"Police, Adjective": The Words and the Things

Police, Adjective: The Words and the Things Andrei Gorzo National University of Theatre and Film “I. L. Caragiale” [email protected] Abstract The article considers Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2008 Police, Adjective (one of the most important films of the New Romanian Cinema) as a dramatization of Peter Wollen’s influential 1969 adaptation of Charles Sanders Peirce’s trichotomy of signs – iconic, indexical and symbolic signs – to the field of film theory. L aunched in 2009, Corneliu Porumboiu’s second feature, Police, Adjective, was at the time, and remains to date, one of the most important films of the New Romanian Cinema (NRC). What the 34-year old writer-director did there was to radicalize some of the tendencies within this current in Romanian cinema (a current also known as the Romanian New Wave); first of all, he radicalized the NRC’s predilection for an ‘observational’ use of film. At the same time, Porumboiu took the radical step of explicitly raising the issue of meaning. Police, Adjective was coming in the footsteps of films like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), The Paper Will Be Blue (Radu Muntean, 2006), and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007). An important aspect of each of those films had been the patient, ‘real-time’ documentation of processes undergirded by (more or less strict) procedures: the emergency medical investigations conducted on a possibly very sick man (Lăzărescu); an exchange of code phrases between military patrols (The Paper); the assisted termination of a pregnancy (4 Months). In Police, Adjective it is the police process of tailing a suspect, with its attendant procedures; the film is about a policeman (Dragoș Bucur) who’s tailing some hashish-smoking high school kids. The act of observation stands once again at the foundation of a NRC filmmaker’s aesthetic, the novelty (for 2009) being that Porumboiu also integrates this act in his film’s subject matter, inviting us to observe the daily activity of a professional observer. (This doesn’t mean that he ever invites us to look Andrei Gorzo is a lecturer in Film Studies at the National University of Theatre and Film “I. L. Caragiale” in Bucharest. He was recently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (August 2017 to January 2018). His study of the New Romanian Cinema, Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu, was published by Humanitas Press in 2012. He has recently co-organized with Christian Ferencz-Flatz, at the University of Bucharest’s Center of Excellence in Image Studies, a one-day colloquium (November 29, 2018) honoring the centenary of André Bazin’s birth. Andrei Gorzo’s most recent book is Imagini încadrate în istorie. Secolul lui Miklós Jancsó (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2015). Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 | 21 Andrei Gorzo at things through the detective’s eyes, in the Hollywood manner developed to such perfection by Hitchock in his one-character-tailing-another scenes. Here, no shot is supposed to tune us in to the detective’s optical subjectivity. The perspective on the events remains observational in the documentary sense, providing no access to characters’ subjectivities.) The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, The Paper Will Be Blue and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days were “documenting” life-and-death situations, crises maturing, escalating and resolving themselves over a time span no longer than a few hours. The writer-director of Police, Adjective opts instead for what David Bordwell has described1 as a “threads-of-routine” realism – consisting in the description of the character’s repetitive, banally quotidian activities. Porumboiu, too, no less than the directors of Lăzărescu and 4 Months, tells the story of a crisis that has sprung up in the life of his protagonist: the young detective will eventually rebel against an assignment consisting, as he sees it, in the destruction of a teenager’s life because of a few joints. And, no less than the protagonists in Lăzărescu and 4 Months, Porumboiu’s detective is racing against the clock: his boss (Vlad Ivanov) gave him a deadline for solving the case. On the other hand, it’s a relatively relaxed deadline – not a few hours, as in Lăzărescu or 4 Months, but a few days. And, from the professional point of view of a policeman, the case is still banal, minor. The abortion in 4 Months, Lăzărescu’s feeling sick that night, the bloody fall of the Ceaușescu regime in The Paper Will Be Blue – these are events that, in the case of each film, snatch the protagonist out of his or her quotidian existence, whereas, for the detective in Police, Adjective, the case of the pot-smoking teen is, up to a point, routine work. This routine is cinematically represented through the alternation of sequences showing the detective engaged in field work (tailing the kids), with sequences showing him at police headquarters (engaged in paperwork), and sequences showing him at home (eating). What characterizes all these scenes is the fact that they contain large quantities of ‘dead’ or ‘empty’ time. When the policeman is walking behind a suspect on the streets of his (unnamed) provincial town, Porumboiu shows him walking for minutes on end. When, having returned home at the end of a work day, he’s eating a bowl of soup in the kitchen (while his wife is listening next door to a sentimental pop song from the Ceaușescu era), Porumboiu keeps his camera on him until he’s done eating (enough time for the pop song in the next room to end and begin again several times). When the policeman is waiting in front of the villa where a suspect lives, or when he’s waiting by the closed door of a colleague’s office, Porumboiu gives us minutes after minutes of him waiting. (Figure 1) Of course, this is not exactly the ‘real’ time of his vigils: there is compression, there are temporal ellipses. Nevertheless, in a Hollywood-type film, such intervals of waiting would have been suggested, most probably, through a few consecutive shots – the detective looking towards the villa, the detective looking at his watch, the detective throwing away a freshly consumed cigarette butt – none of them lasting very long. Porumboiu refuses this: he refuses to reduce the fact of waiting to such images which would merely symbolize it. The fact of waiting is represented in something of its temporal weight – the weight given to it by the accumulation of ‘dead’ time. To the extent that films are composed of consecutive shots, and to the extent that a shot can be described as a unit of canned time – the time 22 | Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 Police, Adjective: The Words and the Things Figure 1 elapsed between the order “Action!” and the order “Stop!” – all films can be described (with a phrase borrowed from Andrey Tarkovsky) as objects “sculpted in time”. Narrative cinema of the classical type works to make us forget this – to make us lose track of time. But, of course, there are other traditions which, on the contrary, base themselves on efforts to make duration felt, to give it weight, materiality. To a certain extent, the structure of Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective could be described as a rhythmic organization of intervals of ‘dead’, ‘heavy’ time. To summarize, the ‘realist’ formula of this film is based on: 1) actions pertaining to a not very spectacular, not very dramatic daily routine; 2) the fact that, even if these actions are not represented in their entire duration, their duration on screen leans toward completeness; 3) the fact that these actions are repeated (the policeman does pretty much the same things every day). In Porumboiu’s hands, though, this is not just a formula for ‘realism”: it’s a route towards something else. This way of representing the activities of the policeman – his patient stalking of the teenagers, his picking up the remains of the joints they smoke, his long vigils in front of a villa – has the effect of making them seem somehow absurd, faintly senseless. (Also contributing to this effect are the lack of people in most of the shots – this is a film of mostly underpopulated streets – and the usual fixity of the camera. By contrast, Cristi Puiu’s first two films, which started the New Romanian Cinema – his 2001 Stuff and Dough and his 2005 The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu – are all teeming human activity overflowing from hand-held shots.) In other words, the style in which he represents the policeman’s activities allows Porumboiu to raise the question of meaning. And it is also his style which allows Porumboiu to formulate an answer. We see the detective walking for minutes on end behind some high school kids, sometimes taking cover behind buildings or crossing the street in an effort to remain inconspicuous. We see him waiting for minutes on end in front of a house. We also see him walking on the corridors of the police station, knocking on various doors, asking a colleague to check a car’s registration number, asking another to check a person’s criminal record, etc. And at the end of each day we see, in close-up, the reports that he writes: in other words, the results of his efforts to put sense into all these activities. What Porumboiu does in those moments is make us stare at close-upped handwritten words. Meaning doesn’t reside in the things themselves; it is given to them by words. It is Porumboiu’s accomplishment in this film to have cinematically brought out the mutual alterity of things and words. Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 | 23 Andrei Gorzo Figure 2 Figure 3 It was Peter Wollen who first argued (in his classic book from 1969, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema) that logician Charles Sanders Peirce’s trichotomy of signs – iconic, indexical and symbolic signs – could provide the basis for a semiotics of the cinema2; the British theorist’s proposal made a long career in the field of Film Studies. Iconic signs, according to Peirce, are signs whose relationship with their referents is one of resemblance or likeness: the drawn or painted portrait of a person is an iconic sign, but so are diagrams, whose resemblance with their referents is not a matter of similar features, but of similar “relations between parts.” Cinematic images – of persons, places, things, phenomena, etc. – have a clear iconic dimension. Indexical signs, for Peirce, are signs tied to their referents by a physical, existential bond. Examples: the sundial, the weathercock, the barometer, but also an animal’s footprints in the snow or medical symptoms like a rash or a raised pulse. Traditional (i.e., predigital) photographic and cinematographic images belong to this second category of signs, too: they not only resemble their models – the things that stood in front of the camera; they are also the traces or the ‘fingerprints’ left by the things themselves, with the help of light, on the impressionable film strip. They are signs tied to their referents as though by an umbilical cord, signs generated by their referents. Theorist André Bazin famously grounded his aesthetics in this dimension of the film image – its “indexicality”: a realist aesthetics based, among other things, on the observational use of the camera and on the recording of events in their complete duration – precisely the strategies used by Corneliu Porumboiu to represent the activities of his policeman protagonist. Finally, there are the symbolic signs – signs that are neither existentially tied to their referents, nor do they resemble them. They have come to designate the things they refer to by virtue of conventions, of contracts between people. They are arbitrary, yet they have force of law. The supreme example: words (with exceptions like onomatopoeia, which can be said to ‘resemble’ their referents). Peter Wollen is stating the evidence when he writes: “The cinema contains all three modes of the sign: indexical, iconic and symbolic.”3 Porumboiu’s achievement is to have found a way to contrast them on screen – especially the symbolic with the indexical, the words with the things themselves (represented by the material traces they have left on film). A religious man, Bazin sometimes writes as if he believed that the camera has the capacity to reveal a meaning already present in the things themselves – present without having 24 | Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 Police, Adjective: The Words and the Things Figure 4 Figure 5 been put there by humans: a transcendent meaning. There is no suggestion of such thing in Police, Adjective. Staged and shot by Porumboiu in long takes, with little movement within the frame, the policeman’s activities – the hours spent following the kids on the streets of the town, the hours spent waiting – tend, on the contrary, to become suspect of meaninglessness; meaning starts to appear clearly not as a property intrinsic to them, but as something put unto them by words. Early in the film, in a conversation with a fellow policeman, the protagonist mentions that he belongs to a group which meets regularly to play “foot tennis.” The colleague offers to join the group. The protagonist rejects his offer, explaining that he saw him play football – badly. “If you’re bad at football, you’are also bad at foot tennis,” the protagonist elaborates. “It’s a law,” he concludes. On the other hand, the protagonist is aware of the fact that laws – even written ones – change, as social consensuses are renegotiated and redefined. It is his conviction that Romanian laws criminalizing the use of light drugs are bound to change soon: that’s why he is reluctant to arrest a high school kid, going as far as standing up to his boss. He is also informed by his own wife (who seems to be a teacher of Romanian) that the Romanian Academy has recently changed the spelling rules for a couple of words. His boss in the police, who tries to quench his rebellion by sending him back to the dictionary definitions of the words “law”, “moral”, “conscience”, and “police”, behaves as if those definitions were valid for all eternity, as if they weren’t renegotiable conventions, subject to change. At the same time, the boss’s invocation of the supposed force of law of dictionary definitions doesn’t stop him from manipulating those definitions according to his interest: seeing that the dictionary defines a “police state” as a state which uses the police to “exercise control through repressive methods”, he dismisses this particular dictionary definition as “ridiculous”, adding that “all states need the police”. A moment later, this crypto-fascist police chief also takes issue with the dictionary-approved etymology of the word “policeman”: if the dictionary indicates the German word “Polizist”, the protagonist’s boss states, with a hilarious air of authority, that the true source is the Greek word for “city”, “polis”, which, he adds, also used to refer to “those who were running the city.” The protagonist and his wife had earlier had a conversation about the lyrics of an old Romanian pop song, sung by Mirabela Dauer. Trying to explain to him how words like “sea”, “field” or “flower” function within the text of the song, the policeman’s wife had talked about “images that become symbols” (the field means birth or creation, the flower means Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 | 25 Andrei Gorzo Figure 6 beauty, etc.). Confronted in this way with the instability of linguistic signs – unrelated to their referents either physically/existentially, or through resemblance – the detective had reacted slightly irritably, as though seized not only by the effects of alcohol (he had been drinking that night), but also by some vague apprehension. Although dealing with a detective who develops conscience issues about an assignment he’s been given, Police, Adjective is not a psychological drama. The protagonist’s internal turmoil is not dramatized along the conventional lines of psychological drama – escalating accumulation of aggravating factors, climactic outburst, etc. Who – or what – is this detective? Before being/having a psychology, he is a way of walking, a way of ambling or prowling the streets, and also a way of standing still, without doing anything, etc. These particular emphases in Porumboiu’s characterization of the detective are partly the result of his decision to film the character in long shots and medium shots, never from up close. What’s increasingly gnawing at the character, as his investigation progresses, is not only a guilty conscience, but also an apprehension – turning to vertigo as it’s being confirmed – that it is words that establish the meaning of things and that, words being arbitrary signs, this meaning is always subject to dispute, to relations of force, etc. This drama owes its clarity to the fact that Porumboiu avoids mixing signs – mixing the indexical with the symbolic and the iconic. Rather, he tries to keep them as separate as possible, so that we perceive them as separate, as neatly arranged side by side. It is in the interest of this clarity that Porumboiu avoids reducing his protagonist’s vigils – his long sessions of waiting (in front of a villa, etc.), with their specific temporal weight – to quicker successions of shots (the detective checking his watch, the detective lighting a cigarette, the detective throwing away the cigarette butt) meant to symbolize protracted waits. Things are not the same with Porumboiu (who is working in an indexical medium – the cinema) as they are with Mirabela Dauer, the singer whose lyrics are discussed by the policeman with his wife (and who works with words): with Porumboiu, images resist becoming symbols; they preserve, as André Bazin wished them to,4 “their own weight [as things and facts].”5 Unlike cinematic images of things, words are something completely different from the things themselves. Words are also that which instills meaning into things. Their “complete difference” from the things themselves is what Porumboiu is out to highlight. In Police, Adjective, words are insistently discussed (with the focus on their manipulability and arbitrariness) and insistently filmed (dictionary pages, the protagonist’s handwritten reports, a naïve definition of the word “conscience”, stuttered out by the intimidated detective and 26 | Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 Police, Adjective: The Words and the Things written by someone else on a blackboard at the order of the police chief – Figures 2-5). We are also presented with an iconic sign belonging to the category of diagrams: the map drawn by the detective on the blackboard at the end of the film, to explain how the arrest of the teenager will proceed. (Figure 6) Immediately after this demonstration come (from off-screen) the last words uttered by an actor in this film. They belong to the police chief and they have to do with words and other signs. “Just talk among yourselves and watch out for the signs,” he says. And then the end credits kick in, with a song sung by Ian Raiburg, which in translation goes something like this: “I like words, you know, / Words are my sisters; / When you’re not here, my love, / I speak with the flowers. / Words are my fortune, / They are my palaces, / The word and the heart / Are not alike with others [sic]”. ENDNOTES 1. For example, in David Bordwell, „Getting Real”, May 3, 2009, http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/2009/05/03/getting-real/, accessed on November, 21, 2018. 2. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema: Expanded Edition, London: British Film Institute, 1998, 82-85. 3. Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 84-85. 4. An extended discussion of the Bazinian dimension of the New Romanian Cinema is provided in Andrei Gorzo, Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu, Bucharest: Humanitas, 2012. 5. André Bazin, Bert Cardullo (editor), André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, New-York-London: Continuum, 2011, 65. A somewhat different version of this essay appeared in Romanian on the author’s personal blog. Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 2, 2018 | 27