|Natalie Marlin|
Demonlover plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 27th, through Sunday, March 29th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Content warning: The following piece contains references to sexual violence/rape, abuse, and torture.
Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the twentieth century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is at an impasse. And so, like any artist prone to experimentation may choose, noise enters where all other expressions fail. The final three minutes of the film are pure avant-garde collage, reconstituting the unused footage from the production into a barrage of scratches and monochromatic sketchwork on celluloid. The soundtrack: interjections of static, deafening metallic clangs, and decontextualized industrial music stems. It jars like a bristling of Brillo on contact mic.
The move is a bold proposition, if not a wholly original one—what more expansive shape can film take, beyond what prescripted, time-worn templates have been conjured in the century-plus of the medium’s history? As a writer deeply invested in noise music—itself, another artform’s capacity for shirking formal standards and expectations—this question constantly provokes my thoughts. In any form, what new horizons can be broached beyond mere tradition?
In considering the closest analogs in film, and aiming to chart a prospective canon of “noise cinema,” as I’ve come to refer to it, some obvious answers come to mind. There are the early films of Shinya Tsukamoto or Shozin Fukui, where any modicum of clean narrative gets swiftly cast aside for fever-pitched exercises in heightened physical performance, post-industrial wastelands, and, yes, ear-shattering noise. If we are to take into account Paul Hegarty’s interpretation of the pronounced stillness of John Cage as a form of noise in itself—free of all the conventions and harmony that recorded music implies—then the scoreless works of Stan Brakhage can be counted here as well.1 And then there’s something like Outer Space, the 1999 Peter Tscherkassky short that mercilessly re-edits Sidney J. Furie’s 1981 horror movie The Entity into a fractured, dissociative, abrasive art piece about living with assault and trauma. (In a sense, Outer Space is the closest another film has come to Assayas’s exploration of how existing celluloid can be physically vandalized to the utmost extremes.)
Yet, the most exciting prospect for “noise cinema” is a path yet to be well-trod—one that sees the growing hums and decay in the fabric of our existence, the encroaching pollution of machinery and light and stimuli that overload all our senses as a playground with which we can violently recapture by force, and radically manipulate as meta-rhetorical criticism on its command over our daily lives.2
Assayas himself is one of the few filmmakers who has offered a glimpse at what this possibility can be—six years after burning down the very foundations that Irma Vep stakes most of its runtime upon, he offered a more experimental and panoramic example of “noise cinema” via Demonlover. Released in 2002, the film is one entrenched in the harshest permutations of Web 1.0 culture—LCD computer screens, violently pornographic anime and standard-definition webcam footage, bitcrushed low-pixel deep web sites. Filmed on Super 16mm stock, the image quality straddles the line between crisp and hazy. The soundtrack, composed by noise rock legends Sonic Youth, volleys between tender shoegaze passages, suffocating clipped howls, and stifling silence, sometimes with no warning in its spikes of volume.
The form, as it ought to, fits the function. In Demonlover, Assayas is rendering the aesthetics twofold—both a plunging of the depths that technology staked on sadism can reach if left to fester, and a representation of the casual depravity of the corporate culture that actively builds that technology. The film’s characters and events are submerged within this latter world as if to say, “Do not forget that this culture, these aesthetics, this media was built from this place of power—an abuse of the financial and the sexual. It was built to be consumed and regurgitated to propagate these ideas, to abet further brutality, to test the waters for what levels of subjugation and violence will still sell.”
There’s an uneasy creep to even the earliest passages of Demonlover—in the stillness of first-class airplane cabins filled with sleeping corporate execs, empty office building lobbies at night, board meetings where investors nonchalantly discuss products fetishizing rape. It’s as if Assayas himself is pushing that very same question at the viewer, interrogating them. How much are you willing to buy into this burgeoning, viciously misogynist media, as the level of cruelty becomes more blatant? How much more will you viscerally feel if you recognize, from the start, that this enterprise only leads to real human agony?
The gambit Assayas works at lurches into sickening form at the film’s abrupt midpoint. Following a sudden murder, Demonlover fractures into something of a discontinuous nightmare, weaponizing and rearranging the aesthetic signifiers of its techno-corporate dealings, until the film ceases to resemble a coherent narrative altogether. The editing morphs into an actively antagonistic array of CCTV footage, digital camcorder pseudo-snuff, and torture webpages advertised as a form of lurid pornography. The Sonic Youth score screams in sequences that feel like holding one’s breath; it altogether drops away in sequences that feel like prolonged, harried gasps. In some scenes, the subjects—the actors—disappear from the screen almost entirely, the camera holding on glares on car windshields, blurred views of the rain. The people are abstracted out of this tale of technology, literally dehumanized as the media they create reduces their personhood out of existence.
The back half of Demonlover is rendered into such a cacophony of sounds and images, each veering further from the placidity of a standard thriller, that it feels less akin to watching a feature film and closer to a visualization of a Fushitsusha record, dopplering out into increasingly shapeless stares out into a growing, increasingly jagged abyss. In defining a theoretical permutation of “noise cinema,” one may very well include the psychological effect of watching Demonlover: a prolonged exercise in disorientation, in inverting the sensory experiences that otherwise make watching a film pleasurable into a smothering audiovisual maelstrom. Like a good many noise albums, it is difficult to cleanly grasp the proper rhythms of a selected segment of the film—let alone how multiple pieces play in relation to each other. The interpretation of chronology, motivation, and even the text of the plot are left up to the viewer. Save for the film’s most damning indictment.
In somewhat of a reversal from Irma Vep, Demonlover ends with a sequence that starts as its most conventional-looking. In a bright, tidy suburban neighborhood, a teen shakes his computer from the innocence of a Windows 98 screensaver, and logs into the same torture site much of the film revolves around, paying for a fantasy for our now-captive protagonist Diane. The teen aimlessly works on homework while Diane looks up at the camera—the filming of the teen’s screen smudging an already-compressed image even further. The shot shifts so that the teen disappears from view, so that Diane’s gaze pierces us—the viewer—implicates us for our consumption of this very medium. We’ve already normalized the decay, Assayas implies. We’re entombed in the digital noise, and we’ve sealed our own exit.
Notes:
- Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2007), 5-6. ↩︎
- The theoretical framework that connects industrialization to the gradual permissibility of harsher stimuli is commonly cited as one introduced by Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises; however, given Russolo’s ties to fascism in Italy, I endeavor to consider this sense-making apparatus for post-industrial art as an analysis independent of his writing, and seek to author my own interpretation for this theory that is vehemently anti-fascist, liberatory, and serves—first and foremost—expression of those otherwise oppressed by the very tools they reclaim from the artistic hegemony. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum