You Are Not I (+ Act of God)

You Are Not I (Sara Driver, 1981);About a film which derives much of its power on its audience creating a scenario, creating expectations about future ‘events’, let me write a story for you. A black and white traffic accident releases a mentally disturbed young woman into the wild. We hear her voice, precise but enigmatic, as she wanders through a wasteland, uncertain where the surreal terror of the accident ends and the ordinary terror of free life begins. We follow her encounters with bodies, people, and into the home of her prim sister.
This is a fair description of Sara Driver’s 1981 ‘You Are Not I’, a film considered lost before retrieval of a misplaced negative last year. For the most part, the above synopsis can be followed; this isn’t a blatantly illogical film, or one with disunified times and spaces. The strangeness of the film rather comes from its slow movements and edit, the measured words, which put me in mind of Louis Malle’s (for me, inferior) Black Moon. This pace contributes to a painterly image; Driver sets up her near-still shots with precise diffusions of light, generally complex tones with some overexposure when the sun breaks indoors. Shot by Driver’s partner, Jim Jarmusch, the image has a scratchiness, like the sharp prickles of a haystack. This kind of earthy image put me in mind of Goya; not precise strokes of light, but sharply tactile ones.
The Goya comparison also holds for the black mops of hair that appear, and for the intermingling of location and violence. At the accident scene, on the highway, in the house, the detachment of the women sees the ambulance men as spooks, her sister as a Lynchian crazy. This perhaps explains why each location of the film has the kind of universal character of a film set; locations for an action, with a drabness suggesting violence.
This could all come across as rather portentous, and indeed it does at times. The measured voiceover of the patient is uncomfortably close to the hipster drawl, and putting stones in people’s mouths is an unnecessary intrusion of opaque symbolism. Nevertheless, the detached tone provides some wonderful moments of hypnosis. The fluid, but tiny, rhythms of a rocking chair, or increasingly close cut-ins, pull the audience from tide to tide, as though in a wave machine. It invokes feelings not of searching for the next action, but of a sense of repetition in one movement, one feeling, a tactile reference Driver asks us to grasp as the mental illness.
As far as the structure of the film goes, this feeling also undercuts expectations. The women gives us the expectation, quite explicitly, that she will continue the narrative with a violent act. Should we trust her account? Why should we build up such expectations anyway about a narrative, about what kinds of narratives the mentally ill follow? We are transformed in some way to an accommodation with the women, rather than being a mere onlooker. This idea of the transferral of sense, the transferral of expectations, seems central to the film’s final act, which indeed is truly baffling. The feeling it creates, however, us the film’s great strength. More than just the facile ‘who’s really crazy?’, You Are Not I pushes into our relation with the screen, and the people we see one it.

Act of God (Peter Greenaway, 1980, documentary); The Nyman strings, those tableau framings, all very trad. Greenaway. There is also that discomfitting anti-humanist air, mocking his people. Is there really much beyond the boring old 'eccentric english' stereotypes? The entry of pathos doesn't really do much. Not uninteresting, all the same.