Plasticity and Precarity: Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie (1998)

Nicole Brenez

Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie (Nappun yeonghwa) organises a systematic parallel montage between two street tribes: a gang of delinquent teenagers; and bums who are, for the most part, elderly. One of the formal stakes of the film consists of placing two economies of representations against each other: the young people inside a regime of grand fiction, where derealisation, delirium and heterogeneity go so far as to suddenly transform themselves into burlesque cartoon; and the bums inside a regime of documentary capture, thus bringing in a reality principle against which the film never ceases crashing.

Between these two poles, we have a ‘making of’ representation: shooting, direction of actors, credits ... It’s a matter of exhibiting the making of the film in order to assert its permanent failure, as the very title announces: a timeless, bottomless bad movie. Far from the classical uses of a making-of structure – as a reflexive logic of disillusion, distanciation, contemplation – its use here consist of describing the work of the film as being, in effect, as fragile and under threat as its protagonists, whether bums or teenagers. Fully knowing what faces them, these protagonists, young or old, have no future: whether they die swiftly right before our eyes; or they remain stoned in the eternal present of survival, within the immobility of misery which glues them to their spot on the street. Thus, we must take account of this intensity, this existential economy: they are figures who are dying in the absolute fragility of the instant.

The solution adopted by Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie is to centre itself on gesture: the basic narrative unit is no longer the scene, the wandering itinerary or even an action, but human movement itself. This is evident (for example) when the film, in the course of a bowling scene, leaves behind the players  – who still play the game, albeit with no respect for the rules – in order to concentrate on the female spectators who are happy to simply move about anarchically, without purpose or reason, in pure corporeal wastefulness. The film thus shows simultaneously the ephemeral present and its ineluctable destruction, and turns its entire formal energy to the aim of rendering what is noisy, volatile, useless.

Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie revindicates a plasticity of the draft or sketch, and raises it to the level of an aesthetic ideal. Not for any reason of mere formal provocation, but at the level of a moral exigency: to invent a plasticity of precarity.

Bad Movie represents a triumphant event of liberatory formalism. In the face of what it depicts – misery, death, loss, cruelty, youth wasted in pure loss – the film elaborates this demand: that cinema either go mad from anguish, or crazy with energy.

From Traitement du Lumpenprolétariat par le cinéma d’avant-garde (Paris: Seguier Archimbaud, 2006), pp. 72-75.