Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts

Chapter Three - THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL NARRATIVE SHIFT BETWEEN LENNY ABRAHAMSON’S ADAM AND PAUL AND GARAGE

Iwould like to narrate, here, a brief anecdote of coincidence that I believe relevant to what I discuss below. Travelling by train recently in Belgium, I was reflecting on the interesting historical, mechanical and aesthetic connections between the locomotive and cinema. It was there from the very beginning, first appearing in the early years when the Lumière brothers and Méliès represented the means of transport as either object of momentum coming forward through depths of field in L’Arrivée d’un Train à La Ciotat (1896), or phantasmagorical entity magically hurtling through space and time in Le Voyage à Travers l’Impossible (1904). Cinema was born only decades after the years of the development of underground networks in London (1863), New York (1869) and Paris (1900), whose temporal and spatial effects for the traveller were later duplicated for the film spectator by the editing table in various fades, cuts, wipes and dissolves. It occupied then a significant place at fairgrounds as early twentieth-century carnival rides, in much the same way that contemporary roller-coasters are linked thematically to blockbuster movies. Structural connections between train movement and narration are also evident across a diverse set of genres from the ominous inevitability of train journeys in films such as Le Sang des Bêtes (Georges Frangu, 1949) and Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1955) to opening sequence associations made in films like Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) and Dhoom:2 (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2006), to narrative bracketing devices such as the segment transitions used in Peppermint Candy (Chang-dong Lee, 1999). At times the Chapter Three THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL NARRATIVE SHIFT BETWEEN LENNY ABRAHAMSON’S ADAM AND PAUL AND GARAGE Barry Monahan 42 relationship is sustained throughout the whole narrative structure in films as varied as The General (Buster Keaton, 1926), The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) and The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007). As these thoughts occurred to me, I was distracted by a child’s voice on the other side of the carriage. After a momentary flicker of darkness, a young girl – no more than four years old – said to her grandmother, ‘On vient d’entrer dans un tunel.’ In the light of what I had been thinking, this exclamation was opportunely fascinating in that it drew my attention to another functioning principle of cinema: the mode in which it thinks about and articulates its perceptions. As surely as I had noticed our entry into a tunnel, without affirmatively thinking about it, the girl had not only perceived this, but had felt the need, simultaneously and instantaneously, to state it. For her grandmother, it might not even have emerged as a moment of conscious thought. It struck me then that the language of cinema – its unique silent linguistic matter – and the particular expressive accent through which it articulates, operates in a way that seems to hover between the exclamation of the little girl and the invisible, unremarked realisation of her grandmother. The medium somehow, concurrently, notices and presents ideas and reflections on the universe and its living substance in a way that is connected to its animation and the way that it engages spectators. Like human perception, film somehow notices its environment by simultaneously uttering it, and saying nothing. Film has the capacity to say ‘we have just entered a tunnel’ without using any words; however, it still makes meaning, makes sense and invites conscious or unconscious thought that may call upon language. For more than half a century, film theory has been stimulated by, and has contributed to, debates that address the notion of film authorship. Attempting to answer questions about film meaningmaking , expression and comprehension, theoretical writing has been perennially interested in discovering the foundations of how communication works in the cinematic text. The terminology mobilised for this analysis is broad, and in time we have been asked to consider implied authors, focalisation, enunciation, invisible organisers and countless other narrative and meta-narrative qualities with a view to answering two key questions about film: does film have a consciousness and / or is it capable of representing human The Phenomenological Narrative Shift 43 consciousness? By putting the spectator into the picture (as it were), assessing the way that films are watched and understood, many theorists have considered phenomenology as a useful analytical tool. Concerned with how pre-conscious perception and meaning-making...