Frenetic Density

27/04/2026

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Saturating the Image in Late Communist Film

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In Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze speaks very interestingly about the frame and the opportunities it gives to saturate or rarefy the image. “The highest degree of rarefication seems to be attained by the empty set, where the screen becomes completely black or completely white. Hitchcock gives as an example of this in Spellbound, when another glass of milk invades the screen, leaving only an empty white image.”This would become even more rarefied in Derek Jarman’s Blue and Joao Cesar Monteiro’s Snow White, with Jarman offering a voiceover to blue images, and Monteiro telling the Snow White story against a black screen. In contrast, the saturated frame offers a surfeit of information, from Jean Renoir’s dense accumulation of characters spilling out of it in La Regle du Jeu, to William Wyler’s less chaotic but nevertheless textured mise en scene in, for example, The Best Years of Our Lives, one that can allow the viewer to see more in the frame than the immediacy of the action. This would be taken further by Robert Altman, as Deleuze notes. But perhaps it was taken further again by filmmakers Deleuze’s busy tome doesn’t find the space to accommodate (his book is itself a work of saturation), or only started making films as Deleuze’s early eighties books were written.
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However, it isn’t only that the three filmmakers we will focus on fall outside Deleuze’s orbit; they are also doing something a little different, perhaps from the other filmmakers Deleuze invokes. Even the hectic density of Altman can seem sedate next to sequences in Alexei German, Andrzej Zulawski and Emir Kusturica’s work. In an early domestic scene from German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, the viewer isn’t so much introduced to the characters as thrown in amongst them. The blocking may be very deliberate, the elaboration of the shot complex, but the perceptual field is epistemologically chaotic: the information expelled rather than distilled. When German shows us the general at home near the beginning of the film, he then, in a single shot, introduces us to numerous other characters within it as the camera retreats from the main dining room into a smaller dining area, where German dollies back and shows a character exiting on the left of the frame, while another character enters, crossing the frame to the right. The camera keeps retreating back as three other characters enter the frame, and two more become visible. Continuing its reversal, it dips below the table and shows yet another character as he hides underneath it. It isn’t only that German often clutters his scenes with people; they can also be cluttered by objects. When we see the general sitting at the table with another character, German shows in the foreground a couple of replica peacocks that sandwich him in the frame. There is also a bulky harp, candelabras and antique chairs, all cramming the shot. If Greg Dolgopolov is right to say this is “…one of the most disturbing Russian films of all time”, and that it “…provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime” (Senses of Cinema), it is also one that captures too the madness of another moment in Communist history — the immediate period before its collapse when the film was made: the mid-to-late eighties. Antoine de Baecque, using Khrustalyov, My Car! as an example, speaks of “the devastation of the communist world, this ruination of objects and beings, this disintegration of minds and bodies, manifested itself in film, both before and after the collapse of the soviet Empire. A cinematographic form of history was able to convey a sense of the agony of the communist system.” (Camera Historica)
Yet though this notion of the collapsing image coinciding with a collapsing regime is suggestive, to push such an idea too assertively would be to miss two things: the presence of this dense aesthetic before and long after the late eighties, and the different approaches filmmakers took when showing communist disintegration in those final years. Bela Tarr’s films are much more sparely incremental in their revelation of the scene, while Sharunas Bartas’ work often relies on fixed frames and inertia to capture futile lives. What matters chiefly is a given style over a political manifestation, even if we may find it significant that all three directors here — German, Zulawski and Kusturica — were figures of late communist cinema. No matter if Zulawski worked chiefly in France from the mid-seventies, and Yugoslavia, in Kusturica’s case, was never completely behind the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, looking at German’s film as communist in the context, for example, of a work that plays up the bourgeoisie can be useful, with Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, a brilliant film showing the foibles of the upper classes, just as Khrustalyov, My Car! shows, if not quite the lower orders, at least the lowering orders. Renoir’s film captures in long takes the scheming egos of the wealthy, as if he didn’t quite believe that another style would reflect the promiscuous nature of their interactions. When Renoir said the idea for the film came to him from a Pierre Lestringuez comment that the best way “to write the truth you must get it well into your head that the world is one large-knocking shop…” (My Life and My Films), Renoir fluidly offers these intercourses in long takes with people entering and exiting frames as though they could equally and promptly enter and exit a life. Renoir gives us frenetic frivolity, while German uses the saturated frame to register a despairing neediness. The frame is crowded in both films because the house is crowded, but the differences rest on the expansive mingling of relative strangers, looking for an assignation, and people who know each other well, looking for shelter. Thus, Renoir’s images are dense but not chaotic, and to illustrate the difference, we can take a scene from each film.

In Khrustalyov, My Car!, after a coughing fit in his house, the general opens one door and finds five people behind it. He closes it, and the film cuts to him walking down the corridor, before looking in on the small dining room where we see another two people, and then into the large dining room, with three more. The shot keeps travelling through the apartment, and another four people appear. The scene possesses a Bunuelian sense of intrusion, while in Renoir’s we see the hopeful possibilities of a bourgeois farce. Everybody seems indeed to have their reasons and are motivated by their own needs that La Regle du Jeu tries to capture in the foreground and background. When the aviator arrives, everyone isn’t just busy within the frame; they also muse over the aviator’s presence, and even the servants have their speculations. Writing on the frame generally, Jean Mitry says of the film and its dimensional complexity, that few examples are greater than D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, where the viewer sees “twenty or thirty groups of individuals acting and reacting in various ways….It is obvious, however, that this can only ever be descriptive simultaneity.” He contrasts this with events in La Regle du Jeu, where, while we have simultaneity of action, the director also shows dramatic interaction as well. He sees it too in Citizen Kane and Little Foxes, both films where the directors try to make us see “…not only two or three characters following different actions simultaneously but also those two or three characters reacting differently to the same cause which we know secretly connects them.” (The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema) In this sense, German seems to return us to the earlier simultaneity of action over dramatic interaction. It is perhaps what illustrates the distance between the dense frame and the chaotic one. La Regle du Jeu is within a French rationalist tradition that Raymond Durgnat, in his book Jean Renoir, sees, when quoting the director referencing Marivaux, Musset and Beaumarchais. This is the drama of stratagems over the framing of desperation. German captures well the clutter of straitened circumstances, over the desire for circumstantial encounters.
This, of course, doesn’t make it a style appropriate for a singular subject; that only poverty, despair and collapse can be expressed in such a mode. Nevertheless, if a filmmaker can find a filmic correlative to the difficulty of people’s lives in the chaotic nature of the framing, without turning it into an obvious metaphor of those lives, then there are worse ways to do this than with the hectic image. Hard to Be a God has nothing ostensibly to do with communism (though some critics see comparisons aplenty). It is an adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, set on a planet a little like Earth, but before the Renaissance era. The state suppresses any progressive developments, and people are left in shabby ignorance, scrabbling around in a world of dirt and filth. German goes much further than before in generating a collapsing world within a carefully organised, messy aesthetic. German films events as a bobbing, steadicam intrusion, with the camera usually in close and moving through space with something between bewilderment and indifference, yet with none of the facetiousness often seen in Dogme films like Festen and The Idiots. This isn’t to downgrade one style over another; more to differentiate approaches that can seem initially quite similar. German appears more dogged than Dogme, watching events unfold as if without the sense of surprise that Vinterberg or Von Trier practice, as though, in the latter, the camera itself is shocked by what it happens to be capturing. In Hard to Be God, horror after horror is revealed as if this is the way of the world rather than an aberration from it. One soldier, the film’s main character, Don Rumata, accompanying the black monks after they’ve ransacked the town of Arkanar, goes up some steps, and he passes amongst various hanged men and women. The image is a clutter of corpses, and any cynicism evident in the characters is evident, too, in a form that shows us a conversation between the monk and Rumata, with the monk on one side of the hanged and the soldier on the other. The impression given is that the corpses are in the way, further objects in German’s detrital world, where everything can seem to pass for rubbish. There are elements of Tarkovsky’s own medieval epic, Andrei Rublev, with both directors having adapted the Strugatsky Brothers (Tarkovsky turned Roadside Picnic into Stalker). The sensibilities, however, have little in common. Tarkovsky’s work proposes the contemplation of the spirit, as though any materiality he shows must reflect a soul his images invoke. German’s can seem a soulless world indeed, with dignity at best a hope and very far from an expectation — let alone a spiritual possibility. It would be a stretch to say that the crammed frame denies the godly, the sort of transcendental cinema Paul Schrader insists upon in the work of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and can be seen too in Tarkovsky and later Sokurov. But German is a Russian filmmaker closer to another compatriot, Ilya Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky (4, Natasha), someone who shows a world of terrible immanence, one where a malevolent mood permeates. When Don Rumata puts his hand in an empty noose and yanks it down and shows the noose’s effectiveness, there in front of his hand, we now see the face of a hanged person. One possible terror is immediately met with another that has taken place: the grip of the noose shows how effective it has recently been.
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Andrzej Zulawski’s films are far less cluttered than German’s but no less dizzy; his yen for wide-angle steadicam creates a sense of chaos even if the images are quite clean, even Antonioniesque, as in parts of Possession. But a good example of Zulawski’s crowded aesthetic comes in a scene from That Most Important Thing: Love, in Raymond Lapade (Michel Robin) book-lined apartment. We first see Robin lying in bed when a journalist knocks on the door and speaks to him in the flat. Journalist Servais Mont (Fabio Testi) drinks from one of the numerous bottles of wine found in the place, and Lapade puts on some music and starts dancing. After a cut, the film shows him in his narrow kitchen, and there are even books here. But this kitchen is also a passageway from the room in which he sleeps, to the room in which he works — as the film shows a couple of thousand more books in the other room, and more bottles of wine. There are people with more books than Lapade, but few who have crammed so many into so restricted a space, and Zulawski creates in the process the most saturated of frames. The flat feels claustrophobic, no matter if we see it has a window at the front that is transparent, and a window at the back that is opaque, and this claustrophobia might be the defining characteristic of saturated frame films, even if, frame for frame, there may be many which aren’t so hectically occupied.
Zulawski reckons his cinema “…should be controllable, because otherwise the river that you are trying to direct will start to overflow.” (Film Comment) That he should offer such a defence is reflective of the type of cinema he makes. Like German, the images can seem to overflow, as if the grammar of film as verb, noun and adjective, with sentences and paragraphs, becomes looser, more monological. Zulawski may note that of the fiction he writes, “as I’m getting older, I’m afraid my books are becoming more personal”, but this personality as a visual style has been a component of much of his film work for many years. When he says that the problem with the photography he has also done is that its grammar is basic, this simplicity, that of course can produce astonishing work, can seem for a filmmaker of the saturated frame too simple Central to the claustrophobia lies in accumulation, whether it is German moving his camera through space as he shows yet more bodies, living or dead, or Zulawski moving through a cramped apartment, showing us yet more books. There are great single images of writers at their desks or in their libraries, whether Michel Foucault seated in a wide-angle shot with his books behind him, or Umberto Eco standing in front of his shelves, or Richard Maksey amongst his. But a short video of Eco passing through his book collection at home much more successfully captures a bibliomanic claustrophobia. We see it too in the footage of Richard Maksey’s huge library, and Zulawski, here, captures a personal library as claustrophobia 24 times a second.
This is the difference between a momentary present tense and the present continuous. It is the difference between a photograph and a cinematic image. This seems to us central to the saturated frame in cinematic form and should, of course, be strictly regarded as the saturated shot. While painting can usefully help us understand the rarefied against the saturated, it ought to be a starting point rather than a conclusive comparison. Antonioni may have been influenced by abstract expressionism, but this doesn’t at all pass merely for homage. Seymour Chatman notes, “Rothko’s signature bisection of the horizontal dimension (and Barnett Newman’s of the vertical, and Mondrian’s obsession with the whole box) may well have lingered in the filmmaker’s mind. (Antonioni once famously compared his work to Rothko’s, saying that it is ‘about nothing . . . with precision.’) “ (Art Forum) But the stillness one may sense in such painterly works is quite distinct from the stillness achieved by a filmmaker who has to carry it within movement. Equally, to create a crowded image may be astonishing, and the detail in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘The Dutch Proverbs’, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch, Auguste Renoir’s ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’ or Edouard Manet’s ‘Music in the Tuileries’, can be used as wonderful examples.
But this is astonishing in a different way from the cinematic, which is based not on the careful accumulation of detail on the canvas, but on the logistical accumulation of detail on the film shoot. Within this, different periods of film have different technical problems, and it is worth noting that many of the most breathtaking of single takes (which should feel like a single breath) will have used either a crane or a steadicam, with numerous earlier examples featuring the crane; later ones using the new technology created in the mid-seventies by Garrett Brown. Equally, the shot itself becomes the subject of much enquiry, whether it is Antonioni’s penultimate scene in The Passenger, Scorsese’s nightclub scene in Goodfellas, or the traffic jam in Godard’s Weekend. Documentaries are often made about the making of the film, and show the difficulty of creating authentic moments within an arduous shoot - including the boat going over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo in Burden of Dreams, the filming of The Sacrifice where we see the house burning down in Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, and In One Breath, about the making of Russian Ark, a 93 minute film shot in one take.
There are complications enough in filmmaking, further difficulties working in longer takes, and still further ones when the director saturates the shot. While we inevitably admire the craft of Breugel, Bosch, Renoir and Manet, what we witness is the meticulous, but not the logistically punctilious. This is often a film’s paradox: how to create a sense of chaos, while relying on the carefully preplanned? German, Zulawski and Kusturica’s films often give the impression of visual scrappiness, of shots overflowing with information. But while we wouldn’t want to make too much of the process, it is important to view cinema as closer to a battle than to a puzzle — or if a puzzle, like a jigsaw with moving parts rather than fixed pieces. Zulawski isn’t mentioned in a BFI article on the long take that includes shots by Scorsese, Antonioni, Angelopoulos, Kalatozov, Welles and Godard, which might be due to his emphasis on saturation over lengthiness. In an early sequence in Zulawski’s The Devil, the main character arrives at a convent in Greater Poland, overrun by the arrival of Prussian troops. As the character passes through the building, he sees numerous nuns going mad with despair and soldiers lying dead, dying or desperate. This is proper pandemonium, and it is a word that well describes much of Zulawski’s work, as though he is often seeking the visual correlative to madness, finding it in shots of frenetic dramatic density. In this sequence, the focal point of pain is probably a soldier lying covered in blood on a table, but it remains only for a few moments in a sequence where suffering is manifold. Daniel Bird may say of Zulawski’s mise en scene that ‘‘…in two words: clear and precise. Some equate shallow depth of field with that ‘cinematic feel.’ Not Żuławski. By and large, his approach to filmmaking relies on short-focal-length lenses, giving a wide field of vision, with a large depth of field, so that both the foreground and the background are in focus.” (Film Comment)
Yet this doesn’t quite capture the messiness within the diegesis itself. In L’amour Braque, he often films from the most claustrophobic angles, making what seems a packed situation appear much more so. In one early scene, various characters are sitting in a train compartment. Zulawski films from the lowest of angles and manages to contain in the frame several characters in the compartment, as well as three other officials present as their passports are passed to them. When a character who has been initially out of the frame gets his passport back, all we see is his hand coming into the shot. Later, celebrating a bank robbery, the gang leader Tcheky Karyo opens a bin bag full of cash and starts throwing it up in the air. The camera circles around the numerous characters at a low angle, as Zulawski again emphasises the saturation of the image. It makes sense that Zulawski would absorb Dostoevsky's The Devils into La Femme Publique and claim inspiration from The Idiot for L’amour Braque. There is in the Russian writers' work a feverish fertility that Zulawski draws upon for his own. But no less important would be the theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, with Zulawski saying, “I saw for the first time in my life—I was very young—that a human being, an actor, could do things that I couldn’t have imagined were possible. Speaking voices, the relationship between dialogue and movement, is not as simple as in a Spielberg film where you stop and you talk. So this interweaving of movement, body and mind was very shocking for me, it was a light suddenly in the dark. I had never seen anything else like it.” (Metrograph)
One way of describing the saturated shot is that the focal point is dispersive instead of concentrated, moving away from a centre of attention or diluting it within a mise en scene that is too elaborate for the purposes of the immediate action. There is a bustle of behaviour that the film captures, which can leave actors without the usual emphasis, where they really are no longer the centre of attention. This often leads in Zulawski’s films to thespian histrionics, as though the actor wants to regain control of the image, and does so by acting that is exaggerated, which in turn creates a higher pitch with the other actors, a little like in a pub when one group gets louder and within a few minutes the decibel level of the whole place becomes shouty. When Bird noted that “Possession is distinguished by expressive, some might say excessive performances, not least that of Isabelle Adjani” (Metrograph), he could be speaking of numerous actors in Zulawski’s work. Casting Francis Huster in La Femme Publique and L’amour Braque, an actor from Comedie Francaise who started his own theatre acting school in the early 90s, would be an instance of this over-emphasis, with a theatre actor taking into film the exaggeration of one medium and transposing it to another, one usually much less forgiving of larger performances, except as villainy. It is no doubt partly why so many theatrical actors have been cast as baddies in film. From Alan Rickman in Die Hard to Josh Ackland in Lethal Weapon 2, from Steven Berkoff in Rambo First Blood Part II to Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. The villain can be hammy, over the top, and attack the role with a relish that the hero is expected to eschew, and how often have we seen the hero strapped to a chair while the antagonist makes the most of their moment of torturous villainy? If the hero and villain acted with equal exaggeration, the film would risk the comedic, even if there may be an element of this in Inglorious Basterds, for example, where Waltz is cruelly given to prolonging someone’s misery, while Brad Pitt is happy to milk a scene for a bit of irony when smashing in some heads with a baseball bat. Yet Tarantino wouldn’t want to push his drama into the dramatically frantic, apart from conclusions that can often seem overblown and under-controlled — as in Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino is far from a director of the saturated shot; he is closer to Leone and Hitchcock in controlling the centrality of information in the frame.
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Kusturica is less radical than either German or Zulawski, but he was at a certain moment easily the most famous. From The Time of the Gypsies to Black Cat, White Cat, Kusturica’s work was much seen and widely commented upon, with debates around Underground, including, however directly or indirectly, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Finkelkraut, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-Levy and Peter Handke. Sean Homer, exploring aspects of the debate, quotes Zizek, saying: "What we find here [in Underground] is an exemplary case of  'Balkanism,' functioning in a similar way to Edward Said’s concept of 'Orientalism': the Balkans as the timeless space onto which the West projects its phantasmatic content.’’ Homer says, ‘‘Together with Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (which almost won the Oscar for the best foreign film in 1995), Underground is thus the ultimate ideological product of Western liberal multiculturalism: what these two films offer to the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in the Balkan war — the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions, in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life." (Jump Cut) The difference between Kusturica’s work during this time, and Zulawski’s and German’s, is that, between 1991 and 2001, the Balkan war had taken place, and preoccupied Europe and the West generally. Though we have noted all the directors are loosely Eastern Bloc, we’ve been wary of proposing the stylistic coming out of the political. Yet this still might be better than commenting on the political without attending at all to the style. So completely did Finkelkraut ignore the film’s specific features when commenting on Underground that he didn’t watch the film at all before criticising what he believed was its Serb-nationalism.
This argument rests chiefly on archival footage Kusturica uses that shows Slovenians and Croatians welcoming the Nazis, while the Serbs didn’t. Fedor Tot notes that “the footage used to depict their arrivals in Ljlubljana (Slovenia) and Zagreb (Croatia) showcases crowds actively waving them in, whilst that of Belgrade (Serbia) shows the streets empty, thus aligning the Nazi state with Slovenia and Croatia.” (Bright Wall/Dark Room) Whatever the historical accuracy of the footage that illustrates a key feature of WWII, where many Croatians sided with the Nazis, and the Ustasa, and the Serbs with the allies, and the Partisans, to offer these images in the mid-90s, and when many saw the Serbs as the chief belligerents in the Balkan war, was provocative. It might be fair to acknowledge that the Serbs shouldn’t be seen as perennial bad guys, but it wasn’t a good look when viewers could see on their TVs in the present the devastation of Vukovar and the siege of Sarajevo.
Yet Kusturica’s point was perhaps that it wasn’t ideological purity and organisation that mattered, but the chaos of the region, and the shifting allegiances potentially at work within it. Zizek may be right to see the cliche of “the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions”, but Tot reckons, “the existence of such anarchy in his films is a response to the lawlessness of Serbian and Balkan society in the ‘90s, when hyperinflation annihilated the economy and made the black market king.” He does add, however, that “Kusturica often encourages us to revel in it without truly confronting its meaning and context, so we’re visiting it safely from a distance.” (Bright Wall/DarkRoom) What is important here for us is the form Kusturica offers; the chaos he manages to convey, no matter if Zizek reckoned, in an interview with Bernard Henri-Levy, that in Underground the director shows “a society where people fornicate, drink, fight – a kind of eternal orgy.” (Euronews) It might be a useful way of describing all the films under discussion; that there is an orgiastic quality covering societies that may have been centrally planned, but unravelled with Dionysian wilfulness.
Of the three filmmakers, Kusturica came closest to proposing that this was a party people may have wished to gatecrash, a romp as readily as an expiration. He was also aided by the musician Goran Bregovic, with the drums and various brass instruments coming in and proposing that there is always more energy left for excess. After someone takes a wedding photograph in Underground that manages to cram about twenty-five people into the shot, with everyone stacked as if they are on top of each other, the film cuts to the band, half a dozen of them on a raised rotating platform as the party properly gets started. There’s a monkey, kids playing football, a woman belly-dancing, and numerous revellers in the background. Asked about the complexity of his mise en scene, Kusturica said, “I strongly believe that background, midground, and foreground are equally important. Most of the contemporary cinema industry thinks it's also important, but they always have all these close-ups. I don't think that way. That's probably why my films look more like documentaries, but at the same time, visually balanced. That's why you can see this kind of difference. The use of wide lenses means that you really have to open it and orchestrate so many things at the same time. (Indiewire)
However, while Kusturica’s describes well the blocking of the scene, and his intentions behind such an aesthetic, not all his films capture the chaos in the proceedings. It was a quality that came with Time of the Gypsies and was generally absent from his quieter, gentler and beautiful first two features - Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, and When Father was Away on Business. In the latter film, at another Kusturica wedding (there are plenty of them in his work), the central character witnesses his father’s affair, and the sequence is far more subdued in its mise en scene than in his later films. There are depth-of-field shots where we see in a bold foreground various characters getting introduced as they sit down at the table, and in the background, we can make out diners within the frame at three other tables behind them. But this is closer to classic, deep-focus framing that can be seen in Welles and Wyler. It is far from the hectic image. After the father disappears with his mistress, the film cuts to a medium shot of a dove, clearly hours later, and follows with a long, empty shot of the tables that are now unoccupied. The danger with most of Kusturica’s films, from Time of the Gypsies to Life is a Miracle, including Underground and Black Cat, White Cat, but perhaps less so Arizona Dream, was that he adopted a signature style and a marketable approach, evident in Zizek’s comment. They are virtuoso displays and benefit greatly from Bregovic’s music, yet maybe of the three directors under discussion, Kusturica was the least wedded to this approach, even if his was the one most commercially capable of rendering it palatable.
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Nevertheless, one reason his approach to the saturated shot has been popular rests on its very orgiastic aspect. What Zizek offers as an insult is central to its appeal, and also what links Kusturica to Federico Fellini — a director as interested in parties as Kusturica is in weddings. Fellini’s mise en scene may have given the appearance of greater control than the Bosnian filmmaker, but when Homer quotes Pavle Levi looking at Kusturica’s work libidinally, Fellini will surely come to mind. “Underground’s highest aesthetic achievements,’’ writes Levi, ‘‘are when it causes the spectator to suspend all narrative/diegetic concerns in favour of sheer scopic gratification. These ‘ibidinal choreographies,’ he argues, produce ’autonomous dynamic systems’ that generate the effect of a dissipation of energy… The film accomplishes this through the centrifugal effect achieved by its use of low camera angles and ecstatic bodies organized in circular and rotational movements.” (Jump Cut) La Dolce Vita and 8½ are, in this sense, libidinal works, yet where would we stop if we were to include them here? Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, Makavejev’s Sweet Movie, and early Almodovar would all have this libidinal excess, but they wouldn’t fit into our notion of the saturated shot. It is perhaps one reason why we have avoided making the political central, as if to go down the thematic root over the formal one would open the article up to so many films and styles that the perceptual properties of the works we have put under discussion would dissolve into the vague.
But without some broader idea beyond the saturated shot, we could arrive at the formally arid, making a claim that is visually demonstrable but begging a broader question of purpose and point. By nevertheless allowing the libidinal without insisting on its use beyond the contours of the films under discussion, we might wonder why we see this type of saturation in these three late Communist cinema filmmakers. Nobody was more important in addressing the libidinal than Jean- Francois Lyotard, whose book The Libidinal Economy came out in 1974, and addressed, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, issues of desire and the state, freedom and control, post-May 68. In a talk Deleuze gave in 1973, after reviewing Lyotard’s Discourse/Figure the previous year, he notes there are “movements of intensities, as [Pierre] Klossowski and Lyotard have made clear: the way in which there is a play of high and low intensities, the one in the other, such that a low intensity can undermine the highest intensity and even be as high as the highest, and vice versa.” (‘Nomadic Thought’) In Libidinal Economy, Lyotard says “the important thing is not to decide between the East and West, one suspects. It is a question, rather, of remarking that totalitarianism which is the very process of concentration can expand only to the extent that new quantities of energy are included in the said circulation of capital…” Lyotard adds, “it is the space and time that becomes the objects of intelligence and decision-making, at the level of the labourer’s body in Taylorism.” (Libidinal Economy)
If communism was increasingly seen as a failure, with limitations in the planned economy, and wasn’t yet, or was in the process of becoming, a capitalist one, then it is as if the saturated shot would be one way of making sense of the crisis and the confusion. Other filmmakers from the Eastern Bloc took a different approach, and perhaps nobody more impressively than Bela Tarr. His long-take aesthetic in showing late and post-Hungarian communism relied on incremental revelation over visual spillage, and any madness in the characters’ behaviour was usually countered by the control of the form. But if we differentiate the work of Tarr, as well Alexander Sokurov and Sharunas Bartas, from Zulawski, Guerman and Kusturica, it rests on a different analogous approach to communism’s collapse, all the while taking into account that Zulawski left Poland in the ‘70s and often worked in France, German’s most intensely saturated film Hard to be a God was made in the 2000s, and that Kusturica was working in a country where communism was practised with far less authoritarianism than in most Eastern Bloc nations.
When looking at what he saw as de-modern aesthetics, De Baecque notes that “it was only the collapse of the system itself — and hence the apocalyptic form that enabled its recording, in Guerman, Sokurov [Tarkovsky] and Kusturica’s films — that could at last visually translate communism, which had been so impossible to represent in its attempts at internal reform.” (Camera Historica) But for our purposes, German and Kusturica are quite distinct from Sokurov and Tarkovsky. The visual centre still holds in Tarkovsky and Sokurov; it seems obliterated and splintered in the three filmmakers we address. This isn’t, of course, to suggest less craft goes into German, Kusturica and Zulawski than into Tarkovsky, Sokurov and Tarr. Zulawski insists that no matter the apparent dispersion in the shot, it still needs to be controllable. Nevertheless, that he has to defend himself against the assumption of this loss of control tells us a great deal about the impression the image has on the viewer. Our point, though, isn’t to muse over which filmmakers put more effort into their productions, but only what perceptually comes out of them and, tangentially and tentatively, what we can say about the ideas to be extracted from such an approach. These are images of aesthetic freedom that came out of what could seem a libidinally weakened environment, one that Zulawski described thus, and saw in a writer known, like Klossowski, for the sexual excess of his material. Speaking of Witold Gombrowicz, Zulawski says, “In those terribly sad, grey, and lying times. Whatever he did looked like a savage provocation in front of the Communist concrete and total boredom and total incapacity to do anything right. My entire generation was a Gombrowicz generation.” (Film Comment) How true this happened to be given how singular Zulawski was in the Polish context (Kieslowski, Zanussi and Skolimowski’s films are quite different), it was without a doubt no longer a generation that possessed the ideological faith of those early Soviet filmmakers, who saw in the 1920s great hopes for the revolution, and offered that hope in a style of short takes making clear the purposes the shot served, and the society it was serving. All we need to say is that faith was clearly no longer apparent in films like The Devil, Khrustalyov, My Car!, and Underground.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Frenetic Density

Saturating the Image in Late Communist Film

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In Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze speaks very interestingly about the frame and the opportunities it gives to saturate or rarefy the image. “The highest degree of rarefication seems to be attained by the empty set, where the screen becomes completely black or completely white. Hitchcock gives as an example of this in Spellbound, when another glass of milk invades the screen, leaving only an empty white image.”This would become even more rarefied in Derek Jarman’s Blue and Joao Cesar Monteiro’s Snow White, with Jarman offering a voiceover to blue images, and Monteiro telling the Snow White story against a black screen. In contrast, the saturated frame offers a surfeit of information, from Jean Renoir’s dense accumulation of characters spilling out of it in La Regle du Jeu, to William Wyler’s less chaotic but nevertheless textured mise en scene in, for example, The Best Years of Our Lives, one that can allow the viewer to see more in the frame than the immediacy of the action. This would be taken further by Robert Altman, as Deleuze notes. But perhaps it was taken further again by filmmakers Deleuze’s busy tome doesn’t find the space to accommodate (his book is itself a work of saturation), or only started making films as Deleuze’s early eighties books were written.
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However, it isn’t only that the three filmmakers we will focus on fall outside Deleuze’s orbit; they are also doing something a little different, perhaps from the other filmmakers Deleuze invokes. Even the hectic density of Altman can seem sedate next to sequences in Alexei German, Andrzej Zulawski and Emir Kusturica’s work. In an early domestic scene from German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, the viewer isn’t so much introduced to the characters as thrown in amongst them. The blocking may be very deliberate, the elaboration of the shot complex, but the perceptual field is epistemologically chaotic: the information expelled rather than distilled. When German shows us the general at home near the beginning of the film, he then, in a single shot, introduces us to numerous other characters within it as the camera retreats from the main dining room into a smaller dining area, where German dollies back and shows a character exiting on the left of the frame, while another character enters, crossing the frame to the right. The camera keeps retreating back as three other characters enter the frame, and two more become visible. Continuing its reversal, it dips below the table and shows yet another character as he hides underneath it. It isn’t only that German often clutters his scenes with people; they can also be cluttered by objects. When we see the general sitting at the table with another character, German shows in the foreground a couple of replica peacocks that sandwich him in the frame. There is also a bulky harp, candelabras and antique chairs, all cramming the shot. If Greg Dolgopolov is right to say this is “…one of the most disturbing Russian films of all time”, and that it “…provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime” (Senses of Cinema), it is also one that captures too the madness of another moment in Communist history — the immediate period before its collapse when the film was made: the mid-to-late eighties. Antoine de Baecque, using Khrustalyov, My Car! as an example, speaks of “the devastation of the communist world, this ruination of objects and beings, this disintegration of minds and bodies, manifested itself in film, both before and after the collapse of the soviet Empire. A cinematographic form of history was able to convey a sense of the agony of the communist system.” (Camera Historica)
Yet though this notion of the collapsing image coinciding with a collapsing regime is suggestive, to push such an idea too assertively would be to miss two things: the presence of this dense aesthetic before and long after the late eighties, and the different approaches filmmakers took when showing communist disintegration in those final years. Bela Tarr’s films are much more sparely incremental in their revelation of the scene, while Sharunas Bartas’ work often relies on fixed frames and inertia to capture futile lives. What matters chiefly is a given style over a political manifestation, even if we may find it significant that all three directors here — German, Zulawski and Kusturica — were figures of late communist cinema. No matter if Zulawski worked chiefly in France from the mid-seventies, and Yugoslavia, in Kusturica’s case, was never completely behind the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, looking at German’s film as communist in the context, for example, of a work that plays up the bourgeoisie can be useful, with Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, a brilliant film showing the foibles of the upper classes, just as Khrustalyov, My Car! shows, if not quite the lower orders, at least the lowering orders. Renoir’s film captures in long takes the scheming egos of the wealthy, as if he didn’t quite believe that another style would reflect the promiscuous nature of their interactions. When Renoir said the idea for the film came to him from a Pierre Lestringuez comment that the best way “to write the truth you must get it well into your head that the world is one large-knocking shop…” (My Life and My Films), Renoir fluidly offers these intercourses in long takes with people entering and exiting frames as though they could equally and promptly enter and exit a life. Renoir gives us frenetic frivolity, while German uses the saturated frame to register a despairing neediness. The frame is crowded in both films because the house is crowded, but the differences rest on the expansive mingling of relative strangers, looking for an assignation, and people who know each other well, looking for shelter. Thus, Renoir’s images are dense but not chaotic, and to illustrate the difference, we can take a scene from each film.

In Khrustalyov, My Car!, after a coughing fit in his house, the general opens one door and finds five people behind it. He closes it, and the film cuts to him walking down the corridor, before looking in on the small dining room where we see another two people, and then into the large dining room, with three more. The shot keeps travelling through the apartment, and another four people appear. The scene possesses a Bunuelian sense of intrusion, while in Renoir’s we see the hopeful possibilities of a bourgeois farce. Everybody seems indeed to have their reasons and are motivated by their own needs that La Regle du Jeu tries to capture in the foreground and background. When the aviator arrives, everyone isn’t just busy within the frame; they also muse over the aviator’s presence, and even the servants have their speculations. Writing on the frame generally, Jean Mitry says of the film and its dimensional complexity, that few examples are greater than D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, where the viewer sees “twenty or thirty groups of individuals acting and reacting in various ways….It is obvious, however, that this can only ever be descriptive simultaneity.” He contrasts this with events in La Regle du Jeu, where, while we have simultaneity of action, the director also shows dramatic interaction as well. He sees it too in Citizen Kane and Little Foxes, both films where the directors try to make us see “…not only two or three characters following different actions simultaneously but also those two or three characters reacting differently to the same cause which we know secretly connects them.” (The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema) In this sense, German seems to return us to the earlier simultaneity of action over dramatic interaction. It is perhaps what illustrates the distance between the dense frame and the chaotic one. La Regle du Jeu is within a French rationalist tradition that Raymond Durgnat, in his book Jean Renoir, sees, when quoting the director referencing Marivaux, Musset and Beaumarchais. This is the drama of stratagems over the framing of desperation. German captures well the clutter of straitened circumstances, over the desire for circumstantial encounters.
This, of course, doesn’t make it a style appropriate for a singular subject; that only poverty, despair and collapse can be expressed in such a mode. Nevertheless, if a filmmaker can find a filmic correlative to the difficulty of people’s lives in the chaotic nature of the framing, without turning it into an obvious metaphor of those lives, then there are worse ways to do this than with the hectic image. Hard to Be a God has nothing ostensibly to do with communism (though some critics see comparisons aplenty). It is an adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, set on a planet a little like Earth, but before the Renaissance era. The state suppresses any progressive developments, and people are left in shabby ignorance, scrabbling around in a world of dirt and filth. German goes much further than before in generating a collapsing world within a carefully organised, messy aesthetic. German films events as a bobbing, steadicam intrusion, with the camera usually in close and moving through space with something between bewilderment and indifference, yet with none of the facetiousness often seen in Dogme films like Festen and The Idiots. This isn’t to downgrade one style over another; more to differentiate approaches that can seem initially quite similar. German appears more dogged than Dogme, watching events unfold as if without the sense of surprise that Vinterberg or Von Trier practice, as though, in the latter, the camera itself is shocked by what it happens to be capturing. In Hard to Be God, horror after horror is revealed as if this is the way of the world rather than an aberration from it. One soldier, the film’s main character, Don Rumata, accompanying the black monks after they’ve ransacked the town of Arkanar, goes up some steps, and he passes amongst various hanged men and women. The image is a clutter of corpses, and any cynicism evident in the characters is evident, too, in a form that shows us a conversation between the monk and Rumata, with the monk on one side of the hanged and the soldier on the other. The impression given is that the corpses are in the way, further objects in German’s detrital world, where everything can seem to pass for rubbish. There are elements of Tarkovsky’s own medieval epic, Andrei Rublev, with both directors having adapted the Strugatsky Brothers (Tarkovsky turned Roadside Picnic into Stalker). The sensibilities, however, have little in common. Tarkovsky’s work proposes the contemplation of the spirit, as though any materiality he shows must reflect a soul his images invoke. German’s can seem a soulless world indeed, with dignity at best a hope and very far from an expectation — let alone a spiritual possibility. It would be a stretch to say that the crammed frame denies the godly, the sort of transcendental cinema Paul Schrader insists upon in the work of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and can be seen too in Tarkovsky and later Sokurov. But German is a Russian filmmaker closer to another compatriot, Ilya Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky (4, Natasha), someone who shows a world of terrible immanence, one where a malevolent mood permeates. When Don Rumata puts his hand in an empty noose and yanks it down and shows the noose’s effectiveness, there in front of his hand, we now see the face of a hanged person. One possible terror is immediately met with another that has taken place: the grip of the noose shows how effective it has recently been.
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Andrzej Zulawski’s films are far less cluttered than German’s but no less dizzy; his yen for wide-angle steadicam creates a sense of chaos even if the images are quite clean, even Antonioniesque, as in parts of Possession. But a good example of Zulawski’s crowded aesthetic comes in a scene from That Most Important Thing: Love, in Raymond Lapade (Michel Robin) book-lined apartment. We first see Robin lying in bed when a journalist knocks on the door and speaks to him in the flat. Journalist Servais Mont (Fabio Testi) drinks from one of the numerous bottles of wine found in the place, and Lapade puts on some music and starts dancing. After a cut, the film shows him in his narrow kitchen, and there are even books here. But this kitchen is also a passageway from the room in which he sleeps, to the room in which he works — as the film shows a couple of thousand more books in the other room, and more bottles of wine. There are people with more books than Lapade, but few who have crammed so many into so restricted a space, and Zulawski creates in the process the most saturated of frames. The flat feels claustrophobic, no matter if we see it has a window at the front that is transparent, and a window at the back that is opaque, and this claustrophobia might be the defining characteristic of saturated frame films, even if, frame for frame, there may be many which aren’t so hectically occupied.
Zulawski reckons his cinema “…should be controllable, because otherwise the river that you are trying to direct will start to overflow.” (Film Comment) That he should offer such a defence is reflective of the type of cinema he makes. Like German, the images can seem to overflow, as if the grammar of film as verb, noun and adjective, with sentences and paragraphs, becomes looser, more monological. Zulawski may note that of the fiction he writes, “as I’m getting older, I’m afraid my books are becoming more personal”, but this personality as a visual style has been a component of much of his film work for many years. When he says that the problem with the photography he has also done is that its grammar is basic, this simplicity, that of course can produce astonishing work, can seem for a filmmaker of the saturated frame too simple Central to the claustrophobia lies in accumulation, whether it is German moving his camera through space as he shows yet more bodies, living or dead, or Zulawski moving through a cramped apartment, showing us yet more books. There are great single images of writers at their desks or in their libraries, whether Michel Foucault seated in a wide-angle shot with his books behind him, or Umberto Eco standing in front of his shelves, or Richard Maksey amongst his. But a short video of Eco passing through his book collection at home much more successfully captures a bibliomanic claustrophobia. We see it too in the footage of Richard Maksey’s huge library, and Zulawski, here, captures a personal library as claustrophobia 24 times a second.
This is the difference between a momentary present tense and the present continuous. It is the difference between a photograph and a cinematic image. This seems to us central to the saturated frame in cinematic form and should, of course, be strictly regarded as the saturated shot. While painting can usefully help us understand the rarefied against the saturated, it ought to be a starting point rather than a conclusive comparison. Antonioni may have been influenced by abstract expressionism, but this doesn’t at all pass merely for homage. Seymour Chatman notes, “Rothko’s signature bisection of the horizontal dimension (and Barnett Newman’s of the vertical, and Mondrian’s obsession with the whole box) may well have lingered in the filmmaker’s mind. (Antonioni once famously compared his work to Rothko’s, saying that it is ‘about nothing . . . with precision.’) “ (Art Forum) But the stillness one may sense in such painterly works is quite distinct from the stillness achieved by a filmmaker who has to carry it within movement. Equally, to create a crowded image may be astonishing, and the detail in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘The Dutch Proverbs’, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch, Auguste Renoir’s ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’ or Edouard Manet’s ‘Music in the Tuileries’, can be used as wonderful examples.
But this is astonishing in a different way from the cinematic, which is based not on the careful accumulation of detail on the canvas, but on the logistical accumulation of detail on the film shoot. Within this, different periods of film have different technical problems, and it is worth noting that many of the most breathtaking of single takes (which should feel like a single breath) will have used either a crane or a steadicam, with numerous earlier examples featuring the crane; later ones using the new technology created in the mid-seventies by Garrett Brown. Equally, the shot itself becomes the subject of much enquiry, whether it is Antonioni’s penultimate scene in The Passenger, Scorsese’s nightclub scene in Goodfellas, or the traffic jam in Godard’s Weekend. Documentaries are often made about the making of the film, and show the difficulty of creating authentic moments within an arduous shoot - including the boat going over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo in Burden of Dreams, the filming of The Sacrifice where we see the house burning down in Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, and In One Breath, about the making of Russian Ark, a 93 minute film shot in one take.
There are complications enough in filmmaking, further difficulties working in longer takes, and still further ones when the director saturates the shot. While we inevitably admire the craft of Breugel, Bosch, Renoir and Manet, what we witness is the meticulous, but not the logistically punctilious. This is often a film’s paradox: how to create a sense of chaos, while relying on the carefully preplanned? German, Zulawski and Kusturica’s films often give the impression of visual scrappiness, of shots overflowing with information. But while we wouldn’t want to make too much of the process, it is important to view cinema as closer to a battle than to a puzzle — or if a puzzle, like a jigsaw with moving parts rather than fixed pieces. Zulawski isn’t mentioned in a BFI article on the long take that includes shots by Scorsese, Antonioni, Angelopoulos, Kalatozov, Welles and Godard, which might be due to his emphasis on saturation over lengthiness. In an early sequence in Zulawski’s The Devil, the main character arrives at a convent in Greater Poland, overrun by the arrival of Prussian troops. As the character passes through the building, he sees numerous nuns going mad with despair and soldiers lying dead, dying or desperate. This is proper pandemonium, and it is a word that well describes much of Zulawski’s work, as though he is often seeking the visual correlative to madness, finding it in shots of frenetic dramatic density. In this sequence, the focal point of pain is probably a soldier lying covered in blood on a table, but it remains only for a few moments in a sequence where suffering is manifold. Daniel Bird may say of Zulawski’s mise en scene that ‘‘…in two words: clear and precise. Some equate shallow depth of field with that ‘cinematic feel.’ Not Żuławski. By and large, his approach to filmmaking relies on short-focal-length lenses, giving a wide field of vision, with a large depth of field, so that both the foreground and the background are in focus.” (Film Comment)
Yet this doesn’t quite capture the messiness within the diegesis itself. In L’amour Braque, he often films from the most claustrophobic angles, making what seems a packed situation appear much more so. In one early scene, various characters are sitting in a train compartment. Zulawski films from the lowest of angles and manages to contain in the frame several characters in the compartment, as well as three other officials present as their passports are passed to them. When a character who has been initially out of the frame gets his passport back, all we see is his hand coming into the shot. Later, celebrating a bank robbery, the gang leader Tcheky Karyo opens a bin bag full of cash and starts throwing it up in the air. The camera circles around the numerous characters at a low angle, as Zulawski again emphasises the saturation of the image. It makes sense that Zulawski would absorb Dostoevsky's The Devils into La Femme Publique and claim inspiration from The Idiot for L’amour Braque. There is in the Russian writers' work a feverish fertility that Zulawski draws upon for his own. But no less important would be the theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, with Zulawski saying, “I saw for the first time in my life—I was very young—that a human being, an actor, could do things that I couldn’t have imagined were possible. Speaking voices, the relationship between dialogue and movement, is not as simple as in a Spielberg film where you stop and you talk. So this interweaving of movement, body and mind was very shocking for me, it was a light suddenly in the dark. I had never seen anything else like it.” (Metrograph)
One way of describing the saturated shot is that the focal point is dispersive instead of concentrated, moving away from a centre of attention or diluting it within a mise en scene that is too elaborate for the purposes of the immediate action. There is a bustle of behaviour that the film captures, which can leave actors without the usual emphasis, where they really are no longer the centre of attention. This often leads in Zulawski’s films to thespian histrionics, as though the actor wants to regain control of the image, and does so by acting that is exaggerated, which in turn creates a higher pitch with the other actors, a little like in a pub when one group gets louder and within a few minutes the decibel level of the whole place becomes shouty. When Bird noted that “Possession is distinguished by expressive, some might say excessive performances, not least that of Isabelle Adjani” (Metrograph), he could be speaking of numerous actors in Zulawski’s work. Casting Francis Huster in La Femme Publique and L’amour Braque, an actor from Comedie Francaise who started his own theatre acting school in the early 90s, would be an instance of this over-emphasis, with a theatre actor taking into film the exaggeration of one medium and transposing it to another, one usually much less forgiving of larger performances, except as villainy. It is no doubt partly why so many theatrical actors have been cast as baddies in film. From Alan Rickman in Die Hard to Josh Ackland in Lethal Weapon 2, from Steven Berkoff in Rambo First Blood Part II to Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. The villain can be hammy, over the top, and attack the role with a relish that the hero is expected to eschew, and how often have we seen the hero strapped to a chair while the antagonist makes the most of their moment of torturous villainy? If the hero and villain acted with equal exaggeration, the film would risk the comedic, even if there may be an element of this in Inglorious Basterds, for example, where Waltz is cruelly given to prolonging someone’s misery, while Brad Pitt is happy to milk a scene for a bit of irony when smashing in some heads with a baseball bat. Yet Tarantino wouldn’t want to push his drama into the dramatically frantic, apart from conclusions that can often seem overblown and under-controlled — as in Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino is far from a director of the saturated shot; he is closer to Leone and Hitchcock in controlling the centrality of information in the frame.
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Kusturica is less radical than either German or Zulawski, but he was at a certain moment easily the most famous. From The Time of the Gypsies to Black Cat, White Cat, Kusturica’s work was much seen and widely commented upon, with debates around Underground, including, however directly or indirectly, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Finkelkraut, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-Levy and Peter Handke. Sean Homer, exploring aspects of the debate, quotes Zizek, saying: "What we find here [in Underground] is an exemplary case of  'Balkanism,' functioning in a similar way to Edward Said’s concept of 'Orientalism': the Balkans as the timeless space onto which the West projects its phantasmatic content.’’ Homer says, ‘‘Together with Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (which almost won the Oscar for the best foreign film in 1995), Underground is thus the ultimate ideological product of Western liberal multiculturalism: what these two films offer to the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in the Balkan war — the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions, in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life." (Jump Cut) The difference between Kusturica’s work during this time, and Zulawski’s and German’s, is that, between 1991 and 2001, the Balkan war had taken place, and preoccupied Europe and the West generally. Though we have noted all the directors are loosely Eastern Bloc, we’ve been wary of proposing the stylistic coming out of the political. Yet this still might be better than commenting on the political without attending at all to the style. So completely did Finkelkraut ignore the film’s specific features when commenting on Underground that he didn’t watch the film at all before criticising what he believed was its Serb-nationalism.
This argument rests chiefly on archival footage Kusturica uses that shows Slovenians and Croatians welcoming the Nazis, while the Serbs didn’t. Fedor Tot notes that “the footage used to depict their arrivals in Ljlubljana (Slovenia) and Zagreb (Croatia) showcases crowds actively waving them in, whilst that of Belgrade (Serbia) shows the streets empty, thus aligning the Nazi state with Slovenia and Croatia.” (Bright Wall/Dark Room) Whatever the historical accuracy of the footage that illustrates a key feature of WWII, where many Croatians sided with the Nazis, and the Ustasa, and the Serbs with the allies, and the Partisans, to offer these images in the mid-90s, and when many saw the Serbs as the chief belligerents in the Balkan war, was provocative. It might be fair to acknowledge that the Serbs shouldn’t be seen as perennial bad guys, but it wasn’t a good look when viewers could see on their TVs in the present the devastation of Vukovar and the siege of Sarajevo.
Yet Kusturica’s point was perhaps that it wasn’t ideological purity and organisation that mattered, but the chaos of the region, and the shifting allegiances potentially at work within it. Zizek may be right to see the cliche of “the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions”, but Tot reckons, “the existence of such anarchy in his films is a response to the lawlessness of Serbian and Balkan society in the ‘90s, when hyperinflation annihilated the economy and made the black market king.” He does add, however, that “Kusturica often encourages us to revel in it without truly confronting its meaning and context, so we’re visiting it safely from a distance.” (Bright Wall/DarkRoom) What is important here for us is the form Kusturica offers; the chaos he manages to convey, no matter if Zizek reckoned, in an interview with Bernard Henri-Levy, that in Underground the director shows “a society where people fornicate, drink, fight – a kind of eternal orgy.” (Euronews) It might be a useful way of describing all the films under discussion; that there is an orgiastic quality covering societies that may have been centrally planned, but unravelled with Dionysian wilfulness.
Of the three filmmakers, Kusturica came closest to proposing that this was a party people may have wished to gatecrash, a romp as readily as an expiration. He was also aided by the musician Goran Bregovic, with the drums and various brass instruments coming in and proposing that there is always more energy left for excess. After someone takes a wedding photograph in Underground that manages to cram about twenty-five people into the shot, with everyone stacked as if they are on top of each other, the film cuts to the band, half a dozen of them on a raised rotating platform as the party properly gets started. There’s a monkey, kids playing football, a woman belly-dancing, and numerous revellers in the background. Asked about the complexity of his mise en scene, Kusturica said, “I strongly believe that background, midground, and foreground are equally important. Most of the contemporary cinema industry thinks it's also important, but they always have all these close-ups. I don't think that way. That's probably why my films look more like documentaries, but at the same time, visually balanced. That's why you can see this kind of difference. The use of wide lenses means that you really have to open it and orchestrate so many things at the same time. (Indiewire)
However, while Kusturica’s describes well the blocking of the scene, and his intentions behind such an aesthetic, not all his films capture the chaos in the proceedings. It was a quality that came with Time of the Gypsies and was generally absent from his quieter, gentler and beautiful first two features - Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, and When Father was Away on Business. In the latter film, at another Kusturica wedding (there are plenty of them in his work), the central character witnesses his father’s affair, and the sequence is far more subdued in its mise en scene than in his later films. There are depth-of-field shots where we see in a bold foreground various characters getting introduced as they sit down at the table, and in the background, we can make out diners within the frame at three other tables behind them. But this is closer to classic, deep-focus framing that can be seen in Welles and Wyler. It is far from the hectic image. After the father disappears with his mistress, the film cuts to a medium shot of a dove, clearly hours later, and follows with a long, empty shot of the tables that are now unoccupied. The danger with most of Kusturica’s films, from Time of the Gypsies to Life is a Miracle, including Underground and Black Cat, White Cat, but perhaps less so Arizona Dream, was that he adopted a signature style and a marketable approach, evident in Zizek’s comment. They are virtuoso displays and benefit greatly from Bregovic’s music, yet maybe of the three directors under discussion, Kusturica was the least wedded to this approach, even if his was the one most commercially capable of rendering it palatable.
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Nevertheless, one reason his approach to the saturated shot has been popular rests on its very orgiastic aspect. What Zizek offers as an insult is central to its appeal, and also what links Kusturica to Federico Fellini — a director as interested in parties as Kusturica is in weddings. Fellini’s mise en scene may have given the appearance of greater control than the Bosnian filmmaker, but when Homer quotes Pavle Levi looking at Kusturica’s work libidinally, Fellini will surely come to mind. “Underground’s highest aesthetic achievements,’’ writes Levi, ‘‘are when it causes the spectator to suspend all narrative/diegetic concerns in favour of sheer scopic gratification. These ‘ibidinal choreographies,’ he argues, produce ’autonomous dynamic systems’ that generate the effect of a dissipation of energy… The film accomplishes this through the centrifugal effect achieved by its use of low camera angles and ecstatic bodies organized in circular and rotational movements.” (Jump Cut) La Dolce Vita and 8½ are, in this sense, libidinal works, yet where would we stop if we were to include them here? Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, Makavejev’s Sweet Movie, and early Almodovar would all have this libidinal excess, but they wouldn’t fit into our notion of the saturated shot. It is perhaps one reason why we have avoided making the political central, as if to go down the thematic root over the formal one would open the article up to so many films and styles that the perceptual properties of the works we have put under discussion would dissolve into the vague.
But without some broader idea beyond the saturated shot, we could arrive at the formally arid, making a claim that is visually demonstrable but begging a broader question of purpose and point. By nevertheless allowing the libidinal without insisting on its use beyond the contours of the films under discussion, we might wonder why we see this type of saturation in these three late Communist cinema filmmakers. Nobody was more important in addressing the libidinal than Jean- Francois Lyotard, whose book The Libidinal Economy came out in 1974, and addressed, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, issues of desire and the state, freedom and control, post-May 68. In a talk Deleuze gave in 1973, after reviewing Lyotard’s Discourse/Figure the previous year, he notes there are “movements of intensities, as [Pierre] Klossowski and Lyotard have made clear: the way in which there is a play of high and low intensities, the one in the other, such that a low intensity can undermine the highest intensity and even be as high as the highest, and vice versa.” (‘Nomadic Thought’) In Libidinal Economy, Lyotard says “the important thing is not to decide between the East and West, one suspects. It is a question, rather, of remarking that totalitarianism which is the very process of concentration can expand only to the extent that new quantities of energy are included in the said circulation of capital…” Lyotard adds, “it is the space and time that becomes the objects of intelligence and decision-making, at the level of the labourer’s body in Taylorism.” (Libidinal Economy)
If communism was increasingly seen as a failure, with limitations in the planned economy, and wasn’t yet, or was in the process of becoming, a capitalist one, then it is as if the saturated shot would be one way of making sense of the crisis and the confusion. Other filmmakers from the Eastern Bloc took a different approach, and perhaps nobody more impressively than Bela Tarr. His long-take aesthetic in showing late and post-Hungarian communism relied on incremental revelation over visual spillage, and any madness in the characters’ behaviour was usually countered by the control of the form. But if we differentiate the work of Tarr, as well Alexander Sokurov and Sharunas Bartas, from Zulawski, Guerman and Kusturica, it rests on a different analogous approach to communism’s collapse, all the while taking into account that Zulawski left Poland in the ‘70s and often worked in France, German’s most intensely saturated film Hard to be a God was made in the 2000s, and that Kusturica was working in a country where communism was practised with far less authoritarianism than in most Eastern Bloc nations.
When looking at what he saw as de-modern aesthetics, De Baecque notes that “it was only the collapse of the system itself — and hence the apocalyptic form that enabled its recording, in Guerman, Sokurov [Tarkovsky] and Kusturica’s films — that could at last visually translate communism, which had been so impossible to represent in its attempts at internal reform.” (Camera Historica) But for our purposes, German and Kusturica are quite distinct from Sokurov and Tarkovsky. The visual centre still holds in Tarkovsky and Sokurov; it seems obliterated and splintered in the three filmmakers we address. This isn’t, of course, to suggest less craft goes into German, Kusturica and Zulawski than into Tarkovsky, Sokurov and Tarr. Zulawski insists that no matter the apparent dispersion in the shot, it still needs to be controllable. Nevertheless, that he has to defend himself against the assumption of this loss of control tells us a great deal about the impression the image has on the viewer. Our point, though, isn’t to muse over which filmmakers put more effort into their productions, but only what perceptually comes out of them and, tangentially and tentatively, what we can say about the ideas to be extracted from such an approach. These are images of aesthetic freedom that came out of what could seem a libidinally weakened environment, one that Zulawski described thus, and saw in a writer known, like Klossowski, for the sexual excess of his material. Speaking of Witold Gombrowicz, Zulawski says, “In those terribly sad, grey, and lying times. Whatever he did looked like a savage provocation in front of the Communist concrete and total boredom and total incapacity to do anything right. My entire generation was a Gombrowicz generation.” (Film Comment) How true this happened to be given how singular Zulawski was in the Polish context (Kieslowski, Zanussi and Skolimowski’s films are quite different), it was without a doubt no longer a generation that possessed the ideological faith of those early Soviet filmmakers, who saw in the 1920s great hopes for the revolution, and offered that hope in a style of short takes making clear the purposes the shot served, and the society it was serving. All we need to say is that faith was clearly no longer apparent in films like The Devil, Khrustalyov, My Car!, and Underground.

© Tony McKibbin