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The Blackout review
:. Director: Abel Ferrara
:. Starring: Actors
:. Running Time: 1:38
:. Year: 1997
:. Country: USA
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The Blackout begins as an ordinary love story between an actor (a Hollywood type hunk) and an actress. This apparent simplicity is quickly ousted. Ferrara, clouds the issue by adding a lot of cinematographic references and pastiches, and above all, presents a character (a director named Mickey, played by Dennis Hopper) who keeps on repeating that he is directing a movie at the present time "We are shooting a movie right now". So, the spectator, at some point, no longer knows if he/she is watching Ferrara's final cut of The Blackout, or a movie in the making (which would be either the creation of a remake of Nana shot by Mickey, or Matty's (played by Matthew Modine) hallucinated story.).
Meanwhile the movie shot by Mickey becomes totally different from Ferrara's. The first one claims reality (especially the murder scene), while Ferrara's film claims tricks. His film doesn't let the spectators forget they are watching a film. Thus, Ferrara only uses common movie settings such as a bedroom, a beach, a bar, a strip-joint, and a psychoanalyst office, while multiplying cross-references (there are lots of video images and painting inserts as well as the notion of acting and creation). He constantly refers to other cinematographic works [from one extreme to another, from Godard (the car scene with Hopper-the link scene; often used here with chained transitions) and the French New Wave to Andrew Blake (the scene by the swimming pool and the one where two women strip and caress each other in front of Mickey's camera) and the porn film (the expected music and estheticism: the scene where Mickey follows Annie#2 with his camera on his shoulder telling her :"Excite him baby" is very close to John Stagliano's films), to Fellini (the 8 1/2 poster)].
The core of the film is neither the main character's emotional setbacks nor his drug problems, but rather his relationship with his job. He tells Annie#2: "I don't make any difference between life and acting anymore" (in a conversation in voice over with her after he strangles her). It's up to the spectator to differentiate them, by putting back the different elements in their respective reality; this reconstruction is left open while the director does not interfere to either support or deny the available paths. Therefore, the reference to Fellini's 8 1/2 isn't innocent. In this movie, the editing was made to have the audience go from one level of reality to another (reality levels generated by the hero's mind): from the existence of the character to his fantasies and his work as a filmmaker. The Blackout works in the same way, except that the fantasized reality and the film reality are not generated by the same brain: the director (Mickey) is at the basis of the creation process, while the actor (Matty) hallucinates and fantasizes (what is also a creation process).
Also, the movie doesn't rely on a single plot, but on many, fitting together like Russian dolls: the Blackout tells a love story in which the remake of a movie, (Nana) is featured. Within this movie there is a love story with a strangled woman. In none of the stories is the murder certain: in Nana's excerpt it is impossible to know the victim dies; in the Blackout, Matty doesn't remember killing someone. The murder seems to move from one story to another without ever being materialized. Most importantly, this murder is always presented in the form of an image (in Nana, in Mickey's remake, or in Matty's dreams), which casts doubt on its veracity.
Because of all its cross-references to movies and its heterogeneous structure, this film cannot be reduced to a single source or genre. It is made of a baroque abundance of styles and references. All these processes of cinematic auto-representation (in addition to a stylistic uncertainty) bring the film to point itself out. Ferrara labels cinema as an audiovisual process of vampirization. "I have the impression of being in a vampire movie". He is not far from the truth since he is indeed in a vampire movie. The movie (in a larger sense), like a vampire, can morph from one form to another, and Ferrara, in a sense, makes the Blackout a metaphor of this transformation skill. At the center of this metaphor, Nana, a French Cinema classic (Christian-Jaque, 1955), which Mickey metamorphoses in a videographic work; a vampire-movie that is already a vampire, an adaptation of an Emile Zola novel. To associate cinema to vampirization shows that cinema is immortal, like a vampire, and can indefinitely duplicate, feeding from others' life (here, from other works). Ferrara gives evidence of a crisis in Cinema. It withdraws into oneself to bite its own tail, rather inspired by its past and other arts than the reality from which it supposed to emerge (what Mickey says of his work isn't so ironic:
"It's not a flick it's real!" while he is shooting his remake?). In the same way there are the ideas of the lost image and Matty's poor memory regarding his work: when one can't remember doing it, one can shamelessly redo it-and it looks like cinema forgets quickly. The Hopper character illustrates it when he says: "The question isn't if I [the film-maker] did it but if I remember doing it. More important is, Do you [the spectator] remember? Think about it."
Ferrara doesn't clearly position himself from the mourning of originality that seems to be the burden of postmodern cinema, his reflection remains (as the entire film) open to interpretation. It is rather a demonstration than an attempt to criticize or excuse it.
Sebastian Sipat
 Reviews of Cult Movies since 2012
Cult Films: 1998 - 2011 Reviews
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