Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

ee ef P= Peder be © Ng ea a ee eee believe), Accident is structured in much the same way. While simulating a crash sequence for a film about flight that Duckworth was making with Pat Crawley, the plane actually crashed. The pilot was killed and Pat Crawley, who was filming from inside the plane, was seriously _ injured. Crawley’s footage of the crash survived as did Duckworth's (of course) who was filming from the ground. While the flight film was cancelled, Duckworth went on to make Accident which basically investigates Crawley’s feelings during the crash, indeed the “vision” that he experienced during what he was sure would be the moment of his own death. It would require another paper to investigate this film, but | mention it briefly simply to suggest certain parallels between Accident and The Wish. Accident also alternates black-&-white with colour sequences and italso makes use of interpolated photographs. If the structure of each film implies a dialectic between howit-is-happening-now and how-itwas-then (as | have said), one might also sense a more speculative tension at work in each film. In Accident, Duckworth might have been in the plane. He might have been killed. In The Wish, the mother might not have left; and if the children’s wish is to be honoured (it is honoured in the film with the force and delicacy of a prayer), she might come home. Thus there is in these films the additional dialectic between how-it-was-then and howit-might-have-been. Itis the possibility of perceiving in these films this more speculative tension thatmakes each film, whether in Kracauer's or in Bergers sense of the term, seem like an act of redemption. And where there is a need for redemption there has always been a feeling of guilt. This feeling, finally, is inescapable for all photography and all actuality footage that draws its raw material from actions of living concern. All images of real people are in one sense predatory. They can create simultaneously a feeling of extreme pleasure and moral unease. If all images are emanations from the referent then in acertain sense something from the referent has been taken away. Even the extraordinary form of The Wish, a film which literally tells its story backwards, on reflection creates an aftertaste of personal manipulation. “Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments — an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world.” (Sontag, p. 80) And later on Sontag suggests that" photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality” (p. 80) Actual people and actual events have been utilized to create a cinematic reality in which, finally, they have no part. HARCOURT While endemic to the photographic and documentary process, these moral considerations have little to do with The Wish as a film. With its fragmented form, its richness of connotation, the sense that it conveys of a past that can barely be heard (the hints of the gigue music) and of a future that can scarcely be hoped for, The Wish is finally a philosophical poem about the nature of time and memory which celebrates the precariousness Of the living moment within an irrational world pervaded by loss and need. Itis a unique achievement within the history of cinema. It ought to be better known. Carleton University An earlier version of this essay appeared in Ciné-Tracts, No. 17 (Summer/Fall 1982). Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard. (New York, Hill & Wang, 1981) Berger, John. About Looking. (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980) Elder, Bruce. “Image: Representation and Object : The Photographic Imagein Canadian Avant-Garde Film.” (Toronto, TS, 1982) Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981) Sontag, Susan. On Photography. (New York, A Delta Book, 1978).