If you can create a new lexicon, why then resort to genre cliches?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/03/trouble-whole-new-lexicon-genre-cliches

Version 0 of 1.

As well as being a great town for music, Austin, Texas, is an amazing place for movie-going. I’ve seen five in the last week. First up was the Hungarian doggy epic White God, a canine remake of Spartacus set in contemporary Budapest. Then there was Bullitt, unfairly remembered solely for its car chase rather than its skidding cinematography and a performance of such radical inexpressivity from Steve McQueen that you can almost see his brain shifting gears. Next was a screening of Bresson’s final film, L’Argent, introduced by local boy Richard Linklater. This was followed by Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Finally there was a preview of a new Ukrainian film, The Tribe (scheduled for UK release on 15 May).

Linklater emphasised how Bresson created his own uniquely pared-down minimalist language. Mirror, which begins with footage of a young man finding his voice under hypnosis, is both a demonstration of Tarkovsky’s distinctive style and an exploration of how that style came into being. Confident that a distinctive voice will quickly reveal itself, time-pressed agents and publishers often make up their minds about a book on the basis of the first few pages.

The same can be done with movies. Within five minutes, it’s obvious that Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, director of The Tribe, has his own rhythm, style and language. I mean that literally; devoid of dialogue or subtitles, communication in the film is entirely through Ukrainian sign language. The first shot is of people at a bus stop on a busy road – our view constantly interrupted by thundering traffic – conversing and gesturing: the inaudible choreography of the everyday. The camera is still, patient and distant as we observe a ceremony at a boarding school for the deaf where the bulk of the film will be set.

Then it glides gorgeously into motion. As a new boy begins interacting with other students in the school, it becomes obvious that the film will depend as much on body as sign language. It’s a dance film without music and as such – picking up on Mirror again – is absolutely hypnotic. The one thing it’s not is a silent movie. There’s noise everywhere, just not the sound of speech.

The older pupils are dressed smartly in black suits so that, for a while, we are reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s public school fantasy if…. This, however, is a far darker vision of teenagers gaining control of an institution intended to nurture their skills. A long, jolting sequence in the back of a van shows two girls from the school eagerly kitting themselves out as hookers, pimped out by their male friends to serve resting lorry drivers.

Within 15 minutes, any hesitancy about the unusual grammar of the film has evaporated. Immersed in the swagger of young men bruising their way down corridors, we become quickly fluent in what TS Eliot called “the dialect of the tribe”. The surprising thing is how readily we adapt to an artistic experience that requires the learning of a new language.

The most dramatic example of a similar learning curve in recent literature is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (out in paperback last week). Set during and in the aftermath of the fateful year 1066 it follows a small band of “guerrillas” who are resisting the Norman conquest of England. That’s straightforward enough but it’s chronicled in a pastiche of Old English likely to trigger post-traumatic stress in anyone who, as an undergraduate, was obliged to study Anglo-Saxon. It’s not actual Anglo-Saxon – that would be too alien to our ears – but a subtle remixing and adaptation of the language of the time. At first, you have to refer constantly to the glossary at the back – a tiresome chore but a friend who had blazed the trail ahead of me assured me that if I did this conscientiously I’d get the hang of things by page 20. This proved an optimistic prognosis but by that point I was at least consulting the glossary less frequently. And then, 10 pages later, I was there: back in 1066, in the psychic landscape of the age. I’d learned a new – or old-fangled – language in 30 pages.

Kingsnorth is adamant that you can’t have historical novels written in modern English. With the language comes a modern mindset. It would, he says, be like giving characters iPods and cappuccinos. This is thought-provoking and debatable. One of the greatest historical novels ever, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, owed its inspiration to a line she came across in Flaubert’s correspondence: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”

Yourcenar articulates this moment in modern language (French) while eliminating exactly the kind of period detail that Flaubert lavished on his own historical epic, Salammbô. In doing so, she avoids the risk of transforming the ancient world into a frat-house toga party. Kingsnorth’s different and, from a reader’s point of view, more taxing strategy lures us into a sparsely populated world where the gods of woods and lakes are present, while any suggestion of individual psychology lies hundreds of years in the future.

As The Tribe unfolds – and our memories shift from if… to Scum – its visual language grows progressively less subtle. It becomes a lexicon of beatings, violence and pain. There are still exceptional scenes such as the one in which, over an improvised lunch with the head of the institute, a plan is hatched to get visas so the girls can go to Italy. Delighted by a couple of touristy T-shirts, they are excited about an arrangement that will surely make them victims of sex-trafficking (thereby eliciting disturbing memories of Lilya 4-ever by the fallen angel of Swedish cinema, Lukas Moodysson).

The ensuing sequence outside the Italian embassy is another tour de force. But generally – and I don’t know whether to include or exclude a scene that I couldn’t even watch – the language becomes increasingly foul. Caliban-like, we have learned a language, but what we see is how to swear in it. Gestural nuance is gradually sacrificed to the imperatives of a head-banging denouement. (If some kind of allegory of political disintegration in Ukraine is intended then it seems a limiting one.) I mind the appalling violence less than the gap between the imaginative conception of the film – its stunningly articulate visual poetry – and a willing surrender to narrative self-abasement that is, in a word, dumb.

Having been so insistent on locking his characters in their time and world, Kingsnorth falls prey to something similar in The Wake as the book climaxes with the narrator poised to perform an atrocious ceremony. A book that has gone to such pains to shake off all the trappings of the modern ends up holding itself hostage to the workings of a form that defines the modern period: the novel – and a pretty crudely structured one at that. The Tribe and The Wake are important, impressive and original works. But how much better they would have been if their creators had had the artistic intransigence to resist the rut of generic convention right to the end. Concession to these expectations is always a form of condescension, to reader and viewer alike.