Immanence and Transcendence (Patreon)

Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019)

It's admirable how Saint Maud splits the difference between the au courant stylings of Elevated Horror and a fairly traditional psychological thriller. Glass is not overly concerned with glacial pacing or precious compositions, although the underlit cinematography does become a bit of a barrier. It seems that Saint Maud wants to highlight the sort of economically depressed qualities of seaside Britain, painting the landscape in dingy, 19th century browns and grays. But this approach spills over into the main plot, as though it can satisfactorily envelop the film's two main characters in some sort of stagnant time-funk.

Saint Maud is most interesting when it focuses on the fraught, unequal relationship between a caregiver and her charge. Maud / Katie (Morfydd Clark) is hopelessly working class, and her attempt to do better for herself by becoming a nurse has only exacerbated her festering emotional wounds. Meanwhile, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) represents arty intellectualism in disrepair, the revenge of the body on a dancer whose life's work involved pushing it to its expressive limits. 

Glass sort of gives the game away early on when we see Maud take a framed diploma off the wall and replace it with the crucifix. She believes that fervent belief should and will expunge the vanity of the intellect. And Glass is at least confident enough to take a side. Maud's Catholicism, while not fraudulent, is in truth another social construction for filling the cavity at the center of her identity. Although did anyone else find it odd that Glass chose Catholicism? Sure, it's got great visuals. But contemporary Christian fundamentalism is really more of a Protestant domain.

Al Largo (Anna Marziano, 2020)

In Saint Maud, the title character keeps telling people not to "waste [their] pain." She seems to think that the mortification of the flesh will help others achieve a higher state of consciousness. Anna Marziano takes a much more materialist approach to chronic pain and debilitating illness. Her film Al Largo uses the ocean as a physical metaphor for the overpowering experience of pain. It can take the form of a negative-sublime, something that shatters the self while returning the subject unavoidably back to their embodied situation.

Marziano blends film footage of her own family with observational documentary material focused on various artists who have developed various relationships to their disabilities. Painter Francesco Nash creates Cubist images of the natural world, intimating a deeper structure beneath the seeming randomness of existence. Writer Claire Marin describes her pain as a kind of shadow or fellow-traveler that she must accommodate. And collage artist Dijana Zoradana layers images of ordinary scenes with art historical depictions of religion, compounding the quotidian and the spiritual.

Marziano's primary objective seems to be a deromanticization of bodies in extremis. There is no transcendence, to great insight. Much like Stephen Dwoskin's avant-doc Pain Is, Al Largo considers pain to be a state that can only be managed by adopting practical strategies, finding some way to accept pain without embracing it. Strangely, Al Largo takes a sharp turn in the final third, profiling a doctor and a pair of oceanic researchers. This is material that belongs in some other film, and I don't really understand what Marziano was hoping to accomplish by including it.