Uncommitted Crime

Of time and discovery

2011-12-24T16:45:00.005Z

Tarkovsky's films are, as everybody knows, about time. What time? The time it takes to wait, to take something in, to wait for something to appear because there is no telling when it might. Better yet: the time it takes for the character and the viewer to understand that what they are waiting for has changed between the beginning of a shot and the end. The time it takes to move from a character (i.e. a variable) to a landscape (i.e. a thought), to let the viewer take in the landscape (whether a meadow or a cathedral), and to move back to the character taking in the landscape as a new element in his (rarely her) problem. Which is why his camera movements are rarely about mapping out a space, and often about revealing a character's discovery of a space. And the difference between revealing (the work of the camera) and discovering (the work of the character) is the difference between looking at a character and looking with a character. In Tarkovsky's films, the camera is in almost complete control, and its work is to seize the instant of discovery, of understanding, of appearance. A camera slowly overtakes a character, pushing him out the right side of the frame, only to let him reappear on the left side of the frame at the end of the camera movement. What has changed? The character has now seen. Seen what? That is the question at the centre of every single one of Tarkovsky's films.

Programming notes

2011-11-14T14:09:00.003Z

This year is my final year at university, leaving me with little time to do anything but study (theoretically: the lure of film-watching is often hard to resist). However, one thing I have thankfully found time for is film programming at our local film society. Having been mostly learning the ropes in my first term, I haven't exactly had time to really think through what programming means, and in which new ways it forces one to think about films. Is any film programmed an endorsement? Are we saying we think it is a good film, or only that it is one worth watching for reasons that might not be related to quality per se? How does one pair films? For that last question, one of my ideals has been Brad Stevens's comments on his ideal double bill of Inland Empire+Céline et Julie vont en bateau, but how possible is that kind of fusion in practice on a regular basis?

Anyway, these are thoughts I need to sort out for myself. I do intend to do that, as I raelly do think that however small the scale I'm doing it on, I really should be using my programming to question and enrich some of my critical positions and a prioris.
In the meantime, however, and since I've written shamefully little in the past few months on this blog, here are the blurbs I wrote for films which were shown and I supported (I have tried not to let marketing interfere too much with criticism, but a certain measure of hyping has been inevitable):

The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

Kurosawa remains famous, especially outside Japan, for his historical epics; yet his contemporary works are often equally stunning, and one of the best windows into the transormations Japan went through following World War Two. With The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa delivers both one of the greatest post-noirs ever and one of the most atypical.

Taking its subject matter from one of the countless corruption scandals that has mired Japanese political life since 1945, The Bad Sleep Well follows a real estate bribery case as it unravels from within. It opens with a breath-taking twenty-minute wedding ceremony that presents social systems as contractual arrangements with no place for individuality, an extraordinary feat of mise-en-scène that uses splendid Scope framings to illustrate power relations between all the main characters while giving us only the barest hints as to where the actual narrative will go. Incorporating elements of noir (high-contrast black and white, a view of society as fundamentally corrupt) and modernism (as in l'Avventura and Psycho, it takes a while to understand who the main characters will be), the film even anticipates many of the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (The Conversation, The Parallax View) in its presentation of impersonal power relations where corruption is not a moral conundrum but a system. In the implacability of its progression as in the total mastery of its directing, it stands as one of the most under-rated monuments of its author and the genre he was working in.

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Without a doubt the most (in)famous of the many Italian exploitation films of the 1970s, Cannibal Holocaust is also one of the best. Mixing the usual violent and erotic elements required to put bums on seats with an equally important but less acknowledged political focus, it is a ferocious satire of the media, and a forerunner of many trends in horror cinema, from Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield.

From the opening, where a reporter's speech about places on Earth that still live as if in the stone age, with survival of the fittest as the only rule, plays over images of downtown Manhattan, it becomes clear that the film has more on its agenda than just shocks. It is split in two parts, the first of which sees an anthropologist going into the Amazon jungle to look for four documentary film-makers who vanished without a trace after attempting to film a tribe of cannibals deep inside the “Green Inferno”. This sequence sets up all the archetypes of the exploitation film (civilized whites going into the jungle and encountering evil savages), archetypes the film will spend the remaining half deconstructing. As the anthropologist discovers the team's footage, it becomes clear that any image of savagery the film might have offered possesses its mirror in the horrors the young American film-makers committed. Both deconstruction of media reporting, arresting blood-and-guts spectacle, and comment on Western colonialism more generally, Cannibal Holocaust remains a milestone of exploitation cinema.

Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

It says something about our awareness of world cinema that two of Sokurov's greatest films, Days of Eclipse and The Second Circle, are unavailable in this country. Mother and Son, however, is. A major achievement by anyone's standards, it is one of the most original films of the 90s.

Annointed by Tarkovsky as his heir, Sokurov shares many characteristics with the master: a measured sense of time pushed almost to the point of stasis, a deep mysticism that finds expression in languid shots of nature, and an almost mythological view of the Russian people. Mother and Son, which brings these traits to their aesthetic culmination, details the last few days that a son spends with his mother before she dies. The two enjoy each other's company, delve into the past, and take walks in the fields to admire nature one last time. Sokurov's use of distorting lenses transforms his characters into icons, and the painterly visions of nature he gives us here are among the most gorgeous landscape shots ever committed to film. The moments of contemplation add up to reveal an undercurrent of muted grief, and as the film unfolds, its' silent epiphanies gain a cumulative impact unlike anything else in current cinema. A quietly devastating masterpiece.

Scribblings on A Wife Confesses

2011-09-12T11:35:00.015+01:00

-Jonathan Rosenbaum has repeatedly linked Masumura to Ray, Fuller, Aldrich and Tashlin, but after seeing this film, it is impossible not to be reminded that he initially worked as Antonioni's assistant. The treatment of love as a momentary reprieve against pervasive alienation (of which loneliness and imposed interdependence are only two different forms), the impossibility of it lasting due to moral requirements which are only social requirements in disguise... Without necessarily aiming for it, Masumura has made one of the few films that does not require a point of view. He posits subjectivity as never quite within reach but always slightly beside the point. What matters is not full understanding of, or identification with, any one person's emotions, but what goes on between two clashing subjectivities. He does this using a method of which the Japanese are the masters: the human face is always on the verge of vanishing, at the very limit of being discernable.

-Again, Jonathan Rosenbaum: " It’s a courtroom thriller about a young widow who’s being tried for her part in the death of her abusive older husband while they were mountain climbing, and it hinges on the haunting question of what she was thinking when she made the split-second decision to cut the rope connecting the two of them."
And again, I think he's only partly right. For he loses sight of the many, many ways in which Masumura is always making us refocus on something else: while the trial goes on, the question of guilt is not examined directly, but under the aspect of emotion: are the two in love? For the viewer, the wife's share of guilt in her husband's death (who is presented in a deeply unsympathetic way, which only increases the effect) is a secondary consequence of that fundamental question. When the verdict is announced, Masumura cuts short the judge's announcement and has it pronounced by a bored journalist who leaves the room. The story then seems to focus on the two lovers' relationship, but this is precisely when th issue of guilt becomes central.
If in doubt, consider this image,

and consider the fact that the soundtrack to it is not the sound of the waves, but a music strongly suggesting anxiety.

In fact, from the very start, it becomes clear through framing that the film will be as much about the lovers being apart as about them being together:

Masumura never lets us fall in love with any of the two lovers.

-In this film, Masumura pays back his hommage to Oshima, who had defended him in the fifties. Some of the shots could be straight out of Cruel Tales of Youth:

In fact, one of the elements that make the film so incredibly fertile is its point at the center of so many movements: one of the many films under heavy influence by the European art cinema of the 50s (Cronaca di un amore); one of the pinnacles of the Japanese studio system (Daiei); one of the greatest examples anywhere of a film made inside the system, against the system; an aesthetic inquiry into the work of the emerging generation of new waves, throughout the world but especially in Japan... Anyone even remotely interested in how Japanese culture changed in the 1950s-60s will have to come to terms with this nexus.

2011-06-25T10:30:00.003+01:00

"Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted."

(here)

2011-06-08T12:40:00.005+01:00

These few images, from John Gianvito's Vapor Trail (Clark), are part of a montage which is one of the many inserted in the film as part of its dialectic between history and the present. Gianvito's approach is particularly enriching in that not only does it avoid a linear vision of history and narration, it also, as a consequence of this, points out the multiplicity and intricacy of causes behind any one situation.

But in this particular case, it does something else, too. The montage of pictures of American soldiers fighting, or ready to fight, belongs to one of the two archetypes of war photography (the other one being that of the dead bodies). What remains off-screen in both cases is the other side (the enemy firing back ; the soldier who killed the victim) as an active agent, interacting in the same sphere and time frame as the subject being photographed. Gianvito, by inscribing this sequence in his dialectic of present (oral narratives) and history (narratives based on documents), enables a similar dialectic to take place between the images being shown and what their off-screen (hors-champ) reality is : he extends the simple frame of the picture and includes the present reality of the Philippines as the direct but un-represented off-screen space of those marines, a deployment through not only space (the other side of the war line) but also time.

2011-06-02T12:09:00.001+01:00

Critique: "reconstructions of the internal logic of ideas, deductions of the intellectual and sociological conditions of their possibility, withering exposures of their inconsistencies and omissions."

Here.

Advertising

2011-04-17T10:40:00.004+01:00

Having thought about it a bit recently after a conversation with a friend, it's slightly more clear to me why La Haine seems so tepid in comparison to Ma 6-t va Crack-er, and equally why La Haine is by far the more popular of the two (the fact that Richet's film is banned and therefore unavailable obviously also plays a role), and the more easily sanctioned one (has any self-respecting french middle-class liberal person not seen La Haine by the age of 25?).
It's not enough to say that La Haine is just a sociological speadsheet that simply announces trouble ("Jusqu'ici tout va bien": for how much longer?) while Ma 6-t va Crack-er actively calls for revolution. The more fundamental difference lies in how the two films approach their audiences in relation to what they ask of them. Kassovitz strives to make the banlieues into a subject of discussion, to make us sympathize with the "racaille", to show that they live in conditions which no-one should have to accept, in a phrase (with all the solemnity implied by the italics): to make us understand these people. Its point-of-view is exterior, that of a sociological tourist, designed to enable bourgeois viewers to approach these "problems" disguised as characters. Its impulse is to translate the "racaille" for a non-banlieue audience. As such, there is nothing antagonistic about its position: it seeks acknowledgement and approval from what it theoretically criticizes. If we, as a middle-class left-wing audience, have grown to like these characters, then his mission will have been done (the good old "why can't we all just get along?" solution to all social woes). The film critic who called its aesthetic that of advertising (in Panic, which I've talked about on this blog before) is doubly right: beyond advertising itself as a film (black-and-white as a cachet of "art", the socially significant theme...), it is also, fundamentally, an ad for its subject. It sells the banlieue as a subject of conversation, and its inhabitants as a phenomenon that needs the (non-banlieue) audience's sympathy.
Ma 6-t..., on the other hand, refuses to seek approval. Its defiance (sometimes heavy-handed, as in the slow travelling shot onto the police badge) is one that doesn't look for acknowledgement but demands it. Its characters talk of politics in terms of their own powerlessness rather than in terms of metaphors. Richet is aware that the middle-class viewers so impressed by La Haine are part of the sociological order he is fighting, and as such, he sees no need to humor them. Ma 6-t va Crack-er does not seduce: it fights, and on its own terms.

2011-02-22T03:35:00.011Z

Hard as it might be to describe, La Bocca del Lupo is probably one of the most beautiful and important films to have come out of Europe this century. Most refreshingly, it shows an attentiveness to, and a non-condescending sympathy for, the downtrodden of society barely seen in Italian cinema since Pasolini, and quite unique in today's European cinema. Part portrait of a city (Genoa, city of migrants as the first offscreen monologue tells us, through which Enzo wanders without recognizing it after more than twenty years spent in prison), part commemoration of its popular classes, part portrait of a couple (Enzo and Mary, a transsexual whom he met in prison and who narrates long segments of the film), it is a film completely at ease creating new rhythms, alternating between quiet contemplation and lyrical montage, between Mary's retrospective voice-over narration and recordings of audio tapes sent by her to Enzo while he was still in jail.

Ostensibly but only imperfectly a documentary, it operates outside most assumptions of the genre. Though the interplay between documentary and fiction has been one of the leitmotivs of 21^stcentury cinema, it might be more accurate to say in this case that Pietro Marcello completely reconfigures the relationship of reality to narrative, since what is at stake, fundamentally, is the ability to narrate and remember lived experience. The whole film, in many ways, can be seen as the creation of conditions which enable Enzo and Mary to finally transmit their story. Before they are able to do that, in a sequence of astonishing simplicity that takes up the final quarter of the film, they will have had to go through the whole range of narrative processes open to the film-maker and themselves : mythology (the first scene, with its timeless unidentified voice-over, and its primal vision of man and the sea), poetry (or rather music, but we know how closely the two have long been connected, and are here joined again as opera serves as a counterpoint to archival images of the city's past working classes at work or at play), day-to-day observation, epistolary interchange (the audio tapes which Enzo and Mary used as letters to each other), and genre film-making (in a montage of posters following a comment that with a physique as distinctive as his, Enzo could have been an actor).

It is important to point out here how forgotten the experience Marcello and Enzo work together to excavate now is in Europe. With the slow disintegration of the European working class and its exportation to (mostly) Asia, films paying attention to the experience of the poverty that remains (the working class in its traditional sense may be fragmented and weak, but the number of poor and disenfranchised is only rising), and matching that investigation with formal enquiries into its representation, have been few and far-between (the Dardennes, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche). Almost completely absent has been attention paid to the memory of the working class experience. La Bocca del Lupo emerges as an absolutely essential film in that regard precisely because it pays such close attention to the way that memory can be narrated, an attention that extends from speech (the Genovese dialect, in all its modulations) and voices (Mary's unforgettably raspy voice, whose tenderness comes across slowly but with unmistakeable power) to Marcello's own strategies, and just how far he can put them at Enzo and Mary's service. Marcello's approach here is largely contrapuntal : weaving together historic footage of the Genoa Enzo would have grown up in with images of the city today, documenting its changes, the replacement of one type of popular experience by another (with which both Enzo and Marcello seem less at ease). By never losing sight of the fundamental difference between the means open to Enzo and Mary (speech) and to himself (film) to tell the same story, and yet using these differences in a mutually enriching rather than conflictual manner, Marcello has created one of the most upright films to come out of Italy in a long time.

A few minutes of Videogramme einer Revolution

2011-02-05T09:32:00.003Z

Shot-reverse-shot as a political battle: two opposition leaders talk with their own consistuencies in two separate rooms (but probably the same building). Both are writing a speech, in other words setting up a programme, in other words setting themselves up as leaders to replace Ceausescu. The videos of these moments don't show any time codes, so there's no way of showing for sure the synchronicity of those two scenes. But Farocki and Ujica edit them as shot-reverse-shot, alternating moments from the two rooms almost symmetrically. The use of this now automatic construct (in fact, it might be possible to make the case that it was more automatic when the film was made than it is now) has rarely emphasized its own artificiality as much. These are two shots which clearly don't answer each other in narrative, geographic or maybe even temporal terms. What brings them together is, of course, their political significance. Which is not something that can be identified by a camera (as the commentary to the opening shot makes clear), only by those who wield them and edit the footage. While the whole film is concerned not only by the actual, concrete political moments of a revolution but also the breakdown of visual systems that accompany them, this scene shows Farocki and Ujica consciously attempting something else, something that as a gesture is pretty amazing: both a deconstruction of a pattern of commercial cinema, and a reconstruction of it, accepting its artificiality, as a formal expression of the plural possibilities opened up by the revolution. As such, it's a shot-counter-shot that owes much more to Eisenstein than it does to Hollywood.

Time warp

2011-01-28T14:24:00.005Z

How else to explain a shock such as this? In the middle of Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (which is astonishing for how much of the original novel it maintains to capture, despite butchering absolutely key elements and one of the three brothers of the title, on top of all the other reasons), marked by its debts to Dostoevsky (i.e. the Russian 1870s), formalist strategies partly inherited from the Russian montage school (the Russian 1920s) and sound experiments of Weimar Germany, a shot suddenly materializes which could come straight out of an American film of the 1970s, or maybe rather a French or Czech film of the mid-1960s, or some such miraculous (post-Anna-Karina-in-Vivre-Sa-Vie) period. Gruschenka gives herself up to the music, swirls around with the other gypsies at the inn, Dimitri watches her as very few men have watched a woman, the camera follows the gypsies, the gypsies look at the camera, as the music rises to a crescendo... The camera is drunk.

Quick reaction

2011-01-07T16:25:00.002Z

Far from me the idea of taking sides in the whole realism mini-debate unwittingly initiated by Adrian Martin last month in De Filmkrant, but his new column, which comes back to that whole debate, strikes me as deeply flawed intellectually and methodologically, and slightly disingenuous, in at least two ways.
I'm referring especially to the last paragraph, in which Martin calls "symptomatic" both the making of those films, and their critical reception. Fine enough, but that's opening a (deceptively simple) can of worms which is simply not dealt with, and which really must be if his argument is to stand any ground: symptomatic of what? What is the "broader pattern of cultural-political correspondences that is necessarily beyond them"? If their common denominator is the illusion of realism, why is the illusion of realism reappearing now? What are the forces shaping this, to what extent do they originate outside or inside cinema? There's a difference between identifying the symptom and the cause, and unless that wider force-field is defined (in his defence, something too big to bite off in a Filmkrant column), I don't see how Martin can make his argument stand.
Secondly, what I find slightly dishonest about that paragraph is Martin's unwillingness to consider his own reaction as equally symptomatic, which would be a logical thing a gentleman-like intellectual sparring partner might do (I don't consider his assertion that he doesn't like being considered symptomatic either up to the task). Not only that, but identifying and questioning the dividing line between the two different "symptoms" would throw light on the whole problematic on a much deeper level: the flip-side to that "symptom" as an alternative? Or as a different form of the same problem?

Dimitri Kirsanoff

2010-11-18T15:10:00.002Z

Dimitri Kirsanoff is probably one of the most contradictory mixtures of the traditional (often in the conservative sense of the word) and the radical avant-gardist I can think of right now. His subject matter is drawn from the archetypes of the XIXth century, the plethora of nostalgic recreations of rural figures designed for the consumption of those who left the country-side to go to the city. The myth of their iconicity, of the timeless nature of what they represent, is in itself a symptom of the tensions in which these archetypes arise: the need, when faced with the ferocious change represented by the city, to set against it an "eternal" countryside which, in fact, was of course itself changing due to the same influences that made XIXth century cities what they were (urban migration being only one of the ways in which this change expressed itself).
Yet Kirsanoff, at the same times, is profoundly aware, not of the historicity of his figures (they seem to belong to a different age, something before Griffith, or even Zola, let alone Gance), but of the historicity of the world they move in. Maybe that's what gives his films such a schizophrenic aspect: Kirsanoff as an artist pays enormous attention to "the world" as an abstraction and as something to be presented formally. Many of the montage sequences in Ménilmontant are breath-taking in the understanding they show of the modern world as speed, as alienation from processes now too vast to be grasped by a single individual. Whenever the world intervenes in the story, however, it is as an icon (see, for example, the quasi-complete parataxis used in presenting the maternity hospital in the same film).
It's also important to point out that for all his formal beauty and the breath-taking audacity of some of his sequences (not only the montage sequences already mentioned, but also, for example, the flirting scene by the river, again in Ménilmontant; or the river pouring into the window in Les Berceaux), his archetypes are actively conservative ones, and any case to be made for Kirsanoff would have to take this into account. Women seem hardly to be seen as anything other than victims or mothers, or both (Ménilmontant again, the mother rocking the child in Les Berceaux). When they take action that goes against social norms (L'Arrière-Saison, which not coincidentally takes place in a timeless environment completely isolated from the outside world), it is only as the diturbing element, the solving of which will be a return to the traditional familial order (with nothing hinting towards change). For all this, Kirsanoff seems completely uninterested in men: they are just as equally archetypes, whether absent (the sailor-father-husband of Les Berceaux, or the wood-cutter husband in L'Arrière-Saison, even though he's on screen about half of the time) or engaging in harmful conduct (the charismatic no-good charmer in Ménilmontant). Which again, makes that eye-in-the-eye sequence by the river in Ménilmontant (again, is it a coincidence that this could only happen, implausibly, somewhere rural, obviously removed from the Parisian quartier that gives the film its name?) so refreshing: for a few seconds, Kirsanoff lets his actors just breathe, look at each other, touch themselves. They are free of expectations, free of any narrative stakes, giving themselves completely to the other and the camera (which, for a few moments, are one and the same).

I haven't seen Rapt yet, but intend to soon, so more thoughts on Kirsanoff may follow.

More Nicole Brenez lists...

2010-10-21T04:31:00.003+01:00

I will do some blogging other than just posting NB lists here, I promise! Even though those seem to be quite succesfull, I do want this blog to be something else than just lists.

But in the meantime, here is what Brenez contributed to the Film Comment poll at the end of the decade. I found it after typing "Nicole Brenez Perfect Day", after watching that film on Ubuweb. Of all the films on her end-of-decade list I've seen so far, this one had the least impact on me. It's a very strange mixed bag of moments of intense sideration, succeeding each other in what seemed an almost mechanical fashion. It's also a beautiful paen to the human face, and the "karaoké girl" is endlessly cativating. Maybe one of the issues I had with it was one of intertextuality: the credits at the end show how much comes from Ange Leccia's other works, and since I haven't seen any (exceot for Stridura which isn't included) I didn't quite know what I was watching, or how it fitted in(speaking of intertextuality and human face, I plan to watch Garrel's Les Hautes Solitudes sometime this year). It also brigns up a few thoughts about pop songs as the memories and dreams of our time, since images can be so endlessly modulated and modified (the splendid Saturday Night Fever sequence).

Anyway, without further ado:

#

Even if pools about art are absurd, I participated because of my deep esteem for Gavin and Mark, and to leave some informations about rare and precious films. I’m feeling happy for the great and essential Peter Hutton. But I found the result almost totally americano-american, a usual problem in the world of images and even in the avant-garde/experimental field, who should be more vigilant about that.
So here was my own list, even if I could have mentioned hundred of other important films.

Nicole Brenez for Gavin Smith – Film Comment
50 great avant-garde films/events 2000-2009

0778 man.road.river – Marcellvs l, Brazil, 2004
11 000 km Far from New York – Orzu Sharipov, Tajikistan, 2004
13 Lakes – James Benning, U.S., 2005
365 Day Project – Jonas Mekas, U.S., 2007
The Action – David Matarasso, France, 2004
Addio Lugano bella – Francesca Solari, Switzerland/Germany, 2000
Aéroport Hammam-Lif – Slim Ben Chiekh, Tunisia, 2007
Aldebaran – Hugo Verlinde, France, 2001
Algérie Tours/Détours – Oriane Brun-Moschetti & Leïla Morouche, France, 2007
L’Arrière-saison – Philippe Grandrieux, France, 2006
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty – Jonas Mekas, U.S., 2000
Atomic Park – Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, France, 2004
At Sea – Peter Hutton, USA, 2007
Barbie también puede estar tristee – Albertina Carri, 2001, Argentina
Behind this Soft Eclipse – Eva Heller, U.S., 2004
Bouquets 25-30 – Rose Lowder, France, 2002-2005
Le bombardement la porte des perles – Richard Kerr, Canada, 2004
Border – Laura Waddington, Belgium, 2004
Boyzone – Clarisse Hahn, France, 1998-2009
Bingo Show – Christelle Lheureux, France, 2003
Camera War – Lech Kowalski, International, 2009
Capitalism: Slavery, Ken Jacobs, EU, 2006
Cargo – Laura Waddington, Belgium, 2001
Carps Swimming in Color – Helga Fanderl, France, 2007
Charlemagne 2 – Piltzer – Pip Chodorov, France, 2002
Chic Point. Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints – Sharif Waked, Israël, 2003
A Circle Around the Sun – Ali Cherri, Lebanon, 2005
Les Ciseaux – Mounir Fatmi, Morocco, 2003
Dans le noir du temps – Jean-Luc Godard, Suisse, 2002
Deep Play – Harun Farocki, Allemagne, 2007
Degradation #1, X-Ray : Shroud of Security – James Schneider, International, 2006
De Imago – Patrice Kirchhofer, France, 2009
Dithyrambe à Dionysos. Avec la nuit reviendra le temps de l’oubli – Béatrice Kordon, France, 2007
Double Take – Johan Grimonprez, Belgique/Allemagne/Pays-Bas, 2009
Dream Work (For Man Ray) – Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2001
Easter Morning – Bruce Conner, U.S., 2008
Elding – Marylène Negro, France, 2006
Empire – Edouard Salier, France , 2005, 4′
Escape – Alain Declerq, France, 2001
Etat de choc – Augustin Gimel, France/U.S., 2001
Europa 2005 – 27 Octobre – Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2005, France, 11’
Filmer ce désert – Régis Hébraud, France, 2009
Flesh – Edouard Salier, France, 2005
Flòr da baixa – Mauro Santini, Italia, 2004
Geneva – Augustin Gimel, France, 2004
An Injury to One – Travis Wilkerson, USA, 2002
In Public – Jia Zangke, Chine, 2001
Instructions for a light & sound machine – Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2005
In This House – Akram Zaatari, Lebanon, 2005
Je comprends moi aussi le langage des oiseaux – Sabine Massenet, France, 2000
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thaïland, 2009
Manifeste – Hélène Deschamps et Hugo Verlinde, France, 2002
Meditations on Revolution, Part IV: Greenville, MS – Robert Fenz, USA, 2001
Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City – Robert Fenz, USA, 2003
Mirages – Olivier Dury, France, 2007
Mobile Men – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thaïland, 2008
New York Zero Zero – Jérôme Schlomoff, France, 2006
Night for Day – HC Gilje, Norway, 2004
Nightshots (1, 2, 3) – Stephen Dwoskin, UK, 2006-7
Night Still – Elke Groen, Austria, 2007
Night Sweat – Sigfried Fruhauf, 2008
No Border – Sylvain George, France,
Nouba – Katia Kameli, Algeria, 2003
Nuits polaires. Première mesure : des non-lieux – Sylvain George, France, 2008
Nu lacté de Lionel Soukaz et Othello Vilgard, France, 2002
Oh ! Uomo – Angela Ricci Lucchi et Yervant Gianikian, Italia, 2004
Ogres – Jean-Paul Noguès, France, 2001
On Hitler’s Highway – Lech Kowalski, France/Germany, 2002
Operation Double Trouble – Keith Sanborn, U.S., 2003
La peau trouée – Julien Samani, France, 2004
Perfect Day – Ange Leccia, France, 2008
Performing S.C.U.M. – Angela Marzullo, Switzerland, 2005
Phantogram – Kerry Laitala, U.S., 2008
Philippe Garrel à Digne (Premier voyage) – Gérard Courant, France, 1975-2009
Profite Motive and the Whispering Wind – John Gianvito, EU, 2007
Primitive (exhibition), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thaïlande/GB/Allemagne, 2009
Pulsar – Maria Klonaris, France, 2001
Requiem pour le XXe siècle – Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, France, 2004
Return to the Scene of the Crime – Ken Jacobs, E.U., 2008
River of Anger – Antoine Barraud, France, 2007
Rosa Rot – Luc & Gisèle Meichler, France, 2001
Samouraï – Johanna Vaude, France, 2002
San Francisco Redux – Anthony Stern, UK, 2008
Sans correspondance – Chaab Mahmoud, Syria/France, 2009
The Screening – Ariane Michel, France, 2007
Sommovimenti/I Volti dell’Anonimo/Vita circolare – Paolo Gioli, Italie, 2009
Soviets + Electricity – Nicolas Rey, France, 2001
Star Spangled To Death – Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2003
Sur la piste – Julien Samani, 2007
Tarrafal – Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2007, Portugal
Themes and Variations for the Naked Eye – Caitlin Horsmon, U.S., 2007
Terrae – Othello Vilgard, France, 2004
Time to Stir (Work in Progress) – Paul Cronin, UK, 2008
Untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends… – Jayce Salloum, Canada, 2002
We are winning don’t forget – Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2004
West of the Tracks – Wang Bing, China, 2003
A Whiter Shade – Marylène Negro, France, 2009
The White She-Camel – Xavier Christiaens, Belgium, 2006
Wild Song. Preamble to any possible history of cinema – Chaab Mahmoud, Syria/France, 2008
http://Www.web cam – Lionel Soukaz, France, 2005

Nicole Brenez said this on May 30, 2010 at 6:26 am | Reply

Found here.

Best musicals of the decade, part 2

2010-10-06T16:12:00.000+01:00

Incomplete notes on the character of the new cinema

2010-09-30T15:08:00.003+01:00

"Incomplete notes on the character of the new cinema

The cinema is in crisis. It neither apprehends our reality in an honest way nor does it aid us in imagining a different kind of future. It is suffocated by a set of anachronistic conventions dictated by the agents of commerce. What follows are incomplete notes on the basis for a new cinema practice:

The absence of verisimilitude in the corporate cinema has reconfirmed the essential radicalism of critical realism. But the new cinema will also reflect the fact that, as bb [Bertolt Brecht] has observed, “realism is not simply a matter of form.”

Instead of asking whether images change the world (a question whose answer now seems obvious), the new cinema seeks to discover what should be changed, and how.

The new cinema recognizes that any apprehension of the present is predicated upon an understanding of the past. Likewise, a new future can only be imagined after an understanding of the present is attained.

The new cinema doesn’t concern itself with technological debates, particularly the antagonisms of analogue against digital. It employs, without prejudice, any and all tools available to it.

The new cinema can only exist in a state as unfinished and incomplete as the world it aims to mirror and engage.

The new cinema should strive for beauty, but never perfection.

That which has been viewed as beautiful, the new cinema will regard as ugly;

That which has been seen as ugly, the new cinema will regard as beautiful.

Clarity is a form of beauty. Mystification is a form of defeat.

The new cinema refuses to recognize national borders. It identifies itself neither as fiction nor as documentary. Likewise, it is unconcerned with genre, which is useful only to the agents of commerce.

Popular culture is neither. The new cinema will strive to return popular culture to the people themselves."

Travis Wilkerson, here.

I stumbled on this interview while looking for the links to downloading An Injury to one, which I had just seen, in order to send it to a friend.

The "mysteries" and mysteries of Uncle Boonmee

2010-09-10T07:50:00.003+01:00

I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about Uncle Boonmee, which I've seen twice in two days and preferred the second time. But one of the things I'm already reasonably sure about is that there is something more than slightly irritating about the discourse surrounding it (I mean the articles by writers I would take seriously, i.e. who take the film seriously). I'll probably come back to this when (if?) I get around to reading the Cahiers and Positif articles on it, but one of the dominant characteristics of all the articles I've read so far has been to take a stand on the film rather than discuss it. Mark Peranson's article, sublime in its enthusiasm, in a way falls prey most of all to this trap. Thankfully, the articles accompanies an interview in which Peranson is more acute and searching in trying to explore the film the way he would any other film, but what of the Inrockuptibles review? (I will one day discuss the Inrocks more in detail, how they represent a triumph of taste over insight, with all the losses in intellectual curiosity implied) Even Le Temps has at least one better insight (bottom of page 1). Mystery is a very important word to describe a lot of very good art, and is an essential one to describe Uncle Boonmee, but so far it has been used as a shield, to deflect any attempt to really evaluate what is going on.

With this in mind, I'll attempt to set down a few inroads.

Uncle Boonmee is less hypnotic than the two other Apichatpong films I've seen, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century. Part of this, at least for me, has to do with the lack of camera movement, though I'm still trying to tease out why he completely renounces something he'd used for both previous films. Overall, though, it seems this is more a film of surfaces, less prone to withhold its treasures. There's nothing like the motorcycle ride from Tropical Malady or the Black Hole from Syndromes and a Century here. Doubtless my expectations were also what confounded me the first time, what with the tendency of great artists to do everything except what you expect of them. Especially since in this film, Apichatpong plays with his audience even more than in the previous ones.
This is all the more unsettling since the narrative is in many ways more straightforward than in Tropical Malady or Syndromes and a Century. Apart from a catfish episode, essential thematically but a blast out of nowhere in terms of the narrative, and a dream sequence not very hard to assimilate when it appears (though understanding it is another story), the film is linear. Even the two possible realities at the end (truly superb. I'm reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke article in which he called for greater but more simple imagination on the part of SF writers, using the example of a man walking into a room and switching on the light only to find out that it was already on) happen concurrently, equivalently, but after the time warp that gave them birth.
Yet for all this straightforwardness, Apichatpong is playing a very serious game with audience expectations.
Almost every single scene announces a conflict that will go completely unresolved, that principle extending also to the overall narrative scheme (Jaai, the Laotian helper, so important in the first scenes, announces he will leave soon and is not seen again. Even his departure is neither witnessed nor mentioned by the other characters or us) and even the title: unless we accept the Princess or the Catfish as a previous avatar of Boonmee (there's nothing to indicate this is or isn't the case), we don't see any of Boonmee's previous lives, only his relatives' current after-lives and his own future life. The scene of the Catfish is, once again, essential in this aspect: what is set up as the key elements of the narrative, her quest for her lost beauty and the love of her palanquin bearer, is made completely irrelevant in the face of what turns out, a posteriori, to be essential: the possibility of a relationship between man and nature.

I don't know yet quite how to relate all of this to the rest of the film, except to note that the theme of man's relationship with nature is also present almost everywhere else (Aunt Jen coming from the city and trying to adapt to the rural house, the jungle as place of possibility and danger simultaneously...), but the Princess and the Catfish is one of the supreme instances of man's fusion with the natural world in the whole of cinema. And, of course, it's also a question of man's relationship with cinema, as the Princess's vision of her former beauty in the silver screen of the water makes clear. But what is so beautiful in that scene is not just the sexual nature of the fusion, but how literal it is, and how cinema itself is included in the equation. The encounter is not presented as sexual, it is sexual. And cinema itself becomes a participant in this epiphany: first of all a curious and tender observer of this physical bliss, the camera then suddenly gives up on its status as an outside observer to fuse completely with its surroundings, annihilating itself in a shot which echoes the previously observed movement from abandonment of human contingencies (ornamental status symbols) to pure oneness with the elements.

For the record, it's a very good film, but for the moment, I still think Kagemusha, Apocalypse Now and La Dolce Vita are better, without mentioning Syndromes and a Century. Or even Film Socialisme. Not that this is really the point. Maybe this is one of those films...

By a strange coincidence...

2010-06-23T21:26:00.002+01:00

It's something of a blessing that the first tennis match I have watched in years would be none other than Mahut-Isner. Ok, I walked in when they were already in the 50s, expecting my Common Room to be showing the World Cup (the only occasion on which I watch football), but still...
So I thought I'd just point out that though Daney is the most famous to have written about Tennis in the context of cinema, Chris Marker had prophesied this phenomenon long ago...

Le Cri (part 2)

2010-06-12T19:12:00.005+01:00

Japan in the 2000s:
Bicycling Chronicles, by Wakamatsu Kôji, and All About Lily Chouchou, by Iwai Shunji.

Femme et Fatale vont en bateau

2010-05-29T00:34:00.002+01:00

It might be partly provocation on my part, but what Femme Fatale reminds me of most, is the explorations of Rivette's house: when is a fiction a construction? Is a fiction a construction, or is it a destruction, an unravelling of something that exists? Is vision understanding? There's something about (the idea of, since it happens off-screen) Antonio Banderas rushing down to help a beautiful woman he doesn't know get up that reminds me of one post-68 girl running after another on a huge parisian flight of stairs.
Haven't seen Sliding Doors, but I strongly doubt I would find it half as enjoyable as Femme Fatale. From what I've understood of SD, it's fate that creates the opportunity for choice. In Femme Fatale, choice is always there. It's the consequences that create fate. Which is why Brian DePalma is still miles away from Inarritu's world of coincidence: the ending comes ambiguously close, but it's free choice that dominates.
And this is probably the best heist scene of the 2000s (the other one I can think of, Inside Man, is made into a whole film, which is kind of cheating).

Epics and Lists

2010-05-19T00:32:00.002+01:00

One figure of style that seems to have gone out of fashion is the list. It survives in cinema only as the most conventional montage of, say, images of a city (children and pigeons in the park, people walking in the street, to show us all the lives that will be lost in Rock, for example; or a montage of images of the loved one, now dead; stuff like that), that functions not on the principle of heroic accumulation, but of signifying what they represent (so that in fact, in all those cases, one image should be enough).
But think back to most of the great epic poems, Homer, Virgil, or even other literary models (Shakespeare, Dante, Farid Ud-Dinn Attar, the Ramayana), and they are teeming with lists, lists of enemies killed, or valiant heroes, or extraordinary deeds... They function on a dynamic principle that all elements gain a critical mass from being together, complement each other to a certain degree (it is not enough for the wise hero to be included, if the brave hero, strong hero, cunning hero, good-spirited hero... are not as well).
I was reminded of these moments as I watched the scene in Go-Go Tales in which Ray introduces all the girls to his (almost non-existent) audience: here is a list in all its purity, a rattling of names, an accumulation of bodies that ends up embodying not the abstract idea of "the strip club", but the reality of its community, with its inner tensions (the dancer who refuses to dance, the one who asks for money) and its outer pizazz. Abel Ferrara does something quite amazing: he lists parts to show that the image they call up is more than the sum of them (if that's not dialectical film-making...).

And footnote: Brad Stevens is tremendously helpful in linking this to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.

"The Decade" est mort, vive "The Decade"!

2010-04-15T16:28:00.004+01:00

"If one adopts a cyclical theory of film history, the next golden age of internationalism will be the first decade of the next century."
Jonathan Rosenbaum, September 1987.

If we posit the beginning of the decade, in film terms, with Movie Mutations, in 2003, and if we consider that the number of internet users worldwide has increased by 400% between 2000 and 2009, how gloriously long will this decade turn out to be?

2010-04-12T14:10:00.003+01:00

"L'art moderne doit se montrer à la hauteur de la grande industrie et non pas se contenter de la prendre pour thème", Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
Que dire d'un film qui fait les deux?

Scales

2010-04-11T20:52:00.002+01:00

Pitching two directors "against" one another is more useful as a way of comparing approaches than as a way of making value judgements. So when I compare Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City and Wang Bing's Tie Xi: West of the tracks, it's clear to me that both films are truly great, among the key events of the decade in terms of cinema.

Yet what vast differences! I just saw 24 City again a few days ago to write about it in the student paper and concluded that Jia was more interested in truth than reality. Wang Bing is almost completely interested in reality, but truth shines out of his work just as much as it does from Jia's, though in very different ways. The two most striking differences lie in the fact that firstly, Wang Bing shows people working, which Jia almost doesn't do at all, and secondly, that while Jia films a factory on the scale of cinema, Wang films it to the scale of men, elevating cinema to the scale of the factory rather than vice-versa. This is most apparent in his travelling shots (I'm here referring to Rust I and Rust II, not the long shots taken from trains in Rails): they exist only as the steps of the cameraman walking through a space. No smoothness of aesthetic gestures enabled by the cinematic apparatus (dollies, steadicams...). A camera, placed slightly lower than eye level, accompanying every step Wang Bing makes. Whether the factory unfolds as a monstrous space, or as a wonderful one, or a desolate gradeur, it is the way it unfolds to an individual: any gesture, for WB, will start there, with the simplest, richest scale there is: 1:1.

Great Musicals of the Decade, 1.

2010-04-07T17:10:00.001+01:00

The Whole World

2010-03-05T01:48:00.005Z

I'm still reeling from my discovery of Paradjanov yesterday, especially the second of the two films I saw: The Legend of Suram Fortress (the other was Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which though less perfectly achieved, has some of the finest forest photography I've ever seen, almost on a par with King Hu and Terrence Malick).
What's quite unique in this film is Paradjanov's unashamed attempt to portray nothing less than the whole world, which shines through most aspects of his film-making here.
Every shot in that film is complete and needs nothing more to convey what has to be conveyed. This is not to say that the frame is sealed off: people and animals can enter it or leave it. But once outside it, they might as well cease to exist (as do the son's retinue in the magician's den, toward the end). The idea of off-screen space or cutting along the axis is completely foreign to Paradjanov in this film: each shot is completely fulfilled. Everyone involved in the action is always on screen, and if ever a character addresses someone off screen, it is the audience, which will never, in this film, get or even need a point of view other than the one Paradjanov sets at the beginning of each of his event-chapters. Yet the claim to totality in this film is not that of classical film-making, which also seeks to represent the totality of the action, for the very simple reason that the action is Suram Fortress is presented to the audience without involving the audience in it: for Paradjanov, space is rich, diverse, infinite, but impenetrable.

This is reflected in the narrative, which is brought to a quasi biblical simplicity of means (And Moses said... And God saw that it was good). That's not to say that Paradjanov is uninterested in his story. He's very interested in his tale, but not really as a story, more as a succession of moments of key importance. Every single step is essential in his progression, yet the impression is not that of a narrative unraveling, but of events aggregating. Paradjanov goes for almost complete paratax, relying on our ability to identify places and make connections between location, character and event, and as such is incapable of creating anything like suspense (here too he differs from the classical approach to the complete narrative: there is no construction of a narrative, only eternal present moments amassing like grains of sand in an hourglass, until suddenly the hourglass tips). What he can create, however, is moments of monumental importance: since every one stands on its own, only implicitly a consequence of former events, each one echoes like a miracle.
Any action in any frame is both a culmination of former events, a reinvention of all former actions and an absolutely complete unity: every shot reinterprets the whole film before it.

(Note of frustration: the ending of this masterwork was ruined for me by the man sitting next to me, at the very end of the row I was sat on; this anti-social creature decided, during what was obviously the very last shot of the film, with only seconds to go before the credits, to get up and exit, forcing every single person on our row to let him pass. I've seen some annoying behavior at the cinema before, but in terms of sheer stupidity, this trumps all).

Just for the pleasure

2010-02-15T23:16:00.004Z

My favorite scenes in Pretty in Pink are, pretty predictably, all the ones involving Ducky. Obviously, the disc shop scene is a monument, as is the one when he talks to the bouncer. But what strikes me in both cases is how little dramatic justification these two scenes have. They're there just for the pleasure of spending time with a character who ends up being a lot more than just the foil to the girl (which James Spader ends up being for the boy, although his charisma saves him). Duckie is the one stray element in the film, infinitely more physical than Molly Ringwald or Andrew McCarthy, and though he's probably, with Harry Dean Stanton, the one who suffers most in the film, he's the one most capable of inhabiting his body with sheer joy.

Likewise, Ferris Bueller's Day Off is one long string of scenes that are just for the pleasure. Which is why the least convincing bits (though they are still fun) are the ones involving Jeffrey Jones once Sloane has been picked up from school. They're there to provide some sort of narrative stake, which goes against the grain of the rest of the film: that day off is one big digression.

Also, what is it about museums and perfect scenes? Two great films find their souls in them.

Swingtime

2010-01-31T22:42:00.001Z

Battle Royale

2010-01-29T22:16:00.002Z

What's so surprising with Battle Royale, given its reputation and especially its pitch, is how many positive examples of humanity Fukasaku actually gives us. The film is full of quiet moments of cooperation, love, help... (This might explain why I don't find the "villain" who joins in the game for the killing that convincing. He acts like an invincible zombie more than any thing else, unlike the other two "monstrous" characters of the film, Mitsuko and Kitano). What makes it all the more poignant is how easily those are destroyed by the children themselves when they internalize the dynamics of adults bent on setting all forms of rebellion against each other. This means not only a despairing outlook in which rebellion becomes something that feeds into the plans of power, but also, more hopefully, a vision of simple humanity lending a hand to others as the most basic but most essential act of resistance.

And the ending is one of the great puzzles of modern cinema.

2010-01-08T10:03:00.003Z

What's most disappointing in Haneke's The White Ribbon, especially given its aims (to represent how a repressive protestantism can destroy the community it tries to uphold) is how almost completely it fails at representing community. The diverse strands of the narrative (doctor, preacher, peasant, baron, teacher) are very rarely brought in contact with one another. The teacher, who narrates the story, seems to have little to no contact with either the peasant family or the doctor, and most of these narrative strands exist in isolation from one another. However many scenes happen in the streets, there is no sense of the village as a public space in which social forces interact (as villages go, Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us or Shimizu's Children in the Wind or Four Seasons of Children could teach Haneke a thing or two... or fifty).

The case of the peasant family is the most typical: regarded with contempt more than empathy (but then the only attempts at empathy in the film are rather unconvincing, i.e. the too-naive to be touching romance between the teacher and a young woman he ends up marrying (probably)), they are represented as suffering from their economic quasi-enslavement to the baron, though that is denied any force: the father tells his son that they are now starving and cannot find work, but there is no depiction of any process, of any attempt to find food for the family, of anything other than the fighting between father and son. They never interact with any of the other characters, apart from one scene which really drives the failure home: at church, the baron makes a speech about those who mishandled his son and how the farmer's son mishandled his cabbages. Though in the communal milieu par excellence, the scene could almost be happening solely between the farmer and the baron: the shots of other members of the audience shown are faces of strangers, giving no opportunity to connect any of the characters we know to this particular issue. There is no sense of roaming, of opening up to other unforeseen interactions, either: Haneke implies, rather heavy-handedly, that the other peasants could be in that same uncomfortable situation one day, but since there is no sense of who these other peasants are, or of what community they form, the point is purely intellectual. There is no sense of how the same framework connects to the teacher, the doctor, the preacher (mentioned briefly at this point in the voice-over, but who carries in this scene zero dramatic significance).

The same could be said of the village ball scene, which serves, in a classical manner, as a superficial setting of joy before the chaos starts: Haneke only pays attention to individual interactions on the margins, except for one brief (and precious) shot highlighting the animosity between eastern European immigrant labourers and the local Austrians. Apart from that, the party might as well have been cancelled with no dramatic impact.

As in Tarantino's uninteresting Inglorious Basterds, which for all its load of hype contained one of the most beautiful images of the last ten years (Shoshanna projected ona burning screen, her face seen in the smoke), Das Weisse Band contains one of the most beautiful shots of the year, which starts off as the most perfect vision of a child's fear I know of, but sadly ends up rejoining the film with its obsession of making a point over observing its unfolding. The doctor's young son climbs down the stairs, calling his sister in a trembling voice, making the supreme effort of entering a dark room (but only moving within the ray of light projected from the door), not finding her there, going back to look for her in a room he has already seen... The first half of that shot is priceless; it conjures a sense of primal fear more effective than the rest of the film put together.

Nicole Brenez and the avant-garde, vol. II

2009-12-30T09:58:00.003Z

Here is the second part of that list I started a post earlier. My first impression is that though more of the titles are familiar, less of them seem readily available on youtube or such easy sources. Maybe I'll get around to posting links for those I can find, but no guarantees.

1970-1980:
Cuadecuc-Vampir de Pere Portabella, Esp., 1970, 75'
Sochaux 11 juin 68 du Collectif de cinéastes et travailleurs de Sochaux, 1970, 20'
No Pincha de Tobias Engel, Guinée-Bisseau, 1970, 80'
Jean Genet parle d'Angela Davis de Carole Roussopoulos, Fr, 1970, 8'
Brésil: rapport sur la torture de Saul Landau et Haskell Wexler, USA, 1971, 60'
Punishment Park de Peter Watkins, USA, 1971, 88'
Numéro Zéro de Jean Eustache, Fr, 1971, 120'
Main Line de Michel Bulteau, Fr, 1971, 102'
Two-Lane Blacktop de Monte Hellman, USA, 1971, 102'
Island Fuse de Arthur et Corinne Cantrill, Australia, 1971, 11'
L'Extase des anges de Koji Wakamatsu, Jap., 1972, 89'
Letter to Jane de Jean-Luc Godard et Jean-Pierre Gorin, Fr, 1972, 60'
Sous les drapeaux, l'Enfer de Kinji Fukasaku, Jap., 1972, 96'
Winter Soldier de Winterfilm Collective, USA, 1972, 96'
Sex Garage de Fred Halsted, USA, 1972, 35'
La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? de René Viénet, Fr, 1972, 90'
Silver Surfer de Mike Dunford, GB, 1972, 15'
L'Autre Scène de Dominique Avron, Claudine Eizykman, Guy Fihman et Jean-François Lyotard, 1972, 6'
Mourir pour des images de René Vautier, Fr, 1973, 45'
La Société du spectacle de Guy Debord, Fr, 1973, 88'
Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life) de Peter Hutton, USA, 1973-74, 29'
L'heure de la libération a sonné de Heiny Srour, Liban/Yemen, 1974, 52'
Honky Tonk de Tav Falco, 1974, USA, 26'
Avec le sang des autres de Bruno Muel, Fr, 1974, 49'
Edvard Munch de Peter Watkins, Sweden-Norway, 1974, 210'
Quand on aime la vie on va au cinéma du Groupe Cinéthique, Fr, 1975, 90'
Ali au pays des merveilles de Djouhra Abouda et Alain Bonnamy, Fr, 1975, 49'
Les Saisons de Artavazd Pelechian, USSR, 1975, 29'
Leave Me Alone de Gerard Theuring, RFA, 1975, 120'
Underground de Emile De Antonio, USA, 1976, 88'
Sodom and Gomorrha, New York 10036 de Rudy Burckhardt, USA, 1976, 6'15
S.C.U.M. Manifesto de Carole Roussopoulos et Delphine Seyrig, Fr, 1976, 20'
Allée des signes de Gisèle et Luc Meichler, Fr, 1976, 21'
Salomé de Téo Hernandez, Fr, 1976, 65'
Guacamole de Chick Strand, USA, 1976, 10'
New York Portrait: Chapter One de Peter Hutton, USA, 1978-79, 16'
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome de Kenneth Anger, USA, 1978, 39'
Cinématons de Gérard Courant, in process since 1978
Roulement, rouerie, aubage, de Rose Lowder, Fr, 1978, 15'
Bon pied bon oeil et toute sa tête du Groupe Cinéthique, Fr, 1978, 80'
Soma de Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki, Fr, 1978, 50'
Retour d'un repère de Rose Lowder, Fr, 1979, 19'

1980-1990:
Au bon peuple portugais de Rui Simoès, Portugal, 1980, 110'
Stridura de Ange Leccia, Fr, 1980, 13'
3rd Degree de Paul Sharits, USA, 1982, 24'
Selva de Maria Klonaris, Fr, 1982, 75'
Les Tournesols de Rose Lowder, Fr, 1982, 6'
Nuestra Senora de Paris de Teo Hernandez, Fr, 1982, 6'
Beach Umbrella de Raphael Montanez Ortiz, USA, 1985, 8'
L'Affaire des Divisions Morituri de F.J. Ossang, Fr, 1985, 81'
You Can Drive the Big Rigs de Leighton Pierce, USA, 1986, 15'
The Inspector d'Arthur Omar, Brésil, 1988, 12'
Le troisième oeil d'André Almuro, Fr, 1988, 35'
Impressions en haute atmosphère de José Antonio Sistiaga, Esp, 1989, 75'
Images du monde et inscription de la guerre de Harun Farocki, RFA, 1989, 75'
Cruises de Cécile Fontaine, Fr, 1989, 10'
Test d'ouverture pyrotechnique sur conteneur (CP1) Optomat "R" d'Alexis Martinet, Fr, 1989, 13'

1990-2000:
See You Later/Au revoir de Michael Snow, Canada, 1990, 18'
Sanctus de Barbara Hammer, USA, 1990, 19'
La Plage de Patrick Bokanowski, Fr, 1991, 14'
A Child Garden & the Serious Sea de Stan Brakhage, USA, 1991, 73'
Red Shovel de Leighton Pierce, USA, 1992, 8'
VRFilm de Joost Rekveld, Netherlands, 1994, 2'
Meni de Karel Doing, Netherlands, 1994, 6'
The Color of Love de Peggy Ahwesh, USA, 1994, 10'
50 Feets of String de Leighton Pierce, USA, 1995, 51'
Prigioneri della guerra de Yervant Gianikian et Angela Ricci Lucchi, It, 1996, 62'
Vertical Air de Robert Fenz, USA, 1996, 28'
Ile de Beauté de Ange Leccia & Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Fr, 1996, 70'
Tribologie de Yves Berthier et Jean-François Dalle, Fr, 1996, 11'
En une poignée de mains amies de Jean Rouch et Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 1997, 35'
Docteur Chance de F.J. Ossang, Fr-Chili, 1997, 97'
Ma 6-T va crack-er de Jean-François Richet, Fr, 1997, 95'
Starship Troopers de Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1997, 129'
Retrospectroscope de Kerry Laitala, USA, 1997, 4'
L'Envers de Patrice Kirchhofer, Fr, 1998-2000, 20'
Va te faire enculer de Yves-Marie Mahé, Fr, 1998, 10'
Sombre de Philippe Grandrieux, Fr, 1998, 110'
Il n'y a rien de plus inutile qu'un organe d'Augustin Gimmel, Fr, 1999, 9'

2000-(the book is dates september 2006)
Battle Royale de Kinji Fukasaku, Jap, 2000, 114'
Le profit et rien d'autre ou (réflexions abusives sur la lutte des classes) de Raoul Pevk, Fr, 2000
Cargo de Laura Waddington, Netherlands, 2001, 30'
Où gît votre sourire enfoui? de Pedro Costa, Fr/Portugal, 2001, 104'
Pulsar de Maria Klonaris, Fr, 2001, 15'
Exposed de Siegried A. Fruhauf, Austria, 2001, 9'
Les Soviets + l'électricité de Nicolas Rey, Fr, 2001, 175'
Meditations on Revolution, Part IV: Greenville, MS de Robert Fenz, USA, 2001, 29'30
Escape d'Alain Declerq, Fr, 2001, 11'30
Aldebaran de Hugo Verlinde, Fr, 2001, 9'
Marocaine à deux dimensions de Brahim Bachiri, Fr, 2002, 10'
La Vie nouvelle de Philippe Grandrieux, Fr, 2002, 102'
Untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends... de Jayce Salloum, Liban-Canada, 2002, 11'22
Manifeste de Hélène Deschamps et Hugo Verlinde, Fr, 2002, 12'
Samouraï de Johanna Vaude, Fr, 2002, 12'
Nu lacté de Lionel Soukaz et Othello Vilgard, Fr, 2002, 5'
Charlemagne 2 - Piltzer de Pip Chodorov, Fr, 2002, 22'
Nouba de Katia Kameli, Algérie, 2003, 5'
Azé de Ange Leccia, Fr, 2003, 72'
A l'Ouest des rails de Wang Bing, China, 2004, 540'
11000 km Far from New York de Orzu Sharipov, Tajikistan, 2004, 17'
Man. Road. River de Marcellvs L., Brésil, 2004, 10'
Night for Day de HC Gilje, Norway, 2004, 28'
Une Visite au Louvre de Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet, Fr, 2004, 49'
Terrae de Othello Vilgard, Fr, 2004, 7'
Border de Laura Waddington, Bel., 2004, 30'
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine de Peter Tscherkassky,Aust., 2005, 17'
Degradation #1, X-Ray: Shroud of Security de James Schneider, International, 2006, 3'30.

A Nicole Brenez, les spectateurs reconnaissants...

2009-12-21T13:41:00.004Z

Nicole Brenez writes like nobody else at the moment. What gets me every time is the sharpness of her pen: she's able to express an idea with more clarity and less words than most people I know, yet she can make it incisive, tough and biting (yet always generous) in a way very few people can match without sounding fanatical.
Her small pamphlet on the Avant-garde for Les Petits Cahiers is no exception. While it's probably more of a warm-up for her Jeune, Dure et Pure than a full-fledged detailed discussion of avant-garde cinema, it's still one of the most refreshing reads in a while (though I'm currently in the middle of The Material Ghost which isn't bad either...). She ends with some documents from the history of the avant-garde, and a reading list and a viewing list. I might get around to posting the reading list as well, though I doubt it, but for the moment here's the first part of the viewing list:

1900-19210:
The Big Swallow de James A. Williamson, USA, 1901, 2'
L'Homme-Mouche de Georges Méliès, Fr, 1902, 3'
Série 1 (vols d'insectes) de Lucien Bull, Fr, 1904, 4'
Les lunettes féeriques de Emile Cohl, Fr, 1909, 5'

1910-1920:
Onénisme Horloger de Jean Durance, Fr, 1912, 5'
Les tourbillons cellulaires de Henri Bernard et C. Dauzère, Fr, 1912, 9'
La Folie du docteur Tube d'Abel Gance, Fr, 1915, 10'

1920-1930:
Symphonie Diagonale de Viking Eggeling, All, 1921, 9'
Rythmus de Hans Richter, All, 1921, 4'
Entr'acte de René Clair, Fr, 1924, 22'
Strike de S.M. Eisenstein, URSS, 1924, 95'
Ballet Mécanique, Fernand Léger, Fr, 1924, 18'
Anemic Cinema de Marcel Duchamp, Fr, 1925, 7'
Ménilmontant de Dimitri Kirsanoff, Fr, 1926, 35'
Combat de Boxe de Charles Dekeukelaire, Bel, 1927, 8'
Inflation de Hans Richter, All, 1927, 3'
La P'tite Lilie de Alberto Cavalcanti, Fr, 1927, 20'
Sur un air de Charleston de Jean Renoir, Fr, 1927, 21'
The Fall of the House of Usher de Hames S. Watson et Melville Webber, USA, 1928, 12'
Un Chien Andalou de Luis Bunuel, Fr, 1928, 16'
Disque 957 de Germaine Dulac, Fr, 1928, 6'
L'Etoile de mer de Man Ray, Fr, 1928, 17'
La Marche des machines d'Eugène Deslaw, Fr, 1928, 9'
Etudes sur Paris d'André Sauvage, Fr, 1928, 76'
La Petite marchande d'allumettes de Jean Renoir, Fr, 1928, 29'
Les Nuits électriques d'Eugène Deslaw, Fr, 1929, 10'
Marseille Vieux-Port de Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Fr, 1929, 9'

1930-1940:
A Propos de Nice de Jean Vigo, Fr, 1930, 31'
Lot in Sodom de J.S. Watson et M. Webber, USA, 1930, 25'
Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiss-Grau de Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, All, 1930, 5'30
Le Fleuve Sumida de Zen Amaya, Jap, 1931, 20'
Limite de Mario Peixoto, Brésil, 1931, 120'
Taris ou la natation de Jean Vigo, 1931, 10'
Les Berceaux de Jean Epstein, Fr, 1931, 5'
Les Berceaux de Dimitri Kirsanoff, Fr, 1931, 7'
Que Viva Mexico de S.M. Eisenstein, Mexique, 1931-32, unfinished
Le Bonheur d'Alexandre Medvedkine, URSS, 1932, 95'
Rapt de Dimitri Kirsanoff, Suisse, 1934, 88'
Rainbow Dance de Len Lye, GB, 1936, 5'
Early Abstractions de Harry Smith, USA, 1939-1956, 22'
Meshes of the Afternoon de Maya Deren et Alexander Hammid, USA, 1943, 13'

1940-1950:
Jammin' the Blues de Gjon Mili, USA, 1943, 12'
Le Tempestaire de Jean Epstein, Fr, 1947, 15'
Fireworks de Kenneth Anger, USA, 1947, 15'
Le Sang des bêtes de Georges Franju, Fr, 1949, 22'
Lost, Lost, Lost de Jonas Mekas, USA, 1949-63-1976, 178'

1950-1960:
Le Film est déjà commencé? de Maurice Lemaître, Fr, 1951, 62'
L'Anti-concept de Gil J. Wolman, Fr, 1952, 70'
In the Street de Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, James Agee, USA, 1952, 16'
Under Brooklyn Bridge de Rudy Burckhardt, USA, 1954, 20'
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome de Kenneth Anger, USA, 1954, 38'
Weegee's New York de Arthur "Weegee" Felling, USA, 1954, 20'
Les Maîtres fous de Jean Rouch, Fr, 1954, 36'
Visages dans l'ombre de Peter Weiss, Suède, 1956, 6'
Free Radicals de Len Lye, NZ, 1957-1979, 5'
Flesh of Morning de Stan Brakhage, USA, 1956-86, 21'
Une simple histoire de Marcel Hanoun, Fr, 1958, 68'

1960-1970
Actions de rue de Ben, Fr, 1960-1972, 25'
The House is Black de Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1962, 20'
Saïn de Masao Adachi, Jap, 1962, 56'
Prison de Robret Lapoujade, Fr, 1962, 13'
Cosmic Ray de Bruce Conner, USA, 1962, 4'
Ai (Love) de Takahiko Iimura, USA, 1962, 10'
Towers Open Fire de W.S. Burroughs et Anthony Balch, USA, 1963, 10'
Lapis de James Whitney, USA, 1963-1966, 10'
A Caça de Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 1964, 21'
Film de Samuel Beckett, GB, 1964, 22'
Quixote de Bruce Baillie, USA, 1964-65, 40'
Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches) de Jonas Mekas, USA, 1964-69, 180'
Now de Santiago Alvarez, Cuba, 1965, 6'
Pestilent City de Peter Emanuel Goldman, USA, 1965, 16'
Oskar Langenfeld, 12 fois de Holger Meins, RFA, 1966, 13'
Méditerranée de Jean-Daniel Pollet, Fr, 1966, 40'
The Chelsea Girls de Andy Warhol, USA, 1966, 195'
Meet Marlon Brando de Albert et David Maysles, USA, 1966, 28'
Breakaway de Bruce Conner, USA, 1966, 8'
Films Fluxus, USA, 1966sq (George Maciunas, Albert Finne, Yoko Ono, John Cale...)
Off the Pig - Black Panthers de Newsreel, USA, 1967, 15'
Chronique d'Anna Magdalena Bach de Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet, All, 1967, 94'
Fuses de Carolee Schneeman, USA, 1967, 25'
The Hour of the furnaces de Fernando Solanas et Octavio Getino, Argentine, 1968, 260'
Préparation d'un Cocktail Molotov, anonyme (Holger Meins), RFA, 1968, 3'
Mickey Mouse au Vietnam de Lee Savage, USA, 1968, 1'
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G de Paul Sharits, Usa, 1968, 12'
Ciné-Tracts, collectif, Fr, 1968, length unknown
Film-Tract no 1968 de Gérard Fromanger (avec Jean-Luc Godard), Fr, 1968, 3'
Le Révélateur de Philippe Garrel, Fr, 1968, 60'
El Chacal de Nahueltoro de Miguel Littin, Chili-Mexique, 1969, 95'
La premièrecharge à la machette de Manuel Octavio Gomez, Cuba, 1969, 80'
Grève et occupation d'Apollon de Ugo Gregoretti, It, 1969, 76'
The Gladiators de Peter Watkins, GB, 1969, 80'
Comment pouvons-nous le supporter de Christian Boltanski, Fr, 1969, 0'30''
Vite de Daniel Pommereulle, Fr, 1969, 35'
Deux Fois de Jackie Raynal, Fr, 1969, 72'
Le Rouge de Gérard Fromanger, Fr, 1969, 3'
Nouvelle société no 5, 6 et 7 du Groupe Medvedkine de Besançon, Fr, 1969, 30'
British Sounds de Jean-Luc Godard et Jean-Henri Roger, GB, 1969, 52'
Graphyty de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Fr, 1969, 20'
HWY: An American Pastoral de Paul Ferrara, USA, 1969, 50'
Necrology de Standish Lawder, USA, 1969, 1970, 12'

I'll post the other half at some point soon... Some of the short ones are available on internet, so I'll make it a pleasure of watching many over the next few days!

Films of a man who should have been free

2009-12-05T22:21:00.003Z

Boris Barnet makes films that defy viewing, for the simple reason that he's almost completely uninterested in narration. For both Okraina and By the Blues of Seas, the first reaction has been one of admiration and curiosity, with little emotion, whereas the second viewing in both cases has been a major event. I suspect that his narrative (non-) technique might be the source of that initial confusion, as well as the source of the subsequent endearment.

What is striking when seeing Okraina again is how little he cares about classical narrative structure. He doesn't even rebel against it (à la L'Avventura), he just works as if every scene were the next's equal, as if every moment deserved to make as much sense as the previous (and of course, in his hands, they do) without necessarily leading to the next, except maybe following a logic that lies in small details as much as in narrative events per se. That might make his films slightly harder to get a grip on (simply put, they don't fit any other model of narrative), but it also makes every moment a quasi-epiphany.

This refusal to priviledge any event can make for the most free inventions/surprises in thirties cinema. The scene when the soldiers leave is already remarkable for its refusal to dwell in any length on the father's sorrow, showing him only as often as trains departing or crowds rushing by, but when Barnet cuts back to him for the last time, it is to show him leaving the frame, only to reveal Manka standing beside him, still looking in the direction the soldiers left to. Manka, until now not part of the scene, and yet, as the constant beacon of pre-politicized humanist tenderness, always at the heart of the film...

Misfits

2009-10-26T21:57:00.000Z

"I have, besides, always been drawn to stubborn autodidacts, to various sorts of intellectual misfit. In part it was the heedlessness of their own peculiar angle of vision that attracted me to writers and artists like Conrad, Vico, Adorno, Swift, Adonis, Hopkins, Auerbach, Glenn Gould, whose style, or way of thinking, was highly individualistic and impossible to imitate, for whom the medium of expression, whether music or words, was eccentrically charged, very worked-over, self-conscious in the highest degree. What impressed me about them was not the mere fact of their self-invention but that the enterprise was deliberately and fastidiously located within a general history which they had excavated ab origine."

Edward Said, Between Worlds, London Review of Books, 7 May 1988.

Le Cri

2009-10-01T00:14:00.004+01:00

Two "gridi": the only possible answer to metaphysical terror and economic violence.

La Vie nouvelle

2009-09-29T09:26:00.004+01:00

La Vie nouvelle is the nightmare of western civilization faced with the catastrophe of its own existence.

I'm still too puzzled and overwhelmed to write anything more coherent than that, but I'll try. I haven't seen Sombre yet, but so far I prefer Grandrieux working with negatives rather than positives (Un Lac), even though admittedly negative effects are easier to reach than quieter ones (the soudtrack goes a long way in L.V.n.); the reason for this may be that in Un Lac, as pointed out in Spectres du Cinema, the fable form which insists on a-historicity, even when the intruder shows up, only partially convinces me, for the very reasons that are sketched out in the opening sequence of La Vie nouvelle: those faces, staring at the catastrophe, know that there is no Eden possible anymore. Maybe Un Lac was the tale of its loss, I'd have to watch it a second time (I'll have to watch it a second time anyway, I can't even pretend that I got a firm grasp on it the first time, let alone understood it), but the violence of La Vie nouvelle resonates more with me than the attempts to reclaim its preceding innocence.

The dance scene may be one of the single most thrilling (and blood-chilling) film moments of the last decade, akin to very few others I can think of. Its dialectic of control and freedom, of alienation within a crowd (the pimp and his creation first dance alone, bring their bodies to a climax, then go on dancing to the same music, in the same space, that is now filled with people), of possession/independence of the human body, make it the key moment of the film for me. Boyan is the greatest incarnation of the devil on screen that I can think of right now, and nowhere is this more evident than in this sequence, where the seduction of the primary pulsions that Grandrieux is so interested in, and that cause the disaster we are continually witnessing, is laid bare in a giddy swirl of Dionysiac liberation/enslavement (the only other scene that matches this plays exactly like a trip to hell: the thermic scene).

Probably more on this soon...

Springtime in Berlin

2009-09-15T11:54:00.002+01:00

Kino Arsenal's Room 2, in Berlin, seems to hold a treat that I never thought I would actually encounter ready for every time I come to Berlin: last time, a pristine copy of Paul Fejos's Lonesome, this time, a raesonably good copy of Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town. Both masterworks, though radically different ones. But seriously, has that spot been chosen by angels?
Fei Mu knows how to frame two characters and their interactions better than 99% of directors I can think of right now: though the whole film is superb and the group scenes are marvellous, the film's defining moments are its intimate scenes between two characters, where he sometimes inserts a fade and a change of camera position between a question and its answer (oh, and the agreeable little irony of seeing a film in which a wall plays such a prominent role in Berlin of all places). His mastery of the long take reminds me of Ophuls more than anybody else, but their worlds are completely different: Fei Mu is almost completely indifferent to decorum.

Inglorious...

2009-08-29T22:14:00.004+01:00

-Does anyone agree with me that Tarantino makes the same film as Joseph Goebbels?

-The only good image of the film is that of Shosanna's face being projected on the smoke of the burning theater, the screen having already been destroyed by the flames.

-Coincidentally, one of the most beautiful images of Assayas's Demonlover is Connie Nielsen being shown the proof, on a mini-DV camera, that she did indeed kill another woman. A true foray into the means of projection (cringe) in the modern world. Assayas seems to believe, and kudos to him, that digital cinema can still testify, that digital images are still worth something as images, though they are in ever greater danger of being hijacked for disembodied exploitation of suffering. Tarantino doesn't even need digital: what he did to nitrate we are now doing to Poland.

Novels and Film

2009-08-11T18:21:00.002+01:00

Spurred by an interview in which Chris Marker recommended reading Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel to understand cinema, I'd done that and tremendously enjoyed it at the beginning of this year. The theme of the exteriorisation of memory was of course straight up Marker's street, but of course he had a point, and the book can be a useful tool in thinking about cinema, especially (I find) it's documentary aspects: what it keeps for posterity, as a whole set of gestures, attitudes, practices that are not only filmic but historical as well (to use an obvious example, why Feuillade has become so important again recently).
I'm wondering if Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller might not end up having the same effect. The way it playfully approaches readership, authorship, the construction of narrative as something the audiences does, I think deserves to be extended to film. It might make some very good cross-reading with the Rosenbaum-Durgnat-Ehrenstein roundtable, for example.

Un monde qui s'organise en récit...

2009-08-02T22:32:00.003+01:00

Few films I know make theirs the famous Mitry quote to as much of an extent as Miguel Gomes's Our Beloved Month of August. For the first half, only snapshots of a world, with its local heroes (who jump off bridges for money), its pop tunes, and only the faintest hints of montage devices (a song about childhood dreams playing to a firemen's truck driving by, just after a close-up of a child drawing said fireman's truck). The act of filming is acknowledged but, as will soon become obvious, not with any intention of deconstructing anything... Rather with the always patient expectancy of a narrative being born, an event described, in a scene about a third of the way through, as an almost religious miracle in the hands of the sound man (who, as the hilarious ending establishes, is symbolically to be thanked for the beauty and coherence of the integration of songs as thematic and emotional counterpoints to the narrative).
And when the film that Gomes was supposed to be filming in the first half of the narrative comes on, it is indeed a miracle: all the disparate elements that composed the first half as documentary are reconfigured as fiction, given a place that brings new meaning to the new scene and puts the initial appearance in a new light. I hope I get a chance to see this again soon. This is probably one of those films that unfolds endlessly to give you, in a modest and non-ostentatious way, humanity.

Things to look into:
Links between this and key films about narrative construction: The Wind Will Carry Us, Celine and Julie...
The use of pop songs is the best since Distant Voices, Still Lives.
And I can't remember a more beautiful first time scene in any film.

Antichrist

2009-07-16T19:59:00.003+01:00

My first Von Trier film, and if I'm dedicated enough not my last, but let's say certainly not an auspicious beginning. Mark Peranson's article is, as far as this film is concerned, completely justified. Slow-motion winds in ferns does not Tarkovsky make.

It's a distant cousin of Dreyer's Day of Wrath, with a similar line of argument: it is the internalization of the male view of female evil that forces women to become evil (references to middle age torture practices ground the reference to Dreyer). In Dreyer, it is religious dogmatism that drives women towards witchcraft, in Antichrist it is male psychoanalysis of female sexuality. But whereas, in Day of Wrath, the witches seize on the only tool left available to them for emancipation (which is also sexual, and takes place in an ambiguously luxurious natural setting, cf. Gilberto Perez), in Antichrist Charlotte Gainsbourg's liberty is never even hinted at: she exists merely as a symptom. Her husband's control over her psyche (harmful dramatically as well as thematically: even if one accepts the dubious premise, seeing him getting everything about his wife right untoil the final gore-filled twenty minutes is somewhat tedious), however sincerely helpful, may make her into a beast. But where is the streak of resistance in her acts that makes Dreyer's witches so morally compelling?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds...

2009-07-05T13:06:00.003+01:00

One aspect of Zabriskie point that strikes me as truly optimistic, especially in Antonioni's overall body of work, is its utopian union, however temporary, of the two main strands of counter-culture and political protest in late 60s early 70s US: the pacifist hippies and the more violent protesters, such as the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Though it is never completely certain that Mark has indeed shot the policeman, it seems certain, especially when another policeman shows up in the desert, that he would be ready to do so. Daria refuses such tactics. But despite such divergences, the two can choose to unite.

Maybe, therefore, the final explosion corresponds to Daria's taking upon herself the violent methods of Mark, since he now cannot?

And maybe it's significant that her explosion is directed not against the police but against big business.

The last utopia

2009-06-22T18:09:00.003+01:00

Saw Godwin's Law mentioned somewhere today, and it made me realize, blogs which avowedly exist as a launchpad to discussion (for films, which is what I know, the two obvious examples are Girish and Dave Kehr) consistently prove this wrong. It probably helps having something specific to talk about, but still, there's something beautiful about it.

Road Movie

2009-06-17T14:50:00.002+01:00

One of the most interesting things about Christian Petzold's Yella is the way it reconfigures the car not as a living space or as a space of self-realization, but as a working place. In the US, the car is freedom and social status, or somehow dialectically linked to these ideas. No such approach here: the car is not limited to its social function of wealth indicator (though it is also that), it is mainly a place where economic relations (therefore power relations, since power is with he who wields balance sheets best) are determined, through deceit or its acknowledgement.
What makes the film intelligent is that it does all of this after having set up the car as an instrument of persecution (in the shot of Yella being followed from inside the car), and then violence (in the car crash). No wonder then that the only moment when the car is used for a journey (of sorts), and then driven off course (to Yella's home town), as opposed to the commuting seen until then, should lead to conflict: relationships are not defined anymore if the car is taken off its predetermined course...

Coraline

2009-06-13T15:21:00.004+01:00

Coraline on Saturday, and one of the most pleasurable trips at the cinema I've had this term (not that I've had many). The film is great, but it has many flaws, and one of the most interesting is that which badly harms the last third of the film: the narration plays out like a video game.
Coraline is set a task, to find three eyes, hidden in three places visited previously in the film; she sets about doing exactly that, and finds them one after the other, with only marginal excitement thrown in; after that, she confronts the villain. It has the same feel as the tasks in Pan's Labyrinth: the episodic structure weakens the dramatic impact completely; one could take away any one of the three "eye" scenes without it affecting the way Coraline sets about doing the other two in the slightest.
That the same fault should appear in two films that happen on the frontier between reality and a little girl's imagination is quite interesting, I'm at a loss to explain it. Considering Del Toro's film's success (I need to revisit it, was underwhelmed when I saw it), it might be a case of influence, but even then, there is definitely a case of contamination of video game structures into cinema. One day, someone will write an in-depth study of video game video sequences, but what that will leave out is the overriding way of organizing narrative progression: levels, portals. Maybe even save games (could they be the logical consequence of the cliff-hangers of TV series?)?
What is interesting is that as much as the origin in both cases seems to be video games, upon further thought the structure is also reminiscent of exactly what Pan's Labyrinth wanted to be: fairy tales. The princess is given three nuts in which she finds three dresses which... The tailor is given three nights in which to find out why the seven princesses' shoes are worn out every morning... Pan succeeds in bringing up this image better than Coraline, but it's there.

Otherwise, the film is delightful. I haven't been following animation as closely as I would like (despite thinking it shameful that it is so often neglected), but this seems to me one of the best western animated films in a long time. The reason I say western is that Amazing Life of the Fast Food Grifters, Paprika or especially Spirited Away belong to the list of the best films of the decade, not the best animated films...
And, alas, eastern European animation, not to mention middle eastern, remains criminally unknown...
Which makes me think that uncovering this bountiful treasure should be one of the possibilities offered by internet. Here's a good place to start, I think.

Afrique 50

2009-06-07T18:01:00.003+01:00

Back after a few days without internet, and before two weeks of revision (I might still post a bit). Managed to find René Vautier's Afrique 50 on internet today, which of course had me tremendously happy. Promptly downloaded it and watched it, here are a few thoughts.

-The film seems to me inextricably linked to its production, reminding me of Assayas's comment that L'Eau Froide was more important as an experience than as a result. This is not the case here, as the film is great seen today, but appreciation of how it was made (illegally, Vautier having run off from the French police in Africa to shoot it; when he came back, most of the material was seized except that fragments that make up the film I saw, for which he recorded the voice-over commentary while in the police station) definitely enhances the experience: here is, for real this time, that old cliché: filming as a weapon, as an act instead of a gaze.

-The voice-over. The use of "tu" for both the audience and the filmmaker, alternately, puts the words of the african subject, said by the filmmaker, and the words of the french citizen (turned dissident) on the same level. The"tu" of the African (note: there is not much indication of where the images come from, which is why I'm using African as an umbrella term) to the filmmaker is worth the same as the "tu" of the filmmaker to his audience. One wonders what the film would have been like with direct sound, which would have enabled Vautier to transmit the African "tu" directly.
The voice-over also provides a violent counterpoint to what I definitely did not expect from the images: their beauty. The sequence of the opening of the dam (around the 8 min mark) actually reminded me of Vertov's Enthusiasm more than anything else in its formal attention to bodies at work. But whereas Vertov praises the bodies who engage in voluntary work, Vautier admires the bodies of the African quasi-slaves while, with the voice-over, virulently denouncing what lies behind that image. The image could be admirable, but the voice-over reminds us that what we admire, in the present conditions, is quasi-slavery. Likewise for the children playing: they play because there is no school.
The voice-over therefore almost becomes an investigation into what we have a right to admire or not. The fervor of the ending minutes, which documents the insurrection and calls for its continuation, is the one moment when euphoric commentary on beautiful images is possible. The genius of it lies in the fact that that euphoric commentary is impossible for what the original target audience (the film was commissioned by the french state for educational purposes) would have considered beautiful, whereas it is necessary for precisely what that audience would not have wanted to face. By its very structure, the film describes the moral inversion at the heart of the colonialist gaze which would view the African as subject beautiful, but the African as citizen intolerable, and restores it to its proper place.

-The music. Possibly the only option to replace the African voice that Vautier could not get? The music here expresses all it should, and everything that western (classical?) music could, but has no right to.

Hypocrisy

2009-05-25T13:38:00.002+01:00

Let The Right One In: Or How A Director Can Film Children As If They Were Emo Gangsters And Hope To Be Called Sensitive.

In one of the first scenes, we see a man in long shot knock another man unconscious, then hang him upside down from a tree, then grab a knife to slit his victim's throat, at which point he steps in front of the camera to hide the act: the director is being "sensitive" about violence...
Except he cuts from that shot to a close-up of the blood trickling down into a bottle, with sound effects to boot. Giving cheap blood thrills while pretending to be discreet about it.

I saw the film just after having read an article by Daney in La Maison Cinema et Le Monde in which he explores how the dividing line between progressive (seen in his argument as proposing a positive proleterian class heroism) and immoral cinema runs through, and not between, "industry" and "art" cinema (films d'auteurs). It was not, therefore, too much of a surprise to find that the film this vampire blood-porn fest reminded me of the most was the other film to have made me so angry recently: Watchmen. Same hypocritical attitude to violence, same superficial disdain for human emotions passing off as depth, same sickly fascination for power, which here means the power to slaughter...

Day of the Dead

2009-05-18T22:59:00.003+01:00

The french magazine Panic was a key stage for my film education, and one to which I still go back now. It was a bimonthly magazine that only ran 5 issues, all of which contain great articles. From the beginning, it was daunting but also exciting: in the 1st issue, an interview of Olivier Assayas in which he discusses the need to fundamentally rethink the established standards of film criticism (a few points which I remember vividly: there has been as much time elapsed between us and the Nouvelle Vague as between the Nouvelle Vague and silent cinema, from which the film grammar we inherit was established; his belief that the most interesting writing about cinema is that written by filmmakers).
Only recently was I able to approach, with more contextual information, the articles of one of the contributors. The articles were impassioned, rigorous, daunting, fiercely political, full of references, only 1/20th of which I understood (now, only about 1/10th). The writer was of course Nicole Brenez.
One of the articles, A Propos de Nice or the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphet, has been reprinted at Rouge, but another one, The Treatment of the Lumpenproletariat by Avant-Garde Cinema, has as far as I know not. I will post on it more completely when I get back home (where my magazine is), but for the moment let me post one of the videos she recommended, which I've been watching often over the last few weeks: Afrika Shox.
(I don't yet know how to embed a youtube video)
It could be part of her urban pamphlet article as well, since its project corresponds almost exactly to what she describes:
It "shows how social injustice is inscribed within flesh itself, on walls, within the very fabric of urban organisation, in the concrete occupation of space [...]. It describes injustice’s physical dimension, reconstitutes its symbolic function, demonstrates its violence".
Maybe more on this videos in days to come.

China Girl

2009-05-15T13:16:00.001+01:00

Testing: Post 1.
Have just finished going through a Ferrara marathon in order to read Nicole Brenez's book (which was as superb as everyone said). Previously, I had seen only New Rose Hotel (still my favorite) and Bad Lt (with the Driller Killer and The Funeral, the one I liked least).
China Girl I was excited about. The film is obviously a pamphlet against racism. The first level of reading is introduced in the first few minutes: the two big brothers and their racist friends, the criminal organisations that meet above the characters' social levels... Everything is put in place to install a regime of equivalence.
But the film goes beyond that by insuring that this simplistic reading is installed so early and obviously: now that this point has been made, the film will be about not only proving how baseless the prejudices are, but opposing two different versions of equivalence. Brenez is right to point out that the two lovers are one of the only versions of pure good in Ferrara's cinema: to the equivalence of the criminal organizations, Ferrara contrasts the equivalence of their innocence, the equivalence of what both cultures can produce that is beautiful (they teach each other how to say "I love you" in their respective languages, for example). The hurlement de rage of the film is therefore not only to declare that the two cultures have their meeting grounds, but to affirm that those can be love as well as crime. It is also despair at the final destruction of this, the only valid utopia of relating to the other.
(Still struggling with how to integrate images)