Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Rey

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 3

    TIFF 2012 – Day 3

    Gebo and the Shadow

    Dir. by Manoel de Oliveira
    I won’t pretend I know anything about Raul Brandão beyond what I’ve just learned from his Wikipedia page — that he became a journalist while working in Portugal’s Ministry of War, that the most productive period in his writing life came after retiring from that career, that he’s an important figure in Portuguese Modernism. Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from 103-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, is as far as I can tell an adaptation of one section of Brandão’s 1923 novel, Os Pescaderos, a sympathetic study of the beautiful and tragic lives of the hard-working residents of various fishing villages.

    Although Brandão is a generation older than Eugene O’Neill, de Oliveira’s film plays out like A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stagy even compared with de Oliveira’s other recent work, Gebo and the Shadow is built from several long, late-night conversations that lead inevitably toward ruination. “It was you and her that bound me to life,” Gebo (Michael Lonsdale) tells his wife Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale), and in that one line is contained all of the film’s tragedy. The daily labors of life, the lies and deceptions, the sacrifices — Gebo’s every action is made in despairing love and generosity for Doroteia and their daughter-in-law Sofia (Leonor Silveira).

    Cinematically, Gebo and the Shadow is a fairly simple film. (I heard one other critic at TIFF refer to it as a script table-read.) The opening moments are fantastic, though. The first shot (shown above) is an unnaturally lit, not-quite-realistic image of Gebo’s son João (Ricardo Trepa), who we see in profile, his face and body casting black shadows. (This allusion to the film’s title is obvious to me only in hindsight.) After a quick, impressionistic recreation of one of João’s crimes, de Oliveira cuts to the small room in which nearly all of the remainder of the film occurs. Sofia stands in front of a window, illuminated by candlelight, and as the camera dollies, we catch a glimpse of Doroteia in reflection. It’s a lovely shot that reveals the full physical space in which the characters exist, while also setting up the female leads as mirror images of one another. An especially nice touch is that the first image of Doroteia is blurred. At first it’s possible to mistake her for a literal reflection of Sofia, one of the film’s many reminders of the passage of time. (No reminder is more shocking than watching the aged faces of Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau.)

    differently, Molussia

    Dir. by Nicolas Rey
    Nicolas Rey introduced differently, Molussia with a long quotation from an essay by Günthers Anders in which Anders critiques the common usage of the word “totalitarian.” Rather than an adjective by which one speaker defines himself in opposition to another (it’s always the other power or system that is “totalitarian”), Anders argues that totalitarianism is instead characterized by its “sense of the machine.” “What can be done, needs to be done,” he writes. Once a technique is discovered, it will be marketed until a need for it is created, which can then be exploited for profit. Resistance, as they say, is futile. Rey smirked while quoting Anders again during the Q&A: “Nothing discredits a man more quickly than critiquing a machine.”

    The essays Rey quoted were written some thirty or forty years after his only novel, The Molussian Catacomb (1932-36), a collection of brief, witty, and incisive conversations between prisoners in an imaginary fascist country. Rey’s remarkable adaptation is built from nine reels of hand-processed 16mm film and shown in random order (making 362,880 possible versions of the film). Each includes a voice-over reading of a passage from one chapter of the novel, juxtaposed against images of landscapes, a soundtrack that mixes machines and natural sounds, and occasional portraits of the residents of Molussia (most of the film was shot within close driving range of Rey’s home near Paris). My interview with Rey and a much longer write-up about the film will be included in the next issue of Senses of Cinema.

    Night Across the Street

    Dir. by Raul Ruiz
    Long John Silver, rhododenrons, retirement parties, desert landscapes, Beethoven, pink walls, mysterious assassins, four-letter words, childhood memories, gun barrels, a beautiful dancer, bicycles, Antofagasta, classroom anxiety, shiny faces, a man who never speaks, ugly video, ships in bottles, a last desperate gasp of life, and ghosts and ghosts and ghosts.

    That’s all I’ve got.

    Wavelengths 2

    More to come in full write-up later this fall.

  • Schuss! (2005)

    Schuss! (2005)

    Dir. by Nicolas Rey

    “Do you ski?”
    Pause. Sly grin. “I used to.”
    — First question at the Q&A with Rey, TIFF 2006

    Nicolas Rey’s Schuss! is an experimental essay film that is concerned, ultimately, with the spoils of capitalism. More specifically, it’s about the rise of the aluminum industry, the building of a French ski resort, and the economic interests that joined the two. Also, Schuss! is about the cinema, which, I realize, is one of those lazy critical phrases that gets attached to every film that pushes, in even the vaguest of ways, the boundaries of film form. But in this case it’s a fair assessment, I think. During the post-screening Q&A, Rey told us that the overarching subject of his work is the 20th century, and in this film he’s particularly interested in chemistry — specifically, the radical innovations that improved manufacturing processes and that made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey participates actively in his investigation by scavenging decades-old film stock, shooting it with restored cameras, and processing his footage by hand. (His previous film, Les Soviets plus l’electricite, was apparently shot on Soviet-era Super 8. Not surprisingly, he’s in no hurry to buy a DV cam, and he doesn’t want you to either.)

    Schuss! is divided into several chapters, each of which includes: early 9 1/2mm skiing footage, recent footage shot atop a ski slope, archival documents that unearth the history of an aluminum manufacturing plant and the local economy it fueled, and contemporary images of that plant and the owner’s large home that towers over it. A voice-over (I can’t recall if it’s Rey’s or an interviewee’s) comments on the images, filling in some — but not all — of the gaps. I’m ambivalent about the film’s rigid structure, but the aspect of the film that I most admire would be impossible without it: the repetition of the skiing footage. The man in the image above is one of the sixty or seventy vacationers we watch take off from the same spot. Each acts in precisely the same manner. They pause briefly, stare down the slope, push off (“schuss” is a German word that describes a fast downhill run), and turn to pose for Rey’s camera as they pass. Rey cuts the skiers together into a montage that begins to feel like a loop until interrupted, from time to time, by black, “empty” frames. (I’ve been following Zach’s recent posts on cinema violence and flicker films with interest because I suspect that much that I liked about Schuss! is wrapped up, somehow, in those ideas. I remember, after the screening, making some vague comment to a friend about how I wanted to understand “what those black frames were doing to my eyes.” Any guidance in this area would be much appreciated.) Schuss! is a long film — unnecessarily long according to the few reviews I’ve found online — but the effect of the duration, the constant repetitions, is to defamiliarize those skiers, making them . . . well . . . gross.