Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Germany

  • Sentimental Education: Christian Petzold on Afire

    Sentimental Education: Christian Petzold on Afire

    This interview was originally published at Cinema Scope.

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    “And then sometimes I start lying.”

    Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homosexual love or something like that. I’m not very professional sometimes.” I had asked him a straightforward, fact-checking question about whether his new film, Afire, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale, would be, as has been widely reported, the second film in a three- or four-film cycle loosely inspired by the elements: water, fire, earth, and sky. “Harun Farocki always said, ‘You know, nowadays, in arthouse cinema, they make movies like modern museums: just one fantastic building with no surroundings,’” he replied. “I love the film series of the ’40s and the ’50s. I love John Ford movies, with his stock company. I want to be part of a city and not to be in a lonely museum on the outskirts of town. And so I said Undine (2020) is the first movie of a trilogy. I must say, it’s a little bit of a lie.” Petzold is currently writing the script for his next film, tentatively titled Miroirs No.3, which will go into production in spring 2024. “I have no idea for the third part of this trilogy,” he claims. We’ll see.

    A few weeks after Undine premiered at the 2020 Berlinale, cinemas shut down, as did Petzold’s plan to adapt Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel Dirty Snow, a pitch-black portrait of an amoral, murderous teenager in Nazi-occupied Brussels. While promoting Undine in Paris, Petzold and the film’s star, Paula Beer, both contracted COVID, and so he passed the next month in bed, rewatching Visconti and Rohmer films, reading Chekhov and Richard Ford novels, and developing theories about summer movies. “My children were 22 and 24 years old, and everything was forbidden for them. They couldn’t go out, no clubs, no cinema, no cafeterias, nothing. And I thought, ‘My God, what is happening to our summers?’” He was struck by the contrast with his own youth, in the ’70s and ’80s, when his thoughts of the future weren’t clouded by pandemics or the existential threat of climate catastrophe. Revisiting Rohmer reminded him of the French tradition of summer movies: teenagers on the beach, with no supervision and little to do. Discovering David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) reminded him of the American tradition: a car, two half-naked girls, two boys with beer and tattoos, and a cabin in the woods. Petzold regretted that Germany had no such tradition. “And then I remembered that we had this genre before the fascists won their first election: People on Sunday (1930)by Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer. One day, summer, Berlin, young people, a lake, love, alcohol, dancing—it’s utopia. The world is open to you, like a summer night’s dream.”

    After four weeks in bed, Petzold lost interest in making Dirty Snow, which was to be about “the end of morality for young people in the fascist regime.” Instead, he took inspiration from a teacher at the DFFB who had encouraged students to make films like Rohmer’s, films that in 30 years would show viewers “how people had kissed, betrayed, walked, and so on. I liked this theory.” The result is Afire, in which two young artists, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel), retreat to Felix’s family cottage on the Balkan coast to enjoy the sea and to complete their latest projects. Leon is feeling pressure to deliver a draft of his second novel to his editor, Helmut (Matthias Brandt); Felix is searching for a breakthrough with his photography portfolio.

    After Felix’s Mercedes breaks down—“Something is wrong” is the first line of the film—they arrive late in the evening to discover that the little house in the woods is already occupied by the beautiful Nadja (Beer), a seasonal worker in the local tourist town, and that a forest fire is raging 30 kilometres to the west. The next morning, Leon spots Nadja through the kitchen window, mounting a bicycle in a red summer dress and riding alone into the woods. Until then, she had been for him only a figment formed by the traces she’d left in the house: a half-eaten meal, lingerie on the floor, and the sounds of sex with lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs) bleeding through their shared bedroom wall as he tried to sleep.

    Afire is a fairy tale by way of Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967). For Petzold, the greatest shock of watching that film for the first time in decades was discovering that Rohmer had given agency to Haydée (Haydée Politoff), the object of desire, in ways that the men in the film were oblivious to—and that the twentysomething Petzold who first viewed it had overlooked as well. “It was like a slap in the face! I asked myself, ‘What is your perspective of the world? Of women? What kind of male subject are you?’” Leon, then, is by Petzold’s own admission some version of himself at that age: insecure, pretentious, condescending, an observer of the world rather than a participant in it. And Nadja, like Haydée, is also more than she at first appears.

    Cinema Scope: Near the end of the film, as the fire is approaching, Leon confesses his love for Nadja, and then the plot turns in unexpected directions. The final act is open to interpretation, but I imagine you probably have a very particular understanding of what happens. Is it important to you that the audience interprets the end correctly?

    Christian Petzold: No, it could be different. After the premiere, my children had a different understanding of the end. For my son, it was as if the movie had put things together again. The world could go on. We have a future.

    I read an interview with a Brazilian football player who for his whole life wanted to win the World Cup. And he said later that when they won, it was a moment of presence without any reflection. But then he heard his name over the loudspeaker, and in that moment, it was past, it was gone. This is fantastic! For me, this happens in movies sometimes. Movies are always in the present. Even in a historical film like Barry Lyndon (1975), you see an image of the past, but it’s still now. It’s always now. But the voiceover in Barry Lyndon is somehow very far away.

    For me, this happens in this moment when Leon says to Nadja, “I have loved you from the start.” Idiot. For the first time he wants to open himself up in this moment, but everything’s closed. The police are coming. Death is coming. He can write a novel, but in the same moment when he can write a novel, he’s losing his love, he’s losing his desire.

    Scope: How we interpret the shape of the film affects how we interpret Leon. The snippet we hear from his draft novel, Club Sandwich, is laughably bad. But is Leon a bad writer? How did you conceive of him as an artist?

    Petzold: I wrote two or three pages of Club Sandwich. It’s very hard to write a bad novel! But I wrote it in about one hour, these three pages. And I was a little bit proud of it. I thought, “It’s not so bad.” Then, during rehearsals, the actors, especially Paula and Thomas, said to me, “This is a really bad novel, it’s so embarrassing.” And I started to say, “No, no, it’s not so bad.” I was a little bit angry about that—the criticism. And then they asked, “What’s the title of your second movie?” The actors in this film are all very intelligent; I love working with intelligent actors. Like detectives, they understood that in this artist, Leon, there’s a big part of my own biography. I said, “The title of my second movie is Cuba Libre (1996).” Cuba Libre. It’s a drink. And they say, “Club Sandwich? Cuba Libre? It’s similar. You can order them both in your hotel for lunch.” I started laughing.

    When I made Cuba Libre, I was playing a director. I’d had success with the first movie, so the second movie, I knew, was very important. I wanted to say to the world what a great auteur I was, what a great cineaste. We shot on 35mm. There were quotations from Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945). We used many of Jean-Pierre Melville’s locations on the northern coast of France and Belgium. After five or six days of shooting, my wife—she was not yet my wife then—said to me, “What is happening to you? You are playing a director. I don’t believe you.” I was totally depressed. In two nights, I changed the perspective of the script. I put away the beautiful girl in the story and made a portrait of the male subjects, and this rescued the movie.

    I told this story to the actors, and I think they needed to know that Afire is partly about being a male-subject artist in this world, and that I’d had this experience myself 25 years ago.

    Scope: To make sure I understand your earlier point, at the exact moment Leon chooses to stop being a pretender and enter the world, the world closes itself off to him. Is this ironic?

    Petzold: No, not ironic. I think it’s punishment. Perhaps it’s self-punishment, given what I’ve told you about Cuba Libre. He’s open to her in this moment, but it’s too late. How can he expect a kiss or tenderness from her now? At the beach, he had a chance and missed it. The punishment is delivered by the structure of the movie—by the Sakamoto Ryuichi cue, by the arrival of the police. I’m bored with police cars in films, but I like the image of Leon standing there with no glass, no window between him and Nadja, and behind them there is the world, and the police are coming. They arrive to punish him for his moral failings—for his bad summer and his bad friendship and his bad behaviour. Once he’s been punished, he can write.

    Scope: My sense of Leon is that when he’s at his worst—insulting and patronizing Devid and Nadja, for example—he’s overcompensating out of an insecurity that has more to do with class than talent.

    Petzold: I’m glad you asked this. It was very important that we have two friends from different social classes. There’s no dialogue about this in the movie, but you can feel it—that Felix is paying at the supermarket, that he’s the owner of the house, that he has no fear about the car breaking down because his mother will just buy him another one. In German private schools for the upper class, 25% of students are on scholarship, and for this 25% it’s a very hard life, surrounded by rich kids. They don’t wear the same clothes, they don’t go on holidays with their parents. This is important for me, but it’s not in the dialogue—it’s in the bodies, in the behaviour. Leon is from the working class, and he’s jealous. His self-confidence is weak. He hides behind a hard mask to survive.

    Scope: There’s another interesting class issue in the film. Afire is set on the Baltic Sea, in what was East Germany. At one point Felix makes a condescending comment about Devid’s name. For non-German viewers like me, is this just the standard snobbishness city people often feel about the provinces, or does it reflect a historical/cultural divide between the West and East?

    Petzold: It’s a West-East divide. In the former German Democratic Republic there are small cities with names like Boston and Philadelphia, and people who live there have names like Mike and David. It’s a long history, going back to the 18th century, when people there wanted to start new lives in the US. Frederick, the King of Prussia, said, “No, stay here, we need you to build up agriculture, to feed our nation.” And he gave them money and farmland, and they formed villages named Philadelphia and Boston because that was their desire.

    Two hundred years later, the people of the GDR couldn’t leave because they were behind a wall. But they wanted to reach the US, to drive an American dream car, to see California and the Pacific. They had American music and American literature and American cinema, so they gave their kids names like Mike and David. But they had to spell them so that they sounded American, so David became Devid.

    My parents are refugees from the GDR, but I was born in the West. When I shoot at the Baltic Sea, for example, or shoot in the east part of Germany, when I shoot in places my parents dreamed of before they escaped, I respect this. I respect the dreams of my parents.

    Scope: Most of your films have a romantic couple at the centre, so I find it interesting when you expand the cast—for example, the dozen or more speaking parts in Transit (2018). In Afire, your main cast is four men and one woman, and there’s a kind of fluid desire passing between all of them, which seems new for your work. I’m curious to hear how you approach constructing that flow of desire, formally. Is it just a matter of cutting on an eyeline match from one fascinating face to another?

    Petzold: The couples in my movies are always one woman, one man, so the shot/counter-shot strategy works, but I was a little bit bored of this, I must say.

    Most German actors come from the stage, because theatre is so important in Germany. Our theatres are the best in the world, with fantastic actors for the stage. We have fewer good actors for movies, because cinema is not as important for our social and cultural life. For me, shot/counter-shot is so important in cinema because you are in the space and in the tension between two people. When actors are on stage, you’re never between them—you work instead with speech and choreography, but the audience will never be inside. Most actors don’t understand this when they are in front of a camera: they speak and act for an audience, like they’re on stage.

    I talked about this with my actors. Most of them are not from acting schools. We had rehearsals three months before shooting, and we went to the locations before they became crowded with the production crew. They are still innocent, these places, they have their own dignity. So, for example, there was a table in front of the house, and I said to the actors, “I think we can use this space when the characters are talking, or when Nadja reads the poem.” And then I sat 100 metres away and watched the actors walk around. They looked at the house and trees, they sat down at the table. And who sits where is very important. Paula sits on the edge, the other guy sits there. They find their position in space, and they find their position in the group. I like this so much. It’s like when an abstract painter stops and says, “This is right.” By finding their positions, they also find out something about their characters—not by psychology, but by choreography. I watched a documentary three or four weeks ago about Visconti’s rehearsals, and they were exactly the same. You have to wait.

    I remember this time as my happiest time of making movies, these three days in the forest near the sea.

    Scope: Did you design the house? The windows play an important role in several scenes.

    Petzold: Leon is not part of the world. His working place is like a stage. He’s always looking at the world through windows, through doorways. He hears the world behind walls. So, yes, we built the house, with many windows, allowing access to many perspectives. I told the actors, “We have built this house so that everybody can look at each other.” They can’t hide. And they loved it. They each found the room they wanted and the bed they wanted to sleep in. We built up the kitchen, so that when you’re in there you can look outside and inside. And when you’re looking outside, you are on a higher position, like Napoleon, like from a hill. This gave the actors opportunities during rehearsals to find connections to each other and to establish positions of power or weakness.

    Scope: Your earlier interviews give me a sense that your collaboration with Harun Farocki revolved around food and smoking and long conversations about cinema and economics and human nature. Has your writing process become more solitary since Farocki died? I’m sure he can’t be replaced, but have you found other people to engage in those types of conversations?

    Petzold: His grave is not far away from here. Remember in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), the scene where Henry Ford is at the grave of Ann Routledge and asks her advice? It’s a little bit like this when I’m writing and I go to his grave. We have a conversation. I want to remember the ideas that were very important for us. For example, we believe that in a film each location should be used twice, and the different atmosphere of the two scenes is the story. In Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), a young woman has vanished but first we see her in a village. Then, three months later, when they are looking for this girl, they come back to the same place. Antonioni positions the same extras on the staircases, and in the cars, and you remember this place as a place. But something has changed. And this difference is important. This is something I always have to remember when I’m writing—that places like the beach, the table, the forest, we are there twice, but something has changed. Dialogue is not necessary; it’s something the audience can feel.

    Now I’m solitary, but in another way. Now, I’m talking to Paula Beer. I’ve become friends with more actors, and I can talk with them about scripts. There is no vanity. It’s very interesting, because I must say Harun and I, we are male subjects and we are cineastes. We are architects— you can live in a good script like in a good house. But I need someone else, too, who can tell me more about the people who live in this house. There was a woman who was very important for me, the casting agent Simone Bär, who died six weeks ago from breast cancer. With her, it was like I had bought a house and could ask her, “Where are the bedrooms? And where can the kids play?” She brought a warm energy to this structure.

    Scope: I’m sorry to hear about Simone Bär. Did she help cast Thomas Schubert?

    Petzold: Yes. I saw Thomas in Dominik Graf’s Police Call 110 (Bis Mitternacht, 2021). He’s a killer, and he is fantastic. Then, Matthias Brandt made a Netflix series (King of Stonks, 2022) with him. Simone said to me, “The actor who plays Leon, please don’t cast someone handsome, because the audience will hate him.” The audience must identify with Leon, and when he’s too handsome, he’s not part of you.

    Thomas is a really fantastic actor. He sees the world. He’s interested in the world, and he’s interesting to the other actors. Simone told me, “He’s looking into the eyes of others.” And so many actors never do this—they just look to themselves. But he’s always changing. It’s another kind of dialogue.

    Scope: I’m a few years younger than you, but I think we’re the same generation of cinephile. When I was young, I could only see a handful of Hitchcock films on TV. So as a teenager, I would check out Hitchcock/Truffaut from the library and read those conversations, stare at the black-and-white still images, and imagine the films. In hindsight, I think that experience made me an auteurist critic. How was your understanding of cinema and the job of a director shaped before you moved to Berlin?

    Petzold: Totally similar to your biography. I grew up in a small town without cinema, so the library was my cinema, and it opened everything. I read the same book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, an ugly book in Germany, with terrible black-and-white pictures inside. But I think you always need someone who opens your eyes and your mind. You have to be a pupil.

    I remember at this age sitting on a bench in a park, and the boyfriend of a friend of mine was sitting beside me. We were smoking cigarettes, and I was talking about two records I had bought—by Dire Straits and Phil Collins, I remember! And he said, “This is shit. Total shit. You can visit me tomorrow and I’ll give you a lesson.” So I went to his place and we listened to the Residents and Devo and all of the bands on Rough Trade and so on. He explained everything for me, and I must say I learned to hear from him like I learned to see from Hitchcock/Truffaut.

    Then, when I was 18, there were film clubs in Wuppertal and Dusseldorf and Cologne, and there were teachers who would introduce the movies. I saw all of Hitchcock’s movies when I was 18. I saw all of Howard Hawks’ movies when I was 19. You have to learn to see. At first I wanted to write about cinema, but then I changed to the other side. I was 26 or 27 when I became a student at the DFFB in Berlin. At the time they didn’t want young people—they wanted people who’d already experienced l’education sentimentale!  I remember Jean-Luc Godard said, “I have to be 30 to make my first movie.”

    Scope: It was interesting to watch Afire and Angela Schanelec’s Music on back-to-back mornings in Berlin. Both are great films, and both are very pleasurable viewing experiences, but the pleasures are very different. Her montage is becoming increasingly elliptical, associative, private; yours is classical and efficient. At this point in your life, how do you think about the pleasures of spectatorship?

    Petzold: In 1991, 1992, Angela and I were in the same seminars. We saw and talked about the same movies. It was a fantastic time to learn to see at the editing table in front of movies like To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Every day there was a new movie on the editing table, with fantastic professors like Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky who opened our minds. I think there are correspondences between Angela’s movies and mine. I love to see Angela’s movies. I’m always totally impressed by them. They are so clear.

    For me, the other model was Dominik Graf. You can always find fantastic American or French directors, you can see all these fantastic movies by David Lynch and Tarantino. But when you are a student, you need someone who’s nearby, who you can touch, who you can talk to. Dominik Graf’s movies in the ’90s were like islands of rescue. I like that he tries to find the balance between the market and art.

    I think avant-garde style is important when it is integrated into bigger productions, like Salvador Dalí in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), or the traces of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in David Lynch movies. You need it. This ocean is for all of us, and we each have to find our way. I needed to find a way like Dominik Graf’s, where you please the audience and are also an auteur. This is something I learned from him. Angela and I, we have left our seminar and we are on the same ocean.

    Scope: Afire seems a good example of what you’ve just described. Is it a stretch to compare its style to Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk, or even John Ford, where reality is interrupted by flashes of expressionism? I’m thinking of Leon’s vision of Devid walking naked into the woods, or that image of ash dropping from the sky.

    Petzold: Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958) was the first movie I watched with the actors in rehearsals. I first saw it at the DFFB with Frieda Grafe; it was one of her favourites. At the end, after the death of Shirley MacLaine, and when Dean Martin puts his hat away, I could see through her big glasses that she was crying—when she had seen this movie 200 times in her life. She felt ashamed that she was crying, so when the lights came on, she said, “This copy is shit! This is not Technicolor! The reds are destroyed!” It’s one of my favourite movies.

    For me, it was very important to discuss this movie with the actors, and not only because Frank Sinatra is a writer in the film. It has something to do with this—that you are inside of a dream. This is why we decided to shoot day for night, as in American studio films. The movie is inspired also by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there’s something in the idea that behind the next door there’s a park, there’s a house in the woods, there is a night, and it’s dream work. I often discussed with Harun that in 1895 the Lumières invented the cinema, and in 1895 Sigmund Freud invented dream work. It’s a correlation.

    It’s an opera, Some Came Running, and it’s also total reality. I always start crying when Sinatra is reading his novel to Shirley MacLaine and she says, “It’s great.” And he asks, “What’s so great about it? Why do you say it’s great?” And she says, “It’s great because it’s from you.” I always start crying at this moment. This is one of the best love scenes I’ve ever seen in my life.

  • The Girl and the Spider

    The Girl and the Spider

    Dir. by Ramon and Silvan Zürcher

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    This essay was originally published at Metrograph.

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    To begin, a brief description of the first six shots of The Girl and the Spider:

    Shot 1: After a few simple, white-on-black titles we hear distant construction noise and the familiar click of a mouse. The first image is a computer screen. The mouse pointer tracks over the floorplan of a four-room apartment and clicks print.

    Shot 2: A high-angle close-up of a jackhammer bit boring through concrete. The construction noise is now at full volume.

    Shot 3: A close-up of the back of the head of the jackhammer operator.

    Shot 4: A medium close-up of Mara (Henriette Confurius), a twentysomething with searching blue eyes, who stands motionless, staring at something to her left, presumably the back of the head of the jackhammer operator. Behind Mara, her soon-to-be-former roommate Lisa (Liliane Amuat) gets on a bicycle and rides toward the camera. Mara turns to make eye contact as Lisa passes.

    Shot 5: After the remainder of the titles, accompanied this time by Eugen Doga’s “Gramofon” waltz, we see a static image of an empty room. We will soon come to understand that this is the bedroom of the four-room flat illustrated in Shot 1. Or perhaps we already understand that, intuitively, on a first viewing.

    Shot 6: A close-up of Mara, who is again staring and again standing in one spot while a flurry of activity happens around her. Lisa and two handymen, Jurek (André M. Hennicke) and Jan (Flurin Giger), pass behind her carrying building materials. Mara pivots to her left, then to her right, observing it all with quiet curiosity. She’s wearing a solid gray shirt, Lisa is in yellow, Jurek and Jan are both wearing blue.

    This kind of formal description is useful when approaching The Girl and the Spider because one gets the sense while watching it that Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, identical twins who shared writing and directing duties on this film, are working with a slightly different set of rules. Or, more precisely, they seem to have discovered something new in the old rules that everyone else missed and, in the process, somehow, miraculously, have expanded the century-old grammar of continuity editing. The same was true of The Strange Little Cat (2013), Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature about a family gathering in a small Berlin apartment. In that film, which takes place over the course of a single day, people wander in and out of frame, tell stories, eat and drink, and display both affection and open hostility toward one another, all of it stitched together by Zürcher’s montage, which reverse engineers the classic eyeline match: instead of showing us a character in closeup and then cutting to whatever or whomever the character is looking at—forcing us to see the world through that character’s eyes—Zurcher does the opposite, giving us an image and then cutting to the character whose perspective we have been unknowingly occupying. In these films we rarely look at; we’re always looking with. And not knowing whose point of view we’ve stepped into has two disorienting effects. First, every image is activated by the suspense of not-knowing: no moment feels private or stable because every moment is potentially being observed (a very 21st-century twist on Hitchcock’s shame/guilt kink). Second, it creates an inverted Kuleshov Effect: imagine if instead of cutting to Mara after the jackhammer operator, we instead saw a poli­­ce officer or a crying child or an angry man holding a baseball bat. Each would require the viewer to actively reinterpret the previous shot in a slightly different way. As a result, watching a Zürcher film is a peculiar and uniquely engaging experience of spectatorship, demanding a constant renegotiation of character motivations and relationships.

    The opening sequence of shots in The Girl and the Spider establishes Mara as our primary surrogate within the film’s world. She’s agreed to help Lisa and Markus (Ivan Georgiev) move into their new apartment, but she’s not happy about the transition. (It’s no coincidence that Mara is stationary in those opening shots, while Lisa is always moving.) She acts out her resentments in petty aggressions—tormenting dogs, taunting a neighbor about her crying child, piercing a Styrofoam cup with a pencil and leaving it on a table as a makeshift trap to spill wine on whomever finds it. In another signature moment for the Zürchers, Mara uses a screwdriver to gouge Lisa’s countertop, but because Mara is again staged in a static medium close-up, we hear what she’s doing outside of the frame but can’t see it, so each of us is left to imagine the scar she’s making in the counter—a thousand different scars for a thousand different viewers. “What are you doing?” an unidentified voice asks. And in the brief pause between the question mark and the next cut, Mara and we have to assess in real time how much damage (in more than one sense of the word) has been done. The Zürchers’ strategy in these scenes is an ideal realization of Robert Bresson’s axiom, “the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient.” Their use of off-screen sound and “these impatiences” is downright cheeky. Fifteen minutes later, during a montage of insert shots scored by Doga’s waltz, the gouge in the countertop is finally revealed, which doesn’t so much relieve suspense as generate a deeply satisfying frisson, as each of us immediately, unconsciously compares the actual scratch to the one we’d imagined.

    The Girl and the Spider expands, with an algebraic logic, the scope of the Zürchers’ project—it’s 30 minutes longer than The Strange Little Cat, with two apartment buildings and two days of action rather than one. (The final film in the trilogy, The Sparrow in the Chimney, is coming soon.) The slightly larger canvas allows room for a more discursive narrative and a larger cast of characters, including Lisa’s mother, Astrid (Ursina Lardi), who flirts with the older handyman and seems disappointed with her daughter and regretful of the distance between them. We meet three neighbors, all of them women, and hear stories of others, each of whom gets a brief moment in the spotlight. There are animals and face-painted children, floating feathers and water balloons, three open wounds, and a beautiful woman across the street who shares longing glances with Mara. In an interview for Cinema Scope, Ramon Zürcher describes their storytelling as “everyday myths. Sometimes in the small things there are big things being articulated.” The fairy-tale quality of the film is written into the costuming and production design, which, taking a cue from New Wave-era Godard, colors everything and everyone in shades of red, blue, yellow, and gray. I haven’t worked out the math yet, but I suspect one could map the shifting relationships between characters to the colors of the shirts they wear, like team jerseys. Note the touch of yellow in Mara’s outfit when she recounts a story of a happier time, when she and Lisa were still close.

    Despite all of this talk of algebra and film form, there’s nothing pedantic or fussy about The Girl and the Spider. Just the opposite, in fact. This is, for lack of a better phrase, a very horny movie. “It’s like a queer-bisexual-multisexual universe where the relations, the friendships, don’t fit any traditional definition of anything,” Ramon Zürcher says, in that same interview. “Everyone’s sexuality is allowed to change.” The Zürchers’ filmmaking style isn’t theoretical or incidental to this notion; it methodically engenders a visual language of complex desire that circulates without bounds, recklessly. When Lisa’s new neighbor (a member of the red team) gets her close-up in the center of the frame, she pivots like Mara did—like they all do—and her eyes dart from person to person, quickly scanning their faces and bodies, before finally landing on Mara. “It’s a shame it’s not you moving in,” she whispers, picking a piece of lint from Mara’s shoulder. “I’m sure we would have fun together.” It’s a come-on, and the goodbye kiss she gives Mara is erotic, but all desire in The Girl and the Spider is infected with loneliness and longing. (A virus is a useful metaphor here.) Mara tells a story about a former tenant in her apartment, who left on a whim to become a chambermaid on a cruise ship, where she hoped to find peace in the daily routine of cleaning rooms, alone and unbothered. “Maybe one day she’ll come back,” Mara says, standing motionless in close-up, with a slight smile, staring directly into Lisa’s eyes.

  • The Strange Little Cat (2013)

    The Strange Little Cat (2013)

    Dir. by Ramon Zürcher

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    This conversation was originally published at 2013 AFI Fest.

    – – –

    Since its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013, Ramon Zürcher’s feature-length debut, The Strange Little Cat, has done a tour of more than two dozen of the world’s most prestigious fests, including Cannes, Toronto, Vienna and now AFI FEST. It’s rare to find a young filmmaker with such a distinct, mature voice, and even rarer to stumble upon a film that so generously rewards post-screening discussions and multiple viewings. It’s a small gem, a film that tells a familiar story in a genuinely new way.

    The Strange Little Cat is set almost entirely in a Berlin apartment, where an extended family has gathered to prepare and enjoy a meal together. The main character – if it’s fair to call her that – is the mother of the family who is hosting the party. She’s middle-aged, attractive, and by turns delighted by and indifferent to her family, including her husband, their two older children who have returned home for the occasion, and a young daughter. Throughout the course of their day, various members of the family tell deeply felt stories – reveries, really – that fall on deaf ears, and it becomes increasingly obvious that there is an unacknowledged tension between them.

    – – –

    Blake Williams is a doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and a video artist whose work has screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Pacific Film Archive. Darren Hughes is a communications director at the University of Tennessee and a freelance critic. The following is an edited version of a recent conversation they had about The Strange Little Cat. It’s fair to say that both have been unusually obsessed with this film for the better part of the last year.

    – – –

    HUGHES: How many times have you seen The Strange Little Cat?

    WILLIAMS: Three times all the way through. The last time was at a press screening in late August, before the Toronto International Film Festival began.

    HUGHES: How did your impression of it change with each viewing?

    WILLIAMS: About two months had passed between my first viewing, which was an online screener, and my second at Cannes, where it was playing in the sidebar called ACID. I remembered a few details: the song, “Pulchritude,” what the mother looked like, and what kind of cat it was. Loosely, I remembered there was a dinner and that a hacky sack came through the window at one point.

    But pretty much everything about the movie – even though I had really liked it – was very foreign the second time. I felt like I was watching a different film, and one that left an even stronger emotional resonance. There are very few films I can watch repeatedly and have a different experience with each time, but this has ended up being one of them.

    HUGHES: You had an emotional response?

    WILLIAMS: Yes!

    HUGHES: What were you responding to?

    WILLIAMS: This will probably be a long answer to a short question, but here we go: one thing I think the film does is set up scenes and little moments that are about building up pressure. A bottle of fizzy water hums and whistles because it contains effervescent water; they release the cap and the bottle makes a “sssss” sound, or, later, the cap just blows right off and knocks out a light bulb. In an early scene the mother comments on the older daughter having a pimple on her face that she popped and so it’s become very noticeable. The kids play Connect Four, which is a game in which the pieces mount up on top of each other in a kind of chaos, until there’s an alignment, the game ends, and the pieces get released from the bottom. And, of course, the scene with the sausage, which squirts on the uncle’s shirt.

    The best example, though, is a bit different from the others because it isn’t about a literal build up of pressure, but an emotional one. A few minutes into the film, the mother tells a story about going to the movies with the grandmother. At the theater, she gets stuck in a strange position – the grandmother’s fallen asleep on her right and the stranger to her left has rested his foot against hers. She can’t move her foot because she’s waited too long and now it’d be awkward to move it, having not done so immediately. So she just sits there, stuck and imposed upon, growing more uncomfortable, until a trumpet blast in the film wakes up the grandmother. This allows everyone to shift and reposition themselves, releasing them from the hold-up they’ve been caught in.

    I think the overall structure of the movie constitutes a similar build-up. In one of the last shots in the film the grandmother is sleeping in a back room and the cat comes in, steps over her, and then walks off screen. The next shot is a close-up of the cat, which falls asleep, and the sound of its purring swells and consumes the entire soundtrack. That particular moment for me was a kind of release, which I want to say was almost a phenomenological moment of pure sense experience. A subliminal tension had been building throughout the movie and there it all came rushing out.

    That’s where I found the emotional core to the movie, where it became more than what I’d seen on the first viewing, which was “just” a Tati-esque Rube Goldberg machine with fun sounds and quirky moments – very pleasurable but, in a way, a little trivial.

    HUGHES: It’s remarkable how similar our experiences were. I remember being impressed by the filmmaking and charmed by, as you said, its Tati-esque qualities. But on the second viewing, I was overwhelmed by it all. There’s so much hostility and anxiety just beneath the surface of every scene.

    WILLIAMS: There’s a kind of amicable cruelty constantly on display throughout the movie, where characters are obviously very annoyed with one another, inexplicably mean to one another, but their responses are always counter-intuitively forgiving and accepting. There are a number of occasions where one character slaps another, and it’s always received with a smile – a genuine smile, as if they needed that slap.

    HUGHES: When I revisited the film, I had no memory of the mother slapping the younger daughter, Clara. By the third viewing, I was worried for her. The way Clara’s treated, and her response to the situation, made me truly anxious.

    Part of it, I think, is that the first time we see Clara, she’s sitting at the kitchen table, letting out one of her piercing, wide-mouthed screams. I suppose we could add that image to your list of pressure build-ups and releases, because as soon as her mother turns off the kitchen blender, Clara stops screaming, giggles, and goes back to doodling on her piece of paper. The Strange Little Cat is so quiet and so still, and characters tend to keep their emotions in check, so Clara’s scream is like a burst of expressionism that stains the surface-level geniality.

    WILLIAMS: The acting in this film is being compared with Robert Bresson, which is, I think, a shorthand way of describing the very mechanical style of the performances. Something I’ve felt more with each viewing of the film is that many of the characters are almost technological, like automatons. They move from one very still pose into another in a very swift and exact motion, blinking and smirking and turning their heads with an extreme precision. It’s uncanny, really, and almost literally so. The uncanny was often attributed to the experience of looking at something that looks human but is revealed, on closer inspection, to not be. Even the word, from the German “Unheimlich,” directly translates to “unhomely,” so there is something unsettling with the characters’ robotic motions, and it creates a wonderful tension set against the domesticity of the mise-en-scène.

    HUGHES: Yeah, generally speaking, the camera in The Strange Little Cat tends to focus on one character – Clara sitting at the end of the kitchen table, for example – and that character is oddly robotic, as you say. Meanwhile, the other bodies moving back and forth around him or her are more natural and recognizably human. And I mean “bodies” literally. I’ve never seen so many “headless” torsos pass through a frame.

    I especially like the portraits of the mother. To drop a few more big names, they’re almost like something you’d see in a Carl Dreyer or Andrei Tarkovsky film. At key moments, Zürcher will cut to her in a still pose. She’s always lost in thought, isolated, with an inscrutable expression on her face. But all around her, people are mending buttons or fixing washing machines or making grocery lists. I can’t think of another filmmaker who combines those two radically different styles of performance in a single scene. And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it could work.

    WILLIAMS: There are so many aspects of this film – and of Zürcher’s short films as well – that I wouldn’t expect to work but do. Any self-respecting film student will challenge himself to go against textbook theories and forms for how to make a film the “proper” way, but that usually results in dumb little exercises that only reinforces why the theory or form became a convention in the first place. I think it’s fair to call Zürcher’s work thus far “exercises” because there’s a sense that he’s working through very formal ideas that are also very theoretical, and he doesn’t mind eliding “plot” entirely.

    HUGHES: I wonder how intentionally theoretical it is for Zürcher? When I stumble upon a young filmmaker who has such a distinct voice, I’m tempted to chalk it up as intuition. You know, “Give this guy a camera and these are the kinds of images he’ll make. Give him a blank page and this is the kind of dialog he’ll write.”

    And yet, as you said, he’s blatantly refusing to abide by the basic rules of film grammar. I’m especially fascinated by the way he avoids using traditional eye-line matches. There’s a sequence early on when the father and Clara leave to go grocery shopping. The apartment is finally quiet, and Zürcher cuts to the mother, who’s framed beautifully by light from the kitchen window. It’s the first of those portraits I was talking about. We get to just stare at her for a few seconds. The shot functions as a kind of glimpse into her subjectivity, but Zürcher doesn’t cut to a tighter close-up or to her perspective as we would expect. We never see what she’s staring at or get a better sense of what is going through her mind. Instead, Zürcher cuts to her son, who’s staring at her, unnoticed, from the other side of the room. It’s an eye-line match in reverse! The portrait of the mother is also his subjective perspective.

    WILLIAMS: And I wonder if that doesn’t happen by accident. When I watched the film again after you noted the lack of eye-line matches, it felt as if he were actively resisting the impulse to make those matches. The fact that he almost never does, and that the film works perfectly well despite it – I’d just be surprised to find out that he’s not self-consciously avoiding certain expectations.

    HUGHES: I’m always surprised when The Strange Little Cat ends after only 72 minutes because I feel like I’ve spent more time than that with the characters. There’s an emotional complexity that just doesn’t seem possible in a film so short. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s a consequence of these little formal moves we’re describing.

    Each time the film cuts from a portrait to an unexpected image of a spectator, we’re dropped into a kind of loop, where we’re forced to make sense of this new shot – the son on the other side of the kitchen, for example – and at the same time we also have to cycle back to the previous shot, re-contextualize it, and create a new association between the two images and between the two characters. This isn’t Claire Denis’ style of subjectivity where we get an intimate experience of the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That cut is, in some ways, our best glimpse into the relationship between the mother and son, and it’s totally opaque.

    This process that we’re forced into, of re-evaluating every image immediately after it’s gone, is such an interesting tactic. You and I are talking about this in a very removed, theoretical way, but it’s a deeply human, empathetic act. I wish I knew more about cognitive psychology because I’m sure the “loop” I’m trying to describe is a standard notion.

    WILLIAMS: This will seem like a stretch at first, but, in that sense I think there are interesting similarities between Zürcher’s films and some of David Cronenberg’s. Cronenberg also often has a layered theoretical framework that is rendered human at the end. I’ve been thinking of him lately in particular because he’s made two films, The Fly (1986) and Naked Lunch (1991), that are deeply indebted to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and I was taken aback to learn that The Strange Little Cat is influenced by it as well.

    In Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he’s turning into an insect, and the crucial problem of “The Metamorphosis” is that he’s stuck at this point between being truly human and becoming fully insect. In a way, that place of being stuck links back to what I think is the fundamental theme of Zürcher’s film. These characters are in a kind of flux or limbo. Or you could say they’re between two subjectivities.

    You used the word “hostility” earlier. People in The Strange Little Cat aren’t comfortable with themselves or with each other. They speak to each other, but they don’t listen to one another. If someone asks a question, they’re almost always given a one-word answer. “Yes.” “Right.” It’s all a very utilitarian way of maintaining their relationships.

    In a way, I almost think his project with this film, as it relates to “The Metamorphosis,” is this kind of not really knowing where you are or why you’re there or how to get back to where you were or how to get onto the next stage. The reason the mother ends up being such a tragic figure is because her family seems to be in a transitory or ruptured state, and she seems to not really know where to go with that. From an emotional standpoint, there’s this sense that she’s in two places at once, or stuck trying to get between subjectivities, and nothing is really progressing in either direction.

    HUGHES: Each time I watch the film, the reverie sequences become more moving and dramatic. The mother with her trips to the restaurant, the daughter with her orange peels, the son with the drunk girl at the party. These characters are telling stories that are clearly of deep significance to the teller. Each story is such a desperate effort to share something with the people around them. I mean, the poor niece who shows up with her cello tries to tell a story about reading a book at the swimming pool, and she can’t even get to the end of it because people keep interrupting her. It’s just brutal.

    WILLIAMS: There’s a wonderful scene in Zürcher’s short film, I Like This Song Today (2007), in which a young woman tells a story about sitting on a train and seeing a man with a ponytail. It’s only after she notices his reflection in the window that she realizes she’s actually looking at two people, the man and a woman in front of him. The woman with the ponytail is blocked from the main character’s perspective, but someone who’d have been sitting right next to her would have had no problem seeing that it was actually two people. In Zürcher’s films, there’s an absurdity and also a kind of tragedy in this limited subjectivity.

    I think that’s why the shot of the cat is so moving. The cat is as close as we come to an objective observer. The cat isn’t prone to feeling the chaos or the tension or the family drama or the cruelty happening in front of it. If someone is slapped and smiles immediately afterward, it’s just a completely removed observation. Somehow, having this close-up of a cat as it falls asleep, going from a conscious to unconscious state, provides a closure to that entire dilemma that the film sets up.

    HUGHES: That’s a nice analysis of the cat shot, but again it’s fairly theoretical and intellectual. When you saw the film, your response was primarily emotional.

    WILLIAMS: Right. Earlier I described that moment of seeing the cat as a phenomenological experience. The way you respond to a film will almost always be emotional, and whether or not you take to that emotional response will dictate the amount of effort you’ll make to intellectualize your experience. So I would say that as a response to the very strange feelings and the swell of emotions I experienced at the sight of that cat . . . well, I want to understand why.

    It’s similar to the experience I have when I watch Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), a simple film about a child returning a notebook to his classmate who he knows will get in trouble if he doesn’t do his homework. The very last shot is of the teacher flipping through the child’s notebook, and just before the film cuts to black and the credits start to roll we see a dried flower that has been placed between two pages. Most of the people I know who’ve seen that film, the moment they see that flower there’s this rush of adrenaline and emotion that is pre-conceptual, experienced before there’s even been a chance to mentally process what’s been seen. It goes from the screen straight to the viscera.

    HUGHES: The old Walter Pater line, “All art aspires to the condition of music.”

    WILLIAMS: Exactly. I’m knee-deep in all of this at the moment because of some research I’m doing in grad school, thinking about new ways of interpreting emotion and experience. Anyway, so, the cat. I don’t know if it’s tapping into some primal thing that’s lodged in my brain after millions of years of evolution or if it’s something else. {Laughs} But I want to put it into words.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene near the end when the lights go out unexpectedly, and the aunt starts taking pictures. . . .

    WILLIAMS: I always forget about that scene! When I watched the film in the cinema, I was struck by how the flashes of light were actually pretty harsh to look at. I would feel it physically in my eyeballs because they had adjusted to the darkness.

    HUGHES: See, that’s why I mentioned it, and it’s one of the things I’d like to be able to explain better. What is happening to me, the viewer, when I’m hit by those flashes of light? It’s partly physical, right? I mean, The Strange Little Cat is an audience-friendly narrative film, but that’s an avant-garde move – a kind of borrowing from flicker films.

    WILLIAMS: Zürcher does seem drawn to pure aesthetic moments like that. There are these transformations that occur where the narrative goes from being a film about process to a film about watching visual phenomena happen on the screen. In his short film Reinhardtstrasse (2009), there’s a scene where the main character is standing outside of a bedroom, listening to music. Colorful light is flowing out of the room and landing on her face, bathing over her. We watch her dance for a minute or two, and it’s really . . . pleasant.

    HUGHES: I’ve probably watched that scene nine times. {Laughs}

    WILLIAMS: It’s so great. So, the aunt with her camera, then, is both a moment of visual phenomena happening on screen and another example of a limited subjectivity that isn’t shared. She takes a photo and then that image flashes momentarily on her camera’s screen. But we never see it, so I feel like I’m being denied a certain perspective. She even seems to take a number of photos of people or objects that are outside of the frame, so it’s another way of addressing the extra-cinematic space.

    HUGHES: Zürcher does that with sound as well. A couple years ago I interviewed James Benning about his film Twenty Cigarettes (2011), which is a portrait series in which each subjects lights, smokes, and discards a single cigarette. I asked him why he staged each person in front of a two-dimensional background – a wall, for example – and he said it was because he wanted sound to open up three-dimensional space. I was reminded of that conversation a few minutes into my first viewing of The Strange Little Cat, because the same thing happens in that cramped little kitchen. The camera is fixed on one person, but the rest of the space in the room is created by the soundtrack.

    We keep circling back to a theme, I think, which is that Zürcher’s formal decisions all make the viewer an active participant in the creation of characters, the creation of relationships, the creation of physical space. You can’t sit passively with this film. He just won’t let you.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    Barbara

    Dir. by Christian Petzold
    Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Petzold. From shot to shot, cut to cut, Barbara is smart, precise, classical filmmaking at its best. There are no radical or self-conscious gestures in his style — most sequences boil down to some variation on establishing shot / medium shot / closeup / point of view — which here drops us into the secretive perspective of the title character, a doctor (Nina Hoss) who has been relocated by East German authorities to a provincial seaside town. Barbara conforms to all the plot conventions of the “beautiful stranger” genre, which makes the final act — and the final shot, in particular — a bit too neat for my tastes, but the pleasures are all in the filmmaking. There are no clues given about the location of the town, but in the recurring, fairy-tale-like images of Nina Hoss bicycling through the woods, the trees are always being blown by strong gusts, and seagulls can be heard around her; there’s no actual mention of the sea until the film is almost over. A colleague who visits Barbara’s apartment asks if she plays the piano, but, again, we don’t actually see the instrument in her room until a scene late in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

    Mekong Hotel

    Dir. by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul
    Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards. But I found it really moving, especially the final few minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work are embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in Thailand’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” she says. “I hate that my life has become this,” she says. Apitchatpong has a kind of super-human sensitivity and attentiveness to beauty and sorrow. I’m beginning to think of him as the other side of the David Lynch coin.

    Big in Vietnam

    Dir. by Mati Diop
    It’s a stupid comparison, I know, but this is the messy, ambitious, visually inventive film I wanted Tabu to be. When an actor disappears into the woods while filming a low-budget adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Vietnamese director walks off the shoot and goes wandering through the city (Marseille?) until she finds a karaoke bar and meets a man, also Vietnamese, of her generation. Diop then crosscuts between the film shoot, now being directed by the woman’s son, and images of the woman and man as they talk and walk among French sunbathers. When writing about Big in Vietnam, I feel obligated to preface every statement with “presumably.” The 25-minute film is elliptical to the extreme, and the thematic connections are never made explicit. Diop has apparently received funding to expand this idea into feature length. I can’t wait to see it. Big in Vietnam is my favorite film of the festival so far, and by a fairly wide margin.

    Sightseers

    Dir. by Ben Wheatley
    I suspect I’ll end up writing at length about Sightseers in a few weeks, when I have more time. It’s an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked more had I not seen it with an audience that laughed loudly at every brutal killing. I don’t blame them for laughing. The film is designed for laughs. But if I’d watched it alone, it would have been a straight-up horror film, and if I can convince myself that it’s all in the service of a coherent allegory — working-class anger is the best bet — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film. This is the first Ben Wheatley film I’ve seen, and I really like his visual style. I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Student

    Dir. by Darezhan Omirbayev
    Several critics I admire and whose tastes are similar to my own are big fans of Student, a concentrated, mostly-silent adaptation of Crime and Punishment (or Pickpocket or American Gigolo or L’Enfant, depending on your point of reference) from Kazakhstan. For now, I’m content to sit on any judgment of the film until I’ve had time to read their reviews. The title character is a brooding, non-verbal Raskolnikov, even by comparison to Bresson’s Michel, and for the first hour of the film, Omirbayev’s visual strategy — watching the student walk, zombie-like, stoop-shouldered, through town — left too much unsaid. But after the murder, as the accumulating guilt begins to spawn fantasies, the slow buildup pays dividends. More to come on this one . . .

    Wavelengths 1

    I’ll cover the Wavelengths shorts programs later, after I’ve had time to watch them again.

  • Revanche and Delta

    Revanche and Delta

    I’ve developed a lazy habit of saying that I don’t particularly care what a film is about; I care what it does formally. But, while well-directed and wonderfully performed, the standout feature of Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche is the story, which, particularly over the last 80 minutes, is perfectly constructed. Borrowing from scattershot genre conventions (lovers on the run, an escape to the country, the Madonna whore), Revanche is the kind of taut, thinking-adult’s drama that America stopped producing 30 years ago. Although his film maybe lacks so neat a moral dilemma as that posed by The Son, Spielmann matches the Dardennes at the level of execution. Or, more to the point, I was tense and curious for the entire length of the film, and I was completely satisfied by its resolution. (Also, what the Dardennes did for the lumberyard, Spielmann has done for the wood pile.) Highly recommended.

    And now I’d like to make my annual request of first-time writer-directors: When you find yourself typing the words “And then she’s raped,” please reach for the backspace key and go for a long walk, because you aren’t working hard enough. I’d lost trust in Kornel Mandruczo well before Delta took its predictable dramatic turn. Although the right influences are on display here (Tarr most of all but also a bit of Angelopoulos), although he sustains an admirable formal rigor throughout the film, and although there are individual moments of knockout beauty, Delta is starving for a purpose. I knew as soon as the rape scene began that I was watching the anti-Revanche, a film built upon a single idea, populated with paper-thin characters, headed inevitably toward a careless, banal conclusion. I suspect that, had Mandrukzo appeared for a Q&A, he would have defended the film in symbolic terms (I won’t be giving anything away to say that the final image is of a pet turtle swimming back into nature), but the ideas animating those symbols are too anemic to justify this mess.

  • 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.

  • Fassbinder

    Fassbinder

    Last night I watched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) for the first time in six or seven years. Along with Ali, I think I’ve seen only Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Whity, so I’m relatively unfamiliar with Fassbinder and have never had much of a sense of his style. What struck me last night was how avant-garde, formally, Ali is. In fact, the film I was reminded of most often was Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth. Both find their dramatic and emotional impact in impeccably composed images. Obviously, Fassbinder’s film has a much more traditional narrative than Costa’s, but the flat, staged performances given by his actors undermines any comfortable sort of identification we might have forged with their characters otherwise. It’s like Fassbinder has reduced melodrama to its first principles then blown them up into full-color, super-saturation, not unlike the images of the film itself.

    Until I finish working through all of those Godard films, I won’t have time to really dig into Fassbinder as I’d like, but can anyone recommend a handful of his films that I should check out? Are the camera work and formal devices employed in Ali typical?

  • Week in Review

    Week in Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Great Films, Part 1

    The Great Films, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Short Takes

    Short Takes

    I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:

    Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.

    I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.

    The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.

    If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.

    And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.

    Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.

    The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.

    Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.

    * Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.

  • The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (1972)

    The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (1972)

    Dir. by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

    Images: Staged entirely in Petra’s bedroom and filmed largely in long takes, using slow tracking and deep focus shots. Mise-en-scene might be described as early-70s, too-hip opulence: bright colors, shag carpets, cutting edge (but impractical and uncomfortable) fashions. Characters are often dwarfed by a Michelangelo-esque wall mural, which is particularly interesting when the nude male figures can be seen (often only from the waist down) between the faces of the actresses. The film “feels” like a play — broken into several (6?) scenes, each clearly delineated by a fade-out/fade-in.

    • • •

    The title character (played by Margit Carstensen) is a successful fashion designer whose happiness has been shattered by the death of her first husband and by a bitter divorce from her second. Her sad existence is reflected by the mise-en-scene: isolated (there are no windows), grotesquely fashionable, and charged with ambivalent sexuality (her bed is the only practical furniture). After relating to a friend the shameful details of her failed marriage, Petra is introduced to Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a beautiful young woman who apparently shares Petra’s bitterness with life and love. The two become lovers, living together for six months until Karin finds success as a model and returns to her husband.

    Petra’s “bitterness” is more likely the frustration of a woman incapable of selfless behavior. She brutally dominates those close to her — including her mother, her daughter, and her silent servant, Marlene — as if she were a spoiled child. When Karin leaves her, for instance, Petra explodes into a gin-fueled tantrum, shattering her tea set and literally rolling on the floor, beating her fists. Petra is a tragic figure, beautifully realized by Carstensen and Fassbinder. With each scene, she slips into a new character, as if a new wig, a new outfit might offer the cure she seeks. She’s at her most honest and sympathetic, though, in the film’s opening and closing scenes, when we find her lying alone in bed without a wig or make-up.

    Perhaps the most interesting character in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is Marlene, the silent and endlessly accommodating servant. She adds to the film yet another layer of strange sexual politics. (With her tight black dresses and straight-backed walk, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that oft-cited lesbian film icon, Miss Danvers from Hitchcock’s Rebecca.) But Marlene is different from the other women in Petra’s life in her refusal to be dominated. Their relationship, though clearly marked as master/servant, is also clearly founded on Marlene’s terms. When, at the end of the film, Petra attempts to lift Marlene onto an equal plane, Marlene refuses, choosing to remain silent and to leave.

    Fassbinder’s experience in the theater is obvious here. In fact, I can think of few cinematic precedents for this film, but was reminded throughout of plays like Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends, another experimental examination of heterosexual frustrations and repressed lesbian desire that also features an all female cast. Also, the constant tapping of Marlene’s typewriter feels like a direct allusion to Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, a wonderful piece of early-20th century expressionism.