A LITTLE STIFF
Minimalism seems to be getting a bad rep in some quarters these days, mainly from critics who identify that movement with the 70s and think that artistic styles should be up-to-date. But what if the artists themselves don’t identify with the overstuffed and unwieldy smorgasbords of 80s and 90s postmodernism? It seems to me that any serious assessment of minimalism has to consider what it manages to include as well as what it leaves out.
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The strengths of this concentrated approach are both comic and analytical; the results never stray from the recognizable and lifelike. The film’s multiple repetitions lampoon the monotony of romantic obsession and the monotony of a life-style that simultaneously supports and thwarts such an obsession. Caveh’s experimental film, which he shows to Erin and another character at one point, is a sort of objective correlative to this syndrome. It consists of endlessly repeated loops of different falls–an emaciated concentration-camp corpse is dumped into an open grave, a plane takes a nosedive, a prizefighter punches out an opponent, and a silent-film comic takes a pratfall. These are followed by animated drawings of the same actions, and all these loops are accompanied by the same musical fragments repeated over and over. The second short film of Caveh’s, which we see in production as well as in finished form, is nothing less than a staged repetition of his first encounter with Erin in the elevator–another instance of his repetition compulsion, in this case a miniature version of A Little Stiff itself. Given this obsessiveness, it’s hardly surprising that when Caveh receives a “climactic” phone message from Erin asking him to call back, he replays her message twice before he even thinks about complying.
(1) Settings. Apart from a few privileged outings, these consist primarily of a bench outside a campus building where Caveh and Greg converse, always about Caveh’s love life; an elevator in one campus building, where Caveh first encounters Erin; the living room in Caveh’s apartment, where he places and receives phone calls; the seventh floor of a campus building, where Erin paints in a studio; a table outside one of the campus buildings, where Caveh and Erin are twice seen sitting. (The first time, they talk; the second time it’s raining, and he holds an umbrella while she writes, chiding him not to watch her.) Once we see a wide path leading from one of the campus buildings in an extended take from a fixed camera position–Caveh’s second encounter with Erin, when he asks if he can come see her paintings. Later, the film broadens this narrow repertoire to include Caveh’s bed, one room in Erin’s apartment, two rooms in her parents’ house, a small strip of southern California beach, and the dark interior of Erin’s car; each of these settings also appears only once.
(6) Behavioral patterns. The most blatant repetition in the film occurs when Caveh is seen on three separate occasions with a plant or flower of some kind–in long shot it’s hard to tell–that he’s attempting to deliver to Erin, each time finding that she isn’t in either one of the seventh-floor studios. Alternating with these scenes (filmed each time from the hallway) are phone calls to Erin placed from his living room in which he delivers three different messages to her answering machine–inviting her to go see a Bresson film, then to go see a Paradjanov film, and finally just asking her to call back. (Later, in person, he invites her to a Tarkovsky film–again without success.) Indeed, trying to find or reach Erin is Caveh’s main activity, followed by evaluating her responses and nonresponses with Greg’s help, trying to make small talk with her or her friends when he does find her, and trying to coerce a more committed response from her (when he calls her during his bad trip and later when he tells her he loves her).
Whether the integrity and unity of A Little Stiff is mainly a matter of what its authors are unable to do, or of what they choose not to do, is ultimately beside the point. What finally matters are the insights, the lived experience, the laughs and grimaces that result from the film’s unity and integrity. And we’re all much richer for them.
