Understanding Bliss
(Canada, 80 min.)
Dir. William D. MacGillivray, Writ. William D. MacGillivray,
Kathryn Cochran
Starring: Catherine Grant, Bryan Hennessey
Screening as part of the Canadian Film Institute’s series
“The Enlightened Screen”, William D. MacGillivray’s 1990 feature Understanding Bliss treats audiences to the
kind of introspective independent Canadian cinema the series serves to
spotlight. Understanding Bliss,
MacGillivray’s last dramatic film prior to Hard
Drive (which screened at the CFI last night), engages audiences in the
director’s mediations upon identity and how one’s sense of self is shaped via an
engagement with place, space, art, and technology. Understanding Bliss is an innovative exercise in film form and a
self-reflexive portrait of how art defines both the individual and the
community.
The film opens with a layered soundtrack as a plurality of
voices whir in Elizabeth’s mind as she reads “Bliss” in the dim candlelight of
her bathroom, repeating the line “What creepy things cats are” first in her
head and then aloud. The handheld camera then follows Elizabeth in darkness as
she steps out of the bath and towels off, all the while repeating the mantra of
“Bliss”. The candle remains both the source light and key light as she walks
around her hotel room in the dark: Understanding
Bliss, MacGillivray shows, is not a film defined solely by images but more
so by the way it tells the story through the interior struggle with art and
identity. The latter facet appears when Elizabeth turns on the lights and
receives a call from Peter, her lover and fellow artsy-type teacher, played by
Bryan Hennessey. She notes the marginality of his little town—such a far
journey from the centre called Toronto—and then teases her lover in “Bliss”-ish
literary witticisms of affection.
MacGillivray draws direct attention the relationship between
people, place, and art as the shot cuts to the film’s first
exterior/establishing shot of its Maritime town. A foghorn loops on the
soundtrack as a man, presumably Peter, rambles in voiceover a chorus of layered
readings akin to the ones Elizabeth rehearsed the night before. He tries to
understand the woman he intends to meet by studying the art that defines her
career. The film then provides a strikingly cinematic tracking shot as the
camera follows one of Peter’s students through the streets of St. John’s,
taking in the sights and sounds of the town as the only noises on the
soundtrack are ambient sounds of the city. MacGillivray and cameraman Steve
Campanelli capture much of Understanding
Bliss in intimate long takes as Peter and Elizabeth stroll around St. John’s
before a Steadicam in the hours preceding Elizabeth’s lecture. Understanding Bliss foregrounds the
couple against a backdrop of working class Newfoundland, rooting the story in a
sense of place highlighted by the same brightly coloured houses with the
chipped paint around which the student navigates as he makes his way through to
class in the first of many long takes that take viewers on a tour of the city.
Understanding Bliss interrupts
the silence of the student’s walk to class with a repetition of the interior
dialogue as the student mentally rehearses lines for the class’s upcoming Mummers’
play to be held that night. The lecture he walks into segues Understanding Bliss into an intimate
affair of art and culture as Peter speaks to the students in his undefinable class.
It’s not quite drama, but not visual art, either. It’s some sort of
contemporary fusion, as Peter has his pupils bring in a variety of old videos
that they watch both separately and in unison on all the old TVs that clutter
the room.
“What is important is not the story but the storyteller… the
event of the story being told,” Peter notes in his lesson with the students.
MacGillivray injects Understanding Bliss with a hyperawareness of its own
form of storytelling. Understanding Bliss
is framed by static and title cards that reek of 1990s novelty.
“It’s a little weird on video,” Peter notes, drawing
attention to the cheap video on which Understanding
Bliss is shot. Understanding Bliss, shot on video rather than on pricy
film, draws attention to the economical aesthetics of the less glamorous of
film forms. Peter’s words have the most resonance when the time comes for
Elizabeth to deliver her reading of “Bliss.” The lecture is mediated by video—a
shot within a shot—as an unseen cameraman zooms on Elizabeth’s face as she
stiffly and dryly recites the words of the story to the unseen audience. Jerky
camera movements and incessant zooms punctuate Elizabeth’s reading as the
camera finds the right frame and focus for her. The image is a potent metaphor
for the whirlwind of emotions going on in Elizabeth’s mind thanks to her daylong
date with Peter. The shot comes to rest on a close-up of Elizabeth as her words
resonate, steadying the camera and focus, and the words she reads aloud blur
with the inner voice reading the words through a subjective filter before she
shares them with her audience.
The reading returns later in the film when Peter decides to
watch the video product of Elizabeth’s work. He’s bored by the image and unable
to grasp its meaning without fast-forwarding like Don Jon impatiently perusing
online porn. The watching erupts in a violent coupling, which Understanding Bliss conveys in a
desaturated image as Peter turns their lovemaking into a dehumanizing extension
of his self-indulgent Mummers’ play. The exercise, which plays out like a cacophonous
mish-mash of Shakespeare and Monty Python, acts as a third-act centrepiece following
Elizabeth’s reading. One can sense that the love has drained from the
relationship long before the colours of Bliss
fade, though, for Elizabeth seems completely withdrawn in the act following
her failed reading and her realization that the relationship has failed in
turn.
Understanding Bliss
is very much a product of the analogue days and the days when Canadian cinema
was a modest affair created in small communities. (One could rightly argue that
it still is.) The low-res VHS tapes Peter has his students share with their
peers are very much akin to the kind of collaborative appreciation for art that
helped films like Understanding Bliss
emerge in co-ops and collectives. It’s not so much the art itself that
Elizabeth watches Peter share with his students, but the sense of community
that one creates through the act of sharing and creating art. The sense arises
again when “Bliss” assumes a new reading for Elizabeth as she shares it with
the audience. The story is not the same as it was in the reading that opens the
film, for the day with Peter, his class, and the stories from the people of St.
John’s have shaped it anew. Understanding
Bliss underscores the point that sharing art and stories with others
creates a story of its own when the film sees Peter play one video in isolation
for his class and then cuts the shot to a montage of images as all the videos
are played for the class in unison. The stories have different meaning by
themselves, but, as Peter says, “together they say something new.”
Understanding Bliss screens Saturday, October 19 at 7:00 pm as part
of the CFI’s “The Enlightened Screen” series.
Also screening
Saturday is MacGillivray’s 2010 documentary Man
of a Thousand Songs, which starts at 9:00 pm.
Both screenings will be
in the Auditorium of Library and Archives Canada and will include an
introduction and chat with William D. MacGillivray.
Please visit www.cfi-icf.ca for more information.
