Long Pauses

Category: Film

  • Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Religious faith is utterly irrational. By calling myself a Christian, I claim to believe at least this: that we are all born into a fallen world and that each of us is in need of grace, an undeserved forgiveness possible only through the sacrifice of Christ. It makes no sense. From a rational perspective, it’s not terribly different from a belief in “Leda and the Swan” or the practices of New Age mysticism. All might otherwise be described as man-invented responses to the irrational tendencies of human experience — things like creativity, desire, curiosity, grief, suffering, injustice, and good ol’ existential dread. Faith offers a kind of all-encompassing framework of understanding, a culturally- and historically rich narrative that provides, at the very least, the appearance of meaning, even if not Meaning itself.

    To watch the body of Abel Ferrara’s films, as I’ve tried my best to do over the last month and a half, is to see a man wrestling obsessively — sadomasochistically, even — with the Irrational. The stylized violence, the scenery-chewing performances, the gratuitous and exploitative female nudity — all are window dressing. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the very possibility of grace. If looking at a woman lustfully is ultimately (or Ultimately) no different from committing adultery itself — if, in other words, each of us is equally depraved, equally culpable — then all of us are trapped in a world very much like Ferrara’s, where good and bad have blended to a shade of deep, dark gray.

    It’s this quality, I suspect, that led Brad Stevens to name his critical biography Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision, and it’s also what other participants in today’s blog-a-thon have called Ferrara’s “humanism.” I don’t think humanist is the right word for him, though. His films, in fact, seem to me to be deeply cynical. While his characters often act badly with the very best intentions — I’m thinking of Tom Berrenger’s washed up boxer in Fear City, Christopher Walken’s Robin Hood-like drug lord in King of New York, and the husband and wife of ‘R X-Mas — and while Ferrara refuses to rule over them as a moral judge (and prevents us from doing so as well), he most definitely situates them in a world corrupted tragically and completely by our cultural institutions (capital, politics, and religion, to name just three) and by man’s basest instincts. It’s an ugly, ugly place.

    But despite its ugliness, Ferrara’s world is occasionally illuminated by brief moments of redemption, and I’m tempted to say that, in each case, its an explicitly transcendent, transhuman redemption. These are Ferrara’s encounters with the Irrational. The most obvious and affecting example is the bad lieutenant, who, after witnessing the victimized nun’s extraordinary forgiveness of her attackers, confronts the very Source of her strength before performing a charitable act of grace himself. That same moment is reenacted in The Mother of Mirrors, the film-within-a-film in Dangerous Game. Sarah Jennings’ (Madonna) character has experienced a kind of religious epiphany that has allowed her to reform, and in doing so she has brought into relief the depravity of the world she and her husband have created. There is a specifically Christian character to these transformations in Ferrara’s work, just as there’s a specifically Christian character to, say, Bresson’s and the Dardennes’.

    Briefly, I want to add, also, that I think this battle with the Irrational is part of what makes Ferrara an American filmmaker. We are a confused and compromised lot, are we not? Two centuries later, our political rhetoric remains heavy with allusions to the protestant work ethic, to the Deistic ideals of the Enlightenment, and to the One God under which our Nation stands. Meanwhile, we consume, degrade, exploit, and dehumanize with the best of ’em. Which is probably why we’re so fond of transcendent redemption as a concept — so much so that we’ve made it a hallmark of American tradition. What I most appreciate about Ferrara is the messy collision of his cynicism and, for lack of a better word, his faith: grace is never cheap in his world, and that’s as it should be.

    Until this point in my post, I’ve carefully avoided making any aesthetic judgments on Ferrara’s work. Counting the early shorts, I think I’ve now seen fourteen of his films, and I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a director of genuine importance whose films are almost all fundamentally flawed. Bad Lieutenant is, I think, his most coherent and best picture; Dangerous Game is his most interesting; and King of New York is his most traditionally entertaining. Ms. 45 is probably the best low-budget exploitation film I’ve ever seen (for whatever that’s worth); and, given a choice of which of his films to rewatch tonight, I’d pick New Rose Hotel without a moment of hesitation.

    If I were a bigger fan of Ferrara’s work, I’m sure I could put together a well-reasoned apology for the pacing problems, the tone problems, the performance problems, and the basic narrative problems that characterize, to various degrees, all of his films. (Even as a fan, though, I doubt I could justify his misogyny — I’m talking to you, Cat Chaser.) Part of me wishes he would find a strong-willed producer and editor, people willing to reign him in just enough to un-kink the various lines of thought that wind through his work. The ideas are compelling, and the execution is occasionally stunning. (I really, really love those long takes in Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game, especially the scene between Zoe Lund and Harvey Keitel, and Madonna’s “What do you want from me?” moment in front of Eddie Israel’s camera.) Until that happens, I’ll continue seeing his new films and, I suspect, continue being frustrated by them.

    See also:

    [with more to come]

  • Calls to Conscience and Action

    Calls to Conscience and Action

    Jeffrey Overstreet, who’s writing a book about his experiences as a film critic in/to Evangelical America, has posed the question, “What would you show in a film festival about ‘Calls to Conscience and Action’?” Specifically, he’s looking for “works of art that make us want to put our hands to the plow.”

    Frankly, his question makes me uncomfortable. I say that, in part, because I’m having trouble coming up with one or two specific titles (a topic I’ll come back to later) but mostly because it’s been so long since my hand last touched a plow, metaphorical or otherwise. I’m more the “righteous indignation” type — the guy who carefully positions himself above the fray while the “Red States,” on the one side, react against liberal America’s progressive agendas, and the “Hollywood Elite,” on the other, try to decide which is the bigger evil: racism, homophobia, or, um, Joe McCarthy. I prefer to strike the pose of the humanist aesthete, sniping soldiers on both sides from the satisfied comfort of my expensive home theater. It’s so much easier than, you know, doing something. (Have you ever tried to plow? That shit is hard.)

    Sarcasm aside, I’ll admit to feeling a bit shamed by Jeffrey’s question. That it would arise from a book project addressed to Evangelical readers should come as little surprise. Whatever frustrations I feel toward that world’s cultural and ideological assumptions are always tempered by my genuine love and respect for so many people who have found their spiritual home there. Color me ambivalent. When, a few years ago, I suggested to some friends that we temporarily set aside our Bibles and study art instead, I first had to convince them that the questions we’d been trained to ask would remain essentially unchanged: What does this text (whether Scripture, a painting, or a film) teach us about truth, beauty, and grace? What aspects of God’s character are revealed here? And how do we apply these lessons to our daily lives? Say what you will about Evangelical America’s failure to meet Christ’s standards (and I’ve said more than my share), but that question of application — of putting hand to plow — is more prominent there than in any other American sub-culture I’ve inhabited.

    And so it pains me to review my life as a critic (for lack of a better word) and find so little evidence of my faith/politics/aesthetics translated into practical action. Maybe this hypocrisy (too strong?) is partly to blame for the ferocity of the public debate surrounding the Oscars this year. High-minded talk, whether from the Right or the Left, divorced from sympathy and service will inevitably come off as smug.

    I’m deliberately overstating the case here. Of course my sense of the world, of right action, of human tragedy and grace have been radically transformed by an immersion in the arts. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the simple idea of empathy. (Slacktivist, by the way, has written two great posts on the subject this week.) I wonder, for example, how I would view the war in Iraq if, instead of watching regional, humanist filmmakers like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi, I was learning about righteous vengeance, sadism, and “freedom” from Hollywood. The creative imagination, as expressed through great art, can be an empathy-making wonder. Christ, after all, was a prophet and a storyteller.

    But to answer Jeffrey’s question: If offered the chance to program a “Calls to Conscience and Action” festival, my opening night film would be The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda’s documentary about the long-standing tradition of gathering up leftover crops (“gleaning”) after the fields have been harvested. Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself. As Jonathon Rosenbaum points out, Varda expresses the ambiguities of gleaning even in the title of the film, though her point is lost in translation:

    There’s a suggestive discrepancy between the French and English titles of this wonderful essay film completed by Agnes Varda last year. It’s a distinction that tells us something about the French sense of community and the Anglo-American sense of individuality — concepts that are virtually built into the two languages. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse can be roughly translated as “the gleaners and the female gleaner,” with the plural noun masculine only in the sense that all French nouns are either masculine or feminine. The Gleaners and I sets up an implicit opposition between “people who glean” and the filmmaker, whereas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse links them, asserting that she’s one of them.

    Regardless of what would follow on the festival program, The Gleaners and I would properly frame the central question of conscience and action, making it a matter of community (or, to satisfy the pomo Christians in the audience, we could call it “kingdom” instead) and foregrounding art as an underutilized means of consciousness-raising, community-building, and (dare I say it) worship.

    I would also program The Gleaners and I for personal reasons. For a large number of viewers, the most memorable sequences in the film involve a young man who, despite having earned a Masters degree in Biology, has chosen to glean his food from a Paris market and to live in a shelter, side-by-side with the newly-arrived immigrants to whom he voluntarily teaches French most nights of the week. I can’t imagine that I would have become an English as a Second Language teacher myself had I not first met so many non-Americans through the literatures and cinema of their countries. My ESL work is as close as I’ve come, I suppose, to pushing a plow, though that metaphor distorts the actual experience. It implies calloused hands, sweat, and sacrifice.

  • Code Unknown (2000)

    Code Unknown (2000)

    Dir. by Michael Haneke

    “The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there’s a mirror. People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”
    — Walker Evans

    “Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
    — Susan Sontag

    Twice during Code Unknown, director Michael Haneke cuts together montages of still photographs. The first is a series of grisly images from war-torn Kosovo; the second is a collection of portraits taken surreptitiously (if we are to believe the film’s narrative) on the Paris Metro. The second montage is actually the work of documentary photographer Luc Delahaye, but his obvious forebear is Walker Evans, whose hidden camera work on Depression-era New York subway trains resulted in the book, Many Are Called (1966).

    In “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Susan Sontag calls Evans an heir to Walt Whitman’s “euphoric” humanism. “To photograph is to confer importance,” she writes, and Evans’ photos, or so the argument goes, democratize their subjects by leveling the playing field — “leveling up,” Sontag notes. Viewed through his lens, the Victorian homes of Boston are exactly as beautiful, as ugly, and as important as the dusty cotton towns of south Alabama. Evans’ images are, in his own words, “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” Sontag continues:

    The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.

    I doubt I’ll be the only participant in today’s blog-a-thon to call upon Saint Susan. They’re too obvious a pairing, Sontag and Haneke — sharp intellects, determined moralists, and impossibly talented craftsmen, both. The question that’s nagging at me, though, is whether Haneke’s films, in general, and Code Unknown, specifically, achieve the egalitarian aims for which Sontag praises Evans. As opposed to the streams of self-canceling images that spray from television, Haneke’s films are, perhaps, as hyperselected as moving images can be — I admire his precise direction like I admire the prose of a great essayist — but to what ends, exactly?

    Haneke’s use of Delahaye’s “L’Autre” photos is, like so much of the film, a highly self-conscious gesture. In this allusion to Sontagian (?) romanticism, he critiques by juxtaposition the kind of contemporary, sado-pornographic photojournalism typified by George’s Kosovo pictures. (George’s dry voice-over reading of a letter to Anne as the montage of dismembered bodies and grieving faces spools by is another nice — if heavy — touch.) By comparison, the black and white portraits of disinterested subway riders are more artful and ambiguous, and, therefore, one might argue, more essentially human. After seriously considering the term for several years now, I still don’t understand what “transcendent” means, precisely, but I know that the second photo montage and the shots of deaf students drumming are my favorite moments in Code Unknown, perhaps because they short-circuit, temporarily, my intellectual processes during a film that, at times, feels too much like a high-minded parable.

    Haneke’s allusion to Evans’ literacy, authority, and transcendence is problematized, though, by the scene in which we watch George take his subway photos. When he sits down in front of an attractive young woman, their knees only inches apart, it feels like a predatory act, one nearly as taut and tense as Anne’s later confrontation with an aggressive teenager. Again, the scene is highly self-conscious. George’s camera is Haneke’s camera, and it’s also every other camera documenting and fragmenting our lives (and it’s a weapon and a phallus, to boot — quite a potent symbol, this camera).

    “People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway,” Evans tells us, but why should we believe him? I’m not sure that I do, and Haneke almost certainly doesn’t. Even the photo that appears on the cover of the most recent edition of Many Are Called (see above) betrays the Heisenberg-like effect of Evans’ camera on his subjects. That woman on the left, it seems to me, is — if not wholly aware that she is being photographed — at least suspicious of that man sitting across the aisle from her. Or, perhaps Sontag is right, and Haneke and I are simply enjoying, begrudgingly, the symptoms of our postmodern cynicism. Literate in the debates surrounding image culture, we strike the moral pose, asking tough questions, complicating assumptions, conscious all the while of the vast gulf that separates our bourgeois thumb-twiddling from power.

    In Code Unknown, Haneke harkens toward the prelapsarian image — “the real face” — with the goal, I think, of infecting us with a similar nostalgia. Even the form of the film derives from that goal: each of the vignettes plays like one of Sontag’s “privileged moments . . . a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” Once afflicted by the longing for authority or for the proverbial “genuine article,” anything less — a traditional thriller like Anne’s new film, The Collector, for example — will be exposed as trivial or even morally harmful.

    See also:

  • The Human Stain (2003)

    The Human Stain (2003)

    Dir. by Robert Benton

    I really like this image, which I grabbed from a brief making-of featurette available on the DVD release of The Human Stain. Philip Roth isn’t a participant, really, but he does show up in this one shot — the very last shot of the featurette. He’s turning his head from left to right, I assume because he’s just noticed that he’s being filmed, and there’s a charming look of amusement on his face.

    Philip Roth and Nicole Kidman

    He’s chatting with Nicole Kidman, and Anthony Hopkins is also there in the room. As is Gary Sinise, who’s pretending for the day to be Nathan Zuckerman, a successful Jewish writer now sequestered and hard at work in an isolated cabin somewhere in the wilds of Thoreau and Hawthorne country. Roth, of course, has been pretending to be Zuckerman for nearly thirty years now. Come to think of it, this image could have come directly from the pages of one of his novels — somewhere, maybe, between Deception and The Counterlife: “Philip Roth” meets “Nathan Zuckerman” and all epistemological hell breaks loose.

    The Human Stain is a little more impressive each time I read it. I’m still frustrated by the sadistic delight with which Roth degrades and destroys Delphine Roux, the 100-pound beauty of a French feminist scholar who, as it turns out, really just needs a good fuck from a virile classical humanist like Coleman Silk. And Les Farley, the deranged Vietnam vet, is never developed too far beyond the deranged Vietnam vet “type”; though, to Roth’s credit, Les does come to life — and then some — in one or two of the best scenes Roth has ever written, most notably the conversation between him and Zuckerman that ends the novel. But those are minor complaints, really. Of Roth’s writing of the last twenty-five years, The Human Stain, I think, is second only to American Pastoral in terms of ambition, formal invention, and sheer imaginative force.

    I have no idea if Robert Benton’s adaptation of The Human Stain works on its own as a film. (The Almighty Tomatometer gives it a 41%, so consensus seems to be that it doesn’t quite.) Like the Tolkein-o-philes who continue to parse through every last detail of the Rings trilogy, I read Benton’s film as a vast intertext consisting of Roth’s many novels, his critics, the interviews, the essays, and my own evolving thoughts about — not to mention my imaginings of — The Human Stain itself. What I did last night barely qualifies as “watching a movie.” In the guise of objectivity, though, I’ll say this much: Nicholas Meyer’s screenplay streamlines the various storylines to focus more intently on the relationship between Coleman Silk (Hopkins) and Faunia Farley (Kidman), which seems a perfectly logical choice. He and Benton cut between the postwar promise of 1948 and the politically correct era of fifty years later with a fluidity that gives cohesion to both halves of Silk. And I was especially impressed by Wentworth Miller and Jacinda Barrett, who play the young Silk and his first love, Steena “Voluptas” Paulsson. Their too-brief scenes together restore a sense of balance and scaled-down emotions to a film in more need of both.

    Adaptation is always, in some sense, an act of criticism, I suppose. Meyer and Benton, in close collaboration with their actors and crew, have in essence performed a close reading of Roth’s novel. For example, Meyer has chosen to keep Zuckerman as a narrative device — the author/detective who reconstructs “the whole story” — and Benton foregrounds that device by shooting most of the film from an objective remove. With only a few notable exceptions (Faunia’s discussion with the crow, for instance) the film is almost completely devoid of eyeline matches. When Steena dances for Silk, the camera stays near the back of the room, never allowing us to align too closely our own perception of the film’s world with Silk’s. This is an essential characteristic of Roth’s recent work, nicely transposed to the film.

    But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions. (I love Roth most of all for his ten-page diversions.) But seeing the boxes in the film — those specific boxes, small, gold, hidden below her bed frame — became an essential moment in the development of Faunia’s character, more essential, I would argue, than Kidman’s overwrought monologue that immediately follows. They are present, like a memento mori, with a force that Roth’s writing never achieves.

    An even more interesting example is Coleman’s last professional fight. Roth’s description:

    Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was always dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he’s got, Silky, and give the people their money’s worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck You. I’m getting a hundred dollars, and I’m going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money’s worth? I’m supposed to give a shit about some jerkoff sitting in the fifteenth row? I’m a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he’s a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I’m supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

    After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman’s behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money’s worth. But you didn’t. I ask you nicely, and you don’t do what I ask you. Why’s that, wise guy?”

    “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” (116, 117)

    On the page, that scene is about Coleman’s arrogance, his intellectual superiority. Boxing, he tells his parents earlier, is a matter of outsmarting one’s opponent. The film, however, foregrounds the significance of Roth’s elision: “After the fight . . .” Benton chooses, instead, to shoot the boxing match Rocky-style, and so we are forced to watch the light-skinned Coleman, passing as a Jew, “outsmarting” his black opponent by beating him senseless. Not surprisingly, the rhythm of Wentworth Miller’s performance feels forced and awkward when he delivers the line towards which Roth’s prose so carefully builds: “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” On film, the words have been overpowered and made redundant by the force of the visual image. (I’m embarrassed to admit that, until I saw Silk fight, I’d never seriously considered the importance of Invisible Man — and “The Battle Royal,” specifically — as a precedent for The Human Stain.)

  • Showgirls (1995)

    Showgirls (1995)

    Dir. by Paul Verhoeven

    Another post in today’s Showgirls-a-thon. (Or is that a-thong?)

    I can’t seem to find it now, but one of my all-time favorite Onion headlines is something like, “Area Man No Longer Able to Enjoy Ironically.” He’s a guy in his early-30s, married, maybe with a kid (I don’t remember), and one day he looks around his house, sees his Chia Pet or his KISS Meets the Phanton of the Park VHS tape or his collection of vintage mood rings or his David Soul albums — he sees whatever particular brands of kitsch he happens to have bought while thinking, “This is the greatest, stupidest thing I’ve ever seen!” — and he looks at this crap that litters his shelves and his walls and that fills his garage and his basement and he realizes, finally, that it’s crap. It’s all crap.

    I’m willing to admit a certain fondness for Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s satire of fascism and the pornography of violence, but whatever it is that inspires some to extoll the virtues of Showgirls . . . well, I just don’t got it. That’s not to say that there isn’t something intellectually interesting about a film that remakes All About Eve with hundreds of bare breasts and still manages to be less erotic than, say, an episode of Quincy. (Surely Verhoeven knew he was making the, um, limpest of blue movies. I mean, a single still image of Gina Gershon’s mouth is sexier than this entire film.) But, to me, whatever parodic or subversive effects might be at work in the film — and that’s a big “might” — are undone by the movie’s crassness and by its remarkable lack of wit.

    About thirty minutes into Showgirls — last night’s was my first viewing — I started fast-forwarding and continued doing so off and on throughout. I would guess that it took me about 90 minutes to watch the 128-minute film. I wanted it to end quickly because the scenes at the Cheetah Club gave me an urge to watch something else instead: John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The pathetic joke-teller in Showgirls, Henrietta ‘Mama’ Bazoom, reminded me of Mr. Sophistication, who is also pathetic, of course, but who is allowed some life and dignity as well. I prefer my entertainments non-ironic, I guess.

  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

    Dir. by Alfonso Cuaron

    I’ve seen each of the four Harry Potter films on the opening week of its release, but until this weekend I’d never read — nor, frankly, had I ever felt even the slightest desire to read — any of J. K. Rowling’s wildly popular novels. Joanna loves the books, though, and so each year we make a date of seeing the new film together. And each year I genuinely enjoy visiting Hogwarts for an hour or so. I appreciate the world-building that goes on in the films’ first two acts. Rowling is most responsible for that world, of course, but the three directors who have helmed the films, along with their well-appointed staffs of designers and artists, have done a commendable job interpreting her vision. There’s always a lot to look at in the films — more than enough, at least, to keep me entertained.

    But, unfortunately, the films stretch beyond that first hour, and soon the twists and turns of Rowling’s detective plots take precedence, necessitating long stretches of mind-numbing exposition and culminating, inevitably, in evermore elaborate (and loud) action sequences. I tend to spend that last forty-five minutes waiting for the film to end and wondering how different it might have been had it been directed by a talented filmmaker allowed just enough room to interpret, rather than slavishly transcribe, the source material.

    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is the third in the series and the first to not be directed by Chris Columbus, is the exception to the rule in every respect. I’ve watched it twice now in the last four days — the first time when two of our nephews were in town, the second alone with a notebook, curious to see if the film is really as good I think it is. This is what I’ve come up with so far: If I allowed myself to revise old top 10s, I’m pretty sure Azkaban would go on my best of 2004 list.

    The classic discussions of auteurs center on people like Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler, veterans of the Hollywood studio system who worked in a variety of genres and brought their own cinematic voice and mise-en-scene to pictures that, more often than not, were written and developed by someone else. I’m tempted to say that that kind of filmmaking is less common today, but the recent critical successes of Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Terrence Malick, David Cronenberg, and Ang Lee might prove otherwise. Regardless, one reason I find myself so excited by Azkaban is the notion that it is Alfonso Cuaron’s “fantasy” or “blockbuster” film in the same way that The Shining is Kubrick’s “horror” picture and Shampoo is Ashby’s “romantic comedy.” And, really, Azkaban is so much more satisfying than other recent “event” films that part of me wishes more of our contemporary auteurs would give themselves over to the experiment of making such a film. Even if just once.

    I don’t know the whole story of how Cuaron came to make Azkaban. Having begun his Hollywood career with A Little Princess (1995), another fantastic children’s film, he was a perfectly logical, if risky, choice — risky because immediately before joining Team Potter he made Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), a fantastic, um, coming-of-age/menage-a-trois/Mexican road movie. I suspect, though, that he was drawn to Rowling’s third novel, in particular, because of its relative emotional complexity. I read the book this weekend and was pleased to see that much that makes this film so much better than the other three is already there — that is, the story’s sense of tragedy stems from the characters’ conditions rather than from Rowling’s neatly-plotted mystery. (For the record, Rowling’s writing is a bit better than I’d expected. Had I been born twenty years later, my ten-year-old self would be standing in line for every midnight sale, wand in hand. As it is, I doubt I’ll read another one.)

    Synopsis: In Azkaban, Harry begins his third year at Hogwarts in grave danger. Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), a murderous servant of Voldemort, has escaped from Azkaban prison intent to kill Harry, who is, as we all know by now, the only remaining threat to Voldemort’s plan to reign supreme over the Muggles (non-wizards). Or something like that. Like I said, the intricacies of the plot are never particularly interesting to me. Two new teachers are introduced as well: Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), the latest in a revolving cast of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, and Sybill Trelawney (Emma Thompson), who teaches Divination. We also meet the Dementors, the terrifying guards of Azkaban who come to Hogwarts in pursuit of Black, and there’s a side plot involving Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and a bird/horse creature called a Hippogriff.

    Among the many challenges of filming a Harry Potter novel is the sheer amount of time (one full year) and action it must cover. The latest, Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire (2005), is the least successful in this regard. It’s little more than a plodding series of episodes, none more important or emotionally resonant than another. Daniel Kasman, who has written great reviews of both Azkaban and Goblet, says of the movie: “The complaint is not that the film is alienating non-fans, but rather that the film does not even work as a film.” I was genuinely surprised at the end of the movie, for example, to see Harry heading home for the summer. The various events depicted are so disjointed, I couldn’t tell if they’d occurred over the span of a few months or a few days, and I still don’t understand why I should give a damn about that wizarding tournament in the first place. It turned the whole film into a “child in peril” story, motivated, as far as I could tell, only by the wizards’ hyper-vanity and by Rowling’s desire to expand the world of her novels beyond the English Channel. (By the way, if Daniel revisits Azkaban, I bet he’ll raise its grade into the B range.)

    Having already proven his deftness with coming-of-age stories, Cuaron (along with screenwriter Steven Kloves) understands that all the sound and fury of big budget spectacle signifies little unless it’s in the service of character, and so, here, the novel’s 400+ pages are neatly trimmed to show a single but significant stage of Harry’s development. The book’s three Quidditch matches are, thankfully, reduced to a single sequence, and the film’s final rescue is cut so quickly as to make it an afterthought.

    Cuaron solves the inevitable problems of pacing by foregrounding the passage of time itself. His Hogwarts is dominated by a massive clock tower with an equally massive pendulum, and his camera (a CGI animation, actually) pushes forward through the clock’s mechanical gears, making of it a metaphor and a character. Even more important, Cuaron strings together the points of the narrative with a series of inventive and, frankly, beautiful transitions. Three or four times he does his best imitation of Murnau, irising in and out from black. And in three of the film’s more memorable (and funny) moments, he tracks the change of seasons by showing the weather’s effect on another of Hogwart’s principle characters. The threats of danger, the burdens and joys of school life, and the strangeness of adolescence — all qualities essential to the telling of this story — are made more real and significant by the felt sense of time.

    I also like the way Cuaron expands the borders of Hogwarts by setting it more firmly in the natural world. (Not too unlike his use of the small highway towns in Y Tu Mama Tambien, I’d argue.) It’s a lesson that extends back to at least the 19th century Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, whose heroes are hounded as much by the sublime landscape as by any particular ghost or demon. Cuaron and Kloves transpose many scenes originally set inside the closed walls of the castle to wooden bridges and forests. Even the walk from the school to Hagrid’s hut has been made steep, perilous, and beautifully green (in a way that only the English countryside can be beautifully green). There’s a sense in this film — and only in this film — that the wizards inhabit a world that would be surprising, joyful, frightening, and tragic even if there were no such thing as magic.

    Here’s where I drop a major spoiler . . .

    Finally, though, what distinguishes Azkaban from the other Potter films, and what makes it the work of an auteur, I think, is that, in spite of the big budget and special effects, it remains an essentially human drama. As in so many other archetypal fairy tales, our hero is an orphan who, through hard-fought experience, seeks to define himself in a foreign world. This is true, I guess, of all of Rowling’s novels, but in Azkaban Harry is finally allowed his first meaningful glimpse of the family life he’s been tragically denied. Black, rather than being a murderer, is in fact Harry’s loving godfather, and Lupin is also a dear friend and trusted mentor. But neither can remain with Harry at the end of the film. Lupin the Werewolf poses too grave a danger to the students; the only evidence that can prove Black’s innocence has slipped through Harry’s fingers. I don’t hesitate at all when I say that these moments are considerably more poignant in the film than in the book.

    That Lupin and Black are able to elicit our sympathies is essential to the success of the film; Harry’s desire for their affection absolutely demands real motivation. Cuaron is the only director so far who has exploited the gifts of his guest stars, making of their performances an integral component of the story that really matters: Harry’s. (Seeing Thewlis, Oldman, and Alan Rickman together sure is a lot of fun, too.) David Thewlis is just so damn good as Lupin, a man whose own tragic secret has prevented him from achieving the life he desires. When, in the final forty-five minutes of Azkaban, we get to that inevitable action sequence, the battle between Lupin and Black, Werewolf versus Grim, is not so much a nail-biter as a melancholy tragedy. It is, for me at least, the first moment of genuine consequence in any of the Harry Potter films.

  • 2006 Film Diary

    2006 Film Diary

    January
    1 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [Cuaron]
    5 Tabu [Murnau]
    6 L’Intrus [Denis]
    7 Wonderland [Winterbottom]
    7 Naked [Leigh]
    8 Naked [Leigh]
    10 Showgirls [Verhoeven]
    14 In This World [Winterbottom]
    15 24 Hour Party People [Winterbottom]
    17 The Human Stain [Benton]
    21 The Flowers of St. Francis [Rossellini]
    21 The New World [Malick]
    25 Birth [Glazer]
    28 Birth [Glazer]
    29 Au Hasard Balthazar [Bresson]
    31 No Fear, No Die [Denis]
    February
    3 Barcelona [Stillman]
    5 The Bad News Bears [Linklater]
    11 Code Unknown [Haneke]
    12 Code Unknown [Haneke]
    12 Nicky’s Film, The Hold Up, and Could This Be Love [Ferrara]
    13 The Son [Dardenne]
    15 Metropolitan [Stillman]
    20 The Driller Killer [Ferrara]
    22 The Last Days of Disco [Stillman]
    24 Ms. 45 [Ferrara]
    26 Fear City [Ferrara]
    28 Cat Chaser [Ferrara]
    March
    4 King of New York [Ferrara]
    5 Bad Lieutenant [Ferrara]
    8 Henry Fool [Hartley]
    10 Body Snatchers [Ferrara]
    12 Cache [Haneke]
    15 New Rose Hotel [Ferrara]
    17 Good Night, and Good Luck [Clooney]
    19 Dangerous Game [Ferrara]
    21 New Rose Hotel [Ferrara]
    22 R-XMas [Ferrara]
    24 The Weather Underground [Green and Siegel]
    25 The Unbelievable Truth [Hartley]
    27 Surviving Desire [Hartley]
    27 Theory of Achievement [Hartley]
    27 Ambition [Hartley]
    28 The Lady Eve [Sturges]
    April
    2 Last Days [Van Sant]
    4 Amateur [Hartley]
    6 Simple Men [Hartley]
    8 The World [Jia]
    8 Theologians Under Hitler [Martin]
    28 Directed by William Wyler [Slesin]
    29 The Love Trap [Wyler]
    May
    2 Kings and Queen [Desplechin]
    6 Junebug [Morrison]
    7 The Beat That My Heart Skipped [Audiard]
    13 Tropical Malady [Weerasethakul]
    14 Mysterious Skin [Araki]
    15 Good Night, and Good Luck [Clooney]
    20 Counsellor at Law [Wyler]
    21 The Good Fairy [Wyler]
    21 Grizzly Man [Herzog]
    25 Sexy Beast [Glazer]
    27 Safe [Haynes]
    29 Birth [Glazer]
    31 X3: The Last Stand [Rattner]
    June
    3 Dodsworth [Wyler]
    4 Come and Get It [Wyler]
    10 Dazed and Confused [Linklater]
    14 Sideways [Payne]
    24 Dead End [Wyler]
    27 Sex, Lies and Videotape [Soderbergh]
    July
    1 Jezebel [Wyler]
    2 The Letter [Wyler]
    9 A Scanner Darkly [Linklater]
    11 The Road to Guantanamo [Winterbottom]
    15 The Little Foxes [Wyler]
    16 Mrs. Miniver [Wyler]
    19 Eyes Wide Shut [Kubrick]
    22 La Cienaga [Martel]
    23 The Holy Girl [Martel]
    23 A Scanner Darkly [Linklater]
    29 Tristram Shandy [Winterbottom]
    30 Turtles Can Fly [Ghobadi]
    31 Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) [Jost]
    August
    1 Belle De Jour [Bunuel]
    4 The Calcium Kid [De Rakoff]
    6 Carrie [Wyler]
    7 Clean [Assayas]
    12 Roman Holiday [Wyler]
    13 The Desperate Hours [Wyler]
    15 Tell Me Do You Miss Me [Buzzell]
    17 The Man Without a Past [Kaurismäki]
    19 Friendly Persuasion [Wyler]
    20 The Squid and the Whale [Baumbach]
    20 Secretary [Shainberg]
    23 The Children’s Hour [Wyler]
    26 The Collector [Wyler]
    September
    2 How to Steal a Million [Wyler]
    4 Distant [Ceylan]
    7 Climates [Ceylan]
    8 12:08 East of Bucharest [Porumboiu]
    8 Hamaca Paraguaya [Encina]
    8 Toi, Waguih [Messeeh]
    8 These Girls [Rached]
    8 Bouquets 28-30 [Lowder]
    8 In This House [Zaatari]
    8 A Bridge over the Drina [Lukomski]
    9 Ten Canoes [de Heer]
    9 Bamako [Sissako]
    9 Manufactured Landscapes [Baichwal]
    9 v-r [Canterbury]
    9 PSA. 09 Body Count, PSA. 10 Occupation, and PSA. 14 Target [Madansky]
    9 Afraid So [Rosenblatt]
    9 Hysteria [Battle]
    9 Memo to Pic Desk [Kennedy and van der Meulen]
    9 Nachtstuck [Tscherkassky]
    9 Kristall [Girardet and Muller]
    9 Tsuioku [Matsuyama]
    9 Roads of Kiarostami [Kiarostami]
    9 Poet’s Dream [Jordan]
    9 3 Minuten [Brunner]
    9 Ema – Emaki 2 [Ishida]
    9 Lancia Thema [Debarnig]
    9 Lions and Tigers and Bears [Meyers]
    9 Swivel [Husain]
    10 Summercamp! [Price and Beesley]
    10 Schuss! [Rey]
    11 Woman on the Beach [Hong]
    11 Psychiatry in Russia [Maysles]
    11 The Beales of Grey Gardens [Maysles]
    11 Gambling, Gods and LSD [Mettler]
    11 Circa 1960 [Curreri]
    11 Seascape #1 Nicht, China Shenzhen 05 [Barbieri]
    11 Silk Ties [Jennings]
    11 Song and Solitude [Dorsky]
    11 The Zone of Total Eclipse [Taanila]
    12 Summer ’04 [Krohmer]
    12 Offside [Panahi]
    12 Coeurs [Resnais]
    12 Still Life [Jia]
    13 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone [Tsai]
    13 Belle Tujours [de Oliveira]
    13 Fantasma [Alonso]
    13 Day Night Day Night [Loktev]
    14 Prague [Madsen]
    14 Colossal Youth [Costa]
    14 Red Road [Arnold]
    15 In Between Days [Kim]
    15 Grbavia [Zbanic]
    15 Zidane: Un Portrait du XXIe Siecle [Gordon and Parreno]
    15 Rain Dogs [Ho]
    16 Dong [Jia]
    16 Flandres [Dumont]
    16 Iran: Une Revolution cinematographique [Homayoun]
    16 Syndromes and a Century [Weerasethakul]
    24 Demonlover [Assayas]
    October
    1 The Black Dahlia [De Palma]
    2 The Gold Rush [Chaplin]
    3 Half Nelson [Fleck]
    7 The Big Country [Wyler]
    8 Funny Face [Wyler]
    10 The Gold Rush [Chaplin]
    13 Ma nuit chez Maud [Rohmer]
    14 Counsellor at Law [Wyler]
    15 A Small Town [Ceylan]
    21 A bout de souffle [Godard]
    22 Clouds of May [Ceylan]
    28 Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick [Godard]
    29 Un femme est un femme [Godard]
    31 Shortbus [Mitchell]
    November
    4 Ma Vivre sa vie [Godard]
    5 Les Carabiniers [Godard]
    11 Contempt [Godard]
    12 Pierrot Le Fou [Godard]
    18 Alphaville [Godard]
    19 Masculine Feminine [Godard]
    23 Band of Outsiders [Godard]
    23 Stranger Than Fiction [Forster]
    24 Made in the U.S.A. [Godard]
    27 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her [Godard]
    December
    3 Le Petit Soldat [Godard]
    9 Satantango [Tarr]
    16 Week-end [Godard]
    17 Sympathy for the Devil [Godard]
    17 Stranger Than Fiction [Forster]
    20 The Queen [Frears]
    21 La Chinoise [Godard]
    25 Eragon [Fangmeier]
    29 Letter to Jane [Godard and Gorin]
    30 Tout Va Bien [Godard and Gorin]
    31 Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque [Richard]
  • Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)

    Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    I had planned to write a longish post today about Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo. I’ve queued up a bunch of his films and hope to watch as many of them as possible in the coming weeks. I was really moved by the film, but I knew, even as I was watching, that I would have been as moved (if not moreso) by a mediocre documentary on the subject. It was the images of the bombed-out city and its dying and hopeless citizens that created the film’s dramatic urgency. When I was aware of Winterbottom’s mise-en-scene at all, I was frustrated by its haphazardness — odd cuts are scotchtaped together by forced music cues, the camera jumps too often into the subjective perspective of unimportant characters (an after-the-fact narrative justification for Winterbottom’s use of a hand-held, I suspect), and the central story gets lost in the noise of several side-plots that, to be frank, are more compelling than the Schindler-like story of a journalist’s decision to save an orphan. A longer response isn’t really necessary, though, because Matt Roth’s piece in The Chicago Reader says it all so well. It’s really a fantastic piece of writing:

    Even more than the Western literary tradition, steeped in Conrad, Milton, Dante, and the Bible, the ideology of filmmaking is what ultimately explains Winterbottom’s portrayal of Sarajevo as simply a place of the damned, a position that lets us off the hook entirely. Narratives that take the human-interest approach and center on individuals always valorize personal, direct, unself-conscious action–and always implicitly derogate indirect, bureaucratic action. As it turns out, however, the opportunities for most of us to take pure, direct action–to look into the eyes of a child and determine to save her–are extremely limited.

    Even if someone did drop everything to go to Bosnia tomorrow to, I don’t know, nurse war casualties, no one can be in all of the world’s trouble spots at once. So it’s either take highly indirect action through vast, impersonal bureaucracies or take no action at all. Our unromantic reliance on such vast bureaucracies is what makes democracy important–and rigorous policy debates, much more than teary-eyed tales of individual heroics, vital. By advocating an unrealistic course of action, Welcome to Sarajevo ultimately reconciles us to doing nothing at all.

  • Best Films of 2005

    Best Films of 2005

    Of the ten best new films I saw this year, eight were festival screenings, and, of those, only two (Cache and Tristram Shandy) have a reasonable chance of making it to a theater here in Knoxville. I mention that in passing as a reminder of how these year-end best lists are shaped by distribution and by the brand of popular American film criticism that still ghettoizes the vast majority of world cinema into a single, convenient category, “Foreign Language Film.” Like last year, I’ve again ignored distribution dates and chosen, instead, to simply pick my favorite “new” films from the list of those I saw between January 1 and today.

    For me, the two highlights of the otherwise lackluster San Francisco International Film Festival were Ana Poliak’s Pin Boy and the one-night-only screening of Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was accompanied by a live performance from American Music Club of their newly commissioned score. That Pin Boy hasn’t fared particularly well on the festival circuit or received wider critical attention is a complete mystery to me. I picked up a ticket after reading David Walsh’s review, and other than the write-up by Doug Cummings (who was sitting with me in SF), Walsh’s remains one of the few English language reviews. It’s really a brilliant piece of naturalistic filmmaking.

    The two films on my list that played here in East Tennessee are Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know and Bergman’s Saraband. If forced to single out my favorite film of 2005, I would probably choose Saraband, which is as good as any of Bergman’s many films — and better than most. My high opinion of it, I’ll admit, was likely influenced by the specter of the event itself: I never imagined I’d have an opportunity to see “the new Bergman” down at the local multiplex. For one afternoon, I felt just a bit like Pauline Kael or Stanley Kauffmann or, hell, like Alvy Singer.

    The other seven films on my list were all screened in Toronto. The only surprise in that fact is that none of those films are The Sun or L’Enfant. (They would likely come in at #12 and #13, respectively, with Bohdan Slama’s Something Like Happiness taking the eleven slot.) In deciding which films make the cut, I often find myself asking, “Which of these would I be most excited to rewatch right now?” And by that standard, Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy, and Nobuhiro Suwa’s Un Couple parfait all stand out. Winterbottom and co. deserve special mention for making a film that is so smart and so ridiculously funny. I was beginning to worry that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were the last men left who could pull that off.

    Cache has become the odds-on choice these days for most of those “Best Foreign Language Film” votes. If such a category must exist, then Cache is a fine choice. What most haunts me about the film is the precision of Haneke’s direction. Nothing else I saw this year was so surely controlled. How else to explain why, three months later, I’m still troubled by the image of a man lying down to take a nap? The only other piece of direction that can compare is Cristi Puiu’s work in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I’m tempted to call the “most important” film of the year, though I’m not sure exactly why. Not surprisingly, my top ten is rounded out by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, two filmmakers whom I admire and adore to the point that I can no longer consider myself an objective critic of their work.

    Also deserving of special mention are: the films of Claire Denis, which have become an almost unhealthy obsession for me this year; Michael Apted’s Seven Up series, which Joanna and I watched night after night in August; the eighty-seven, always brilliant episodes of The West Wing that kept me entertained on the treadmill; and Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, which is an aerobic workout of a completely different kind.

    The Ten Best New Films I Saw in 2005 (by title)

    Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
    Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
    Un Couple parfait (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2005)
    The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
    Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)
    Pin Boy (Ana Poliak, 2004)
    Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
    Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
    Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005)
    The Wayward Cloud(Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)

    The Ten Best Older Films I Saw for the First Time in 2005 (by title)

    Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
    The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
    Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
    I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)
    It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (Richard Linklater, 1988)
    A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
    Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
    Seven Up Series (Michael Apted, 1964- )
    Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
    Wavelength(Michael Snow, 1967)

    Some Honorable Mentions

    Short: Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, 2005)
    Live Music: Street Angel (Frank Borzage, 1928) with a new score by American Music Club
    TV/DVD: The West Wing Seasons 1-4 (Aaron Sorkin, 1999-2003)

  • Beau Travail and Britten’s Billy Budd

    Some random thoughts inspired by another viewing of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail:

    I’m not sure how to characterize her use of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Billy Budd.  Because the film is so closely tied to Galoup’s subjectivity, my first tendency is to read the music with some irony, as if this were exactly the kind of soundtrack — one full of epic Drama and Meaning — that Galoup himself would choose to score his inner life. While not always the case, the Britten cues do appear at a few moments that are clearly subjective visions, most notably the moment after Galoup decides to destroy Sentain; the music climbs as Denis slowly tracks-in on the two men circling closer and closer to one another, a dance of sorts that serves metaphorically for their “real,” impending showdown. (Sentain’s punch is, by comparison, quite anti-climactic, I think.)

    But the emotional effect of the music — on me, at least — is anything but ironic. In true Melvillian fashion, this is an epic battle of Drama and Meaning, the most epic battle, in fact, if we recall our fuzzy memories of the Christian symbolism that permeates Billy Budd. Granted, Denis strips away most of those symbols (I wonder about the etymology of Sentain), but the central conflict of the film remains mostly unchanged. It’s still Good vs. Evil, and the sturm and drang of Britten’s opera seems appropriately scaled for the images and emotions it accompanies.

    I’ve written before about the music in Beau Travail and about Denis Lavant’s final dance, but until this most recent viewing, it had never occurred to me how closely the film as a whole resembles a ballet. What few words are spoken are necessary only to explain the most basic of plot points. Everything else — the emotions, the motivations, the conflicts — is expressed by bodies in motion. The training sequences here are categorically different from those in, say, Full Metal Jacket. (I’ve seen the comparison more than once in reviews.) I don’t seem to have the vocabulary to describe the exercise scenes in Beau Travail, but I suspect that I’d have to go to critics of modern dance to find it.

  • You’re Tearing Me Apart!

    Or, a few more words about Nicholas Ray  . . .

    Born to Be Bad (1950) — If this weren’t a Nicholas Ray film, and if I hadn’t set out with the goal of watching as many of Ray’s films as possible, and if it hadn’t appeared (as if by magic) on the TCM schedule two weeks ago, I doubt I would have made it through the first thirty minutes of Born to Be Bad. Despite its provocative tagline — “Man-bait! Trouble never came in a more desirable package!” — the film is remarkably dull. Joan Fontaine is beautiful as always, but there’s nothing especially vampy about her performance, and so she never quite rises to the level of “bad girl we love to hate.” (Where’s Barbara Stanwyck when you need her?) She doesn’t even get a vicious come-uppance at the end, and the vicious come-uppance is half of what makes films like this so much fun. Born to Be Bad is one of the early films Ray made at RKO under the watchful eye of Howard Hughes, who was at the time trying to woo Fontaine away from her husband, and so I have to wonder how much of the film’s tonal problems were generated behind the scenes. The script has the feel of bureaucratic compromise.

    Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — It’s always interesting to watch an iconic film for the first time. I’ve had the experience several times this year, actually. The best ones — Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, My Darling Clementine — work their magic despite the added burden of their status. For example, I’d seen the clip a hundred times, I’d seen it parodied to death by Carol Burnett, but I still got chills when Norma Desmond announced she was ready for her close-up. Parts of Rebel Without a Cause worked for me, but the strange psychology of the film prevented it from completely transcending its iconic status. The mother/father issues in this film make Hitchcock’s brand of Fruedianism look downright subtle by comparison. James Dean is always fascinating to watch on screen, and I especially enjoyed his scenes with Jim Backus and Edward Platt, but the motivations for the characters’ actions are so flimsy and the Tragic (with a capital T) arc of the narrative is so artificial that I always felt removed from the story. I look forward to watching Rebel again, with different expectations and with an eye more squarely on Ray’s style.

  • Five Spiritually Significant Films

    Five Spiritually Significant Films

    The fine folks at the Arts and Faith discussion forum have cast their votes, crunched the numbers, and released their second annual list of the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. I’ve been an on-again, off-again participant at the forum for several years now and was excited to check my virtual ballot. The results, I have to say, are pretty darned impressive.

    I’m especially glad that the main criterion was left intentionally vague. In the weeks leading up to the votes, there was some debate over the precise meaning of “spiritually significant,” but the only consensus reached was that there was little chance of us reaching any kind of consensus, and that that was probably for the best. It brings me great satisfaction (and even a bit of hope) to know that a group consisting largely of American evangelical Christians would include The Gospel According the Matthew, Ikiru, Stalker, and Sunrise among the Top 20.

    In honor of their fine work, I offer my own obvious and predictable Top 5 list:

    My Top Five Spiritually Significant Films

    5. Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman, 1961) — A few years ago I would have gone with the more obvious choice, Winter Light, but Through a Glass Darkly, I think, is the most potent and concentrated expression of Bergman’s agnostic horror. I still think the final scene is a bit out of tune with the rest of the film, but David’s speech to Minus isn’t what we remember, right? It’s Karin’s final lines and that image of her putting on her sunglasses. Devastating.

    4. The Son (The Dardennes, 2002) — I’ve been told that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are more interested in the Old Testament than the New. The Son is like a story from Genesis, like Abraham and Isaac. It makes all of those Christian catchwords like “grace” and “vengeance” and “Father” suddenly as strange and ambiguous as the world I live in.

    3. Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) — Again, a few years ago I probably would have gone with Au Hasard Balthazar (and I might change my mind tomorrow), but for now the story of this well-intentioned priest is, for me, the more “spiritually significant” of the two. It’s the final scenes that get me. Every time.

    2. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1969) — Any of Tarkovsky’s film would fit comfortably in this spot, but I chose Rublev because it is actually about an Orthodox icon painter, and what most moves me in his films is their icon-like mysticism. At the end of the day, Tarkovsky’s film are about artistic creation, but the truecreative act here is always committed in a spirit of idealized surrender and sacrifice.

    1. Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) — I’m a Christian by faith, not just by name or birth or culture, and faith is utterly irrational. I can’t recall at the moment who said it, but I agree that “Ordet is the only filmed miracle.”

  • In a Lonely Place (1950)

    In a Lonely Place (1950)

    “I wouldn’t want anyone but you.”

    In a Lonely Place (1950) is one of those films that, by a kind of strange magic, reveals its greatness twenty or thirty minutes after it ends. There’s an honesty and emotional texture to the film that makes it really unsettling, especially given its superficial appearance as a genre picture. I say “unsettling,” of course, in the best sense of the word. Bogart’s Dixon Steele is, at first glance, a run-of-the-mill film noir anti-hero, but his performance is uncharacteristically vulnerable. Gloria Grahame’s Laurel Gray is, likewise, a fascinating meld of noir archetypes — something much more human, sympathetic, and compelling (to my mind, at least) than the Madonna or the Whore.

    More than any other filmmaker, I was reminded as I watched of John Cassavetes. There’s something even in Bogart’s mannerisms here that remind me of Cassavetes, the actor. But, much more impressively, Bogart, Grahame, and Ray seem to have captured that uncanny emotional reality that makes films like A Woman Under the Influence and Faces such rich and difficult viewing experiences. In a nice bit of self-reflexivity, Dix Steele, the Hollywood sell-out desperate to write a screenplay of substance, even comments on this during a breakfast scene. When Laurel compliments him on the love scene he’s just written, Steele (speaking for Ray?) replies:

    Well that’s because they’re not always telling each other how much in love they are. A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we’re in love.

    That’s good stuff. And it works, I think, only because it’s an expression of an ideal that had already been demonstrated several times in the film itself. The scene I’ve captured in the image above, for example, doesn’t to my mind have a direct precedent in any other Hollywood film of its day. Steele and Gray are sitting at a piano bar, listening to Hadda Brooks sing “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” when Steele asks, “Anything you want to make you happy?” Ray cuts from a medium two-shot to a close-up of Grahame’s face buried in Bogart’s neck. What she whispers to him is less important than the unexpected moment of silent intimacy shared between these two lovers in a crowded, noisy room. That moment serves, I think, as the film’s sex scene, and it’s an incredibly moving and erotic one. The whole film is in that image — Dix bowing his head to her as a gesture of trust; Laurel closing her eyes in hope of love, then opening them to the sight of a detective entering the room.

    – – –

    Bonus: As soon as Bogart gave his signature line — “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me” — I found myself humming a tune. It was an hour or so later before I realized it was a song from the Smithereens album, Especially for You, a song I played ad nauseam in 1986 and 1987. Turns out the song is called, “In a Lonely Place.” Go figure. I still like it — mostly for all of the things that make it sound nothing at all like a Smithereens song: the syncopated rhythm, vibraphone, tasteful acoustic guitar, and backing vocals from Suzanne Vega.

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    After staring at a blinking cursor for better than an hour, trying — and failing — to compose the opening sentence of this “review,” I’ve finally abandoned all hopes of objectivity. I can’t seem to find the right tone of third-person voice to describe this film, which is only appropriate, I guess. Like each of Caveh Zahedi’s previous features and shorts, I Am a Sex Addict is a work of autobiography in which Zahedi himself plays the starring role. In the opening shot, he addresses the camera directly, introduces himself as Caveh, and tells us that for many years he was a sex addict. His film is a frank, neatly-plotted, and curiously moving recreation of those years. It’s also incredibly transgressive and very, very funny. Quite a balancing act.

    Hi, Caveh. I’m Darren, and this is my attempt to make sense of how and why I reacted to your film as I did.

    By way of plot summary, I’ll just mention the two marriages and the three other relationships that were affected by Zahedi’s addiction. We meet all of these women over the course of the film. A few are glimpsed only briefly in old footage; others are brought to life by actresses. “Brought to life” is actually a curious choice of words here, given the film’s meta qualities. In several cases, we meet the “real” woman (via home movies), the performed version of her (via the film proper), and the “real” actress who plays her (via behind-the-scenes, documentary-like footage). I say documentary-like because the film’s form questions the truthfulness of cinematic representation at every turn. I mean, after Zahedi interrupts one of the opening scenes to tell us that the Paris street we are looking at is actually in San Francisco because he couldn’t raise enough money to shoot in France, and after he interrupts a later scene in Paris to inform us that they made the trip after all, all epistemological ground is up for grabs, including some of our most basic interpretive strategies. Home movies and behind-the-scenes hand-held footage are more “real” or trustworthy than staged recreations? Who says?

    What most impresses me about I Am a Sex Addict, and what makes it, I think, Zahedi’s most accomplished film, is the care with which he (in cooperation with co-editor Thomas Logoreci) controls its tone. The film feels as though it could fall apart at any moment, and that it doesn’t is some kind of miracle. After writing that sentence, it occurs to me that I’m quoting almost verbatim Hal Ashby’s description of Being There: “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad.” It’s not a perfect analogy. Ashby’s challenge was to illuminate the absurdities of simulacrum politics while preventing his satire from slipping into banal parody. Zahedi’s task, I think, is even more difficult. For I Am a Sex Addict to really work, it must humanize the victims of sex addiction, expose the very real consequences of addictive behavior, and, despite all that, remain watchable, which is easier said than done given the particular nature of Zahedi’s fetishes.

    Zahedi’s addiction became manifest most often in a desire to have sex with prostitutes. To combat that desire, he instituted a series of progressively destructive strategies, beginning with a genuine desire to openly and honestly acknowledge the problem with the support of his partner; by the time he attends his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting years later, his “prostitute fetish” has taken a much darker and sadistic turn.

    Zahedi shapes the film’s tone through careful modulations in humor, self-reflexivity, and music. The image of a sound mixer comes to mind — raising and lowering the levels of each voice to create a kind of satisfying harmony. I’m thinking of two difficult scenes, in particular. In the first, Zahedi tells his wife about his desire to receive oral sex from a prostitute. She responds by offering to satisfy the craving herself. Which she does. Three times. In the second scene, Zahedi visits a prostitute with the intent of enacting his deepest, most humiliating desires. Warning: the following blockquote is verygraphic:

    In my fantasies, I will grab whoever it is by the hair, and I’ll make her say things like, “I want to suck your dick” and stuff, and maybe call her a bitch or a slut. And then I start fucking her really hard in the mouth and make her gag and stuff. . . . What I’m thinking is that, if I went to a prostitute one last time and just did everything that I always fantasize about doing, then I think maybe I could get it out of my system once and for all.

    If Zahedi’s story had been told by a more naturalistic filmmaker, it would, I imagine, have looked something like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, and, in that case, my tendency as a critic would have been to describe — and to experience — the onscreen sex metaphorically. Zahedi, however, has a vested interest in exploring the psychological underpinnings of his own addiction, and so he constantly undermines our learned tendencies as “readers.” About Twentynine Palms, I wrote, “Audiences are forced to observe everything — the ordinary and the terrifying — unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylized photography.” Zahedi’s approach is the polar opposite, and, as a result, watching I Am a Sex Addict is, interestingly, a simultaneously intellectual and deeply personal or human experience.

    The passage of dialogue quoted above is from a conversation between Caveh and Greg Watkins, who was not only Caveh’s best friend at the time of his addiction but is also Sex Addict‘s cinematographer and co-producer. (Their conversation is also a nice echo of the opening scene in their first feature, A Little Stiff.) When we see Zahedi’s visit to a prostitute a few minutes later, his words — with all of their graphic detail and hopeless self-delusion — linger over the scene. The act portrayed in the scene is difficult to watch. It’s misogynist and sadistic. But the scene itself is fascinating. Zahedi interrupts the sequence several times with jokes and with his ubiquitous voice-over, both of which act, throughout the film, as Brechtian distancing devices. Whereas someone like Dumont dares you to keep looking (and assumes, probably, that many of us won’t), Zahedi needs you to look. It’s important. This is what he did to women, and not metaphorically speaking. A man who had once marched in an anti-pornography rally and who considers himself a feminist degraded himself and women, and did so recklessly. Asked recently about his approach to comedy in the film, Zahedi quoted Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.”

    Zahedi’s attention to the personal and human dimension of his story pays emotional dividends in the film’s final act. Each time I’ve watched Sex Addict, I’ve felt my relationship with the material shift categorically at exactly the same moment. Soon after the release of A Little Stiff, Zahedi began a relationship with a woman named Devin, who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. The actress who plays Devin, Amanda Henderson, is also an alcoholic — or, at least, so claims Zahedi, who interrupts the film to show us backstage footage of Henderson pulling her bottle from a brown paper bag. (I have no idea if she actually has a drinking problem. It’s impossible to know given the film’s hall-of-mirrors relationship with “truth.”) Sex Addict is structured around such revelations. The woman who plays Zahedi’s first wife, as it turns out, is actually a porn star. The woman who plays Zahedi’s girlfriend Christa, as it turns out, is unwilling to simulate on-screen sex.

    But the scene with Devin/Amanda is different, and I think the difference is owing both to the quality of Henderson’s performance (which is much better and more natural than either of the other two female leads’) and to the deftness of Zahedi’s direction. For the first 75 minutes of the film, I feel at some remove from the material. It’s an intellectual distance, the ironic distance of, say, Annie Hall writ large. But when Zahedi cuts from Henderson and her bottle to Devin drunk and spewing slurred insults, that comforting distance vanishes, and the effect is potent. I’ve been on the verge of tears both times I watched the film. I’m reminded suddenly of the “Eternal City” chapter in Catch-22, when Heller steps out of his satiric voice just long enough to send Yossarian on a walk through the grotesque streets of war-torn Rome.

    For the remainder of the film, Zahedi exists, by and large, outside of his mensch-y persona. There are fewer jokes, and the voice-over and recurring musical motif become less obtrusive. Like the lines of dialogue I’ve quoted above, images of Zahedi’s transgressive sexual encounters linger over the final twenty minutes of the film, but they’re suddenly transformed by the tragic human consequences of his behavior. We in the audience, in effect, undergo an awakening similar to his own. He “hits rock bottom” (to borrow from the language of recovery) and is forced, finally, to abandon his intellectual justifications. The stakes are high. And real. In the opening scene, Zahedi informs us that he’s narrating the film on his wedding day — his third — and those of us familiar with his previous feature, In the Bathtub of the World, know that it’s Mandy who will soon be walking down the aisle toward him. I can’t seem to resist the urge to paraphrase that cheesy Jack Nicholson line: Mandy clearly makes Caveh want to be a better man.

    I’ll be damned if the last scene in Sex Addict wasn’t the first time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

  • Fifteen for Fifteen

    Fifteen for Fifteen

    In celebration of its 15th anniversary, the IMDb has invited its editorial staff to submit their Top 15 Lists: 1990-2005. Never one to pass up an opportunity to obsess for a few days over such a challenge, I’ve put together a list of my own — a list joyfully free of editorial imposition, meaning that I can stretch and/or ignore even the most basic criteria/rules. For instance, my Top 15 includes close to 30 films. Got a problem with that? Fine. Go start your own website. Also, I’ve limited my list to only feature-length narrative films.

    So here they are. Alphabetized by the name of the director.

    Bottle Rocket / Magnolia (Wes Anderson and PT Anderson, respectively) — See? I warned you about the whole “rules” thing. These two films get to share a slot because they’re both by American writer/directors of roughly the same age, who seem to have been shot out of the womb with distinct cinematic voices. Also, they’re both refreshingly sympathetic to the flawed humanity of their characters. And they’re both named Anderson. So it makes perfect sense, really. Two years ago I would have put Rushmore on the list, but I now prefer Wes Anderson at his least precious. PT Anderson, it seems to me, is at his core a moralist, and Magnolia is his most unapologetically moralizing film. It’s also big and messy and ambitious in a way that brings me great pleasure.

    Saraband (Ingmar Bergman) — My favorite Bergman films are, almost without exception, the first of his that I saw. His voice is so clear, so penetrating, that one can’t help but be shaken a bit upon first hearing it. But that effect wanes with time — it has for me, at least. I was beginning to doubt my general enthusiasm for Bergman, in fact, until seeing Saraband, which joins Cries & Whispers, Winter Light, and Through a Glass Darkly on my very short list of favorites. Also, Saraband is a representative (of sorts) for the many filmmakers who, over the past decade-and-a-half, have made remarkable films in their later years. After catching up with the many, many films I haven’t yet seen, I can imagine adding works by Godard, Rohmer, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, etc. to future revisions of this list. Here’s my one-sentence review of Saraband: I’m so glad that Bergman’s film career faded-to-black accompanied by Bach.

    Beau Travail / L’Intrus (Claire Denis) — If marooned on an island with only the post-1990 films of a single director, I’d take Claire Denis’s. Beau Travail and L’Intrus are my favorites, I think, because they’re located in relatively “manly” worlds (the French foreign legion, the final days in the life of a regret-filled playboy), but it’s a masculine world transformed by Denis’s subjective camera. She and her cinematographer, Agnes Godard, have this uncanny ability to make nature strange and new just by looking at it, and I can’t get enough of that view. (L’Intrus, by the way, is finally coming to DVD on December 5th.)

    La Promesse / The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) — Speaking of moralists. I was raised with the stories of the Old Testament and the parables of Christ like most kids are raised with Disney (I had my share of Disney, too, of course). I love these two films because they defamiliarize Biblical ethics. Watch The Son, then let’s talk about grace and vengeance and pride and mercy.

    La Vie de Jesus / L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont) — I’ve written enough about these two films.

    Calendar / Exotica / The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan) — Is any contemporary filmmaker more frustrating that Atom Egoyan? I love these films, all three of which are dramatic, well-acted, formally inventive, intellectually rigorous, and, finally, human. Each of his other films fails on one or more of those counts — some disastrously so. I wonder if it’s fair to classify Egoyan as a post-colonial artist. I like him best when he’s preoccupied by questions of identity, memory, and trauma.

    Good Men, Good Women / Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien) — When selecting a Hou film, I finally just settled on the two that I most connect with on a purely subjective, personal level. As with Denis, I’m drawn to Hou because of the unique way he looks at the world. Any number of directors could setup a medium-long shot of, say, a young woman drinking tea, but Hou’s will always be instantly identifiable. I swear it’s a kind of magic.

    Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch) — Over the past two months, I’ve watched all but two of Jarmusch’s films (Permanent Vacation and Night on Earth are the exceptions). I enjoyed all of them for more or less the same reasons: his preference for people over plot (you’ve gotta love a jailbreak film that elides the jailbreak), his casting of charismatic personas (Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Iggy Pop are just so cool), and his collaborations with high-callibre cinematographers like Robby Muller and Frederick Elmes. Dead Man is a different animal entirely, though. Along with being one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen — and its beauty alone would get it on this list — Dead Man is one of those fables that grows more rich and complex the more I think about it. Is this a vision of heaven or hell? And whose heaven? Whose hell?

    Close-Up / Ten (Abbas Kiarostami) — I like Kiarostami best when he’s playing with form. My favorite part of Taste of Cherry is the last five minutes, when he reminds us we’re watching a movie. My favorite part of The Wind Will Carry Us is that long shot of the engineer driving out of town to make a phone call — the shot that returns again and again throughout the film, each time making you think, “Surely he’ll cut this time. Surely he won’t make us watch this again.” Close-Up and Ten do things filmmakers are not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to blend documentary and fiction. You’re not supposed to set up a camera in a car and leave the actors to their own devices. Kiarostami breaks the rules and makes smart and emotionally-rich films anyway. So much for the rules.

    Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick) — Like everyone else, I had been waiting eagerly for nearly a decade to see what Kubrick was up to. And like everyone else, I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this film. I still don’t, really. It’s such a strange film, so full of mystery and consciously-suppressed emotion. I also think it’s incredibly sad — tragic, even.

    Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater) — If Denis’s films were unavailable, I’d probably take Linklater’s with me to the island. I’d never be lonely, for sure. Linklater’s the great egalitarian filmmaker, a humanist with a palpable respect for all of the characters who wonder in and out of his films. I could easily have gone with the Before Sunrise/Sunset films or Waking Life, but Dazed and Confused is my favorite. It’s funny and honest in a way that no other “teen comedy” can touch. And I never seem to tire of watching it.

    The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick) — Only Terrence Malick would take a James Jones novel and turn it into Walden. That a war is going on is important to the film, of course, but the battles seem almost insignificant compared to those shots of wind blowing through tall grass.

    What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang) — This is my favorite of Tsai’s films simply because it’s the one that most moves me.

    In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi) — I stumbled into Zahedi’s films after being mesmerized by the “Holy Moments” sequence in Waking Life. If all goes as planned, I should have a better idea next week of why I like this particular film so much. I’ll post the essay when it’s finished.

    I can’t decide what to put in the 15th slot. Maybe Todd Haynes’s Safe or Kieslowski’s Blue or Haneke’s Code Unknown or Kore-eda’s After Life or Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Or maybe a guilty pleasure like The Usual Suspects or Dark City. I can’t decide. Too many choices.

  • Boring Art Films

    I just stumbled upon a review of Un Couple parfait that calls it the “quintessential Boring Art Film.” The same critic dismisses Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man because it “cares more about impressing the audience with profound ideas” than about giving them a compelling narrative. (I watched Dead Man for the first time Sunday night and am pretty sure that, after a few more viewings, it’ll work its way on to my short list of favorite films.) I have no qualms with this particular critic. In fact, he and I are often in agreement. All of which makes me wonder, Why do I love Boring Art Films?

    Borrowing Girish’s bulleted list format, here are a few rough ideas. Maybe I’ll add more as they come.

    • A compelling narrative (read: plot) too often privileges what a character does over what a character is. Granted, we’re all defined, to some extent, by the actions we take, and blah, blah, blah. But the best Boring Art Films develop characters not by thrusting them into a particular scenario and guiding them down a particular — and particularly exciting or extraordinary — path, but by watching them during the quiet, mundane, banal moments in which we all spend the majority of our lives. As a viewer, I find myself empathizing with the characters rather than simply sharing vicariously their thrills and chills.
    • In the mad dash to build and resolve, build and resolve narrative tension, most movies use standard continuity editing to do the work for us. In the perfect genre film (Psycho, for example), we’re at the director’s mercy. We willingly surrender our freedom for two hours and go wherever the film leads. Boring Art Films, by contrast, are often elliptical. Instead of splicing together a perfectly coherent line of narrative development, they leave gaps. I like the words “parataxis” and “hypotaxis.” The former juxtaposes, the latter draws connections. “I left. She cried.” versus “When I left, she cried.” Boring Art Films typically use parataxis to force the viewer into a participatory role. We get to be creative when we watch. We get to fill the gaps.
    • In Boring Art Films, form (how the story is being told) is as important as content. And I’m fascinated by form. I long ago stopped caring about “what happens” in novels. That Ahab is chasing a White Whale seems downright irrelevant compared to the brilliance of Melville’s writing. A family travels across town to bury their mother? Who cares, except that Faulkner explodes the story into a community of strange and competing narrative voices. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for Modernism, but I like Boring Art Films — the great ones, at least — because they reshape my understanding of what film can do.
    • Boring Art Films have a distinct voice. The voice of an auteur (more or less). I usually decide ten or fifteen minutes in if I can trust that voice — if it’s a voice of authority or wit or insight. If so, I’m grateful for an opportunity to listen in.

    Others?

  • Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Dir. by Francois Ozon

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste. As has been the case with the few other Ozon films I’ve seen, it feels slight and undernourished, like a short story pushed to novella length. Melvin Poupaud plays Romain, a thirty-ish fashion photographer who, in the opening moments of the film, is diagnosed with cancer. Rather than suffer the side-effects of aggressive treatment, he decides, instead, to accept the three-month life expectancy given him. He decides, also, to keep his condition a secret — the first of several head-scratching choices that alienate him from everyone in his life. At a family dinner, he humiliates his sister with a barrage of savage insults. At home, he matter-of-factly breaks off his relationship with his boyfriend. By the time the film reaches its inevitable conclusion, Romain is quite literally alone. (Ozon’s final image is frustrating. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it.)

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste, but then, while typing up notes this morning, I tripped over this line from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel: “My sister and I can never inflict total damage — that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.” In Doctorow’s novel, Daniel and Susan Lewin are the son and daughter of characters modeled closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the young Jewish couple executed in the summer of 1953 for giving the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets. Daniel’s line, I think, has a doubled meaning. As the child of traitors, he has inherited a particular ability to offend, to enlarge and extend personal grievances into a wider sphere of influence. But he and Susan have also inherited a particularly tragic history and, with it, the right to offend. “He’s such a bastard,” acquaintances must surely think, “but give him a break. Can you imagine all he’s been through?”

    In Le Temps qui reste, Romain tells only one member of the family about his illness, his grandmother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Their brief scene together is the most interesting in the film. He’s drawn to her by their shared relation to the world — both will be leaving it soon — and she is likewise alone, alienated from family and community. During a late-night conversation, she confesses to having had a string of lovers soon after her husband’s death. She is unapologetic, though, and refuses to judge the friends, family members, and neighbors who so callously judged her at the time. “They didn’t understand,” she tells Romain, his head resting on her shoulder. “I would have died otherwise. It was survival instinct.”

    When Ozon introduced Le Temps qui reste at TIFF, he called it a “personal and secret” film, and, while I have no interest in psychoanalyzing Ozon or presuming to extrapolate conclusions about his life, I do suspect the film’s “secret” is closely related to Romain’s and his grandmother’s “survival instincts.” For Doctorow, Daniel’s “right to offend” has political connotations. The Book of Daniel is, in Doctorow’s words, “the story of the American left in general and the generally sacrificial role it has played in our history.” Daniel is a walking, breathing reminder of an iconic and tragic past. He has, in a sense, earned his right to disrupt our complacent social mores.

    Ozon’s film is a smaller, more personal (and, ultimately, less successful) work of art, but it’s no less transgressive. I also like its ambitions. When Romain first learns of his prognosis, he immediately asks, “Is it AIDS?” I’m not gay, and I worry that I’m wading into dangerous critical waters here, but Le Temps qui reste works most effectively as a study of, for lack of a better word, gay psychology. Romain dies of cancer, but he’s haunted by the same specter of mortality that floats through the work of so many queer artists of the AIDS era. It’s important that we hear the word, I think. And it’s also important that we’re reminded of the difference between heterosexual and homosexual mortality — that is, the procreative aspect of sex, the ability to share DNA with one’s lover in the formation of a new life that will carry on beyond one’s own. A side plot involving Romain’s decision to impregnate a woman whose husband is impotent, though underdeveloped in the film, does touch upon some quality of gay psychology (again, excuse the poor choice of words) that I seldom see addressed in films. It’s another of Ozon’s “secrets,” I suspect. Another survival instinct.

  • Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Look closely at the image above. It’s Un Couple parfait in miniature — a story told in body language. The husband (Bruno Todeschini) is an arm’s length from the table, his shoulders turned perpendicular to his wife. His cup sits untouched, reminding us, even moreso than the expression on his face, just how unwelcome these daily rituals of marriage have become. The wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has a Mona Lisa smile. At first glance, she appears perfectly content — a woman deeply in love and endlessly curious, perhaps? But look at her eyes. They’re staring past her husband, lost in thought, wandering. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about the way her right arm rests against her leg. And the way her body leans forward, gesturing toward him despite the growing distance.

    The image is also a capsule of Suwa’s cinematographic style. There are maybe thirty-five shots in the entire film, all but a few from the fixed, static perspective of a waist-high camera positioned some distance from the characters. Suwa has said that, while working as an assistant director, he came to distrust the artificiality of traditional blocking. He chooses, instead, to allow room for his actors to move freely, to breathe and embody emotions more complex than those expressed in their dialogue. Language is slippery in Un Couple parfait. Or, not slippery, but irrelevant, maybe. Suwa isn’t at all interested in offering some metacommentary on the entanglements of postmodern discourse. Rather, his style — allowing actors to improvise lines while the camera is running, for example, or admitting, even, that he often did not understand exactly what his French actors were saying — is more humanist and psychological. Like an analyst, he observes quietly and respectfully the unspoken, looking for clues in behavior and movement, ripples from the subconscious.

    Notice also the door that separates the characters from the camera. When asked why he so often underlights his actors, losing their faces in shadow, he said, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Unlike so many filmmakers, Suwa clearly values the latter as much as the former, and his film is, on some level at least, a pedagogical instrument. At more than one point in Un Couple parfait, the husband and wife sit in adjoining hotel rooms. After one or the other shuts the door between them, Suwa lets his camera run, trapping our vision for a time. These, he claims, are his favorite moments in the film, for as we sit suspended, staring at the closed door, we’re also allowed room to move, to empathize or judge or imagine freely.

    What you can’t see in the image are all of the subtle touches that make Un Couple parfait such a satisfying film. The look of wonder on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s face as she wanders through a museum. The brief interruption of “reality” when an actor sneezes, another says “God bless you,” and they continue on with the scene. The occasional hand-held close-ups that jar you back into close identification with the characters, preventing the film from becoming a formal, intellectual exercise. The late-night conversation between Bruno Todeschini and an old man he meets in a cafe. Or the final scene, which rediscovers a cinematic cliche by taking the “irrelevance of language” to its logical extreme. Un Couple parfait is a kind of collision between the visions of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien: brutally incisive but always fascinated and tender.

  • And Then There Were None

    Home again. Back in the suburbs. Back in the southern heat and humidity. And just a wee bit depressed about it. A friend’s line last year was, “Thank God there are no more movies. I wish there were more movies.” That about sums it up, I’d say. A last batch of first impressions . . .

    Un Couple parfait

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Suwa offered my favorite line of the festival. When asked why he so often underlit his actors’ faces, he replied, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely, the other is to close your eyes and imagine. I want audiences to do both.” To be honest, I only scheduled this film because I’ve developed a bit of an infatuation for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. (She also has a small role in the new Ozon film.) Un Couple parfait ended up being one of my favorites of the festival, though — a small relationship film shot in long takes, often from a fixed, waist-high position. I asked Suwa what attracted him about that particular shot, and he said that working as an assistant director taught him to hate traditional blocking. He wants, instead, to allow his actors room to move, to embody emotions more complex than those expressed by the dialogue. He admitted, even, to not understanding the actual words being spoken at times (he’s Japanese; the actors are all French). Their emotions were real enough, he said; the words were largely irrelevant. Another great festival find that I hope to write about at length at another time.

    U.S. Go Home

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    The two films I scheduled for Friday afternoon, 51 Birch Street and Bed Stories, were both late additions, neither of which particularly excited me. So I decided to skip them both and spend a few hours, instead, at the Toronto Film Reference Library, where I was able to see (on un-subtitle video) Claire Denis’s 1994 TV film, U.S. Go Home. Starring Alice Houri and Gregoire Colin, again playing sister and brother, it feels a bit like a prequel to Nenette et Boni. I’d read on a number of occasions that Denis’s obsession with Eric Burdon and the Animals was deep, deep, and it’s on full display here. U.S. Go Home will never be released on any home video format because rights to the music alone would surely cost in the millions. Along with the Animals, we hear a whole bunch of Otis Redding and other ’60s soul. The new Song of the Moment, The Animals’ “Hey Gyp,” plays in its entirety in a dance scene that rivals Denis Lavant’s at the end of Beau Travail. If it hasn’t become obvious over the past few months, Claire Denis is now, hands-down, my favorite active filmmaker. U.S. Go Home is another perfect little film.

    The Death of Mister Lazarescu

    Dir. by Cristi Puiu

    Thirty minutes in, I wasn’t sure if I would make it. I was exhausted from the week, and the idea of spending two more hours watching a character die in a Romanian hospital was almost too much to bear. But then a remarkable thing happened. At some point I slipped into the film’s rhythms, forgot that I was watching actors, and became completely engrossed in one of the most technically-impressive and beautifully humanist films I’ve ever seen. Shot entirely in hand-held (that brand of photography we’ve been trained to associate with verite), Puiu’s film exposes class divides, critiques modern health care systems, humanizes patients and medical professionals (for good and bad), and makes allusions to Dante, the Bible, and mythology. And it manages to do so in the service of a brilliant and deceptively complex narrative. Really an extraordinary film. Not to be missed.

    The Wayward Cloud

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-liang

    Oh my. Give me some time for this one. I love all of Tsai’s film, this one included. In some ways, The Wayward Cloud is his richest and most extravagantly emotional film yet. But I’m not sure what to do with that last 20 minutes. Um, wow. My notes are filled with questions. I haven’t come up with any satisfying answers yet.

    Angel

    Dir. Jim McKay

    I’ve come away from TIFF this year with a long “to see” list. To the list of directors I want to explore — Carlos Reygadas, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Ning Ying, Bohdan Slama, and Nobuhiro Suwa — I’ve also added Jim McKay, who impressed me as much by his Q&A as by his new film. I should say, first of all, that Angel is not a perfect film. J. Robert and I agreed that the ending is amibguous in the least satisfying way. But it’s ambitious, and I like McKay’s particular ambitions. When he was asked about the film’s lack of a score, he confirmed what I had suspected during the screening, telling us that he’s been most inspired by recent films from France and Iran (and, I would guess, Belgium, Austria, and Taiwan). Angel is as close as we’ll likely come to getting an American Dardennes film. First-time actor Jonan Everett plays Angel, a good kid from Brooklyn who’s been kicked out of him home; Rachel Griffiths is the social worker who takes him in. The film is a quiet character study of both, shot mostly in close-ups. Another really nice surprise.

    L’Enfant

    Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    I’ll say it. I was disappointed by L’Enfant. But part of my disappointment stems from the fact that L’Enfant happens to be the film the Dardennes made after The Son. I think I expected them to improve on what I feel is a perfect film. An unreasonable expectation, I’ll admit. L’Enfant will still be among the very best films I see all year, though, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with others. There’s a lot to wrestle with here.

    Backstage

    Emmanuelle Bercot

    I should have stayed in the hotel or gone out for a beer. But the pull was too strong. One last film. One last chance to watch that damn anti-piracy short. Emmanuelle Seigner plays an emotionally disturbed pop singer; Isild Le Besco plays an emotionally disturbed fan who forces her way into her idol’s life; both look really hot. And then there are some scenes with music and backstage drama. Honestly, my favorite parts of the film are two montages of Paris at night. Backstage was shot by Agnes Godard and looks typically amazing. There’s not much else to recommend the film, though.

    And so that’s it. I hope to write about a few of the films at length, but I’m not sure when that’ll happen.

  • Movies, They’re Everywhere, Man. EVERYWHERE!

    Last Thursday, Girish introduced me to a friend of his, a Toronto native who had just returned from Montreal, where he had seen 54 films at that festival. He had another 45 tickets in hand for TIFF. I don’t get it. I just left my 31st film (I think), and I’m exhausted. Completely. Like I felt the week I took my doctoral comprehensive exams.

    I’ve realized that part of the reason I’m so tired is that I’m just not built to process films — or any information, really — in this manner. I’m not shy, but I’m deeply introverted, and so, as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing the festival experience with a group of friends, the social element — the scheduling and the meals and the intense discussions between films — is taking its toll. I’m enjoying this moment right now. Alone in my room, drinking hotel coffee, staring out the window, taking a long pause. Nice.

    I’ve also realized that I’m the last person who should be posting first impressions live from a fest. It’ll take a few weeks’ time and several hours at the computer before I discover what it is that I particularly like and dislike about the films I’ve seen. I’m finding myself increasingly tongue-tied when asked to justify my fondness for some of the films I’ve enjoyed. They worked for me. I enjoyed experiencing the world from each director’s particular perspective. Why? I have no idea. Give me time. I’ll get back to you.

    But, in the interest of this on-going experiment, here are a few more quick thoughts . . .

    Vers Le Sud

    Dir. by Laurent Cantet

    I’ve seen only Cantet’s previous film, Time Out, and I like it quite a lot. I appreciate his ability to make money real in that film. It’s not just another middle-aged white man has a crisis story; instead, like Bresson’s L’Argent, it shows money changing hands and determining lives. That was my favorite part of Vers Le Sud, as well. The story of wealthy western women who vacation in Haiti in order to sleep with young black men, the film is very much about “exchanges” — of money, power, love, domination. I appreciate the ways in which Cantet explores the pathology of the relationships, acknowledging both the benefits and the degredations inherent in them.

    Where the Truth Lies

    Dir. by Atom Egoyan

    Let’s see . . . I liked the music, so that’s something. And I enjoyed seeing Egoyan in person. (Much shorter than I expected.) Where the Truth Lies is a fairly unexceptional thriller, and, despite all of the controversy, it’s not even particularly erotic. So, disappointing on all counts. The most interesting part of the afternoon was hearing Egoyan recount his fights last week with the MPAA.

    Cache

    Dir. by Michael Haneke

    Please don’t expect me to draw any conclusions about this one yet. It might be the best film I see at TIFF, but I’m not sure why. It works perfectly well as a thriller — who knew a shot of a man laying down for a nap could be more exciting than a car chase? — but Haneke has also crafted a complex study of Europe’s post-colonial history and bourgeois guilt. Someday I hope to be able to justify that last sentence with a full-length response. Really remarkable film.

    Tristram Shandy

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    Ten years from now, when asked to name my all-time favorite film comedies, Tristram Shandy will no doubt be near the top of the list. Like, maybe once a decade, a film this smart, this well-made, and (lord be praised) this funny comes along.

    The Wild, Wild Rose

    Dir. by Tian-lin Wang

    Tsai Ming-liang introduced this Grace Chang musical from the early-1960s, then hung around afterwards for a half-hour or so to talk about his film-going experiences as a child in Malaysia and the influence of the Cathay films on his own work. (Five of Chang’s songs can be heard in Tsai’s The Hole, and another is used in his latest, The Wayward Cloud). Chang is the “Wild Rose” of the title, a nighclub singer with a checkered past who seduces a young, naive pianist and drives him to alcoholism and crime. Quite a synapsis, eh? Part musical, part thriller, part comedy, part noir. I’m eager to track down other films of the era.

    The highlight of the screening, though, was listening to Tsai recount the history of the Cathay studios. Someone in the audience asked why he and other Chinese filmmakers (like Hou) seem to be obsessed with the late-1950s and early-1960s, and Tsai gave two reasons. First, because it was a golden era for film buffs. Tickets were cheap and, without VHS or DVDs, film-watching was a communal experience. Also (and more interestingly, I think), Tsai admitted that he is nostalgic for the genuine and oversized emotions on display in those films. “The music,” he said, “is the most pure form of those emotions.” The musical interludes in The Hole, I assume, are to serve the same purpose — offering a kind of psychic counter-point to the absurd human alienation that marks so much of the film’s “real” world. I see The Wayward Cloud first thing tomorrow morning.

    Why We Fight

    Dir. by Eugene Jarecki

    Why We Fight opens with a snippet from Eisenhower’s farewell address, the speech in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex.” That choice gave me great hope that this film would offer a rich historical analysis of what Daniel Bell called America’s “permanent war economy,” a term that preceded Ike’s by more than a decade. Instead, director Eugene Jarecki constructs an argument only slightly more nuanced than Michael Moore’s in Fahrenheit 9/11, moving much too quickly, I think, from the Cold War to what is clearly his main target, Iraq. I’ll admit that I’m mostly faulting Why We Fight for not being the film I wanted to see, but I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with Left-leaning critiques of America that don’t do the messy work of wrestling with multinational capital. Jarecki missed several opportunities to discuss the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and America’s “open door” economic policies, which, in my opinion, contributed a great deal more to “why we fight” than Haliburton. Also, I’m getting tired of filmmaker’s who cut in shots of, say, “regular Americans” sitting in small town diners, and do so with an air of condescension. I have other strong opinions about this film. None are particularly favorable.

    Le Temps qui reste

    Dir. by Fancois Ozon

    While discussing Ozon’s latest with Girish afterwards, I realized that the film — which isn’t particularly great — did touch me in unexpected and deeply personal ways. When he introduced it, Ozon called Le Temps qui reste a “secret” film, and I think I know what he means, though I’m sure I won’t be able to explain it. It’s a film about “survival instincts,” I think — words used by Jeanne Moreau to describe the decisions she made after her husband died. And did I mention that Moreau walked within inches of Girish and me? Jeanne Moreau! Inches! That is so much cooler than spotting Cameron Diaz or Charlize Theron. The woman who walked through the rain wearing that black dress in La Notte walked right past us. sigh.

  • Losing Touch with Reality

    This is such a very strange way to live. Last night, while running from the Paramount to Jackman Hall, I actually felt a bit drunk, outside of myself. I’d come out of Capote, my fourth film of the day, and was surprised to find it dark outside. The sun had set, and I couldn’t recall having seen it that day. My back is starting to hurt, and, to be frank, so is my ass.

    I haven’t decided if the quality of films is improving or if I’m simply developing calluses to sentimentality and failed ambitions, but I’ve seen several good films (though few great ones) since my last update — and not a dud in the lot. A few more first impressions . . .

    I Am

    Dir. by Dorota Kedzierzawska

    I added I Am to my schedule because it was selected for NYFF and because the still image in the TIFF program is so stunning. It’s of a young girl, her head resting on a wooden table lit by candlelight. She’s staring at the camera, and another hand reaches from beyond the frame to stroke her cheek. It reminded me of the farmhouse scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and, as it turned out, so did many other images from the film. It’s just beautiful to look at. Amazing, really. The sepia-toned palette seems to have been chosen to match the freckles on the cheeks of the young boy at the center of the film. But the film lacks the mystery and transcendence of Tarkovsky (an unfair comparison, I realize). I Am is a “child in peril” story, and I’m not sure what more to say about it.

    Perpetual Motion

    Dir. by Ying Ning

    I have a real weakness for this type of film. A successful woman learns her husband is having an affair, so she invites to her home her three best friends. They gather to celebrate the spring holiday, but the host’s real goal is to discover which woman has betrayed her. As in a Bergman chamber drama or a Eugene O’Neill play, the characters in Perpetual Motion move gradually from light-hearted small talk to brutally frank discussions of their loss and pain. During her Q&A, director Ning Yang told us she is frustrated by depictions of women in Chinese cinema, claiming that one symptom of liberal markets is the commodification of youth and beauty. The result, she said, is that young women in Chinese films become copies of copies. With Perpetual Motion, she’s trying to counter that trend by focusing on menopausal women (her word), and she’s made a hell of a film in the process. I have several pages of notes on this film, too, and look forward to writing it up when I get home. Great film. I like it more with each day.

    Something Like Happiness

    Dir. by Bohdan Sláma

    My new favorite shot of the festival: Camera cranes up over the horizon of a field we’ve seen earlier in the film, pans to the left to reveal (and reintroduce) a major character, follows her down a path, then waits behind her as a bulldozer knocks down a brick wall a few feet away. I’d have to give away too many plot points to explain why the shot is so powerful, but it’s one good example of director Bohdan Slama’s creativity and economy of shotmaking. Something Like Happiness is another great festival find. Three fantastic performances (especially from Pavel Liska) and a really well-told story, from beginning to end. Too few films have had great final scenes this week; Something Like Happiness is the exception.

    Mary

    Dir. by Abel Ferrara

    All of my friends are seeing Mary later in the week, so I’ll hold off posting too many comments until we’ve all discussed it, but for now I feel confident in calling it an interesting mess. Some parts work, others don’t — most of them don’t, actually. But I could maybe be convinced otherwise.

    Little Fish

    Dir. by Rowan Woods

    I’ll admit it, I scheduled Little Fish in hopes of seeing Cate Blanchett. No luck. But the good news is that the film works. Blanchett and Hugo Weaving give the finest English-language performances I’ve seen all week — Weaving, especially. It’s a meaty role, for sure, but he knocks it out of the park. (Lord help me, I’m sounding like a celebrity reporter.) My family has been touched in really horrible ways by drug addiction, and Little Fish is one of the few films I’ve seen that shows adults (rather than teens and thugs) struggling to overcome the particular banality of its evil. Unfortunately, the script falls apart in the final act, but the film is worth seeing for the quieter scenes.

    Capote

    Dir. by Bennett Miller

    I have way too many personal connections to this story to write objectively about the film. Joanna is from Monroeville, the small town in south Alabama where Truman Capote met Harper Lee, and Miss Nell is a friend of the family. (I haven’t had a chance to meet her, unfortunately.) I liked the film quite a lot, but perhaps what most surprised me is that, despite Hoffman’s Oscar buzz and the typical biopic trappings, Capote remains a genuinely small film. It feels European, even. It’s shot almost entirely in tight close-ups, for instance, and in really shallow focus. It’s a story told by the actors, by the slight expressions in their eyes. (The cinematographic style of Capote is actually quite similar to Laurent Cantet’s latest, Vers Le Sud, which I’ll write more about later.) I look forward to seeing it again with Joanna.

    Wavelength

    Dir. by Michael Snow

    I traded my ticket to Gabrielle for a screening of Michael Snow’s landmark structuralist film, Wavelength. I’m really glad I did, as chances to see it projected with Snow in attendance are rare. Enough has been written about it already, but I’ll just add that I enjoyed all 45 minutes of it. Sometimes a film does live up to its reputation.

    I saw two other films this morning, but will write about them later, when I have more energy. Cache begins in two hours. Haneke. I’m not sure how to get into the right head space for this one.

  • The Very Best Intentions

    After three days, 14 films, a brilliant Sufjan Stevens concert, several fantastic meals, and too little sleep, I’ve abandoned my ambitions of blogging a brief capsule review of everything I see. There’s too little time, and I don’t want my TIFF experience to be hampered by blog guilt. Instead, here are some brief comments — first impressions and unsupported opinions, mostly. I hope to write up longer responses to the best films after I get back home and find some breathing room.

    Ballets Russes

    Dir. by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine

    There are so many interesting films to be made about the Ballets Russes. There’s the story of their collaborations with the finest artists of the Modern era, including Dali, Picasso, Miro, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and Copeland. There’s the story of how the Ballets Russes thrived at times under the glamorous spotlight of celebrity, bumping elbows with Hollywood elite. There’s the story of sexuality and the early-20th century ballet — of masculinity, in particular, and gay men who became women’s fantasies. But these stories are only hinted at here. Instead, Geller and Goldfine appear to have become trapped by the good fortune of their interviews, and the film plays like an episode of Biography in which dancer after dancer recounts those favorite stories that, I can only assume, they’ve been telling for the better part of eight decades. The surviving members of the Ballets Russes are endlessly entertaining, and there’s a real charm in their storytelling. The women are still elegant and graceful — sexy, even; the men are still full of piss. But the film doesn’t do much beyond providing a platform for their pride (in the best sense of the word) and nostalgia. Ballets Russes will likely play well on cable and PBS.

    The Sun

    Dir. by Alexander Sokurov

    My favorite moment in The Sun is a shot of Emperor Hirohito as he steps onto the front porch of his Palace. Sokurov shoots him from a low angle and tracks slowly — very slowly — to the left, panning right as he goes. The effect leaves Hirohito alone and still at the center of the frame but sets the background in motion, a perfect visual metaphor for the much-transformed world the Emperor has entered. If I’m not mistaken, it’s literally the first glimpse of sunlight in the film, and it comes forty or so minutes in. Set during the hours preceding Japan’s surrender, The Sun studies Hirohito in close-up, fusing the film’s perspective with the character’s subjective view. (Hirohito’s subjectivity transforms the battle sequences in particularly amazing ways.) I have two full pages of hand-written notes on The Sun. Great film. Really great.

    Three Times

    Dir. by Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Hou Hsiao-Hsien is in a close race with Claire Denis right now for the title of “Darren’s Favorite Active Filmmaker.” (Claire and Hou are incredibly jealous of the title, as you can imagine.) I had a stupid grin on my face during every moment of Three Times. There’s no chance I’ll see a more beautiful film this week, and, while I wasn’t as moved by it as I was Cafe Lumiere last year, I found it more interesting. It’s juxtaposition of three eras harkens to Good Men, Good Women, my favorite of Hou’s films. Three Times, so far at least, is the highlight of my festival, but I would have predicted as much.

    Shanghai Dreams

    Dir. by Xiaoshuai Wang

    For the first 90 minutes, I thought Shanghai Dreams was an interesting but flawed film, but then it broke one of my cardinal rules: Only really, really, really talented filmmakers get to rape a character for dramatic effect. At that point I began to actively dislike the film. My friends liked it a bit more than I, but we were all disappointed by the final act.

    Wavelengths 1

    I’m not sure what to say about Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine except, um, wow. Five minutes in I realized that my left hand was gripping my right forearm to the point that both actually hurt. One of the local critics described the film as the most exciting 17 minutes of the festival, and he was exactly right. It’s Modern in the defamiliarizing, “Make it new!” tradition, but it’s also a pastiche of pop culture, and it’s hip-hop in a way that someone like Darren Aronofsky only hints at. Amazing.

    Mrs. Henderson Presents

    Dir. by Stephen Frears

    Although nearly everyone I’ve spoken to in festival lines would disagree with me about this, I think this film has some serious pacing and tone problems, and I was also annoyed by a late plot development, but, good lord, Judi Dench is great fun to watch. There’s a scene between her and Christopher Guest that might include the greatest spit take in the history of comedy. Despite my complaints I laughed pretty hard at times, and it played well to the audience.

    L’Enfer

    Dir. by Danis Tanovic

    During his Q&A, Tanovic spoke often about how this film is his homage to Kieslowski. K’s spirit is alive and well in the content of the film — it poses another of those classic moral conundrums without offering anything like an answer — but I felt little of Kieslowski in the style. I’m ambivalent about this one, so I’ll hold my comments for a bit.

    Battle in Heaven

    Dir. by Carlos Reygadas

    I went in with doubts, but by the ten-minute mark I had surrendered my trust completely to Reygadas. Like Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, which sparked a great deal of conversation among my friends here last year, I enjoyed Battle in Heaven as a character study that does most of its work through a subjective camera. Though I have some theories, I’m not sure which parts of the film “really happen” and which are dreamed, and I’m not at all convinced it matters. All of the film is very, very real to the main character. I found myself thinking occasionally of Bruno Dumont during the film, as well. There’s something to the camera movements, especially, that suggest some kind of outside or transcendent force at play in Reygada’s world. It’s related to the film’s Catholic iconography, I’m sure, but I haven’t yet decided how. If it were playing again I’d be tempted to give it another shot. This might be the film so far that I’m most looking forward to discussing.

    A History of Violence

    Dir. by David Cronenberg

    It’s going to be a lot of fun watching how this one plays to American critics. It works wonderfully as a genre film, and based on the laughter and cheering that errupted throughout the screening, it will definitely play as such to many audiences. But it also subverts the genre and offers an allegory on Bush’s America that, in my opinion, holds together much better than Dogville. Another great film.

    Sketches of Frank Gehry

    Dir. by Sidney Pollack

    I’m addicted to the TV show American Chopper for the same reason I enjoyed this documentary: I love hearing experts talk about fields that are a complete mystery to me. Pollack’s film doesn’t break any new formal ground, but he avoids most of the biopic pitfalls (it’s not arranged chronologically, for example), and his close friendship with Gehry allows him some intimacy with the subject.

    A Travers la Foret

    Dir. by Jean-Paul Civeyrac

    I arrived a bit late to this screening after a mad dash down Bloor, so take my comments with a grain of salt. This film has some fine camerawork and nice performances, and I really enjoyed the tone. It worked for me as a “mood” piece (for lack of a better word), but I’m not sure if there’s much there there.

    Les Saignantes

    Dir. by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

    I scheduled this one because it was made in Cameroon and because only at TIFF do I get to see films from places like Cameroon. If I watch a film a day for the next ten years I’ll likely never see another one like Les Saignantes. Bekolo introduced it as a “science fiction, comedy, horror film about the future of his country” and said that making the film rescued him from despair. It’s about a movement of women who use their sexual power to overthrow the government. In the process, the film manages to suggest a kind of cool, untapped feminist political power, but unfortunately it does so by projecting onto women degrading male fantasies. Baby steps, I guess.

    L’Annulaire

    Dir. by Diane Bertrand

    Apparently during her Q&A, Bertrand said that she read Yoko Ogawa’s novel three times, wondering all the while how she could turn it into a French film. The comment doesn’t surprise me. As I watched it, I sensed that many of the scenes that played so badly on screen would work better on the page. L’Annulaire is ambitious, it’s a film of ideas, but it really didn’t work for me. I found myself laughing at scenes that I assume weren’t intended to be funny, though even that is up in the air, as the tone of the film was quite a mess.

    Marock

    Dir. by Laila Marrakchi

    Films like Marock are the reason that every filmlover should attend TIFF at some point. I knew weeks ago what my first 20 film picks would be; it’s the next 25 that take some research and some risk. For every Les Saignantes and L’Annulaire — films that, at some point, you stop watching and start waiting to end — there’s a Marock, a genre picture that likely won’t get American distribution, that will never be available to American audiences in any format, but that is just a delight to watch. Laila Marrakchi is a young (mid-20s) filmmaker from Morocco who has drawn from her own life for her first feature. It’s a coming-of-age film that employs all of the coming-of-age conventions, but it does so with a real confidence and grace. I was constantly suprised by small touches — slow pans, perfectly timed dissolves, great lines of dialogue. Hell, I was even moved by it, tears and all. Plus, you have to love a film that rediscovers David Bowie’s “Rock and Roll Suicide.” I’ll never think of the song in the same way. Highly recommended.

    Enough for now. I skipped Sunflower this afternoon for a much-needed walk in the sun but need to head out for I Am. Post any questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to reply.

  • Blogging TIFF

    I have tickets for 44 films this year, plus a ticket to Sufjan Stevens’ sold out concert at the St. Paul’s Centre. 44 tickets. It’s absurd. But with a 50-film festival pass, I decided to schedule as many as possible, knowing that I’ll end up skipping a handful along the way.

    Here’s my complete schedule, along with links to the descriptions at TIFF’s website.

    Thursday September 8, 2005

    Friday September 9, 2005

    Saturday September 10, 2005

    Sunday September 11, 2005

    Monday September 12, 2005

    Tuesday September 13, 2005

    Wednesday September 14, 2005

    Thursday September 15, 2005

    Friday September 16, 2005

    Saturday September 17, 2005

  • Christmas Morning

    TIFF '05 Out-of-Town Package

    Ah, the last Wednesday in August. It doesn’t quite match the morning I woke up to find a Millennium Falcon under the tree, but the sight of a FedEx truck in late August is just about as good as it gets. The plan is to spend the next few hours poring through the catalog, obsessing over the schedule, and checking titles off of my spreadsheet — yes, I created a spreadsheet — all in hopes of creating the most efficient and dud-free lineup of films possible. I then overnight my ticket requests back to Toronto and hope for the best.

    If all goes according to plan, over the span of ten days I’ll get to see new films by Alexander Sokurov, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Laurent Cantet, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Francois Ozon, Thomas Vinterberg, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Stephen Frears, Danis Tanovic, David Cronenberg, the Quay brothers, Bennett Miller, Patrice Chereau, Eugene Jarecki, Nobuhiro Suwa, Cristi Puiu, and about twenty others.

  • A Few Words on . . .

    • Films Watched: The Battle of Algiers dir. by Gillo Pontecorvo; Down by Law dir. by Jim Jarmusch; Saraband dir. by Ingmar Bergman; 35 Up dir. by Michael Apted
    • Books Finished: Libra by Don DeLillo; The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation by Hayden White; The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
    • CDs Purchased: Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club; Pixel Revolt by John Vanderslice; Donnie Darko (soundtrack) by Michael Andrews

    Remember that episode of The Office when David Brent interrupts a training seminar to sing his ode to the free love freeway? The comedy in that scene is about a mile-and-a-half thick. There’s the typical embarrassment of Brent’s colleagues, there’s Tim’s disbelieving stares into the camera and Gareth’s interruptions (“She’s dead”), but what I most love about the joke is that Brent, a middle-aged paper salesman from Slough, has written — and is earnestly performing — a song about driving a Cadillac through the American southwest, bedding lovely “senoritas” along the way.

    Oh, dear lord, how I wish I could chalk up Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s new album Howl to an extended exercise in irony. Generally speaking, I avoid power-trio rock-and-roll, but BRMC’s last record Take Them On, On Your Own was one of my favorites of 2004. It’s heavy when it needs to be but also features melodic songwriting and great guitar noise. Howl, apparently, is their attempt at “roots” music. Acoustic guitars? Check. Harmonicas? Check. T-Bone Burnett credit? Check. Song titles that make confused, sepia-toned allusions to southern spirituality and Depression-era heartache? Check. Apparently these California boys turned off their Jesus and Mary Chain records just long enough to watch O Brother Where Art Thou seven or eight times, and now they’ve lost their way in the funhouse of Americana simulacrum. Fortunately, The Disc Exchange has a ten-day return policy, so I’ll be getting that New Pornographers album instead.

    The week wasn’t a total bust for new music, though. After spending most of the last month listening obsessively to John Vanderslice’s “Exodus Damage,” I picked up the new album, Pixel Revolt, and it’s a beaut’. Vanderslice is a story-teller. Okay, so that’s not terribly unusual. But he’s a story-teller who works in genres. For example, “Continuation” is a police procedural. Seriously, it’s sung by a detective who’s working a case. And it has a cello solo. You’re probably going to laugh at some point during the first twenty-two seconds of the song. Then Vanderslice will start singing, and by the time he hits the chorus, you’ll be tapping your foot and smiling.

    Still high from the Miranda July film, I also picked up a used copy of the Donnie Darko soundtrack this week. (Both films were scored by Michael Andrews.) Except for its inclusion of three, barely-distinguishable versions of “Mad World,” I like it a lot. Maybe instead of a Fender Rhodes, I should be on the lookout for a Mellotron.

    Another week, another book of critical theory, another postmodern doorstop. In The Content of the Form, Hayden White asks, “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” For White, the interpretation of history, like the acts of fiction-making and criticism, is a moral and political act. Reading White alongside Don DeLillo’s Libra made for an interesting study of theory and praxis. DeLillo’s “Author’s Note,” included on the last rather than first page, reads:

    This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.

    Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I’ve altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.

    Libra, in effect, is about the writing of history, the transformation of “real” events into a narrative. It’s a job, DeLillo implies, shared by novelists, historians, CIA analysts, politicians, and anyone else — Lee Harvey Oswald, for example — who writes themselves into human history. That’s an admittedly pedantic description of a novel that was honest-to-god fun to read. I was blissfully ignorant of the JFK assassination before picking up the book, so I was swept quickly into the various intrigues and conspiracies. I have no idea at this point how much of the novel is “real,” which, I guess, is precisely the point.

    If I watched fewer films this week, it’s because much of my spare time was spent parsing through the list of 256 features and 79 shorts that will be playing at TIFF this year. Again, I’m holding off on commenting on the 7 Up films until I finish them all, and I have a longer response to Saraband in the works, which leaves only The Battle of Algiers and Down by Law. I missed Algiers during its theatrical re-release a year or two ago, and I’m sort of glad that, instead, I was able to see it now, at some remove from Bush’s march to war and the prison abuse scandals. That Pontecorvo’s film was made forty years ago, and that America now finds itself in a situation so similar to colonial France’s (the same arrogance, the same disregard for history, the same dehumanizing mistakes), is just maddening. It’s almost too much to watch — and I mean that as the most sincere compliment. Again, Doug has two really fine essays on the film and the DVD release.

    Down by Law is also a great film, and for completely different reasons. What happens in Jarmusch’s film is irrelevant — three guys are arrested and make a jailbreak — all that matters is that it happens to three guys who are endlessly watchable. John Lurie doesn’t so much act as simply embody cool. In fact, I like him best when he’s standing still or functioning as the straight man. Tom Waits is Tom Waits is Tom Waits. And Roberto Benigni, despite what you might think of him after Life is Beautiful and the Oscars, has some kind of superhuman comic timing and this crazy gift for swinging effortlessly between mania and pathos.

    When I first mentioned Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, Bulb wrote in a comment, “I left [a copy] in my guest bathroom and it never fails to elicit favorable comments.” I don’t mind admitting that I read most of Spree two or three pages at a time. It’s great in small doses. Hornby tells us what he read, why he read it, and whether it was worth the effort, and he does so in a typically charming and insightful manner. I can’t write fiction. It’s a complete mystery to me. Which is why I so enjoy reading writers write about writing. Best of all, Spree has given me an unexpected and much-needed push toward the book shelf (and the blog).

  • Week in Review

    Week in Review

    • Films Watched: Nosferatu dir. by F.W. Murnau; 28 Up dir. by Michael Apted; Vers Nancy dir. by Claire Denis; Me and You and Everyone We Know dir. by Miranda July; Los Angeles Plays Itself dir. by Thom Andersen
    • Books Finished: The Public Burning by Robert Coover; Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction by Amy Elias
    • CDs Purchased: Until the End of the World (soundtrack) by various artists; Me and You and Everyone We Know (soundtrack) mostly by Michael Andrews

    With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me. First, Hornby’s columns are essentially blog posts by another name: they’re written in the first-person, they’re chronological (especially once collected in book form), and they’re unified by a single topic. Second, like Hornby, I could chart the course of my life by pacing slowly through a library full of books, CDs, and DVDs.

    Because Long Pauses is essentially a notebook, a diary, and an archive, all in one, I’ve decided to give this “Week in Review” idea a shot. Granted, seven days from now this will all likely have taken on the smell of a deadline, but for now, it seems a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. If I stick to it, the Song of the Moment feature will probably be absorbed into the weekly review, Borg-like.

    As I mentioned a few days ago, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, left quite an impact on me, though I sense the effect waning somewhat. I worry that, when all is said and done, the film’s message is only slightly more nuanced than “carpe diem,” though, really, as far as messages go, that’s a pretty good one, especially when handled with a certain grace. July has a deep, deep fondness for her characters and a child-like wonder about the world in which they live. As a storyteller and filmmaker, she’s ambitious in the best sense of the word, and her ability to capture something of the beauty and fear (often simultaneously) that characterize love and life in the modern world is something special. Maybe the best compliment I can give the film is to say it doesn’t feel like it was made in America. “When I call a Name” is the opening track from Michael Andrews’s fine soundtrack, which reminds me a bit of those Brian Eno Music for Films albums.

    Nosferatu is the latest entry in my Great Films series. I watched it last Sunday after a long weekend that involved two trips to the emergency room, an overnight stay in the hospital (for Joanna), and very little sleep. Which is to say that Nosferatu is an almost perfect film to watch in a waking dream state. Murnau’s brand of expressionism is so organically “uncanny,” and Max Schreck’s performance is so utterly alien. It’s my new favorite Dracula, bar none.

    Like any great essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost too rich to be eaten in one bite. I want to watch it again before commenting at length, but three quick points for now: 1) It made me want to watch Blade Runner again. 2) It made me want to track down the films of Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Julie Dash, and other independent black filmmakers of the 1970s. 3) I love the idea of looking for documentary moments in narrative films, an idea that was raised in Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves, as well. (Doug has a really great essay on Los Angeles Plays Itself, by the way.) I’ll return to the 7 Up films and the Denis short in later weeks.

    Seeing only two titles on the “books finished” list undersells the size of my accomplishment, I think, considering that the novel weighs in at 534 pages and the other is a book of critical theory. The next chapter of my dissertation, ostensibly a tight reading of The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, is actually about the rise of the academic Left in the 1970s and 1980s and the political problems of postmodernism. Elias’s book posits that “history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire,” which she wraps into discussions of “the Sublime,” the traditional historical novel (think Walter Scott), and post-1960s American fiction, in particular those novels she calls “metahistorical romances.”

    Did I mention that Elias is on my dissertation committee? Or that her book was blurbed favorably by Linda Hutcheon? Or that in her preface she thanks Hayden White for his encouragement, advice, personal generosity, and kindness? (I know those two names mean, like, nothing to most people, but if you’re working in history and postmodern literature, they mean a lot.) The Public Burning comes up quite a bit in Elias’s book as an example of an avant-garde metahistorical romance, which is quite a nice way of describing it, I think. Its voice alternates between first- and third-person (the former from the p.o.v. of Vice President Richard Nixon), and Coover also cuts into “Intermezzos,” which take on various forms: a poem pasted together from snippets of text from President Eisenhower’s public statements, a dramatic dialogue between Ike and Ethel Rosenberg, and a mini-opera sung by the Rosenbergs and James Bennett, then-Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons.

    The novel reaches its climax in the middle of Times Square, where all of American history has come undone. Betty Crocker, Uncle Sam, and the nation’s Poet Laureate (Time magazine) are all there to witness the Rosenberg execution, as are the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, Cecil B. DeMille (who’s producing the spectacle), Walt Disney (who’s selling souvenirs), and fighting bands of patriots and redcoats. Elias (via Soja, Jameson, Frank, and Foucault) would describe the scene as an example of spatialized metahistory: “What one gets is a view from above, a critical view akin to the perspective of aerial photography, flattening out time, space, and history in order to map them.” The question for my chapter is this: “What does this mean for a ‘real’ politics of the Left?” I’m intrigued by the line that ends Elias’s second chapter:

    The humanities [English and philosophy departments, for example] not only take seriously the challenge to history in fantasies and novels; they have forcefully asserted that history is fantasy and fiction allied with power, and have thrown down a gauntlet to the social sciences to prove otherwise.

    That “prove otherwise” puts an interesting spin on the debate, I think.

    That covers everything from this week except for the Until the End of the World soundtrack I picked up used for $7, proving once again that spontaneous buys are seldom good buys. I think I’ll enjoy these songs more when they show up randomly in iTunes. They don’t make for a very cohesive or compelling album.

  • Dreaming of Movies

    I had my first TIFF-related dream last night. It was kind of like that dream where you show up for a final exam after skipping class all semester, except that, instead of sliding into a strange classroom, I was wandering around Toronto with no tickets because I’d forgotten to submit my out-of-town form. I woke up feeling anxious.

    Some of that anxiety may stem from a rookie mistake I made last year. I had passes for three films on the evening I arrived but had failed to realize that my actual tickets were housed in an office somewhere on the ground floor of a building near Yonge and College rather than at the box office, where I arrived thirty minutes before the first film began — plenty of time, I assumed, to get in line, rest, grab a good seat, whatever. Instead, I went running (literally) out of the theater, cursing the volunteer who had politely — and I say “politely” only in retrospect — who had politely handed me a map and pointed me north. By the time I found the ticket office, I was sweating and the tops of my feet were bleeding. (Note: Don’t ever run in Birkenstocks.) I ran back to the Paramount in time to catch the last 45 minutes of Nobody Knows.

    My TIFF dream was also related, I think, to Michael Apted’s 7 Up films, the first two of which I watched for the first time last night. We went to bed some time after midnight, and I spent the next two hours in that strange waking dream state. I don’t remember any specific details of the dreams, but they were full of those kids — Tony the Jockey, John the Reactionary, and Neil the Sad-Eyed Chess Player, in particular. Joanna and I were so moved by the films that we cheated. I looked up a few reviews of the later films to get snapshot updates of their lives. Part of me regrets doing so now, but I suspect that watching the other four films will actually be a better experience without the “suspense.”

  • What Are We Talking About?

    Given the content of this here website, what I’m about to say might come as something of a surprise: Except under certain circumstances, I really hate to talk about movies, literature, religion, and politics. Yesterday Joanna and I went to a 4th of July picnic where we knew only the host and one other couple. At some point I found myself talking to a guy who, after learning about my dissertation and my film writing, used my interests as an excuse to tell me about Ayn Rand and Memento. I got the sense that this guy was accustomed to being the most knowledgeable (or at least the loudest) guy in the room, so I was content to let him talk until he ran out of steam, hoping all the while that Joanna would wander back in our direction or that a meteor would destroy the apartment complex across the street. Anything that would give us an excuse to change the subject.

    But nothing like that happened. And the guy wouldn’t let me off the hook. “So what’s the best film you’ve seen in the theater this year?” Um, Pin Boy, probably. It’s from Brazil, I think, or maybe Argentina. I forget which. It’s a great little film about . . . “I don’t know anything about Pin Boy. What about American films?” This year? I guess The Life Aquatic was the most interesting American film I’ve seen this year, but I was actually a bit disa . . . “Okay, what about the last ten years? Did you see Memento? How about Fight Club? The Usual Suspects?”

    And on and on it went. At some point his friend joined us and, after listening for a while, added, “Oh, I get it. You’re one of those ‘I don’t watch summer blockbuster movies’ types, right?” And if you’re guessing that he said that in an effete, high-pitched voice, then you’d be right. “Don’t stereotype the guy,” Mr. Memento said. Hey, sometimes the stereotype fits, I joked.

    Eventually the subject changed to The Lord of the Rings, which drew Joanna’s attention and which gave me an excuse to slide over to the one couple I knew. I asked them about their upcoming trip to California — a brief tour of Hollywood, followed by a four-day drive up the coast and a long weekend in San Francisco — and, quite unexpectedly, I soon found myself talking about movies again. After telling me about California, they asked if Joanna and I had any trips planned and I mentioned Toronto.

    “You know, many Iranian directors make films for that festival in Toronto.” Yeah, Kiarostami had a new film there last year. And I think Makhmalbaf’s daughter did, too. I forget her first name. “Yes, they make these films for Western audiences that are so depressing. Poverty is a part of Iran. I don’t deny that. But I can’t understand why festivals love these films.”

    Assana is in my ESL class. I had known her for several months before learning that in Tehran she had been a doctor. On Thursday I plied her with questions about the election, and she seemed grateful to have found an American who was interested. Yesterday, I told her a bit about Kiarostami’s Ten, which had given me my first glimpse of middle class Tehran.

    I’m not sure what this story illustrates exactly. (Joanna would say it illustrates that Mr. Memento is an asshole.) Sociologists have been saying for years that popular culture serves an organizational function in America. The people who line up on opening night at theaters in Anchorage, Kansas City, and Miami (or who watch the Super Bowl or who read the latest Harry Potter or Purpose-Driven whatever) are actors in a shared experience. Pop culture guarantees some kind of connection between strangers. But it’s always the most superficial of connections, and so small talk becomes a discussion of which film has the most realistic depiction of human evisceration, The War of the Worlds or Independence Day. And it makes me crazy.

    Maybe I’m the asshole.

  • The Great Films, Part 1

    The Great Films, Part 1

    In a deliberate effort to beef up my cinephile cred, lately I’ve been loading my GreenCine queue with selections from the list of 1,000 Greatest Films compiled by the folks at They Shoot Pictures. With 30 or 40 films now in my queue, I’ve stopped prioritizing or shuffling the list and just watch whatever happens to show up on my door. It’s probably not the best strategy — perhaps I should instead queue up ten films of a particular genre or, say, all of the John Ford or Japanese films I’ve never seen — but I’m enjoying the variety. It’s been a fun, summer-time distraction from the brain-wearying work of dissertating. Next up are Some Like It Hot and My Darling Clementine.

    Some quick thoughts on recent viewings. (I’m afraid that none were overwhelmingly positive, so any feedback would be much appreciated.)

    The Blue Angel (1930, dir. Josef von Sternberg) — My first Marlene Dietrich film. Also, my second Emil Jannings film (after The Last Laugh). Both are fun to watch here, though I find it almost impossible to imagine how they would have been received by an audience in 1930. Jannings is the subject of our ridicule and sympathy, and von Sternberg’s balancing of the two is tricky. Dietrich is likewise a complicated character — a femme fatale, a seducer, and a betrayer, whose charm is irresistible. Two weeks later, what I most admire about the film are its images of the creative world behind the stage curtain, which bring to mind the magic of Bergman’s films.

    Jules and Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut) — Jules and Jim was my first New Wave film. I remember checking it out from the Wilmington public library eight or nine years ago, when I was first dipping my toes into world cinema. What little lasting impression it left was mostly negative. I recall being annoyed with all of the main characters and confused by their behavior. A decade later, I now recognize some of its precedents — writers like Flaubert and, to a lesser degree, James, both of whom saddle their characters with particular flaws then watch (as if casual observers rather than authors) as those flaws become manifest in the inevitable and messy consequences.

    I appreciate Flaubert and James, but I don’t read them for pleasure, just as I seldom watch Truffaut for pleasure. To be fair, I’ve seen far too few of his films (five or six, maybe) to make any blanket statements, but, aside from The 400 Blows, I don’t recall ever being pestered by one of his films. By “pestered” I just mean that mixture of confusion and curiosity that follows (sometimes days later) an encounter with great art — or, if not great art, then interesting or daring or insightful art. I don’t mean to imply that Jules and Jim is lacking here on all counts; only that, the morning after, I wasn’t the least bit curious to know more about Jules, Jim, or Catherine. Perhaps I’ll give it another go in ten years.

    The Life of Oharu (1952, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) — Much to my embarrassment, it’s time that I own up to the fact that, on a number of occasions now, I have found myself surprisingly unmoved by the great Japanese filmmakers. There’s something so thoroughly alien (other-worldly, even) about the customs, politics, music, and rituals of, in this case, 17th century Japan. But I feel excluded, also, by the film style. The long takes, which I so admire in many other filmmakers, try my patience in Mizoguchi. His actors’ movements, which are so graceful and balletic, are impossibly strange to me. I can’t seem to penetrate through to the emotional core of the characters and, so, remain uninvested in their tragedies.

    About 40 minutes into our screening of The Life of Oharu, I leaned over to a friend and joked that I felt like I was watching a Thomas Hardy novel. He chuckled, then a few seconds later added, “Hey, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.” Mizoguchi’s film is, with one notable exception, textbook Naturalism. Oharu, like Tess, Maggie, and Carrie before her, is abused by a patriarchal system, to be sure, but the depths and the ironies of her suffering suggest that a vast and indifferent universe is conspiring against her. The Life of Oharu is like an anti-picaresque novel, a compilation of vignettes in which our heroine, rather than outsmarting her abusers, is instead toyed with, degraded, and openly mocked by them. I love Mizoguchi’s camerawork in this regard. He often looks down upon her from a high angle, forcing the horizon line above the edge of the frame so that we, like Oharu, seldom catch a glimpse of the sky.

    The one exception to this Oharu-as-Naturalism theory is the final, enigmatic shot, in which Oharu, now old and alone, looks up with reverence at a tower in the distance. I say “enigmatic” because I simply lack the context and understanding to read the image. Is the tower the home of her son, now a powerful lord? Is it a temple, and, if so, what does it represent to her? In an earlier scene, she has found some consolation in religious ceremony, but it’s an earthy, human consolation — the smiling face of Buddha becomes a talisman of her one moment of perfect happiness, the love she once felt for a young man. Regardless, Hardy, Crane, Dreiser, and the other literary Naturalists tended to leave their heroines in the grave, so the finale of Oharu felt hopeful to me. I’m not sure if that hope is justified, however.

    Note: I didn’t rent this one from GreenCine. It is, however, available as a good-enough R2 DVD from Artificial Eye.

    L’Age d’Or (1930, dir. Luis Bunuel) — L’Age d’Or‘s images aren’t as striking as those in Un Chien Andalou, but I found it a much more compelling film. I guess I prefer my surrealism to be grounded a bit more firmly in narrative, no matter how loosely the term “narrative” must be employed in this context. That Bunuel uses a love affair as a framework around which he builds his political and aesthetic critique gives the images (such as the one in my new title) a deeper resonance. There are humans in this film rather than simply a collection of subjects or symbols. L’Age d’Or seems to be more distinctly a Bunuel film as well — Un Chien Andalou has too many of Dali’s fingerprints on it, in my opinion — and, indeed, a pairing of it with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would feel perfectly natural, despite the 42 years that separate them.