The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

these next few posts are from the chicago international film festival that were left unpublished by the magazine i was writing for, but they are dealing with films that are out now or available for rent.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel (2007)

10.12.2007
Julian Schnabel was originally an art star out of Brooklyn, New York. He got into filmmaking after his success as a painter. His debut film was the biopic of the artist Basquiat. His new movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is the story of the French Elle editor (Jean-Dominique Bauby) who suffers a massive stroke and is diagnosed with “locked-in syndrome”. He is unable to speak or move. The only way he learns to communicate is through blinking.
The opening scene of the movie is all in the point of view of Bauby. The viewer becomes the character through the lens. The lens opens up and there is extreme overexposure and smearing of colors. There are rough edits that imply blinking and there is chaos and confusion, and the camera isn’t focusing, there is dizziness. But it’s all using the film conceptual as a sensory device. You, the audience, is waking up from a deep coma. Schnabel is using the camera in this way to make the viewer become attached to the character, who turns out to be kind of an asshole, but the feeling of experiencing what is happening to him is enough not to care. It creates an intense emotional bond with Bauby. Yet Schnabel does not show the character for the first 20 minutes of the film (other than a brief rock-n-roll styled flashback when it is revealed Bauby was the editor of Elle, with a Lenny Kravitz cameo in tow).
The scene where Bauby is revealed to the audience is after his one of his eyes is sewn up, to prevent infection (still point of view), so the eyelid covers the lens and the needle piercing the skin and coming through, then with a cut to black, and a pan around to uncover Bauby.
Janusz Kaminski (Chicago favorite, Columbia College alum) did an amazing job with cinematography; the colors are stunning and each shot is a piece of art within itself. Kaminski won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, while Schnabel took Best Director.
There is this question of Hollywood art cinema, which is this idea of independent filmmaking with unconventional camera style and editing. Which may seem really experimental to some people, but to a lot of the filmmakers it may seem pretty conservative. Yet I think it is still noticeable that this is something that probably seems really innovative. And for myself, at least, I think it is interesting to see this fusion of techniques to create a more provocative mainstream film. Editing shouldn’t have to be used just to create eye-line matches and continuity, but a conceptual feeling. Schnabel and Kaminski did a fairly good job of creating that synthesis. It had a narrative structured well enough for people to watch and not get tired of the techniques used, but I suppose it was “modern” enough for the viewer to take notice of them. Revealing that is a story being told to you through the lens. But it still is strange to hear that term, art film, in context to a Hollywood independent film.