Lord Jim

Annotation for KRRR! 2019

More than a decade before the legendary nightmare in the form of the Philippine filming of the "Conradian" Apocalypse (1979), Peter O'Toole trudged through the wet Cambodian mud in the shoes of the titular hero of the "Conradian" Lord Jim (1965). "The three months we spent in Cambodia were horrible. Absolute hell. Nightmare. Everyone knee­‑deep in lizards and god­‑like insects. Oh, horror," O'Toole later said. "The horror," laments Marlon Brando in Apocalypse. "The horror," laments the staff adapting some of Joseph Conrad's literary works, in the case of Lord Jim, the story of the model sailor Jim, who succumbs to fear under the weight of the situation and embarks on a journey to redemption.

Following the example of the original novel, director and screenwriter Richard Brooks divided his film into three blocks. The tension between cowardice and courage serves him as the drive for the narrative, which is rich in outlets and always points forward. Each of the three blocks of the film acts as a sub­‑episode on Jim's journey to redemption. Like an episode with its own goals, obstacles, characters and genre schemes. In addition, the first block is accompanied by an off­‑screen narrator who, despite the ambivalence of the novel, helps the viewer navigate the boundaries between Jim's fantasy and the real event. Thus, Brooks replaced the compositional playfulness of the fragmented novel with compositional concentration when working with individual levels, meanings and motifs.

A sympathetic blue­‑eyed blond played by Peter O'Toole, who trudges through an inhospitable landscape, the title of the film as an address to the main character, large decorative sets, ingenious work with the scenic space and cinematographer Freddie Young. Some might see connections between Lord Jim and David Lean's famous film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which was screened in Krnov in 2008. But the desert adventure of the British officer Lawrence was characterized by emptiness: the landscape shots contained a large number of empty plans and the characters' faces were photographed against a simple background. The style of Lord Jim's film, on the other hand, is characterized by condensing, whether between shots in montage sequences and subjective multiple exposures, or, on the contrary, in long shots, within which they compete for the number of characters and props in deep space.

Libor Vrážel