Week #5 2020: Rainbow Dance
I’m currently undertaking a project to watch all of the Sight & Sound Top 250 films of all time by the time the next poll is unleashed in 2022 (check here if you’d like to cackle at my obvious blind spots or the thought of me striding through ten hours of observational doc about Chinese industry; I’ll get there Wang Bing!). There’s a lot more to think about in this act of semi-masochistic canon-swallowing (I’ll be writing about it again), but one thing it makes clear is that if you can’t find a way to write about it, it’s unlikely to be a critics’ pick. I’m not even talking about work made by people who aren’t ‘auteurs’, not a feature-length fiction film (which these lists focus heavily on), or from the groups of people these lists obviously exclude. Having watched about 75% of the list now, I can see four categories of work that this list includes and excludes...
Films that can be enjoyed by anyone and critical explanation tends to dim the appreciation of
Films that can be enjoyed by anyone but are richer with explanation
Films that cannot be enjoyed except with critical apparatus
Films that can be enjoyed by anyone but which criticism cannot explicate
Group 1 features the least on Sight & Sound’s list (check which films Empire’s 500 greatest list champions to get a sense of which films I’m talking about). Group 2 and 3 are a pretty even split. That makes sense. Critics are picking lifetime favourites, and they’re likely to be the films that require the most engagement and repeated viewing, that give threads for critics to pull. There’s a reciprocal parasitism between critics and complex work; that or there’s a certain vanity that comes with enduring difficult work. Of course, I’m being simplistic, a little bit cynical and categorical here. Lists like this serve to encase work just as much as it offers it up. I can’t recapture the feeling of seeing Sansho the Bailiff on release nor can I say that time might me less cold on it (obviously the reason that this ‘task’ is worthwhile is the opposite situation, when you prepare yourself for a diamond-hard impenetrable sit and it’s something as lusciously queer and immediate as The Colour of Pomegranates).
If this all sounds anti-intellectual and risk averse, it’s in service of expanding the family of critical esteem to include films in category four – films that evade criticism – a perfect example of which is Len Lye’s Rainbow Dance (UK; 1936). In like a bullet at number 894 in the critics’ poll, it’s far from being welcomed into the canon. Colour, dance, shape: that’s almost all Rainbow Dance is made of, and are all almost impossible to write about (sorry Zadie Smith).
Every week, as I’m finalising these writings to send to you, I insert the pictures into the email builder, adding descriptions to the images, with the idea that someone unable to see them will have a sense of how the text interacts with the image. Whether or not someone uses these descriptions, it’s a really good exercise, but also has vertiginous depths. Should I mention lighting, colours, the characters’ race, the aspect ratio of the image? The expression on the faces? The names of the actors or the names of the characters? The season, the film stock, the type of chair they’re sitting on, the symmetry of the composition? And this is only a moment: to our relief, films generally only ask us to consider this ridiculous level of possibilities every so often, making a spectacle of themselves, often with characters themselves sharing in the contemplation. Any more and it’s a meal of gigantic proportions and every mouthful rich as treacle.
Rainbow Dance isn’t like that. It’s restless and giddy, a thing of small parts that’s also a brilliant whole. It’s an attempt at ‘absolute film’ that sought to push film’s unique qualities as an art to its extremes: light, movement and colour alone. A man comes into frame with an umbrella, in silhouette; Big Ben is behind him. Streams of colour ‘rain’ flash flash across the screen. The rain stops, and it’s time for the man to jubilantly dance in the rainbow. Umbrella becomes guitar, rain turns to sea, fish dance in the water. At some point there are trains, tennis, pendulums and a savings book.
Looking at what writing surrounds Rainbow Dance, you find a lot about Lye’s experimental ‘Gaspercolour’ technique; how the film fits into the broader sweep of General Post Office information films; how it compares with the experiments of Walter Ruttman and Viking Eggeling. All of that’s worth noting and discussing, but as it piles up, it only points more vigorously to the difficulty of conveying the sensation of watching it. Richard Dyer’s excellent essay ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ is sharp about these kinds of elisions, that what is entertaining is a ‘common sense, “obvious” idea’; criticism tells us that what’s worthy of study is the uses that entertainment is put to and what is hiding behind all that distracting veneer. In a film like Rainbow Dance’s case, text is a lot harder to write about than subtext.
Dyer’s view is that energy and abundance are always present in ‘entertainment’. Think of ‘We’re in the Money’ from Gold Diggers of 1933. Youth, infinite coins, infinite dancers, infinite legs. The same is true of Rainbow Dance. There’s energy in the dancer himself, but also the way that any one idea is stacked upon itself and multiplied (why have one man gleefully returning tennis shots in front of a De Chirico, when you can divide him into three, then into three colours and make the balls a cascading stamp in front of the eyes?). Then, like a seal with a ball on its nose, tossed to another thought entirely. The visual abundance of the film is capped in hilarious bathetic ending, when the Post Office tagline chimes in – Received Pronunciation quavering somewhere between mortally embarrassed and ‘gun to my head’ – ‘The post office savings bank… puts a pot of gold... at the end of the rain-bow for you.’ Prepped for a return to reality, you can go about your business.
While the anti-intellectual drum beat has always been there, the last few years has seen increasing opportunities for people to ask you to ‘let people enjoy things’, to float blissfully downriver on a film's surface experience. It’s fair to say that written criticism is uniquely bad at capturing the moment to moment flow of the experience of watching a film (the essay film reduces this, but in so doing also tracks in its own mud, its own useful gaps in interpretation). Yet that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. It can even yield new pleasures that are in tune with the work itself, rather than serving to pin a butterfly to a frame. If I have a reason for writing anything, it’s only so that people will watch the work and have their own thoughts about it (which is why I’ve mostly focused on exhibiting work rather than writing about it).
A glass of beer, a Babybell, a kiss: these things are at their best when they are happening. But they are also too quickly digested and forgotten, not ephemeral but not as easy to metabolise through writing and literal thought. Trying to keep work like this alive by writing about it is a bit like keeping a culinary tradition alive by making an engraving of a recipe. It’s much easier to make the recipe and take a big bite. Writing is a tribute to experience, and we shouldn’t make the servant the master. However high a tribute you can pay to work you love, you’re still in debt. And yet, here I am, etching pencil in hand. There’s room for both, of course, but if it’s one or the other, I’d rather you tucked in.
Other recommendations
Norman McLaren and Mary Ellen Bute’s ‘short film novelty’ Spook Sport is similarly a joyous dance, this one of electric ghousties.
I love this recipe in equal measure to the amount I love annoying Italian food purists, though I tend to follow the ‘add stock and stir’ approach because I need the zen of tending those arborio in the pan (thanks LAK for that one, I’m still eating ten years on).
Talking About Trees, a great doc from Sudan that’s in UK cinemas now (free if you have MUBI Go). Even if you are allergic to films about filmmaking (like me), this is a poignant, artful (but not artificial) film about where the creative spirit gets channelled when it’s suppressed.