Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Argentina

  • Romina Paula on Again Once Again

    Romina Paula on Again Once Again

    This interview was originally published at Filmmaker.

    * * *

    “My life is not what one would term heroic.”

    The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for wisdom. Emilia’s first-person confession is compulsive, tangent-chasing (building to a sorrowful reverie on Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny), and totally without guile. Despite her self-deprecating claim, there’s something small-h heroic about Emilia’s exhausting efforts to, as Paula told me, “affirm the questions” that are making chaos of her life.

    Originally released in 2009, August is, so far, the only one of Paula’s three novels and many plays to be translated into English and published in the States (by Feminist Press at the City University of New York). In a piece for Berfrois, “Writing in Buenos Aires,” Paula details the various gigs she’s cobbled together to make her career in the arts: novelist, playwright, theater director, writing workshop instructor and actress. I first noticed her in Santiago Mitre’s The Student (2011), in which she plays a fast-talking political organizer and steals every scene. She’s better known to American audiences as a member of Matías Piñeiro’s stock company, with parts in Viola (2012), The Princess of France (2014), and Hermia & Helena (2016).

    Paula has now written and directed her first film, Again Once Again (De nuevo otra vez), which is similar enough in voice and structure to be a kind of sequel to August. Paula plays a fictionalized version of herself, performing opposite her real mother and three-year-old son, Ramón. When I mentioned to Paula that I didn’t know how to refer to the heroine of the film—”should I call her Romina?”—she suggested, instead, that we call her “the character . . . so we can distinguish between the character and the director.”

    Again Once Again opens with a Kodachrome slideshow. Over images of four generations of women, Paula, the character, wonders aloud whether common sense has gotten the best of her. “Maternity,” she sighs, “feels like a grail.” She and Ramón are spending a few days—or weeks maybe; there’s no firm plan—with her mother in Buenos Aires, taking some needed time away from Ramón’s father, who has remained back in Córdoba. Like Emilia, Paula’s character is stumbling through a painful period of transition. This new, “unbearable” love she feels for her son is anxiety-causing and has unsettled her relationships, ambitions and selfhood.

    Again Once Again is a rich and rewarding text. The form of the film shifts constantly, often within a single shot, between the documentary reality of Paula’s family life and more traditionally scripted and performed dramatic scenes. Paula, the director and playwright, is most present in a series of monologues that interrupt and recontextualize the action of the film. Her character is not Generic Woman or Everyday Mother; she’s the particular product of a particular immigrant family at a particular moment in history, when a new feminist movement is shaking Argentina and the Internet has made condescending observers of us all. (“The whole world comments,” Paula told me. “It doesn’t experience, only comments.”) Again Once Again ends with a minutes-long, shape-shifting shot that resolves with a deeply satisfying ambiguity — one suggesting a moment of transformation, a heroic act.

    I spoke with Paula at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 30, 2019, the day after her film’s world premiere. Again Once Again was the standout among the new features I saw there.

    Filmmaker: There’s a scene early in the film in which your character gets ready to go to a party. It’s a familiar movie image: she stands in front of a mirror, trying on different outfits and putting on her makeup. But as a parent I was completely distracted by the sound of her son playing with a drum in another room. You could have edited that sequence in the exact same way without adding that sound into the mix.

    Paula: In fact, there was originally more of the drums, and for me it was better, but we decided to make the sound softer. It’s not a metaphor or symbol. This is what it is to be a woman with a small child. When you try to look pretty to try to seduce someone, or for no reason in particular, already in your head there is something making noise that won’t ever stop. God willing, in the best scenario, the noise will never stop. I wanted the kid to be present in this intimate moment, which is no longer intimate.

    Filmmaker: It happens again in the scene when you’re tutoring Pablo Sigal’s character. We can’t see Ramón, but we can hear him playing outside on the patio. That’s a nice shot. You and Pablo are both framed in closeup and the camera drifts back and forth between you.

    Paula: If I ever do another film, I will do that shifting more often. I like that too.

    Filmmaker: There are a number of one-on-one conversation scenes, and you use a variety of approaches: wide shots, traditional shot breakdowns, and that panning camera style. How did you settle on the right approach for each scene?

    Paula: I had my ideas and explained how I imagined it, very basically. The assistant director and I worked on the technical plan, but then once we were on location, some ideas shifted a little bit. For me, as a theater director, it’s shocking to cut, cut, cut, because I always want to see both actors in closeup. I don’t like this about making movies. In the theater, you choose what to look at. You look at the character’s hand only, you look at the eyes, you look at the whole body. But in cinema you can’t decide as a spectator.

    Filmmaker: I opened the interview with that question about the drum because it’s a specific directorial choice that makes real something you articulate in other parts of the film. In the opening voice-over you describe the psychological burden of parenting as “full-time empathy.” And later you say, “This much love can be . . .”

    Paula: “. . . unbearable.” Yes. I always think about that particular phrase. When my son grows up, I want to explain to him not that I think it was unbearable to love him, which is a terrible thing to hear from your mother!

    Filmmaker: I’m not Catholic, but I recently read a book by a Franciscan priest who says we each spend the first thirty or forty years of our life creating order, forming our ego. Then, eventually, we suffer a catastrophe that sends us into disorder, and at that point, we either wallow in chaos, retreat to the naive comforts of the old order, or, in a well-live life, we move through the disorder and find new meaning in the complexity.

    Paula: This is nice.

    Filmmaker: I only mention it because he says the two great catastrophes are tragedy and love.

    Paula: At the same level!

    Filmmaker: I can’t think of many films that deal with the “unbearable” love of parenting. Becoming a father wrecked my life.

    Paula: Tragedy and love. Both together. Yes, you buy yourself a ticket to tragedy because you have this love, and this person you care about, and you say, “If anything happens, my life is destroyed.” So you live all of the time with that happiness and tragedy. It’s terrible. You think, “Why did I choose this? I thought it would be easier.”

    Filmmaker: I joke that the moment my daughter was born was the first time I really understood I would die.

    Paula: And she also is going to die. This is terrible!

    Filmmaker: But I also understood deeply that in three generations, I would be forgotten, that this moment I was experiencing would be lost. I’ve described it as “nostalgia for the present”: I’m holding my kid, and I’m also eighty years old remembering when I was holding my kid.

    Paula: It’s a portal. It’s true. For me, there is also this greedy thing of wanting to keep my mother and her house, and my mother with my son, which is something that’s going to be gone in a few years when she no longer exists. I don’t know if her house is going to exist anymore but it won’t in this shape. I wanted to keep that. One motivation was to film this so that I would have it. My son is not this person, already, and it was just one year ago.

    Filmmaker: This all reminds me of Pablo’s monologue, when he describes Berlin as a place where time and history collapse.

    Paula: I wanted to talk about the idea of diacronía and sincronía, meaning time is not like this [she holds out one hand parallel to the table, illustrating a single timeline] but like that, superimposed [she holds out both hands parallel to the table, one above the other, illustrating two simultaneous timelines].

    Last winter I was in the jungle and ate an asado with a worker who was raised there by his grandparents. He didn’t know about buildings. “One lives above the other? How do you go down? With a lift? And women work? Like, cleaning houses?” At the same time, in the city I’m experiencing this feminist movement. I thought, “This is not the same chronological time.” I can’t say to this man, “You are a machista,” because that is not his experience. We are not all on the earth in the same chronological time, and who’s to say my time is the right time?

    Filmmaker: There’s a late-night scene where your character and her friend Mariana (Mariana Chaud) are sitting in a park, drinking with some other people. At one point, Mariana’s younger sister, Denise (Denise Groesman), leans over and kisses your character. I love Chaud’s response. The three of you are seated very close to each other, and she immediately grabs her phone and gets a genuinely uncomfortable look on her face. I can’t decide whether it’s a performance or a documentary moment.

    Paula: I don’t know either! Mariana is a very good actress, and she knew I would be kissed, so I think, somehow, she is acting it because she doesn’t care about me or the other actress. There is something concrete about two people kissing close to you. It’s uncomfortable. So it’s that combination of knowing she has to play awkward, but it was probably also uncomfortable to have kissing so close. I like this very much also, what she does. For me, the scene is about her face, not our kissing.

    Filmmaker: This is your first time directing actors in front of a camera. Did you have any strategies in mind? Was it useful to draw on your experience working with actors in the theater?

    Paula: I pulled more from the theatrical experience of gaining the confidence of the actors. I don’t say, “Put this here, do it like this.” It’s just being there with them. With the professional actors I didn’t use any strategies really, but I did do it with my mother. She didn’t learn the text because she’s not an actress. She was always telling me, two weeks before, “You have to tell me what I’m going to do. I need to know what to do.” The scenes were written, but I said, “No, you have to be you.”

    Filmmaker: I’ve hired a professional to take photos of my children, and other people say they’re beautiful, but I don’t like them.

    Paula: You don’t. Because they don’t look like themselves.

    Filmmaker: Exactly. Does your mother look like your mother? Does Ramón look like Ramón?

    Paula: He looks pretty much like himself. I don’t feel that strange thing when you see photos where he is prettier and you think, “This is not my kid.” Both of them, the mother and him, look like themselves.

    Filmmaker: Are you aware that your mother is the only performer who doesn’t get a closeup?

    Paula: No, I didn’t think about that! Now that you say it, it’s true.

    Filmmaker: In your last scene with her, you’re in the foreground, slightly out of focus, and she’s in the background. I don’t mean to push this too far, but the idea of shooting my mother in closeup terrifies me somehow.

    Paula: You can’t look at them closely! My mother is very expressive, and she has all of those lines in her face, like no real actress does. I like to see this very much—an older woman looking like an older woman. When we were preparing our conversations, the scenes where she has to have an emotional ride, I only told her what we would be talking about. Then when we shot we were all very quiet and were with her. It was surprising that she could do it without getting too nervous.

    In our second scene, she is pushing me and I have to react. I thought, “Is she going to do it? Is she going to remember?” And she said this thing I didn’t write, “He has to have other teachers, not only us.” She invented that! Ramón is sleeping behind her [out of sight], but it’s not Ramón, of course. And at the end of the scene, she turns [and puts her hand on the stand-in]. When I saw that, I thought, “She’s a liar! I can’t believe it.”

    Filmmaker: It works. I really did think, “Oh, that’s smart. They framed the shot so that Ramón doesn’t need to be there.” But when she leaned back and patted him, I wondered if he was there.

    Paula: You see? She’s lying! Did she lie to me all my life?

    Filmmaker: Earlier you mentioned the feminist movement in Argentina. In Denise’s monologue she retells the myth of Zeus giving birth to Athena and compares it to “the daughter’s revolution.” Did you invent that term?

    Paula: No, it’s a very common term now in Argentina. If you don’t know, there’s a big fight for feminism right now. It’s not that there haven’t been other feminists, but it’s become a popular movement. A lot of young girls, very young girls, are becoming almost militant. We took this color, this green [she taps her painted green fingernails on the table], for the campaign for legal abortion. So there are a lot of new terms that are very popular. All of the girls use them, you hear them everywhere. This new vocabulary has come to us. The thing I like most about this new vocabulary is “La revolucion de las hijas” [the revolution of the daughters]/ It’s not me who invented it. The girls say that, and I like it very much. That’s why I took it.

    Filmmaker: But the Athena and Zeus story is your contribution?

    Paula: I looked at Athena and thought, “There must be something here. This is a feminist story.” I didn’t remember from when I studied mythology the story of her being born through her father. In fact, they don’t say this. They say, “Zeus ate the mother, and then Athena came out of his head.” It was perfect.

    Filmmaker: It had never occurred to me that this turned Zeus into a mother.

    Paula: By breaking his head. I like that. This is something that would happen to me when I write a book—this kind of looking, searching, drifting, until you find an idea that resonates.

    Filmmaker: In the scene when you’re sitting outside talking to Pablo, there’s a moment when we see Ramón walking up very steep stone stairs in the background. I don’t know if it was scripted, but you turn your head and shoot a quick, worried glance toward him.

    Paula: This was the most dangerous thing we did, the kid going up the stairs. There was someone there with him, but Ramón was going up and down alone. In reality, I would have been much more attentive. I wouldn’t have left him. It works for the scene. She’s hitting on Pablo but is not very convinced about it. She doesn’t know how to read this moment.

    Filmmaker: Your worried look is another small reminder that the burden of parenting never goes away, but it’s also typical of the film in that it’s somewhere between a scripted scene and a moment of documentary reality. The film shifts constantly between four or five different formal styles. Was that always part of the design?

    Paula: There was always the more documentary style with my mother and Ramón, and the scenes with actors that would be more classical, and then the slideshows. I always had them. Would you say the slideshows with voiceover and the ones with actors’ monologues are the same style? How would you subdivide them?

    Filmmaker: I think they’re different viewing experiences.

    Paula: So we have four already. What would you say is the fifth?

    Filmmaker: The final shot, which is a more grand formal gesture.

    Paula: Okay. I agree. I did it [the shifts in style] very freely. I had these images, and I was lucky that my producers let me do it. I didn’t want to be…monochromatic. I like this drifting between different perceptions or sensations.

    Filmmaker: The work of a novelist is solitary and also formally limiting in some ways. Was the idea of exploring different kinds of perception part of what appealed to you about this project? Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer who also made a film?

    Paula: After shooting the film and going through post-production, this work feels more like editing a book than directing the mise-en-scene of a play. I thought, “What is this? I thought cinema was more close to theater.” But what was required of me was more similar to when I write. In fact, my character, this voice, in a book would have been a first-person narrator. Not at all like theater. Not at all.

    Filmmaker: You’ve worked with literary editors for years. Was that useful when it came time to collaborate with your film editor, Eliane Katz?

    Paula: Eliane is very experienced. For each scene I had no more than five takes, so it wasn’t a terrible amount of material. She didn’t know me personally. She had only read the script. I told her to choose. I didn’t want to tell her which takes I preferred. She did all the work alone. It’s such a personal film—with me, my mother, my son. I shot my script, so it was too much of my look, my look, my look. I wanted someone who doesn’t know me and doesn’t particularly love me to make decisions. She needed to see a woman, her mother, and her son.

    Eliane is very serious. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to. She was harsh if she needed to be; if she said something nice, I knew she meant it. I trusted her. I let her propose ideas. So she brought a cut of the film, based on the script, and it somehow worked. It was a bit long, so we took some things out, mostly scenes with Ramón. They were nice but he was taking over. This was good advice from the producers, who said, “Too much kid, too much kid, too much kid.”

    Filmmaker: When I walked out of the press screening yesterday I heard two other critics saying . . .

    Paula: If it’s too harsh don’t tell me.

    Filmmaker: It’s a criticism but it’s not harsh.

    Paula: Okay, I can hear it then.

    Filmmaker: They said, “Her face is so expressive, I don’t think she needed the monologues and voiceovers.”

    Paula: Oh, that’s okay. I like these critics because I think I’m not too expressive. I’ll take it as a compliment.

    Filmmaker: I love slow cinema, so I’m sympathetic to their argument, but I disagree in the particular case of your film.

    Paula: It all radiates from the writing, not so much from the look, the mise-en-scene: “I wrote it, now how do I shoot it?” I don’t know if I could make a movie more cinematographic, where only images tell. I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of these films, and I love them. My characters talk because I write theater.

    Filmmaker: Like I said, I’m sympathetic to the idea that a long, silent closeup has the potential to reveal something about a character that wouldn’t be expressed through dialog, but I also think it’s occasionally a convenient lie we critics like to tell each other. I appreciate that you, or your character, are trying so hard to articulate and make sense of what you’re experiencing, and your understanding evolves over the course of the film because of that effort.

    Paula: This is something I do also when I write: trying to share thoughts. I don’t know maybe yet how to share thoughts without words. Although I love silence, and I like to be bored. When I write—and maybe it’s like this also in the movie—I try to find the idea by writing the same question in two or three different ways. I need to affirm the question. Here I’m also doing that: the same ideas approached in similar ways.

    Filmmaker: In the second voice-over, you say there are no heroes in your family. Emilia says something similar in August: “My life is not what one would term heroic.” I wonder what you mean exactly by “heroic” and if you feel driven—in your life as an artist, a feminist, a daughter, a mother—to achieve that particular idea of heroism.

    Paula: I most certainly think a lot about heroism. Heroism is always a fiction, a story designed to make a life seem exceptional. Sometimes the fiction turns a death from stupid into necessary. Other times, perhaps, it makes our everyday lives seem mediocre, giving us hope that we will become the heroic ones. I don’t know. Stories are more or less always the same, but the how isn’t. How do you say something more than what you are saying, minding the digression over the action, the anecdote? I think in the details, in the digression, there is the look of the narrator.

    Maybe, when consuming heroic stories we go from general to particular, while when the reference is an everyday life story, we do the opposite, from particular to universal? When I mention heroism in the film and the book, it is never without irony. I feel that dealing with everyday life and trying not to succumb to it, not to become bitter or mean, is heroic. I also like to think of a woman’s life being heroic, without the necessity of ending it through suicide. I feel that in heroism there is always the look of “the other,” and that defining what is heroic and what isn’t is itself a moral act.

  • The Man With No Hands: Lucrecia Martel and Zama

    The Man With No Hands: Lucrecia Martel and Zama

    This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

    * * *

    Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a man out of time. Trapped in Argentina, the land of his birth, and serving at the whims of a foreign crown, he embodies the role of colonizer as a middle-aged, corporate functionary—bored, horny, witless, and incompetent. He waits and waits for a promised transfer to reunite with his wife and child, and then waits some more. When he finally does take action, volunteering to join an expedition to find and kill the notorious bandit Vicuña Porto, this adventure too is folly that ends only in further humiliation.

    Lucrecia Martel’s Zama resolves few of the episodes she selected to adapt from Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Instead, she ensnares viewers in a similarly unnerving stasis. Characters enter Zama’s life—three lovely sisters, a visiting merchant called “The Oriental,” the local noblewoman Luciana (Lola Dueñas)—and then vanish again. Throughout, Martel keeps her camera fixed on Cacho’s endlessly fascinating expression, which articulates Zama’s growing frustration, exhaustion and self-hatred. “All the close-ups of Zama with all those surrounding voices created that idea of his interior monologue,” Martel told us. It’s the maddening voice of our demented world.

    This conversation between Martel, Daniel Kasman, and Darren Hughes took place on September 13, 2017, soon after the North American premiere of Zama at the Toronto International Film Festival. Special thanks to TIFF programmer Diana Sánchez for translating.

    * * *

    KASMAN: Last time we spoke, I asked you if The Headless Woman was a horror film. I’m wondering if you see Zama as a comedy, as a comic tale?

    LUCRECIA MARTEL: For me, it’s more about absurdity. There may be a little bit of dark humor, but it’s not about solemnity. It’s not a solemn vision of the past.

    KASMAN: I feel like part of the levity of the film is the presence of animals everywhere.

    MARTEL: [laughs] That was not expensive, because we were shooting in a place where it was to easy to contract animals, to get animals.

    KASMAN: But difficult to direct—to have the llama do what you want?

    MARTEL: That was a miracle, that shot with the llama was a miracle.

    HUGHES: Because I’m an English speaker, every word of dialog gets reduced to a subtitle. Is there any context that I’m missing, in varieties of accents, varieties of voices, in languages?

    MARTEL: That loss, when you’re writing a script you know that some things are going to get lost in translation. Those particularities of the Spanish language we knew were going to be an “only child” for the Spanish-speaking community. I knew this from when I was very young, that when you’re making a period piece you have to re-invent, because there’s no register. Everything that you have written doesn’t help you imagine what the oral language would have been like, because there’s nothing recorded. So I didn’t use the typical Iberian Peninsula Spanish. For the language, what I used was a kind of neutral Spanish that was invented in Mexico for soap operas, so that they could sell soap operas. So it’s an unaccredited Spanish, it’s not a cultured Spanish. On that base I added a lot of linguistic particularities from different areas of Argentina. For every actor that had a speaking part, I would send them a long email explaining the language of the film. And after that we would rehearse.

    This is problematic for us because in Argentina, the representation of the past is very solemn and very heroic, very macho and masculine. It was really important for me to get away from those prejudices, and find a language that was almost humorous, and more close to the general population, because there was a lot of turns-of-phrase in the novel that I really, really liked. I had to shift them so that they wouldn’t be so different from ordinary everyday speech. There are also the indigenous languages that are in the film: Qom, pilagá and mbyá guaraní.

    KASMAN: Where was this shot? Was it in Salta, like your previous films?

    MARTEL: No, it’s an extensive region in the northeast of Argentina. They’re plains. They’re large plains, part Bolivia, part Argentina, part Paraguay. It’s a very hostile environment that hasn’t often been filmed in cinema. Very few films have been shot there, and it’s a place of very big rivers.

    KASMAN: Speaking of an Argentine history often seen as heroic and masculine, I know Zama’s story comes from Antonio di Benedetto’s book, but why did you want to tell the story of a man and a colonizer from this era of history?

    MARTEL: There’s a subtext in the film that really talks about how women are much more prepared for failure. That’s something that men, at least in Latin America, are not so prepared to face. This idea of “somebody that’s waiting” is somebody that is affirmed in identity. They have a strong fixed identity and a self-awareness. In masculine culture, the idea of failure is just a lot more tough and difficult. While for women, we are in the margins of power, and the idea of failure is just something that we’re much more used to. So, in feminine culture, failure also is a means to change your path, an opportunity to change your path, and not get stuck in that situation.

    That’s a subtext through the film, it’s a reflection on that, but it’s also something that happens to both genders, it’s not only men that experience it. And I think this was true for Di Benedetto. I think that this reflection is not just my idea, because the image [at the film’s end] of a man without hands is an image of a man who can’t grab onto anything. When we were developing the script, this was an idea. You have to surrender. Everybody that lives near the Paraná River knows that when you fall into it you have to let yourself be taken along in the river, because if you fight against it or if you try to swim, you’ll drown. And that concept, for the whole film, was a guide for all of us, for the actors, for everyone in the film.

    HUGHES: In an interview for The Headless Woman you said that you imagined the camera as being like a 10-year-old child who is just sitting in the room, being curious. Did you stick to that same approach? I love that metaphor.

    MARTEL: [laughs] So in this film it’s a child who… I’m not sure if he’s grown up or if he’s sick, and he’s a little bit more still.

    HUGHES: How does that work on set? For example, I love the scene with the three sisters, who are walking around Zama in his bedroom picking up coins. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time.

    MARTEL: The sound in that scene was like a music box. I did a lot of staging that was very similar, in order to generate that feeling of déjà vu in that scene. There’s a lot of similar shots throughout the film that I did on purpose because it generates a sort-of paralysed time.

    HUGHES: The novel is very episodic. As you were reading it, how were you deciding which episodes to include, which stories to resolve?

    MARTEL: When I was making the choices…there were so many it’s honestly really difficult to remember now because there was an infinite amount of choices. But I did twist some of the ideas. Also, as the novel’s a monologue, a soliloquy, when I was shooting it I didn’t want to just have one voiceover of Zama, I wanted to have a lot of voices that appear to be the voice of Zama. All the close-ups of Zama with all those surrounding voices created that idea of his interior monologue.

    KASMAN: I was curious about the film’s decision to have such subjective sound in key moments, this ringing that gets louder, and that singular moment where we suddenly enter a secondary character’s head, hearing his inner voice talking about the death of a notorious bandit. It’s already quite a subjectively told story, why did you want to take the film’s subjectivity further?

    MARTEL: That was an important way to slow time. I didn’t have a lot of material at that point and I wanted to create this idea of slowing down time. So it was a choice for rhythm, and with that sound we got to that change of rhythm. From the very beginning, since the first cut, the duration of the film was always the same: 2 hours. So what was the most challenging to adjust, to really get right, that I took 20 weeks to do, was getting the rhythm I was looking for.

    KASMAN: You’ve said in the past that when you start a film, you don’t start with an image but you start with a sound. What was the sound that sparked Zama?

    MARTEL: The first one was the Shepard tone. It’s a description of an auditory illusion that someone described in the 70s, that is a series of descending scales.

    KASMAN: It sounds like it’s always going down, but then it just keeps going…

    MARTEL: [mimics the Shepard tone] It’s continually falling. There’s a lot of insects that actually do that naturally. And frogs. So that was a decision that we made with Guido Berenblum, the sound designer. For the soundtrack we got all the sounds of insects, birds, frogs, that sounded almost electronic. And that’s interesting because these are natural sounds, sounds that occur in nature, but they give the film a kind of modern sound. It’s interesting, because it helps us reflect and think that those people living in the 18th century were surrounded by electronic sounds.

    KASMAN: Since we’re talking about sound and music, I have to ask about this modern tropical soundtrack…

    MARTEL: So a lot of those sounds I found on YouTube, because I’m addicted to YouTube, as I think we all are. Don’t go on it… [laughs]

    KASMAN: You’ll never leave!

    MARTEL: [laughs] At first, I wanted to use Paraguayan music that became popular in Paraguay in the 1950s called Guarania, and while I was looking for Guarania, I found the Tabajaras Indians, who have these incredible record covers. These were indigenous Brazilians, from the north of Brazil, they played guitar, and their dream was to triumph in Hollywood. They played a lot in Europe, in hotels and they also worked a lot in the United States.

    In the ‘50s there was a real tropical idea of what Latin American was, a tropical identity that the rest of the world had, and Rio was the image of all of Latin America. I like this idea of this Latin American pretentiousness, of wanting to triumph in Hollywood. And I like the resonance of the guitar, I thought it was perfect for the film. There’s also that element of humor, because I think there is humor when they play, but it’s also very funny that they wanted to be Hollywood stars, they had Hollywood ambitions. A lot of the aesthetic decisions in the film were taken to distance ourselves from this painterly idea of the past. That’s why I’m very happy it’s my first digital film.

    KASMAN: That really changes the image texture, with digital the past looks like the present.

    MARTEL: I like that about the film, that a lot of the decisions about light and color are taken from ‘60s and ‘70s TV shows.

    KASMAN: From Argentina?

    MARTEL: Yeah, from ‘70s Argentine shows. A lot of the ideas we had we took from Brazilian TV from the ‘60s.

    KASMAN: Did you see this TV as a child?

    MARTEL: Yeah, our family got color television in the mid-’70s.

    HUGHES: You’ve said in the past that you want to desire your actors, you want to enjoy watching them, you don’t want to be bored watching them. Is it possible to describe what you’re looking for, what is it that attracts you to a face?

    MARTEL: That’s actually something vital, it’s not so much being “in love,” but if you’re not fascinated by your actors it’s very difficult to know how to shoot them, how to film them. What’s interesting about that fascination is that it doesn’t have moral barriers, so if the protagonist is an awful person or a really good person, it doesn’t matter, and I think that’s something positive. It’s important because you self-limit yourself and don’t fall into prejudices and judgments, so beauty trumps morality.

    It’s a way of controlling myself for that time. What was important to me with the indigenous and African actors was not to put them in gestures of extreme submission that are common in other films about colonization. I thought that would make the oppression seem more obvious. That was a way of reaffirming the oppression, which is something that I didn’t want to do. It would be like filming a rape, to be filming something that’s an awful image but at the same time you could be fulfilling some fantasies that a lot of people have. It was really important not to reaffirm that oppression.

    KASMAN: In the scene where a colonizing family is asking for their land rights, and Zama gives them 40 indigenous natives, there’s this amazing portrait of an actress who has no lines of dialogue. What do you say to the actress of such a role?

    MARTEL: That poor actress, so that the dog would lick her we had to rub salami on her! [laughs] On her hands, on her face… No, what was important for me to show in that scene was just the frivolous way some decisions are taken. Zama wanted that woman, he was hot for her, and he was ready to give away these 40 Indians. What I wanted to show was the way big historical decisions are often just these…it was just to lower this image of the colonizer, this brute. Because this film talks a lot about power, if you portray someone like that as powerful, then they continue being powerful. That was a crucial point for our Latin American cinema.

    KASMAN: The first half of the film is quite sensual, although Zama is ultimately very sexually unfulfilled.

    MARTEL: That’s an important point, because it defines Zama’s stay in that colony for the whole time. In the book, there was a rape scene that I did originally have in the script. There were two sexual scenes, but in the end for budget reasons I had to take one out, and I ended up taking the rape scene out because I had no desire to film a rape. The idea of not having any violence in cinema is, of course, crazy too, but right now in Argentina every 16 to 20 hours a woman ends up dead or raped, and I just had no desire to film that. Right now, I don’t have any desire to see a dead or raped woman, or film one. I think that’s something that those of us who make cinema really have to think about, because when you’re filming a rape scene, filming a violent scene, filming a racist scene: sometimes you might be contributing to some sort of fulfillment, even though what you’re really doing is denouncing that. It’s a problem that we have to think about a lot.

    HUGHES: How would you characterise Zama’s condition? Some critics are calling it “madness.” Or is it malaise, is it paranoia? How would you describe it?

    MARTEL: For me, being part of our culture implies being in a state of craziness. Unless you are actually in a state of insanity, it’s impossible to accept the idea of “work” and the time we lose at work. The things that we’re preoccupied with, the things that we worry about…when you lose someone you care about, that’s the moment when you realize how ridiculous the things that worry us are.

    And this formidable state of dementia has allowed us to make death something that’s far away from us, not something close. And it’s the only thing we can absolutely be sure will happen to all of us. It’s possible that one might not fall in love, it’s possible that one might not get married—but it’s impossible that we’re not going to die. And so for me our culture implies a state of dementia, and its most obvious symptom is language. The immense power of language is to sustain that dementia.

    HUGHES: Are you saying that we use language to convince ourselves that we’re not demented?

    MARTEL: No, on the contrary. [laughs] Language holds up this whole facade. That’s why poetry is almost like a code, like a code that you would find on a safe that could reveal that insanity, the madness.

    When I think about my characters, I think about a monster—I find it much more useful than thinking about psychological states. I think about the idea of the monster. Because the monster reveals an unstable naturalness. It’s an unnatural being. Because the idea of the monster is much more applicable to the human being than any other idea. And I‘m using a very classical idea, the idea of “monster” as something that appears as exceptional. It comes from the Latin monstrare “to reveal”—and a divine message is revealed. In Greco-Latin cultures, when an albino child or a Siamese child would be born, they would think that that it brings a divine message to the communities. So that’s why it’s very important to watch Trump, because that hair is definitely announcing some sort of important catastrophe.

    KASMAN: Does this relate to the character of Vicuña Porto in Zama, how everyone has a different story, a different picture of him? And when we meet him he’s just a normal guy, he’s committed some sins, no big deal—his legend is somehow constructed through language, through rumor.

    MARTEL: Yes. At first, he seems like a kid, but he’s capable of cutting somebody’s hands off.  So he’s both things. A lot of times in Zama what’s important to see is people will announce who they are—“Yes, I am this person,” “Yes, I am that person,” “Yes, I have this function”—and the state of Being is really an accumulation of words, of language, of self-affirmations—but verbal ones, not a state of physical being. When I give film courses, I do 3-hour classes, and what I do is base it all on dialogue, because dialogue is the key to discovering the perception of the film. Not dialogue in the sense of explaining what’s happening in the film, but dialogue in that codified sense, the sense of being a code.

    KASMAN: Do you relate to directing differently now, because of this gap that you’ve had since The Headless Woman and transitioning to digital filmmaking?

    MARTEL: It was not really important to me to shoot analogue. I don’t have that nostalgia for celluloid and I’m really interested in new technologies. For me, it’s more important to have control over things like the editing, to be able to experiment more, than having nostalgia for this beautiful image. That is not so important for me. For me, right now because sound technology has improved so much, that to me has much more importance. If I have to lose a little bit of image and gain so much in sound, to me it’s a good trade-off.

    KASMAN: You haven’t made a film in nearly ten years. Have you yearned to make cinema in this time since The Headless Woman?

    MARTEL: I did, I was working on a script from 2008 to mid-2010, a science-fiction comic. That didn’t get filmed. But I’m not such a huge fan of cinema. I like it, but what I’m really passionate about is making plans, and organizing stuff, making plans to shoot things. I have been continually working in that time. Excel sheets I like very much. [laughs] Since I was very young I’ve always been the one making the plans, the schedules, organizing, even when we played cowboys when I was a kid I was the one with the maps.

    HUGHES: Do you leave room on the set for freedom? For improvisation in the sense of framing or action, or is it all meticulous and planned?

    MARTEL: There’s liberty, but it’s all before. Once we get to the set, everything should be prepared, all the thinking should have happened beforehand. But of course, there’s always things that you don’t account for, like the llama, that just happened. So we put the llama in that room but no one knew what it would do.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    The Master

    Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson
    Because I’ve waited until September 21, the day of The Master‘s theatrical release, to write this capsule, and because hundreds of thousands of words have already been spilled on this film (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review at MUBI nails my response almost exactly), I’ll just add two quick thoughts.

    First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly a strange thing, and not just by Hollywood standards. The way he collapses his chest and distorts his face reminded me of Emmanuel Schotte in L’Humanite (Dumont, 1999) and also of Antonin Artaud’s disintegration from the striking beauty of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) to the toothless madman of his final years. Phoenix’s histrionic showdowns with Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t impress me nearly as much as his moment-to-moment embodiment of inarticulate panic. I’d like to see a Douglas Gordon-like version of this film built from nothing but long-distance shots of Phoenix walking.

    Second, like nearly everyone else I think the final hour or so of The Master is muddled and frustrating, but I love the final scene, when Freddie: a. finally gets laid, and b. uses the language of “The Cause” as a means of seduction. My main complaint with PT Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood (2007), is that the meticulous period detail is window dressing rather than anything like a real historical context, which is why I’ve never been convinced by readings of it as an analysis of a particular development in capitalism (or religion, for that matter).

    The Master, I’d argue, is about post-WWII America in a way that Blood is not about the early-20th century oil boom. Because it defeated a black-and-white evil in Hitler, we like to pretend the “greatest generation” wasn’t devastated — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, sexually — by the trauma of war. While hardly a perfect film, The Master is, I think, a curious study of the anxiety and desperation that characterized the lives of so many returning veterans and the loved ones they’d left behind. (I never would have guessed a PT Anderson movie would remind me of The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler, 1946].) That final sex scene makes explicit what has been implied throughout the film. Cults, modern marketing and advertising, talk therapy, family, religion, sex, love — especially love — are all a kind of maddening seduction.

    Prediction: Someone is already writing an academic conference paper on The Master and jouissance.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

    Dir. by Marcelo Gomes
    First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays Veronica here, also starred in Gomes’s first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favorite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is Veronica’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: What’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptized by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’s stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’s documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

    Birds

    Dir. by Gabriel Abrantes
    I saw the double bill of Birds and Viola because so many friends — really, everyone I spoke to who had seen any of Piñeiro’s work — told me to. So I went into the screening without having even read the program description, which in hindsight I regret. Birds is a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti. I hope to see Birds again before writing more about it. I suspect it will reward the effort.

    Viola

    Dir. by Matías Piñeiro
    The great discovery of TIFF 2012, Viola is a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances, and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that he cuts and pastes into his dialog, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

    Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music and film bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-ups, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

    That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola is the new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favorites take place in a theater dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the the classic love triangle. The best comparison I can think of is the cafe and tram scenes in Jose Luis Guerin‘s In the City of Sylvia (2007).

    According to Andrea Picard’s excellent program note, Viola is the second film (after 2010’s Rosalinda) in a proposed series “inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s Girls of Fire, an 1854 collection of short stories and sonnets each named for its eponymous heroine.” I can’t wait to see the rest.

    Wavelengths 4

    More to come in my full write-up for Senses of Cinema.

  • Lisandro Alonso: Who’s John Ford?

    Lisandro Alonso: Who’s John Ford?

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    The basic narrative outline of Liverpool – a solitary man journeys home – will be familiar to anyone who has seen Lisandro Alonso’s earlier feature, Los Muertos (The Dead, 2004). When we first meet Farrel (Juan Fernandez), he is napping in the bowels of a freighter, surrounded on all sides by ear-splitting machinery. This claustrophobic, metal-and-grease environment is something new in Alonso’s cinema, and the contrast created by it and the vast, snow-covered landscapes Farrel explores in the second half of the film is telling. I ran into Alonso the day after our interview and asked him one last question: “Is there any John Ford in that shot of Farrel standing in an open doorframe?”

    He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked, “Who’s John Ford?”

    In Liverpool, really for the first time, Alonso’s protagonist struggles with the social order – one more instantiation of the Fordian hero. Unlike Argentino (Argentino Vargas), the recently paroled killer in Los Muertos who remains a blank slate even after the final frame, Farrel is a man of complex psychology – so much so that even Alonso, who claims to have no interest in explaining his characters, can’t resist speculating here about his motives. In the final act of Liverpool, Farrel wanders away from the small mountain village where he has travelled to visit his dying mother, but Alonso stays behind, turning his camera on the people Farrel long ago abandoned. The final shot, of Farrel’s daughter holding a small keepsake, is multivalent, intensely satisfying, and further evidence of Alonso’s place among the world’s great filmmakers.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I love when a film breaks in the middle and becomes something unexpected.

    ALONSO: You mean the girl?

    HUGHES: The entire final sequence, really, from the moment Farrel leaves. What was your starting point for the film?

    ALONSO: Before shooting a film, I first think of a place. So, the first thing that came to mind was the little town.

    HUGHES: How did you find it?

    ALONSO: I was looking at a magazine and saw some pictures of the camp and I thought, “I have to go there.” I got in my car and drove 3,500 km and met the people I saw in the images. I started talking with them and thought, “Okay, maybe I can make a film with them.”

    HUGHES: How long did you stay with them?

    ALONSO: Before shooting the film? I visited several times for a total of about 15 days. Something like that. Did you see my earlier film, Los Muertos?

    HUGHES: Yes.

    ALONSO: Maybe you remember there was a scene where Vargas kills an animal in his boat and then a child appears eating fruit?

    HUGHES: Right.

    ALONSO: Suddenly the film changes for this kid. And I’ve always kept the thought, “Why can’t I stay with this kid?” And so that became the point of departure for Liverpool.

    HUGHES: The girl seems to be the heart and soul of the film.

    ALONSO: She’s just the female character. I don’t know. I cannot say. Whatever character you want to think is the heart or the soul of the film, it’s okay. Why do you think it’s her?

    HUGHES: Maybe because I had a personal connection with the film. I knew someone very much like Farrel and saw the damage he left behind. I was glad that in this film, unlike in Los Muertos, you gave your protagonist a society and a family. It doesn’t explain him, but it gives him some context.

    ALONSO: I don’t like to explain characters, because as soon as you do you also judge them. I’m not interested in judging them. I just observe them and use montage so that the spectator must make sense of the sensations of the film.

    HUGHES: Your montage is different in this film. I’d come to expect whole sequences to be shot from a single, fixed position, but in Liverpool there are a few more traditional shot breakdowns, especially indoors. I’m thinking especially of the little café where everyone eats. You came indoors with Fantasma (2006), but was shooting inside small locations a challenge you gave yourself in this film?

    ALONSO: No, actually, it was freezing. [Laughs.] No, it’s true. It’s a very different kind of environment than in La Libertad [2001] or Los Muertos. It’s totally freezing. No birds, no cars, no trains, no planes, no voices, no animals walking around, nothing. Everything that happens there happens inside, because outside it’s too cold to have a conversation. So, I preferred to be realistic and to shoot inside.

    After Fantasma, I became more interested in trying to generate a kind of strain from interiors. When you are shooting realistically in nature – with the trees and the birds and the movement of the camera – it’s easy to create something unrealistic. But when you’re shooting in a bedroom, what can I do? It’s more difficult for me.

    HUGHES: The opening shot of Los Muertos is a good example. What most interests me about that shot is that you’re using what could be described as a contemplative style – long takes, non-professional actors, elliptical editing – but you’re injecting into this “transcendent” moment the experience of dread or violence. Are you interested in …

    ALONSO: … which part? [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: Well, both, I guess.

    ALONSO: Hmmm, I don’t know. If I had to choose, I would say I prefer the boring parts of cinema. You know what I’m trying to say? In Los Muertos, I thought it was a good first image – a kind of dream or memory of this character who was in jail, the day before he’s released.

    I know what you are asking. I’m trying hard to change my way of shooting, but I can’t. Each day when I shoot, I shoot with the same style. Maybe in the future I will introduce some more elements. The thing is, when I was studying in university, I chose to walk this way. [He grabs two pens and aligns them on the table to illustrate divergent paths.] Now I can move a bit to the left or right, but I’ll always be walking this way. I don’t want to go back and take the other path.

    Also, I don’t think I’d be good working the other way. It’s not so easy to say, “Oh, now I’m going to make my commercial film. Now I’m going to make an art film for festivals. Now a comedy. Now a Western.” I just do what I think I can do, so it’s not a matter of choosing what kind of film I want to make.

    In the future, there will be new questions and, so, maybe new answers. Maybe I’ll change. Maybe actors, maybe not. Maybe more dialogue, maybe not. Maybe a film totally without humans. Who knows?

    HUGHES: In interviews you have said that this process – driving 3,500km, exploring new places, meeting new people – is your favourite part of making a film.

    ALONSO: Maybe it is, because otherwise I would have no excuse to meet these people. I go there with the excuse of being a filmmaker and I can say, “Hello, how are you? Hello, how are you?” Afterwards, maybe the film is good, maybe it’s bad, but I’ve had the chance to meet people who live away from TV and cities and newspapers and radios. I enjoy sharing the way they live with audiences, and I think they enjoy the process of working with us, too – the crew, I mean. There’s never more than twelve of us. It’s a matter of respect.

    HUGHES: You mentioned finding this location in a magazine. How does this secluded, old sawmill function today? I assume there are trucks that climb even higher into the mountains to log the forest. Does everyone we see work for the same company?

    ALONSO: There’s no company anymore. There’s an owner and there are some people from Chile who live there to keep the place alive and functioning. It was much more active in the past, but today it’s not really producing. Remember Torres, the cook? He’s been there for the past ten years, working and looking through the same window, and nothing ever happens on the other side of that window. Ten years! Maybe some rabbits will pass. I’m very curious about him, about the mystery of what is going on in his head. That’s why I like to be there before the shooting. He looks out that window, I look out this window. I’m thinking about him, he’s thinking about me. “What is he doing here?” “What is he doing here?” If I’m lucky, then some of these feelings are there in the film. Or at least that’s what I’m interested in, you know?

    HUGHES: There have been several films this week that have adopted an observational style of filmmaking. There’s such a difference between the ones that work and those that don’t. In the bad ones, the directors seem to think that, if they just point a camera at an actor long enough, audiences will magically intuit some great mystery about the character. Your films are different but I’m not sure if I can explain why.

    ALONSO: I don’t know either, but I understand what you’re saying. I see it also at film festivals. So, what the fuck? [Laughs.] What is happening? [Laughs.] I don’t know what’s happening, why I don’t feel anything with some films.

    HUGHES: Do you know Pedro Costa’s films?

    ALONSO: [Smiles] Yeah.

    HUGHES: There’s something about having someone behind the camera who is giving himself to the other people in the room.

    ALONSO: I’m not talking about my films right now, but I can feel very easily if there is a filmmaker behind the camera – being honest with the characters, with the house, with the streets, with a dog, with the sound, with the photography. It’s hard, though, because my uncle, for example, will go to the cinema and he doesn’t feel shit about Costa or about the new director who puts a camera in front of a dog; it’s all the same. It’s my hope that there are audiences who can feel the difference.

    HUGHES: How do you find your camera set-ups? For example, there’s the scene where Farrel passes out and is carried into a room and put in bed. How do you settle on a camera position? Is it intuitive? Is it just finding the most practical place for the camera?

    ALONSO: No, I just talk with the D.P. and say, “What do you think?” We usually have no more than three options. And then we talk to the people who live there, and we ask, “How do you usually enter the room?” “Like this”, they say, and then we’ll decide where to put the camera. Most of the time it depends on the action and what I prefer to see behind the character. We don’t spend much time discussing the camera. For sure, we are not going to put it too close to the actor. Usually, it’s a medium-shot or a bit further away. I want to see them, but I also respect the distance.

    HUGHES: Didn’t you get fairly close to Farrel’s face? It is somewhere in the first half of the film. I remember being surprised to see him in such a tight close-up.

    ALONSO: Yeah, it’s the only close-up I’ve ever shot. It’s when he wakes up in the abandoned bus. It’s the only time I’ve ever gone like this [creates a tight frame around his own face with both thumbs and forefingers and then recreates the shot, pulling the frame further and further way]. I don’t know why. [Laughs.]

    No, I really wanted to understand – and this is me taking on the point of view of the audience – that he asked for permission to go out, he’s in his land, he got drunk last night, he got together with a prostitute. “Now, I wake up as I did twenty years ago, in the same state, drinking whiskey. This is my fate. What am I going to do now? Now I have to go back and see if my mother is still alive. Should I go? Or should I keep drinking here?” I thought, “Let me see your eyes and maybe I’ll be able to understand your preoccupations.” But maybe it’s just a Kuleshov Effect. I don’t know. [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: Where did the idea for the final shot come from?

    ALONSO: We kept shooting the life of this girl for another half hour. And after Farrel had his final scene with his parents – or whoever he is, the old man – he remembers he has this [Alonso fumbles with a piece of paper like Farrel fumbles with the keychain]. He doesn’t know if she can read because she’s a little bit retarded. So what does “Liverpool” mean? For her, it’s like this piece of paper. It doesn’t mean anything for her. It’s just the one thing given to her by her father.

    For me, it’s more important for the audience than for the girl, because the audience is the only one who can recognize that Liverpool is a distant port. Now, we are thinking, “What about Farrel? Where is he going? Is he back on the cargo ship? Or is he dying in the middle of the mountain?” It’s only the audience who can make the connection between Farrel, the girl and the keychain. If there’s some power in that scene, it comes from the spectator, not from the frame or whatever. What do you think happens to Farrel?

    HUGHES: I assume he went back to the ship.

    ALONSO: How does he get there? By walking?

    HUGHES: I don’t know. Maybe another log truck passes by?

    ALONSO: I don’t know. Maybe I’m more negative. [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: You think he dies somewhere under a three-foot snowdrift?

    ALONSO: Like The Shining!

    HUGHES: He gets lost in the labyrinth!

    ALONSO: He just went back to this place to chase a strange memory. He thinks, “Oh, my mother is alive. She is alive, but she cannot see, she cannot hear. But I had to go back.” So he says goodbye. He doesn’t give a shit about the daughter. No one likes him at the sawmill. No one knows him except for the old man. So he knows: “Soon my mother will die, and now I know. Now I can feel lighter. Now I can drink seriously.” [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: You think he’s made his peace? I don’t know.

    ALONSO: I don’t know either. But that’s what I like about films. When I know too much about the characters or the subject, I don’t do it.

  • Los Muertos (2004)

    Los Muertos (2004)

    Dir. by Lisandro Alonso

    I’ve been trying to catch up with the work of a few of the highly regarded directors who will have new films at TIFF this year, and this morning I watched Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, which, at least on a first viewing, is one of the most exciting and important films I’ve seen in some time. I just regret that I hadn’t had a chance to see it before watching Alonso’s Fantasma at TIFF ’06. I was put off by what I felt was a misanthropic streak in that film, though after having spent 80 minutes with Vargas now, I wonder how different my experience of it would be.

    I’m tempted to call Los Muertos “important” because it complicates a tendency of contemporary art cinema. So many of the films I like fall into particular formal habits: long takes, static cameras, expressionless faces, an avoidance of close-ups and reaction shots, little non-diegetic sound, and a curious attention to physical space (typically the natural world — trees, leaves, grass, bodies of water, etc.). It’s become a kind of formula, and critics and cinephiles who are drawn to these kinds of films are prone, I think, to be a bit too forgiving of their faults. Like, I remember watching Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest last year and thinking, “Okay, this movie has everything I like in a film, so way does its stab at transcendence seem so totally calculated and false to me?”

    What fascinates me about Los Muertos is that it explores the connection between form and content by taking all of the tropes of “transcendental cinema” and staining them, by narrative means, with dread and violence. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s answer (apocryphal, perhaps) when he was asked if he was the father of New Age music: “No, my music has evil in it.”

  • 2007 TIFF Day 5

    2007 TIFF Day 5

    I’m the wrong person to write about No Country for Old Men. It’s exactly the film I was expecting, so I’m not sure why I came away from it so disappointed. The crowd had something to do with my reaction, I’m sure. As with Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I saw here two years ago, also at the massive Ryerson auditorium, I was surrounded again by viewers who laughed at and applauded the bone breaking and blood splattering. I don’t blame them, really. The Coens give Javier Bardim many of the best lines. His ruthless murderer, Anton Chigurh, has an irresistible charisma, which I’m sure will be interpreted as the seductive power of Evil or something. But I just don’t really care. It’ll win a million Oscars.

    I deliberately scheduled several films this year from South America, and also films by young female directors. I think I’m in search of another Lucretia Martel. Encarnacion is Anahi Berneri’s second narrative feature, following 2005’s A Year Without Love, which I’m now curious to see. I enjoy finding films like Encarnacion at TIFF — small character pieces that get the details right. Erni, the film’s protagonist, fits somewhere in that long line of movie heroines who, having reached a certain age, find their beauty fading and their place in the world less secure. I couldn’t help but think of All About Eve, Opening Night, and All About My Mother. Twenty years past her heydays as a calendar pin-up and B-movie queen, Erni now lives alone in Buenos Aires, where she continues to hustle for work on television and in commercials. The dramatic line of the film takes her back to her home town, where she reunites with her disapproving sister and helps to initiate her beloved niece into adolescence. The strength of the film, though, is Silvia Perez’s performance as Erni. A character who could very easily be made maudlin or pathetic has, instead, a curious grace and independence. I love the scenes between her and her occasional lover. A kind of Third Wave hero, she visits and leaves him at her own will.

    Last summer, Nick Rhombes offered a couple fun posts about the “radical beauty” of contemporary CGI spectacles. Watching Superman Returns while listening to his randomly shuffling iPod proved an interesting experience, he writes. “My theory is that we don’t see the beauty and artistry of these CGI films because we have never really learned how to appreciate them. Watching them with random music frees us from the prison-house of narrative compulsion; we see them with new eyes. With open eyes.” When I wasn’t laughing at the ridiculous trainwreck of a film that is Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I was thinking of Nick’s posts. There comes a point when these Hollywood picture shows become so incoherent, when the camera movements become so unmotivated, and when the performances become so irrelevant that there’s nothing left on screen but pure Surrealist spectacle. And people say avant-garde cinema can’t find an audience.

    Wavelengths concluded this year with a performance of Bruce McClure’s Everytwo Circumflicksrent…Page 298. Before the screening, McClure passed out ear plugs, telling us that he had come to accept that loud noise was an essential component of his process but that he recognized others might not be so disposed. He also expressed an interest in the ways that audiences choose to modify their experience of art — wearing ear plugs to rock shows, for example. His performance featured two modified projectors, each displaying a small circle of light that flickered and shifted focus. The soundtracks of each film had been altered by hand, and the rhythmic loops generated by them were then processed through two guitar pedals, which McClure “played” live. The result was overwhelming — loud, disorienting, hypnotic. At the risk of slipping into cliche, I would call it a performance of elemental cinema: sound and light projected in time. It was a great way to cap the Wavelengths programs.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 4

    2007 TIFF Day 4

    Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, in case you haven’t heard, is a coming-of-age story about a hermaphrodite. Alex has lived the first fifteen years of her life as a girl, but the inevitable onset of sexual desire — bewildering enough to those of us not suffering from gender confusion — has done a number on her and also on her parents, who have gone out of their way to protect Alex from discrimination and from the well-intentioned curiosity of doctors. Rather than castrate Alex as an infant, they decided to allow her to choose her gender when she was ready. XXY examines the consequences of that decision. What I most liked about the film was its treatment of that post-pubescent madness we all suffered through. Another important character, a young boy struggling with some sexual confusion of his own, is as awkward, gangly, and desperate for affection as Alex is. I actually wish Alex had been a “normal” girl or boy because the enormity of her “situation” dominated every scene, allowing little breathing room for the characters to transcend the roles as written. I believe it was the Variety reviewer who described XXY as a very good after school special. A bit harsh maybe, but not far from my own take.

    Secret Sunshine. I hate to write capsule reviews of films like this — sprawling, complex stories that pull off the remarkable feat of being simultaneously tragic, charming, inscrutable, and sublime. The tone of this thing could have collapsed at any moment; Lee Chang-dong is some kind of genius for pulling it off. Secret Sunshine is about a young woman, Shin-ae, who moves with her son to the small town where her now-deceased husband was born and raised. There she meets several locals, including a persistent suitor (Song Kang-ho in my favorite performance of the year), a pack of gossipy housewives, and a pharmacist who is convinced that Shin-ae would find true happiness if only she would turn her life over to Christ. After several plot turns that I refuse to spoil, Secret Sunshine becomes, among many other things, the truest depiction of evangelical Christianity I’ve seen on film. Fortunately, Lee’s film is not evangelical itself and, instead, wrestles with the strangeness and disappointments of faith in a way that The Mourning Forest, with its contrivances, could only mimic. Damn, I love this film.

    And speaking of wrestling with faith (which, by the way, is far and away the dominant recurring theme of this year’s festival, or at least of my programmed version of it). I’ve gotten in the habit of describing Saverio Costanzo’s In Memory of Myself as a genre film, a suspense thriller in which the central, driving mystery is faith. It might be strangest film I’ve seen all week, with shades of Kubrick and Dreyer and a formal rigor I wasn’t expecting and have yet to fully process. I honestly don’t know if it’s a good film but I enjoyed every minute of it. I’m reserving all judgment until after a second viewing, which I hope comes sooner rather than later.

    Hannes Schupbach’s Erzahlung is a commissioned portrait of Cesare Ferronato, an 80-year-old Italian sculptor. I’m a total sucker for films that document the artistic process, especially when they allow us to observe hands in action, but what most charmed me about this 40-minute, silent picture was its focus on Ferronato’s domestic life. There’s a wonderful moment, for example, when we watch him and his wife (I assume) play a game of chess. For Shupbach, there’s no distinction to be drawn between art-making and love and work and community — each is absolutely integral to the other.

    Seeing Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses on the massive screen in Varsity 1 was a real treat, but I really wish it had been programmed at any time other than 10 pm on Sunday night. I stayed strong for the first 75 minutes, but the last 25 are a bit of a blur. Fifteen challenging films in three days did me in. Schindler’s Houses is assembled from static shots of the homes and buildings Rudolf Schindler designed in and around Los Angeles between 1921 and 1952. They’re arranged chronologically and include both exterior and, in many cases, interior shots. The sheer quantity of footage has an interesting effect: Rather than the dusty curiosities you might find in a coffee-table collection of architectural photographs, the buildings shift and morph as they find new contexts. They’re domestic spaces that continually evolve to satisfy the tastes of their occupants. They’re material objects with material values (it’s impossible to watch the film and not be reminded of California’s real estate bubble). They’re objets d’art, relics of Modernism. Emigholz matches Schindler’s eye for composition; like Erzahlung this is another meeting of artists. As an aside, I would love to see a remix of this film using only shots of bookshelves (apparently a hallmark of Schindler’s designs). I have a fixation with browsing others’ bookshelves and found myself wanting to linger just a bit longer in front of those we see in the film.

  • Little Sky (2004)

    Little Sky (2004)

    Dir. by María Victoria Menis

    Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.

    Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.

    Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.