Publication!

My first article to be published in a professional venue has come out today. From now on, I hope to cover DVD releases for the Swiss newspaper Le Courrier about once a month, and I will link to the articles here.

The emotion!

http://www.lecourrier.ch/103284/new_york_les_yeux_grands_ouverts

Eric Hobsbawm, In Memoriam

"Il ne pouvait pas être question de guerre: ces gens étaient des hors-la-loi. Les hors-la-loi, on ne leur fait pas la guerre, on les extermine."

"Travelling around Italy in the 1950s, I kept discovering these aberrant phenomena—Party branches in the South electing Jehovah’s Witnesses as Party secretaries, and so on; people who were thinking about modern problems, but not in the terms that we were used to. Second, particularly after 1956, it expressed a general dissatisfaction with the simplified version we had of the development of working-class popular movements. In Primitive Rebels, I was very far from critical of the standard reading—on the contrary, I pointed out that these other movements would not get anywhere unless they sooner or later adopted the modern vocabulary and institutions. But, nonetheless, it became clear to me that it wasn’t enough simply to neglect these other phenomena, to say that we know how all these things operate. I produced a series of illustrations, case studies, of this kind, and said, ‘these don’t fit’. It led me to think that, even before the invention of modern political vocabulary, methods and institutions, there were ways in which people practised politics that encompassed basic ideas about social relations—not least between the powerful and the weak, rulers and ruled—which had a certain logic and fitted together."
Eric Hobsbawm

"It is time the rich remembered to fear the poor."
Eric Hobsbawm (in an address at some forum that used to be on youtube).

In Memoriam: Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012.

Radical Honesty

If it's so hard to make up one's mind once and for all about Hara Kazuo, it might be because the radical honesty of his films always seems to run along two apparently mutually exclusive lines: on the one hand, his honesty is complete, including honesty about the unpleasantness entailed by his being present to shoot the material; on the other, one is never quite rid of the suspicion that this honesty is used as a cop-out to avoid questioning said unpleasant issues ("How can you blame me for it, since I'm showing everything upfront!?"). In other words, one is never quite sure whether it truly is a radical honesty, or a truly dishonest radicality: for all the discomfort his films provoke, how much of it stems from the audience's unease with being confronted with the uncanny, unfamiliar, and often shocking images of whatever repressed social phenomenon Hara is observing? And how much stems from principled rejection of the any-means-necessary approach Hara has to his material, which often seems to entail brutality to those being filmed at the same time as it does brutality to the viewer?

The triangular relationship of filmer-filmed-viewer rarely holds a place as important as it does in his works, but it has also rarely been more difficult to establish and define. In Goodbye CP (a wishful title, as the film ends with main character Hiroshi's desolate acknowledgment that Cerebral Palsy is not to be wished away), the film is as much a product of the patients as it is of the cameraman. At times Hara is clearly used to orchestrate, enable, and record Hiroshi's projects, such as a poetry reading which becomes interrupted off camera. The film is partly financed by Green Lawn, the organisation formed by the patients shown, and we are privy to a board meeting halfway through the film in which the question is raised of whether to continue filming or not. As in the case of the other film of Hara's that I have seen (The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On), then, the film at some point becomes about its own making, about how a filmed person takes control of a film and uses it for their own end. It also is, insistently, about the unwillingness to stop filming, the desire to record everything, even against the wishes of those being filmed.

In the later film, however, showing Okuzaki Kenzo requesting that Hara stop filming (when he was being detained by the police) was a breath of fresh air, a comic interlude which suddenly showed up Okuzaki's playing to the camera, and opened up a critical space for the viewer between the man, his cause, and the means he uses for it. In Goodbye CP, Hara films victims of cerebral palsy; and arguably, it is precisely this reaction of discomfort that he is questioning: should it be any different because they are ill? To which the answer might be: would it be acceptable to film someone who refused to be filmed even if they were healthy? But then again, the answer might equally be: but is not the fact of showing them resisting filming, renegotiating the film as it is still being filmed, the very least Hara can do to let these people keep their dignity? It is in this uncomfortable space, between the affront to the film-maker as a request that he ignores (for the sake of the film, thereby establishing a rather distasteful power-play with his own subjects) and its inclusion as a very strong indictment of his own role (he behaved in an objectionable manner at least once during the shoot. Is this unwillingness to lie about it enough to excuse it?), that debate about the sadism of Hara's method probably mostly happens.

But in the particular case of this film, the issue is made far more complex by the last scene. The film, at this point, has been full of absolutely unforgettable sequences: Hara asking passers-by who give the Green Lawn money why they did it, as if asking the viewers why they are watching the film (“Does it really help?” is the implied question: are admirable motives enough?); Hiroshi and his wife yelling at Hara to stop filming, while the others berate Hiroshi for endangering a collective project... In the last scene, Hiroshi sits naked on an empty road, making us look at his body, and then starts crawling uncomfortably across the road. The belles âmes would have us believe that it is the souls of those affected by CP that count, but those who are ill know that the reason we notice them (but would rather not) is their bodies. Hiroshi and Hara force us to look at the body as a body, as an impediment to action rather than a means to it. But on the voice-over, Hiroshi details his feelings about the film at the end of shooting.

It is often taken as a badge of sincerity on a film-maker's part to question what his film has brought to those he filmed, to ask who is using who, to acknowledge that probably, in the end, his actions as a film-maker had little positive impact on the actions of those he filmed (after all, Ici et Ailleurs, one of Godard's greatest films is based on precisely these kinds of questions). But in Goodbye CP, Hara lets Hiroshi do something else: he tells us himself what his hopes had been for the film, how these have been dashed, and how the film has failed to make any positive impact on his life. This text, running over harsh images of impotent movements, bring us back to Hara's initial question: what are we contributing? What did watching this film achieve? Faced with these images and their voice-over, we are denied one of the last resorts of traditional radical documentary watching: identification with the director. For once, we do not commiserate with a director's impotence. We are confronted with a subject's own admission of defeat. It is this refusal to make Hara's defeat into an aesthetic object, but his insistence to make Hiroshi's loss of hope the real failure, that may very well be Hara's most radical and welcome move.

Late thoughts on the ten-step podium.

(I arrive somewhat late to the discussion because I was having a wonderful time travelling around the east of the USA. Consider this a tardy late answer to Sight and Sound's poll. Or a tardy answer to Girish)

2012, when film culture reached a turning point and failed to turn. There is no doubt that there was, for many people, a hint of triumphalism in the fact that Citizen Kane had been toppled off its seat, yet any cry of victory was overwhelmingly, and correctly, overshadowed by the almost complete lack of any other change in the rest of the canon. Dziga Vertov's entry into the top 10 is the one event of note in a list that is otherwise dispiritingly similar to the previous one. And though it is bracing to see such a free, adventurous film make it into the top 10, it is somewhat damning that the only avant-garde that can «make it in» is an avant-garde that is eighty years old.

Now, why is what happens in the Sight and Sound poll noteworthy? If its status as the canon certainly matters, what made it interesting this time round was the notable changes in film culture in the past ten years. Had DVDs, internet, film blogging, greater consciousness on a wide scale of non-western/mainstream etc really made a difference? It would seem instead that so far the transformations in film culture have been, paradoxically, too effective in opening up the field to transform it quite yet. The lists, as they can be perused on the internet, are a treasure-trove, joyously opening up paths for multiple discoveries and re-evaluations, leading from one bafflement to the next, through an endless chain of cross-links and inter-connections that draw such a rich canvas of cinema that it would seem churlish to complain. Yet this is something else already: a look at the individual choices, whose multiplicity draws a far more compelling and complex picture of cinema than what the whole exercise nevertheless is: the controversial, but ultimately inescapable problem of the canon.

The opposition of the two seems to lead straight into a dead end: on one hand, the consensus of the established ten, their place more or less guaranteed by the security of numbers. On the other, the proliferation of films nominated one, two, maybe ten times, each of them a discovery and a marker of individual taste, but because of the singularity and the anti-canonical impulse underlying their choice incapable of unseating the established masterworks (for none of the films in the top ten is even remotely undeserving of the status). That this might be a perverse effect of our film culture as it stands is not false per se (what is acclaimed is visible), but somewhat beside the point: the individual list takes a stand, but the stand depends on its individuality, and becomes thus incapable of offering an alternative canon.

All of which is fine, as far as it goes. It even leads to much merriment: take Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's list and the method used to make it. Yet it also leads to the thorny problem of the established canon: if each list is its individual entity, then from where does the new canon emerge? If the aim of the new participants (bloggers, younger critics...) is to redraw the map of cinema, to expand it, to shift the way we perceive film history, then it is necessary to offer this new map. In classical Gramscian terms: discrediting a prevailing view is not enough, if one does not have a contending view to oppose to it. Practically: what is the image of cinema that we are fighting for?

This, of course, brings us back to the aim of the whole exercise: for those participants who wish to offer a new view of cinema, what meaning does one's individual list have? Is one trying to unseat the old consensus, or merely offering a new square in a mosaic where, paradoxically, each little bit is beautiful but the total matters very little? But then, if one does not care about the general picture; if what matters is cinema in its totality, not the image of cinema that emerges from one's choice; if the idea of restricting oneself to ten films is anathema; then why take part at all? Either one does seek to create a new consensus, to promote what one hopes is a richer view of cinema, with all the sacrifices it entails: using totemic films (cf. Nicole Brenez's comments, which shows an awareness of the problems this kind of list creates, but an acceptance of their necessity) that represent others; selecting, as Zach Campbell suggested a while back, sustainability rather than originality as a criterion (less sexy, sadly)... Or one goes for originality, hoping that the individual list will somehow matter, that people will make the effort because they share the same outlook, but accepting that the established canon will stand by sheer force of inertia. Either the list is made with an eye to a new canon, or the established canon stands. Have we, then, reached a critical juncture: the canon might as well stand, because it has stopped mattering?

Blurbs, part 3: the end.

Well, that's it. I have finished my studies in Oxford, and with that, an important chapter in my life. As to what comes after, time will tell. Hopefully I will have more time now to post a bit more often than I have in the past year. But in the meantime, the blurbs I wrote for Magdalen Film Society in my final term:

Gremlins.

The classic anti-Christmas horror comedy, still as bitingly satirical as ever.

“Now I have another reason to hate Christmas.”

Joe Dante might very well qualify as one of the most talented American directors currently working, but his consistently intelligent, sharply satirical, and hilariously funny output might paradoxically be enabled by the marginal position he occupies within the film industry, having fun digs at all of its conventions while providing hugely entertaining films. Gremlins, his most famous film and one of the greatest spoofs of the Christmas spirit ever made, displays the characteristic combination of human warmth and savage critique that makes him one of the greatest satirists working in Hollywood today.

The story follows a young man who receives a cute creature for Christmas but breaks the three rules of raising it, only to let loose a bunch of monsters who wreak havoc on his small town. This is little more than an excuse for wrecking all the traditional institutions of small-town America, gleefully bringing to the surface all the neuroses and hidden tensions between the memorable cast of secondary characters. Yet it is central to Dante's vision that there is rarely such a thing as a villain in his films: some of the most sympathetic characters are the gremlins themselves, and Dante clearly has more fun observing their hedonist debauchery than the moral uptightness of some of the human characters. A sharp anti-Christmas comment that reconfigures traditional feel-good movies as horror, and a gleefully liberating destruction fest that rejoices in tearing down the American cultural unconscious, Gremlins still stands as one of the best popcorn films of all time.

A Man Escapes.

A patient examination of the efforts called for by freedom, in one of the greatest films ever made.

“To fight – fight against the walls, against myself, my door.”

Jean-Luc Godard once said of Robert Bresson that he is “French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.” No small praise, coming from the man who is French cinema as Tolstoy is the Russian novel and Bach is German music. One of the greatest films ever made, Bresson's A Man Escapes is also the best introduction to his work, which stands as one of the most original and daring that cinema has produced.

Drawing on Bresson's own wartime experiences, as well as on the true story of Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film follows a man called Fontaine's escape attempt from the Nazi gaols of Lyon. The first shot of the film, showing the man's hands, sets the tone: the excitement and suspense of the film reside in its patient, unflinching observations of the very concrete problems that stand in Fontaine's way, and of the perseverance required he displays. Freedom is the central concern of the film, and Bresson complements his sparse, crisp imagery with a soundtrack that consistently plays on the dialectic of freedom and captivity: the slightest noises indicate menaces or opportunities, comradeship or oppression, and constantly expand the realm of possibilities by reminding us of a world outside the prison cell. With its very concrete sense of resistance, A Man Escapes is one of the few truly existentialist films: a work of art that exhibits a true sense not only of the difficulty, but also of the uncompromising necessity of freedom.

Two-Lane Blacktop:

The cult road-movie, which stands at the peak of 1970s American cinema.

“You can never go fast enough.”

Like many great artists, Monte Hellman might have had great trouble getting his projects off the ground, yet one need only watch the film for which he is most famous to verify that he is one of the most essential American film-makers of the past forty years. For all those who consider that the 1970s were a golden age of American cinema, Two-Lane Blacktop, both the greatest road-movie ever and the absolute anti-road-movie, is one of its most enduring miracles.

The film follows a set of four unnamed characters, as their shifting interactions and rivalries bring into question their entire way of life. Theoretically, the story is the classic set-up of a race between two drivers, one a smooth talker constantly building up his own mythology, the other one quiet and ruthlessly focused on racing. Yet Hellman continually undermines the notion of rugged virility and masculine affirmation which usually form the genre: conflicts are observed in a coolly detached way, and characters stop in squalid diners as often as they cross lush landscapes. By the infamous ending (one of the most memorable in American cinema), the two conflicting visions of masculinity (and of the actor's craft) have exposed as equally false, empty codes whereby men prove themselves to each other but become incapable of genuine contact, so that the very idea of “winning the girl” becomes a dead end. Two-Lane Blacktop takes the road movie ever faster towards its culimation in absolute stillness. Run, run, as fast as you can...

Children in the Wind.

An masterwork of unassuming spontaneity by one of the great forgotten masters of Japanese cinema.

“You only have freedom when you're young.”

The films of Hiroshi Shimizu, one of the supreme (and unjustly neglected) masters of Japanese cinema, offer a blast of fresh air to anyone seeking worthwhile portrayals of childhood on film. Whereas most attempts either portray children as annoying idiots or as cloying creatures so irritatingly cute as to be devoid of any reality, Shimizu pays close attention to their interactions and aspirations, letting them exist as multi-faceted beings as worthy of interest as the adults around them. Nowhere is the generosity of his vision as evident as in one of his best films, Children in the Wind.

Sanpei and Zenta are two brothers who see their position in the group of village children undermined when their father meets with trouble at work. Shimizu attentively follows the reverberations of this, first in the family, then in the wider frame of society, carefully drawing parallels between the economic struggles of the adult world and the discord it creates within the children's society. A master at integrating human figures in landscapes, Shimizu effortlessly creates compositions all the more stunning for their simplicity, and has few challengers in the art of contriving scenes that are both funny and intensely moving. His children are intelligent and funny, eager to discover the world, and Shimizu adopts their posture of patient and ever-renewed exploration to chart the transformations of the slowly modernizing Japanese rural community. Beautifully simple and effortlessly rich, the communal vision of Children in the Wind is one of the most compelling portrayals of children ever seen on screen.

Murder

"This is also why economists get away with murder: it’s so boring that no one is watching them."

Adam Curtis.

Film Society Blurbs, 2/3.

Dear readers who are still out there: I do intend to go on writing for this blog, but for a variety of reasons (exams, very active film society involvement, enhanced social life, and mostly non-film related reading in the past year or so) I haven't really been able to do so for the past few months.

In the meantime, here are the blurbs that I wrote for Magdalen Film Society last term. I will post those for the last term once the films have actually been shown, and then I do intend to post at least a few thoughts on film programming as an activity, as I had promised I would. Anyway, without further ado:


An Affair to Remember

For anyone who still thinks that the 1950s were a shallow decade of conformism for Hollywood, An Affair to Remember, a film of almost unsurpassed romanticism, is also a supreme example of radical genre-mixing. As such, it manages the feat of being both one of the greatest romantic comedies ever, and one of the greatest melodramas ever.

What makes it so simultaneously heart-warming and heart-wrenching is the complete mastery with which Leo McCarey, still a criminally under-rated director, treats this tale of a man and a woman, soon to be married to others, who fall in love and promise to break off their respective engagements and meet again in six months at the top of the Empire State Building. A remake of his own Love Affair, it is a study in what brings two people together or keeps them apart. McCarey uses cinema-scope with a rare, self-effacing brilliance, modulating the spaces that his characters share and taking the time to watch them move from guarded flirting to deep attraction. Resting on the finely tuned interaction between a womanizing Cary Grant whose games of seduction give way to genuine commitment, and a quietly strong Deborah Kerr who refuses happiness on terms other than her own, the film finds its soul in the slow process of falling in love. When the two finally accept their attraction, in a scene whose gentleness is the true heart of the film, the result is an unassuming sincerity without parallel in the history of cinema.

An American in Paris

While the musical is not as fashionable today as film noir among film buffs, it is a genre that helped define Hollywood and has given it as many masterworks as any other genre. An American in Paris, one of the pinnacles of Gene Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli's careers, is also one of the miracles of the genre, defined by the constant tension between the director and the star's personalities.

The film, one of the better versions of Europe as a fantasy of America that have always populated Hollywood, follows the tribulations of Jerry, the eponymous painter who lives in Paris for inspiration, when he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be engaged to one of his friends. From the very beginning, which sees Jerry waking up in his one-room appartment in an elaborate choreography which sees every-day movements (getting out of bed, preparing a cup of coffee) casually infused with a rhythm and musicality that sets the whole world in motion, it is clear that the film's mood is wildly infectious. But what makes it truly distinctive is the final ballet, where Minnelli's bitter-sweet vision of love finds its true expression. As Jerry imagines himself, to Gershwin's score, running through a stylized Paris straight out of the great paintings he loves, the film creates Hollywood's answer to The Red Shoes, an explosion of color and music that radically reconfigures the film and bears up to the comparison with Michael Powell's masterwork. There is no higher praise.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

One of the cult slasher hits of the eighties, A Nightmare on Elm Street belongs squarely to that golden generation of films which, with Halloween as the example, claimed the tradition of Psycho as its own and brought it where it has stayed ever since : in the realm of the pulp, trashy, and endlessly inventive shocker.

The film, which features Johnny Depp in one of his first performances, uses all the well-worn tricks of the trade : it-was-all-a-dream sequence, teen-agers getting killed after sex, references to The Exorcist and The Shining, fear of female sexuality, embodied in the iconic image of the claws coming out from between the bathing heroine's legs...Yet it is clear that Wes Craven, with his absurdist sense of humor, had already understood most of what cinema has been telling us since. With the determination of those with no money but a story to tell, he walks the audience through the teenage version of the american dream and transforms all of its images, from the high school hall to the suburban home, into haunting visions of horror. Twenty-five years before Inception, the film invents the lethal dream, tells us that our world is a nightmare, that nightmares are real, and that we get lost in between. And thus, in the most unlikely way, one of the great pulp masterworks of B horror film-making joins paths with W.B.Yeats: in dreams begins responsibility.

Of time and discovery

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

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

-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.

"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)

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.

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.

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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.

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^st century 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

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

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

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

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...

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.