Long Pauses

Tag: Cinema Scope

  • Hillbilly Elegy

    Hillbilly Elegy

    Dir. by Ron Howard

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    This essay was originally published at Cinema Scope.

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    In his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who today are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States.” Over the previous century, the Scots-Irish smallholders of Appalachia—a region that stretches more than 2,000 miles from western New York to northern Alabama—had been systematically dispossessed of their land and their makeshift livelihoods by a dysfunctional patchwork of property laws, by an influx of capital that trapped mountain people in structured indebtedness, and, in the decades following the Civil War, by the industrialized extraction of iron and coal, the clear-cutting of forests, the resulting erosion of topsoil, and, as technologies advanced, mountaintop removal. In Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, historian Steven Stoll compares the plight of the region to that of a colonized people: “The question we need to ask of every migration from country to city is whether it originated from a government scheme or corporate gambit that so degraded a people’s autonomy as to give them no choice.”

    MacCorkle’s concern was notable among politicians of his day, as many in West Virginia’s congressional delegation at the time were industrialists themselves and beholden more to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil than the citizens they represented. In subsequent decades, the governor’s worst fears were realized. The wholesale destruction of Appalachia’s subsistence economy created starvation-level poverty, which forced tens of thousands of people into wage labour and accelerated the first hillbilly migration—from mountain homesteads to mining towns, where workers were often paid in scrip that could only be spent at the company store. The region’s rich supply of natural resources and exploitable labour, along with its increasingly efficient transportation systems, resulted over time in the extraction and transfer of billions of dollars (by today’s accounting) from Appalachia into the capital reserves of east coast companies. The market crash of 1929 took most of that capital with it, necessitating mine closures and putting workers in a double bind: having traded what little value remained in their land for a steady, if inadequate, wage, they were left hungry, homeless, and indebted. When the elderly union members in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) conjure images of the violent confrontations of the ’30s, they are speaking on behalf of that collective, ever-present trauma.

    It should come as little surprise that none of this history is present in Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s adaptation of conservative commentator J.D. Vance’s 2016 rags-to-riches memoir. In interviews, Howard has gone to great pains to erase what he calls the “sociopolitical aspect” of Vance’s story, vanishing history, labour, capital, and public policy with a wave of his wand and with those magical, middlebrow incantations, “universality,” “shared humanity,” and “very relatable characters.” In that sense, he’s following Vance’s lead. “This book is not an academic study,” Vance writes in the opening pages, with a knowing wink to anyone back home who might accuse the Yale Law grad and venture capitalist of joining the class of elites for whom he expresses such resentment and envy throughout his bestseller. Rather, Vance offers as his one credential for speaking on behalf of an entire region—often literally in the royal “we”—the unimpeachable moral authority of authenticity, a sly rhetorical strategy that makes for good book-club discussions and bad art. Howard has made a habit of leveraging that ethos when framing his adaptation. He likes to tell the story of when Vance visited the set and then offered to call every member of the Academy on Glenn Close’s behalf because “she has somehow captured the absolute essence of my grandmother.” To reinforce the point, Howard inserts home videos of the Vance family into the closing credits, assuring viewers that, yes, Mamaw really was a larger-than-life character and, yes, Close’s transformation really is awards-worthy.

    Hillbilly Elegy is about the legacy of the second migration, when scores of young people, Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw among them, fled the mountains and settled in lowland burgs like Middletown, Ohio, where the postwar boom, union benefits, and company pensions offered the promise of middle-class stability. Howard reduces their journey to a montage of predictable images during the opening titles: a passing glance at a Route 23 road sign, a bustling small-town square, and a CGI rendering of the AMCO plant in its heyday, all colour-corrected in the nostalgic sepia tones of an America that was still great. Jump cut to 1997, and that wide-eyed promise is lost: what little we see of Middletown is now boarded up, the plant stands vacant and decrepit, and Mamaw and Papaw (Bo Hopkins), both of them bent-shouldered and sallow, are shuttling their troubled daughter, Bev (Amy Adams), and her two teenaged children, J.D. (Owen Asztalos) and Lindsay (Haley Bennett), back home after a family reunion in Kentucky. Despite his protests, Howard has, with that elision of six decades, stumbled into a fine cinematic analogue for the sociopolitical content of Vance’s book, which amounts to a portrait of ahistorical resentment, salved by doctrinaire conservative snake oil. For the Vance family story to be universal, Howard must likewise edit out the complex tangle of causes and simply accept the real-world effects—domestic violence, alienation, unemployment, opioid addiction—as natural and representative. (As an aside, Joseph L. Anderson’s Spring Night Summer Night [1967] is the best film about postwar Appalachia. John Crawford’s three-minute, regret-soaked barroom monologue renders most of Hillbilly Elegy redundant.)

    Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor have crafted a serviceable through line to Vance’s story by cross-cutting between his adolescent years, when his home life was at its most chaotic, and two days during his time at Yale, when a potential career-making interview for a prestigious internship is threatened by Bev’s most recent relapse. Howard’s and Taylor’s creative shuffling of events makes Hillbilly Elegy less a film about the life-saving influence of a take-no-shit grandmother, as Vance often describes his book, and more about the double consciousness of social mobility, the grievous push and pull between every aspirational dream and the life left behind. (Yes, the film is at its best when it strikes a universal note.) Gabriel Basso, who plays the older J.D., reminds me of my neighbours here in East Tennessee: he carries the character’s burdens convincingly and sympathetically, even when speaking in clichés. That the culminating scene between J.D. and Bev doesn’t quite land has less to do with the scenario or Basso’s and Adams’ performances than with Howard’s head-scratching lapses in taste. If, four decades into his career as a director, Howard still deems it necessary to insert a POV shot of piss filling a cup to express the emotional turmoil of a 13-year-old boy forced by his family to help his addict mother test clean, then there’s little hope he has a great film in him.

    I can’t decide if I agree with critics who accuse Hillbilly Elegy of poverty tourism. The film fails in the same banal ways most biopics fail: by racing too quickly from incident to incident and clumsily conforming a complicated life to the ready-made beats of a script outline. The film’s few markers of Appalachia—green hills and ramshackle houses, mostly—are too empty to signify anything at all. Howard shot parts of Hillbilly Elegy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, a short drive from the Chattooga River where John Boorman made Deliverance (1972) and just south of the locations Michael Mann used as stand-ins for New York’s western frontier in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). You’d hardly notice. Unlike the directors who have made great films about Appalachia—I’d add Karl Brown’s Stark Love (1927) and Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) to the short list—Howard is untroubled by ghosts of the past and oblivious to the sublime. If I’m not offended by Hillbilly Elegy as I’d expected to be (in that respect I suppose it’s an improvement over Vance’s book), it’s because in his effort to elide history, Howard has made a film about a world of his own invention, a Middle America that exists only on Netflix.

  • A State of Uncertainty: Tsai Ming-liang on Days

    A State of Uncertainty: Tsai Ming-liang on Days

    This interview was originally published at Cinema Scope

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    There’s no exact precedent for the long creative collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. In 1991, as the story goes, Tsai stepped out of a screening of a David Lynch movie and spotted Lee sitting on a motorbike outside of an arcade. The director was struggling to cast a television program about troubled teens, so he struck up a conversation with Lee and invited him to audition. During the shoot Tsai became frustrated and began to doubt whether Lee could perform the role, and in the process he discovered that the problem was his own expectations. “I was projecting too many of my own ideas onto Lee’s performance, rather than allowing him to draw upon his own natural way of behaving,” Tsai told Declan McGrath in 2019.

    Over the course of three decades and more than 30 films, Tsai and Lee have constantly refined and simplified their methods of observation, first stripping away traditional performance styles, and then the three-act structure, and then, finally, the industrial machinery of film production. Following his last narrative feature, Stray Dogs (2013), Tsai hinted at retirement. In fact, he moved increasingly into art spaces, taking commissions for gallery work and exploring the breakthrough he had achieved in 2012 with the first of the Walker films, in which Lee, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, moves as slowly as possible through urban environments. Tsai has said that he now happily accepts his destiny, which is simply to film Lee Kang-sheng’s face. In retrospect, each step of his career seems to have been toward achieving a more pure expression of that ambition, removing all vestiges of interference between the camera and Lee’s “natural way of behaving.”

    Days, which premiered in Competition at the 2020 Berlinale, marks Tsai’s return to feature filmmaking, but even compared with the sparse and elliptical Stray Dogs it is a stripped-down affair. Tsai has made oblique references to the project in recent years, mentioning only that he was filming Lee and another actor and that he no longer considered himself a screenwriter. Instead, he wanted to work without even a concept for the film in mind. As he explains in our interview, that meant, in practice, collecting images of Lee and co-star Anong Houngheuangsy, recording synch sound, and only later shaping the material into something resembling a narrative.

    In the first act of Days, Tsai crosscuts between Lee and Anong living their separate, isolated lives. Lee, now in his early 50s, inhabits a number of spaces, including a spartan, modern flat, the crowded streets of Hong Kong, and what appears to be the abandoned building that Lee and Tsai have shared since they decided several years ago to move closer to nature while Lee recovered from an illness. Lee’s first major health crisis, a mysterious neck ailment, became a significant plot point in The River (1997). Two decades later, the sickness has returned, and much of Days is a deeply compassionate study of Lee struggling to manage his pain. We see him wearing a neck brace and stretching, and in one remarkable, extended sequence, he visits a clinic to receive a moxibustion treatment, which involves affixing small cones (moxa) to the top of acupuncture needles and lighting them on fire. The treatment ends with a massage-like scraping of the affected area, which causes large contusions to spread over Lee’s shoulders and back. Tsai cuts from the procedure to a close-up of Lee, who stares into the camera, twitching, his face marked on both sides by deep lines from the massage chair, like folds in his skin. It’s a monumental image and unlike any of Lee we’ve seen before.

    Tsai and Anong became friends three years ago after meeting in Bangkok, where Anong has worked illegally since emigrating from Laos as a teenager. It’s impossible to not draw parallels between him and the young Lee Kang-sheng we first meet in Rebels of the Neon God (1992): silent, graceful, a strangely arresting screen presence. Tsai often films Anong alone in his home, a barren, concrete slab of a room, where he prays to a makeshift shrine and prepares his meals. The press kit for Days includes this unusually melancholy description of the actor: “Even after several years, the urban city still feels foreign, cold, and lonely to him. His only joy is meeting his Laotian friends occasionally for beer, or making a meal of hometown cuisine at home.”

    An hour into Days, Lee and Anong have a pre-arranged meeting in a hotel room. Lee arrives first and removes the top blanket from the bed, folding it in a practiced gesture and setting it aside. Soon Anong joins him and gives him a massage that ends with masturbation and a passionate kiss, all in real time—two shots lasting just under 20 minutes. It’s a rare moment of relatively uncomplicated connection and pleasure in Tsai’s filmography, which seems miraculous somehow. The exchange is no less poignant for being transactional. When Anong leaves, Lee chases after him and they share one meal before returning to their lonely lives back home. 

    The image of Lee and Anong eating together, like much of Days, recalls the lost family unit that was so central to Rebels of the Neon God, The River, and What Time Is It There? (2001). Lu Yi-ching and Miao Tien, who played Lee’s mother and father, haunt Days with their absence, particularly in a scene after the massage, when Lee and Anong sit quietly together at the end of the bed. Days is a small, modest film, but this shot is precisely blocked and art-directed, with warm light in the foreground and cool fluorescent in the back—a delightful reminder that Tsai remains a master of traditional film form. Lee surprises Anong with a gift, a small music box that plays the theme from Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), and as they sit, listening to the tune, the nature of their relationship transforms suddenly into something more paternal and tender. A generation has passed before us on screen. The cycle is repeating. “And then you suddenly realize you are old,” Tsai told me, with a grin.

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    Cinema Scope: Director Tsai, I met you briefly 15 years ago in Toronto when you presented a screening of a Grace Chang film, The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang Tian-lin, 1960). All I knew at the time about Grace Chang was that you’d included a few of her songs in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005). I remember you saying at that screening that you were nostalgic for those old Hong Kong musicals because they are full of genuine, oversized emotions. Is the music box a kind of trick for sneaking genuine, oversized emotions into Days?

    Tsai Ming-liang: Yes! It’s very interesting that you started with this question! On the flight to Berlin I watched Judy (2019). Why did I watch that film? Because I love Judy Garland. After I watched it, all I could think was, “There will never be another Judy Garland!”

    Cinema Scope: Do you still watch older, more sentimental films for inspiration?

    Tsai: Yes, I can become very obsessed. I have an exhibition space in Taipei, where I showed the Walker films with Lee Kang-sheng. I just had a film festival there and we screened Chaplin’s City Lights (1931).

    Cinema Scope: What happens when the music box is opened? What do you hope viewers will experience at that moment?

    Tsai: It’s a gift! That’s a gift we all need.

    Cinema Scope: Anong, in much of the film, you are doing everyday tasks like cutting vegetables and preparing food, but the music-box scene is slightly more formal. It’s a beautifully lit shot, and I imagine that room felt more like a traditional film set than the other locations. How did Director Tsai prepare you for the scene?

    Anong Houngheuangsy: For the hotel scene, Director Tsai told me to just sit still, to focus on my breathing, and to be prepared to improvise. I didn’t know Kang would bring me the gift, so that was very surprising. I didn’t expect it at all. How I reacted was very natural.

    Cinema Scope: How is the character different from yourself? How much are you performing?

    Anong: I think I was not even acting. I was just being myself. I was cooking and sleeping and reacting exactly as I normally do. I didn’t create a new story for the character.

    Cinema Scope: Lee, I think you and I are about the same age, and I’ve been watching these films for almost 25 years. Seeing you sitting on the bed beside Anong made me realize how much I miss Miao Tien. What do you remember about him? And do you feel his presence in your performance?

    Lee Kang-sheng: Miao Tien played my father in The River, which was when I first hurt my neck, the first time I got sick. I’ve gotten sick again, which is what you see in Days. Twenty years later, I’ve reached the age of 51, and looking at Anong, I see that I have become the father character. Anong is like my kid. So, yes, I do find some sort of connection with Miao Tien.

    Cinema Scope: Director Tsai, I’m now a father, and my own father is nearing the end of his life, so rewatching your films over the past few weeks has been very emotional for me. Much of your work is about foundational familial relationships and about the effort to better understand and sympathize with the people we love. I wonder if you are so fascinated with Lee Kang-sheng because you can project that desire onto him?

    Tsai: When I was making the new film, I did not think of The River at all. But it suddenly hit me one day as I was looking at the footage that there is maybe some kind of continuous connection. I’m present in this film. I’m with them because I see these two actors as my children.

    I draw inspiration for all of my films from life itself, so of course in life you see a lot of repetition. For example, the piece of music in the music box is from Chaplin’s Limelight, which I also used at the end of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), in a Chinese version. Because I’m drawing on life, the films are always overlapping. It’s repetition. There’s a cycle. And then you suddenly realize you are old!

    Cinema Scope: You mentioned that you are present in Days. Are you an actual character in the film?

    Tsai: I was in the film, but I cut myself out! I don’t want the film to be a documentary. It’s a narrative feature.

    Cinema Scope: But there is a mysterious third character. He’s there at the acupuncture appointment, pointing out where Lee Kang-sheng is being burned, and we hear him, or someone, clear his throat near the end.

    Tsai: No! It’s just people walking by. I enjoy the offscreen sounds. Everything you hear is original sound. I didn’t change them. I didn’t enhance them. I wanted to keep the sounds as they are.

    Cinema Scope: You’ve said that you collected footage for a number of years and only later realized it could be fashioned into a film. There’s a mysterious shot in Days of the sun reflecting off the windows of a building. During that scene, I imagined you carrying a camera with you, capturing images as you find them. If so, what are you looking for? How do you know when an image has life in it?

    Tsai: I don’t actually walk around carrying a camera, but I do follow my actor. I follow Lee Kang-sheng. In recent years we haven’t made many feature films, but we’ve made a number of short films for museums. We did theatre. We toured in Europe. I’ve been working with a young and talented cinematographer, Chang Jhong-yuan, who is very interested in filming Lee Kang-sheng and me. For example, he was there when I cared for Lee Kang-sheng while he was sick. When I looked at his images I realized I wanted to use them, but I didn’t know how exactly.

    Lee Kang-sheng wanted to see a doctor, so I said I wanted to film it. He didn’t disagree, so I followed him to the doctor with the cinematographer. I felt that if I didn’t film that day, if I didn’t capture those images, then no one would ever see Lee Kang-sheng’s face and body at that moment. It sounds strange, but when he got sick there was something heartbreaking about it. I wanted to save those images.

    I thought the images would be used in a museum piece, but eventually I met Anong and while we were video-chatting I saw him cooking, and the way he cooked really touched me. I wanted to film it, so I flew to Thailand. That is what I am looking for. I’m always looking for something very real.

    Cinema Scope: After collecting footage for years, you had to assemble it into a film. I’m curious about that process. For example, there are several different shots of Lee Kang-sheng walking. In one sequence a handheld camera is following him through a busy street. In another, he walks alone at night under street lamps in static, long-duration shots. Do those sequences have different functions in the film? How do you decide what is necessary?

    Tsai: Usually when I work on a feature film, I only use one single lens. But this time, when Lee Kang-sheng got so sick, I didn’t realize I was working on a feature. That realization came later. I was simply doing something like a documentary, just recording what was happening to him.

    When we shot his visit to the clinic, we couldn’t negotiate with the doctor. We couldn’t ask for more time for a long shot. We had 30 minutes and everything happened in real time. So we shot with only one camera in a kind of panic. When Lee Kang-sheng is burned, we didn’t plan that. It was all done in a state of uncertainty. 

    Still, I wanted to have beautiful shots. When we walked the streets of Hong Kong, I wanted to avoid people looking at Lee Kang-sheng, so we used a hand-held camera, which of course created a different energy. But because he is so real, because he is so authentic, something powerful always comes out of it.

    Cinema Scope: This was a new experiment, working without a script or even a firm concept. Do you consider it a success? Will you work like this again?

    Tsai: Yes. I’m very happy with the results. I felt very comfortable in this mode. I didn’t have a big team with me this time, so I felt no pressure. I had a cinematographer and another person doing the sound, and we worked slowly, taking our time.

    Of course, we had limited resources, but the cinematographer knew how to create a beautiful digital image. It takes time! But there was no pressure because I didn’t have the film industry behind my back, pressing on me. The result is something handcrafted. I’m obsessed with this way of making films. 

  • Natural Wonders: The Films of Jessica Sarah Rinland

    Natural Wonders: The Films of Jessica Sarah Rinland

    This essay was originally published in Cinema Scope.

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    In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s 2016 short film, The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior), a shy, studious eight-year-old becomes transfixed by a nature documentary while her more rambunctious classmates whisper and pass notes around her. “The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they cannot fly,” the documentary’s narrator intones with BBC-inflected authority. Rinland registers the young girl’s enthusiasm in extreme close-ups, first focusing on her eyes and then the corner of her mouth, suggesting a secret smile. The other kids are all framed in wider shots, bored and antsy like the schoolboys in Le quatre cents coups (1959). When discussion turns to the ostrich’s defence mechanisms—its uncommon speed, strength, stride, and agility—Rinland cuts to a close-up of the girl’s ear, underlining the message of the film: “If you’re a bird that can’t fly, you have to find other ways of surviving.” The girl picks up a note from the floor, folds it into an airplane, stands, and tosses it towards a window while everyone around her looks on in silence. It’s a small but significant moment of self-actualization.

    In most respects The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior) is an outlier among the 20 films Rinland has made since 2008. Commissioned by Random Acts on Channel 4, it’s a crowd-pleasing, inspirational, on-the-nose story told effectively and efficiently in just under four minutes. Still, Ostrich is a useful point of entry into Rinland’s practice because it expresses so matter-of-factly many of her preoccupations and stylistic habits: playfully poking at traditional documentary tropes; mixing classical narrative montage and scripted performances with more experimental strategies; collecting visual material with the curiosity of an archivist (the ostrich footage, which Rinland shot herself in Esteros del Iberá in Argentina, is used in a previous film as well); and precisely modulating the affective experience of viewers, primarily through her dedication to 16mm film and her reliance on formal techniques that verge on ASMR. More simply, the young girl in Ostrich is a convenient personification of the authorial voice that guides much of Rinland’s work, which is full of wonder and open to epiphany.

    Raised in the UK by Argentinian parents, Rinland had her own epiphanic encounter with a film while studying painting and photography at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. As part of a class assignment, she wandered into a screening of Jonas Mekas’ Walden (1968) at the Tate and was struck by how it evoked the same sensations she had experienced as a child when she would compulsively rewatch her family’s home videos. In particular, she was mesmerized by Mekas’ narrated commentary and by her discovery of the meaning-making tension that can exist between layers of image and sound. “There’s something very interesting about the authority of that voice ‘above’ the image,” Rinland told José Sarmiento Hinojosa in a 2018 interview for desistfilm. “For me it’s more interesting when the image and voice are separate and perhaps sometimes they coincide. The separation allows viewers to escape into their own imagination.”

    The influence of Walden is easy enough to spot in Rinland’s earliest 16mm exercises—literally so in Bosque (2008) and To Rock and to Cease (2008), which were both shot at Black Pond, south of London. The Laughing Man (2008) is a silent portrait; Fog (2008) is an experiment with in-camera effects, including double exposures. In Darse Cuenta (2008), Rinland recites Jorge Bucay’s poem of the same name over obscure images that have been processed into low-contrast, periwinkle abstraction. The poem, which Rinland delivers in an intimate whisper, tells the story of a person who, after falling into the same hole nine days in a row, realizes on the tenth “that it is more comfortable walking on the other side of the road.” As the narrator comes to this new consciousness, Rinland cuts to a wider perspective and the image snaps into focus, revealing a sun-soaked window frame.

    At the risk of over-simplification, Rinland’s mature films have tended to fall into one of three general modes. Darse Cuenta and Ostrich belong in the first, which might be classified as fairy tales of a sort. In Nulepsy (2010), an elderly man recounts how his life has been affected by a rare pathological condition that compels him to stand motionless and nude. (In flashback scenes, he’s portrayed by a curly-haired actor whose resemblance to Michelangelo’s David is surely no coincidence). In Not as Old as the Trees (2014), another aged narrator describes the joy of watching the world go by from the vantage of treetops. Both films have some of the superficial markings of televised re-enactments, as if we are watching one of those “strange but true” cable series, but Rinland’s image-making—particularly her blocking of people in the middle of the frame for static portraits—combined with the child-like sensibility of her scripted voiceovers lend the films an abiding sense of awe and attunes viewers to presence. A sequence of portraits at the end of Not as Old as the Trees is like a lesson in mindfulness, guiding viewers to experience life as the old man does, with curiosity and compassion.

    Rinland’s “sensibility,” her “authorial voice”—these are ham-fisted attempts to describe what might more plainly be called her “taste,” that fickle quality in every talented artist that resists simple classification. In the best of the fairy-tale films, Adeline for Leaves (2014), a botanist who is nearing the end of his life awakens with a vision of a blue flower, signifying, as he says in voiceover, “a metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable.” The task of cultivating the flower is bequeathed to Adeline, a young prodigy who toils away silently in her garden. Rinland opens the film with a lovely montage of banana plants and palm fronds before introducing Adeline, posed among the flora in a still, planimetric composition as rich with detail as anything in a Wes Anderson movie. Rinland achieves a kind of twilight rapture in the rhythm of her cutting, occasionally pausing on an especially beautiful image for the sheer pleasure of it—I’m thinking of a 20-second shot of Adeline looking out of a car window, the natural light shifting in shadows on her face, her hair blowing in the breeze.

    In 2011, Rinland happened upon the site of a stranded sperm whale and struck up a conversation with the veterinarian who was performing a necropsy. That chance encounter set her off into the second major phase of her career, a series of films, installations, performances, and a book, completed over five years, that investigate the social and economic histories of whaling. The project also fed her interest in institutions such as museums, laboratories, and historical societies that have grown up around the study and preservation of animals and artifacts. A Boiled Skeleton (2015) documents the basement facility at University College London’s Grant Museum, where the 160-year-old remains of a bottlenose whale are stored away in boxes and bubble wrap. Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From our Eyes into Theirs) (2015) appropriates Stan Brakhage’s objective perspective on the physical remains of a life by filming an everyday dissection. We Account the Whale Immortal (2016), a collaboration with Philip Hoare and Edward Sugden, is a multi-screen installation that revisits the stories of three whales that found their way into the Thames.

    The first of the whale films, Electric Oil (2012), is a transition piece, with another young heroine at its centre—six-year-old Laura Jernegan, who in 1868 set off with her family on a three-year whaling expedition and documented their adventure in a journal that now resides in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. In large block lettering, she sketched daily accounts of the grisly “cutting in” processes that took place up on deck—”they smell dredfully [sic]…the whale’s head made twenty barrels of oil”—which Rinland then spins into a fiction: Jernegan, now an adult, has become plagued by a mysterious allergy (a variant of “nulepsy”) as a manifestation of her repressed trauma. The final minute of Electric Oil cuts rapidly between close-ups of Jernegan tugging at her sweater and found footage of whales racing alongside a hunting boat. As Jernegan strips off her shirt, a harpoon finds its target and a dying whale tips forward, its tail bobbing lifelessly on the surface.

    The found material in Electric Oil also appears in the short sketch, Description of a Struggle (2013), and again in The Blind Labourer (2016), an ambitious essay film that draws parallels between the industrial practices of whaling and logging. When we first see the whalers in Electric Oil, the mid-century footage is intercut with a clinical note written by Jernegan’s fictional physiologist: “Laura’s first memory of this sensation was at sea. She vividly recalled two men, up to their knees in the blubber of a humpback whale, squeezing out the oil.” In that context, the images are charged with a certain eroticism, as they are filtered through the competing subjectivities of both a young girl living in a world of men and the anxious woman she will become. In The Blind Labourer, the exact same footage is rendered inert. The whalers, like the loggers, are little more than cogs in a gruesome machine.

    Rinland is rare among contemporary moving-image artists in that she is more naturally a scenarist and writer than a conceptualist. Her frequent use of voiceover narration generates the polyphony she admired in Walden, but it’s also a literary device that gives her license to craft characters and story arcs, and to play with language itself. (James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a peer in this respect.) It wouldn’t be quite accurate to suggest Rinland is leaving behind those tendencies—the absurd and genuinely funny voiceover in Ý Berá – Aguas de Luz (2016) describes fish that swim backwards to keep water out of their eyes and a one-winged bird that can fly in only one direction—but the most recent phase of her work does represent a significant shift in style. Most striking is a new penchant for disembodying her human subjects by shooting their behaviour almost exclusively in close-ups. This strategy is the foundation of Expression of the Sightless (2016), in which a blind man runs his hands over John Gibson’s statue, “Hylas Surprised by the Naiade,” and describes what he “sees.” Likewise, in Black Pond (2018), Rinland seldom pulls back to a wide shot of her collaborators from a Natural History Society in the south of England. Instead, she focuses on the practiced work of their hands, as they tend to bats and measure trees.

    A key to Rinland’s newest film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, can be found in the closing credits. Along with cinematography, editing, and foley, Rinland is credited as “Voice” and “Pink-Nailed Ceramicist.” (The nail designer is also credited.) When we first see her hands they’re covered in cracked, gray ceramic slip, like gloves. Rinland then cuts to still photos of an elephant’s cracked, gray face, followed by a high-angle shot of Rinland’s clean hands as she vacuums dust from a 3D printer, gradually revealing one section of what will, over the course of the film, become a museum-quality replica of a century-old tusk. I say “century-old” because as Rinland vacuums, she explains that the original was donated to the museum in 1900 and came from an elephant that was poached in Malawi. Because she is not identified onscreen as the speaker, and because the form of the film constantly calls attention to the process of its own making—for example, Rinland claps for sound before the vacuum shot and bridges scenes that take place in interior locations with processed sounds of insects and fauna—we must take on faith the validity of every claim. Rinland, the screenwriter, remains in control.

    Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another ends with one more replica for us to consider: a 3D rendered animation of the tusk. How does it compare to the original? To the ceramic piece? How should we judge the value of each? Rinland is begging the classic ontological questions of art, but that line of interpretation is something of a red herring. Rather, the film seems designed to ensnare viewers in the unspoken fetishistic pleasures of collecting, archiving, and displaying—the same pleasures that drive the economies of poaching and museum-building. Beginning with the whispered poetry recitation in Darse Cuenta, Rinland has consistently used a number of formal techniques that have, in recent years, become associated with ASMR. Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another is a comprehensive catalogue of triggers: hands turning pages of a book, the sounds of dripping water and spray bottles, soft brushes wiping surfaces clean, unboxing, cutting with scissors, crinkly plastic wrap, drawing and tracing, demonstrative hand gestures, latex gloves, rubbing with sponges, and fingers pulling lint from a vacuum bag.

    Nearly an hour into the 67-minute film, Rinland inserts a rare wide shot of a man clumsily stacking tusks and ivory carvings on the bottom shelf of a storage closet, and the noisy banality of his work breaks the long-sustained, hypnotic reverie. He’s not alone. Other workers make small talk, scrub plastic bins, and sweep floors in sterile back rooms. Rinland then catalogs, via red-on-black text, the names of the people with whom she collaborated at a dozen museums. Only in the penultimate shot, when the workers wander outside to enjoy a snack of watermelon, do they appear to truly experience the wonders of the natural world.

  • Belmonte

    Belmonte

    This review was originally published in Cinema Scope.

    * * *

    “What else dost thou want, Belmonte?”

    When the question at the heart of Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s fourth feature, Belmonte, is finally spoken aloud, it comes in a whisper. Javier Belmonte (Gonzalo Delgado) has just woken with a start from a Buñuelian dream in which he sat at a piano with the beautiful young Monica (Giselle Motta), caressing her back and shoulders as she played a dirge-like theme and two of his former lovers looked on in judgment. When Belmonte settles back into bed, the camera follows his movement, revealing Monica sleeping there beside him. He stares at her with a pained expression, as if unsure whether this is also a dream. We can’t be sure either. The walls in the bedroom, as in the fantasy, are painted in rich primary colours, and the strain of the piano carries over into this new diegetic world. Monica lies still, with her eyes closed, and acknowledges him only with her occult whisper: “What else dost thou want, Belmonte?”

    Belmonte is a familiar character, bordering on a cliché: the Middle-Aged Male Artist, divorced and horny, adrift in both his personal and professional life, with all of his many crises on full display. He is, quite literally, the subject of every conversation in the film—to the point that, in the few instances when characters are, presumably, discussing other topics, we aren’t allowed a vantage close enough to overhear their dialogue. All of Montevideo and the people who live there, from the strangers and musicians at the sea wall to a packed house at the Solis Theatre, act as a mirror for Belmonte, reflecting his everyday, all-consuming angst. “You’re not 20 anymore,” a curator at the National Museum tells him. “Don’t you want to fall in love again?” asks his brother. “I want to have a family,” says his ex-wife, pregnant with her new partner’s child. Even the critical essays written for his upcoming retrospective strike Belmonte as invasive and accusatory. “These texts intending to diagnose me,” Belmonte tells the designer of the show’s catalogue, “I want them far away from the images, far away from my work.”

    Veiroj has said that Belmonte grew out of a desire to collaborate with Delgado, a painter and occasional actor and filmmaker who has worked as a production designer and art director on a number of notable South American productions, including Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma (2006) and Liverpool (2008) and Veiroj’s previous features Acné (2008) and The Apostate (2015). He’s a natural onscreen presence, a more rugged Mark Duplass type, and Veiroj wisely puts him to work in familiar surroundings: Belmonte is, among other things, a portrait of an artist. While the film chases a number of tangents, including side plots involving the family fur business and his elderly father’s flirtations with a much younger man, Veiroj is keenly interested in the daily labour of artmaking. If the film is a “character study,” much of the character development emerges from Veiroj’s attention to Delgado’s practiced movements and behaviours. Throughout the film we see Belmonte lifting and carrying canvases, doodling in notepads, and negotiating sales. An early scene involves a perfectly juvenile sightgag in which Belmonte meets with a client. He stands straight-backed with both hands behind his back, and Veiroj frames him so that a large penis in the painting beside him stands in, visually, for his own. Delgado/Belmonte and Veiroj are the same age and at the same point in their careers, so if the punchline is that artists inevitably whore themselves to the financiers, then the joke is on all of them.

    For Belmonte, the most painful rebukes come from his ten-year-old daughter, Celeste (Olivia Molinar Eijo), who, like every decent child of every decent parent, exists as a kind of moral exemplar against whom he must constantly judge himself. In an early scene, Belmonte picks her up from school and drives her to his studio. As they open the door, Veiroj cuts to a low-angle medium close-up of the girl and stays on her cherubic, gap-toothed face for 15 seconds as she takes in the spectacle of her father’s latest paintings, a series of larger-than-life nude men, all hunched and grotesque. Belmonte hides a particularly disturbing portrait that has captured her attention and then clears away a bit of mess to make room for her homework. Neither says very much. Celeste watches him, with fascination, as he staples fresh paper to a canvas. Belmonte watches her, equally fascinated, as she sketches a drawing.

    Celeste’s visit to Belmonte’s studio is a fine scene in its own right. The back-and-forth shifts between the two characters’ points of view open up what had been, until then, a very limited and subjective perspective. (Much of the film operates formally like the dream of Monica, with Belmonte’s technicolour fantasy life bleeding, Kaurismaki-like, into the expressionist visual design of the film’s reality.) Indeed, Celeste is revealed in that moment to be the true love interest in what is suddenly a much more interesting story. But the studio visit also sets up an important scene later in the film, when Celeste prods her father to explain his work, asking him pointedly if one of his subjects has covered his face in his hands because he’s afraid. “No,” Belmonte confesses, “he’s embarrassed.” When she asks why the men are all nude, he pauses in a shameful and exasperated gesture, adding another nice comedic beat, and then turns and makes a quick escape.

    As he’s done throughout his career, Veiroj here observes his main characters with sympathy, curiosity, and, when deserved, a gentle, instructive irony. His style reminds me of Claire Denis in the domestic mode of Nenette and Boni (2005) and 35 Shots of Rum (2008). As a middle-aged father myself, even I’m bored with characters like Belmonte—perhaps especially bored, as I spend more than enough time occupying that limited and subjective perspective—but Veiroj’s grace and humour make Belmonte not only bearable to watch but a pleasure. There’s a simple, unvarnished wisdom in his kindness, as when he manufactures opportunities for Delgado and Molinar Eijo to inhabit and embody a recognizably loving father-daughter relationship. In a film that is barely 75 minutes long, he prioritizes quiet moments in which the two actors simply sit together on a couch, take a weekend boat ride, or share bowls of soup, their comfort with one another immediately translating as deep affection. Before she asks about the “embarrassed” figure, Celeste tells Belmonte, matter-of-factly, that she doesn’t like another of his paintings. Veiroj cuts from a close-up of her searching eyes to an insert of two distorted faces in conflict. ”It’s like an interior dialogue,” he offers in defense. Celeste’s explanation for why she dislikes the piece cuts to the quick in a way that manages to conform to wisdom-of-a-child boilerplate while also being genuinely affecting: “You’re not that bad, Dad.”

    And there’s the rub. That billions of people have struggled to be good parents, suffered disappointments with their families, and endured midlife crises doesn’t make the banality of those experiences any less profound or wrought to the particular individual who is living in that particular moment. Artistic treatments of the subject are common enough, but few escape the temptation to simply repackage that banality as farce. To be clear, Belmonte is a joke, as are all of us performing in this stupid human comedy. The final image of the film is a long shot of him walking in the middle of a busy highway toward the camera, carrying a large canvas with him. Like Camus’s Sisyphus pushing his boulder, I suppose we must imagine Belmonte happy. He’s really not that bad.