preoccupations, but he can help us to understand an aspect of melancholia in film. While hysteria and neurosis can be readily represented and often lend themselves, in the former instance, to the melodramatic, and in the latter to the comedic, melancholia might be harder to capture. Tania Modleski quotes Helene Cixous saying, "Silence is the mark of hysteria…the great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times they have lost more than speech. They are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets through.” Yet Modleski adds, "it seems fair to say that many of the classic film melodramas from the 30s through the 50s are peopled by great, or near-great, hysterics-women possessed by an overwhelming desire to express themselves, to make themselves known, but continually confronting the difficulty, if not the impossibility of realizing this desire.” (‘Time and Desire in the Women’s Film’). Whatever the difficulty the character has, the filmmaker often finds hysteria representable on screen. When Hitchcock shows his central character about to sleep with her new husband in Marnie, she suddenly insists she can’t go through with it and rushes into the other room. The music augments the scene, but there is more than enough in the action to make the event dramatic. Equally, neurosis often finds itself comedically represented, evident in Good as It Gets, with Jack Nicholson bringing his own plastic cutlery to the restaurant he regularly visits. Melancholia is more difficult, and music doesn’t augment the scene; it underpins it, allusively registering despair and loss without registering it too readily on the dramatic surface.

In Le Mepris, Delerue’s music captures a marriage falling apart as if as a forewarning, and offers it ironically when the conclusion proposes a tragedy far greater than merely the marriage’s demise. Paul is a writer hired by a powerful American producer to write a film in Italy, and we watch as the producer tries to seduce his wife, Camille, while he looks on. The film shows Paul’s pusillanimous acceptance that he needs to capitulate to the producer to make the money he needs to impress his wife, and will, in the process of capitulation, lose her respect. The music proposes this is where the melancholy resides. Yet at the film’s conclusion, Camille and the producer will die in an offscreen car crash, and we may sense any reflective sorrow the film has captured will be greatly exacerbated by this most conclusive of conclusions. Godard elides the drama and shows the immediate aftermath of the car sandwiched between the two tanks of an oil truck: the music coming in as the camera cranes in on the bright red vehicle.  

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud differentiates the mournful from the melancholic, partly based on a difference in appearance: with the inhibition of the melancholic puzzling because we cannot see what absorbs him so entirely. “The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning- an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.” The melancholic, in Freud’s formulation, doesn’t merely grieve for the lost object; they also turn the ego against itself. Paul and Claude may be prime material for such a loss of self-respect and, in Truffaut’s voiceover and in Delerue’s music in Anne and Muriel, and Delerue’s music in Le Mepris, the directors propose its possibility, without of course examining the consequences of the loss. Claude loses Anne to illness and Muriel to another man, and Paul’s ineffectual reaction to the producer leads Camille to go off with him in a car that will kill her. We needn’t read beyond the film and muse over what will happen to Paul and Claude, as if creating a sequel to the films that don’t exist. But in the works’ examination of loss, we might notice a melancholic aspect that permeates the story and finds its fullest manifestation in Delerue’s music.

European auteurist cinema has often been drawn to the melancholic, and we find examples of these figures in Andreas in The Passion of Anna, the titular Beekeeper in Theo Angelopoulos’s film, Serge in Le vent de La Nuit, Travis in Paris, Texas, and Mahmut in Uzak. We can find examples from elsewhere, in Lost in Translation, Love Liza, Broken Flowers and Anamolisia, but these American films often take at least partly a comedic form. This doesn’t mean European film isn’t impervious to comedic melancholy, and nobody has practised it with more assurance than Aki Kaurismaki. But as a serious pursuit we can do worse than look at the five examples above. To help, we can also think of Freud’s famous triad (the id; the ego and the superego), and see how it plays out against the triad of hysteria, neurosis and melancholia. When Freud says of the conscience, “What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called 'conscience; we shall count it, along with the censorship of consciousness and reality-testing, among the major institutions of the ego,” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’), we can see how it segues into the superego in melancholic manifestation.

If the id is the most impulsive of the triad, so hysteria is the most impulsive of the three states, with neurosis closer to egoism. This is so if we accept that in many a neurotic film, a character uses their ego to defend themselves, whether it is the cooking and cleaning Oscar Felix does after getting kicked out by his wife and moving in with his best friend in The Odd Couple, or the actress in Persona manipulating the nurse, all the better perhaps to use people for her own acting ends. The neurotic may be as fussy as Felix or as scheming as Elisabet, but they don’t quite collapse into the despondency of the melancholic, with Freud noting, “In the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature. The patient's self-evaluation concerns itself much less frequently with bodily infirmity, ugliness or weakness, or with social inferiority; of this category, it is only his fears and asseverations of becoming poor that occupy a prominent position.” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’) In this claim, Freud seems almost to give the melancholic an otherworldly quality, an indifference to much of what passes for life. If the hysteric is often fighting for expression as it takes extreme form in Woman Under the Influence, Possession and The Piano Teacher, and we believe the neurotic, whether particular or controlling (and often both), usually occupies a recognised place in society, the melancholic is frequently an outsider, or a person who positions themselves as such. This is so in all five characters we will address.

In Paris, Texas, Travis comes out of the desert after four years of wandering, as the film explores his relationship with his brother, his son and, late in the film, his much younger ex-wife, Jane. In an important scene, he visits Jane at a joint where she works. In the two-way mirror, he can see her; she can’t see him. In the second visit, he increasingly makes clear to Jane that he is her husband and talks about how everything went wrong. His remarks are those of a melancholic figure as he speaks of the appalling things he did, how he tied her to a stove and was always drunk, and eventually how he left and kept walking at night and rested during the day. The story he tells involves dreams and imaginings, but his wife comes to understand this is Travis, and we come to understand that the disheveled figure at the film’s beginning was the last stage of the man he was trying to escape. The object he couldn’t let go of is the beautiful young woman he now talks to, having done exactly that: get away. But it was as though Travis could accept the loss only by instigating it — by being the one who left: a man less determined to hold onto the woman he loved than to escape the man he loathed. There is an understandable assumption in Freud’s essay that the melancholic figure has lost something through no immediate fault of their own. It is partly why he links mourning and melancholia. Somebody loses something, and they mourn the death or the abandonment, but while the grieving person in time recovers, the melancholic does not. Freud reckons, “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition - it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.” Freud adds, “This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’) Travis has all the self-loathing of a Freudian melancholic, but he anticipates the loss, and preempts the self-hatred.

The melancholic is the loneliest, or at least the most solitary of the triad, with hysterics often fighting against an oppressive environment, and the neurotic frequently fretting over their place and their role in society. In The Passion of Anna, Andreas lives alone on a small island after breaking up with his wife. But after a woman knocks on his door, asking to use his phone, he becomes emotionally embroiled in her life and those of her two friends. By the conclusion, Andreas will be a disintegrating man, evident in the shot director Ingmar Bergman offers after an argument with the woman who, at the beginning of the film, knocked on his door. Anna is someone who was driving when her husband and son were killed before the story starts, and it looks like she wanted to kill Andreas in the car just before this moment of Andreas’s disintegration. As the camera zooms in, Andreas strides back and forth in the distance, a man in disarray. It keeps moving closer and closer until he becomes lost in the film’s grain. If Freud can talk about a hallucinatory willful psychosis, then this isn’t because Andreas can no longer get over the love object that was his wife; rather, the new object has plenty of hallucinatory psychotic episodes of her own and leads to his collapse.  He destroys his solitude and ends up destroying himself.

In Le Vent de la Nuit, Serge suffers a double mourning. His wife has died in the relatively recent past, and he never quite got over the failure of May 1968. When driving through Europe with a young sculptor, the younger man is fascinated by Serge’s political history, but it is one greatly exacerbated by the later death of his spouse; it is her grave he visits in Berlin, and her photo that will be alluded to when he kills himself at the end of the film. Serge is one of cinema’s most melancholic characters if we accept the loss isn’t only personal, but sociological as well. He has lost a world and then lost a person. Left melancholia was a term Walter Benjamin used without properly defining it, and that Wendy Brown explores in an essay on the subject. Brown notes, invoking Freud, “The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one's sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss.” She sees that we “…come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing like and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist.” (‘Resisting Left Melancholy’)

Is Serge paradoxically radical conservative; someone who may have fought on the streets of Paris and been incarcerated, but now is a wealthy architect who drives a red Porsche and can carry the gravitas of loss, without the realities of a revolution if it had come to pass and would probably leave him with a rather lower standard of living? This doesn’t mean Serge is a hypocrite. Nothing in Philippe Garrel’s film suggests he is, and we might wonder if his suicide rests partly on the possibility he sees himself hypocritically. If Freud believes the melancholic self-hates in the context of the lost object, this might seem valid if the person feels guilty over losing a person to death, or worthless if abandoned by love. But losing both a partner and a cause can seem like a misfortune indeed, with the film presenting so mournful a figure because the personal and the political have collided, and the result must inevitably be self-destruction.

Theo Angelopoulos has often been invoked in the context of Left Melancholia, and Enzo Traverso, looking at work by the Greek director alongside Chris Marker, Ken Loach and others, sees him showing “the twentieth century as a tragic age of wrecked revolutions and defeated utopias, remembering the vanquished of its lost battles. “Death,” Traverso says, “floats over all of them as their fatal destiny.” (Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory). In Angelopoulos’s work, the tension rests between personal unhappiness and political or historical disappointment. Some of his films play down the self and emphasise the group dynamic, as in earlier works, including Days of ‘36 and The Travelling Players; others focus on the personal with the political in the background — evident in Eternity and a Day and Voyage to Cythera. In The Beekeeper, the film is much closer to the personal, with Spiros attending his daughter’s wedding and traversing Greece with a hitchhiker he picks up. Along the way, he meets friends and his ex-wife, but his melancholy is a constant. Speaking of three films he made in a row as the Trilogy of Silence (with The Beekeeper the middle one), Angelopoulos said: “We are … waiting for the world to change but have no idea when this is going to happen. History is now silent.  And we are all trying to find answers by digging into ourselves, for it is terribly difficult to live in silence”. (That’s How The Light Gets In) History and politics are there, perhaps, but unrepresented: this is melancholy but without the Left.

Freud’s piece has nothing to say about the political dimension of melancholy and, while much was made of Freud and Marx in the second half of the 20th century as a way of confronting political change with psychic renewal, numerous figures have thus adopted aspects of Freud’s mourning within the melancholic as a political feature. Traverso interestingly proposes two approaches to the melancholic in the context of mourning Leftist failures. One is essentially conservative and acknowledges the dismal consequences of collective action, or the failures of political hope. As Traverso says, “The memory of the Gulag erased that of revolution, the memory of the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism, and the memory of slavery eclipsed that of anticolonialism: the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles, of their conquests and their defeats.” (Left-Wing Melancholia)This is where we will often see the repentant and recanting revolutionary — the very hypocrites who enjoy their Porsche, driven at high speed, escaping their past. Some of those who started radical and absorbed capitalism allowed for ironies, linguistic and pragmatic. Jerry Rubin was a yippie who became a yuppie and, in the eighties, worked on Wall Street. In 1990 he became a marketer selling something called Wow! — a nutritional drink — with former Black Panther Bobby Seale as one of his salesmen.

Traverso sees an alternative to the ready acceptance of such political impotence, escaping into denial and commerce. He believes “in emotions and feelings that envelop a historical transition, [this is] the only way in which the search for new ideas and projects can coexist with the sorrow and mourning for a lost realm of revolutionary experiences.” (Resisting Left Melancholia) Film as an art form can preserve memory as feeling, seeing in the struggles for emancipation and change a structure of emotion that can be retained, even if the hopes have often been dashed. In very different ways, we can see this as the project of both Garrel and Angelopoulos. They are melancholic filmmakers, but see resistance in recollection: Garrel’s films frequently turn on the memory of ’68, a moment "he would reflect back upon time and again through his career, most notably in his late masterpiece, Les amants reguliers” (Golden Globes), and in Angelopoulos’s interest in the Greek Civil War.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been consistently interested in melancholic characters, and while he has made films throughout a period that many would see as politically oppressive, under prime minister and then president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ceylan insists “when I make a film I don't think about the current situation. The duty of a film-maker is not that of a journalist; the director should be more interested in the soul of the spectator.” (Guardian) He has been more engaged in showing the bad faith of bourgeois characters over their faith and disillusionment with any given political system. In Clouds of May, Uzak, Climates, Winter Sleep and others, he focuses on those who retreat from commitments that are more often social, emotional and aesthetic. Their inability to commit to meaningful relationships or purposeful work gives them a melancholic disposition, even if some are still relatively young: the actor Muzaffer Özdemir is in his mid-forties in Clouds of May, and Ceylan is a similar age, playing the leading role in Climates. These are men at an age when change is possible, but regret likely, and Ceylan’s skill psychologically is often in presenting men who absorb, in a despondent way, a past they believe is more insistently behind them than it is. It gives his films a despair contained by frustration — a feeling that they could change their predicament but are caught in their disposition. While Spiros, Serge and Travis can see their lives mainly behind them, and Andreas, someone who is recuperating from a divorce before embarking more hastily than he should with a woman that is far too troubled to be of help, Mahmut in Uzak allows his professional and emotional life to stall. The film is predicated on a working-class cousin who comes to visit, and much of the film is about their relationship - and Mahmut’s indifference towards this visitor. Yet it’s also about Mahmut’s creative ambitions reduced to photographing tiles for a living, and letting go of a woman he loves while he engages in meaningless sexual assignations. Our purpose isn’t to simplify a character all the better to moralise over him. Ceylan himself says Mahmut “had strong ideals when he was younger. Then he went into commercial photography, and earned money, so he had all the opportunities to reach his ideals, but he doesn’t have enough belief for that. So he has pain and anxiety, and doesn’t like himself much.” (Senses of Cinema) It is, instead, to say the director withholds pity for the character while permeating the film with a doleful atmosphere. The mood is melancholic, but Ceylan indicates the character hasn’t quite earned the right to this state, when his life could still be in front of him if he chose to act.

In one scene, Mahmut is with a group of old friends in a cafe and insists photography is dead rather than seeing that the compromises he has made have made photography dead for him. At the end of the film, Mahmut turns up at the airport where his ex is about to fly out of the country with her husband as they seek a new life. He hides behind a pillar and watches her pass through the gates. Shortly afterwards, in the film’s closing scene, he sits on a bench looking out at the Bosphorus. Ceylan beautifully illustrates the sadness of his world through the images he offers of Istanbul, a city that once held an empire and now contains the solitude of people like Mahmut, who is comfortably enough off (evident in the apartment he owns), but doesn’t know how to prosper. When his ex says she and her new husband are moving to Canada, she suggests a hope absent from her home country, and Ceylan conveys in numerous scenes Istanbul as a city representing sadness over hope, lassitude over purpose. Obviously, Istanbul is a lot more than this, but Ceylan’s achievement as a filmmaker is often to show Istanbul and Turkey more generally (he has filmed all over the country, including the Turquoise Coast in Climates, Cappadocia in Winter Sleep, Anatolia in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Erzurum Province in About Dry Grasses) as a place of melancholic containment. It is a country that reflects a disappointed mood. In this, his work shares similarities with Angelopoulos’s use of the Greek landscape.

This shows that melancholy isn’t only a psychological disposition or a political despondency. It can also reflect a filmmaker’s sensibility in a given milieu. It needn’t mean that some locales are melancholic and others not, even if some lend themselves better than others to manifesting melancholy in film form. Both Ceylan and Angeloupolos often play up the wintry or autumnal over summery expectation, as Greece and Turkey become emptied and desolation proves to be both mental and geographic. “I like melancholic things better” (Guardian), Ceylan says of the type of films he likes to watch and wishes to make, and while summer can bring out the bleakness too (Climates), he usually finds the disconsolate in the fading of the light. He found that with “cinema I was able to create a kind of peace in my soul. It was like therapy; you put all the dark, bad sides of yourself into the films, and so you get rid of them – or at least control them in a better way.” (Senses of Cinema)

What may be clear is that just as we proposed music could be an important dimension in revealing melancholia, landscape and locale might be of almost equal value. Perhaps more than in hysteria and neurosis, it demands a mise en scene over a dramatic scene, and it isn’t accidental that all the filmmakers we have focused upon (Godard, Truffaut, Wenders, Angelopoulos, Ceylan, Garrel and  Bergman) are major filmmakers with a sense of cinema as a frame and a palette, as readily as a dramatic medium for action and behaviour. These features needn’t be absent when exploring neurosis and hysteria, but taking into account Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the shadowgraph, and how buried reflective sorrow can be, it may take more visual acumen to convey than either neurosis or hysteria. Melancholia might have for many centuries been invoked in philosophy, medicine and literature, but we may wonder whether it has found its natural home in film, through filmmakers capable of conveying this most hidden of maladies, and giving it the most precise of forms.    

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Filming Melancholia

Despondent Dispositions

Melancholia is one of the oldest diseases or oldest of conditions, but now is more likely to be regarded as no more than a disposition, and that will be vital as we look at films, including Le Mepris, Anne and Muriel, Paris, Texas, Uzak and Eternity and Day. It was originally one of the four temperaments and linked to the four humours: phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine and choleric, matched by phlegm, black bile, blood and yellow bile. Hippocrates, according to Diogo Telles-Correia and João Gama Marque, saw “these states were clinically characterised by several symptoms, above all fear and sadness.” (‘Melancholia Before the Twentieth Century: Fear and Sorrow or Partial Insanity?’) Hippocrates’ ideas were followed by Galen, who reckoned melancholia was an instance of humoral excess and the temperament came from this overabundance of black bile. Galen saw that “along with depressive symptoms (‘all patients presented fear and despondency’), melancholic patients showed bizarre and fixed ideas (probably alike to what we call today ‘delusion’) and a behavior which was consistent with such ideation. (‘Melancholia Before the Twentieth Century: Fear and Sorrow or Partial Insanity?’)

Various thinkers through the centuries have advanced upon or modified what melancholia is, including Richard Burton in his massive The Anatomy of Melancholy, who pulled together various prior theories and believed “persecution, poisoning and jealousy” were amongst the imaginings of the melancholic mind. William Cullen (who first used the term neurosis), “uses the expression ‘partial insanity’ to define the monothematic delusion in melancholia, contrasting with ‘universal insanity,’ which he equates to mania.” (‘Melancholia before the twentieth century: fear and sorrow or partial insanity?’)  Freud’s contribution came mainly in his key essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, where he says, “Let us now apply to melancholia what we have learnt about mourning. In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object.” Freud notes however that “even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”  Many other thinkers have weighed in on the subject, and Diogo Telles-Correia and João Gama Marque offer a useful diagram of its meaning through history, as it was initially seen as one of affective symptoms, with abnormal beliefs added for many centuries, then in the 18th and 19th centuries focusing on abnormal beliefs, before returning to affective symptoms in the 20th.

In the filmic examples we offer, the emphasis will be on affective symptoms over abnormal beliefs, combining chiefly Hippocrates and Freud, and acknowledging the importance of temperament and the significance of loss. But Burton’s remark about the melancholic as fretting over persecution, poisoning and jealousy will be valid also — without thinking too much of poisoning as anything more than a poisoning of the mind rather than that of the body. In various instances one can see how an approach to the world, and beliefs about it, can poison the thoughts of protagonists, leading to a debilitation of that body which has nothing to do with Rasputin-like plots. Cinema’s approach to the melancholic has usually been much more psychological than that, and frequently focused on the male mind. While hysteria has usually been viewed in film as a ‘woman’s issue’, as if still associated with Hippocrates’ belief that it was linked to Uterine problems, melancholia has chiefly been a male preoccupation. We might, however, note instances of the melancholic in Marguerite Duras’ work, in adaptations like Moderato Cantabile and India Song. When Soren Kierkegaard wrote about “reflective sorrow”, women whose  “exterior is calm and composed, and deep inside, in its little nook, sorrow lives like a well-guarded prisoner in an underground gaol…” (Either/Or), the examples given were women. When Lars von Trier made a film, with the very title Melancholia, its central character was female. Nevertheless, the melancholic type has been as consistently male as hysterics have been deemed women, and so it is men and melancholia in film which will be our focus.

Writing on Francois Truffaut’s Anne and Muriel, Pauline Kael quoted its director Francois Truffaut: “Once a picture is finished, I realize it is sadder than I meant it to be.” (Reeling) But anyone who adapts, more than once, material containing the melancholic shouldn’t be so surprised. Both Anne and Muriel and Jules et Jim are from novels by Henri-Pierre Roche, while The Green Room is adapted from Henry James’ The Altar to the Dead. Truffaut shouldn’t have been so perplexed that they turned out so bleakly, contained as they are by melancholic tones or melancholic characters. Then there are Shoot the Pianist and Soft Skin, Truffaut films with reflectively sorrowful characters, and with a mood permeating the material, and that exacerbates the sense of loss. In Anne and Muriel, Truffaut’s narrator tells us that the central character Claude is invited over to Wales by the daughter of an old friend of the family. We see Claude fall in love with Muriel, eventually breaking off their engagement when he is back in Paris, embarking on an affair with Anne when she comes to study in the French capital, and where Muriel ends up in a deep depression after Claude insists that Anne tell her sister of their liaison.

It is a film about characters trying to live life to the full (at least in Claude’s case), but Truffaut films it as if Claude’s is always at least a glass half empty. Anne and Muriel doesn’t end with Claude contented with the completeness of his existence; it concludes with Claude no longer so young, and Truffaut’s voice-over in the epilogue tells us that, in the intervening fifteen years, Anne and Muriel’s mother has died (Anne having died during the main body of the story), the house sold, Claude’s letters returned, and it is after WWI: “France is full of corpses and shrapnel. Millions have died, few remember why.” The scene takes place at the Rodin Museum. It would have just opened (in 1919), and while Rodin didn’t depict the war (and died in 1917), the film’s voiceover captures, in the images of Rodin’s twisted and tormented figures, those who would have suffered in it. When moments earlier, before the epilogue, Muriel’s voiceover says “We recognise happiness only afterwards”, such a line must have resounded strongly with the millions maimed and those who lost loved ones during the conflict. But Claude’s loss seems to be his own, as if he visits the museum to find the despair he discovers in himself, rather than chiefly as a way of understanding the horrors of a war Rodin’s sculpture captured without representing it. At the beginning of the film, Claude is the one injured: he falls off a swing, and we see him on crutches, then later with a stick. But this is a temporary physical injury that quickly heals. Many others in the war weren’t so lucky, and Claude looks far more crippled emotionally than he ever was physically. It isn’t only that the past fifteen years show strongly on a face that seems wracked and disappointed. He sees various girls around twelve or thirteen playing in the museum’s garden, and wonders if any of them might be Muriel’s now-teen daughter, aware that one of them could have been his. The final Rodin sculpture we see in the garden is Rodin’s The Kiss, but no child came out of Claude and Muriel’s embrace. He tries to get a taxi, and when the driver says he has a fare, he looks at his reflection in the glass and says, “What’s wrong with me today? I look old!” It is the closing line and contains the film’s melancholy, alongside George Delerue’s plaintive, swelling and receding score.

Delerue might be the great melancholic film composer. Numerous scores are famous and take us instantly back to the work: Ennio Morricone’s music in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or The Battle of Algiers. Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, or John Williams with Jaws and Star Wars. But Delerue, who worked often for Truffaut and once so memorably with Godard (on Le Mepris), can take the viewer beyond the film into a past that seems to contain much more than a memory of the viewing experience. If Truffaut noted that his films came out sadder than he anticipated, it wasn’t only due to the source material — it also rests on the final stage of a film’s production, the music.  Delerue’s scores for Jules et Jim, Shoot the Pianist, Soft Skin, Anne and Muriel add enormously to the films’ reflective sorrow. Perhaps more than with hysteria and neurosis, music can convey very well a despondency beyond words that might also be somehow beyond the body’s ready manifestation as well. When Truffaut said Anne and Muriel was “not a film about physical love, but a physical film about love” (Truffaut: A Biography), we might puzzle over the statement, and resolve it in musing over how love becomes more than a physical manifestation, and that melancholy more than hysteria and neurosis exemplify this.

To understand this aspect, we can again think of Kierkegaard’s essay on ‘Shadowgraphs’. When Muriel says we only recognise happiness afterwards, Claude might respond that he recognises unhappiness afterwards, evident in the film’s conclusion. Muriel is married with a child; he is left wondering what he has lost. Kierkegaard notes that reflective sorrow “brings with it no characteristic outward charge; from its very first moment it hastens inwards and only a reasonably careful observer suspects its vanishing; afterwards it takes great care that the exterior obtrude as little as possible.” (Either/Or) He also adds that “what gives rise to reflective sorrow can lie partly in the individual’s  own subjective nature, partly in the subjective sorrow itself or its occasion.” Kierkegaard may be getting close to Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, but his interest is chiefly with women and love, and ours, melancholia more broadly, which is why Freud will be of use later on.  But the idea is that it remains representationally difficult partly because, for Kierkegaard, it is in constant oscillation. When he says “it does not lend itself to spatial specifications”, we might wonder if it lends itself to temporal specifications in the form of music.

We wouldn’t wish to pressgang Kierkegaard’s complex concerns into the narrowness of our preoccupations, but he can help us to understand an aspect of melancholia in film. While hysteria and neurosis can be readily represented and often lend themselves, in the former instance, to the melodramatic, and in the latter to the comedic, melancholia might be harder to capture. Tania Modleski quotes Helene Cixous saying, "Silence is the mark of hysteria…the great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times they have lost more than speech. They are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets through.” Yet Modleski adds, "it seems fair to say that many of the classic film melodramas from the 30s through the 50s are peopled by great, or near-great, hysterics-women possessed by an overwhelming desire to express themselves, to make themselves known, but continually confronting the difficulty, if not the impossibility of realizing this desire.” (‘Time and Desire in the Women’s Film’). Whatever the difficulty the character has, the filmmaker often finds hysteria representable on screen. When Hitchcock shows his central character about to sleep with her new husband in Marnie, she suddenly insists she can’t go through with it and rushes into the other room. The music augments the scene, but there is more than enough in the action to make the event dramatic. Equally, neurosis often finds itself comedically represented, evident in Good as It Gets, with Jack Nicholson bringing his own plastic cutlery to the restaurant he regularly visits. Melancholia is more difficult, and music doesn’t augment the scene; it underpins it, allusively registering despair and loss without registering it too readily on the dramatic surface.

In Le Mepris, Delerue’s music captures a marriage falling apart as if as a forewarning, and offers it ironically when the conclusion proposes a tragedy far greater than merely the marriage’s demise. Paul is a writer hired by a powerful American producer to write a film in Italy, and we watch as the producer tries to seduce his wife, Camille, while he looks on. The film shows Paul’s pusillanimous acceptance that he needs to capitulate to the producer to make the money he needs to impress his wife, and will, in the process of capitulation, lose her respect. The music proposes this is where the melancholy resides. Yet at the film’s conclusion, Camille and the producer will die in an offscreen car crash, and we may sense any reflective sorrow the film has captured will be greatly exacerbated by this most conclusive of conclusions. Godard elides the drama and shows the immediate aftermath of the car sandwiched between the two tanks of an oil truck: the music coming in as the camera cranes in on the bright red vehicle.  

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud differentiates the mournful from the melancholic, partly based on a difference in appearance: with the inhibition of the melancholic puzzling because we cannot see what absorbs him so entirely. “The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning- an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.” The melancholic, in Freud’s formulation, doesn’t merely grieve for the lost object; they also turn the ego against itself. Paul and Claude may be prime material for such a loss of self-respect and, in Truffaut’s voiceover and in Delerue’s music in Anne and Muriel, and Delerue’s music in Le Mepris, the directors propose its possibility, without of course examining the consequences of the loss. Claude loses Anne to illness and Muriel to another man, and Paul’s ineffectual reaction to the producer leads Camille to go off with him in a car that will kill her. We needn’t read beyond the film and muse over what will happen to Paul and Claude, as if creating a sequel to the films that don’t exist. But in the works’ examination of loss, we might notice a melancholic aspect that permeates the story and finds its fullest manifestation in Delerue’s music.

European auteurist cinema has often been drawn to the melancholic, and we find examples of these figures in Andreas in The Passion of Anna, the titular Beekeeper in Theo Angelopoulos’s film, Serge in Le vent de La Nuit, Travis in Paris, Texas, and Mahmut in Uzak. We can find examples from elsewhere, in Lost in Translation, Love Liza, Broken Flowers and Anamolisia, but these American films often take at least partly a comedic form. This doesn’t mean European film isn’t impervious to comedic melancholy, and nobody has practised it with more assurance than Aki Kaurismaki. But as a serious pursuit we can do worse than look at the five examples above. To help, we can also think of Freud’s famous triad (the id; the ego and the superego), and see how it plays out against the triad of hysteria, neurosis and melancholia. When Freud says of the conscience, “What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called 'conscience; we shall count it, along with the censorship of consciousness and reality-testing, among the major institutions of the ego,” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’), we can see how it segues into the superego in melancholic manifestation.

If the id is the most impulsive of the triad, so hysteria is the most impulsive of the three states, with neurosis closer to egoism. This is so if we accept that in many a neurotic film, a character uses their ego to defend themselves, whether it is the cooking and cleaning Oscar Felix does after getting kicked out by his wife and moving in with his best friend in The Odd Couple, or the actress in Persona manipulating the nurse, all the better perhaps to use people for her own acting ends. The neurotic may be as fussy as Felix or as scheming as Elisabet, but they don’t quite collapse into the despondency of the melancholic, with Freud noting, “In the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature. The patient's self-evaluation concerns itself much less frequently with bodily infirmity, ugliness or weakness, or with social inferiority; of this category, it is only his fears and asseverations of becoming poor that occupy a prominent position.” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’) In this claim, Freud seems almost to give the melancholic an otherworldly quality, an indifference to much of what passes for life. If the hysteric is often fighting for expression as it takes extreme form in Woman Under the Influence, Possession and The Piano Teacher, and we believe the neurotic, whether particular or controlling (and often both), usually occupies a recognised place in society, the melancholic is frequently an outsider, or a person who positions themselves as such. This is so in all five characters we will address.

In Paris, Texas, Travis comes out of the desert after four years of wandering, as the film explores his relationship with his brother, his son and, late in the film, his much younger ex-wife, Jane. In an important scene, he visits Jane at a joint where she works. In the two-way mirror, he can see her; she can’t see him. In the second visit, he increasingly makes clear to Jane that he is her husband and talks about how everything went wrong. His remarks are those of a melancholic figure as he speaks of the appalling things he did, how he tied her to a stove and was always drunk, and eventually how he left and kept walking at night and rested during the day. The story he tells involves dreams and imaginings, but his wife comes to understand this is Travis, and we come to understand that the disheveled figure at the film’s beginning was the last stage of the man he was trying to escape. The object he couldn’t let go of is the beautiful young woman he now talks to, having done exactly that: get away. But it was as though Travis could accept the loss only by instigating it — by being the one who left: a man less determined to hold onto the woman he loved than to escape the man he loathed. There is an understandable assumption in Freud’s essay that the melancholic figure has lost something through no immediate fault of their own. It is partly why he links mourning and melancholia. Somebody loses something, and they mourn the death or the abandonment, but while the grieving person in time recovers, the melancholic does not. Freud reckons, “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition - it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.” Freud adds, “This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.” (‘Mourning and Melancholia’) Travis has all the self-loathing of a Freudian melancholic, but he anticipates the loss, and preempts the self-hatred.

The melancholic is the loneliest, or at least the most solitary of the triad, with hysterics often fighting against an oppressive environment, and the neurotic frequently fretting over their place and their role in society. In The Passion of Anna, Andreas lives alone on a small island after breaking up with his wife. But after a woman knocks on his door, asking to use his phone, he becomes emotionally embroiled in her life and those of her two friends. By the conclusion, Andreas will be a disintegrating man, evident in the shot director Ingmar Bergman offers after an argument with the woman who, at the beginning of the film, knocked on his door. Anna is someone who was driving when her husband and son were killed before the story starts, and it looks like she wanted to kill Andreas in the car just before this moment of Andreas’s disintegration. As the camera zooms in, Andreas strides back and forth in the distance, a man in disarray. It keeps moving closer and closer until he becomes lost in the film’s grain. If Freud can talk about a hallucinatory willful psychosis, then this isn’t because Andreas can no longer get over the love object that was his wife; rather, the new object has plenty of hallucinatory psychotic episodes of her own and leads to his collapse.  He destroys his solitude and ends up destroying himself.

In Le Vent de la Nuit, Serge suffers a double mourning. His wife has died in the relatively recent past, and he never quite got over the failure of May 1968. When driving through Europe with a young sculptor, the younger man is fascinated by Serge’s political history, but it is one greatly exacerbated by the later death of his spouse; it is her grave he visits in Berlin, and her photo that will be alluded to when he kills himself at the end of the film. Serge is one of cinema’s most melancholic characters if we accept the loss isn’t only personal, but sociological as well. He has lost a world and then lost a person. Left melancholia was a term Walter Benjamin used without properly defining it, and that Wendy Brown explores in an essay on the subject. Brown notes, invoking Freud, “The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one's sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss.” She sees that we “…come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing like and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist.” (‘Resisting Left Melancholy’)

Is Serge paradoxically radical conservative; someone who may have fought on the streets of Paris and been incarcerated, but now is a wealthy architect who drives a red Porsche and can carry the gravitas of loss, without the realities of a revolution if it had come to pass and would probably leave him with a rather lower standard of living? This doesn’t mean Serge is a hypocrite. Nothing in Philippe Garrel’s film suggests he is, and we might wonder if his suicide rests partly on the possibility he sees himself hypocritically. If Freud believes the melancholic self-hates in the context of the lost object, this might seem valid if the person feels guilty over losing a person to death, or worthless if abandoned by love. But losing both a partner and a cause can seem like a misfortune indeed, with the film presenting so mournful a figure because the personal and the political have collided, and the result must inevitably be self-destruction.

Theo Angelopoulos has often been invoked in the context of Left Melancholia, and Enzo Traverso, looking at work by the Greek director alongside Chris Marker, Ken Loach and others, sees him showing “the twentieth century as a tragic age of wrecked revolutions and defeated utopias, remembering the vanquished of its lost battles. “Death,” Traverso says, “floats over all of them as their fatal destiny.” (Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory). In Angelopoulos’s work, the tension rests between personal unhappiness and political or historical disappointment. Some of his films play down the self and emphasise the group dynamic, as in earlier works, including Days of ‘36 and The Travelling Players; others focus on the personal with the political in the background — evident in Eternity and a Day and Voyage to Cythera. In The Beekeeper, the film is much closer to the personal, with Spiros attending his daughter’s wedding and traversing Greece with a hitchhiker he picks up. Along the way, he meets friends and his ex-wife, but his melancholy is a constant. Speaking of three films he made in a row as the Trilogy of Silence (with The Beekeeper the middle one), Angelopoulos said: “We are … waiting for the world to change but have no idea when this is going to happen. History is now silent.  And we are all trying to find answers by digging into ourselves, for it is terribly difficult to live in silence”. (That’s How The Light Gets In) History and politics are there, perhaps, but unrepresented: this is melancholy but without the Left.

Freud’s piece has nothing to say about the political dimension of melancholy and, while much was made of Freud and Marx in the second half of the 20th century as a way of confronting political change with psychic renewal, numerous figures have thus adopted aspects of Freud’s mourning within the melancholic as a political feature. Traverso interestingly proposes two approaches to the melancholic in the context of mourning Leftist failures. One is essentially conservative and acknowledges the dismal consequences of collective action, or the failures of political hope. As Traverso says, “The memory of the Gulag erased that of revolution, the memory of the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism, and the memory of slavery eclipsed that of anticolonialism: the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles, of their conquests and their defeats.” (Left-Wing Melancholia)This is where we will often see the repentant and recanting revolutionary — the very hypocrites who enjoy their Porsche, driven at high speed, escaping their past. Some of those who started radical and absorbed capitalism allowed for ironies, linguistic and pragmatic. Jerry Rubin was a yippie who became a yuppie and, in the eighties, worked on Wall Street. In 1990 he became a marketer selling something called Wow! — a nutritional drink — with former Black Panther Bobby Seale as one of his salesmen.

Traverso sees an alternative to the ready acceptance of such political impotence, escaping into denial and commerce. He believes “in emotions and feelings that envelop a historical transition, [this is] the only way in which the search for new ideas and projects can coexist with the sorrow and mourning for a lost realm of revolutionary experiences.” (Resisting Left Melancholia) Film as an art form can preserve memory as feeling, seeing in the struggles for emancipation and change a structure of emotion that can be retained, even if the hopes have often been dashed. In very different ways, we can see this as the project of both Garrel and Angelopoulos. They are melancholic filmmakers, but see resistance in recollection: Garrel’s films frequently turn on the memory of ’68, a moment "he would reflect back upon time and again through his career, most notably in his late masterpiece, Les amants reguliers” (Golden Globes), and in Angelopoulos’s interest in the Greek Civil War.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been consistently interested in melancholic characters, and while he has made films throughout a period that many would see as politically oppressive, under prime minister and then president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ceylan insists “when I make a film I don't think about the current situation. The duty of a film-maker is not that of a journalist; the director should be more interested in the soul of the spectator.” (Guardian) He has been more engaged in showing the bad faith of bourgeois characters over their faith and disillusionment with any given political system. In Clouds of May, Uzak, Climates, Winter Sleep and others, he focuses on those who retreat from commitments that are more often social, emotional and aesthetic. Their inability to commit to meaningful relationships or purposeful work gives them a melancholic disposition, even if some are still relatively young: the actor Muzaffer Özdemir is in his mid-forties in Clouds of May, and Ceylan is a similar age, playing the leading role in Climates. These are men at an age when change is possible, but regret likely, and Ceylan’s skill psychologically is often in presenting men who absorb, in a despondent way, a past they believe is more insistently behind them than it is. It gives his films a despair contained by frustration — a feeling that they could change their predicament but are caught in their disposition. While Spiros, Serge and Travis can see their lives mainly behind them, and Andreas, someone who is recuperating from a divorce before embarking more hastily than he should with a woman that is far too troubled to be of help, Mahmut in Uzak allows his professional and emotional life to stall. The film is predicated on a working-class cousin who comes to visit, and much of the film is about their relationship - and Mahmut’s indifference towards this visitor. Yet it’s also about Mahmut’s creative ambitions reduced to photographing tiles for a living, and letting go of a woman he loves while he engages in meaningless sexual assignations. Our purpose isn’t to simplify a character all the better to moralise over him. Ceylan himself says Mahmut “had strong ideals when he was younger. Then he went into commercial photography, and earned money, so he had all the opportunities to reach his ideals, but he doesn’t have enough belief for that. So he has pain and anxiety, and doesn’t like himself much.” (Senses of Cinema) It is, instead, to say the director withholds pity for the character while permeating the film with a doleful atmosphere. The mood is melancholic, but Ceylan indicates the character hasn’t quite earned the right to this state, when his life could still be in front of him if he chose to act.

In one scene, Mahmut is with a group of old friends in a cafe and insists photography is dead rather than seeing that the compromises he has made have made photography dead for him. At the end of the film, Mahmut turns up at the airport where his ex is about to fly out of the country with her husband as they seek a new life. He hides behind a pillar and watches her pass through the gates. Shortly afterwards, in the film’s closing scene, he sits on a bench looking out at the Bosphorus. Ceylan beautifully illustrates the sadness of his world through the images he offers of Istanbul, a city that once held an empire and now contains the solitude of people like Mahmut, who is comfortably enough off (evident in the apartment he owns), but doesn’t know how to prosper. When his ex says she and her new husband are moving to Canada, she suggests a hope absent from her home country, and Ceylan conveys in numerous scenes Istanbul as a city representing sadness over hope, lassitude over purpose. Obviously, Istanbul is a lot more than this, but Ceylan’s achievement as a filmmaker is often to show Istanbul and Turkey more generally (he has filmed all over the country, including the Turquoise Coast in Climates, Cappadocia in Winter Sleep, Anatolia in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Erzurum Province in About Dry Grasses) as a place of melancholic containment. It is a country that reflects a disappointed mood. In this, his work shares similarities with Angelopoulos’s use of the Greek landscape.

This shows that melancholy isn’t only a psychological disposition or a political despondency. It can also reflect a filmmaker’s sensibility in a given milieu. It needn’t mean that some locales are melancholic and others not, even if some lend themselves better than others to manifesting melancholy in film form. Both Ceylan and Angeloupolos often play up the wintry or autumnal over summery expectation, as Greece and Turkey become emptied and desolation proves to be both mental and geographic. “I like melancholic things better” (Guardian), Ceylan says of the type of films he likes to watch and wishes to make, and while summer can bring out the bleakness too (Climates), he usually finds the disconsolate in the fading of the light. He found that with “cinema I was able to create a kind of peace in my soul. It was like therapy; you put all the dark, bad sides of yourself into the films, and so you get rid of them – or at least control them in a better way.” (Senses of Cinema)

What may be clear is that just as we proposed music could be an important dimension in revealing melancholia, landscape and locale might be of almost equal value. Perhaps more than in hysteria and neurosis, it demands a mise en scene over a dramatic scene, and it isn’t accidental that all the filmmakers we have focused upon (Godard, Truffaut, Wenders, Angelopoulos, Ceylan, Garrel and  Bergman) are major filmmakers with a sense of cinema as a frame and a palette, as readily as a dramatic medium for action and behaviour. These features needn’t be absent when exploring neurosis and hysteria, but taking into account Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the shadowgraph, and how buried reflective sorrow can be, it may take more visual acumen to convey than either neurosis or hysteria. Melancholia might have for many centuries been invoked in philosophy, medicine and literature, but we may wonder whether it has found its natural home in film, through filmmakers capable of conveying this most hidden of maladies, and giving it the most precise of forms.    

 


© Tony McKibbin