Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

Certain filmmakers also excel at using an ironic aesthetic to effectively satirize or even subvert our own expectations. Without Empathy: Irony and the Satirical Impulse in Eight Major Filmmakers, a captivating new book by India-based film and literary scholar MK Raghavendra, is a cogent exploration of this paradoxical domain in which irony and satire are impulses often used creatively to circumvent even the conventions of the industry itself, ostensibly an entertainment system, within which some directors somehow manage to achieve a popular acclaim and critical success that are themselves frequently at odds with the challenging source material they choose to film.

A handful of them, titans such as Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Rainer Fassbinder and David Lynch, manage to invite us into their dream worlds and succeed in innovating altogether new ways of seeing and storytelling. Another creative cluster, artists such as Robert Altman, Paul Verhoeven, Aki Kaurismaki and Alexsei Balabanov, achieve a special stature reserved for cinema craftsmen who specialize in seemingly biting the hand that feeds them. It’s a paradox, perhaps, that some audiences, those who share in the often caustic bond these storytellers are sharing in their work, willingly put forward their hands to be gently gnawed on aesthetically. Such is the community of independent cine-artists which has inspired Ragavendra to isolate and identify the impulses behind their films as exemplars of imaging irony and satire.

The carefully curated grouping of directors the author examines in his book also automatically makes one pine for a film program that features their communal interests via a selection of their most emblematic works. Perhaps such a program will follow, since the sequencing of certain films by these directors would accumulate an impressive conceptual wave of awesome proportions. Some of the double features could be illuminating indeed. The first such combos that spring immediately to mind for instance (or at least to my celluloid-saturated mind) could be a pairing of Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) with Altman’s The Player (1992), or Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (1982) with Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). You can proceed with that curatorial parlor game at your leisure, of course, while I hasten back to the thesis of this fascinating book.

Veronika Voss, Rainier Fassbinder, 1982.

Inland Empire, David Lynch, 2006.

Raghavendra is a notable scholar who has penned eleven books on film and politics, among them the highly regarded Seduced by the Familiar (2008), as well as a book on legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray (2021), and he also serves as founder and editor of Phalanx, a journal of debate in the humanities. He gets right down to business in his introduction, going on the record as to what his potentially ambiguous subject and theme are here, and oddly enough one of the key elements he appreciates in the gifted filmmakers whose works he profiles is that very ambiguity itself. Also, obscurity of meaning, intention and purpose in their often obliquely angled works are precisely what he wants to showcase in his new tome:

This book is focused on irony and the satirical impulse as expressed in cinema through its appearance in the work of filmmakers of importance. By irony what is meant is neither situational irony nor dramatic irony but only verbal irony or its cinematic equivalent: the treatment implying that something is not meant to be taken literally.

Irony is a useful strategy to use when the theme dictates a certain emotional response (i.e., Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 1957 or Altman’s M.A.S.H., 1970). Often these filmmakers say something with a straight face which they want us not to accept. All of them also often say something they do not actually mean and expect people to understand not only what they actually do mean but also their attitude towards it. 

The author astutely unearths in great depth and detail both what such cine-artists really mean, and what we really comprehend, by consistently using irony in films that are often too ambiguous to be termed satire. Both irony and satire, especially, for instance, in Altman and Kubrick, are regularly employed to say something contrary to the truth in order for the truth to be exposed to a general public for the purpose of heightened awareness and social change. The book commences with a detailed but efficiently delivered series of sections on the satirical impulse, both in history and in contemporary culture.

Without dwelling at length on what he terms the historically satirical affiliates, he deftly touches lightly upon Juvenalian satire, Horatian satire, burlesque and parody (Dr. Strangelove from 1964 is probably the most brilliantly utilized example) as well as the overtly carnivalesque and hyper-sarcasm modes (to some extent Lynch’s whole body of work is an exemplar of almost all of the above ingredients, including film noir tragedy and surreal comedy, often at the same time). He then assists those of us who were slightly puzzled, at first, by his main title Without Empathy:

The key tendency in the works described is to distance the reader/spectator from the action. But one of the characteristics of arthouse cinema today is arguably its tendency to elicit empathetic responses from its audience, to identify with the protagonists to the greatest extent possible. Empathy, however, is not always a laudable emotion to enlist since it promotes passive viewing. The issue here is what emotions should be appealed to, and many artists have proceeded with the belief that distance is desirable since it would facilitate reflection. But irony, satire and their affiliates, as may be evident, stand at the other end in the emotions they try to enlist, away from empathy.

This suggests an active involvement in both the action presented and the subtext lurking beneath it, as viewers are free to interpret what they witness and feel as they see fit.

Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick, 1975.

Fallen Leaves, Aki Kaurismaki, 2023.

It helps to remember that this critic/historian is always discussing arthouse cinema, apart from some occasions where differentiating them from popular entertainment such as James Bond movies elaborates on whatever point he is making at the moment. So readers with some familiarity with the kind of artist whose works are essentially paintings in film, the kind that celebrate a certain stillness, motionless dwelling, slowness and highly stylized visual detailing, will naturally be the ones who most comfortably traverse his prose. But those other readers who are curious about the phenomenon of cinema as visual art, and are willing to explore the subject with some degree of patience, will also benefit greatly from his very accessible narrative.

As he explains:

Some of those I have selected—especially Bunuel, Fassbinder and Kubrick---have been widely written about but their work is too complex for everything possible to have been exhausted, and so still one makes discoveries. The eight individual filmmakers being studied in this book are not alike and there could even be disagreement that Fassbinder and Lynch are satirical. But the fact is that all the filmmakers appear to have the kind of artistic sensibility that can be termed sardonic, producing at some point or other work with a satirical bite. Another factor bringing the filmmakers together is that where the satire is usually transparent, these filmmakers have made films that are puzzling, thus inviting interpretation, but also resisting it.

Such artists are, of course, right up my alley, but anyone with an interest in films as a sequence of still images magically moving in time and space at the service of telling a story, even if it might be a perplexing or distressing one, will find these films richly rewarding, and such an aesthetic alley often offers and delivers a most elegantly refined pleasure. And these are also the ideal readers of this book: readers who don’t mind scratching their heads a bit in a state of something resembling bewilderment perhaps, but also simultaneously in a state of beautiful wonderment. That state of mind is summed up quite succinctly in the author’s ongoing aesthetic assessments. He most excels wherever he situates his and our viewing experience in the context of emotions which are somewhat controlled, or even occasionally manipulated, by the film’s director.

The Phantom of Liberty, Luis Bunuel, 1974.

The Player, Robert Altman, 2006.

This is a very fine study indeed of the subconscious mind of contemporary cinema, via an excursion through eight of its most notable artists. Though I’m still coming to terms with his notion that most films adhere to attempts to create empathy, which requires a distance within which the audience can reflect, whereas the films he’s exploring eschew or avoid empathy by manufacturing an immediacy inherent to irony and satire, I find the manner in which he makes his well-reasoned arguments to be kind of enthralling, as are the films whose virtues he extols.

At the outset when I mentioned a personal resonance, I was referring to the stylistic overlaps in a film program I once curated for Cinematheque which featured several cousins of the works the author examines: Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog (1982); The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975); Landscape in the Mist by Theo Angelopoulos (1988); Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964); Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais (1961); Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders (1987); Blue Velvet by David Lynch (1986); and Alphaville, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965.

I reference these eight now solely because they occupy space in what I’ve called the same aesthetic alley as the artists featured by Raghvendra, one focused on the hyper-visual and often ironic suspension of disbelief so crucial to all great movies. It is also my intention to pay tribute to his fine book by curating an upcoming Cinematheque film program featuring double features drawn from the eight directors he has so deftly explored. Hopefully this will also result in having him available to visit us for a lecture with a Q&A session.

The Fourth Man, Paul Verhoeven, 1983.

Brother, Aleksei Balabanov, 1997.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.