La Flor (part three / conclusion) (Mariano Llinás, 2018) (Patreon)

There's no point denying the overall power and importance of La Flor. Before seeing the film, I jokingly referred to it as a "megalith," and unbeknownst to me, Llinás cites the giant stone structures of antiquity as a source of unexplained power. (This is during Episode Four, when Professor Gatto is investigating witchcraft and other supernatural phenomena.) Although Llinás is not so immodest as to draw the parallel himself, there is an implied connection between the massive calendrical totem of Stonehenge, say, and the titanic monument to human storytelling that La Flor represents. In this respect, it barely matters whether or not one "likes" La Flor (and in certain ways, I do not). It simply is.

But because Llinás' film, in many respects, obviated the typical rules of how a film is supposed to exist and function, I felt it was necessary to break a few rules of my own. Typically, I don't like to read other people's reviews, analyses, or filmmaker interviews prior to formulating my own ideas about a work. But at the same time, I felt that certain of Llinás' intentions were so unclear that I had to learn more. Although my critical practice does not adhere to a rote schema -- at least I hope it doesn't -- I do tend to organize my initial thoughts on the basis of three interconnected questions when considering an artwork. What was it trying to do? How well did it do it? And finally, was that endeavor worth doing?

At a certain point in Episode Four, which is the most self-reflexive part of the film, "Llinás" (the director character) admits that, from a film historical standpoint, he is "reinventing the wheel." I did feel that Episode Four, while the most enigmatic on its face, was actually the episode that offered the clearest passkey to the La Flor project, and sure enough, Jordan Cronk used the quotation about "reinventing the wheel" as his epigram for his excellent interview with Llinás for Cinema Scope. This episode begins with a grumpy conflict between Llinás and his quartet of actresses (Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes) because instead of remaining in Canada to shoot an episode with them, he is off to another country to shoot a series of trees. The progression of Episode Four not only encapsulates the dominant ideas of La Flor, but, I think, the problems inherent in "reinventing the wheel."

The first part of the episode alternates between Llinás' crew struggling to find perfect shots of pink trumpet trees and a series of shots of said trees, rhythmically edited with a minimalist soundtrack. For the avant-garde minded, this segment immediately calls to mind the early work of Peter Greenaway, and later, when the director begins noticing strange, facelike protrusions in some of the trees, the tone is reminiscent of John Smith's film The Black Tower. In both films, directors observe random features in the landscape and begin to imbue them with a sort of supernatural power through their own paranoid projection.

Later segments of Episode Four, featuring Prof. Gatto and the research into witchcraft, also adopt the free-roaming structural camera of John Smith's Hotel Diaries, and Gatto spends much of this segment writing to a colleague named Smith. This is probably all coincidental. But what seems quite deliberate is Llinás' abandonment (through his onscreen surrogate) of the idea of a formalist avant-garde. By chance, a perfect shot of a tree is "spoiled" by workers on a bench, and through this experience, Llinás concludes that images of trees are better when there are people in them. This revelation leads him back to his four actresses, who are afforded a series of interwoven, free-form portraits. 

But what does this actually tell us? It is very much in keeping with the critique of the formalist avant-garde in some ways exemplified by Peter Wollen's essay "The Two Avant-Gardes." The gist of that argument (which, it should be noted, Wollen no longer adheres to, but many others still do) is that a type of film that examines the parameters of time, space, and vision (e.g., Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs) is inherently not as complex, worthwhile, human, as a cinema that engages with questions of language and storytelling (e.g., Godard, Straub / Huillet, Kluge). Llinás calls on the procedures of the formalist avant-garde precisely to frame them as inadequate, and then supplement them with an inquiry into genre and narration, which is his primary area of concern. 

So, a study of trees "evolves" into a supernatural story about female power, which also becomes an implicit inquiry into the patriarchal parameters of filmmaking (the brotherhood of the male crew vs. "witches") and, later, an allegory about female desire and the male gaze, as Gatto becomes unwittingly captivated with the head of the psychiatric colony and her women colleagues, their strange attraction to the Italian, and his assertion that their unbridled sexual desire constitutes a "category four" event, a rift in the structures of reality that drives men mad and requires governmental intervention. And the trees? They become sentient villains in a (possibly imaginary) war. Everything is subjugated to a narrative purpose. Episode Four is like a trip through 1970s and 1980s film theory, but without any critical distance. Llinás appears to be a true believer.

And I am not. So that's where the complications lay for me. I cannot but admire La Flor as an intellectual enterprise, even as I strongly disagree with many of its basic premises. 

At the same time, there are certain things Llinás accomplishes that are unequivocally impressive just from an experiential point of view. While I don't think that a formalist consideration of trees is somehow inadequate, there's no question that, having gone through that portion of Episode Four, we see trees very differently than we would have otherwise once they are reintroduced into the narrative flow. In conventional film, we don't exactly see the landscape, because it's the empty space where action happens. Llinás, by contrast, allows us to recognize the figure / ground relations that are basic to all cinema, but usually ignored.

And there is also no question that, over the 14-hour running time, we develop a unique spectatorial connection to Carricajo, Correa, Gamboa, and Paredes. We see them transform, but more than this, we see them simply exist. Raul Ruiz wrote in his essay "Central Conflict Theory" that films are also documentaries of their actors' lives, noting that eventually viewers would be able to detect what Robert De Niro had eaten for lunch between the shots. There is a time element in the ten-year making of La Flor that cannot be approximated by any means besides duration. Llinás makes this explicit by showing us that, by the completion of the film in Episode Seven, two of the actresses are pregnant.

And yet, I am bothered by the decision to show partial, and then complete nudity as a kind of "reward" for sticking with La Flor to the bitter end. It feels like ironic feminist-film-theory box-ticking, a sort of thumbing of the nose at the spectator. "We have spent all this time conjuring desire for these women by means of the cinematic apparatus. You are not immune to this gaze. So here you go." Maybe Llinás conceived of this finale as honesty, a final stripping-away of all actorly pretense. But if that's the case, he's pretty naive, and that's one thing I am certain Llinás is not.

So was it all worth it? I am still not sure that La Flor's engagement with genre was particularly revelatory. Making a bunch of barely-connected, stylistically diverse films under the aegis of one project really is "reinventing the wheel," as though film history needed One Film to Rule Them All, a demonstration that we all grasp the laws of genre and narration. Even the ending credits, which borrow from Michael Snow (La Région Centrale) and Yvonne Rainer (Privilege), feel like showboating, as if the question of originality were being bracketed for the purposes of evaluating greatness, and we were temporarily going to judge film solely on hours logged and labor expended. 

But Llinás isn't trying to secure a pilot's license. He's out to create a self-consciously monumental work of cinematic art. The remake of Renoir's Day in the Country feels particularly pointless, as if Llinás understood that, in order to absolutely create a film that could claim to encompass "all of cinema," he had to decide on an outside masterpiece and include it, a sort of True North against which his other experiments would revolve. In this regard, the plodding, expansive Episode Three feels equally random. Is "spy cinema" some kind of unique apotheosis? Why is that section the most amoebic and outwardly protruding? As a film in itself, it would have its own justification -- there are no supporting characters, every story implies backstory, etc. -- but given the implicit claims for La Flor, it's hard to justify. Unless the ruling metaphor is more like planets and their moons, not a flower and its petals.

In the end, La Flor only strengthened my resolve on one crucial issue. Someone needs to produce a film adaptation of Roland Barthes' S/Z. That would accomplish what La Flor thinks it's doing, in half the time, and with twice the elegance.