American Torso

Gabor Body - 1975
Gabriel Body’s 196? American Torso is made up of a series instructions, demands, commands, father’s voices. These words, or actions, are performed by a figure with a disregard for, though they are always directed towards, an other. This series of one-channel communications lines plot from character to character that fail to intersect, combine to form a film that speaks a truth, in its disconnected stabs, of modern warfare and domination.
The play, and the notion of theatre is crucial here, takes place during the American civil war, where it can be established that some kind of technology of long-distance sighting mechanisms is being pioneered. Opening the film, and repeated throughout, are views of people as ‘targets’, between cross-hairs. Others aren’t interlocurs or part of one’s life; they are a shape in a line of sight, for words, and perhaps bullets, to be fired at.
The film neither has a narrative, nor is it anything traditionally called realism. A theatrical distancing is made by the disjointed delivery of lines, and intrusions of incongruous references to the cowboy and other such mild absurdities. It could nearly be called a collection of skits, collected by locale rather than time. The film stock is deliberately torn or flickering in overexposure, the settings are unrealistic. I mean unrealistic in that they employ a theatrical, rather than cinematically real, space; for bar location is a single room separated by spotlights that into a series of non-communicative groups. This idea of separate locations, with a failure to connect between in any meaningful way, is a key thematic of the film. What Body is, through cinematic means, is to juxtapose and create a kind of communication by holding together to the light of the film the two separate elements. This put me in mind of Bela Tarr, who curated American Torso’s recent screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and declares himself deeply affected by the work. Tarr uses few visual cues, overlappings or moves across planes, to indicate depth. The world is of separate, uncommunicative planes. Yet his camera’s framings, and often his depth of field, allow the two separate elements to be seen together, to mediate and connect with each other in a single image. Perhaps cinema is the spider that Tarr frequently uses as a motif, and is also invoked in American Torso; imperceptible, translucent webs are woven across the world.
Lines, imposed non-diagetically across the environment at crucial stages of American Torso, mark paths of connection and separation. Along words fired there, Walt Whitman phrases and Karl Marx theories, one rarely feels that a complete geometrical shape will be made. The lines don’t come together to make beautiful shapes, or run perfectly parallel. They splay out in all directions as if from shotgun. Body does not give us particularly beautiful or totally clear images; his rfrequent cuts to close-up seem designed to break up the smooth running of ‘pretty pictures’.
This harsh view of relations, with humanist or revolutionary tracts working as commands in the military environment, gives the film a peculiarly modern sense of chaos, of miniature power struggle carried out in every word and deed. Yet I wouldn’t call this a brutal film; harsh, maybe, but with a sense of curiosity and even tenderness for its figures. The individuals at once controlled by and part of a system, an abstract conspiracy, still have soft skins that put me in mind of Jacques Rivette. If Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient, Bandes Des Quatres, or Haut Bas Fragile worlds are of the interplay of the sensitive soul and their search for narrative and goodness), Body has pre-empted Rivette in a subtly different way. Body’s film, rather than being concerned with victims, displays the bad guys, the ones who consider themselves to be running the conspiracy (they are, of course, as entrapped as any). His military men have a complacency, a theatrical brazenness about the slaughter. Yet they still fail to deliver a true narrative, military technology is not understood by its consequences, the slaughter still proceeds. Like Rivette’s seekers, they search for a narrative; the difference is that Body’s figures have fooled themselves that they have found this key. Picked up like loose military ‘intelligence’, swatting around in the dark of the midday American sun, American Torso is fine-tuned to an erratic frequency broadcasting a version of the truth.