Screening
Milestones: Paranoid Park
Fri 8 Apr 2022, 20:15
De Cinema, Antwerp
PART OF Sabzian: Milestones
  • With an introduction by Nina de Vroome

On 8 April, Sabzian and De Cinema will screen Gus Van Sant’s 2007 film Paranoid Park in Antwerp. This film follows Alex, a young skater who is involved in a traumatic experience that overwhelms him with guilt. The elliptical structure and groundbreaking cinematographic form of Paranoid Park offer us impressions of adolescence, loneliness and the confrontation with death.

Gus Van Sant was born in 1952 and studied painting and cinema at the Rhode Island School of Design. He started his career making advertising films to finance his experimental films, such as Mala Noche (1985). During Van Sant’s long and productive career, he wrote a novel (Pink, 1997), made music videos and a number of Hollywood productions. Years later, already in his fifties, he released four groundbreaking films in a short time: Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park (2007). These films mark an experimental period in which an unconventional approach to the soundtrack and compositional refinement are particularly striking. In Gerry, two friends, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, get lost on a walk through the desert. Their hypnotic rhythm of walking creates a vast temporal space. In Elephant, too, the characters’ trajectories plot the cinematic storylines. The film is based on the 1999 Columbine High School tragedy, in which two students with guns caused numerous casualties. In Last Days, the moments before death are given special attention. The film evokes the last days of the life of rock star Kurt Cobain, revealing a fabric of time fragments without a chronological structure. In Paranoid Park, various time fragments are cast in a non-linear structure that is associative rather than thought out. In recent years, Van Sant has been focusing more and more on painting, and in this medium he also works with very diverse techniques and styles.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)

Milestones is a series of stand-alone screenings, hosted by Sabzian, of film-history milestones, reference works or landmarks, films that focus on aesthetic or political issues and stimulate debate and reflection. In earlier instalments, Sabzian presented Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964), Jean-Luc Godard’s monumental video work Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Robert Kramer’s Milestones (1974), Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963) and L’ordre (1973), Shadi Abdel Salam’s Al-mummia (1969), Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique ou les quatres saisons (1946), Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1980), Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1983) and Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt (1989). For each screening, Sabzian publishes texts that contextualize the film.

FILM
Paranoid Park
,
,
85’

The title Paranoid Park refers to an illegally built skate park under a bridge in Portland, Oregon. Sixteen-year-old Alex is enticed by the park’s anarchist reputation. One night, this utopian place where skaters get together is forever changed. When Alex goes out with an older skater, he is involved in a fatal accident. When he throws his blood-stained skateboard into the river, his awe of a liberating counterculture is exchanged for a lonely struggle with guilt. Alex tries to put his secret on paper. His diary notes chart an associative course, which is reflected in the film’s elliptical structure. Instead of a chronological narrative, Paranoid Park treats time in a rather literary manner, paying exceptional attention to cinematic forms. Bright light floods the image, time is slowed down, and the soundtrack tempts us to explore what we hear. Like skaters meandering down slopes, gaining explosive speed and slowing down to a quiet, weightless moment, Paranoid Park is a composition of various tempos and sensations.  

 

“When you don’t have a script, all of a sudden your speech patterns become natural. You’re going forward without a flashlight.”

Gus Van Sant

 

« Quand je tourne mes longs métrages, la tension entre récit et abstraction est capitale. Parce que j’ai appris le cinéma à travers des films faits par des peintres, à travers leur façon de retraivailler le cinéma, et de ne pas adhérer aux règles traditionnelles qui le régissent: soit parce qu’ils ne savaient pas les respecter, soit parce qu’ils ne le voulaient pas, trouvant leur propre voie comme ils en avaient l’habitude en peinture. Il ne s’agit jaimais, pour moi, d’apprendre ce que l’industrie vous dit de faire ou de ne pas faire - et c’est ce qui contunue de me préoccuper aujourd’hui. »

Gus Van Sant1

 

«« J’ai envie de faire désormais des films dans mon garage » avait déclaré Gus Van Sant juste après le tournage d’Elephant. En se délestant de la pesanteur de la production hollywoodienne, le cinéaste a voulu trouver la liberté des musiciens, qui précisément peuvent composer, répéter dans leur garage. Et, plus encore que le temps du tournage (où même à équipe réduite, un plateau reste un plateau), c’est celui de la post-prodiction qui bénéficie le plus pleinement de la liberté induite par le profil économique de ces productions. Le montage, le mixage, beaucoup plus que dans les films des années 90, deviennent les moments décisifs où s’invente la forme du film. Avec sa chronologie déconstruite, ses éclats de séquences disséminés d’un bout à l’autre du film, ses plans-leitmotives qui composent une lancinante mosaïque, Paranoid Park est un film qui trouve son identité dans une étape postérieure au tournage, et à partis des rushes duquel il serait facile de concevoir un film tout à fait autre (alors que le dessin final du film est déjà au travail dans les choix de scénographies d’Elephant ou de Gerry). C’est un film ou la post-production fait tout – bien plus que le tournage, et bien plus évidemment que le scénario. Composé de plans qui ne durent souvent que quelques secondes, le film sent la trituration, le bidouillage aux manettes, le « home studio ». Seul aux consoles (Gus Van Sant monte le film lui-même), le cinéaste travaille comme un musicien électronique. Si déjà Gerry, Elephant et surtout Last Days, manifestaient le soin extrême apporté à la matière sonore (bruitages sans rapport illustratif avec l’image, alternance de silences artificiels ou au contraire de sourds vrombissements...), Paranoid Park franchit encore un palier dans la sophistication des compositions sonores. Dès le premier plan du film (après celui de générique), Alex, le jeune personnage principal est avachi sur un canapé, tandis que son oncle (le chef-opérateur du film, Chris Doyle) déambule derrière lui. L’homme se dirige vers le fond du cadre et ouvre la porte d’un réfrigérateur. Le tintement des bouteilles, dans un premier temps simple bruitage réaliste, se métamorphose en symphone de carillons jusq’à se fondre avec la musique de la séquence suivante, l’« ambient » planante d’Ethan Rose, qui illustre la première scène de skate. La musique tapisse tout le film, organise en fondus audios l’enchaînement des séquences, constitue une sorte de plasma sonore, ouaté, permanent, recouvre parfois même les dialogues. Gus Van Sant, qui fut aussi musicien, édita même deux albums de rock sous son nom au début des années 80, a choisi d’organiser le film à la façon d’un mix, dont la playlist est étonnamment disparate (musique classique, hip-hop, rock...) et opère parfois d’étonnants courts-circuits avec la bande-image. »

Stéphane Bouquet et Jean-Marc Lalanne2

 

“There is not so much a drama to the story – that of an accidental crime shuffled into the film chronology but infusing every frame of the film – as there is a hazy suspension of things, both a heightening of sensations and a stunned dulling, a distance from the surroundings that were normal and everyday before the crime. Although not death focused, like Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days before it, Van Sant’s latest is a film of limbo. No longer pointing towards the end of days, Paranoid Park nimbly catches Alex after his awakening but before any sort of realization, and as such he hangs in a suspension, and the film along with him, of uncertainly of memory and environment, of unreal glimpses of both abject alienation and of the sublime. With a designed musical soundtrack that changes tone and style almost instantly from grandiose orchestral arrangements to Elliot Smith pop laments, and a similar visual alternation between Doyle’s embalming compositions and the exhilaratingly grit and realism of Li’s skater cam, Paranoid Park is a wondrous cinematic transfusion of the mindstate of a destabilized youth, a shuffling, eerily smooth, dissynchronous impression of a clouded mind dazed by a terrifying, momentary glimpse of sin, of responsibility, and of a world outside himself.”

Daniel Kasman3

 

“Alex is lying down on his driveway. The girl rides up to him on her bike. She gives him a ride. He is on his skateboard and holds onto the back of the bike. There are three circles caused by the elements of the lens – another reference to Easy Rider (1969), photographed by László Kovács. The girl tells Alex to write a letter about what’s bothering him. That’s the person to whom Alex has been writing to all through the running time of Paranoid Park. She tells him just to get out what is bothering him out of his system. He doesn’t have to send the letter. Or he can send it to a friend – like her. Alex is home. It’s revealed that he has written it to her. He stops, does a little guitar playing. Alex burns the letter. It brings to mind the burning of the sled at the conclusion of Orson Welles’ masterwork, Citizen Kane, in 1941. The fire in Paranoid Park is held for a long time. School. The class shown in the beginning of the film returns. Alex is tuned out. Slow-motion montage of skateboarders. The beauty of the action. A skateboarder makes a jump. Cut to black. Paranoid Park has concluded. The credits tell us that the film was shot on location in Portland, Oregon. End of Gus Van Sant’s experimental film period.”

Vincent LoBrutto4

  • 1. Matthieu Orléan, Gus Van Sant / Icônes (Arles : Cinémathèque française/Actes Sud, 2016)
  • 2. Stéphane Bouquet et Jean-Marc Lalanne, Gus Van Sant (Paris : Cahiers du Cinéma, 2009).
  • 3. Daniel Kasman, Paranoid Park, MUBI Notebook, 8 March 2008.
  • 4. Vincent LoBrutto, Gus Van Sant. His Own Private Cinema (Westport: Praeger, 2010), 124-125.