Tag: Region: Hungary

2009 SFIFF Diary 2

Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry’s The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru’s recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush’s war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator’s self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun — and heated — exchange. Heddy Honigmann’s latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I’ve only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I’ve been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima’s finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he’s overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don’t have any dreams. No, I don’t have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats — homeless kids — who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They’re graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities — a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann’s personal relationship with her home country.

Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

To recycle a line I’ve used before, I’m often more interested in what a film does than what it’s about, and Bradshaw’s first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music — a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I’ll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw’s success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act — and, more importantly, Bradshaw’s cynical handling of it — caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

I’ve already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis’s take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he’s leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who’s walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that’s how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there’s something much more interesting in Lionel’s expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter’s behavior, his realization that she’s cleaning, which means that she’s upset, which means that it’s his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There’s text — Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father — and there’s subtext — not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations — her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don’t. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

Zift (Javor Gardev)

A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth’s iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I’m glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

Wild Field belongs to a class of films I’m drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can’t find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist’s inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

April 30, 2009
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.

September 5, 2008
2007 TIFF Day 3

Naomi Kawase’s Mourning Forest could be used as a template for the kind of film I love. A slow, moving camera that captures images of nature, with an almost fetishistic fascination with wind blowing through trees and tall grass. Nearly wordless characters, whose desires and pain are expressed instead by their faces, which we’re allowed to watch closely and intimately. A curiosity about essential things like faith and love and loss. Oh, and the desire for transcendence, of course. It’s a ready-made Long Pauses kind of film. Except that it isn’t. Girish and I have been trying to understand why we’re the only people among our group of like-minded friends here who were disappointed by Mourning Forest. (And, for the record, to say that I was disappointed is not to say it isn’t an interesting film.) The story concerns a young woman and elderly man, both of whom have suffered a great loss. For the first half of the film, we watch them going about the routines of daily life at the retirement home where she works and he lives. I was quite liking the film until they began their journey through the forest, at which point I was instantly reminded of other similar, more compelling movies. I think Kawase’s handheld photography was part of the problem for me. It seemed at odds with the tone of the film. But mostly I was frustratingly unmoved by the two leads, and the last image of the film — that inevitable grasp at transcendence — was too calculated and a little clumsy. But don’t listen to me. Everyone else loves it.

The general consensus at the festival is that The Man from London is minor Tarr. I’ve been ambivalent about the other two films of his that I’ve seen, Damnation and Satantango. As the latter film proved, I will gladly sit for hours and hours and hours in front of his films. (Question of the day: Has any director in the history of cinema had a more distinct style?) The camera moves slowly, the actors speak slowly, the music churns slowly, and as a result “real” time is compressed. I couldn’t believe, when The Man from London ended, that 135 minutes had passed. My qualms with Tarr have always concerned his view of the world, which is too misanthropic for my tastes. Which is probably why his latest film is my favorite of the three. I keep calling it a film noir that was left to simmer over low heat, reducing the genre to its fundamentals: man is trapped, man finds money, man attempts to escape fate. Friends look at me funny when I tell them how much I liked the protagonist, who in typical Tarr fashion has little to say. But in his own way, he’s actually quite tender at times. (That I managed to use the word “tender” here is probably another reason for disappointment from the Tarr loyalists.) As usual, The Man from London is a joy to look at. His camera is still tracking for minutes at a time, and he’s thrown in a couple new tricks. The 12-minute opener is a doozy. Also, Tarr stuck around for a Q&A and didn’t bite off a single head. He was charming, actually, and really funny.

Jia Zhang-ke’s latest, Useless, is an odd one. Like last year’s documentary, Dong, Useless is a portrait of an artist, though in this case Jia is less concerned with fashion designer Ma Ke, specifically, than with what she represents to China’s leap into consumerism. In a recent interview, Wang Bing (see yesterday’s post on Wang’s latest) mentions that one reason he is not making narrative films right now is because “in China, social changes have come so fast and been so massive, that the opportunities for documentaries are considerable.” I suspect that Jia feels the same way. Useless, the title, comes from the name of Ma Ke’s haute couture line fashioned from traditionally hand-made fabrics. The middle third of Jia’s film documents the line’s impressive debut at Paris’s Fashion Week and includes interviews with Ma in which she waxes nostalgic about the human touch and artistry that is missing from mass-produced clothing. As we’ve learned in the first act of the film, though, Ma is only able to concentrate her efforts on Useless because of the fortune she made with Exception, which seems to be the Chinese equivalent of Banana Republic. Jia opens the film with a tour of the facility where hundreds of workers hunch over sewing machines, manufacturing garments for the chain of Exception store fronts. The shots are mirrored in the second act, when Jia shows two Chinese women hunching over weaving machines to produce the “hand-made” fabrics for Useless. The film ends in a rural mining town, where Jia follows several locals, including two tailors and a former tailor who was forced by the low cost of manufactured clothes to take a job at the mine. This quick summary lays out the macro-structure of Useless, but its the finer points — the visual echoes that reverberate throughout the film, the ironies and ambivalences — that make the film so fascinating. I like it better the more I think about it.

John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones. Gianvito structures the film chronologically and breaks the sequence of shots only on occasion to show images of wind blowing through leaves and grass (shades of Whitman and the Transcendentalists) and to interject jarring hand-drawn animations that represent the impersonal, amoral transactions of capitalism. The relative simplicity of the form allows the film to function pedagogically (I came away with a list of names and events I want to explore), but it also leaves room for the viewer to create connections and find new contexts. We can chart, for example, the movement of civil rights from New England to the South, and, likewise, the movement of manufacturing from the South to the Midwest. Or, in my favorite cut of the film, we learn that the founder of America’s first labor organization lays in an unmarked grave, while, at the same time, Sojourner Truth was being buried under an oversized headstone. In 1883, apparently, an African-American woman could be commemorated with greater honor than a white male labor organizer. Fascinating.

Ute Aurand and Maria Lang’s The Butterfly in Winter is a 30-minute silent portrait of Lang’s life at home, where she tends to her 96-year-old mother. Each day begins with the opening of her mother’s bedroom window, a glass of water, breakfast, a wash and massage, and ends with a whisper in her hear and the closing of the window. Aurand assembles their life in jump cuts and closeups, revealing the slight variations amid the routine. I like Andrea Picard’s description: “Every day is the same and every day is different.” There’s such beauty and sweetness in the film.

September 12, 2007
Satantango (1994)

Dir. by Bela Tarr

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 12, 2006
Damnation (1988)

I’ve wondered, on occasion, what it might look like if a contemporary filmmaker were to use Sculpting in Time as a style guide of sorts, deliberately mimicking Tarkovsky’s technique but toward very different ends. Would Tarkovsky’s style, siphoned through another imagination, produce a similar effect? Would any of that strange poetic logic survive the translation?

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s Damnation (1988) makes for an interesting case study. Many of the Tarkovsky trademarks are on display: stark black-and-white photography, elliptical editing, textured (for lack of a better word) mise-en-scene, wet floors, wandering dogs, and lots and lots of rain; Tarr’s camera creeps slowly through most of the film, typically from side-to-side, and shots last for minutes at a time. Damnation captures something of Stalker‘s dystopia and Nostalghia‘s sorrow, but Mirror casts the longest shadow. Vali Kerekes’s resemblance to Margarita Terekhova is, at times, uncanny; her make-up seems even to have been designed to remind us of the circles under Terekhova’s eyes.

And so, as I watched Damnation, I thought often of Tarkovsky; and yes, at times, Damnation felt like a Tarkovsky film. I would agree with Jonathon Rosenbaum that it is “compulsively watchable” for that very reason. But Tarr’s and co-writer László Krashnahorkai’s imaginations are no match for Tarkovsky’s, and so the content of the film, ultimately, borders on the banal. Alienation and isolation and desperation are, of course, perfectly acceptable subjects for artistic meditation — Damnation joins an impressive body of work in that respect — but I was struck repeatedly by a clash of content and form that reduces the film, finally, to a string of platitudes and (even worse) symbols. Tarkovsky writes:

in film, every time, the first essential in any plastic composition, its necessary and final criterion, is whether it is true to life, specific and factual; that is what makes it unique. By contrast, symbols are born, and readily pass into general use to become clichés, when an author hits upon a particular plastic composition, ties it in with some mysterious turn of thought of his own, loads it with extraneous meaning.

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

Using a near static camera, . . . Tarr reflects the desolation and spiritual lethargy of the directionless and morally bankrupt protagonists: the cloakroom attendant’s hollow recitation of religious scripture to Karrer; the dispassionate act of intimacy between Karrer and his lover; the somnambulistic group line dance that recalls the opening image of the sluggish, automated motion of cable cars.

Likewise, the dogs that roam silently through much of the film (shades of Nostalghia) are transformed by Damnation‘s closing image into a trite symbol of man’s savage nature (or some such oversimplification). I haven’t decided yet if it is fair to call Damnation a failure because it doesn’t meet Tarkovsky’s standards, but I feel justified in my reservations. The film’s style implies a kind of intellectual and spiritual freedom (for the viewer, for man, in general) that is simply absent in the film itself.

June 4, 2004