High Art · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Water is coming through Syd's bathroom ceiling.

That's the whole machinery of the film, sitting there in the plaster. A brown bloom over a young editor's tub, one flight of stairs, and a neighbor who turns out to be a photographer who walked away from the art world ten years ago.

Before Lucy Berliner is a face, she is a leak and a noise. The sound mix keeps the upstairs alive as room tone: a party heard through a floor, the drip, the low hum of a building where nothing is urgent. Deleuze has a term for this, borrowed from what directors have always known. He calls it the out-of-field: the space a frame implies but withholds. Thrillers use it for the thing in the hallway. Cholodenko uses it for wanting. For the first stretch of High Art the apartment above is nothing but an audible adjacent world, wet and getting closer, and Syd climbs the stairs the way you walk toward a sound.

What she finds is a second film living directly on top of the first.

Downstairs: beige competence, a boyfriend, a job at Frame where Syd stands at desks and in meetings and is appraised. Tami Reiker lights that world cool and flat, professional daylight, and Amy Duddleston cuts it conventionally, on dialogue and reaction. Upstairs: amber, underexposed, grain left in, ashtrays and bottles and bodies crowding the edge of the frame. Those scenes drift. Dissolves, long holds, takes that run well past the point where their information has been delivered. Two apartments, two lighting schemes, two rates of time. The quiet horror of the film is that they share a plumbing system.

Deleuze, writing about the Zola line in cinema (Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey), described a kind of movie that presents a perfectly ordinary place, a hotel or an office or an apartment, which turns out to be thin skin over what he called the originary world: a zone run by appetite rather than by reasons, where everything slides downhill. The realistic address is the derived milieu. The originary world is what it's actually made of. Most films can only imply that relation. High Art plumbs it. The originary world is upstairs, and it is coming down, and it stains.

The lens earns its keep by refusing to keep the two plots apart. Taken as art-world satire with a doomed romance attached, the film has a drug problem in one room and a career problem in another. Taken as naturalism, it has one force at two temperatures. Syd's hunger for a discovery and Lucy's for a fix run on the same grammar: appetites that use people and call it appreciation. The magazine is an addict with better lighting.

Naturalism works by fetish, Deleuze says. The drive tears a piece off the world and clings to it. Here the part-object isn't only the drug, it's the photographs. Negatives, contact sheets, a documented life in boxes, all of it existing in one copy in one woman's apartment, because this is 1998 and an image is still an object. The plot turns on that scarcity. Syd wants the pictures and wants Lucy and can't find a clean edge between the two wants. Neither can anyone else in the building.

And naturalism runs on one clock, what Deleuze calls the line of slope: entropy going one direction. The title says it twice, and the second meaning is terminal. Barbara Loden's Wanda supplied the exact package Cholodenko reassembles — 16mm blown up to 35, available light, scene lengths that drift, a woman's story that ends flat and unredeemed.

Lucy is the film's seer: Deleuze's name for a character who has stopped being an agent, whose perceiving no longer converts into doing, who can only look and endure. A photographer who hasn't made work in a decade is that idea with a camera around its neck. Sheedy builds her out of withholding, a flat low register and almost no gesture, a watchfulness that could be burnout and could be hunting. Reiker shoots the fixes with the camera going slack instead of delirious, holding on faces in repose. That's a genuine refusal. The decade's heroin cinema had a house style of acceleration, and this film declines it. What's left in those held faces is feeling that never gets discharged into action.

Duddleston's cutting is where Deleuze's dead time lives: stretches the film keeps after the plot is finished with them. The residue is the movie. The debt is to Cassavetes, Faces specifically, whose scene grammar is 16mm in close quarters and overlapping half-audible talk and takes held until the actors' evasions rather than the lines carry the information. Deleuze called that a cinema of the body, meaning duration stops being something the story spends and becomes something a body carries: attitudes, postures, waiting. Cholodenko's addition is horizontality. Cassavetes' bodies stand up and collide. Hers lie down. She stages whole scenes on the mattress and the low furniture while Syd's working life is played vertically, and the erotics are architectural before anyone admits to anything. That crowded two-shot, two women pressed into one small frame, is her invention and her signature: the room applies the pressure so the dialogue doesn't have to.

The crowded frame comes from Fassbinder, and the film says so out loud by giving Greta a Fassbinder past. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant staged an entire erotic hierarchy in one apartment by stacking women in layered planes of a single shot, so whoever is being excluded stays visible inside it. Clarkson plays Greta at full theatrical pitch, accented and grandly sorry for herself, and Deleuze's word for that is the gest: a posture that makes a social relation readable. Greta is what becomes of the woman who used to be the one photographed. She is Lucy's future, performing itself in the same room.

The late visit to Lucy's mother adds a third register, upholstered and bourgeois and embalmed. Deleuze found in Visconti a crystal of decomposition: an ordered, well-appointed world rotting from inside, everything arriving too late. Vera's house is that in a single sequence, and it explains both what Lucy fled and what she has rebuilt upstairs in a rougher key.

There's a Bazinian argument running underneath all of it. Bazin thought a photograph carries a piece of its object's being, a trace rather than a picture, which is why we extend it a credit we never give a painting. Lucy's work is designed to hold that credit — Goldin's method from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, intimates on their own beds in available tungsten, documents instead of compositions. That's exactly what makes Syd's enthusiasm feel faintly predatory. Nothing inside the pictures changes when the magazine takes them. What changes is that a document becomes a style. And the film catches the last moment when this could be dramatized as theft at all, because the image was still scarce and physical. A few years on, there's no negative left to possess.

Here's what it does to narrative. Deleuze's history of cinema turns on a break: the movie where someone sees a situation and acts and the action resolves it gives way, after the war, to the movie where action no longer works and someone just watches. High Art puts both regimes in one building, one stacked on the other, and then does the unexpected thing. It lets the action win. Syd perceives, decides, acts, makes the deadline, transforms the situation. Textbook. It is also the catastrophe. The film has no interest in making her a villain; she's young and she's on a clock, and the clock is the antagonist. Narrative time beats chemical time, and something irreplaceable leaves with it.

That's a hard shape to hold, and it's why a first feature shot on 16mm for a Sundance budget still carries weight. It reached theatres through October Films while October was being folded into USA Films, an independent sensibility bought by an institution that admired its outsider charge, which is also the plot. The Waldo Salt award got it right: the events happen in the calibration of what two people say while chasing something neither will name. Sheedy's Lucy became the standard case of a career reintroduced by independent film. Reiker's low-light intimacy went on to Love & Basketball and, much later, The Old Guard. Duddleston came back to cut Laurel Canyon. The line back through Wanda, Faces, Chelsea Girls and the scoreless domestic fixes of The Panic in Needle Park is a real inheritance, not a set of references.

Watch the ceiling next time. Cholodenko puts her thesis in the plaster before anyone speaks: something is coming down from above, it can't be stopped, and the woman it's coming toward is going to decide to call it an opportunity. The question the film leaves open isn't whether Syd loves Lucy. It's whether anyone living on a deadline can still feel the difference between being drawn to a person and needing what she has.