Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Let's Get Lost
1988 · Bruce Weber · Let's Get Lost on Sightlines
There is a convertible. Chet Baker rides in it, near sixty, his face gone hollow and creased, and around him sit young people as beautiful as he once was. The light is the light of a fashion shoot. The car seems to be driving out of 1954 and into 1988 at the same time, and nobody in it seems to mind.
That one frame holds most of Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost. Weber was a fashion photographer, and this was his first feature. He brought the methods of the studio sitting with him: directional light, glossy surfaces, beaches and hotel rooms arranged like an ad campaign. With his cinematographer Jeff Preiss he made a choice that looked perverse in 1988, when documentaries were moving to color and video. They shot the new footage in black and white. So the old Baker can sit beside a 1950s glamour portrait of the young one with no seam between them. The grain matches. Only the face has changed.
Gilles Deleuze has a name for an image like this. He calls it the crystal-image. Every moment, he argues, splits as it happens into two sides: the present that passes, and a past that is kept, the way a mirror holds a reflection next to the thing reflected. Most films keep those sides apart. A flashback is dated. It says "this was then." The crystal is an image where the two can no longer be told apart, where the actual and its virtual double keep trading places. Weber's monochrome builds exactly that. When the editor, Angelo Corrao, cuts from the young face to the old one, he sets two Bakers face to face on the same surface. The beautiful boy becomes the ruin's memory. The ruin becomes the boy's future. The film never lets you hold one without the other.
Why bring in Deleuze at all, instead of just calling this nostalgia? Because nostalgia looks back from a fixed point, and this film doesn't have one. Corrao's cutting is associative, not chronological. A phrase of trumpet carries across a cut from an old photograph to a present-day interview. The early recordings, silky and androgynous, play over the late man, and the late voice, rough and halting, plays against the early pictures. Deleuze describes a cinema where sound and image come apart and tell two stories at once. This film doesn't go that far, but it leans that way: Baker's music keeps coming back over the testimony of the people he hurt, and every time it does, the verdict you were about to reach gets harder to hold.
The testimony is the second thing to watch for. The ex-wife, the women companions, the children, the musicians all describe the same events, and their accounts do not fit. Corrao lays them side by side and doesn't rule on them. Deleuze calls this falsifying narration, one of what he names the powers of the false. Documentary has long worked under a contract, the one André Bazin's realism honors: the camera records, and what it records is true. Deleuze points to another tradition, coming out of Jean Rouch, where the camera catches people in the act of making up a truth, telling the legend of themselves. He calls this fabulation. Every witness in Let's Get Lost is caught at it. Decades of hurt have shaped their stories, and the film treats that shaping as part of what it is filming.
At the center is Baker himself, a perfect case of what Deleuze calls the forger. The forger is more than a liar. He has no fixed truth to betray, and his identity shifts from scene to scene. Baker performs charm, then victimhood, then a blankness you can't get behind. He seems to know exactly how much the camera loves him, and he plays to it. Watch his face in the interviews: detached, evasive, and still lit like a matinee idol's. For Deleuze the close-up is the face that registers a feeling before it turns into action. Here it mostly registers a withdrawal. You keep looking for the man and finding the surface.
The most unsettling forger may be Weber. He stages the convertible ride, the beaches, the pool set-ups full of beautiful people. He brings in the look of 1950s Southern California and of his own ads, and he rebuilds the fantasy of West Coast Cool around a man that life has visibly worn down. Skeptics have called this an ethical problem, and they have a point. The light that ennobles Baker also prettifies a life of hard use. But the film never hides its artifice. It shows you the seduction while it seduces you. That is its real subject: a romance with a face, filmed by someone who knows the romance is suspect and can't stop.
The film has a family. From Jazz on a Summer's Day it takes the stills photographer's eye, the jazz musician as an object of glamour. From Portrait of Jason it takes a whole feature built on one self-mythologizing subject who contradicts himself on camera. Chronicle of a Summer gave it the interview that lets subjects perform and argue with being filmed. Grey Gardens gave it people playing their own faded glamour for a camera they know is there. Lightning Over Water gave it the hard question of staging a beautiful artist's decline. Sans Soleil showed that juxtaposition alone could carry an essay, with no narrator laying out the facts. And Preiss carried the material forward himself, into his own jazz feature, Low Down (2014), about the pianist Joe Albany.
What Let's Get Lost did to the music documentary was refuse its arc. It skips the rise, the fall and the lesson. Instead it circles for two hours and builds by accumulation, and its plot is your own slow disillusionment as the beautiful surface gives way. It moved the jazz film from building a canon to doubting one. And it put the filmmaker's desire on screen as something for us to judge.
So when you watch it, keep both faces in view. Each time a song comes in, ask whose year it belongs to. And watch the light. It is lovely, it is lying a little, and Weber lets you see it lie.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Weber and Preiss shoot the new footage in black and white so it matches the 1950s archive, and Corrao cuts the young 'beautiful face' straight against the aged 'ruin', so past and present sit on one surface and can't be told apart
- falsifying narration — Ex-wife, companions, children and musicians give accounts of the same events that don't fit together, and the edit sets them side by side without ruling on them
- the forger — Baker switches between charm, victimhood and blankness, seems to know the camera loves him and plays to it; Weber, offstage, stages scenes and courts his subject
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — The interviewed women and children give testimony shaped by decades of hurt, and the film treats how they present themselves as part of its subject; the method comes from Chronicle of a Summer's reflexive interviews
- audiovisual disjunction — Baker's early recordings play against the late images and his worn late voice against the early ones; a trumpet phrase carries across a cut from an old photograph to a present-day interview, and the music comes back over the testimony of the people he hurt
- affection-image (the close-up) — Baker's face, lit like a glamour portrait and lingered over in close-up, shows a detached, evasive withdrawal instead of a feeling about to turn into action