It’s an extraordinary passage: engrossing, indelible, unexplained. But its success is due almost exclusively to the peculiar sureness of its sound design and the precision of the framing and editing. Despite that emphasis on technical detail, this isn’t a passage one would expect to see in a Hollywood movie: even taking into account the the industry’s warming to the stylistic effects of hand-held cameras and other devices associated with independent film, commercial film remains wary about spending too much time on a single image (this one consumes several rapt minutes). And even when the effect of a composed sequence is required, the producers generally feel secure in making use of an established set piece: an exploding helicopter, say, or a string-smothered reunion.
Stock devices have their place, of course, and many movies have capitalized and deepened them, even in recent years; but American commercial film has demonstrated no misgivings about its commitment to mere iteration: of genre forms, of plots, even of individual shots. Its willingness to develop seems restricted to reference to itself. It’s interesting, actually, that that development is being done mostly by the most dismal of its products: the schlockiest of the Christmas crop, or the horror-movie spoof with the highest numerical title. It’s in those films one can expect to see winking quotes or razzing of famous moments from the common American library. In more serious movies—you know, the latest Batman—there appears only the development of more technologically advanced helicopters to explode.
Independent film has thus far offered two principal routes out of this roundabout: the first, which gained considerable steam through the nineties, but is already beginning to feel exhausted, sought to create new interest through the cross-pollination of forms and the confusion and multiplication of tropes. Quintin Tarantino, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kauffmann interested themselves in an intentional overload, a morass of interwoven complications, where a connection between form and content is tried in various configurations, threatened, abused, contorted—until (at last!) it achieves a new, imperfect unity; or (more often) collapses under the weight.
In the March 5, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, David Denby referred to this movement as “The New Disorder” (but even in its latest form it could not reasonably be said to be any newer than the last twenty years). He found much of its proposals still compelling, going so far as to suggest that they might offer “a new understanding of art,” or, grander still: “even a new understanding of life.” He focused on Babel, one of the latest movies to seek “a new understanding” through labyrinthine plotting.
Ballast is an example of the other route: a revival of direct, focused realism. It is fundamentally a more retrospective movement than the postmodern tack, explicitly calling upon far-flung auteurs of the past: Robert Bresson, Satyajit Ray, Yasujiro Ozu. In the last decade an increasing number of films have taken this approach, among them Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop and Chris Eska’s August Evening, both released last year. But comparisons chafe, and Bahrani, in an interview with Cineaste, complained that no review of his film appeared that did not include the word “neorealism“—usually attached to an unspecific gesture at an Italian: Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti.
Of course he’s right: the reflexive turn to the Italian cinema of the 1950s is a term paper cliche; Film Studies 101 often rattles through these directors’ greatest hits, and the received wisdom rarely acknowledges that De Sica and Visconti were equally capable of producing great costume melodramas and stylish romantic comedies. Their plaintive realist ruminations are what stick, partly because they’re so easily lumped together in the same country in the same decade. Even so, it’s hard to ignore the similarities between the movies of Bahrani or Hammer and Umberto D. or La Terra Trema: they are comfortable in their limited budgets, with their amateur actors, and the conditions of everyday poverty—a subject outside of the scope of most popular cinema.
But Italian neorealism drew its strength from standing in opposition to the stylistic artifice of the theatre (but not its melodrama), whereas the version we now witness instead takes it stand against the easy, unconsidered irony of commercial cinema (but not necessarily its stylistic artifice). Perhaps the principal difference between this emerging strain in independent film and the traditional twentieth-century mode of psychological realism may be the absence—or possibly rejection—of psychology as a formal concern. Perhaps it would be better called “neonaturalism”: in place the determinacy of biological nature that characterized the original naturalism, in these films the viewer usually faces the indeterminacy of external moral structure. The most obvious absence is an coherent politics: the almost mawkish ambiguity of these new films feels wanting if placed next to the explicit Marxism that motivated De Sica and Pasolini.
Ballast appears at first to be a vehicle for social reform, and perhaps its success at Sundance is due in part to the suggestion of social awareness which is automatically conferred by a setting in rural Mississippi; but to the experience of the film itself the setting is found to be immaterial in all but visual character. The plot, such as it is, revolves around James (JimMyron Ross), the boy in the scene described above: a black preadolescent living with his single mother (Tarra Riggs). Most of the action takes place in tiny makeshift dwellings, shot on site, in natural light. James does not go to school, or really have any of the interactions typical of someone his age. His primary formative event is the suicide of his father, and the mounting conflict between his mother and uncle (Michael J. Smith, Sr.).
It certainly sounds like a ripe scenario; that the director is a white Californian and a Hollywood professional whose past credits include visual effects for such disposable studio products as Batman & Robin and Practical Magic cues one’s expectation for some redemptive social reprimanding or at least predictable awareness-raising. But Ballast has none of that: the plight of James is not explicitly rendered in terms of race, or even class; in fact it is not even really presented as a plight. The things that happen are conditioned by the environment, but there is little to suggest any particular attitude toward that environment, let alone any anodyne moralizing.
It’s certainly a kind of triumph that such a claim can be made; and indeed that there is very little to take issue with in the film as a whole. The acting is sound, though largely unremarkable, the script natural (in interviews Hammer claims that it is improvised from notes), and the story holds together believably enough. The filmmaking is occasionally exquisite, but the poetics of the film—what makes some sequences so fresh and memorable—rarely makes a connection with the rest. The visuals do not enrich the story, and the story adds little to the cinematography. The tone is always solemn, and relishes, in the finest neorealist style, the most pedestrian actions: the boy lying on the living room floor next to his dog, which is softly snoring, or eating cereal and playing video games. But somehow that world isn’t the world of James. At times these sequences beautifully convey the breathlessness and sharpness with which a young boy sees the world, but there is nothing to convince that is the world of this boy.
Pauline Kael wrote, of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven:
What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we’re not quite sure what it is … The film is a series of pictorial effects—some of them, such as a train passing over a lacework bridge, extraordinary—but the overpowering images seem unrelated, pieced together. The movie suffers from too many touches, too many ideas that don’t grow out of anything organic.
Ballast also gives a sense of the assured, stylistically perfect, and somewhat academic way Hammer and Malick approach their films. The conflicts presented in the story seem shortchanged by the consuming attention they have for the potential of the medium purely in and of itself. The viewer feels a little lost (why follow the details of story, if it’s not what matters?), or, worse, a little suspicious (what really does matter?).
It’s helpful that Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep has finally received a theatrical release. The 1977 film, sometimes cited as a forerunner to Ballast, is a cornerstone of American realist cinema. It has appeared at intervals at various international festivals—its first official screening was at the Berlin International Film Festival, in 1981, and it was shown there again in 2008—and that year, shepherded by Milestone Films and restored by UCLA Film Archives, it finally overcame obstacles licensing its soundtrack and enjoyed a full theatrical release.
Much has been written about the film, and it has long been a deliciously obscure favorite of university film programs. The legend is consummate: Burnett, a student at UCLA, shot the film for under $10,000 over a series of weekends in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (where he grew up). J. Hoberman called it “universal.” Its depiction of poverty is considerably sharper—both tonally, with the grit of its budgetary constraints constantly apparent in the film’s grain, and in the characteristic actions of its characters. In judicious and at times spare editing, it maintains pace and constant emotional connection despite being composed of disparate vignettes (a structure one might associate with filming over weekends): children playfully flinging rocks at each other in impossibly dusty South L.A., two men attempting to carry a truck engine for salvage, the eponymous job in a mutton factory. It’s easy to ascribe the uniqueness and delicate peculiarity of these events to Burnett’s personal proximity to the story, and no doubt there is something to that—but it’s not enough to account for the mysterious continuity and exact pitch he achieves throughout the film.
The difference between Killer of Sheep and these recent neorealist movies is that it seems to consider realism as a condition, rather than an achievement. The approach to each scene arises from the necessity of that scene’s purpose, rather than an overarching decision designed to convey veracity. Its use of nonprofessional actors was a necessity, rather than an aesthetic conceit. And Burnett seems neither yoked to, nor impeded by his story: what is filmed is of a piece with how it is filmed—they inform each other.
