Tag: Decade: 1990s

  • Favorite Films of the ’90s

    Favorite Films of the ’90s

    Thanks to the AV Club, film nerds everywhere are declaring their favorite films of the 1990s. I spent all of five minutes on mine, which is why they’re alphabetized. Three things stand out as I look over this list from the vantage of 2012. First, the movies that meant a great deal to me at the time (Pulp Fiction, Rushmore, Unforgiven, The Player, etc.) are all fantastic gateway-to-cinephilia films that mean very little to me today. Second, all those critics talking about “new waves” in Iran and Taiwan were on to something. And, third, if you exclude Kubrick (71) the average age of these directors was 41 at the time of their film’s release. The older I get, the more impressive that seems.

    Terrifying trivia of the day: Bela Tarr was 39 — younger than I am now! — when he made Satantango (which just missed the cut here).

    Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998)
    Casa de Lava
    (Pedro Costa, 1994)
    Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
    Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
    Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
    Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995)
    I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)
    A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
    La Promesse (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996)
    Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)

    Edit: Removed Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) after I realized I’d forgotten Buffalo ’66.

  • Tren de Sombras (1997)

    Tren de Sombras (1997)

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “It isn’t life, but its shadow, it isn’t movement, but its silent ghost.… This, too, is a train of shadows.”
    – Maxim Gorky

    José Luis Guerín’s fourth feature-length film, Tren de sombras, is, like so much of the Spanish director’s work, a challenging and mesmerising hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: Seventy years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of Tren de Sombras, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. Much to his credit, Guerín, as he’s proven throughout his career, is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigour, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-Matrix, pop philosophy discourse.

    Tren de sombras begs comparisons with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and also, I suppose, with all the other narrative films that followed suit by revolving their plots around some formal aspect of the cinema (mise en scène, editing, sound design, etc.), thus foregrounding it in a self-reflexive, self-critical, and, one might cautiously add, postmodern way. Films like Blow Up, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) and, more recently, the work of Michael Haneke (Code inconnu [2000] and Caché [2005]), transform filmic materials into forensic artefacts, physical evidence to be meticulously examined and deconstructed. Attention to form is the hallmark of Guerín’s cinema, as demonstrated clearly in his latest films, the companion pieces Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia and En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (both 2007). The former is a silent, autobiographical, essay film constructed mostly of still, black-and-white, documentary photographs that harkens back not so much to Chris Marker, who famously used a similar technique in La Jetée (1962), but to Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century innovators of the “moving image”. In Unas fotos, Guerín wanders the streets of Strasbourg, chasing the ghost of a woman he met there more than twenty years earlier. Each photograph reconstructs and, in a sense, supplants a particular memory, transforming it, like one of Muybridge’s horses, into a single, extended frame in Guerín’s slow-moving picture. En la ciudad de Sylvia is a more traditional narrative film, shot in colour 16mm and blown up to 35mm, but it’s no less concerned with form. Here, Guerín again re-enacts his search for lost love in the streets of Strasbourg. However, the act is now made multivalent – curious, humane, nostalgic, voyeuristic – not unlike cinematic spectatorship in general.

    Likewise, the very subject of Tren de sombras allows Guerín to explore, both literally and metaphorically, the meaning of images. In Fleury’s footage, we see his extended family at their large home near the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, relaxing as if on holiday. They hike to a site overlooking a lake and picnic there. The children ride bicycles, play with dogs, and perform magic tricks. On several occasions the family poses for portraits. It’s only in the second half of Tren de sombras, after the author of the film begins to re-sequence shots, blow-up images in order to reveal lost details, and freeze particular frames, that we begin to detect something amiss among the Fleury clan. As in Antonioni’s film, there’s a fetishistic thrill to watching the clues become revealed through real, mechanical processes. Gérard Fleury rarely steps out from behind his hand-held camera, so nearly all that we witness in the old footage is from his first-person point-of-view (it’s similar to Unas fotos in that respect). The “author” first becomes fascinated by and suspicious of Fleury’s sister-in-law and pays particular attention to two shots of her, one on a swing, the other in a passing car. The author rewinds those shots, slows them to half speed, juxtaposes them in a split-screen, enlarges her face, and freezes the frames in which her eyes make direct contact with the camera (and by analogy with Fleury). What shared secrets are revealed in that glance? The mystery appears to be on the verge of revelation.

    Guerín, however, pushes the experiment even further than Antonioni, veering out of narrative filmmaking altogether and toward the truly avant-garde. To say that Guerín is fascinated by the texture of film is a literal truth. Near the end of Tren de sombras, the author’s use of Fleury’s footage becomes more playful, the pace of the jump-cuts more frantic, and the relationship between images more unpredictable and fractured. In a word, everything begins to disintegrate – the Fleury family relationships (or our tentative understanding of them, at least), the satisfying order the author had briefly conjured with his editing, and the literal, physical record of what we are studying – that is, the film itself. In Tren de sombras’ most compelling sequence, Guerín moves into pure abstraction, finding a Stan Brakhage-like beauty in the scratched and disintegrated material of the found footage. It’s a fascinating modernist turn for Guerín, a kind of escape from chaos into the aesthetic realm. In this sense, Tren de sombras would be at home programmed alongside the work of contemporary avant-garde filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky, and David Gatten.

    Like Guerín’s return to Strasbourg decades after his first encounter with Sylvia, Tren de sombras is also structured around a return to the scene of the crime: the village of Le Thuit and the estate where Fleury’s footage was shot. The author brings with him actors in period costumes and recreates scenes from the decayed home movies. He reverses angles, finding new clues and new shared glances. But even more interesting are the contemporary shots that seem totally unmotivated by the through-line of the plot. Again with one foot in the avant-garde, Guerín devotes considerable screen time to images of abstract beauty found among the prosaic. Several shots from a long sequence that takes place in the old home at night during a rainstorm would not be out of place in a Nathaniel Dorsky or Jim Jennings film. And one image in particular, the light cast by a passing car moving slowly along an interior wall, not only returns multiple times in Tren de sombres but also in the opening moments of En la ciudad de Sylvia, evidence that Guerín is still haunted by a train of shadows.

  • Pedro Costa’s “Vanda Trilogy” and the Limits of  Narrative Cinema as a Contemplative Art

    Pedro Costa’s “Vanda Trilogy” and the Limits of Narrative Cinema as a Contemplative Art

    This essay was originally published in Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema (2008), edited by Kenneth Morefield for Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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    The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see the picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it’s oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.
    — Michael Snow (Snow, 67)

    The same moment that we are looking, we forget.
    — Jean-Luc Godard (Walsh)

    For experimental filmmaker Michael Snow, a viewer’s ability, literally, “to see” is of first importance. Snow came to film relatively late in life, having explored first the fields of music, painting, sculpture, and photography, and cinema for him has never been primarily a storytelling medium. Rather, he treats the foundations of film—mechanically produced light and sound moving in time—as just more artistic material. Snow’s most famous film, Wavelength (1967), for example, is essentially a 45-minute, continuous forward zoom through a New York loft, accompanied by an electronic sine wave that over the course of the film modulates gradually from its lowest frequency (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000 cycles per second). Wavelength deliberately rejects the traditions of narrative cinema and foregrounds, instead, the structure and mechanics of film. For Snow, then, a comparison might be made between the typical movie viewer and an impatient museum-goer, who rushes from portrait to portrait noting only the names of the historical figures represented there while overlooking completely all that distinguishes one artist’s brush or canvas from another. Artistic form vanishes amid the simpler pleasures of narrative.

    Placed within the context of a discussion of faith and spirituality, Snow’s warning about the dangers of narrative cinema takes on an obvious metaphorical meaning as well. Religion is, to borrow the Evangelical parlance of the day, a “worldview,” a lens through which people of faith examine every issue before claiming a moral position, forming judgments, and acting (or choosing not to act). Snow’s demand that we see “the picture as picture” implies an attentive, active observer as opposed to a passive consumer of images. He is warning against what theologian P. T. Forsyth, in his writings on aesthetics, calls “the monopoly of the feelings,” whose aim is to move men rather than change them. For Forsyth, hardly an iconoclast himself, the error “is the submersion of the ethical element, of the centrality of the conscience, and the authority of the holy” (qtd. in De Gruchy, 74). Narrative cinema, with its seamless cutting, heroic faces, and manipulative musical cues, is particularly well-equipped to monopolize one’s feelings and co-opt one’s imagination, thus rendering the passive religious viewer pliable to anti-religious ideologies. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky calls this tendency “tragic”: “if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola” (179).

    The work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is a useful test case for a discussion of the limits of narrative cinema as a contemplative art. Without abandoning narrative altogether, Costa has over the past two decades moved progressively toward abstraction and, in the process, has discovered his own brand of what avant-garde filmmaker Nathanial Dorsky calls “devotional cinema”: “a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable” (Dorsky, 27). In particular, Costa’s trilogy of feature films set in and around Fontainhas, an immigrant slum in Lisbon, demonstrates an increasing dissatisfaction with the tropes and traps of conventional cinematic storytelling.

    In the “Vanda Trilogy,” as it has become known—Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude Em Marcha, 2006)—Costa pays homage to other spiritually-minded filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu, while also borrowing from the formal and explicitly political legacies of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and Daniele Huillet, the latter two of whom are the subject of Costa’s 2001 documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?). Costa’s films are infected with the same nostalgia for Modernism that characterizes so much of today’s art cinema, where the rigor of Bresson and the alienating camera of Michelangelo Antonioni threaten to inspire a new “Tradition of Quality” characterized by expressionless faces, glacial pacing, and calculated stabs at transcendence. But what distinguishes Costa from his contemporaries is his uncynical commitment to form and ethics, which are bound in his films not by transcendence but by imminence—that is, by the sacred dignity of the material, human world.

    When Costa’s first feature-length film, The Blood (O Sangue), opened in 1989, it was something of an anomaly simply due to the fact that theaters in Lisbon were not at the time showing Portuguese films. Describing his and his classmates’ experience of film school in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Costa says, “there was no past at all. We knew that [Manuel] Oliviera had done Aniki Bobo (1942) and a few other things in the ‘60s. There was a guy named Paolo Rocha too, but as for the rest . . . We were not even orphans, we were the unborn” (Peranson, 9). Rather than film history, Costa’s formal training emphasized theory, as Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema was well appointed with teachers who remained caught up in the spirit of the “Carnation Revolution” of 1974. The school was also frequented by radical lecturers from France, including writers from Cahiers du Cinema. “Revolutionary tourism,” Costa calls these visits by Marxist critics and intellectuals. “It was a completely impossible situation” (8).

    Costa received what he calls his real film education after leaving school. While working on various productions throughout the 1980s (“I never learned anything at all from that” [9]), he attended nightly screenings at the Lisbon cinematheque, watching complete retrospectives of the classic auteurs: John Ford, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Roberto Rossellini, Ozu, Bresson, etc. Their influence can be felt throughout The Blood, which, while stunning to look at, doesn’t quite work aesthetically or even at a basic narrative level. It’s a very personal film—the first of Costa’s many attempts to rescue on celluloid the family he was denied, personally, as a child—but its lush, romantic black-and-white photography, its Igor Stravinsky score, and its many mannered allusions to other filmmakers (Bresson, Ray, and Charles Laughton, in particular) are superimposed onto its small story of two young brothers in a manner that generates an unsatisfying tension between the narrative and form. The Blood is like a purging of Costa’s long-gestating ideas and influences and has little in common with the films that followed.

    By contrast, Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, 1994) is much more assured and coherent. Costa claims to have begun the project out of anger with Portugal’s turn to the right amidst the formation of the European Union, which precipitated a dramatic restructuring of the nation’s economy, including the privitization of television. The few sources of funding in Portugal’s small film economy dried up. “I was so disgusted that I told Paolo [Branco, his producer] that if he’d give me some money I’d go to Africa and make something there,” Costa says (11). The decision would prove to be an important turning point in his career. Like a mash-up of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988), Down to Earth concerns a young woman, Mariana (Ines de Medeiros), whose exotic notions about the Other are tested and refuted by first-hand experience. Wishing to escape the mundane, lonely existence of her daily life as a nurse in a Lisbon hospital, Mariana escorts an immigrant patient back to Cape Verde, the former Portuguese colony off the west coast of Senegal.

    Any illusions Mariana has about the romantic allure of Cape Verde are challenged, however, from the moment she arrives there. Dropped off in a barren field by helicopter, she finds herself alone with her patient’s still-comatose body. And when she does finally make her way to the local medical clinic, she’s frustrated to discover a general apathy about her patient’s condition. It’s the first of many such scenes in which Mariana misinterprets the behavior of those around her. She is forever asking the Cape Verdeans to speak in Portuguese rather than Creole. “I don’t understand you,” she repeats again and again. Like so much Post-Colonial art, Down to Earth explores the various ways in which meaning is interpreted and reconstructed by competing powers.

    Down to Earth, an impressive film in its own right, also sets the stage for the “Vanda Trilogy.” Costa’s experience with the people of Cape Verde gained him access to the poor immigrant communities in Lisbon that continue to be his principal subject. But Down to Earth also introduces several formal touches that have become hallmarks of Costa’s style. The film opens in complete silence as we watch the simple white-on-black credits, followed by a montage of volcanoes. It’s found footage, presumably, but Costa’s syncopated cutting turns it strange and abstract. Music enters at the two-minute mark, and it’s likewise complex and counter-rhythmic, a viola sonata by Paul Hindemith. Its atonal bursts of dissonance disturb the beauty of the nature sequence, but the piece also alludes to High Modernism and acknowledges the camera’s “outsider” perspective. This film about Cape Verde is the work of a Portuguese director and a European economy, and it would certainly find its largest audiences among First World festival-goers and cineastes.

    Costa next cuts together a montage of iconic portraits. He frames the women of Cape Verde in close-up, shooting their hands, the backs of their heads, and, most often, their expressionless faces. The women share several particular traits: thick eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones, freckles, and wisps of hair on their upper lips. They have centuries of colonialism, slave trade, and miscegenation written into their DNA. Then, in the closing seconds of the sonata, Costa cuts again, this time to a construction site in Lisbon, where several Cape Verdean men are working. It’s a remarkable feat of filmmaking. In less than three-and-a-half minutes Costa has established the central conflict of the film—that is, the perilous relationship between colonizer and colonized and the complex history (economic, political, cultural, and familial) they continue to share—and he’s also implicated himself and the audience in that history.

    In the “Vanda Trilogy,” Costa continues to evolve his use of elliptical editing and static close-ups, but as he gradually moves away from standard narrative forms he also begins to experiment more conspicuously with sound design and mise-en-scene. Bones opens with another of Costa’s icon-like portraits, this time a forty-second, mostly-silent medium shot of a nameless young woman who is barely visible amid the shadows of an underlit room. The film is set in the Fontainhas district of Lisbon, a claustrophobic place where people wander into and out of rooms and seldom, if ever, find a space where they can be alone. Even the most intimate of experiences (sex, an attempted suicide) are observed directly by others or are intruded upon, psychologically, by the constant, low-frequency hum of neighborhood arguments, music, and crying children. Because Costa never gives us a top-down perspective of Fontainhas—because he never establishes a navigable geography—we get lost there, too. There’s little direct sunlight, even in the few scenes shot during daytime, and the narrow alleyways between buildings are like paths through a hedgerow labyrinth.

    All of this is significant because Costa establishes a stark dichotomy between Fontainhas and the middle-class districts where one of the main characters goes to clean apartments. The dank, congested din of slum life seems a world away from her employers’ white-walled flats. And given Costa’s elisions, it’s impossible to situate either district in a real geographic space: they might be a world away; they might be right next door. Costa’s approach to his subject creates a dialectic of sorts, as he accomplishes more than simply reminding us—in a pat or comforting way, as a traditional narrative would inevitably do—of the differences between the haves and have-nots. Rather, he has set these two worlds in direct opposition to one another. Or, more to the point, he’s developed a cinematic form that arises, organically, out of an already-existing (in the real word) and material opposition.

    By comparison to the two films that would follow, Bones has a relatively traditional plot. A teenage girl has given birth to a child that she and the baby’s father are unable and unwilling to raise. Three women attempt to come to the couple’s rescue: Clotilde (Vanda Duarte), a neighbor who works as a house cleaner; Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), a middle-class nurse who treats the child in hospital; and an unnamed prostitute (Ines de Medeiros) who offers to raise the baby herself. Like Mariana in Down to Earth, all of the women in Bones are lonely and in search of love, security, and some kind of domestic pleasure. Particularly given Costa’s use of several non-professional actors and his determination to shoot the film on location, the subject matter of Bones is potentially exploitative. The danger is that it could become one of those unsentimental, “fly on the wall” films that tend to be commended by liberal Western audiences for their access into “a world seldom seen on-screen.” Tahani Rached’s These Girls (El-Banate Dol, 2006) is a fitting example. Rached’s film is a well-intentioned and unsettling documentary about the street girls of Cairo who spend their days huffing glue, avoiding arrest, and suffering violence at the hands of men and each other. In her attempt to remain objective and to strip away her authorial voice, however, Rached has made a film that is as ephemeral, emotionally and morally speaking, as a “Feed the Children” television commercial. Both stoke the audience’s guilt with provocative images of suffering but offer precious little analysis. Rached’s film ends up functioning much like a typical Hollywood entertainment or TV show. These Girls, in fact, is sentimental, but it appeals to sentiments like pity and shame.

    Such sentiments are easily elicited by even incompetently constructed narrative images. Soon after the release of his film For Ever Mozart (1996), which concerns, in part, the Bosnian War, Jean-Luc Godard was asked if he felt Western governments had made use of televised images of suffering in order to promote their political agendas. “Yes, of course,” he replied. “We made images in the movies, when we began, in order to remember. TV is made to forget. We see Sarajevo, okay, we forget in two seconds. The same moment that we are looking, we forget” (Walsh). If cinema is to have value as a contemplative art then it must, as Snow suggests, teach us “to see,” and it must do so in a manner that avoids reducing the image to gross propaganda. “Beauty has been redefined to serve commercial and ideological ends,” writes theologian John W. De Gruchy in Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice. “This abuse of art does not necessarily reflect a lack of aesthetic sensibility; rather it manipulates it to great effect because people do not have the ability to evaluate its character or consequence” (92). For De Gruchy, art must instead serve a prophetic function by “disrupt[ing] and destabiliz[ing] dominant portrayals of reality and, in turn, offer[ing] alternative perceptions of reality.” Contemplative art, De Gruchy argues, offers historical analysis, it imbues the contemplative viewer with empathy, it unmasks hypocrisy, and it evokes hope that compels action (200-01).

    The material of cinema poses particular problems in this regard, however, as commercial interests have proven remarkably adept at consuming images, narrative tropes, and editing techniques—no matter how Modern and defamiliarizing they might have once seemed—and regurgitating them into our visual culture. (Prime time television, especially during commercial breaks, now regularly broadcasts images that until very recently would have seemed avant-garde.) Made nearly a decade after For Ever Mozart, Godard’s Our Music (Notre Musique, 2004) revisits Sarajevo and again questions our capacity to ignore and even enjoy the suffering of others, this time by subjecting viewers to “Hell,” an intensely visceral, ten-minute collage of newsreel war footage and violent film clips. With “Hell” Godard seems resigned in his anger, as if he’s whispering a cynical challenge to every viewer: “I know that you will forget all of this too.”

    Discussing Down to Earth, Costa suggests that he shares Godard’s concerns about the epistemological instability of filmed images: “I set out to make an angry film about prisoners in Africa but then the Romanesque took over” (Peranson, 11). Presumably, by “Romanesque” he’s referring to the Gothic elements in the film—the sublime landscapes, haunted glances, and romantic entanglements that are conspicuously absent from his later work. What’s interesting about his comment, though, is his admission that he was, in a sense, helpless to prevent the formal components of his film from “taking over” and reshaping its content. With Bones, Costa begins to strip away all such elements that might fall too easily into convention. There are hints of this even in Down to Earth. For example, at the midpoint of the film he cuts together three close-ups of locked doors and floods the soundtrack with crying children, creating an ambiguous disunity between the sound and image. This approach is extended throughout Bones, in which the life of Fountainhas is represented predominantly by the offscreen sounds it makes. It’s an effective gesture toward Bresson, who, in Notes on the Cinematographer, writes, “When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outer” (51).

    As many commentators have noted, Bresson’s use of sound functions metaphorically, representing the natural world just beyond the limits of the country priest’s experience, for example, and equating Mouchette’s plight with that of the partridges poached by Arsene. But Bresson’s sound design also creates a hard, physical reality. Every inhabitant of Fountainhas is like Fontaine, the heroic prisoner in Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, 1956), whose determined attention to every passing sound renders the outside world in sharp clarity. When asked why he so often underlit the faces of his actors in A Perfect Couple (Un Couple Parfait, 2005), Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa responded, “There are two ways to really watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Consumers of traditional narrative cinema are seldom required to do much of either, however, as the combined effect of continuity editing, high-key lighting, emotive acting, and on-the-nose dialogue skillfully conspires to eliminate any potential confusion or ambiguities from the story being told. Viewers of Costa’s films, like those of Bresson and Suwa, are expected to stay alert and attentive, while also remaining free, like readers of great fiction, to participate in the imaginative act of world- and character-creation.

    A telling example of Costa’s formal strategy comes early in Bones. The young mother and father share only one scene in the entire film, a strange and wordless encounter marked by exactly the kinds of ambiguities seldom found in narrative cinema. First, we see the girl and boy separately. Tina (Mariya Lipkina), having just been released from the hospital, carries home her newborn son, lays him on the couch, shutters the windows, and opens the valve of a gas tank that she has dragged in from the kitchen. Along with the muffled sounds of neighbors, we also now hear the hiss of escaping gas, as Tina takes a seat beside her fidgeting child and closes her eyes. Costa then cuts to the nameless father (Nuno Vaz), who is wandering alone through Fontainhas. When he eventually arrives at Tina’s home, he finds her and the child lying motionless on the couch. Recalling both Pier Pasolini’s rendering of Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, 1964) and Carl Dreyer’s portrait of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928), Costa then frames the boy in an extended close-up as he examines and contemplates the scene around him. Silently and without expression, he walks past the couch and into another room, where he collapses in Tina’s bed. He remains alone there for a moment until she comes to his side, wrestles him to the floor, and drags him by his shoulders into the room where their sleeping child lies. The sequence is capped by a cutaway to another iconic portrait of the unnamed woman from the opening shot of the film, who stares into the distance like a silent witness.

    By conventional standards, this sequence, which includes an attempted suicide and infanticide, is relatively undramatic. Even the moment when Tina releases the gas and closes her eyes is more curious than horrific. The low-level lighting shrouds her face, and Lipkina’s performance is completely without affect. Likewise, when the young father surveys the scene, his response is vague and puzzling. Tina and the child are dead, we’re led to assume, so his decision to walk past them into the bedroom seems inhumanly callous. But then Tina comes to the door, and we’re forced to reevaluate all of those assumptions. Did she change her mind or did the tank simply run out of gas? Did he know they were sleeping, and, if so, was he actually being courteous rather than callous? Is he devastated by or indifferent to Tina’s suicidal tendencies, whether successful or not?

    These ambiguities are amplified when Tina comes to him on the bed and embraces him. Shot in near-complete darkness and from a fixed camera position a few feet away, the scene is a fierce battle—at once intimate, tragic, sorrowful, and bitter. When most films would explode with tears and exposition, Bones instead becomes even more quiet. Rather than fight back, the father goes limp when Tina grabs him, pulls him to the floor, and tugs him to the other room. His final gesture—hiding his face behind one arm and turning away from Tina and their child—is selfish and cowardly but also an emblem of his shame and helplessness.

    The temptation with such a scene is to fix each character and movement within a symbolic framework. This young couple, for example, might be casually interpreted as one more artistic instantiation of Joseph and Mary. But Costa’s style deliberately resists such facile handling. Rather, like the poetic logic of Tarkovsky’s enigmatic images, Costa’s films give “the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings” (Tarkovsky, 109). Costa’s mise-en-scene is Brechtian as well as Tarkovskian, alluding to other figures of immanence such as Christ and St. Joan but doing so by way of mannered gestures that keep viewers at a disconcerting emotional and intellectual remove. This is a human, material world that Tina and the young father inhabit, and Costa reminds us of this by representing their battle through only the mundane sounds of rustling clothes, a thumping body, and dragging shoes.

    Even when Costa finally cuts to a reverse angle from beside the child and we can again see the young couple in higher-key light, their motivations remain cryptic. Tina slumps against the wall, exhausted by the effort and by life, generally, while he lies motionless on the floor with his face hidden from view. By focusing his camera on his actors’ bodies rather than shining a spotlight (whether literal or metaphoric) on their emotional states or back-stories, Costa short-circuits the conventional viewing experience and thus forces the audience into a position of active and curious engagement, which leads, ideally, to empathy and analysis rather than sympathy or, worse, self-satisfying judgment.

    Costa’s final cut in the sequence, from the image of the mother, father, and child to a close-up of the nameless woman, anticipates his next feature film, In Vanda’s Room. The cut functions as an eyeline match, implying that this mysterious woman has done the impossible: witness directly Tina’s suicide attempt and the intimate battle that followed. It also implies that she witnessed the events but would not or could not intervene. While the story of Bones might be conveniently reduced to a kind of ambiguous fable—a moral tale about desperate, lost children in search of a mother, or a tragic parable of poverty—In Vanda’s Room throws off narrative conventions to such an extent that it comes to question, finally, the limits of narrative itself. Like Andy Warhol’s structuralist experiments of the 1960s—films like Empire (1964), which consists of a single, eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building—In Vanda’s Room challenges the viewer to ask: What is dramatic? What is the relationship between real life and “reel life”? And what are the ethical implications of our role as passive cinematic spectator?

    According to Costa, work on In Vanda’s Room began soon after the completion of Bones, when one of the actresses, Vanda Duarte, suggested that they could make a different kind of film together. What began as “the worst documentary ever made” (or so says the director), evolved gradually over two years of shooting into an intimate fiction film (in the loosest sense of the word) about the looming destruction of community in Fontainhas (Peranson, 13). Shot with small digital video cameras and a bare-bones crew, In Vanda’s Room is strikingly different from the films that preceded it. The opening scene is a long, static shot of Vanda and her sister, Zita, sitting together on their bed, talking, coughing, and smoking heroin. Both are full-blown addicts, as are most of the other residents of Fontainhas who we meet throughout the course of the film. Costa offers glimpses of the small dramas that determine their lives—Vanda sells vegetables door-to-door, another of her sisters is arrested for shoplifting, her friend Nhurro moves from vacant apartment to vacant apartment in search of a home—but the majority of the film’s three-hour run time is devoted to scenes like the first one: formally-simple, extended takes filmed in confined spaces that capture the mundane details of life in this Lisbon slum.

    Despite Costa’s formal rigor, however, In Vanda’s Room remains an emotionally arresting experience. Its avoidance of the sentimentalizing traps that ensnare These Girls is due largely to his disciplined concentration—even moreso here than in Bones—on the bodies of his actors. In Devotional Cinema, Nathaniel Dorsky writes: “If you have ever looked at your hand and seen it freshly without concept, realized the simultaneity of its beauty, its efficiency, its detail, you are awed into appreciation. The total genius of your hand is more profound than anything you could have calculated with your intellect. One’s hand is a devotional object” (38).

    For Dorsky, too many filmmakers mistakenly ignore the holy inscrutability of natural objects and instead force upon them calculated, symbolic meanings. He supports his argument by analyzing the closing sequence of Ozu’s first sound film, The Only Son (1936), in which a mother and her adult child, both of them sorrowfully disappointed by the paths their lives have taken, sit side-by-side in the grass, looking occasionally to the sky before walking off together across a field. Dorsky concludes, “There is no summation to all these elements, only the direct experience of poetic mystery and the resonance of self-symbol” (40). Like Ozu, whose films, typically, are modest family dramas, Costa aspires toward a kind of radical domestic cinema with In Vanda’s Room. Rather than Dorsky’s hand, the objects of devotion here are Zita’s tired eyes, Nhurro’s hunched shoulders, Vanda’s rasping, hollow cough, and any number of other deep-lined faces and needle-injected forearms we witness along the way. Because Costa never cuts within a scene, and because the camera position remains fixed in the most practical position (rather than the most dramatic or conventionally cinematic), we are, again, allowed the freedom to explore Fontainhas and its residents on our own.

    By gradually transforming the characters of In Vanda’s Room into objects of contemplation, Costa also transforms Fontainhas itself into a sacred community whose imminent destruction is cause for mourning. Early into the making of the film, demolition crews began to literally tear down the neighborhood and relocate its inhabitants into new tenement high-rises. Costa intercuts the day-to-day lives of Vanda and her family with demolition scenes, and Nhurro’s constant moves, from vacant room to vacant room, signify the very real threat facing them all. The penultimate shot of the film echoes the first, as we see Vanda and Zita again smoking heroin in their room, but this time Costa fills the soundtrack with the noxious noise of approaching bulldozers and wrecking balls.

    This grounding of his aesthetic in a specific historical moment points to another important aspect of Costa’s project. While his formal strategy transforms the material of his filmed world into devotional objects, they remain “material” in the Marxist sense as well. In Vanda’s Room patiently describes the life of a drug addict, for example, not as a high-stakes game between dealers, junkies, and police, as is the case with most films and television shows, but as the inevitable byproduct of an economic system that exploits and excludes its inessential members. “After the Portuguese ‘discovered’ India in the 16th century,” Costa says, “we became unemployed forever: unemployment, poverty, and sadness. . . the worst capitalist exploitation” (Peranson, 14). Or, as one character puts it in the film, “We’re unemployed, but that’s work.”

    This melding of immanence and the political becomes even more pronounced in the third Vanda film, Colossal Youth, which finds Costa moving cinematographically toward an exaggerated Brechtian abstraction that recalls the films of Straub and Huillet. The signature image of Colossal Youth is a low-angle shot of Ventura, the film’s protagonist. He is an elderly man, tall and thin, and in this particular image, we see little of his face—just one eye peering over his right shoulder. The shot is dominated, instead, by the severe lines and sharp angles of a newly-constructed, State-funded high-rise that blots out the sky behind him. Costa cuts first to the building, which hangs in space like a two-dimensional painted backdrop, and pauses there for a few seconds, allowing our eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness before Ventura enters the frame. The light is so cool and clear and the contrast so high that all of the contours in Ventura’s black suit are lost and he is likewise rendered in two dimensions. Only his expressionless face has depth and shadow and, thus, appears “real.” Otherwise, the image could be mistaken for a work of cubism.

    Colossal Youth begins where In Vanda’s Room left off. The last remaining buildings in Fountainhas are coming down, and nearly all of the residents, including Vanda, have been removed to Casal Boba, a suburban housing development, where they enjoy relatively healthy living conditions and benefit from State-subsidized healthcare and social programs. Though still plagued by her cough, Vanda has gotten clean thanks to methadone treatments and is living with a kind man and raising a daughter. She looks different now. Her trademark long hair has been trimmed and she’s gained weight. She makes several appearances in the film, most of which take place in her new bedroom, where she watches television and recounts stories to Ventura. As in In Vanda’s Room, Costa shoots these episodes in long, uninterrupted takes from a fixed camera position, which emphasizes the stark contrast between the decrepit but organic-seeming environs of Fontainhas and the institutional brightness of Casal Boba.

    Costa’s intent in Colossal Youth is to tell “the history that nobody has yet told,” the story of the immigrants of Ventura’s generation who were lost in the shuffle of Portugal’s transformation in the mid-1970s from a dictatorship to a liberal democracy (McDougall, “Youth”). Ventura is a ghost-like figure in the film who moves back and forth through time. In some scenes we find him holed up in a work shed with his young friend Lento while the “Carnation Revolution” of April 25, 1974 rages around them; in others we are back in the present day, watching as Ventura relocates from Fontainhas to an apartment in Casal Boba large enough for all of “his children.” Costa offers no explicit clues to explain or demarcate these shifts in time, and even the basic past/present divide breaks down near the end of the film, when Lento, who has long since been dead, visits Ventura in his new home.

    These elisions and Surrealist touches are another source of ambiguity that offer ethical instruction. Dorsky notes that we actually experience life as a series of elisions. (Turn your head quickly to one side and, rather than a seamless pan, you will see several rapid jumpcuts.) Therefore, the montage of devotional cinema must also “present a succession of visual events that are sparing enough, and at the same time poignant enough, to allow the viewer’s most basic sense of existence to ‘fill in the blanks.’ If a film fills in too much, it violates our experience” (31). By the same token, Amy Elias, drawing on postmodern theorists Ihab Hassan and Hayden White, finds deeply imbedded political implications in similar narrative techniques that hearken to parataxis, a rhetorical strategy that avoids connectives between words—“I left. She cried.” as opposed to hypotaxis, “When I left, she cried” (123). In Colossal Youth, Costa has divided the world into past and present and has populated both with devotional objects. Rather than mouthing a didactic tract, however, he has discovered a political force in that poetic juxtaposition, like lines in a haiku. Ventura’s poignant recitation of a love letter to his wife in the past collides with the image of him standing alone in his sterile new home in the present, and in that frisson Costa achieves a hard-earned critique of historical “progress” and the economic systems that determine its course. “Filming these things the way I did does not put much faith in democracy,” Costa has said. “People like Ventura built the museums, the theaters, the condominiums of the middle-class. The banks and the schools. As still happens today. And that which they helped to build was what defeated them” (McDougall, “Youth”).

    Critic David McDougall has identified in Costa’s films—and in Colossal Youth, particularly—a sense of what Portuguese speakers call “saudade,” which translates roughly as “nostalgia” but is more anguished and rooted in the present moment, as if longing for one’s life while living it (“Saudade”). Saudade is simultaneously tragic, anxiety-causing, and curiously pleasurable, as it reminds one of all that was lost while suggesting a hope for its eventual return. That Costa’s films manage to provoke a feeling of saudade within viewers as well is perhaps the best testament to their truly being works of contemplative art. The “Vanda Trilogy” is almost completely devoid of overt allusions to faith, spirituality, or organized religion of any sort, yet the films overflow with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, borrowing a metaphor from music, calls the “cantus firmus”—a foundational value or belief “to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint” (161).

    Works Cited

    Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison, The Enlarged Edition. Ed. by Eberhard Bethge. London: SCM Press, 1971.

    De Gruchy, John W. Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

    Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 2005.

    Elias, Amy J. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

    Hanlon, Lindley. “Sound as Symbol in Mouchette.” Robert Bresson. Ed. by James Quandt. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario Monographs: 307-23.

    McDougall, David. “Saudade and Colossal Youth.” 2 June 2007. Chained to the Cinematheque. 2 Jan. 2008. < http://chainedtothecinematheque.blogspot.com/2007/05/saudade-and-colossal-youth.html>.

    – – -. “Youth on the March: The Politics of Colossal Youth.” 15 May 2007. Chained to the Cinematheque. 2 Jan. 2008. < http://chainedtothecinematheque.blogspot.com/2007/05/ youth-on-march-politics-of-colossal.html>.

    Peranson, Mark. “Pedro Costa: An Introduction.” Cinema Scope Summer 2006: 6-15.

    Snow, Michael. Interview. A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Ed. Scott MacDonald. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992: 51-76.

    Suwa, Nobuhiro. Question and Answer Session. Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto. 16 Sept. 2005.

    Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998.

    Walsh, David. “Those Who ‘Play at Life and Death’: Jean-Luc Godard’s For Ever Mozart.” 2 Dec. 1996. World Socialist Web Site. 2 Jan. 2008. < http://www.wsws.org/arts/1996/dec1996/god-d96.shtml>.

  • Life on Earth (1999)

    Life on Earth (1999)

    Dir. by Abderrahmane Sissako

    “There is an organic unity to village life, but it is both fragile and alienating. In this regard Sissako refuses to either promote some pure, untouched pre-modernity or to mourn for some lost social integration. Sissako’s encompasser always has to make room for those transnational nomads who can’t quite pass muster with traditionalism, and whose presence causes the seemingly organic community to slowly reveal its fissures.”

    Michael Sicinski

    Here, Michael’s actually discussing Waiting for Happiness, Abderrahmane Sissako’s second feature film, but the tenuous unity of village life that he notices there is represented even more clearly, I think, in the earlier film, Life on Earth. As Michael points out, the film opens with a self-consious allusion to Godard — a long tracking shot along shelves and shelves of food in a French supermarket. It’s in the next shot, though, that Sissako establishes the visual template for his film. We first see racks of shoes in the foreground and shelves of toys behind them. Then Sissako himself appears. We eventually learn that he is a student abroad; his trip back home motivates the film’s plot, and his letter to his father provides the voice-over narration. When Sissako enters the frame, he moves from left to right, splitting the two depths of field that were established initially.

    Life on Earth (Cissako, 1999)

    The same visual motif continues after Sissako has left the consumer wonderland of Paris and has returned to his Mali village. In the shot below, Sissako again establishes two depths of field (the group of men sitting below the shade tree and the photographer in the distance) before introducing horizontal movement (first the goats moving left to right, then the man on donkey moving right to left).

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    Then a new variation: Again the donkeys establish horizontal movement and depths of field, but now a figure moves on the perpindicular line, walking toward the camera.

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    Frequently, characters are also staged on various planes of action. In the example below, the man in the foreground and his bicycle wheel are on the horizontal, the man in the back is on the perpendicular, and Sissako, the outsider in the middle ground, breaks the grid at a 45-degree angle.

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    Finally, near the end of Life on Earth, Sissako includes two back-to-back, single-shot sequences that are the culmination of his visual strategy. In the first, we see two merchants at two depths of field. Sissako slowly pulls focus to create a relationship between the men.

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    In the second, he again creates two depths of field, along with the expectation that he will again pull focus. Instead, a third character bisects the planes, and we watch him walk off into the fuzzy distance until Nana stands up and exits on the horizontal.

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    Life on Earth (Sissako, 1999)

    I don’t recall there being any dialogue in any of the shots I’ve captured here. (Nearly all of the film’s few conversations take place in the small post office, where villagers try in vain to communicate with the outside world via a single telephone.) Sissako’s camera, however, is obsessed with relationships and with the geography (geometry?) of social interaction.

  • Casa de Lava (1994)

    Casa de Lava (1994)

    Dir. by Pedro Costa

    Pedro Costa’s second feature, Casa de Lava, opens with a barrage of arresting juxtapositions. The first few minutes pass in complete silence as we watch the simple white-on-black credits, followed by a montage of volcanoes. It’s found footage, I assume — all grainy and pulsing, like scenes from a seventh grade science documentary — but Costa’s syncopated cutting turns it strange and abstract. Music enters at the two-minute mark, and it’s likewise complex and counter-rhythmic. Paul Hindemith’s viola sonata serves double duty here. Its atonal bursts of dissonance disturb the beauty of the nature sequence, but it also alludes to High Modernism and acknowledges the “outsider” perspective of the filmmaker. This film about Cape Verde, the former Portuguese colony off the west coast of Senegal, is the work of a Portuguese director and a European economy, and it would certainly find its largest audiences among First World festival-goers and cineastes.

    The sonata continues, but Costa next cuts together a montage of miniature portraits. He frames the women of Cape Verde in close-up, shooting their hands, the backs of their heads, and, most often, their expressionless faces. The women share several particular traits: thick eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones, freckles, and whisps of hair on their upper lips. They have centuries of colonialism, slave trade, and miscegenation written into their DNA. As for why Costa shoots only women: in the closing seconds of the sonata’s fourth movement, Costa cuts to what we eventually learn is a construction site in Lisbon, where several Cape Verdean men are working. It’s really a remarkable feat of filmmaking. In less than three-and-a-half minutes Costa has established the central conflict of the film — that is, the perilous relationship between colonizer and colonized and the complex history (economic, political, cultural, and familial) they continue to share — and he’s also implicated himself and the audience in that history.

    The feat is even more impressive given the mixed quality of Costa’s first film, O Sangue, which, while stunning to look at, doesn’t quite work aesthetically or even at a basic narrative level. It’s a very personal film — the first of Costa’s many attempts to rescue on celluloid the family he was denied, personally, as a child — but like many first films its admirable ambitions are hampered by inexperience and by a too-obvious debt to his influences. (O Sangue is the only Costa feature I’ve seen only once, so I’ll leave it at that.) By contrast, Casa de Lava is much more assured and coherent. Costa claims to have begun the project out of anger with Portugal’s turn to the right amidst the formation of the European Union, which precipitated a dramatic restructuring of the nation’s economy, including the privitization of television. The few sources of funding in Portugal’s small film economy dried up. “I was so disgusted that I told Paolo [Branco, his producer] that if he’d give me some money I’d go to Africa and make something there.” (See Mark Peranson’s “Pedro Costa: An Introduction” in Cinema Scope 27 for the rest of the interview. It’s well worth tracking down.)

    Casa de Lava (Costa)

    Costa’s own description of Casa de Lava reads like a ghost story:

    In the beginning there is noise, desperation and abuse. Mariana wants to get out of hell. She reaches out her hand to a half dead man, Leao. It’s only natural, Mariana is full of life and thinks that maybe the two of them can escape from hell together.

    On the way, she believes that she is bringing the dead man to the world of the living. Seven days and nights later, she realises she was wrong. She brought a living man among the dead.

    Like a mash-up of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie and Claire Denis’s Chocolat, Casa de Lava concerns a young woman, Mariana (Ines de Medeiros), whose exotic notions about the Other are tested and refuted by first-hand experience. The hell she wishes to escape is the mundane, lonely existence of her daily life as a nurse in a Lisbon hospital. Costa connects Mariana with her supposed savior, Leao (Chocolat‘s Isaach de Bankole), early in the film, when, after being injured at the construction site, he is brought to her in a coma. It’s another fascinating and unusually efficient sequence of images. We first see Leao at the site, staring without expression into the distance; then the film cuts to another worker, who is bringing news of Leao’s fall to the foreman. (Or, I assume he’s speaking to the foreman. Costa rarely uses reaction shots.) As with Lento’s fall in Colossal Youth, Costa ellides the accident itself and, instead, cuts to a low-angle shot of Mariana, presumably at work, as two hands reach upward and grab her face. Costa reuses the same low-angle shot in his next film, Ossos, again with a patient reaching for a nurse. The image is uncanny and terrifying, like a final, desperate struggle before death wins out.

    Any illusions Mariana has about the romantic allure of Cape Verde are challenged from the moment she arrives there. Dropped off in a barren field by helicopter, she finds herself alone with Leao’s still-unconscious body. And when she does finally find her way to the small medical clinic (a former leper colony), she’s frustrated to discover a general apathy about her patient’s condition. Like so much Post-Colonial art, Casa de Lava explores the various ways in which meaning is interpreted and reconstructed by competing powers. The film is full of ambiguities, in the best sense of the word. Mariana is forever asking the Cape Verdeans to speak in Portuguese rather than Creole. “I don’t understand you,” she repeats again and again. When she finds a love letter written to Edith, an elderly colonialist whose pension is a boon to the local economy, Mariana can’t help but misinterpret its significance. (It’s the same letter, by the way, that Ventura recites throughout Colossal Youth.)

    Casa de Lava (Costa)

    “You ate our food. You drank our wine. Maybe it turned your head. Not even the dead rest here. Don’t you hear them?”

    And yet Mariana can’t help but be seduced by the Otherness of Cape Verde. The image above captures her at her most deeply enchanted, lost in the music that surrounds her. Except for O Sangue, which features a lush and oddly romantic score, Costa’s films employ very little non-diegetic music. The Hindemith sonata is a notable exception, but it serves as a weighted counterpoint to the diegetic fiddle music played throughout the film. Typically, Costa uses diegetic music to establish a kind of domestic community (as in his many indoor dance scenes) or to invoke nostalgia (see Dave McDougall’s post about “Labanta Braco” in Colossal Youth.) Here, the music is one more seducer that tricks Mariana into believing that she is the object of desire. It’s also one more language that she invariably misinterprets.

    Mariana only realizes her mistake — that she has “brought a living man among the dead” — in the film’s closing sequence. Appropriately, the final images in the film resist simple interpretation. Without spoiling the plot, I’ll say only that Mariana witnesses two events that shatter the illusions that had sustained her during her week in Cape Verde: that she was a source of health and healing for the wounded people there, and that she held sexualized power over them. At her moment of awakening, Costa frames Mariana in a still close-up and, for only a few seconds, brings back the non-diegetic viola music. When the music ends, so does her story. Costa concludes Casa de Lava, however, with two last shots that demonstrate what we could maybe call post-colonial inertia. In the first, a band of musicians, all of them men, sets off on one more trip to Portugal, where they are seeking work. (“Everyone wants to leave” is a common refrain throughout the film.) Despite more than three decades of independence, Cape Verde is still inextricably bound to its colonial founders, and the cycle continues. The final shot is more enigmatic. It’s another portrait of the same nameless woman pictured at the top of this post. She returns in a similar role in Ossos, acting as a kind of silent, iconic witness. I think Costa’s ethic is located in that face.

  • Satantango (1994)

    Satantango (1994)

    Dir. by Bela Tarr

    Perhaps the best way to begin this response is to just be out with it: Satantango is not the Greatest. Film. Ever. Also, seeing it projected in 35mm at a good theater and in one sitting (minus two fifteen-minute intermissions) was not one of the defining experiences of my cinema-going life. And unlike Susan Sontag, I’m in no hurry to watch it again, once a year, for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, it was still one of my favorite film moments of 2006. How could it not be? After my only other experience with a Bela Tarr film, I wrote:

    The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It’s the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: “A bucket is a bucket is a bucket.” The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion.

    I felt the same frustrations throughout the seven-and-a-half hours of Satantango. There’s an odd tension generated by the collision of Tarr’s form/aesthetic (long takes, slow tracking shots, expressionless faces in close-up) and his vision of the world, which strikes me as pessimistic in the extreme. The influence of Tarkovsky is so heavy, I can’t help but compare the two, and what most fascinates me about the comparison is how Tarkovsky’s films, even at their most bleak (Ivan’s Childhood, Nostalghia), feel guided by a generous (spiritual?) wisdom, while Tarr’s seem to have been constructed in Nature’s laboratory. In contrast to Tarkovsky the Mystic, I imagine Tarr as the Skeptical Scientist, training his eye on his human subjects, determined to prove his cynical hypotheses.

    Take, for example, the story of Estike, a young girl who is pulled from a sanitarium by her mother and brought back home, where she suffers all manner of neglect and abuse. We meet her just as she’s being tricked out of her last few cents by a thieving older brother, and then, over the next forty minutes or so, Satantango becomes her film. We see her act out in a desperate effort to take control of some aspect of her life, wrestling with her cat in one of the most disturbing film sequences I have ever seen. (“I am stronger than you,” she hisses at the terrified cat.) We see her make one last attempt at human contact, but, cursed and rejected, she is sent running off alone into the dark woods. We see her walk, without blinking, down an empty road, and this time we watch her even more closely; Tarr holds her face in focus for minutes at a time (“a face is a face is a face”). And then we see her die. We watch as she curls up beside her dead cat and eats the same rat poison that killed it.

    Before she dies, Estike imagines an angel looking down on her with sympathy. Right now, as I struggle to find the next sentence — and despite the many misgivings I’ve already expressed — I’m aware of a tenderness in Tarr’s gaze that I didn’t experience during the film itself. I keep thinking of another shot, a minutes-long close-up of Estike’s face as she peers through a window at the drunken townspeople dancing in a pub. Why has she been rejected by this human community? Is she too pure? Too uncorruptable? (Are these even the appropriate questions to be asking of her?) And, even more importantly, does this human community have access to any means of redemption, whether transcendent or humanist? My sense is that it does not, but I’m feeling an urge to reacquaint myself with Tarkovsky’s Ivan, Bresson’s Mouchette, and the Dardennes’ Rosetta to test my own hypothesis.

    Satantango is, inevitably, a defining experience in one respect: As a self-proclaimed lover of boring art films and a proselyte for the long take, I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to immerse myself in that aesthetic for an entire day. (I’m reminded of a friend in Toronto who recounted Andrea Picard‘s response when he expressed his misgivings about spending a weekend with Warhol’s Empire. “But what happens?” he asked. “Life happens,” she said.) Like the coal buckets in Damnation, the opening shot of cows being loosed into the fields in Satantango is as beautifully strange and breath-taking as any image I saw all year. Following it with a hundred more long takes pushes, in interesting ways, the limits of the affect. At times I became fatigued by it all and began praying for a cut. But two or three shots later I would become mystified again. I’d be curious to get the DVDs and hold the “boring” (in the best sense) shots up beside the “boring” (in the worst sense) shots to get a clearer sense of the distinction. Is it a matter of aesthetics? (Is beauty more compelling?) Is it a function of narrative? (The cat-wrestling scene was certainly the most heart-pounding.) Is it an elemental question of form? (Given similar content and cinematographic style, how would variations to mise-en-scene, for example, affect our viewing pleasure?)

  • Showgirls (1995)

    Showgirls (1995)

    Dir. by Paul Verhoeven

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

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

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

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

  • Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)

    Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

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

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

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

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

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

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

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

    – – –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fifteen for Fifteen

    Fifteen for Fifteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Safeway Cart

    Safeway Cart

    Beau Travail is a perfect film, and one of the many reasons it is perfect is Claire Denis’s uncanny knack for discovering moments of transcendence with music. Watching the film again last night, I found myself daydreaming about Denis’s record collection, imagining myself in her home, sitting silently as she cues up songs and conjures visions in words. Beau Travail does that to me.

    Denis includes snippets from Benjamin Britten’s opera, Billy Budd, which is only fitting given that the film is a loose adaptation of Melville’s novella. I’m not familiar with the piece, but its dissonant chorus reminds me of the bits of Ligeti that Kubrick uses in 2001. She contrasts the high drama of Britten with 90s dance music and manages to find the beauty in it as well. I’ve spent too much of this morning watching over and over again the film’s final sequence, a brilliant fantasy — well, I call it a “fantasy,” but it’s one of those moments that exists in some magical, subjective space just outside of Denis’s main narrative — a fantasy in which Denis Lavant unleashes a savage but impossibly graceful dance to the sound of Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night.” Somehow, in this context, the otherwise banal lyrics find some poetry. It’s really a remarkable scene.

    The new Song of the Moment, Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart,” scores a scene in which the Legionnaires march through a rocky desert, one of their many meaningless exercises in the film. It plays like a dirge and is one of Beau Travail‘s few explicit references to the Christian allegory at play.

    Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
    Like a sandal mark on the Savior’s feet
    Just keep rolling on it’s a ghetto dawn
    Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
    Going, going, gone and the picture cries
    It’s a ghetto dawn
    Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
    Going, going, gone and the picture cries
    Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
    Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
    Past the Handy mart to the Savior’s feet
    Going, going, gone and the picture cries
    Baby looks so sad
    Baby looks so bad
    It’s a ghetto dawn
    Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
    Like a sandal mark on the Savior’s feet
    Just keep rolling on to a ghetto dawn

  • Slacker (1991)

    Slacker (1991)

    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.

  • Strange Waters

    Strange Waters

    Bruce Cockburn’s “Strange Waters” has been something of a theme song for me this year:

    I’ve seen a high cairn kissed by holy wind
    Seen a mirror pool cut by golden fins
    Seen alleys where they hide the truth of cities
    The mad whose blessing you must accept without pity

    I’ve stood in airports guarded glass and chrome
    Walked rifled roads and landmined loam
    Seen a forest in flames right down to the road
    Burned in love till I’ve seen my heart explode

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters

    Across the concrete fields of man
    Sun ray like a camera pans
    Some will run and some will stand
    Everything is bullshit but the open hand

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters
    Streams of beautiful lights in the night
    But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
    If I loose my grip, will I take flight?

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters
    Streams of beautiful lights in the night
    But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
    If I loose my grip, will I take flight?

    I asked Bruce about “Strange Waters” yesterday, and his answer was a tense, beautiful sermon. In order to read the full interview, though, you’ll need a subscription to Beyond magazine, the sweetest slice of ads-free goodness you’ll ever taste. And I’m here to help. Same rules apply. The first ten people who post “I want to taste the goodness” in the comments section of this post get a free subscription on my dime. Be sure to use your real name and email address, because I’ll need to contact you with additional information.

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?

  • Snow

    Snow

    Since watching Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World on Sunday, I have probably listened to The Innocence Mission’s “Snow” thirty times. Hopefully I’ll find time to write about Bathtub in the next day or two. It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a film.

  • Late August, Early September (1998)

    Late August, Early September (1998)

    I had planned to write a full response to Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September, but when I sat down to do so I realized that I just didn’t have much to say. It’s a smart enough film — well made, finely acted, and a pleasure to watch — but like, say, one of Rohmer’s late comedies, the charm of Late August is found almost entirely in its characters (all of whom are likeable enough and three-dimensional enough) and in the smart things they say to one another. They twist themselves in existential knots, struggling to balance their idealized visions of integrity with the muddy necessity: compromise. They try to love themselves and others, in that order. They smoke. And drink wine. It’s all captured in cool-filtered, hand-held 16mm, and there are some fun, self-referential lines about gauging artistic success based upon the size of one’s audience. All in all, I would call it a pleasant and mostly forgettable distraction.

  • Dreamer

    I’m almost finished Dreamer, Charles Johnson’s novel about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggles in Chicago in 1966, and it’s amazing — the finest novel I’ve read in months. (Dreamer wants to become part of my stalled dissertation; I have, as yet, managed to fight that urge.) Early in the novel King meets Chaym Smith, his doppelganger, and seeing his own face on the body of a homeless drug addict shakes his faith in the very foundation of his Movement: Equality.

    Nature was unjust. Who could deny that? But in the realm of the spirit invoked by the Founders, in God, there was no defensible social distinctions, for all creatures great and small, black and white, were isomers of the divine Person. It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure.

    At least until now. . . .

    In no other way than the somatic were [King and Smith] equal. In fact, they were like negatives of each other. He laughed, humorlessly. The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke. Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God-given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune. You could not say they were deserved.

    Smith acts throughout the novel as a foil to the Movement’s idealist platitudes. When Amy, a young volunteer, tells of her grandmother’s and great-grandfather’s back-breaking efforts to forge a strong black community and strong family values, the novel’s narrator, another volunteer, compares her story to “being gently led into the past, a distant better time when black people were the moral fiber of the nation” (88). Smith will have none of it: “That story she told, . . . it’s a fucking lie. Front to back, it was kitsch. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion” (92). It’s a nice device: interrupting a story to expose it as myth.

  • Cross Bones Style

    Cross Bones Style

    The oft-repeated but still-juicy line from Godard: “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls. The history of history is boys burning girls at the stake.” You can confirm the second sentence by watching TV for three minutes. To confirm the first sentence, watch the Cat Power videos available here at the Matador website.

    I don’t know who Brett Vapnek is, but she’s internalized the not-very-hidden fact that Chan Marshall is beautiful like few people are ever beautiful. She does what director Patrick Daughters does in the “Maps” video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — lets the remarkable looking people provide remarkability. Each Cat Power video is better than the previous one because each song is better than the previous one and Marshall is more beautiful in each successive video. (At this rate, she will soon become a small dwarf star.) “He War,” a song that drives me bananas when I can’t see her, is almost unbearable as an actual sequence of moving images. The bronzed paeans to Jean Seberg and Anna Karina and Garbo tumble through my head, but they don’t stay long. There is little to say except “I was hoping to see somebody who looked like that one day.” And I have.
    Sasha Frere-Jones

  • I’ll Be Gone

    I’ll Be Gone

    I have no idea why I’ve been listening to American Music Club’s San Francisco so much lately — I mean, other than because it’s a great album. “I’ll Be Gone” is a damn fine song.

    It was a long hot summer day
    We’re in the living room
    watching the light drain away
    Too tired to read what your cards foretold
    Inside of a yawn
    When she said,
    The first time you show me your true heart
    I’ll be gone.

    The numb ringing after the bell was rung
    Playing red light green light, such timeless fun
    There was no way to kickstart any conversation
    It was like the beginning of 2001
    When she said, I’ll be gone.

    The air isn’t moving and
    The women have nothing on their lips
    But the kind of breath that you keep
    for the hospital bed
    Pregnant with the timeless drop and the wind
    How the air leeches the gold out of everything
    elusive and stolen
    I’ll be gone

  • Calendar (1993)

    Calendar (1993)

    In Atom Egoyan’s remarkable film Calendar (1993), a photographer and his wife (played by Egoyan and Arsinee Khanjian) travel to Armenia to take pictures of ancient churches for a calendar project. Once there, they are led through the countryside — and through the country’s historical narratives — by Ashot Adamian, an Armenian man who tells stories, sings native songs, and, eventually, vies for Khanjian’s affection. It’s a love triangle, but one with interesting metaphoric weight. Egoyan, the intellectual Westerner far-removed from his Armenian roots, is juxtaposed against Adamian, and Khanjian stands somewhere in between, torn between two symbols of her own hyphenated identity.

    Khanjian is, in both a literal and metaphoric sense, the film’s translator, and the process of translation — with all of its inevitable frustrations and miscommunications — is the film’s main subject. Specifically, Egoyan is concerned with telling the stories of the Armenian diaspora, all the while knowing that culture, politics, technology, and human memory will constantly reshape and reinterpret those stories. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up, Calendar represents this dilemma even in its form, blurring the lines between documentary and narrative film, fact and fiction.

    Made for German television and with a budget of only $100,000, Calendar is one of the most compelling and stylistically inventive films I’ve seen this year. Typical of Egoyan’s work, it is structured around twelve, non-linear episodes (one for each month of the calendar) and alternates between film and video footage. At times, the characters address the camera directly, their improvised dialogue lending the film some air of verisimilitude; at others, it all has a very staged feel, particularly when we watch Egoyan, now back at home in Canada, going through the rehearsed motions of dating. Calendar is quite a display of filmmaking — probably Egoyan’s best, this side of The Sweet Hereafter.

  • The Wind

    The Wind

    A friend and I exchanged mix CDs this week, and apparently I now have to go buy PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? You know you’re dangerously obsessed with a song when WinAmp is set to repeat and the playlist includes only one track. “The Wind” is totally that song.

  • Blood on My Hands

    Blood on My Hands

    I just didn’t get the whole groupie phenomenon until about ten years ago, when I caught The Sundays at a club called The Moon in Tallahassee. Looking up at Harriet Wheeler, my elbows resting on the raised stage, I fell instantly and deeply in love. Or maybe it was lust. Regardless, she was the most seductive beauty I had ever seen. Her hair up. A form-fitting black dress. Those impossibly large eyes. I totally would have humiliated myself at her expense. And I mean “humiliated” in the Def Leppard Behind The Music kinda way.

    As beautiful as she was, though, it was the music that got to me. All of that ridiculous talent. Wheeler’s voice is some kind of marvel. Calling it “angelic” would be a cliche, I guess. But it’s not smoky exactly either, or soulful or torch-songish. It’s mostly a breath, which is probably why, a decade later, “Blood on My Hands” still gives me chills. It exemplifies all that made The Sundays such a great band — that syncopated snare hit, David Gavurin’s chorus-heavy guitar, and that beautiful, beautiful voice.

  • Dream Brother

    Dream Brother

    Even before Jeff Buckley drowned at 30, his voice was thick with melancholy and tragedy. Grace is without question one of the finest albums of the 90s, and “Dream Brother,” the disc’s closer, is proof. Amazing.

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    Dir. by Mark Rappaport

    Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney’s Website, I rented Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls “a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions” — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg’s life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America’s journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.

    Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard’s Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America’s heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger’s nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.

    Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg’s major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the “curse” of playing Joan of Arc. It’s a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg’s most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?

    Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt’s Seberg tells us, doesn’t care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt’s lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.

    Seberg’s life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent “doing what she was told,” the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover’s F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we’re left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is “enigmatic” and “sphinx-like,” or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.

    I look forward to sharing Rappaport’s film with students who bristle at the word “feminism,” because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.

  • Cupid’s Trick

    Cupid’s Trick

    “Cupid’s Trick” is my favorite Elliot Smith song, and I’ve been listening to a good bit of Elliot Smith lately, for what it’s worth.

  • Resplendent

    Resplendent

    What to hear a perfect song? “Resplendent,” by Bill Mallonee and Vigilantes of Love, is as close as it gets. There’s the Bruce Cockburn-like guitar, that sweet snare drum shuffle, and Emmylou’s harmonies. And then there’s the lyrics. When Mallonee sings, “Honey, we’re all resplendent,” you just know that he’s right. (Thanks for this song, Candace.)

    I remember the dark clouds raining dust for days on end
    Blew all the Earth out to California
    Just left us here with the wind
    Desperate times, you know everbody’s part
    It’s your own lines you’d like to forget
    Till what you were meets what you’ve now become
    And grins and says, “Hey, haven’t we met?”

    Lost my first born that Winter
    My wife on the first day of Spring
    So I poured my sweat to the Earth
    To see what that harvest would bring
    And I remember how the fury
    Just like a plague of locusts
    Egypt’s punishment for sins of pride
    Is that now what has come over us?

    How much of this was meant to be?
    How much the work of the Devil?
    How far can one man’s eyes really see
    In these days of toil and trouble?

    Honey, we’re all resplendent,
    Yeah, Honey, we are all thrift store
    Like a wine-o with a $20 bill
    Yeah, forever and eternally yours
    And I can make you promises
    If you don’t expect too much,
    Yes, and I will run the distance
    If you’ll please, please excuse my crutch

    How much of this was meant to be?
    How much the work of the Devil?
    How far can one man’s eyes really see
    In these days of toil and trouble?

    How much of this is failing flesh?
    How much a course of retribution?
    My, my, how loudly we plead our innocence
    Long after we made our contribution

  • Children of Heaven (1997)

    Children of Heaven (1997)

    As an antidote to the American media, lately I’ve been spending my precious down time with films from the Middle East. Quick tangent: Long Pauses attracts an odd assortment of readers — undergraduates looking for “Benito Cereno” papers to steal, disenfranchised Christians seeking fellow travelers, and film buffs, mostly. For those of you not in the latter group, let me just say that, for the last decade or so, Iran has produced many of the world’s most remarkable films and filmmakers. Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi, to name just a few, are among a select group of active directors who consistently meld craftsmanship, beauty, honesty, and a vital social-political voice. For more info, check out my friend Acquarello’s invaluable site, Strictly Film School.

    Majidi’s Children of Heaven is a sweet little film that I can’t help but compare to two of my all-time favorites: Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Like De Sica’s classic of Italian Neo-Realism, Children of Heaven concerns a hard-working father who wants only to provide for his wife and children, but who is trapped in a world that seems determined to frustrate him. Like Ray, Majidi tells his story from the low-angle perspective of the children, a boy, Ali, and his younger sister, Zahra. The plot turns on Ali’s having lost Zahra’s only pair of shoes and on their efforts to recover them, which are often pathetic but never overly sentimental. Majidi must surely have been thinking of Ray’s original Apu (Subir Bannerjee) when he cast Amir Farrokh Hashemian as Ali, for the two share that wide-eyed yearning on which the success of both films depends. (As a strange aside, both boys also remind me a great deal of my oldest nephew.)

    Like his predecessors, Majidi shoots on location and employs non-professional actors, which lends the film an urgency often lacking in Western productions. But it’s also quite beautifully filmed, contrasting stunning images of Tehran’s superhighways, mansions, and high rises with its alleys, markets, and elementary schools. Children of Heaven would be a great rental for any of you who might otherwise be reluctant to enter the “Foreign Films” aisle. Most reviews in the popular press have described it as “heartwarming,” which it certainly is, and it also delivers a deliriously tense finale. While the film lacks the explicit political critique of something like Panahi’s The Circle (banned by Iranian officials) or Kiarostami’s Close-Up, it offers a wonderfully told story, and it also performs a service that is terribly important right now: Our hearts should be warmed to the people of the Middle East, the people who are (or who soon will be) hiding out under the devastation of our bombing campaigns.

    (P.S. I realize that that last sentence smacks of stereotypical bleeding-heart liberalism. But, well, sometimes that’s a good thing.)

  • The Sweet Sting

    The Sweet Sting

    With nothing better to do last Saturday night, my wife and I found ourselves watching Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused again. Aside from my lingering obsession with Sixteen Candles, I’ve never been a big fan of teen comedies. Most are cut-and-paste collages of cliches and bad pop that are too busy romanticizing high school to remember how much it sucked and how damn interesting the typical teenager really is. I’m not being ironic this time. Seriously.

    The best compliment I can give Dazed and Confused is that it makes me deliriously nostalgic. My American Heritage calls “nostalgia” a “bittersweet longing,” which gets it just about right, I think. I’ve never been one to miss high school. I would guess that in the last ten years I’ve spoken to three people from my class. But I do occasionally find myself longing for something from those days, something lacking in the day to day management of adult life.

    Joanna and I chatted about this as we watched Dazed and Confused Saturday night (as adults are wont to do — we chat), and we decided that that something is an “intensity of experience” only found amidst the stew of anxiety and wonder that is adolescence. Think about it. When you’re in high school, whose car you ride around in on Friday night matters. And who sees you in that car matters even more. It’s not trivial, although I think we adults like to console ourselves by pretending it is. In fact, I’m not sure that anything I’ve done in the last ten years has mattered as intensely as almost everything mattered when I was fifteen. Dazed and Confused gets that just right, which makes it the only teen movie that, well, that matters.

    Watching it again, I was really struck by this conversation, which is also just right.

    Mike: I’m serious, man, we should be up for anything.
    Cynthia: I know. We are. But what? I mean, God, don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future.
    Tony: Yeah, I know. It’s like it’s all preparation.
    Cynthia: Right. But what are we preparing ourselves for?
    Mike: {glib} Death.
    Tony: Life of the party.
    Mike: {glib again} It’s true.
    Cynthia: You know, but that’s valid. Because if we’re all gonna die anyways, shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.
    Mike: Exactly. Man, that’s what everyone in this car needs is some good ol’, worthwhile, visceral experience.

    Sure, it’s a bit carpe diem-ish — and I usually recoil at anything that smacks of Robin Williams sentimentality — but there’s also something wonderfully freeing in that existential naivety. That “insignificant preamble” stuff has come up often in my conversations with other well-adjusted adults lately. Odd.

  • It’s Alright, Baby

    It’s Alright, Baby

    I have almost completely exorcised television from my daily diet. Aside from The Daily Show, That 70s Show reruns, and assorted documentary and news programs, I watch only one show: The Gilmore Girls. It’s a wonderfully written show — witty and sarcastic, but surprisingly free of cynicism. I’m also drawn to the show for personal reasons, most notably the strange resemblances between the Gilmores and the family that I married into. Don’t believe me?

    With Sam Phillips as its musical supervisor, The Gilmore Girls has always had impeachable music cred, and now it’s on display in a fantastic soundtrack album. I listened to it for the first time last night and am still reeling. The song of the moment, “It’s Alright, Baby” by Komeda, is Euro-retro-pop at its most infectious. Just a fantastic song.

  • Bathsheeba Smiles

    Bathsheeba Smiles

    I’m on a quest for the perfect pop song. “Bathsheba Smiles” isn’t quite perfect, but it comes awfully darn close: an infectious melody, a sing-along chorus, a simple chord progression, and a sweet lyric. Heck, you could almost dance to it.

    What do you think? It’s time to make this blog interactive. Nominate your favorite pop song and tell me why it’s perfect. I’ll post your responses as I get them.