#it reasserts 'canon' amidst the 'non-canon'

[emerald-amidst-gold]

WIP Whenever

Thank you @dungeons-and-dragon-age for the tag! You got me at a good time because I got goodies~! >:D

Taking a break and playing Inquisition got the inspiration flowing again! So, I have some Solas and Mhairi bonding time! :D

I encountered the Dalish clan in the Exalted Plains, and this is what was born of it:

---

“Da’len,” Solas approached where Mhairi was sitting on the log by the fire, arms at his sides and brow furrowed with subconscious concern. “...have you seen Fane by chance?”

He was beginning to get worried. For the more he searched the Dalish encampment, as small as it was here, along the creek of Halin’sulahn, the less he saw any hide or hair of Fane. His dragon was by no means hard to spot, hair like new fallen snow upon black cliff side and very presence dominating, even if the man sought to make himself unnoticeable. Although, in this instance, Solas knew why Fane was possibly making himself scarce; memories. Painful, painful memories. However, that was why it was imperative that he find the dual being, to stop a spiral before it became a vortex.

The young woman had seemingly been repairing the segment of her robes that had unfortunately met the edge of a Freeman’s blade when Solas spotted her. He himself was giving the other clan’s members distance, so it had taken him a bit to locate the young woman, but it was for the best. He, too, had difficult memories of the Dalish, blades brandished for naught but truth, words hurled in every direction that sounded home to his folly, that spread the guilt like he did plaster and paint. So, it was best for everyone, Inner Circle and Dalish, if he kept his ‘delusional stories’ and ‘maddened opinions’ to himself. He was busy at present, anyway. His own discomfort meant little when he knew there was someone suffering worse than he.

Mhairi blinked, the movements of her hands pausing from where they were delicately weaving twine and thread. Icy blue eyes and a youthful face marked with the maroon of June turned upwards to him, abandoning repairs to regard him easily.

“Fane?”, Mhairi said his sought after’s name, her slightly darker brows drawing together as she tilted her head a bit. “He was with you, wasn’t he?”

Solas shook his head, dread growing within his heart. “No.”, he said simply, doing his to keep tone calm, professional as he kept the connection of eyes that began to melt, concern beginning to show in them. “I have not seen him since before sunset. I presumed he had been with you. Evidently, I was mistaken.”

Mhairi’s delicate features turned downwards, petites hands curling within pure white samite bordered with pink vestment. “...You haven’t seen him at all? Maybe with Cole? Sera?”, she asked, lilting voice shaking a bit with a panic born of the past and all it harmfully bore for the two soulful siblings.

Solas shook his head at each question, letting his expression soften a bit. He had not wished to alarm the young woman, but he saw now that he had been foolish to think his inquiry would have done anything but. Fane had spoken of Mhairi’s anxiety concerning abandonment, and Solas himself had seen such an acute episode when the man had been thought lost in the Fade during Adamant. He should have been more delicate in his delivery, more aware of his words and the effect they had.

Ill-suited as ever, Solas berated within the safety of his mind, releasing a quiet sigh through his nose as he gazed down as the now fidgeting woman. Nails were picking apart sewn thread, undoing work redone without thought, and a deeper frown etched itself upon normally bubbly features. Ice-colored orbs were staring pointedly at the article, but were hazy, distant, lost to the flow of putrid memories. Solas matched the deep frown with a small one of his own, taking a tentative step towards where Mhairi was seated to kneel down in front of her.

He had to fix what he had wrought--in many ways, but for now, he would focus on a light that echoed as much of the past as his unaccounted for dragon did.

“Mhairi,”, Solas called out to the slightly trembling woman, keeping his tone soft, guiding. “Ir abelas. My words were poorly chosen. I didn't mean to alarm you, to cause you to fear.” He managed a tiny smile when long locks of platinum shifted with the rising of a head, reconnection. “I am sure your brother is close by. I merely have not been able to deduce where he may have gone when in concern to the Dalish. That is all.”

Solas watched as the slight tremors in pale hands and lithe shoulders lessened. There was still a concerned frown upon pink lips and the tell-tale signs of dampness upon ice-blue, but he had succeeded in drawing a bright mind back from the edge. At least, he hoped he had. It was hard to tell with his dragon’s sister, even if she was far more open than her sibling. Perhaps her inherent bubbliness blinded him at times, made him believe there were no troubles to ponder, nightmares to banish. Everyone had a mask they used to protect themselves, and he was truly foolish to forget that simple truth.

“N-no, I’m--”, Mhairi tried to say, but released only a shuddering sigh. Fingers begin to pluck and pull at thread once more, but with more care, more awareness this time.

Solas kept a watchful eye on the Dalish woman, noting her breathing was shaky, but not quickening with encroaching panic. The tremors had not returned, but neither had full light to her eyes. The spiral was still swirling, then. He would have to choose his words carefully, and carefully he shall.

“Take your time, da’len.”, Solas encouraged, gingerly reaching out with his own hands to still the ones curling and clenching into purity. His skin flinched a tad when Mhairi’s did, but relaxed when she did so in turn. “Everything will be right where you left it. It will not disappear, vanish as if but a dream.”

A sharp, but quiet intake of breath had Solas freezing up a bit, fear gripping his heart like an owl's talons snatched up a mouse. Had he spoken out of turn again? He had not meant to--!

“Ma serannas, lethallan.”

Solas blinked, the guilt and dread of his mind stilling as he refocused on the woman in front of him. Ice and turquoise regarded him kindly, serenity in their deepest depths and a watery, but grateful smile played with plushness of flesh, curving like the softest of a halla’s horns. Maroon ink was lax, further serenity carved into the heart shaped visage before him. There was no ridicule, no scorn, no retribution in any of those features, and that weighty revelation had Solas sucking in a steadying breath of his own, quiet, but deep. 

How many people would he continue to witness staring at him with such...forgiveness before his own mask cracked from the blow? He did not deserve that release, that depth of understanding and emotion from Mhairi, from Fane, from anyone, and yet, it was there--pure as the snow white hair of his beloved, gold as the spirit that cascaded down...down…

...one of his people.

Solas let his eyelids droop, gingerly taking one of Mhairi’s hands into both of his own. That echoing appendage was joined by its counterpart, squeezing with both as they joined to soothe in tandem. That silent gesture of understanding had Solas closing his eyes fully, heart tight, soul weeping for him to speak, to divulge. Why was he suddenly so overcome with the want to do such?

She would not understand, Solas chided himself, attempting to ward away how his whole being yearned to greet another soul like his dragon’s, like his. She would react adversely. For myself, and for her, I must keep the truth hidden. Now is not the time nor place for such things. There will be much to tell her when the time is right, from myself and Fane. She does not need that burden, that crisis of faith, now. Even if--no.

Solas let out a soft sigh, carefully slipping his hands from the warmth of Mhairi’s own to place them back within his lap. He registered the look of gentle confusion in both delicate features and twinkling eyes, but he once again shoved away the inherent urge to explain. He had let himself falter, allowed his mind to splinter, and now he would repair it, shore up the foundation so it may weather any other storm that would come to pass.

He must find the one who would hold his bloodied hand with one of their own, but even that laced his heart with guilt-filled poison. How much more would he touch and destroy before he perished? Two lights, and they would find themselves extinguished if he continued to be selfish, but...he couldn’t help it, couldn’t fight the want to belong, to be accepted.

To coexist. How pitiful he was. How pitiful.

---

...You have no idea how hard I am resisting on making a female Fane to fully romance this wolf right now. I need to finish canon Fane first, but...HNNNNGH. I just want to analyze the hell out of how Solas changes with romanced Lavellan. *puts face on screen* He called Fane ‘lethallan’ the other day while I was playing, and I DIED AND SCREECHED. ...I always do. *slinks away*

Fun fact: At the beginning of my writing hobby, Solas and Mhairi were supposed to be romantically together! :D 

Tagging (if you wanna, you beautiful people! <3): @oxygenforthewicked @noire-pandora @little-lightning-lavellan @the-dreadful-canine @blueheaded

[iandeleonwrites]

“Slam Your Doors in Golden Silence”: Marxist Applications and the Democratization of Comedy in Jacques Tati’s Playtime

In 1936 Charlie Chaplin dealt the first great cinematic blow to the modern industrial age with his celebrated American classic Modern Times. In 1967 the next decisive blow was thrown by a less canonized French comic director, Jacques Tati, with his quietly incisive epic Playtime. 

In the case of Chaplin, his Modern Times thrusts the beloved “Little Tramp” character in an increasingly de-humanized and alienating American workforce transitioning from the Great Depression to the pre-WWII industrial boom. 

Tati, who despite not being a household name in America had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1956 and won the Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958, channeled the international goodwill of “Monsieur Hulot” into a subtle exploration of isolation and conformity in the rapidly globalizing postwar Western society. 

Interestingly, both films also reflect the attempts by their creators to retire the immensely popular characters they had given birth to years earlier. This could account for the initial unenthusiastic reception at the domestic box office for both films, as well as their creators’ struggle to fully let the characters go. Chaplin would go on to include a Tramp-esque character in The Great Dictator (1940), while Tati would reluctantly return to Hulot one final time in Trafic (1971).  

Countless parallels may be drawn between these two great clowns of international cinema, but it is also worthwhile to discuss the point at which both artists most differ. In a 1976 BBC Omnibus program pointedly titled Jacques Tati in Monsieur Hulot’s Work, the director speaks about the signature Chaplin and Tati styles in terms of “active” and “passive” comedy. 

While Chaplin would often be the active instigator of a gag, usually thinking he’s had “a marvelous idea”, Tati claims that his own approach with Hulot relies on other parties misinterpreting some important element of the action, resulting in the oblivious Hulot’s genuine surprise at the conclusion of the gag. In this way, Tati’s Hulot becomes less of a classic fool and more of an everyman, struggling to understand his place amidst the ever-changing rules and expectations of modern life. 

Tati’s is indeed a comedy of inclusion, of democracy, and in no film was that given greater expression than in his ambitious folly Playtime, which the director concedes “will always be my last film”. Through the embrace of the 70mm widescreen format, his eschewing of technical directorial flares, and his radical approach to narrative storytelling, Tati’s Playtime embodies a style of filmmaking that is at once celebratory and critical of the emphasis on uniformity and collectivism that came to define the postwar Capitalist system in the West and the Soviet system in the East. 

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama wrote about the erosion of political dichotomies in the post-Cold War era and the emergence of a new, global synthesis of ideologies that found its expression in Western-style liberal democracy, the “final form of human government”. 

Crafting Playtime in the midst of Cold War tensions, Jacques Tati must have come to a similar insight as to the future of the individual in the larger schema of modern society. Tati’s entirely built set of the Paris of the future is a clean, efficient and transparent cipher of international commerce. It is a world that is non-specific, infinitely translatable, and highly inflexible. In this functioning Tativille of a set, the director is able to articulate his vision of a product-driven world in which uniformity and cooperation have conversely lead to alienation and isolation. 

To begin describing Playtime, we must first talk about its groundbreaking use of the high resolution, 70 mm widescreen format. Before 1967, the majority of motion pictures shot in 70mm were musicals, historical dramas, westerns, and high octane action films. While there was the occasional 70mm comedy, these films tended to use the wide format to emphasize a particularly lavish location that merited the photographing of such panoramic vistas. Never before had the format been used to such an extent in the presentation of an office building. 

Tati understood the format to belong to the future, and he employed it, along with a stereophonic sound track, in the service of the viewer of tomorrow. Tati’s camera is so wide that the film has been described as one you don’t simply watch, but browse. The director himself discussed his aspirations in true egalitarian terms, stating his desire for the audience to “watch, look, appreciate the people all around you, who serve you”. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has said that “The richness of the film is not accessible in a single viewing.” Theorist Noel Burch takes this a step further arguing that Playtime is “the first film in the history of cinema that not only must be seen several times, but from several different distances”. 

On the topic of distances, Tati felt quite strongly that the question of cinematic focal lengths was a crucial part of his democratic plan for comedy. The film rarely tells the audience where in the frame to look. At times, sound cues, employing the sophisticated directionality of stereo systems, are used in place of camera work to direct the viewer’s attention. But generally, the film allows viewers to look about the frame wheresoever they please, with no wrong answers, no correct thread to follow. 

“I don’t do close ups or tracking shots to show you what a good director I am.” Indeed, there is a plethora of evidence to suggest that Tati deplored the use of close ups, finding them garish. Playtime itself provides many examples of this negation. But his decision to use primarily wide frame compositions has as much to do with the democratization of the frame as it does with challenging the concept of the individual. 

As mentioned before, by this time in Tati’s career, he was looking to distance himself from the character of Hulot, which had become an international celebrity. Portrayed by Tati, the character of Hulot would thus be relegated to the margins of the narrative, and often to the margins of the frame itself in order for the film to approach a more authentic representation of the everyman comedian. “What I am trying to do is defend the people [...] look at them long enough, and anyone is funny.” 

Actually, the majority of the people within Playtime’s frames are non-actors/non-comedians, There are even more than a few cardboard cutouts as stand ins for the fully articulated human automatons of the business office and the trade show. Occasionally, Tati even finds ways of broadening the authenticity of his comedic situations by letting an extra be themselves. In other words, a businessman plays a businessman, a group of American Army wives play hokey tourists, and a carpenter plays the carpenter. For Tati, these true-to-life congruences provided countless comedic possibilities, imbuing the film with the sense of “naturalism” he so desired. 

The film is also a pioneer in the free-flowing ways it plays with the accepted narrative conventions of its day. In terms of plot, there is barely one to speak of, with film historian Philip Kemp offering his own abstract interpretation, “[it’s about] how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line”. This geometric distillation of the plot goes a long way to describing the film’s relationship to architecture and its impositions. 

During the film’s first section, the characters are all victims of the tyranny of the architect. For all its postulation of simplicity, openness, and transparency, the film focuses on the ways in which Modernist architecture can also alienate, obfuscate, and isolate. Walking in the proscribed method of straight lines and sharp right angles, the characters in this first part of the film are governed by the layout of the architecture. All of that glass, concrete, and steel, rather than liberating the masses, has created an environment that feels impenetrable and immutable. To use a late twentieth century term, this design is not user friendly. 

Prisoners within this labyrinth of reflective surfaces, Hulot and the others spend a great deal of time dealing with missed connections and mis-recognitions. A seemingly infinite number of mirror images (or doppelgangers) and deceptive spatial relationships cause more than a few violent collisions with the architecture. Indeed, the motif of birds, prone to flying into such Modernist sky traps, is repeated several times throughout the film, not the least of which is the visual gag that ends with Hulot crashing into the glass entrance door of the Royal Garden nightclub. 

It is this nightclub/restaurant set piece that concerns the greater part of the film’s final section. While noticeably smaller in scale to the previous sets, the level of complex choreography present within these scenes has prompted Rosenbaum to call it “the most formidable example of mise-en-scene in the history of cinema”. Here is when the straight lines start to become curved, when the people begin to strike back against the tyranny of over-design. 

In fact, one of the principal characters in this section is the architect of the restaurant himself, who in the diegesis of the film is on hand to troubleshoot any last minute problems during the club’s grand opening. As it will turn out, the poorly designed restaurant will prove entirely inadequate for the needs of its waitstaff and its guests. Improvising on the fly, the workers and patrons of this establishment begin to find ways to circumvent the failings of the design by performing an escalating number of tweaks and modifications to suit their needs, a near-literal invocation of Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To return to the technological metaphors of the present, the restaurant undergoes a transformation from a proprietary system to an open-sourced one.

Hulot, the consummate klutz, manages, during an act of kindness, to bring down a large section of the restaurant’s interior facade, causing a chain reaction that ends with the restaurant’s total transformation from a chic nightclub to a classic Parisian cafe. Hulot is sarcastically dubbed the venue’s new architect, and with the pretentious illusions of the restaurant’s designers shattered, the location is able to play host to a vastly more colorful and diverse cast of characters from the city streets. The old world of Tati’s memories making a tiny encroachment into modern society’s relentless drive towards alienation and stratification. 

By the last shots of the film, the characters who we’ve come to follow literally become circular in their patterns of behaviour as the day begins anew with a vast, crawling traffic jam swirling endlessly around a rotary as a carnivalesque theme takes over the musical score, cementing the necessity of play in the great, turbulent carousel of life.  In his own way, Tati has been able to take his meticulously constructed faux reproduction of a Parisian financial district and couch it with such an honest sense of realism and refusal of sensationalism that Truffaut felt compelled to describe it as “a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently”.

True to its name, the film is an invitation to the audience, to discover, but also to create. “After you see the picture two or three times, it stops to be my film, and it starts to be your film.” With its immense depth, monumental scale, and plurality of protagonists, the presentation of Playtime in its original widescreen format represents a high point in emancipatory filmmaking. By ceeding the control of the linear narrative over to the filmgoer, Tati has succeeded in creating a galvanizing experience in which “the movie starts when you leave the cinema”.

-  Ian Deleón  Summer ‘19