Two Studies in Space-Time
The recent George Roy Hill-Paul Monash production of Slaughterhouse-Five impressed me as one of the most advanced and systematic achievements in deployment of Space-Time and recalled especially the theme and style of [Alain] Resnais's last film, Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968). Although Hill confirmed to me that he has never seen the Resnais film … the formal treatment of the story is structurally and thematically close to the earlier Resnais work. (p. 3)
Anyone familiar with the nuances of Resnais's filmic expression will be prepared for Je t'aime and its constant detours in time. But to encounter a similar, integrated development of Space-Time in an American commercial film, by an established Hollywood director, is an aesthetic shock of the first order. When George Roy Hill read the galleys of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five—still at work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—his immediate reaction was positive, yet he viewed the time structure of the novel as insurmountable filmically. Hill was still thinking in terms of traditional norms, and it was not until he later read a first-draft screen version by Stephen Geller that he was able to grasp an "emotional thread" that would provide a central focus and make the fractured time concept viable.
Vonnegut's story was inspired by his searing memory of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, and in order to comment on the present, he uses as his central character, Billy Pilgrim, a man who has, in his words, become "unstuck in time," having survived the Dresden holocaust during his youth. Vonnegut, however, tells the story as an omniscient observer in the third person, explaining in detail Billy's personal history and thus providing a rationale for Billy's time-tripping. The main body of the novel is flanked by two chapters in which Vonnegut explains his personal reasons for the narrative and creates an ironic contrast with the present bombing of Vietnam. While remaining true to the tone and spirit of Vonnegut, Geller and Hill have eliminated the author and the descriptive mode, restructuring the entire work, building up sketchy details, and making Billy the central consciousness of the film. As a result, virtually all the expository scenes in the novel are gone to make way for a direct yet startlingly elliptical dramatic development and a very flexible use of filmic Space-Time as we move through the disordered landscape of Billy's memory and fantasy life, with occasional stopovers in the "real" world. Thus our sense of a "free-fall" in time is much the same as in Je t'aime; but at least in one respect the Resnais film appears almost classic by comparison.
In Je t'aime, the idea of time-tripping is set up in no uncertain terms by the opening scenes, detailing the experiment, and though there is progressing ambiguity in the flow of consciousness, the rules of the game are established: there is a beginning, middle, and end, in that order. In Slaughterhouse-Five, however, our bearings from a narrative viewpoint are initially less certain, and the logic of the structure is suggested but never directly stated in the film.
The opening shots of the film, set in the present, immediately connote dislocation in perspective as the camera peers through the windows of Billy's suburban house to his daughter and her husband on the exterior, trying to locate Billy. When we finally see him, Billy is well past middle age and is engrossed in typing a response to his local newspaper, detailing his experience of being "unstuck in time," which he has recently revealed. Between paragraphs, Billy time-trips back to his youth on the snow-covered battlefield somewhere in Germany, where he is fiercely accosted by three GI's who suspect him to be an enemy agent…. The image-logic signals a "flashback," but an abrupt and unexpected cut to a shot of Montana Wildhack … to whom we are later introduced—thumbing through a magazine and responding, "Time-tripping again, Billy?" breaks up the connection. When we return to a shot of Billy at his typewriter 25 years later, then back to Germany, thence to Billy's wedding night after the war, an elliptical, achronological pattern establishes itself as part of a mental continuum, reflecting inner experience.
Just as in the Resnais film, the stylistic "playing with time," aside from its critical distancing of the spectator and its purely aesthetic appeal, expresses an existential portrait…. Because time in Slaughterhouse-Five is levelled off into relatively broad dramatic scenes, we can perceive Billy's situation, not only in terms of his private fantasy life, but in his alienated behavior, which the film is rich in detailing. (pp. 6-7)
Even more daring is the way Hill juxtaposes two sequences in exactly their reverse chronological order, like the musical effect of dropping from a sfortzando to pianissimo passage with exposition following development. Billy is the sole survivor of a plane crash in which he is critically injured and mumbles the address recited to him by a German officer in Dresden years earlier: "Schlachthof-funf, Schlachthof-funf." In a sequence of hair-raising intensity that could have been inspired by a Mack Sennett chase, Valencia hysterically flies from their home screaming, "Billy, I'm coming!" She tail-ends another car, rockets the wrong direction up a freeway exit, careens across hills and lanes to avoid police, in an absurd, frantic dash to the hospital, reducing the Cadillac to a pile of rubble as she crashes into the emergency entrance, ironically her final resting place. From the hospital, where Billy is undergoing surgery, Hill cuts to the morning of Valencia's previous birthday as Billy awakens her with a stretch of ribbon that she gleefully follows to the front lawn and her dream-come-true—the gleaming new El Dorado we have just seen demolished.
The climactic development of the film is centered around two themes: the tragic destruction of Dresden, and Billy's increasing regression into fantasy. The entrance to Dresden is a kind of travelogue extravaganza as seen by Billy; a "land of Oz" as he calls it, casting a spell of enchantment in its sculptured trellises and baroque architectural detail, as well as its smiling inhabitants still unscarred by the war…. This paradise with its happy atmosphere is soon transformed into a fiery hell which Hill and his cameraman Miroslav Ondricek capture in beautifully executed tracking shots, moving from the figure of a young German soldier traversing the landscape in an anguished attempt to find his family. The irony here, is that Billy's emotions are already so shattered at the time that he can only comprehend the horror of the event through memory, prompted by an arrogant military historian (who sees Dresden as a mere "tactical error" compared with Hiroshima) with a stoical resistance to moral assessment.
As Billy moves closer to an adult realization of this past experience, he becomes more detached from it, retreating more often into his fantasy of Tralfamadore and his idyllic life there with the sexy starlet Montana Wildhack. Vonnegut has to go to great pains in his book to establish the background of this fantasy, rooting it in the imagination of a science-fiction novelist Billy has read. The film, however, more satisfactorily establishes it through visual iconography. At one point, Billy discovers his son with a girlie magazine, cautions him against it, then smiles knowingly over a nude fold-out of Montana. At a drive-in movie, Valencia explodes into rage when Billy and her son greedily absorb the vision of Montana's exposed breasts on the silver screen. When we finally see Billy transported to the geodesic dome on Tralfamadore, along with Montana, surrounded by the luxury trappings of Sears Roebuck, the fantasy becomes an apotheosis.
Billy's time-tripping becomes a form of enslavement rather than liberation because, for him, fantasy becomes the only viable reality. He tries to explain (in the opening sequence, which is continued near the end of the film) to his daughter his life in the fourth dimension of time—just like the Tralfamadorians—but naturally Earthlings cannot understand and think him insane. He sees life as "a series of moments in random order,"… a concept which the Tralfamadorians use to describe their books, in Vonnegut's novel, as "brief clumps of symbols." (pp. 8-9)
Some people see Billy's fantasy-images in the film as inspired and poetic; in a sense, they are, but what they represent is something else. Although he is presented as a lovable sad sack, Billy's imaginative resources are very limited; they are shaped, more than anything, by the idealism of popular literature and films…. [In] the final shots of Tralfamadore, against a background of fireworks and grandiose organ accompaniment, Billy and Montana acknowledge the applause of Tralfamadore after the birth of their son—a supreme parody of the sentimental Hollywood finale. Audiences automatically cheer at this "happy ending," but there is a critical dimension built in by the film-makers, by concluding on this fantasy. Billy's inspiration is only a hiatus, and existentially a sad one; he has transcended the real world but he is still the same placid, ineffectual self as in reality. He has failed to achieve any growth or self-identity.
When I mentioned the striking similarity in theme and style between this film and that of Resnais, George Roy Hill replied, "I don't want you to think I haven't been influenced by Resnais … but I wasn't interested in making an experimental film … that's not my bag." At the same time, he is greatly pleased with the film and is quite surprised that the distribution has been handled so well with enthusiastic reception, unusual for a film that boasts no celebrities and only Vonnegut's name and the jury prize at Cannes as selling points. Equally significant is the fact that Hill and writer Stephen Geller have successfully reorchestrated Vonnegut's material into a unique filmic structure … that questions most of the traditions of Space-Time adhered to in commercial cinema, and challenge the spectator to an effective participation in the experience at a time when Hollywood seems to be returning to traditional formulas and nostalgia for success. When most of the films of the seventies have become passé, Slaughterhouse-Five will, I think, remain durable and achieve its rank as an American masterpiece. (p. 9)
Lee Atwell, "Two Studies in Space-Time," in Film Quarterly (© 1973 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of The Regents), Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Winter, 1972–73, pp. 2-9.∗
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