9 Songs

The first time I saw the film I was impressed by the cinematography and by the film's texture. The soft light that adorns Lisa's face when she smiles or even when she cries turned this sensual and mysterious creature almost into a symbol of piety. The cinematography is reminiscent of Kieslowski's very subjective use of color and light in The Double Life Of Veronique only, in 9 songs, Lisa is adorned in the colors that male subjectivity suggests: this is how Matt remembers her. An objective and unbiased account of Lisa is impossible since we are spectators of Matt's recollection of his intense love affair.

This is one of the aesthetic points of the film from where I begin to appreciate it. We witness a glimpse of a woman and of the world through the memories of a man and therefore every image is filtered by his emotions and his very own perception of Lisa, in other words by subjectivity. This film is arguably a vindication of Marcel Proust's belief about literature and the world - that we do not need to change the world, but to see it through different eyes. Obviously, cinema overall suggests suck an outlook since the artificial eye of the camera is a second medium (that is why medium specificity is always relevant in cinema and accounts of films).

This film then does not seek to interpret the central female figure or to unravel her before us, for we are gazing at her from a distance. The director looks at her in awe and wonder, trying to unravel her, aware of in the process that this is inevitable since he is gazing at her from a distance, immersed all the while in the male spectatorial position. This is the key point of subjectivity: the male gaze seeks to interpret the object of its desire but gets merely a glimpse of it, of all the antithetical elements that consist her rubric. However, we perceive the layered nature of Lisa, her mysterious, ethereal and intriguing qualities which are better left as such, fascinating and puzzling, otherwise all the initial excitement may vanish.

This brings me to what I mentioned earlier. I initially admired the texture of the film, meaning the realistic facet of its artifice. 9 Songs might be the subjective memories of a man but nevertheless, the images and their qualities are prescribed by realism. After all, Winterbottom is a disciple of the British realists Anderson, Reed, Reisz, Loach, Frears and Leigh whose heritage is embedded in British films of the 90s and 00s. Many films that portray a theme and an attitude like that of 9 Songs very often distort the image by using effects, excessive coloring, music with very specific and binary connotations and even fantastic elements. 9 Songs manages to deliver its worldview without any such effects. This is achieved thanks to the minimalistic scenery, improvisation of the actors, real settings and of course from the desire to immerse us absolutely in the experience of love, hence the real sex scenes. Let us not confuse realism with naturalism.

In the case of 9 Songs a basic realism is applied since this is not a neorealist film or a Kitchen Sink film and Free cinema. This means that the political and social aspect of neorealist films has been left out since the theme would have to revolve around the lives of the lower classes and of marginalized social groups like gays and lesbians. This basic realism is predicated by a certain distance that the director maintains from the events in the frame. We are not peeping toms but neither uninvited guests. The director documents every little event without over dramatization. There are no trumpets sounding before the break-up of the couple or even after, to proclaim the end and then accentuate its terrible consequences. Additionally, Winterbottom does not wish to excavate every scene, body, face, kiss, genitalia and ejaculation.


Essentially then the formal language of the film is (partly) realism which is necessary in order to perceive the world as objectively as possible .

Yet, Winterbottom stands with one foot on the heritage of the British and European modernists Roeg, Powell, Kubrick, Antonioni, Rossellini and Kieslowski. A fundamental aspect of modern and modernistic films is the absence of a linear narrative. This dictates that a plot is nonexistent or that the events in the film unfold without referring to cause and effect. Therefore, we are very often not in a position to fully understand and assess the characters of the films since their actions and incentives are predicated by impulse and are depicted as impulsive, without a subtext. The combination of a traditional realistic and modernistic approach by the filmmaker is what posits 9 Songs in the same category with stunning love stories of the twentieth century which revolutionized cinema: Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Truffaut's Jules et Jim, Kar Wai's Happy Together, Scorcese's The Age of Innocence, Borowczyk's Story of Sin, Jordan's End of the Affair and of course the masterpiece of all masterpieces, Hitchcock's Vertigo which epitomized forever the ethereal female figure that is looked at by the man, unable of grasping her essence, despite his attempts to transform and conquer her. I shall now describe the modernistic aspects of the film in order to conclude to a final assessment.

The film begins with Matt's voice over, as we see him in a plane flying over the glaciers of the South Pole. The scenes at the South Pole are some of the most remarkable cases of what Pasolini called free indirect vision, or in other words free indirect associations. This concept very generally refers to the technique of poetry applied in cinema, with cinematic means of expression. It is a modernist technique introduced by Rossellini and perfected by Antonioni, Godard and Resnais to illustrate the psyche of the protagonist, without referring to narrative prose. This is achieved thanks to a combination of camera work, dialogue and especially mise en scene. Above all, free indirect vision is instructed by realism but with an eye to subjectivity.

In the opening scene, we dive head on into the fluid and distorted memories of Matt who recalls the most visceral "images" of Lisa, her skin, her smell. From the beginning then, Winterbottom is faithful to the first canon of free indirect vision, subjectivity. The narration is in first person: "I saw", "I remember" says Matt. With the "I"comes a biased and personal account of reality. In doing so, the director is showcasing the flux of memory which chooses what to remember and in what context, very much like in the masterpieces of Resnais, who explored but never essentially revealed the workings of memory, only its fluid state. How does this scene explain the psyche of the protagonist? As Pasolini suggests in his famous text, what is achieved is an allusion to a certain state of being.
This is highlighted by mise en scene. In Voyage to Italy, in a rather crude and obvious manner, Rossellini displayed female angst in the face of mortality by placing Ingrid Bergman at the Vesuvius excavations. The images and the subjective gaze, maintained by camera work, underlined and showcased her angst, which is not expressed through dialogue and prose. In 9 Songs, Vesuvius is replaced by the vast Glacier, a cold, barren, lifeless site, where agoraphobia and claustrophobia coexist and where memory is stored in the depths of the ice which preserves life forms from centuries ago - memory itself. Free indirect vision in this case points towards the mechanisms of memory, how we could remember only smells, sounds, textures. What this narrative also reveals is the impact that this intense relationship had on our male protagonist, the memory of which is stored like a scar in his mind, just as various life forms are trapped, sealed within the ice caps - "memories" of other times.

One could also argue that the ice represents Matt's state of being - his soul is frozen, numb without the presence of this woman whose memory is carved in his mind. This may seem like a silly and of course two sided metaphor (as is often in poetry which uses metaphors). However, what we have in this image (interestingly a man flying over the ice, as if in a dream looking down while floating in the air above like Guido does in the opening of Fellini's 8 1/2) is a fluid and dialectic relationship between subject and image, which is simultaneously reality but also "mind-screen" an extension and reflection of Matt's psyche. Therefore the relationship between image and subject is in constant motion, exchanging information. Again, narrative prose is absent and the image can speak on its own. This is the famous deleuzian time-image, a free indirect suggestion predicated by the condensation of time within the cinematic frame.

Probably the most modernistic element of the film is the ubiquitous ethereal woman who is Lisa, a female figure that shares so much with Madeleine (Kim Novak) and other women who were idolized by the camera eye. As I described earlier,the modernist cinematic subject's actions, behavior and initiatives are very often impulsive veiled by mystery. Matt met Lisa one night at the Brixton Academy at a rock gig. They felt mutual attraction and from there began an intense relationship exploring the boundaries of love, affection, sex, carnal lust, pleasure, happiness, sadness, passion, attraction, break-up. All the emotions that consist the meaning of our existence, life at its most high moments. This is what 9 Songs is - a symphony in a high major key, a 69 minute celebration of love, of the platonic Eros and of carnal love.


Still, let us not forget that the film is Matt's memories of Lisa's smell and skin, the superficial elements of a human being, arguably the only part of a person that we can have direct access to. Lisa's inexplicable urges, behavior and attitude are what consist her fascinating side that one may want to discover. One moment she is in the mood for love, always trying to be above Matt and to experience sexual pleasure more than him, as if competing. She is a independent and strong female character, not unlike Sada Abe in Oshima's film. Another moment, in the morning, she wakes up crying, for no special reason. She is just sad, somehow experiencing a strong emotional conflict. Matt gazes at her. The gaze, a free indirect vision, suggests a mystery, a question from the side of Matt: why is she suddenly crying? how do I get to interpret this person who seems to experience everything in ways unimagined?

 Every orgasm, party, gig or every little nuance, caress, play,kiss are equally important and exciting for her. At one point, while Matt is in the kitchen cooking, she begins to masturbate using a vibrator. But the actual man is right there! No, she will pleasure herself even while she knows that Matt can hear her and that he is standing there watching her with a mixed sense of pleasure and unease. The gaze suggests a thought: "why is she doing this?" "what is this woman?". Matt's masculinity is being challenged and with that his character. And then she breaks up, leaves back to America, just like that. He is partly devastated but she is fine, life goes on, full of exciting things to do while you are young and full of love. But we are left in the end with an emptiness, the void of Matt's psyche, a desire that goes beyond sex and ephemeral pleasures. Possibly this is the Eros of Socrates who agonizes to find the reason why we constantly seek for that "other half" that will make us whole and kill the angst of our existence in Plato's Symposium. Alkiviades gazes at Socrates with the same unease and childish desire that Matt does at Lisa unable of grasping the mystery that is Socrates.


Is this love, or just ephemeral pleasure? is actual love on the border of sex and of platonic Eros, the awe and fascination that Matt feels towards Lisa? No one knows. This is surely life and this is definitely great cinema. The films that avoid great political statements and patronizing audiences while feeding them with pseudo intellectual philosophies. real life lies in the small and mundane revelations of every day life, in the smell of Lisa, the look she gave me, the ice glaciers of the south pole, lifeless and bleak. The textures of life are embedded in this film which speaks about the pleasure of being young, the beauty of love and sex, the little big things that make life meaningful and exiting.