published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Autumn 2009 Issue, Volume #10
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The Illusion Of Time
by Maaret Koskinen

Anyone who has seen the portraits by Swedish master photographer Georg Oddner (1923–2007) never forgets them. How can one, when confronted with the self-conscious glance of a young Anita Ekberg in the 1950s, her face framed by an elegantly folded shirt collar?

Particularly worth remembering is the shot of Ingrid Thulin from 1960, not least because of Oddner’s conscious attempt at uglifying this classically beautiful actress. Here the hard lighting lays half of her face in darkness, whereas it highlights every existing wrinkle in the other, visible half. It is as if the photographer had made a stab at chiselling forth another face, from under the existing one, which according to normal perceptual laws should have remained invisible.The image in fact turns into a kind of cubist photo-painting, since the different viewpoints of the motif, which normally must be seen one at a time, instead seem visible all at once. Indeed, in the shot of Thulin it is as if a future, yet non-existing face had been conjured forth, in the here and now, and an ageing face revealed in the still young.
Yet another fascinating aspect of this picture is that it was granted a kind of prolonged life in the medium of moving images, since it seems to have inspired Ingmar Bergman to uglify the same actress in The Silence (1963). Here Thulin has even been furnished with a pale, almost clown-like makeup, which is further enhanced by a harsh lighting, just as merciless as in Oddner’s portrait. When I happened to point out the similarity in a museum catalogue text, the ageing photographer (whom I had never been in contact with before) phoned me and expressed his deep gratitude, claiming that no one had noted this connection – except himself, some fifty years ago.

Actress Ingrid Thulin (1926–2004) in the film The Silence (Tystnaden), 1963 by Ingmar Bergman

In any case, what this highlights is the still photograph’s relation to time. To quote Georg Oddner himself in the Swedish film director Jan Troell’s fascinating documentary Närvarande (Presence, 2003): “Only the moment is alive – the moment which is eternity […] And it is time [itself] you want to look at.” Exactly. For still photography can’t be reduced to that sliver of time which happens to get caught on the emulsion, but also encompasses the viewer’s experience of time, in the sense of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept ‘la durée’ – the duration of time.
Naturally moving images, too, are related to time. According to some, film is even the foremost among time-based media, in that it allows the viewer to experience a ‘now’ that is continuously engendered – as if we in film literally see time materialized before our eyes. Indeed, it is argued, one of the reasons that we are constantly drawn to the (illusion of) real time offered by moving images, is that it allows us to retrieve the sense of absolute presence and, thus, regain ‘lost’ time – the proverbial sand that constantly runs through our fingers and is diluted in memories of the past or expectations of the future.
But then, as we noted, there is also the physiognomy of the star actors, which registers time in a much more concrete fashion. For it is arguably in their faces and bodies that the vanishing of beauty is the most palpable. And this kind of time, too, we want to “look at”, in Oddner’s precise phrase!

Now ageing is of course not the same thing as uglification, but the point is that it is perceived as such (at least in Western societies). Let me quote the legendary American film critic Pauline Kael, who once noted that the actress Julie Christie “has that gift that beautiful actresses sometimes have of suddenly turning ugly and being even more fascinating because of the crossover. When her nose practically meets her strong chin and she gets the look of a harpy, the demonstration of the thin line between harpy and beauty makes the beauty more dazzling – it’s always threatened.” What Kael put her finger on is not only that we tend to be fascinated by beauty, pure and simple, but also the extent to which we intuit that it is constantly under siege, in the here and now, and not least, in the long run – as time inexorably goes by.
The theme of ageing is particularly prominent in contemporary American film. This is not surprising, since a whole generation of male actors are all in the midst of their swan song. Take, to name a few, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones film, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill. In the last film, the main characters are a pair of ageing, increasingly desperate cops. The reason for their mood is supposedly that the serial-killer case they are investigating seems to point to the fact that the guilty one may be a colleague. But their desperation is equally clearly related to age, and that they are soon to be pensioned from the force. And so, implicitly, are the actors. Is this why De Niro’s character is constantly forced to prove himself by performing acrobatic sex with a woman twenty-five years his junior, or that several crucial dialogue sequences have been placed in the gym, as if to highlight their predicament? To quote the reviewer of this film in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter: “It is in fact quite macabre. The ageing actors are lustfully using the fact that death is approaching. A sort of a death dance”. No doubt Righteous Kill turns into a kind of male version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford dancing an equally macabre and humiliating dance over their former screen-personas and vanishing film careers.

Clearly, ageing icons are rarely allowed to finish their careers in style. Although exceptions do exist, one example can be found in The Whales of August (1987), featuring Bette Davis and silent-film star Lilian Gish. The film is about two elderly sisters, but most of all really about these two old stars, for here Davis once more was as magnificently sarcastic as in All About Eve (1950), whereas Gish was as delightfully wide eyed as in her silent roles. And among current American film actresses Meryl Streep is arguably the only one who has managed to age with any honour intact, starting as the middle-aged mother who navigates down the symbolically tempestuous rapids in The River Wild (1994), and a year later experiences a so-called mature romance in the bittersweet The Bridges of Madison County – not to mention her fabulous rehabilitation of the ageing flower-power woman in Mama Mia.

But of course it was her co-star in this film, Clint Eastwood, who paved the way in In the Line of Fire (1993). After all, the film was all about an ageing bodyguard, who made potentially fatal errors of judgement, and became embarrassingly out of breath as he ran beside the president’s car, while his younger colleagues were watching. At the time, the film was received as a symptom of the ongoing dethroning of white, heterosexual maleness, noted also in other contemporary films like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Falling Down (1993). But most of all the film was about its star, and Clint Eastwood’s ageing as male icon, not least since he himself managed to set the agenda, by showing how a role literally could be custom-made for an ageing screen persona. What Eastwood in fact managed here was a sort of Gorbachev-move of popular culture – by voluntarily stepping down from the throne as action hero.

But what about actors belonging to the younger generation? Regarding, for instance, pretty boy Brad Pitt, it is interesting (as was noted by Swedish film critic Kerstin Gezelius) that in many films he seems to do his best to destroy his boyish beauty. And perhaps this is symptomatic of his realization that it is precisely the beauty that (partially) made his career, which in the not too distant future will let him down. Take for example The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This film is about ageing (albeit backwards) but can also, on a meta-level, be regarded as a conjuration of sorts, in the particular way it displays the ageing process – in advance so to speak. Indeed, what better cure for an ageing pretty boy than deconstructing yourself, and taking a lease on the future – before time does so.
 

It is hard to come much closer to a Dorian Gray-ish contract with the Devil, although in this case displayed on the silver screen, for all to see, in contrast to an ageing portrait hidden in the attic, as in Oscar Wilde’s classical tale. Also, this digitally cgi-driven film about Benjamin Button is reminiscent of Georg Oddner’s old, analogically based portrait of Ingrid Thulin, since in this photograph, too, an aged physiognomy is revealed in the (still) young. In the same vein, Benjamin Button can be regarded as a cubist portrait consisting of simultaneities, within one and the same frame – although composed of moving images.

  

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Autumn Issue 2009 Volume #10.