F.J. Ossang's Doctor Chance (1997) is showing on MUBI in December and January, 2018 as part of the series F.J. Ossang: Cinema Is Punk.
“Out into the halls again, past dark Coke machines, and there he is lying horizontally across a metal folding chair like he’s practicing a levitation trick, both ragged cowboy boots propped up on a metal desk. He’s blue. That’s the first thing that strikes me. He’s all blue from the eyes clear down through his clothes. First thing he says to me, ‘We don’t have to make any connections.’ At first I’m not sure if he’s talking about us personally or the movie. ‘None of this has to connect, in fact it is better if it doesn’t connect.’“
—Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook
“The world has a new form of beauty: speed. Art is dead.”
—Angstel Presley von Sekt
It should surprise exactly nobody that F.J. Ossang and Nicholas Ray were born on the same day. Neither can it be a wonder that of all the failed Ray and Cocteau wannabees at Cahiers du cinéma none of them ever succeeded like Ossang in the tricky matter of kino-ivresse. Ossang has triumphed partly because (brace yourselves!) he is not pathologically movie-mad, and like any poet worth his salt he is a Debordian phenomenologist, not a Xerox-boy or a sampler. Yes, a poet first (the unholy trinity of Lautréamont, Artaud, and Céline), and a musician first again (which he calls “a pretext to make noise…”) and this is clear from how he cuts. Exhibit A: the drive-by shooting in The Case of the Morituri Divisions (1985) immediately kule-shoved against eels sliding silently past each other. That’s how you do it. Musicality is rare enough to count. Let’s remember for a sad-emoji moment too that Godard is indoors chasing 3D, intifadas of solipsism, and cat-videos, like our bad tempered and grandfatherly ancestral algorithm. Ossang, in turn, again and yet again, has kept the dialectical faith of desire and sensibility. Loyalty d’origine.
And not to get all lipstuck-traced on you, but what you realize through Ossang’s movies is that the premiere—in the unswingin’ London of 1972—of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime is one of the foundational moments of punk. Probably only Bowie noticed. And maybe he doesn’t know this beyond the reptile brain, but the Shepard of Cowboy Mouth, Tooth, and Angel City runs through the veins of all of Ossang’s movies. But again, to be unaware or mistaken about your parentage is bliss and a decent vintage of freedom. Next, if you can imagine the Derek Jarman of Jubilee and The Last of England but de-albionized, vitamixed with Dziga Vertov and Fritz Lang, then you get warmer about the cold-splintered fusion of F.J. Ossang.
The worst film of a musician or a painter is better than the best film of a movie brat. Don’t @ me. It’s a matter of seeking.
And now onward to the Atacama, color saturation, and Doctor Chance (1997). Ossang said two important things about Doctor Chance. That he brought two movies on videotape to Chile, to watch during the shoot: Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). But the tapes were PAL not NTSC, so they were never watched. He also said that the movie was the history of the 20th century, made as a crooked and dashed center line in the most beautiful country in the world which is itself also a sort of line. This sort of polemical declaration lays out Ossang’s fundamentalist resistance to hermeneutics and easy interpretation and interpellation (something he shares with ol’ Nick Ray), which in this age of prêt-à-porter ideology (is it memeable?) results in acute marginalization. We like our artists to know what they are after. All of these films throw up—vomit is the right word—plot and exposition and dialogues, and even poetry and action as misdirection and chaff, and in this way demand from the viewer a unique synthesis. One cannot, and should not, connect to this movie in the usual, unthinking way. Remember, cut-up is his first school.
All of these movies are constructed in a very plunderphonic way, which makes Ossang a paradigmatic audio-visual artist. Watching an Ossang movie is the experiential analogue to listening to the KLF’s Chill Out—these are superficially “punk” experiences. Morituri is genuinely a punk film, a mix of Kuleshov and Debord, but the rest are ambient cinema. These are films that replicate the drift of late night shortwave radio. That explains, for me, the increasing gaps and caesuras. If anything, we are watching a symphonic synthesis of silent movie aesthetics (yes, those two cross-over figures, Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs) and the new sonic potential of contrapuntal radio like Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North. This is something you can tell more overtly in his Critique of Landscape trilogy (Silencio, Vladivostok, Ciel éteint!), where the generic trappings are dropped for a pure Ossangification.
We know that romantic arias about losers who win as they lose, who blur the borders of those states, are a part of Hollywood and punk mythos alike. You can say that a punk is a passeur and a dandy in the sweepstakes of success. But even though Ossang makes movies that look on the surface like a romantic rehash of this ancient veneration, they are actually transcendental in effect. Because of their relentless audio-visuality and sonic digressiveness.
Fiduciary duty: The plot—which is like something scribbled on an old postcard by Michel Subor in Le pétit soldat—there is no one in this film named Doctor Chance. Doc Chance might be the witch-doctor god of encounter, or the shamanic spirit of consequence. Elvis Presley’s son, Angstel (Pedro Hestnes), who is trapped in post-Oedipal conflicts with his demonic surrogate father, Satarenko (Féodor Atkine), the failed artist, critic of the spectacle, and art dealer of forgeries, and his mother, Milady (Marisa Paredes) and his true love, Ancetta (his muse, Elvire), who he keeps reminding us and her, is a whore. Yes, Mother-Whore, it’s that kind of movie, if you want it to be. It’s also about container ships and the death of art.
But underlying all this nonsense (I mean this in the best possible way) is a genuine orphic feeling, like Ossang is a reincarnated troubadour in the age of radio and static. Orpheus goes to the underworld, which is coincidental with the spectacle, breaks his lyre and comes back. But what can he do now? Just be a troubadour of troubled, textured ambiances, a spirit which is farthest from the exhausted zeitgeist of punk as can be.
And I know this is an absurd thing to claim in a movie where Joe Strummer is running around playing Vince Taylor and monologuing about gonads, but bear with me. What matters about the historical Taylor is the evanescent iconography of an icon (like Strummer, and Presley) and the fact that he is a pilot and can get us all aloft to the beginning of the picture, this radio-on road movie that takes to the skies as apotheosis.
This another thing about Ossang’s perversity—the poetic logics of the films are unconstant. This is why, unlike other films, you can watch them over and over, and watch them without fetishizing a former self. Without the trap and ornaments of nostalgia. Ossang may not change much, but the film does, and you must.