So this is kind of exciting.
Already on my must-see list:
And the list will grow and grow and grow until even that 50-film pass will feel like a compromise.
Nothing like a film meme to get the desiccated, blog-writing juices flowing again. I found it at CultureSpace.
1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video.
250? Something like that. Maybe closer to 300 if you include shorts, TV shows, and films that have been burned to DVD by friends. I bought my first DVD player in January ’98, when there were only a few hundred titles available and when a slew of soon-to-be-busted dot.coms were competing for market share by offering ridiculous online sales and bargains. Anyone else remember the 3 DVDs for $1 deal? That’s why my collection includes As Good As It Gets, Fargo, and The English Patient, three films that I like but that I wouldn’t consider buying today — not for more than 33 cents apiece, at least.
The bookshelf where I store my DVDs consists of four shelves devoted to English-language films and two for non-English. That distribution seems about right to me. A two-to-one ratio.
2. Last film I bought.
That would be The Princess Bride, which we picked up for $9 at Wal-Mart when our niece was in town. We didn’t actually get around to watching it, but it’ll be a good one for the collection, I think. There are too few family-friendly films that I can stand to watch over and over again. I’m planning to grab a copy of Au Hasard Balthazar (and the new Pernice Brothers CD) later today.
3. Last film I watched.
Napoleon Dynamite. Gosh!
4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order).
I might be interpreting “watch a lot” differently from how it was originally intended. I have this habit of putting in DVDs and watching favorite scenes in the same way you might put on an album to listen to a favorite song. These are the films I would be most likely to grab right now:
Mirror (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) — My favorite film, but I seldom watch it from start to finish. Instead, I flip from chapter to chapter, watching particular scenes as the mood strikes me. It’s a good bet, though, that I’ll watch Margarita Terekhova sitting on the fence and the shots of the Soviet ballooners. Man, those ballooners break my heart every time.
Harold and Maude (dir. Hal Ashby, 1971) — Nobody cuts to music better than Ashby. The opening titles and the closing sequence (“Trouble”) are just perfect.
Beau Travail (dir. Claire Denis, 1999) — Denis Lavant dancing.
Lemony Snicket (dir. Brad Silberling, 2004) — At some point, I hope to write a full response to this film, which is more stylish and more beautiful than the material deserves. The shots of Violet Baudelaire tying up her hair get me every time. And even more impressive are the closing titles, which feature fantastic design and great music from Thomas Newman. The closing titles are a short film that could stand on their own.
Solaris (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2002) and What Time Is It There? (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2001) — The pairing of these films might only make sense if you’ve ever watched them while mourning. I can’t quote a single line of dialogue from either film, but I’ve watched all or parts of both twenty times, I’m sure. They’re both beautifully shot and have a sustained mood that I find familiar and comforting. Solaris has the added benefit of Cliff Martinez’s percussive score. I often put in the disc just to hear the music and to watch the ships float through space.
5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be?
Well, except for the broken legs and the falling out of the window part, it wouldn’t suck to be Jeff in Rear Window.
And in the True Spirit of Meme, I’d love to read Girish’s, Rob’s, and Doug’s answers.
I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:
Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.
I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.
If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.
And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.
Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.
The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.
Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.
* Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.
Dir. by Xan Cassavetes
Xan Cassavetes’s Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession tells the parallel, rise-and-fall stories of a Los Angeles pay-TV channel and Jerry Harvey, the man who acted as its chief programmer and svengali. Harvey, as the film informs us in the opening minutes, murdered his second wife in 1988 before turning the gun on himself, and the “tragedy” of his end is ostensibly at the heart of Cassavetes’s documentary. I say “ostensibly” and put scare quotes around “tragedy,” though, because in Z Channel the only real tragedy is the loss to film buffs of Harvey’s single-minded cinephilia. We’re reminded of this loss again and again, as talking head after talking head (Altman, Tarrantino, Payne, Jarmusch, Verhoeven, etc.) wax nostalgic for the days when any Los Angelino could turn on Z Channel and see Berlin Alexanderplatz, The 400 Blows, an Italian skin flick, or the premiere of Peckinpah’s cut of The Wild Bunch. Cassavetes includes a bounty of clips from Harvey’s favorite films and supplements her story with interviews of his co-workers and friends.
I love many of the same films that Harvey loved. And I would pay quite a lot to have a station like Z Channel beamed into my home. Watching Cassavetes’s film, I was once again reminded — as I assume was Cassavetes’s intention — of how pedestrian and market-driven so much of current film programming is, both theatrically and on cable. But, so what? I knew that before the film began. When asked whether writing political theater is just “preaching to the choir,” Tony Kushner once responded:
A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.
Z Channel is a crummy film. It’s poorly constructed from short segments that offer superficial observations about specific films (“the director’s cut is obviously better”), the film industry (“without studio support and marketing, a film doesn’t stand a chance”), and Harvey himself (“he was seeing a psychiatrist several afternoons a week”). As an aside, I was also annoyed by Cassavetes’s systematic use of only the most provocative film clips — for example, the hot tub scene from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the pagans in Andrei Rublev. Instead of rattling her audience’s smugness, Cassavetes relies upon it, offering up a paean to cinephilia that is audacious enough to equate metaphorically the death of a TV station (and the eclectic programming it represented) with a murder/suicide.
Z Channel comes to life for only one brief moment during the very end. After describing the last few days of Harvey’s life, Cassavetes includes a brief snippet from one of his former friends and colleagues. Barely containing his emotion, he says something to the effect of, “There’s a danger of turning Jerry into a hero here, and I’ve got a real problem with that.” I sat upright in my chair. It was the sentiment I’d been waiting for more than an hour to hear expressed. Lest we take this warning too seriously, though, Cassavetes then cuts to Robert Altman, who, when asked the same question about Harvey, pronounces with little hesitation, “I like him.”
I did a quick scan of other online reviews of Z Channel and was disappointed to find so many critics accepting this redemptive narrative of the inspiring soul who was taken from us, tragically, and whose work for the integrity of cinema we should take up in his stead. Such a reading is possible only because of Cassavetes’s decision to elide the violence of Harvey’s end. How would the tone of the film change, for example, had she included reports from the crime scene or interviews with his wife’s surviving family? Instead, we are offered only one quick glance at a photo of the woman who later would be brutally murdered, and a few fond remembrances of her from Harvey’s friends.
San Francisco, in case this hasn’t been said often enough, is a great city, and I spent most of my time there doing all of the touristy things one is obligated to do during a first visit — riding cable cars, walking through Muir Woods, taking pictures of the Golden Gate bridge, browsing through record and book shops, and eating to the point of exhaustion. It’s a particularly great city to visit with other film buffs; we hit almost every stop on the Vertigo tour.
The first week of the ’05 San Francisco International Film Festival was a bit of a disappointment, though. This is what I saw:
I hope to write at length about three of them: Pin Boy, which was the real standout of the lot, Street Angel, which featured a new, live score from the American Music Club, and L’Intrus, which I managed to see again thanks to Rob’s access to press screeners. After a second viewing, L’Intrus may have bumped Cafe Lumiere from the top spot of my 2004 list. Just a great, great film.
Of the documentaries I saw, Depardon’s is the best, though I’ve come to accept the fact that I just don’t know how to write about films like it. It’s a portrait of a dying way of life, beautifully composed and deeply fond of its subjects. And I’m always a sucker for films that allow the elderly an opportunity to tell their stories (several of the farmers are in their 80s). Definitely worth seeing. The documentary about Edward Ulmer, director of The Black Cat and Detour, is enjoyable in a Biography channel kind of way, but it offers little insight into Ulmer’s style and fails to pursue one of its more interesting threads: a questioning of auteur criticism. The Fall of Fujimori has certainly provoked more debate than any of the other films we saw, and, to be honest, I still don’t know what to think of it. Like Fog of War, it allows its subject to craft his own story, for good and bad, through a series of sit-down interviews. I’ll be curious to see if any kind of critical consensus builds for this one.
Of the other narrative films I saw, I can recommend Innocence if only for the incredibly rich atmosphere it invokes. (During the walk back to the subway, I was reminded of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.) The film’s allegory isn’t quite substantial enough to maintain the weight of a feature length, though, and at some point I began waiting for it to end. The Gravel Road has all of the faults of a low-budget debut film — frustrating pacing, heavy plotting, hit-or-miss performances — but I found myself unexpectedly touched by its final act. Dear Enemy is a competent comedy of manners that made me laugh out loud once or twice, but I can’t imagine thinking about it again after I finish writing this sentence. As for La Petite Chartreuse, well, I’ll just echo what Doug has already written: Any film that makes Olivier Gourmet utter the line, “Don’t you understand? I can’t cry!” deserves some kind of special raspberry. What a ridiculous waste of a stunning performance.
Oh, and Suzi Ewing’s 14-minute short, Going Postal, is really nice. Definitely my favorite of the Revelations program.
A few interesting snippets from part 1 of Jonathan Hourigan’s interview with Tim Cawkwell, author of The Filmgoer’s Guide To God. . .
Well, it annoys me that religious people know about Michelangelo. And they might have read some Graham Greene. But if you said to them “Go to the cinema. That’s where the modern visual understanding of religion is being developed”, they just haven’t got a clue where to start. My book, I hope, helps them to start. . .
Just crudely, then, the Orthodox Church wants to celebrate the spiritual nature of human beings. The Catholic Church wants to celebrate God in the world, immanent at all points, if not necessarily transcendent. Protestants generally take a sterner view: It’s about the word and personal salvation.
Dir. by Richard Linklater
Fifteen minutes or so into Slacker, a college-aged guy (Tom Pallotta) steps out of a coffee shop and is greeted by Jerry Deloney, a fast-talking, 40-something conspiracy theorist in a Batman T-shirt. Tom is headed home, and Jerry invites himself along for the walk, unloading a stream of paranoid fantasies as they go. Anti-gravity technologies, Mars landings, “secret groups in charge of the government,” drug cartels, missing scientists—Jerry’s ideas sound deluded and absurd even when they creep into the realm of verifiable fact. (Fifteen years later, his warnings about greenhouse effects seem eerily prescient.)
On his commentary track on the Criterion DVD release of Slacker, writer/director Richard Linklater recalls his one direction to Tom:
“It’s very important how you react. This is the tone of the movie.” I didn’t want any judgment. I said, “Don’t look at him weird. Don’t judge him. That’s up to the audience to do.”
That refusal to judge, I’m finally realizing, is what attracts me again and again to Linklater’s films. Even in a genre picture like Dazed and Confused he avoids the typical teen movie cliches by affording equal value to all of his characters, regardless of their clique or social standing. That some of the characters come off looking worse than others (Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion and Parker Posey’s Darla, for example) is more the product of their particular behavior—a kind of socially-sanctioned sadism not uncommon among teens (and adults, for that matter)—than any too-simple, prescribed plot device.
Linklater, perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, is alive to the potential and the basic human value of the men and women who walk in and out of his films. And he seems to have a particular fondness for the folks who live on the margins, whether by choice or necessity. Slacker takes on one particular marginalized community—that class of restless, searching, “underemployed” artists, musicians, and drop-outs who seem to congregate in the corners of all American college towns—but his attitude toward them is not markedly different from his treatment of those teenagers in Dazed, the lovers in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, or the philosophers, scientists, and poets who drift through Waking Life: all are people of ideas with active imaginations and complex human desires. That we instantly fall into the habit of judging them is a bad thing, Linklater reminds us again and again.
The young men and women of Slacker often talk nonsense. Their ideas are seldom fully-formed, and the most articulate of the lot are occasionally guilty of parroting whatever book they’ve read most recently. There’s the “Dostoyevsky Wannabe” who grabs a pencil to transcribe his own pretentious ideas at the moment of inspiration, and the “jilted boyfriend” who reads from Ulysses as he tosses his friend’s typewriter from a bridge. The film is smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge that simply parroting others’ ideas isn’t enough. As in Waking Life, there’s an existential bent to much of the film, a constant debate between theory and action. “You just pull in these things from the shit you read, and you haven’t thought it out for yourself, no bearing on the world around us, and totally unoriginal,” one girl tells her boyfriend. “It’s like you just pasted together these bits and pieces from your ‘authoritative sources.’ I don’t know. I’m beginning to suspect there’s nothing really in there.” And by that point in the film, we’re already feeling a bit bored and a bit superior, and so we nod our heads in agreement.
But, while it’s not enough, reading and debating, becoming engaged with the world of ideas, is something of value, even when in its earliest stages of development and even though it can’t be easily commodified by a consumerist culture. Linklater refers to several of his characters as “uncredentialed authorities”—people like the JFK assassination buff, the old anarchist, and the video backpacker. They are experts in their various fields, knowledgeable and articulate, and yet they remain marginalized just the same. With a Ph.D. after their names or a five-figure price tag beside their art installations—with a credential—their place in society would be more secure, their market value more easily quantifiable. But, instead, they’re “slackers,” a term that has become derogatory in the years since the film’s release.
There’s something wonderfully subversive about Slacker. I think so, at least. Linklater gives us a world functioning within a different economy. People live communally in shared houses, taking with them little more than a pile of clothes and books. They repair their own cars using borrowed tools and junked parts. One stamp and a few licks gets several people into a bar for free. “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work at it,” one guy says. Of course, as anyone who has ever toyed with radical ideas knows, even alternative economies are slaves to “the real thing,” and so viewers of Slacker are forced to balance whatever romantic idealism they find in the film with the practical questions of life in capitalist America. I enjoy wobbly discussions of the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but somebody’s got to buy the next round of beers, know what I’m saying?
Is there a single issue more important in America today and more absent from our movie screens than class? We occasionally get one of those fairy tales about some guy (usually white) who has it all but who doesn’t learn to live until he is befriended by some world-weary and wise person (usually black) from the wrong side of the tracks. Or we get satires of the suburbs that ask us to “look closer.” But we seldom see films that fundamentally challenge the system itself. I love that Slacker, like a good documentary, explores this other world, this other economy, while allowing us relative freedom to judge its merits.
In one of Slacker‘s final sequences, an old man walks alone, speaking into a tape recorder.
My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.
It’s as close to a defining moment for Slacker as you’re likely to find. The first time I watched the film, I fixated on that last sentence, reading it as a challenge to anyone who would dismiss Linklater’s experiments in form. “Coherence is a lie of narrative cinema,” he seemed to be saying. (And I still believe that, by the way.) But now I can’t seem to get past the old man’s comments about the “necessary beauty” of the struggles of life. Or perhaps that should be the struggles with life. Active rather than passive.
I just opened my mailbox to find a package waiting from DVD Planet. For $38.97 ($20.98 below MSRP) I was able to order Criterion’s 5-disc version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander and have it shipped to my door at no additional cost. Along with new transfers of both the theatrical and television versions of the film, I also got a whole host of extra features, including three documentaries, an audio commentary, and new essays from writers like Rick Moody.
My last DVD order came a few weeks ago. It included all four of Claire Denis’s films currently available in Region 1, along with Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn. After entering all five titles into the seach engine at DVD Price Search, I found that Overstock offered the best price: just a penny or two over $70. For five films. Five films that, were it not for DVD, would have been almost impossible for me to see, let alone own.
But there’s even more to the story. When I sit down to watch Fanny & Alexander, I will see it projected at 100″ diagonal in my basement. Granted, I’ve spent more than most would (or could) on my home theater. But, the fact remains that for the cost of a ’99 Ford Taurus, I am able to experience something this close to cinema in my own home. And, armed with a $20/month subscription to GreenCine, I have a nearly bottomless supply of films at my disposal. I just wish that Bazin and Truffaut had lived long enough to see it.
This a blog-length response to a book-length subject, but is it possible to underestimate how radically our relationship to cinema has been changed by technology in the last 8 years? The impact extends well beyond easy access to films. (Although access certainly isn’t insignificant; how many of us have been waiting for years for the opportunity to see the TV cut of Fanny & Alexander?) Technology is rewriting the role of film criticism as well. Do I really need to read my local film reviewer when Rotten Tomatoes can, in a millisecond, determine critical consensus? Why look at the position of one reviewer’s thumb when I can just as easily gather together all of the nation’s reviewers and ask for a roll call? Is there any particular value now in being film history- or trivia-literate when Google and the Internet Movie Database can provide all of the answers to all of our questions by simply feeding them the appropriate keywords? (There’s some value, of course—we’ll always need experts—but certainly that value has been diminished.)
These are great days for cinephiles. The playing field has, to a great extent, been leveled. Those of us in “flyover” country (somewhere between The Walter Reade, The Film Center, and The Film Forum) now get to experience great cinema as it was intended, and the Internet gives us a place to share our thoughts with others, to engage in the types of conversations that gave birth to the New Wave. (How’s that for a nice bit of hyperbole?)
This is all incredibly obvious, I know. But I just can’t get over the excitement of opening that package.
Dir. by Claire Denis
Claire Denis’s debut film, Chocolat, opens with a two-minute static shot of a man and child, both black, playing in shallow ocean waters. When the camera does finally move, it pans nearly 180 degrees to the right before coming to rest on a young white woman. I thought little of the shot the first time I saw the film, but watching Chocolat again last night, I was struck by the economy of that single, simple camera movement. By dividing the frame in perfect halves, the shot’s composition introduces what will become one of the film’s central metaphors, the horizon line; by recontextualizing an idyllic image of a father and son (presumably) through what amounts to a cutless eyeline match, the pan firmly establishes the film’s tricky but essential subjective perspective.
The young woman, we eventually learn, is traveling through Cameroon, visiting the lands where she was raised as the daughter of a French colonial district officer. France (Mireille Perrier) carries with her her father’s leatherbound diary of notes and sketches, and she fingers its pages as if the diary were family album, romance novel, and roadmap, all in one. Ten minutes into Chocolat, we leave the present to enter her reverie of the past, and all but the final few minutes of the film are a recreation of her childhood landscape. Specifically, France remembers a time when her father set out on a short trip, leaving her and her mother (Giulia Boschi) behind under the care of their houseboy, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé). Like an Edith Wharton novel, Chocolat appropriates the conventions of a romance plot to comment on restrictive social structures, specifically the complexities of a colonial system that simultaneously dehumanizes and hypersexualizes the colonized, while also degrading the colonizer. It’s brilliantly executed—a story told completely in small but significant gestures.
Reviewers who have deemed “unnecessary” the framing device involving the adult France have completely misread Chocolat, I think. While there is much to recommend in the film—Agnes Godard’s cinematography, the many fine performances, and Denis’s typically seductive pacing, to name just a few—Denis’s handling of the film’s subjective perspective is what differentiates this film from other earnest and well-intentioned examinations of racism and/or colonialism. (There is probably room here for a discussion of the differences between Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, and Anthony Minghella’s also-good but differently-focused film adaptation, but I’ll save that for another day.)
Take, for example, the most significant of Chocolat‘s many small gestures: the moment when the mother reaches slowly from her position on the floor to touch Protée’s calf. It’s a perfectly staged sequence, more charged and transgressive than anything imagined in a typical Hollywood sex scene. And Protée’s reaction retains its mystery and shock even on a second viewing. But who is “remembering” this moment? Although Denis’s camera shoots from the vantage point of the young France, three feet or so from the floor, France is not in the room. She could not have witnessed this event, and so we are left to answer any number of questions: Who is telling this story? From what evidence is she reconstructing her narrative? How does something so subjective as memory (not to mention love, faith, and power) distort our understanding of history, both personal and political.
Near the end of Chocolat, France is told by her father, “The closer you get to [the horizon], the farther it moves. You see the line, but it doesn’t exist.” It’s one of those movie lines that screams significance. But recognizing the metaphor as metaphor and unpacking it are very different tasks, and I’m finding the latter a pleasant and surprising challenge. The most banal reading might be something like, “the line that separates the races is culturally-determined and, therefore, surmountable.” There’s nothing in the film to suggest such a rose-colored reading, however, and, really, the film would be dishonest crap if there were. Or, the father’s line might be exploded into some universal platitude about the hopeless quest for understanding. “No matter how hard we search, Truth always remains just out of reach.” But Chocolat is too grounded in specific historical conditions to be reduced to a platitude.
The horizon metaphor begins to find its shape, I think, in juxtaposition with another scene: the moment when the mother reprimands her cook, who speaks in badly broken English. “Enoch, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying,” she tells him. (I can’t comment on the original release of the film, but the DVD wisely leaves the African languages untranslated.) I have always wished that someone would film Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, but Chocolat has made any effort to do so redundant, for at their core both are about the colonizer’s desire to understand the colonized, a desire that is human and noble, on one hand, but too disfigured by power and history to be anything more than patronizing. This is how Gordimer describes the terrifying moment when her heroine, Maureen Smales, recognizes that she is caught in such a trap with her servant, July:
How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
Fifteen Years
your boy
you satisfy
But—and this is important—unlike the end of July’s People, which is a story of revolution, Chocolat does offer some portent of hope. The film ends, once again, in the present day. France has hitched a ride from the black man whom she first spotted swimming in the ocean, and whom she soon discovers is actually an American immigrant. This revelation once again recontextualizes Chocolat‘s opening image, calling into question the validity of France’s perspective. (Had she imagined herself witnessing some timeless ritual of real black African life? Did this fantasy put her in closer communion with her mother? With an imagined version of her mother?) Denis, who also spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa, clearly sympathizes with France’s plight. Her desire to understand, to write narratives that discover the human in inhumane circumstances, is noble, is essential, even if fraught with ambiguities and unavoidable landmines.
The final image in Chocolat is another long static shot, the frame divided in half once again by the horizon. Three black men smoke and laugh as an unexpected burst of rain passes through. France is gone, but somehow we have retained her (its) perspective. Denis leaves the camera running for several minutes, inviting us to understand these men, or, at least, fostering in us the desire to do so.
This essay was originally published at Sojourners.
– – –
Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster’s classic defense of traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, and solitude. Published in 1978, Foster’s book offered a corrective to America’s increasingly alienating and shortsighted cultural values – values that had inevitably infected the life of the church as well. Three decades later, Foster’s critique of the “doctrine of instant satisfaction” is more vital than ever, for technology now mediates all aspects of our lives, putting gigabytes of information in our hands (or handheld devices) but offering us little incentive to process it meaningfully. As a result, we are a people driven to distraction by trivia – by facts and figures, sound-bites, and rhetoric divorced from meaning or human consequence.
The traditional Hollywood cinema is a direct contributor to this superficiality. Most films playing at your local multiplex – like most television shows, political speeches, and pharmaceutical advertisements – actively reinforce the comforting notion that all determining forces, whether social, political, economic, or biological, can be overcome through some combination of will, effort, and, if need be, superhuman or transcendent goodness. The assumption is that a narrative can and will be written that will discover a perfect order amid the filmed world’s chaos. Think of the standard comic book blockbuster, murder mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural. The clues will all add up in the end. The dissonances will all be resolved. And in two hours or less.
John Cassavetes, best remembered for his starring performances in such films as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, countered Hollywood’s lazier, dehumanizing tendencies in a series of landmark films made between 1959 and 1984. Serving variously as writer, director, actor, financier, and all-around master of ceremonies, Cassavetes crafted a handful of films that, collectively, give lie to Hollywood’s faith in melodramatic plotting. Instead of stock character types, his films are populated by people who exist in constant flux, defining and redefining their social roles in relation to ever-changing circumstances. Rather than plotting a traditional narrative arc, Cassavetes’ films resist resolution (and often exposition, climaxes, and denouement as well), offering us poignant glimpses of recognizable lives, messy details and all.
The Criterion Collection’s recent release of a Cassavetes DVD box set offers the perfect opportunity to discover five of his most important films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). The collection also features an impressive, if regrettably uncritical, assortment of DVD extras, including a new documentary, interviews, and archival materials that provide further insight into Cassavetes’ working methods and his defining preoccupations.
CASSAVETES WAS BORN in New York City in 1929, the son of Greek immigrants. After graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts and finding moderate success on stage, on television, and in the movies, he opened a method-acting workshop in Manhattan that attracted a core group of young talent. Recognizing the dramatic potential in his students’ improvisations and eager to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, Cassavetes scavenged $20,000 and over a two-year period developed Shadows, a jazz-scored, Beat-infused document of disillusioned youth and race relations. In doing so, Cassavetes essentially gave birth to America’s independent cinema.
Shot with a handheld 16mm camera, Shadows feels at times like a documentary, and indeed Cassavetes’ early methods owe more to the work of documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and to the Italian Neorealists (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) than to the classic Hollywood studio system. Shadows achieves additional verisimilitude by means of its improvisatory nature. Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney offers a useful distinction between our typical understanding of “improvisation” – that is, an actor spontaneously inventing dialogue – and Cassavetes’ approach, which, though meticulously scripted, captures the performative nature of our daily lives, those moments when we improvise conversations, struggling to find the right words and too often stumbling upon the wrong ones instead. His characters, Carney writes, “are not denied moments of zaniness, inconsistency, or improvisatory inspiration because these would violate some tidy, coherent, package of ‘character’ – an entity, it is easy to forget, that exists only in certain forms of art and almost never in life.”
This preoccupation with capturing the complex rhythms of “real life” extends to the structure of Cassavetes’ films as well. The average movie is composed of 50 or more brief sequences, each typically lasting less than five minutes, and each is designed with a particular end in mind – say, to move the plot from point G to point H or to develop a significant aspect of a character or relationship. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, both starring Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, throw off this traditional plotting and are instead built from a relatively small number of extended scenes. The result can be disorienting for the first-time viewer. Without the familiar tropes of melodrama (good vs. evil, love triangles, comedic relief, etc.), viewers are freed to explore the film without bias. As Carney writes, “every moment becomes as potentially important, interesting, and worthy of our attention as every other.” The multiplex is where we go to “lose ourselves” for a few hours at a time. Films like A Woman Under the Influence deliberately frustrate this tendency at every turn, forcing us to participate actively in the lives depicted onscreen.
The films of John Cassavetes will never be accused of being “mindless entertainment.” His characters are, like the rest of us, fallen creatures in a fallen world who suffer the consequences of their behavior, deserved and undeserved, but who hold out hope despite it all, egged on by occasional encounters with love and something like grace. That makes them rare finds among American movies: characters deserving of our time, our patience, our empathy. “I am a moralist,” Cassavetes once said, “in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and to not be in judgment.” He extends that freedom to his audience as well. It is a powerful corrective to Hollywood’s superficiality.
So this is kind of exciting. My first magazine piece hits the newsstands today. It’s also available online.
When I was contacted by an editor at Sojourners a couple months ago and invited to contribute to their Culture Watch section, I felt some ambivalence about the offer. Mostly I worried I would be asked to review mainstream films. I have no interest in mainstream films, and, to be perfectly blunt, I don’t like “reviews.” They seem unnecessary to me. In this age of Rotten Tomatoes, when critical consensus can be compiled, tabulated, and spewed forth in real-time, reviewing has become boring and formulaic — a catchy lead, a plot summary, a tip of the hat to the performances and direction, and, finally, a recommendation. Whether it’s a positive or negative recommendation is almost beside the point. With very few exceptions, popular reviews, along with the requisite celebrity profiles and interviews, are indistinguishable from the general din of marketing noise.
I’ve always considered my film responses here to be, well, “long pauses” — that is, a somewhat disciplined attempt to sit quietly and meditate on my experience with a particular text. Doing so has freed me to write only about films that, for any number of reasons, “justify” the time, energy, and contemplation that I devote to them. I’ll even go a step further and admit that, by most standards, I’m not even a movie buff. I don’t have much of an attention span these days, and sitting down for two hours often feels like a chore.
What I do love, though, is to be engaged in good conversation. Conversation that values beauty and curiosity and empathy and intelligence. Conversation that is genuinely interested in the strangeness of human emotion and faith and culture and experience. And that, I think, is where criticism should find its voice. That’s my goal, at least. To be in conversation with artists whose creative imaginations are large and complex and varied. And I consider it the great responsibility of the critic to be up to that challenge. Work, brother. Work.
Which brings me to the other source of my ambivalence about writing for Sojourners, which is simply this: What does it mean to be a Christian cultural critic? And, more to the point: What does it mean to so publicly out oneself as a Christian in “moral values” America, where religion and political ideology have spawned such head-shaking horrors? (Notice my shift to the formal third person there? It’s easier that way. Less inflammatory.)
Most of my doubts were lifted when I saw Jim Wallis on The Daily Show. Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, has been out pushing his new book, God’s Politics, and seeing him was a much-needed reminder of what evangelical Christianity can look like. The rest of my doubts faded when it occurred to me that being a Christian cultural critic means taking long pauses and that this site has, from the very start, been some kind of an attempt to answer those very questions.
Oddly enough, the editor and I were in total agreement, and I’m pleased to say that my first piece for Sojourners, a 1,000-word introduction to the films of John Cassavetes, would not be at all out of place here on Long Pauses. Hopefully they’ll let me do it again someday.
Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang
When I wrote an overview of Tsai’s career two years ago, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to see The Skywalk is Gone. So I cheated. I stole a great line from Chuck Stephens’s review and turned it into my conclusion. Here’s what I wrote then:
If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.
That last line is a bit too precious, and “grace,” in particular, seems too lazy a word to describe the workings of Tsai’s world, but those blue skies do have a peculiarly joyful effect. That there are blue skies at all in Tsai’s Taiwan is, of course, a major development. Skywalk pokes fun at Tsai’s trademark mise-en-scene (water-logged streets and apartments) by replacing it with a draught, and the director gets some nice gags out of the premise: Hsiao-kang trying to wash his hands, Shiang-chyi trying to order a cup of coffee.
Such change, it seems to me, is the central concern of Skywalk. In the film’s opening image, Shiang-chyi stares up at the spot where the overpass once hung; Tsai floods the soundtrack with the drone of jumbotron advertising and passing crowds. The tilt of her head says it all. “Progress” is a mixed bag, improving our lives at times but also destroying old bonds and reshaping our memories in the process. Those of us who have seen What Time Is It There? know this location, but it’s suddenly unrecognizable, and like Shiang-chyi, we are forced to recontextualize the scene. Doing so demands some work of the viewer, and Tsai allows us plenty of time to do it, leaving his camera fixed for several minutes at a time.
The Skywalk is Gone is like a little gift to all of us who have followed Tsai’s career, and I’m thrilled that Wellspring included it on the DVD release of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (Unfortunately, Wellspring has unloaded on us a couple more horrible transfers.) I especially enjoyed the escalator scene, which alludes directly to The River, and, by doing so, sets up our expectations for an encounter that isn’t resolved until later in the film. Great stuff. More on Goodbye, Dragon Inn in the coming days.
| January | |
| 4 | The Life Aquatic with Steve Sizzou [Anderson] |
| 10 | It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books [Linklater] |
| 11 | Faces [Cassavetes] |
| 12 | A Woman Under the Influence [Cassavetes] |
| 13 | It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books [Linklater] |
| 14 | The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [Cassavetes] |
| 14 | Opening Night [Cassavetes] |
| 22 | Slacker [Linklater] |
| 29 | Slacker [Linklater] |
| 30 | First Name: Carmen [Godard] |
| February | |
| 1 | Chocolat [Denis] |
| 4 | Slacker [Linklater] |
| 7 | Slacker [Linklater] |
| 9 | The Apartment [Wilder] |
| 12 | The Gleaners and I [Varda] |
| 14 | Two Years Later [Varda] |
| 16 | All the Youthful Days [Hou] |
| 16 | Waking Life [Linklater] |
| 18 | The Skywalk is Gone [Tsai] |
| 18 | Goodbye, Dragon Inn [Tsai] |
| 20 | Bad Education [Almodovar] |
| 21 | La Guerre est Finie [Resnais] |
| 22 | Sunset Boulevard [Wilder] |
| 27 | The Scar [Kieslwoski] |
| 28 | The Usual Suspects [Singer] |
| March | |
| 2 | In the Bathtub of the World [Zahedi] |
| 6 | Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow [Conran] |
| 7 | Chocolat [Denis] |
| 13 | I Can’t Sleep [Denis] |
| 17 | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Gondry] |
| 18 | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Gondry] |
| April | |
| 14 | Super Size Me [Spurlock] |
| 22 | The Gravel Road [Menon] |
| 22 | Profiles of Farmers: Daily Life [Depardon] |
| 22 | Innocence [Hadzihalilovic] |
| 23 | Revelations [eight short films] |
| 23 | La Petite Chartreuse [Denis] |
| 23 | Street Angel [Borzage] |
| 24 | Dear Enemy [Xhuvani] |
| 24 | Pin Boy [Poliak] |
| 25 | Edgar G. Ulmer — The Man Off Screen [Palm] |
| 25 | The Fall of Fujimori [Perry] |
| 25 | L’Intrus [Denis] |
| 27 | End of the Century [Fields and Cramaglia] |
| 28 | Mayor of Sunset Strip [Hickenlooper] |
| May | |
| 1 | Fanny & Alexander TV Version [Bergman] |
| 3 | The Cyclist [Makhmalbaf] |
| 4 | Lemony Snicket [Silberling] |
| 5 | All About Eve [Mankiewicz] |
| 8 | Sunrise [Murnau] |
| 10 | Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession [Cassavetes] |
| 12 | I’m Losing You [Wagner] |
| 13 | La Jetee [Marker] |
| 13 | The Eye Like a Strange Balloon [Maddin] |
| 14 | Beau Travail [Denis] |
| 16 | The Missing [Howard] |
| 19 | Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train [Ellis and Mueller] |
| 22 | The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler] |
| 24 | Notre Musique [Godard] |
| 28 | Stranger than Paradise [Jarmusch] |
| 30 | The Corporation [Abbot and Achbar] |
| June | |
| 1 | Trouble Every Day [Denis] |
| 4 | The Weather Underground [Green and Siegel] |
| 4 | Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith [Lucas] |
| 14 | Ecstasy of the Angels [Wakamatsu] |
| 15 | The Blue Angel [Von Sternberg] |
| 16 | Napoleon Dynamite [Hess] |
| 23 | Batman Begins [Nolan] |
| 26 | Jules and Jim [Truffaut] |
| July | |
| 1 | Life of Oharu [Mizoguchi] |
| 4 | L’Age d’Or [Bunuel] |
| 8 | Some Like It Hot [Wilder] |
| 11 | Kingdom of Heaven [Scott] |
| 20 | Bright Leaves [McElwee] |
| 21 | Aguirre, The Wrath of God [Herzog] |
| 22 | Paris, Texas [Wenders] |
| 23 | Bad News Bears [Linklater] |
| 24 | My Darling Clementine [Ford] |
| 26 | Open Water [Kentis] |
| 30 | The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [Huston] |
| 31 | Seven Up! [Almond] |
| 31 | 7 Plus Seven [Apted] |
| August | |
| 6 | Pather Panchali [Ray] |
| 11 | 21 Up [Apted] |
| 14 | Nosferatu [Murnau] |
| 15 | 28 Up [Apted] |
| 15 | Vers Nancy [Denis] |
| 16 | Me and You and Everyone We Know [July] |
| 19 | Los Angeles Plays Itself [Andersen] |
| 20 | Battle of Algiers [Pontecorvo] |
| 23 | Down by Law [Jarmusch] |
| 24 | Saraband [Bergman] |
| 26 | 35 Up [Apted] |
| 30 | 42 Up [Apted] |
| September | |
| 1 | Nenette and Boni [Denis] |
| 3 | The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [Ford] |
| 8 | Ballets Russes [Geller and Goldfine] |
| 9 | The Sun [Sokurov] |
| 9 | Three Times [Hou] |
| 9 | Shanghai Dreams [Wang] |
| 9 | Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine [Tscherkassky] |
| 10 | Mrs. Henderson Presents [Frears] |
| 10 | L’ Enfer [Tanovic] |
| 10 | Battle in Heaven [Reygadas] |
| 11 | A History of Violence [Cronenberg] |
| 11 | Sketches of Frank Gehry [Pollack] |
| 11 | À travers la forêt [Civeyrac] |
| 11 | Les Saignantes [Bekolo] |
| 11 | L’ Annulaire [Bertrand] |
| 12 | Marock [Marrakchi] |
| 12 | I Am [Kedzierzawska] |
| 12 | Perpetual Motion [Ning] |
| 13 | Something Like Happiness [Sláma] |
| 13 | Mary [Ferrara] |
| 13 | Little Fish [Woods] |
| 13 | Capote [Miller] |
| 13 | Wavelength [Snow] |
| 14 | Vers Le Sud [Cantet] |
| 14 | Where the Truth Lies [Egoyan] |
| 14 | Caché [Haneke] |
| 15 | Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story [Winterbottom] |
| 15 | The Wild, Wild Rose [Wong] |
| 15 | Why We Fight [Jarecki] |
| 15 | Le Temps qui reste [Ozon] |
| 16 | Un Couple parfait [Suwa] |
| 16 | U.S. Go Home [Denis] |
| 16 | The Death of Mister Lazarescu [Puiu] |
| 17 | The Wayward Cloud [Tsai] |
| 17 | Angel [McKay] |
| 17 | L’ Enfant [Dardenne] |
| 17 | Backstage [Bercot] |
| 20 | Mystery Train [Jarmusch] |
| 23 | 2046 [Wong] |
| 25 | The Dreamers [Bertolucci] |
| October | |
| 2 | Dead Man [Jarmusch] |
| 4 | The Sweet Smell of Success [Mackendrick] |
| 10 | Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai [Jarmusch] |
| 12 | Broken Flowers [Jarmusch] |
| 13 | Coffee & Cigarettes [Jarmusch] |
| 15 | Time of the Wolf [Haneke] |
| 16 | Our Song [McKay] |
| 20 | In the Bathtub of the World [Zahedi] |
| 21 | Japon [Reygadas] |
| 23 | A Little Stiff [Zahedi] |
| 25 | I Am a Sex Addict [Zahedi] |
| 26 | A Moment of Innocence [Makhmalbaf] |
| 26 | I Am a Sex Addict [Zahedi] |
| 26 | Close Up [Kiarostami] |
| 31 | In the Bathtub of the World [Zahedi] |
| November | |
| 2 | Tripping with Caveh [Zahedi] |
| 6 | La Captive [Akerman] |
| 9 | In a Lonely Place [Ray] |
| 11 | Croupier [Hodges] |
| 22 | Born to Be Bad [Ray] |
| 25 | The Brown Bunny [Gallo] |
| 27 | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [Newell] |
| 27 | Rebel Without a Cause [Ray] |
| 30 | Beau Travail [Denis] |
| December | |
| 4 | Bitter Victory [Ray] |
| 11 | L’Eclisse [Antonioni] |
| 19 | Welcome to Sarajevo [Winterbottom] |
| 20 | The Passenger [Antonioni] |
| 28 | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [Cuaron] |
| 29 | The Squid and the Whale [Baumbach] |
At the end of 2004, these are the films that I most look forward to seeing again. Several films that impressed me at the time — Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé, Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are, Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, and Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron — have since faded from memory, while a few that did make the list have done so despite my reservations about their style (Tarnation and ScaredSacred) and despite my frustrated incomprehension (L’Intrus). I’m paralyzed by the process of ranking films, but Café Lumière was an easy choice for favorite of the year. A transcendent film about transcendence, Hou’s homage to Ozu is a beautifully human piece, full of silence and grace and, most of all, curiosity.
Favorite Film of 2004:
Nine More (in alphabetical order):
Ten Favorite Older Films I Saw for the First Time in 2004
That, my friends, is the CSI: Forensic Facial Reconstruction Kit: Case #2 Blue Eyes, available for the holidays from Toys R Us. Um. Let’s let that sink in for another second or two.
First thing, and you had to know this was coming, my wife is cooler than your wife. Second thing, I watched fifteen minutes of C.S.I. last night, and it is the most morally reprehensible thing on TV. Wife Swap, The Swan, Date My Mom — all pale in comparison.
Girish asked me once to name a film that I absolutely hate, and I didn’t hesitate for a second: The Cell, to me, is sadistic pornography. On the surface, its plot demonizes the serial killer for his twisted fantasies of torture and murder; Tarsem Singh, the film’s director, then renders those fantasies in beautiful technicolor for our viewing pleasure. Tarsem’s images seduced Roger Ebert into claiming: “It’s not often the imagination and the emotions are equally touched by a film, but here I was exhilarated by the boldness of the conception while still involved at a thriller level.” That word “exhilaration” is key, I think. The Cell seduces viewers into not only empathizing with a sadistic mind but enjoying it.
Sure Hitchcock was a bit hung up on mid-century psychoanalysis (which imbued him with an unfortunate propensity for overt phallus symbols, mother complexes, etc.), but that interest also gave him some insight into the moral problems of spectatorship. We turn our allegiances to Norman midway through Psycho, and, as his glare into the camera at the end of the film makes clear, that is a bad thing. We’re guilty too. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is another classic example. Here is a film that aestheticizes violence but does so critically, foregrounding the ethical implications of our identification with Alex. (That so many people — college undergrads buying up posters for their dorm rooms, for example — read A Clockwork Orange or, say, Fight Club as anything but satire exposes the problems of irony among an effectively illiterate populace.)
And then there’s C.S.I., which would be a radical text if it weren’t so thoroughly uncritical of its ambitions. Like The Cell, this show is designed to put viewers “in the minds of killers” by way of hyperstylized and grotesque imagery. Dismembered body parts, gunshots, stab wounds — they are all lit, filtered, cut, distorted, and scored to the point of fetishization. Violence becomes pure aesthetic, arousing our (sexualized) emotions without irony or consequence or instruction. And now kids can play out those fantasies at home with a facial reconstruction kit of their own. That is fucked.
(I wonder how many people would be more offended by my use of “fuck” than by the sadism they invite into their homes each week when they watch C.S.I. and its spin-offs. All three are in the top 15 for the year.)
Dir. by Jonathan Caouette
The theater where I saw Tarnation subjects early arrivals to “The Twenty,” an obnoxious barrage of advertisements that I tolerate for two reasons: first, because it helps to subsidize Knoxville’s only venue for foreign and independent cinema (and given the small crowds that typically greet me there, it would appear that those subsidies are essential); and, second, because I relish the moment immediately following “The Twenty.” The digital projector is quieted, the house lights dim, and the film projector comes to life. In those few seconds of silence before the first trailer begins, you can hear actual film spooling through a gate—a mechanical process with gears and a bulb and celluloid.
I mention all that because when the projector kicked into motion yesterday, I wondered how much longer the sound would last. Jonathan Caouette, as we all know by now, constructed Tarnation on his Mac for a couple hundred bucks. It’s composed largely of still photos and home videos. Little film was exposed in the making of his movie, and the quality of its presentation would have suffered little had it been projected digitally. As most films will be. Soon enough. That’s what was I thinking, at least, as trailers for Kinsey and The Sea Inside streamed by. Two biopics of extraordinary men who led extraordinary lives. Two films I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing. I’m just not interested in extraordinary lives, apparently. Give me the ordinary. The mundane. But present them to me with a touch a grace, and do it honestly and artfully. That’s what I was thinking, at least, when the ads finally ended and Tarnation finally began—in darkness and to the diegetic rumblings of Caouette’s camera.
A quick synopsis. When she was twelve years old, Renee LeBlanc, a strikingly beautiful child, fell from the roof of her home and suffered temporary paralysis. Her parents, convinced that Renee’s troubles were psychological, approved aggressive treatment, and over the next two years she was subjected to more than two hundred rounds of shock therapy. Whether her mental illness existed prior to the treatments or was, in fact, a result of them Tarnation does not make clear (and cannot make clear, given the vagaries of memory and denial). Caouette, Renee’s only child, suspects the latter, however, and his film is a blinding, visceral document of the anger, sorrow, desire, and hope (despite it all) that have forever colored his perceptions of art, family, and love.
Drawn from nearly 160 hours of home movies, tape recordings, and clips from Caouette’s amateur narrative films, and complimented by odes to pop culture and by an aggressive soundtrack, Tarnation has been described by its executive producers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell as a “movie of the home” and an “autobiographical documentary.” In the case of Tarnation, classification is no exercise in pedantry, for evaluating its success or its artfulness (for lack of better words) demands discussion of its aims and methods. The film is compelling, to be sure—always interesting and, at times, deeply moving. Only the most jaded could emerge from the experience of Tarnation without respect for its subjects, a mother and son who have somehow managed to emerge from the circumstances of their lives with a hard-fought love for one another and for the sacred moments of beauty in life. It’s worth seeing for that reason alone.
But, finally, I think, the film’s formal problems—its haphazard construction, conflicted voice, and questionable representations of life—become too great to sustain the weight of Caouette’s noble ambitions. (Because this is a blog and not a formal essay, and because I really should be working on other projects, I’m going to make it easier for myself by tackling each of these critiques in turn. The best compliment I can give Tarnation is to say that it’s the first film I’ve seen in weeks that compelled me to write.)
Construction. The first of my complaints with Tarnation is also perhaps the most petty, and it’s simply this: After the opening titles, I don’t recall a single moment of silence. The film moves from one montage to the next, each accompanied by music culled from Caouette’s personal collection of CDs and LPs. Occasionally the songs are manipulated for effect—tailored to enhance the images on screen—but much more frequently, the picture is cut to sound. Caouette’s much-discussed exploitation of iMovie’s editing features explodes his home movies into stunningly beautiful abstraction, but they find their rhythms too easily in the music. This, it seems to me, creates an aesthetic dissonance. I could too clearly imagine the filmmaker, exhausted by the endless decisions of editing, pulling an album from his shelf and allowing the song to determine the cuts. “Rhymed abstraction” (or some such makeshift term) might be employed to justify the technique. Perhaps it’s a fitting description of schizophrenia. I don’t know. I just felt that the form too often co-opted the content, which is most regrettable because when Tarnation does find its voice, it’s stunning. Which leads me to . . .
Voice. Following a trip to visit his mother, the teenaged Jonathan smoked two joints that he later learned had been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde. The resulting psychotic episode left him with depersonalization disorder, “a feeling of disconnection from the body and a constant sense of unreality.” Caouette writes:
They don’t really have a cure for this disorder, so it’s something I have learned to live with. Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they’re in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. Tarnation is a documentary in the sense that it’s a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you.
Caouette mimics his thought processes through formal means, beginning with the narration, which is textual, rather than the expected voice-over, and which refers in the third person to the Jonathan we meet on screen. This is a Jonathan Caouette, the film implies, one of many that we will eventually meet. There is the young Jonathan with his first camera, acting the role of an abused woman “givin’ testimony” to her sins. There is the teenaged Jonathan, openly gay and directing his musical adaptation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (brilliant!). There is the 20-something Jonathan, living (happily?) and acting in New York City. We are asked, in a sense, to read each of these personae as characters in a film about a boy’s search for the love of his mother. It’s all happening to them, the film implies, to those people.
But the step into third person is a conceit, and, in my opinion, it’s an unnecessary and misguided one. In the final act of Tarnation, when Caouette is living in a long-term relationship and is choosing to take on the responsibility of caring for his mother, we meet the Jonathan whose voice has been, by turns, whispering, screaming, and crying in our ears. Caouette’s effort to dramatize the “disconnection from his body” is a posture: Tarnation is no less self-aware than one of Caveh Zahedi’s autobiographical films and it lacks Zahedi’s formal rigor. I like the idea of a film such as this deliberately fracturing the narrative voice, but the execution in this case is poor. A symptom of Caouette’s relative inexperience, I would guess. Which leads me to . . .
Representing a Life. Look closely at the image I’ve posted above. Mother and son. Finally at rest. Finally at peace. It’s one of Tarnation‘s closing images and also one of its most poignant. A glimmer of hope. Love among the ruins. But here’s the thing: the scene is staged. Renee is, as far as we know, really asleep, but Jonathan is not. He and David (Jonathan’s boyfriend) found her there on the couch and apparently couldn’t resist the precious, pieta-like beauty of the moment. The film begins with a similar trick: the camera is fixed on television static when David returns home to their apartment and wakes Caouette from a nightmare. He’s been dreaming about Renee, we are told. He’s worried. Cut to the next morning. Jonathan and David wake to the sound of an alarm clock. Try to ignore the tripod. Try to ignore the fact that you’re now suddenly watching a narrative film.
I was anticipating Tarnation with some excitement because I had assumed that, unlike the larger-budget biopics filling the multiplexes right now, it would, without compromise, elevate truth above affect. But it does feel compromised. Caouette betrays the integrity of his film by focusing again and again on images that seem to float outside of the film as aesthetic objects. Like his mother, Caouette is a striking beauty (as is David, actually), and portions of the film play like a love song to their remarkable faces. (Notice the slow zoom-ins on Jonathan’s and David’s dark eyes.) Perhaps it’s another symptom of depersonalization disorder to reduce people to two-dimensional characters, but, regardless, it doesn’t make for great filmmaking. Ultimately, Tarnation is a compelling film about extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and that, regrettably, is its greatest asset.
Dir. by Claire Denis
Joanna tells me — and she’s told me this many times over the years — that she fell in love the first time we held hands. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Men, in my experience at least, seldom consider hands. Or, we consider them only when they’re noticeable — scarred, chewed, ornamented by loudly painted nails. Even then, though, we offer only a passing glance and a quick, rarely-conscious judgment. To really consider a hand demands a certain intimacy, I think. We’re allowed to stare at faces, encouraged even to maintain eye contact during public conversations, but to really look at a hand (or the place where a neck meets a shoulder or the back of a knee) is taboo outside of a bedroom (metaphorically speaking).
In After Life, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s brilliant 1998 film about a heaven in which the new-dead film the happiest moment of their lives that they might relive it eternally, one woman restages her first taste of love — a perfectly innocent encounter on a public bench — and when we finally see the finished film, it culminates in a slow zoom onto her lover’s hands. That sequence, like nearly every frame of Claire Denis’s Friday Night, reminded me of Joanna’s words and sent me off wondering about “the female gaze.” (The quotation marks allow me to allude casually to feminist film theory, though I’m not sure yet if that is what I’m really after here.)
Denis seems to have discovered a cinematographic grammar entirely of her own. I say that having seen only three of her films — Beau Trevail, which I love in part because I never would have imagined such an adaptation of Billy Budd possible; L’Intrus, which is the most beautifully frustrating film I’ve seen this year; and now Friday Night, a film about a woman (Valérie Lemercier) who has an affair the night before she is to move in with her boyfriend. I would like to read a formal analysis of one of Denis’s films because I simply don’t understand how they work. She and cinematographer Agnès Godard are able, somehow, to create a world that is both recognizably real and mythic; the camera remains objective (showing us things that no character could have seen), but it also becomes so intimately involved with the action that the entire film is covered by a sheen of subjective emotion. Magic is possible.
When we were discussing L’Intrus, Girish kept reminding me that the line separating narrative- from experimental filmmaking has been arbitrarily drawn and that Denis’s films prove the point. While more neatly-plotted than her latest feature, Friday Night also slips easily across those borders. The lovemaking scenes, for example, are constructed from a collage of extreme close-ups that slip in and out of focus to the point of abstraction. Sex, which is so often reduced by most films to little more than genital stimulation, becomes alien. And familiar. A patchwork of fingers and necks and ankles. And hands. If I were asked to summarize Friday Night, I would say it is a film about hands and about the impossible fact that my wife decided to love me the moment she first held mine.
The fine folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? have done some more tweaking to their list of The 1,000 Greatest Films. You’ve got to admire their initiative. It’s like the movie fanatic’s Holy Grail:
This list of the 1,000 Greatest Films of all-time has been compiled by using individual critics’ and filmmakers’ top-tens from film polls conducted by Sight & Sound (1992 & 2002), John Kobal (1988), Positif (1991), Time Out (1995), Village Voice (1999), Facets (2003) and selected top tens listed by Senses of Cinema, Combustible Celluloid, Your Movie Database’s (YMDB) Critics Corner and various other sources. Commencing with John Kobal’s 1988 poll, a total of 1,000 top-tens have so far been used to calculate (via some rather tricky formulas) the 1,000 Greatest Films.
Painstakingly collated and ‘lovingly’ assembled, we believe that this is quite possibly the most definitive guide to the most-acclaimed movies of all-time. At the very least, it is a rather spiffy place for all budding/established film buffs to commence/enhance their cinematic experiences. So what are you waiting for? Start that checklist now!
I’m an enthusiastic supporter of lists like this. Not because they’re objective or infallible — far from it — but because they send me in new directions and force me to confront my own biases. Like, I’ve seen 49 of the top 50 films (The Conformist, if you’re curious), but once we get into the next hundred or so, my dislike of certain genres (westerns, especially) begins to catch up with me. Looks like I need to spend some time with John Ford.
This list’s greatest asset is its length. Midway through, once you’ve worked your way past the canonical films, you start discovering titles like Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale, Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur, Erich Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, and Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson. I love knowing that so many films I’ve never heard of are still there waiting to be discovered.
The Films
Number of films shown: 328 (including shorts)
Number of films I saw: 27 (including shorts)
Days in Toronto: 6 1/2
Average number of films per day: 4.15
Number of late arrivals: 1 (Nobody Knows)
Number of walk-outs: 1 (Low Life)
Some Favorites (in roughly preferential order)
Café Lumière (dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (dir. Theo Angelopoulos)
The Holy Girl (dir. Lucrecia Martel)
ScaredSacred (dir. Velcrow Ripper)
Moolaadé (dir. Ousmane Sembene)
L’Intrus (dir. Claire Denis)*
Tell Them Who You Are (dir. Mark S. Wexler)
Demain on déménage (dir. Chantal Akerman)
Earth and Ashes (dir. Atiq Rahimi)
9 Songs (dir. Michael Winterbottom)
10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (dir. Raymond Depardon)**
* L’Intrus continues to climb higher on my list, mostly because friends and I have spent more time discussing it than all of the other films combined.
** Again, this film only began to come together for me after discussing it with friends.
Great Meals
Thai: 2
Vietnamese: 1
Indian: 1
Ethiopian: 1
Cuban: 1
$2 street vendor hot dogs: 2
Friends
Number of old Internet friends whom I was finally able to meet face-to-face: 8 (Doug, J. Robert, Girish, Rob, Jason, Candace, David, and Cindy)
Miscellaneous
Approximate hours spent in theaters: 46
Approximate hours spent on subways: 14
Approximate hours spent walking through downtown Toronto: 20
Approximate hours spent in line: 8
Approximate hours spent sleeping: 35
Approximate hours spent discussing movies while riding the subway, walking, eating, driving, and standing in lines: 40
Celebrity sightings: 2 – Penelope Cruz (I think) and Ivan Reitman
Cinephile celebrity sightings: 13 – Theo Angelopoulos, Jonathon Rosenbaum, Chantal Akerman, Ken Burns, Claire Denis, Don McKellar, Pawel Pawlikowski, Mark Wexler, Atiq Rahimi, Ousmane Sembene, Liu Bingjian, Lucrecia Martel, Velcrow Ripper
Connectivity is definitely an issue for me this week, so it will probably be some time before I’m able to post full responses. Of the 11 films I’ve seen so far, my favorites are probably Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, Tell Them Who You Are, Moolaade, and Earth and Ashes. The real highlight, though, has been discovering Toronto, which, especially this week, is possibly the most international city in North America. I’m introverted by nature but have really enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers in line and in the theaters. So many interesting lives intersecting here.
Dir. by Michael Winterbottom
“It’s claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed.” Matt (Kieran O’Brien) delivers this line in voice-over after the fact — after his ex-girlfriend Lisa (Margot Stilley) has returned home to America and after he has returned to Antarctica, where he is researching glaciers. The threatening isolation of Antarctica, like Matt’s simile, feels forced in 9 Songs, a small film about intimacy, in its various shapes and guises. Winterbottom’s framing metaphor, complete with flyover shots of stark, white landscapes, is too heavy and the only false note in what is otherwise a fascinating and successful, I think, cinematic experiment.
Intercutting scenes of the couple’s private moments (revealed in graphic detail) with their trips to live concerts, 9 Songs explores that juxtaposition and discovers in it something of the human struggle to balance one’s needs for protection and individuality, on the one hand, and self-surrender and love, on the other. Anyone who has ever closed her eyes and moved in perfect unison with those around her at a packed music venue will recognize in 9 Songs the almost tribal spirit of its live concert footage. Brought together with shared interests and with a desire for shared transcendence (or whatever you want to call it), concert-goers are often offered a glimpse, however brief, of ideal community. We lose ourselves to the music, lose ourselves to the rhythms of the crowd — a respite from the monotony and narcissism of our private preoccupations. And, best of all, with no long-term commitment required.
Likewise, anyone who has ever stared across the table at a lover, aware of unacknowledged tensions but unwilling or unable to address them, will recognize 9 Songs‘ portrait of a failing relationship: infatuation, disillusionment, and escape. Like a contemporary Breathless — and O’Brien’s resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo makes such a comparison impossible to ignore — 9 Songs describes a relationship by exposing its most casual, least self-conscious moments. (I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s desire for Eyes Wide Shut to be about “the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed.”) My favorite moments in 9 Songs take place just before and after sex, when Matt and Lisa are at their most unguarded — laughing at a bathroom mirror, relaxing in the tub, fixing breakfast. I can’t think of another film that gets those moments just right.
Which leads me to believe that 9 Songs succeeds where so many other films have failed, in part, because of its graphic sex scenes. Unlike, say, Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus, which features a brief penetration shot to emphasize the base desires that drive so much of human behavior, 9 Songs includes several extended sequences that reveal the complexities of any sexual relationship: the pleasures and insecurities, the playfulness, the self-gratification (at times) and the selflessness (at others), the awkwardness and the beauty and the joy — or, in a word, the intimacy. Friends and I who saw 9 Songs all agreed that, at only 65 minutes, we would have liked for it to be even longer, especially if we could spend more time with Matt and Lisa behind closed doors. Recommended (with obvious warnings, of course).
Your reward for reading the entire response: “Suddenly” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, one of the bands featured in 9 Songs.
Dir. by María Victoria Menis
Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.
Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.
Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.
Dir. by Ousmane Sembene
Sembene introduced his film by reminding his mostly white, mostly Western audience that Africa — the entire continent, its nations, its governments, and its people — is experiencing a period of unprecedented transition. There was no moralizing or condemnation in his tone, not even a suggestion of the catastrophic crises and genocides that fill the back pages of our newspapers. Africa is in transition, he told us, and this film is about that transition.
By the time it reached Toronto, Moolaadé was already the talk of the festival, having garnered much acclaim at Cannes from such influential voices as Roger Ebert, who is actively campaigning on its behalf. I knew only that it was a film about the traditional practice of salinde, or female circumcision, that Sembene was generally known as the “grandfather of African cinema,” and that several of my friends were jealous of my getting a ticket to the sold-out screening. In fact, genital mutilation is but one of the film’s many concerns. The salinde serves more generally as a site of contention between the women who, newly empowered by the creeping influence of Western humanism and technology, begin to rebel against the patriarchal structures of their society — salinde is a site of contention between these strong, young women and the men who wish to maintain their patriarchal hold on power.
Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is a second wife who, still scarred from her own circumcision, had refused years earlier to have her only daughter “cleansed.” In the opening moments of the film, four young girls come to Collé for similar protection, and she obliges, instituting a moolaadé, or a ceremonial zone of refuge. Her decision sets in motion the principle conflicts in the film: the older generation of women (particularly those who perform the ritual) vs. those women who oppose it; the men of the village whose identity is founded on traditional notions of masculinity vs. those who offer an alternate model (the Western-educated son or the big city mercenary); and, more simply, the old (including a particular interpretation of Islam) vs. the new (symbolized by the ubiquitous radios that blare from all corners of the village).
By the standards with which I typically judge a film, Moolaadé is too sentimental and predictable, and its performances are uneven, at best. (The notable exception being Coulibaly, who delivers my favorite performance of the year.) And yet watching Moolaadé is a gut-churning experience, in part, I suspect, because of its close proximity to “reality.” Sembene told us that he shot on location in a typical West African village and that he cast untrained locals in many of the speaking parts. These particular young women that we watch on screen represent thousands of others just like them, and their very real investment in the “transition” is apparent.
I hope this is a fair comparison — I always worry about applying Western models to non-Western stories, imperializing them, so to speak — but as I watched Moolaadé I was reminded of certain American literatures of the late-19th century, another significant period of transition. If Moolaadé is didactic, then its didacticism might be forgiven: What value, after all, can be found in the other side of the genital mutilation (or slavery or suffrage) debate? And, a question of even greater value, I think: When is unbridled emotionalism (which I often too casually dismiss as “sentiment”) a perfectly appropriate and even politically resonant response to particular conditions? The emotional trajectory of Moolaadé reaches its climax when Collé is punished for her transgressions. It’s a brutal scene, but I found myself more deeply moved by a more quiet moment that followed. It’s the sound of a crying mother. That’s it. A crying mother. And it worked, breaking through my cynicism and emotional distance. Highly recommended.
Dir. by Theo Angelopoulos
Angelopoulos introduced his latest with very few words. It is to be the first of three films about the life of a Greek woman who manages to survive the 20th century, and its concern is “the human condition.” What more would you expect?
The Weeping Meadow opens with its first of many meticulously composed, extreme long shots. It is 1919, and a group of refugees have made land near Thessaloniki. At the center of the frame are Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), his wife and son (Nikos Poursanidis), and Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), the young orphan he has adopted. The Trilogy will be Eleni’s story, and in The Weeping Meadow we are given the first 40 years of it — her love of Spyros’s son, her giving birth to twins, and the tragedy of her many losses during World War II and the Greek civil war that followed.
The Weeping Meadow takes its shape from Classical Tragedy, but the Fates, in this case, are not so deterministic as to run trod over the complexities of life. While bathed in a sheen of melancholia and mourning, the film still takes great delight in the intensity of young love, the vitality of community, and the simple pleasures of music. Eleni’s young husband is a gifted accordionist whose original composition is developed first on-screen and is then folded into the film’s score, returning occasionally in the final act to comfort Eleni like a Greek chorus.
This was my first Angelopoulos film, and so, perhaps, others who are more familiar with his work and who are accustomed to seeing it projected in 35mm will be less overwhelmed by the film than I was. I sat there in a stupor, to be honest, constantly in awe of the immensity of his imagination. The still image posted above is just one of thirty or forty that could be stripped from its context and hung on a gallery wall. And equally impressive were the choreographed camera movements that lasted for minutes at a time, exploring landscapes and interiors with the detailed eye of a great novelist. I actually gasped at the end of one shot, which like Russian Ark in miniature, captures an entire drama in a single take. Angelopoulos’s camera follows his young lovers through a noisy dance hall where they are confronted by a threat from their past. Setup, conflict, resolution — all in a single movement. Unbelievable.
One week and nearly twenty films later, my imagination is still alive with memories of The Weeping Meadow. There are images in this film — sheep hanging from a tree, water rising around an ancient village, a floating funeral procession, a field of billowing white sheets — that I would not have imagined possible. Like the first time I saw Tarkovsky and Cassavetes, seeing Angelopoulos has forced me to reconsider the potential of cinema. Highly recommended.
Dir. by Guka Omarova
Omarova’s debut takes its title from a nickname given to the main character. Schizo (Olzhas Nusuppaev) is 15 years old and a bit slow; his classmates abuse him and exploit his gullibility. He is soon hired by his mother’s thug boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev) to recruit unemployed laborers for illegal boxing matches. However, when the first man he recruits dies after the fight, Schizo is drawn into a new life. Like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes’s La Promesse, Schizo tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who commits to helping a woman and her young child, first out of obligation and, later, out of love. As I told a friend after the screening, Schizo is the most heart-warming bare-knuckle boxing movie I’ve ever seen.
Told in minimalist style, with long takes, little nondiegetic sound, and a cast that includes several nonprofessional actors, Schizo is always compelling to watch, even if the story is, at times, too predictable. Fifteen minutes in, I was concerned that it would all collapse into either Of Mice and Men tragedy or Forrest Gump sentiment, so I was impressed with Omarova’s handling of Schizo, who, as it turns out, isn’t terribly slow after all and whose decisions constantly surprised me. I also really enjoyed Olga Landina’s performance as the young mother whom Schizo befriends. Like Natalie Press in My Summer of Love, Landina has a compelling face of a type that I see too seldom on the screen. Both actresses reminded me a bit of Badlands-era Sissy Spacek.
Schizo is not a film that I am anxious to revisit, but it does exemplify one aspect of the festival that I greatly enjoyed: the opportunity to encounter a new voice in cinema, and one from a place that I will likely never visit. A woman from Kazakhstan recently began attending my English as a Second Language course, and I was surprised to find this person whom I had assumed was Chinese speaking Russian. On several occasions during the screening of Schizo, when the narrative was losing hold of my interest, I just sat and studied the people who populate the film. Kazakhstan has been called the “crossroads of Europe and Asia,” and that history is written into its faces.
Dir. by Mark S. Wexler
Tell Them Who You Are has the best opening scene of any film I saw at this year’s festival. Haskell Wexler is standing in his camera equipment room, taking stock of his inventory for an upcoming sale. When his son Mark, who is shooting the documentary that we are watching, asks his dad to explain where they are standing, Haskell shakes his head, twists his face with exasperation, and says (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “No, Mark. You’re holding the fucking camera. Just shoot the room, and you’re audience will figure it out. If this is what your fucking movie is going to be like, if you’re planning to just shoot a bunch of talking heads, then the hell with it. I want nothing to do with it.”
It would be nearly impossible to make a dull documentary about Haskell Wexler. Now in his mid-80s, Wexler is as sharp and as full of piss as ever — still decrying injustice wherever he finds it, still ridiculing the mistakes of other filmmakers whenever he encounters them. Having shot nearly fifty features over the past five decades (including John Sayles’s Silver City, which also played at the festival), Wexler is justified in thinking himself an authority on the subject of filmmaking, which is why Tell Them Who You Are is such a fascinating movie. Being on the other side of the camera forces Wexler to revisit the aesthetic decisions that guided him through the making of his own documentaries forty years earlier, groundbreaking social films such as The Bus (1965), Medium Cool (1969), and Introduction to the Enemy (1974). He can barely tolerate his son’s direction at times, and that tension is at the heart of the film.
Mark Wexler is quite good with a camera himself, however, and his film is remarkably well-constructed. What begins as a standard Biography-style portrait, complete with childhood photos, juicy gossip, and celebrity testimonials, slowly evolves into, first, a self-reflexive commentary on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and, finally, a touching story of forgiveness and reconciliation. One of the final images is of Haskell sitting at a monitor, watching his son’s completed film. Mark doesn’t linger too long on the shot or allow it to become sentimental, but the emotion is evident on his father’s face and it speaks volumes. Mark seemed reticent to speak too candidly after the screening but did acknowledge that having a camera fixed between them offered both men a much-appreciated filter and that their relationship has, in many ways, been healed by the process.
I hope that Tell Them Who You Are finds decent distribution, and given the recent critical and popular success of so many documentaries, perhaps it will. It was one of my favorites of the festival, largely because of Haskell Wexler himself. His bottomless hatred of corporate interests and political conservatives (like his son) is inspiring and laugh-out-loud funny. But the film also exposes his pain and, though he would be loathe to admit it, his regret, particularly in a moving scene with his ex-wife, Mark’s mother. Another high recommendation.
Dir. by Atiq Rahimi
Days after his village is destroyed in a bombing raid, Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani) and his five-year-old grandson Yacine (Jawan Mard Homayoun) jump from the back of a pickup truck and take their seats at a desert crossroads, where they wait and wait for a ride to a nearby mine. Dastaguir is charged with the horrifying task of notifying his son that the young man’s wife and mother are dead and that his son, Yacine, is now deaf. Dastaguir is worried for his son’s sanity and is plagued by memories of his daughter-in-law’s shaming, which he was unable to prevent.
As I stepped out of the theater, a woman beside me dismissed Earth and Ashes as an “Afghani Waiting for Godot“; I agree with the description but not the dismissal. Here, unlike Beckett’s play, the absurdity of the situation is grounded in a real historical moment. Earth and Ashes is not only an allegory for some vague existential crisis (though it is certainly also that); instead, the film reveals the human cost of a particular tragedy. By the time Dastaguir recounted the story of his village’s destruction to the fourth stranger, and after hearing yet one more weary soul beg God’s blessings for the dead, I began to experience something of the old man’s exhaustion and helplessness. To be frank, I was embarrassed by it — embarrassed to be sitting in an air conditioned movie theater while on vacation, taking “pleasure” from the suffering depicted on screen. (Doug and I had a great discussion afterwards about film tastes and political sensibilities, but I’ll save that one for another day.)
Earth and Ashes is a jaw-droppingly beautiful film as well, shot on location in wide-angle 35mm (Scope?) and featuring countless elegant crane and tracking shots. In his introduction of the film, Rahimi recounted the risks he and his crew faced by shooting in Afghanistan, particularly because the film features female nudity. The landscape, he claimed, is critical to the story, and I would agree, even extending the concept to the landscapes of Afghani faces, young and old.
Existentialism — to borrow momentarily from my acquaintance’s allusion to Godot — demands that we find some measure of hope in our suffering, that in our acceptance of life’s absurdity we are making some heroic gesture toward freedom. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes. Rahimi seems driven by a similar conviction. I’m going to cheat and borrow from Doug’s review:
the final sequence of the film is comprised of a gradual focus: a man leaves a conversation, walks through the desert, becomes isolated, begins to sing. The image fades but his singing continues in darkness, a tribute to human dignity and its perseverance through time.
Despite the hectic pace of the film festival, the audience sat quietly for two or three minutes in complete darkness, listening to the old man’s song. It plays like a benediction. Highly Recommended.
Dir. by Raymond Depardon
10e Chambre, instants d’audiences is 105 minutes of documentary footage shot within a French District courtroom. We watch as Madame Justice Michèle Bernard-Requin hears the cases brought against twelve defendants (culled from the 169 that Depardon originally shot). Most are there on misdemeanor offenses: drunk driving, petty theft, possession of a weapon, selling marijuana. And in nearly every case we watch the process from start to finish, from plea to verdict.
During the screening of 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences, I was quite disappointed by the film, but even then I knew that my disappointment was with the audience rather than with the film itself. At the Sunday screening — and friends who saw it on Tuesday report a very different experience — 10e Chambre played as pure comedy. (One friend, a TIFF veteran, argues that crowds are different during the opening weekend, when more people dress up and come out to experience the festival itself rather than to see the films, and I think he might be right.)
The idea of 10e Chambre as “comedy” is quite disturbing to me. And I’ve come to realize that that is partly Depardon’s point. He crafts the film so that our allegiances immediately fall to the side of the witty and cynical Judge, whose clever retorts to the first few defendants are, at times, well justified. But by the time we are laughing at a young man who is clearly under the influence of a narcotic while in the courtroom, the joke has gone on too long. We are now no longer well-heeled sophisticates at an international film festival; we are Middle Americans, smoking pot, watching Jerry Springer, and laughing at the poor clods who are too poorly educated, too economically burdened, too mentally incapacitated, or ( perhaps most damning of all) too dark-skinned to know any better.
10e Chambre began to open up for me when my friend Girish described that laughter as a Rorschach Test. What do we laugh at? How do we choose where to direct our derision? And why do we often side with those in authority? Depardon shoots each of the defendants from the same static, low-angle position, giving us a perspective of the criminal that is similar (metaphorically speaking) to the Judge’s: he or she is a disembodied head, divorced from context or backstory, who is offered only a few moments to justify his or her behavior. The opportunity to judge them is impossibly seductive, as my audience proved, and Depardon invites us to do so by not revealing the verdicts of the final cases. I have no doubt how most in that theater would have ruled.
As a side note, one of my friends who attended the Tuesday screening reports that one or two members of that audience also felt the need to laugh throughout much of the film. Not surprisingly, the social pressure of being the lone voice laughing in a hushed room led them to suppress that urge during the last half hour. The analogy to being a lone voice of dissent, whether in an important public discourse or, say, a jury room, is fascinating. This will be a wonderful film to teach.
Dir. by Kim Ki-duk
Jae Hee plays Tae-suk, a young man who breaks into homes, prepares meals, bathes and naps, then repays the homeowner’s generosity by performing small acts of kindness: washing clothes, repairing broken electronics, and the like. While squatting in the most opulent of his many homes, Tae-suk discovers that he is not alone. Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yun), a former model, is trapped there by her husband, bruised and beaten. Tae-suk rescues her, and the two become accomplices and lovers, moving from house to house in complete silence, never speaking even a word to one another.
The description of 3-Iron in the TIFF catalog begins with the following quote from Kim:
All of us are empty houses, waiting anxiously for somebody to unlock and liberate us….
It’s the perfect synopsis of 3-Iron, a fable for our times. Each house that Tae-suk enters acts as an embodiment of its absent owner, and with time and repetition we in the audience begin to anticipate the sameness of it all — the conventions, the status symbols, the stuff. Even Sun-hwa, when we first meet her, is property, and the joy of watching 3-Iron comes from seeing her beauty emerge along with her individualized identity. The bruises on her face fade as she gains confidence and as her fate becomes more tightly bound to Tae-suk’s.
3-Iron is one of the films that I saw at TIFF that I feel could benefit from some trimming, and I’ll be curious to see if the cut that showed at Toronto is the same version released in the West. (3-Iron was picked up for distribution soon after its first screening.) The film gets its title from the golf club that Tae-suk and several other characters use to enact vengeance upon one another, and while it makes for a nice metaphor (what better symbol to show the divide between the haves and have-nots?), several of the more violent sequences created frustrating tonal shifts and pacing problems, particularly an odd scene that takes place in an underground parking garage, which could be cut completely.
Otherwise, though, I quite liked 3-Iron. The final act of the film shows Tae-suk alone in a prison cell, where he seems to transform slowly into a ghost. The sequences are just stunning to look at, and they’re cut together with a real grace. Again, like a fable, there’s something almost magical about the prison scenes, and they contain some of the images that have lingered longest in my imagination. Not a perfect film, but one that I will look forward to revisiting.
Dir. by Don McKellar
My first and only five-film day of the festival began early Sunday morning with Don McKellar’s latest, Childstar. McKellar stars as Rick Schiller, a cinema studies professor and experimental filmmaker who finds himself working as a chauffeur to Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), an adolescent heartthrob whose latest film, The American Son, is shooting in Toronto. Schiller soon hooks up with Burns’ mother (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), becomes Burns’ legal guardian, and guides the young actor through his inevitable and by-the-numbers coming of age.
During the post-screening Q&A, McKellar told the story of the film’s inspiration. (Here’s another version of the same story, as reported in the Toronto Sun.)
It was the Dreamworks party for American Beauty, and I met Haley Joel Osment at the bar. . . . I don’t know what he was drinking, but I’m sure it wasn’t scandalous. Anyway, I talked to him for quite awhile before I realized he was 12 or whatever. He was so mature, there were no adults around him, he was just talking. And I thought what a potent symbol he was of something — of my experience of Hollywood. He was an unnaturally precocious kid in a culture where kids act too old and adults act too young.
Part family drama, part satire of Hollywood, Childstar allows McKellar plenty of room to poke fun at the film “industry,” with its gangster-like agents, manipulative and cost-conscious producers, and exploitive parents. And for the most part, it works. I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed the relationship between Schiller and Burns. McKellar has the perfect face for the role; he always looks vaguely exasperated by the waste and ego of celebrity, and his intelligence and wit make him an entertaining guide through it all.
I decided to see Childstar mostly for the opportunity to hear McKellar introduce it — I’ve been a big fan since first seeing him in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica — and his introduction set up the best laugh of the morning. His microphone was positioned at the bottom right corner of the screen, and he began by saying that he had promised himself that he would never be “one of those directors who goes on and on about the film, sucking the life out of the room, but that he wanted to take a minute or two to explain why he felt that he must make this particular film.” Remember that if you get a chance to see Childstar. (McKellar held little hope for American distribution, by the way, but said that it will be shown widely in Canada, beginning in October.)