It is, by now, a given that Angela Schanelec’s films involve insoluble tarrying with opacities at every available level. Consider Blake Williams in Cinema Scope 68: “Like Godard, Schanelec presents us with only enough narrative so that we feel our desire for narrative,” a situation through which “the primacy of interpretative thought in the face of the unknown is, again, affirmed.” Or Giovanni Marchini Camia, in issue 76: “The notion of searching for something essential yet impossible to describe or even fully conceive represents an existential longing that has afflicted all of Schanelec’s characters to date, and which drives the films themselves.” For a some viewers, this is maddening, even unbearable—the work remains remote, a series of finely polished surfaces lacking the usual signifiers that provide points of human attachment. For others, those who are more comfortable dwelling in failure and ignorance, Schanelec’s films sit at the current peak of narrative sophistication. Both positions are captured by a line from Manny Farber on the other director invoked above: “In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.”
This apparently elliptical approach is not exactly novel; Williams, for example, convincingly places it within the lineage of gaps and ruptures dating to the earliest days of cinematic surrealism. The compositional tropes of various high modernists, Bresson above all, loom large. Schanelec’s invention, instead, is tonal, a chording of irony and earnestness which allows her to handle the hottest emotions without ever being burned. Taken in other terms, this too looks more like refinement than
