Tag: Senses of Cinema

  • TIFF 2019

    TIFF 2019

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    On 31 December 2018, the fundraising arm of the Toronto International Film Festival sent a year-end email solicitation, urging recipients to support cinema by helping the organisation hit its annual target of 3,600 donors. This is standard practice in the non-profit world, where calendar-based tax laws are convenient tools for incentivising the philanthropic class. (I do this for a living.) I saved the email because it was addressed by Piers Handling and had a memorable subject line, “My final message as CEO.” After 36 years at TIFF, Handling was officially turning over the reins to his festival Co-Heads-in-waiting, Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente, and entering “the next chapter of [his] life—writing, travelling, watching lots of movies.”

    It makes a certain sense that Handling’s final message as CEO would be a fundraising appeal. During his tenure, TIFF expanded its mission to include year-round film programming, community initiatives, special talks and events, industry conferences, talent labs, film preservation, and more. TIFF has also worked in recent years to reshape its brand, emphasising diversity and inclusion, most prominently in its “Share Her Journey” campaign, which champions gender equality in the film industry. (36% of all films at TIFF this year were directed or co-directed by women, a new record.) In 2018, that expansion came at a total operating cost of $45 million, one-eighth of which was paid for by private donations.

    Seven months later, TIFF announced the first new major event of the Bailey/Vicente era, The TIFF Tribute Awards Gala, a “fundraiser to support TIFF’s year-round programmes and core mission to transform the way people see the world through film.” Held midway through the festival at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, the first-annual gala honoured Meryl Streep, Joaquin Phoenix, Taika Waititi, Roger Deakins, Mati Diop, and Jeff Skoll and David Linde of Participant Media, each of whom received an award and, as importantly, dressed up and made speeches in front of cameras and a room full of donors who had purchased tables for the evening. Variety was the exclusive trade media partner for the event and lent their name to the Variety Artisan Award given to Deakins. The TIFF Tribute Actor Award was sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada. Two weeks later, Phoenix’s charming and emotional speech – ”My publicist said, ‘Someone wants to give you an award.’ I said, ‘I’m in. Let’s do it.’” – is already the fifth most-viewed clip on the TIFF Talks YouTube channel.

    I mention all of this without any cynicism or eye-rolling. For more than a decade now, I’ve used these annual reports as a kind of longitudinal study of the TIFF experiment, which is impressive if for no other reason than its ambition. I titled my first piece “New Directions” because the impending debut of the TIFF Bell Lightbox and a shuffling of the programming team, including the naming of Bailey as Co-Director of the fest, were signs that 2008 would be a pivotal moment in the life of the organisation. And it was. Notably, 2008 was the first year when donors received preferential treatment in the ticket lottery system and passholders were required to pay full ticket prices for premium screenings. In the eleven years since, TIFF has grown into a full-fledged cultural institution, subsidising any number of worthy projects (hundreds of them, according to the annual report) with dollars generated in part by all of that glitz and glamour: TIFF’s earnings in 2018 accounted for 48% of total revenue, and I assume a majority of the sponsorships (another 30%) are directly associated with the festival.

    If there’s a theme to my decade of reporting it’s the growing recognition that cinema, like symphonic music, dance, sculpture, painting and opera, is a cultural value in need of public partnerships and private gift support if it is to thrive. By coincidence, I’m writing on the very day that Iowa City, Iowa (population 76,000) celebrates the opening of a new three-screen facility that boasts DCP, 35mm and 16mm projection – this, only six years after FilmScene, then a fledgling non-profit, crowdfunded $90,000 to outfit its original theatre. (They’re screening Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud [2005] at the moment. Just imagine!) While FilmScene’s budget is less than 2% of TIFF’s, both represent, I think, variations of the same scalable, sustainable model for repertory and non-commercial theatrical exhibition and the local cinema culture it nourishes.

    The question of whether all of this growth and transformation has resulted in a better festival, judging only by the quality of the films screened, is more difficult to answer. I also noted in 2008 that two programs dedicated to boundary-pushing and formally-inventive features, Visions and Vanguard, had both been halved that year; they were soon phased out completely, with a half-dozen Vision-like slots transferred over to an expanded Wavelengths. I suspect this was as much a practical decision (simplified marketing and fewer arguments with sales agents) as it was an intentional shift away from adventurous programming, but later changes, such as the elimination of gallery installations after a particularly strong effort in 2016, suggest a general shift in the voice of the festival to align with its evolving cosmopolitan, industry-friendly and woke mission. Along those lines, in 2009 TIFF launched City-to-City, which showcased filmmakers living and working in one particular city. After a controversial start – the focus on Tel Aviv prompted a protest by a group of prominent filmmakers, artists, and actors – City-to-City carried on for seven more years, lost in the massive lineup and without making many waves, before finally being dropped. Michael Sicinski’s report on City-to-City: Seoul is an excellent discussion of the values and failings of the concept.

    Handling’s final signature contribution to TIFF programming was the creation in 2015 of Platform, a relatively small, curated selection of films that, according to the original press release, was intended to champion “artistically ambitious cinema from around the world.” Bailey touted it at the time as “one of our most international programmes. . . . [It] is meant to highlight auteur cinema, directors’ cinema, at the festival.” Named in part for Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film, Platform was announced with a certain fanfare because it also introduced a new competition with a juried prize. While TIFF is already home to arguably the most important festival honour in the industry – ten of the past eleven TIFF People’s Choice Award winners were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars; four of them won – Platform seems to have been designed in part to sustain media attention on Toronto throughout the front-loaded, eleven-day fest and to reinforce TIFF’s brand as an advocate of artist cinema.

    Jia was joined by Claire Denis and Agnieszka Holland on the original jury, which awarded the first Platform Prize to Hurt, by Canadian documentarian Alan Zweig. The next three juries likewise featured established international auteurs, including Brian De Palma, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chen Kaige, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta, Béla Tarr and Lee Chang-dong. Last year Norman Wilner of Toronto’s Now magazine asked, “Will TIFF’s Platform Prize ever take off?” Zweig, for his part, was skeptical: “I know that people in Toronto think that, given that the prize was given by Claire Denis and Agnieszka Holland, Hurt must have burned up the European film circuit. . . . As far as festivals and distribution, it’s not my least successful film . . . but it’s on the bottom with the rest of them.” As one measure of the program’s influence on international markets, Hurt is among the 20 (of 48) films that screened in the first four Platform competitions that did not find American distribution.

    In hindsight, the Platform prizewinners are an idiosyncratic lot: the 2016 selection of Pablo Larraín’s Jackie over Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight has received particular attention. In his piece for Now, Wilner noted a disconnect between the average age of the jury members (at 63, Lee was the youngest member in 2018) and Platform’s mission of recognising emerging talent. Whether by coincidence or by design, the 2019 jury was younger than its predecessors and also more diverse, in terms of experience and expertise. Filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, Berlinale Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian, and Variety critic Jessica Kiang were chosen, according to Bailey, to push the next evolution of the young program: “we feel incorporating established industry professionals into its jury is the natural progression.” With Handling’s departure, Bailey and long-time Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard took over curatorial responsibilities, joined by a selection committee of Brad Deane, Ming-Jenn Lim, and Lydia Ogwang.

    The consensus at the fest favoured the changes. The five Platform films I’ve seen are all commendable, although I was personally disappointed to varying degrees by four of them, including the prizewinner, Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello’s follow up to Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015). By relocating Jack London’s 1909 novel to some vague all-of-the-20th-century-at-once Italy, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci have made a pastiche of the specific historical conditions that shaped the despairing logic of American Naturalism, and as a result the politics of the film are a muddle. Martin Eden is stunning to look at – its found footage of a sinking ship was the most striking image I saw at TIFF. It is a big, delightfully ambitious, Capital-A Art Film, but it is always just a bit out of balance. By the time Martin (Luca Marinelli) takes the stage and delivers his first fiery address at a gathering of socialists, the over-determined plotting has caught up with it, and we’re left to ponder not the lessons of class struggle and mass culture but how to make sense of a cockeyed final act that doesn’t at all proceed inevitably from what comes before. Alice Winocour’s Proxima and Federico Veiroj’s The Moneychanger (Así habló el cambista) were among my most highly anticipated fall premieres but they both proved to be the least interesting of each director’s features. It’s especially gratifying to see Veiroj make his well-deserved debut at the New York Film Festival this year; I just wish it had been with his previous film, Belmonte (2018).

    Toronto filmmaker Kazik Radwanski has screened regularly at TIFF since 2008, when his student film, Princess Margaret Blvd., made with producing partner Daniel Montgomery, premiered in the now-defunct Short Cuts Canada program. Three more of their short films and two features, Tower (2012) and How Heavy This Hammer (2015), have also played the fest, but the selection of their latest, Anne at 13,000 ft., for the Platform competition marked a formal coming out of sorts – for Radwanski and Montgomery, specifically, but also for a coterie of young Canadian filmmakers and actors who have made increasingly accomplished work in recent years.

    Indeed, one of the most pleasant surprises of covering TIFF for the past decade has been observing the emergence of a talented and enterprising independent filmmaking community in the city. Many of its members have been associated with the graduate program in film production at York University, which, academic coursework aside, offers ample financial support and access to production resources, allowing students to focus full-time on the work of filmmaking for two years. Radwanski is an alumnus of the program (his thesis film, Scaffold [2017], screened at TIFF and NYFF); other current and former students include Sofia Bohdanowicz, Antoine Bourges, Andrea Bussman, Daniel Cockburn, Matt Johnson, Luo Li, Isiah Medina, Nicolás Pereda, Lina Rodriguez and Sophy Romvari. TIFF also screened new films this year by Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Blake Williams (2008) and by the team of Yonah Lewis, Calvin Thomas and Lev Lewis, whose White Lie represents a significant jump in commercial ambition and budget for the community.

    Anne at 13,000 ft., which was awarded an honourable mention by the Platform jury, stars Deragh Campbell as a part-time daycare worker in crisis. Following her debut in Matt Porterfield’s I Used to Be Darker (2013) and a leading role in Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven (2015), Campbell has become, pardon the term, “the face” of the Toronto film scene, collaborating with Lev Lewis and Bourges, performing for and co-directing with Romvari and Bohdanowicz, and appearing on the cover of a recent issue of Cinema Scope. (The subject of the cover feature, Campbell and Bohdanowicz’s MS Slavic 7, screened at Berlin and New Directors/New Films.) Anne is a ripe role, and Campbell makes the most of it, drawing comparisons, inevitably, to Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974).

    As in his first two features, Radwanski shoots his lead almost exclusively in hand-held closeups, giving viewers no choice but to experience the world through the character’s limited, subjective perspective. The technique (and I think that’s the right term for it) allows Radwanski near-complete freedom in the edit: his jump-cutting and cross-cutting strategy is built on emotional rather than classical continuity. But somewhere in the process, that continuity has been lost. Because Anne’s condition is as vague in the opening scene as in the last, and because there is so little arc in her story or in Campbell’s performance (on the simplest plot level, it seems impossible to me that this woman has been an employable childcare worker for three years when we meet her), Radwanski activates Anne’s mental illness like a suspense-making machine. Radwanski’s features are all 75-78 minutes long, which I suspect might be a measure of the limitations of his technique.

    Platform opened with Rocks, directed by Sarah Gavron, who makes an interesting move here from the middling period piece, Suffragette (2015), to this finely observed and neatly made piece of social realism. The project originated with British playwright Theresa Ikoko, who, along with co-writer Claire Wilson, workshopped the story for months with children like those we see in the final film – working-class Londoners, most of them from immigrant families. Rocks turns on the lead performance by first-time actress Bukky Bakray, who embodies in every glance and gesture the exhausting, everyday pressures and lowered expectations of poverty and racism. When we first meet “Rocks”, she and her girlfriends are joking, singing and taking selfies on a highway overpass, with the city skyline behind them in the distance. She returns home from school the next day to discover that her mother has abandoned her again, leaving the 16 year-old with an envelope of cash and the responsibility of caring for her little brother, Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu).

    This is a kind of film I’ve seen too many times at festivals over the years – one more well-intentioned “child in peril” story – but Gavron and her team of collaborators (most of them women and including the children) find new complexities and recognisable relationships in the situation. When Rocks and Emmanuel are confronted by the owner of a hostel where they’ve rented a room for the night, Savron balances a number of tensions – Emmanuel’s naive confusion and Rocks’s growing desperation but also our sudden realisation of how easily the white owner had accepted Rocks’ story that she, a black teenager, was the mother of Emmanuel, a seven year-old. Rocks was shot by Hélène Louvart, who over the past two decades has worked with Alice Rohrwacher, Nicolas Klotz, Eliza Hittman, Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda and Claire Denis, among others, and one of the great pleasures of the film is its craftsmanship. There’s wisdom in these kids’ stories, and it’s there in the form of the film too.

    That Rocks was one of the few real discoveries for me at TIFF this year speaks both to the persistent frustrations of navigating such a large program (with so many established filmmakers in the lineup, it’s always difficult to justify taking chances on the unknown) and to the generally poor quality of what I chose to see. I can’t recall a weaker selection of films in my 16 years of attending the festival. Along with the Winocour and Veiroj films, I was also slightly disappointed by the latest work by Mati Diop (Atlantiques), Corneliu Porumboiu (The Whistlers), Bertrand Bonello (Zombi Child) and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles). To my surprise, the three Cannes standouts were A Hidden Life, which usefully complicates Terrence Malick’s spiritual project by grounding two crises of faith in a structured narrative (Franziska Jägerstätter’s story is more interesting, I think, than her martyr husband’s); Liberté, which is not only Albert Serra’s best film but also the clearest evidence of his immense talents as a dramaturg; and The Traitor (Il traditore), in which 79 year-old Marco Bellocchio again grinds pulp material through his operatic sensibility to delirious effect: his staging of a deposition scene in a massive, prison-lined courtroom was the closest I came to cinematic ecstasy at the fest. The remainder of my report will cover a few films deserving of attention that are likely to be lost in the noise of fall festival season.

    Sandra Kogut returned to TIFF with Three Summers (Três Verões), a shape-shifting comedy inspired by “Operation Car Wash”, the multi-billion-dollar money laundering and bribery scandal involving Petrobras, Brazil’s largest company, that led to hundreds of arrests and asset forfeitures. The film opens in the luxurious seaside condo of Edgar (Otávio Müller) and Marta (Gisele Fróes), where friends and family have gathered to celebrate the holidays. It’s a raucous affair, overseen as best as she can by Madá (Regina Casé), their fast-talking, perpetually optimistic housekeeper who has ambitions of her own. The only portent of trouble in the film’s first act is a mysterious phone call and Edgar’s response to it; a year later, Madá and the other workers find themselves home alone for Christmas, sipping Champagne and answering the door of a police raid. In the final act, Madá and Edgar’s aged father (Rogério Fróes) prove their moxy by finding innovative ways to monetise their situation (this being a film about the creative abuses of modern capital).

    Three Summers marks a change of style for Kogut, whose previous features, Mutum (2007) and Campo Grande (2015), both examine social divisions by focusing on children who have gotten lost in the mix. This script, co-written with Iana Cossoy Paro, has the tidy, workshopped structure of a stage play, which is a less-than-ideal fit for a director whose strengths lie in observing characters in a sensory-rich world. (After seeing Mutum and The Holy Girl on early trips to TIFF, I’ve come to associate Kogut with Lucrecia Martel.) Three Summers is built around Casé’s comic persona, which is a bit of a gamble because, along with being funny and sympathetic, she is also gabby and abrasive. When, in the final act, Madá reveals the tragedies she’s overcome to create this life for herself, the scene fails to land as powerfully as one might hope because, despite Casé’s moving performance, it reads like a sample monologue in a screenwriter’s portfolio rather than the note of pathos and solidarity toward which the film seems to be building. Still, Kogut is a filmmaker worthy of greater recognition.

    I will admit to taking a chance on Ina Weisse’s The Audition (Das Vorspiel) because of its star, Nina Hoss, and because of the TIFF logline: “A stern, particular violin teacher becomes fixated on the success of one of her pupils at the expense of her family life.” Hoss is, I think, one of this era’s great movie stars, and among her many gifts is an uncanny sensitivity to the power dynamics around her, both real (actor to actor, body to body) and fictitious (character to character). Always watchful and calculating, she can shift with a glance from a dominant stance to submissive, always strengthening her position in the process. Borrowing from Pauline Kael’s description of Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) Hoss also has “that gift that beautiful actresses sometimes have of suddenly turning ugly and of being even more fascinating because of the crossover. . . . the thin line between harpy and beauty makes the beauty more dazzling – it’s always threatened.” The Audition takes full advantage of both qualities.

    Hoss plays Anna, a gifted violinist who has lost her confidence and, so, finds herself teaching at a Berlin high school, where she pushes her newest student to achieve the same level of excellence that she was raised to prize above all. Her son and husband have both fallen short of the mark – in Anna’s estimation, at least – so she makes proxies of her diamond-in-the-rough student and a member of the cello faculty. (The Audition is the sort of film in which metaphorical calculations are relatively simple: musical performance equals sexual performance.) The script, which, like Weisse’s first feature, The Architect (2008), was co-written by Daphné Charizani, veers inevitably into sado-masochistic territories, culminating in a long, unbroken shot in which Anna forces the boy to restart a piece of music again and again and again until his cheeks turn flush and he comes within reach of perfection. Weisse is no scold like Michael Haneke, and The Audition is not The Piano Teacher, but the final plot twist does achieve a level of audacity that is all the more transgressive for the film’s middlebrow trappings.

    On March 6, 1953, a day after succumbing to the consequences of a stroke, Joseph Stalin was lain in state in the Hall of Columns, beginning a four-day, nationwide period of mourning that came to be known as The Great Farewell. Exactly 15 years earlier, the Hall of Columns had been the site of the notorious show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, the former Lenin associate and editor of Pravda who was soon afterward executed in Stalin’s purge of rivals. Thousands of visitors queued to pay their final respects and to catch a glimpse of Stalin’s open casket, which rested on an elevated pedestal, surrounded on all sides by ferns and dense bouquets of red and white flowers. An estimated 109 people were crushed and trampled to death in the process. In Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, the image of Stalin’s body on display is unnaturally saturated, as if the colour spectrum had been reduced to only the most potent, weaponised shades of totalitarian propaganda.

    Following The Event (2015) and The Trial (2018), State Funeral is the latest, and best, of Loznitsa’s found-footage reconstructions. I don’t know if there’s an exact precedent for these films, which artfully assemble rarely-seen material, in combination with original soundtracks that mimic synchronised sound (a constant murmur of voices in crowd scenes, for example) while also always drawing attention to the artificiality of the conceit. Although not nearly as long as most Wang Bing films, State Funeral likewise allows for frequent caesurae, when the content of an image sheds its familiar connotations. Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria are revealed to be uninspired speechmakers and jockeying bureaucrats. The grand bouquets and painted portraits become heavy, lumbering burdens when they are lifted awkwardly and carried to Red Square in the funeral parade. The mourners, some of them literally scarred and hobbled by war, file by the coffin in an endless procession – victims of Stalin’s cult of personality and survivors of outrageous trauma.

  • TIFF 2018

    TIFF 2018

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    In 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival joined Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Vienna in announcing major changes in leadership. After 36 years at TIFF, the final 24 of them as chief executive officer, Piers Handling will step down at the end of the year. Cameron Bailey, who has served as Artistic Director since 2012, retains that title and has also been named co-head of the fest, alongside new Executive Director Joana Vicente, who comes to Toronto after leading Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) for the past decade. During his tenure, Handling steered TIFF’s course from its original, local brand, the Festival of Festivals, to its current position as North America’s preeminent showcase of new cinema and the launch pad for awards season. Handling also led the effort to conceive, fund and build the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which opened in 2010 as a permanent home for the festival, its staff and TIFF’s film reference library. In addition to providing screening venues and entertainment spaces during the festival, the Lightbox has enabled the organisation to expand its year-round programming beyond the Cinematheque repertory screenings that had, for years, been held a few blocks north at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

    The very presence of the Lightbox, occupying five stories of an entire city block in Toronto’s entertainment district, is significant if for no other reason than because it represents a substantial and increasingly rare capital investment in cinema as a shared cultural and civic value. Located within short walking distance of premier museums, theatres, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (home of The National Ballet of Canada and The Canadian Opera Company), and Roy Thompson Hall (home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra), the Lightbox makes real, in a physical way, Ricciotto Canudo’s century-old and still aspirational description of cinema as “the seventh art”. The nearest analogy in North America might be the founding in 1969 of The Film Society, which bestowed a particular, Lincoln Center-certified, institutional credibility not only to film exhibition and appreciation but also to the social act of film spectatorship and to cinema as an art form worthy of philanthropic support. This is becoming a recurring theme in my festival reporting: better positioning non-commercial cinema in the public and non-profit marketplaces will prove key to its long-term sustainability. That TIFF and the city of Toronto managed to pull it off amidst the transition to digital exhibition and a downtown real estate boom rather than, say, during the heydays of campus film societies is quite a feat. It’s easy to imagine someone banging his or her fist on a TIFF boardroom table in 2005 and demanding, “I know it’s a risk, but if not now, when?” Film advocates in other cities, and working at other scales of funding and ambition, should be asking the same.

    TIFF’s video tribute to Handling includes footage from the 9th Festival of Festivals (1984), where he presented a landmark program, “Northern Lights: A Retrospective of Canadian Cinema”, that featured work by Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Denys Arcand, Gilles Carle, Michael Snow, Evelyn Lambert and Norman McLaren, among many others. “Northern Lights” remains an interesting historical document because it proposed a new canon – quite literally, as it was preceded by the first-ever broad polling of critics, academics, filmmakers and other industry professionals to determine the top 25 Canadian films of all time. In his program notes for “Northern Lights”, Handling sketches a brief history of Canadian cinema back to 1896, when Edison’s and Lumiere’s shorts first screened in Montreal and Ottawa, establishing from the very beginning a relationship in which, in his words, “our self-image was overshadowed by our more powerful neighbors” in America and France. Throughout the early decades of the 20th century, as the major Hollywood studios consolidated control of production, distribution and exhibition, the imbalance of power became even more pronounced: Canadians “remained foreigners within our own cinematic marketplace.” Handling’s notes for “Northern Lights” amount to a polemic and a mission statement, while also demonstrating his rhetorical and marketing talents, essential skills not to be overlooked in a festival director:

    Film in Canada is undergoing significant changes in its development. . . . At this critical juncture, it is time to look back at our cinematic heritage, to see what is best, what is indigenous, what marks it as distinctive and truly ours. . . . Although we need to understand the context in which they were made, the films need no apology. In fact they constitute one of the most stimulating national cinemas in the world and are a constant source of stimulation and interest to me. Innovative, often challenging, they tell us who we are and where we life. Together they constitute a family album of extraordinary richness.1

    Along with showing more than 200 Canadian films, the 1984 festival also introduced the Perspective Canada program, which in the following years would go on to promote the work and international reputations of any number of directors, including Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, David Cronenberg, Bruce McDonald, Deepa Mehta and Peter Mettler. In 2004, TIFF did away with Perspective Canada and began screening Canadian filmmakers alongside their international peers, but the Perspective brand lives on as the name of TeleFilm Canada’s touring film market. As an aside, during my 15 years of attending TIFF, three of my favourite experiences were repertory screenings of Michael Snow’s Wavelengths (1967), Allan King’s A Married Couple (1969) and Francis Mankiewicz’s Les bons débarras (1980), all of which screened in “Northern Lights”.

    All of which is to say it is impossible to separate Handling’s legacy from the essential Canadian-ness of the enterprise he helped to build. I’m curious to see how that aspect of the organisation evolves under new leadership. Certainly Joana Vicente’s arrival seems to suggest further expansion of TIFF’s mission of showcasing and supporting Canadian filmmakers. IFP, which also operates as a non-profit, has for nearly 40 years shepherded American independent filmmakers through every stage of production, from screenwriting and financing to marketing and distribution. And like TIFF, IFP deals daily with the very practical concern of how to make profitable use (in the general sense) of brick-and-mortar facilities in a digital age. IFP’s broad portfolio of events and services – IFP Week, classes, industry talks, Filmmaker magazine, the Screen Forward Conference, the Gotham Awards, the Made in NY Media Center – offers any number of tested models for Vicente’s new board of directors to consider as they evaluate their own industry offerings, including Rising Stars, Talent Lab, Writers’ Studio and TeleFilm Canada’s Pitch This! TIFF has already begun making some efforts to augment its brand and marketing reach through all of the standard channels (YouTube, podcasts, a blog, social media), and its five-year commitment to support women filmmakers, “Share Her Journey”, is a focused and timely message around which to build a non-profit fundraising campaign.

    One outcome of “Share Her Journey” was the announcement in June, made by Brie Larsen at the Women in Film Los Angeles Crystal + Lucy Awards, that TIFF would join Sundance in allocating 20 percent of press credentials to underrepresented writers. The event was held only a few days after the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released “Critic’s Choice?”, a study designed to “assess the gender and race/ethnicity of reviewers across the 100 top domestic films of 2017,” using Rotten Tomatoes as its data set. The results should come as little surprise to anyone who has attended a press screening or paid attention to review bylines:

    Two-thirds of reviews by Top critics were written by White males (67.3%), with less than one-quarter (21.5%) composed by White women, 8.7% by underrepresented males, and a mere 2.5% by underrepresented females. White male critics were writing top film reviews at a rate of nearly 27 times their underrepresented female counterparts.

    Andréa Grau, TIFF’s Vice President of Public Relations and Corporate Affairs, commented after the announcement: “It’s become more evident of what our role is. Festivals showcase the best cinema of the world, but we also have to showcase the range of voices talking about these films.” It’s worth mentioning that Sundance and TIFF are among a small and highly select group of international marketplace festivals whose business models are built on press coverage and, as a result, host thousands of press and industry professionals each year. I commend them for driving this conversation. They’re two of the only festivals with the clout and resources to do so.

    In my report from the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam for Filmmaker magazine, I argued that large festivals must constantly evaluate and improve their efforts to help make independent filmmaking a sustainable career: “Until a model exists that allows those same filmmakers to mature their craft and be paid a reasonable wage while doing so – to make not just a second feature but a fifth and sixth – then a premiere screening at an oversized fest risks becoming a kind of participation trophy.” I also noted that film criticism is facing a similar sustainability crisis: “At 45, I’m often the old man in the press room, surrounded by hard-hustling freelancers. Not coincidentally, I earn my living through other means, as do many of the filmmakers I cover.” TIFF acknowledges this situation in its inclusion initiative, vowing to use money raised through the “Share Her Journey” campaign to cover travel costs for underrepresented writers. The problem is real. A few weeks after TIFF, I created a Twitter poll, asking accredited press whether they would make enough money from their writing to cover the costs of their trip to Toronto. This is hardly scientific research, but of the 130 respondents, only 21 people (16%) answered “yes”. In the interest of full disclosure, I broke even. TIFF paid for my flight and I slept on a friend’s couch, but I’m not being paid for my work, a problematic bargain I’ve made in exchange for editorial freedom and longer deadlines. I can only afford to make this bargain at my age, with children and a mortgage, because I am able to use paid vacation leave from my day job and because my partner is willing to take on all parenting responsibilities while I’m gone. Also, I’m willing to write about experimental films and festival news during my lunch hour and late at night after my kids have gone to bed.

    Transparency is essential in this discussion, I think, because otherwise it’s too easy to overlook the other factors, in addition to the urgent question of inclusion, that are determining the range of voices in our critical conversation, chief among them day-to-day economics. I’m writing a few days after a group of advertisers filed suit against Facebook, alleging the company knew for years that it was overstating the amount of time users spent watching videos on the platform. Those fraudulent reports contributed directly to the industry-wide “pivot to video” that precipitated one more gutting of staff writers and editors. The consequences of this de-professionalisation of journalism, generally, and of film criticism, more specifically, are never more obvious than during TIFF. Inspired by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, I concocted a less rigorous study of my own. Over the past month I’ve read one hundred reviews of four high-profile films that I saw at TIFF: If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins), High Life (Claire Denis), The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery) and Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas). Like the authors of “Critic’s Choice?” I used Rotten Tomatoes as my data set, limiting my selections to reviews posted within two weeks of each film’s first TIFF screening. The results were equally stark: 64 of the reviews contain spelling, grammar and/or factual errors that would never have made it past a competent editor; only 35 of the reviews include what I would consider genuine critical insights into the film. This last metric is subjective, obviously, but I did approach the project with generosity. I was looking for anything beyond plot summaries, celebrity gossip, production histories, first-person rambles, and simple evaluation. Even a single inspired metaphor was enough to check the “critical insight” box.

    I wouldn’t recommend repeating my experiment. It wasn’t much fun. On the whole, critical writing produced by accredited press during and immediately after TIFF is of poor quality more often than it’s good. To be clear, I’m in no way drawing a correlation between my criticisms and TIFF’s inclusion efforts. This has been a subject of conversation among critics, programmers, and filmmakers at every festival I’ve attended for several years now. The reasons for the mediocre writing are obvious and yet difficult to surmount. That the films are being written about is more important to TIFF’s position in the market than what is being written. In the battle for buzzworthy fall premieres, pageviews and retweets are the coin of the realm. The festival, then, is incentivised to maximise press capacity, but in order to do so it’s having to draw from a deepening pool of writers who have no reasonable expectation for a sustained career in the business. For their part, the writers are incentivised to post quickly rather than thoughtfully and accurately (pageviews!) and to trade a bit more credit card debt for the opportunity to wear a badge, see the new movies first, and be “part of the conversation”. Few will ever have the benefit of collaborating with good editors, who not only catch mistakes but challenge ideas and help to hone the craft of writing. Like the independent filmmakers they cover, too few critics will ever gain the benefits of experience. There are no simple solutions to these economic conditions, but I do hope TIFF, Sundance and other well-resourced festivals constantly evaluate their role in shaping those conditions. Press accreditation is also beginning to feel like a participation trophy.

    Wavelengths Shorts

    After a screening two years ago, Kevin Jerome Everson was asked a question about the seeming haphazardness of his technique. His response was along the lines of, “I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s my job. I work 40 hours a week making movies.” The man who asked the question didn’t seem to realise it was a bit patronising, and Everson’s answer didn’t take him to task for it. The guy probably came away thinking, “I was right. He shoots without much planning and then tries to find meaning in the editing.” Whereas Everson was implying, “I trust my instincts because I’ve done the work. I know where to put the camera. I know there will be wisdom in these images.” Everson’s background is in photography, which shows in his compositions, but his strength as a filmmaker has always been the integrity of his conceptual approach to each subject. When shooting Polly One, which opened the four programs of Wavelengths shorts, Everson did what millions of other Americans did on 21st August, 2017: he turned his gaze to the sky to observe a rare solar eclipse. The six-minute silent film is composed of two shots of the crescent sun, each of equal length and filmed in 16mm. In the first, the cloud cover moves quickly from right to left, presumably in a time lapse, which causes constant variations in the levels of light diffusion and in the length and shape of the lens flares that extend outward in all directions from the sun. The sky is clear in the second shot, and the lens flares are prismatic. The image is softer and more abstract, in shades of deep lavender and orange, like a Whistler nocturne. The effect of the images is coloured by the title, an ode to Everson’s grandmother, who had died a few days earlier. To assign a specific symbolic meaning to Polly One would oversimplify the viewing experience, but the film does call for ancient and out-of-fashion words to describe it, like sacramental, reverent and consecrated.

    James Benning returned to TIFF for the first time in several years with L. COHEN, which was also shot during the 2017 solar eclipse. Benning has said that, although he’d read a great deal about eclipses and spent much time preparing for the shoot, he was still overwhelmed by the immediate strangeness of the experience. “I was very confused,” he told an audience at UCLA last summer. “I had a whole different sense of time. For some reason, maybe because I’m getting old, it became a metaphor for how quickly life passes. . . . It seemed very spiritual.” A few days before the eclipse, Benning drove to Madras, Oregon, the location nearest his home that would be in the centre of the shadow’s path, meaning that he would get to witness the longest possible duration of the totality, when the moon blocks out all light except for the sun’s corona. He then scouted an isolated location at the exact midpoint of the path and pointed his camera due west. L. COHEN consists of a single take, and like Polly One the film is divided in half, with the few seconds of maximum eclipse as the fulcrum. The image is of a flat, empty pasture with Mt. Jefferson in the far distance. A few objects scattered in between and a line of telephone poles at the right edge of the frame give some sense to the depth of field. (At TIFF, Benning somewhat reluctantly admitted that he’d placed a gas can in the foreground: “I thought a little yellow would look good there.”) For much of the film’s first 20 minutes, our perception is tricked both by the long duration of the gradual changes in light levels and by the digital camera’s auto-exposure, which measures and compensates for those changes, just as the eyes of the eclipse-watchers cheering somewhere off in the distance had involuntarily measured and compensated. I observed the totality of the eclipse at home with my family and, like Everson and Benning, was bewildered by the almost fearsome foreignness of the experience. When Benning plays Leonard Cohen’s “Love Itself” on the soundtrack a few minutes after the totality, it seems redundant, a faint echo of actual catharsis.

    Throughout his highly productive digital period, Benning has moved constantly between galleries and the cinema. Although L. COHEN has been presented as an installation, including as part of an exhibition at the 2018 Berlinale, it strikes me as being essentially cinematic. Kudos to Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard and everyone else at TIFF who made it possible for a fortunate group of us to watch the film in the Lightbox’s massive Theater 1. To sample just a few minutes of L. COHEN, or to see it in a room with ambient light and other distractions, or to watch it all the way through beginning at some point other than the opening moment, would undermine the film’s fundamental justifications for being. Near the end of TIFF, a friend asked, “Why are we still having to look to filmmakers in their 70s, like James Benning and Claire Denis, for big ideas and new forms?” It was a rhetorical and slightly hyperbolic question, but I understood his point. I don’t know if this is a sign of my changing tastes, or if it speaks to trends, but at the risk of having to defend a sweeping generalisation, the main difference between the best and worst films I saw in Wavelengths this year was the sophistication of the concept and assuredness of its execution. A number of short films were constructed from footage gathered by the artists without much apparent pre-determined intent. While they all included startling images – and to be fair, beauty and defamiliarisation, of course, remain worthy pursuits in experimental art – they too often lacked an essential shape or motivating force. Seeing several versions of this type of film over four nights of programming (I began to think of them as travelogues) caused them to bleed into one another in my imagination. Even Nathaniel Dorsky’s latest, Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle), was a slight disappointment in this regard. That nearly all of them were shot on film makes me wonder if celluloid has indeed become a fetish object; shooting, processing and editing film is not, in itself, enough to justify a work. The remainder of my report will spotlight a few of the shorts that I think succeed in fully realising a compelling concept.

    L. COHEN screened in the largest room at the Lightbox because it was preceded by Björn Kämmerer’s silent, five-minute short, Arena, which was shot in 65mm and required 70mm projection. Kämmerer has become a regular presence at Wavelengths. Navigator (2015) is a pulsing assemblage of close-ups of a rotating Fresnel lens that playfully discovers endless variations of movement and light/dark contrast. Untitled (2016) was made with even simpler means, standard-issue Venetian blinds set against a black background, which he likewise transforms into graphical elements. For Arena, Kämmerer found an unusual outdoor auditorium in the Czech Republic, where, rather than shooting the stage, he positioned his camera in the proscenium and turned it toward the seats. The film begins with a relatively tight frame (only four rows are fully visible along the y-axis) and then slowly dollies back as the entire grandstand rotates clockwise, mimicking a camera pan. Shot at 100 fps, Arena offers one more impossible perspective from Kämmerer on a familiar object. The chief pleasure of his work is the constant shifting of emphasis in our perception of the material. The seats are just seats until we begin to notice that some are slightly different colours, at which point “seats” becomes a group of individual units: one seat beside another seat, beside another, and so on. Like novice meditators, our attention can only hold that thought for a few moments, however, and soon the seats lose their specificity, become unrecognisable, and mutate, like Untitled’s Venetian blinds, into content-less shapes. Because the camera is dollying back, the frame widens gradually (by the end of the film eight rows of seats are visible) and the effects of motion parallax become more pronounced, creating visual illusions. The wide 70mm image also affords viewers uncommon freedom to explore the frame, and each time we shift the focus of our attention, new effects materialise. Whether turning the site of the subject into the spectacle is a meaningful intervention, I don’t know, but it’s a usable metaphor and a standout piece of old-school structuralism.

    In the three years since his last feature, Cemetery of Splendor (2015), Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made several shorts, produced a documentary, and installed work at festivals and galleries in Asia, Australia and Europe. Blue, the latest of his short films to screen in Wavelengths, was developed with 3e Scène, an ambitious project of the Paris Opera that invited artists to create new work inspired, in some tangential way, by the 450-year-old institution. That context is useful, I think, when approaching a new piece by Apichatpong because the industrial bias toward feature films has limited our ability to see most of his work properly presented. Of the recent non-cinematic pieces, I’ve only experienced SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, which allowed guests in Rotterdam to check in for the night to a large room with multiple beds and a projection, all designed by the artist. His recent flurry of activity recalls Primitive Project, the collection of multimedia works he made in the late-2000s that set about unearthing the lost history and past lives of Northeast Thailand. Blue certainly evokes Phantoms of Nabua (2009), a short film from that project in which teenage boys kick a flaming ball at a park late at night, eventually igniting a makeshift screen upon which Apichatpong is projecting filmed images of manufactured lightning strikes. In Blue, Jenjira Pongpas Widner (star of many of his films) sleeps restlessly in the jungle. Her bed is arranged opposite a hanging theatrical backdrop that cycles through three illustrations. Apichatpong, like Kämmerer, puts his camera between the spectator and the spectacle, cutting between the two without fixing a clear meaning to the relationship. A fire is ignited and appears to burn from Widner’s chest. In fact, the superimposition is a centuries-old mechanical illusion: a glass positioned between her and the camera is reflecting an image of the fire. In the final shot of the film, the fire has grown large and loud. We see it in the foreground and also reflected in the glass, as if the entire jungle is burning to the ground. Widner, in the deep background, seems finally to have drifted off to sleep. Apichatpong’s particular genius is his ability to conjure the sublime from the most basic of elements – and I mean that in both senses of the word. He summons elemental sensations from commonplace sounds and practical effects: a flickering spotlight, humming insects, theatrical props, and a nighttime breeze. It’s a kind of primal magic.

    Karissa Hahn exposes the basic technique of Please Step Out of the Frame in the opening shot. The first image is black-and-white Super 8 footage of a MacBook sitting on a small desk. The camera zooms in briefly toward the computer before zooming back out again, beyond the original focal distance, which reveals that the image we have been watching is itself being displayed on the screen of that same MacBook and was filmed by that same Super 8 camera from the same position at some earlier moment in time. Hahn’s film is, in short, a kind of mise en abyme as intimate, digital nightmare, and it’s tremendous fun to watch. She introduces her next trick by showing found footage of people playing with the roller coaster backdrop on Apple’s Photo Booth app. After doing so, Hahn, who we’ve glimpsed briefly interacting with the laptop, becomes the central character in the film. She herself rides Apple’s roller coaster in one clip and then adds a new custom backdrop to Photo Booth, Eadward Muybridge’s Semi-Nude Woman Hopping on Left Foot (1887). Seeing Hahn emerge, glitchy and ghost-like, from Muybridge’s photo series is deeply uncanny, and it suggests other century-old precedents for the film, particularly Lumière’s playful inventions. In one of the more unnerving moments, Hahn sits at the computer, opens a video app, and plays a screen capture of some previous version of herself interacting with the desktop. She then stands, walks behind the camera, and takes hold of the lens, zooming in so that the video on the laptop fills the entire screen, essentially erasing the diegetic world originally established in the shot and replacing it with an alternate reality. The soundtrack, like the image, is a distorted amalgam of analogue noise and digital processing – or vice-versa, I’m not sure which. Describing art as “Lynchian” is so common as to make the term useless, but Please Step Out of the Frame is a precise expression of that familiar and disquieting dread particular to David Lynch. Hahn’s film is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in recent years.

    By referencing Lynch, I’ve happened upon a useful transition to Words, Planets by Laida Lertxundi, who has likewise spent much of her career thinking about how to film Los Angeles. When asked by R. Emmet Sweeney about her training at Cal Arts, she mentioned the significance of Benning’s “Listening and Seeing” course, where she learned to patiently observe a location, as opposed to claiming it like a tourist. “We weren’t allowed to shoot or record anything, just take the place in. . . . I didn’t think about shooting, but about time and landscape.” Collectively, the ten short films she’s made since then are a kind of world-building exercise, in the sense that her representation of L.A. – the geography of the city, its people, and the surrounding deserts and mountains – is so consistent and particular that it not only sidesteps the familiar cliches of Hollywood movies but imagines a wholly alternative landscape, more private but no less fantastic or dreamlike. I think of Lertxundi as a member of the Ozu camp, filmmakers whose formal preoccupations are so fixed over time that one pleasure of watching each new film is discovering small variations that suggest a maturing or complicating perspective. Her previous film, 025 Sunset Red (2016), with its allusions to her father’s political career and its incorporation of her menstrual blood as visual material, marked a shift to direct autobiography. Words, Planets pulls from her standard storehouse of images and sounds, including desert cacti, diegetic music, and the faces and bodies of friends and collaborators, while also exploring for the first time the effects of motherhood on her work: the film ends with white-on-black text that reads, “… and my life from now on is two lives.” (The infant, who appears several times in the film, is the ideal performer for Lertxundi – pure Bressonian affect!) Lertxundi has said that Words, Planets grew out of a course she teaches that begins with a reading of “For a Shamanic Cinema”, in which Raúl Ruiz proposes six strategies that interrupt the narrative machinations of industrial cinema. The suggestions, borrowed and adapted from Chinese painter Shi-T’ao, include “draw attention to a scene emerging from a static background” and “reversal of function. What ought to be dynamic becomes static and vice-versa.” I suspect it would be possible to reverse-engineer Words, Planets by assigning each shot and cut to a Ruizian strategy, but I doubt doing so would provide much insight. Rather, the point is that Lertxundi has evolved her own particular shamanic cinema. She has, in Ruiz’s words, put her “fabricated memories in touch with genuine memories [that] we never thought to see again.”

    In his director’s statement for Walled Unwalled, Lawrence Abu Hamdan writes: “In the year 2000 there was a total of fifteen fortified border walls and fences between sovereign nations. Today, physical barriers at sixty-three borders divide nations across four continents.” A few minutes into the film, Abu Hamdan recites the names of every affected nation, reading them from his phone at a breathless pace while pacing from side to side a few feet away from a studio microphone. To be more precise, he’s at Funkhaus, a facility purpose-built in the 1950s to broadcast GDR state radio into West Berlin. As he races through the names, Abu Hamdan is in the second of three interconnected soundproof spaces that we see through windows from our fixed position in the darkened control room. The camera, then, is always peering through one, two, or three walls of glass: the widest shot is planimetric, which gives our view of the soundproof rooms the shape of a triptych. Abu Hamden is an artist, academic, and “audio investigator” whose various interests in the ways “we can act in the world as listening subjects” has brought him to the attention of Amnesty International and Defence for Children International as well as MoMA, the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim. In Walled Unwalled, he delves into a central paradox of our political moment: that at the same time we’re constructing physical barriers between nations and peoples, technology has eroded the divide between personal and private space. He spins three ripping yarns – about a Supreme Court case, the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, and a style of East German prison architecture whose acoustic design punished prisoners – but each might also have been presented as lectures (Abu Hamdan is a compelling multimedia performer) or as, say, a podcast series. Walled Unwalled, however, also succeeds as a work of cinema. The setting is essential, both thematically and as a formal device. For example, before illustrating how the Cold War-era prison design turned walls into “weapons, creating prisoners who see nothing but hear everything,” Abu Hamdan shows a clip of then-actor Ronald Reagan advocating for Radio Free Europe: “The Iron Curtain isn’t soundproof!” The clip is projected onto a wall through one of the studio’s windows, which, because of the angle of our perspective, reveals that the camera is separated from the other spaces by four thick panes of glass, each of which reflects the projection, creating multiple staggered superimpositions. Likewise, the drummer who pounds out a repeating figure through the first five-and-a-half minutes of the film in studio space three is silenced suddenly when Abu Hamdan shuts the door between the drum and the microphone in space two, walling what had been unwalled.

    Beatrice Gibson’s I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead opens with a jagged-edge video montage of crowded subway stations, speeding trains, crumbling glaciers, violent protests, and, from time to time, in almost subliminal bursts, black-and-white home movies of her young daughter, Laizer. Over the images, Gibson describes a panic attack: “I can still feel my body except it’s like the skin is gone. It’s all nerve, edgeless, pulsating. There’s intense breathlessness. Blood is thumping. It’s like being in the club. I feel weightless. Unstitched.” Conceived soon after the election of Donald Trump, in collaboration with poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles, the 20-minute film argues forcibly, in both content and form, for the necessity of art in a time of anxiety and despair. Gibson borrows her title from CAConrad, who delivers a combative and vibrant performance of their poem of the same name. Myles reads too, and Gibson recites passages by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and Alice Notley. The film is scored, in part, by Pauline Oliveros. “I wanted to put all of these voices in one frame for you,” Gibson tells Laizer in voiceover, “so that one day, if needed, you could use them to unwrite whoever it is you’re told you’re supposed to be.” It’s a poignant moment because it’s so intimate, as if we’re secret witnesses to the passing down of an inheritance. The scene also captures the helpless terror of unconditional love, an aspect of parenting seldom addressed in films. Over exquisite 16mm images of Gibson alone and Laizer at play, Gibson recalls and modifies her earlier description of panic, now redeemed by love, like an act of grace: “Because of you, I am tone of voice. All nerve, edgeless, pulsating. I can breathe.” For the final act of I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, Gibson and Laizer reenact Denis Lavant’s dance at the end of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999). When I interviewed Denis a decade ago, she described the scene as the “dance between life and death.” Restaging it – complete with mirrored backdrop, disco lights, Gibson in all black, and Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” – is an audacious and self-conscious move, obviously, but seeing it in the fall of 2018, several years into the migrant crisis and rising nationalism and after the GrenFell Fire and Charlottesville and all the rest, felt purifying somehow. That feeling of “being in the club” is cleansed of anxiety and transformed, even if briefly, into an act of joy and play. And in the process, the voices of three more artists, Claire Denis, along with Beau Travail’s cinematographer Agnès Godard and editor Nelly Quettier, are added by proxy to Laizer’s birthright.

  • TIFF 2017

    TIFF 2017

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    My conversations during the first two days of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival were dominated by two subjects: Twin Peaks: The Return, which had aired its final episodes earlier in the week (and ultimately overshadowed every film at the fest), and “the Globe story”, a months-in-the-works investigation into the various intrigues surrounding Canada’s highest-profile cultural organization. TIFF had contracted with a crisis management firm, people whispered. The article was going to be published during the opening weekend to maximise exposure while the A-listers were still in town, they predicted. The article, everyone speculated, would tie together all that was already publicly known – the announced retirement of long-serving CEO Piers Handling, TIFF’s decision a year earlier to trim the festival program by 20%, the departure of beloved Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes – and expose to the light the longstanding rumours of inflated payscales for TIFF executives, low employee morale, and debate over the strategic vision of the the Lightbox, TIFF’s expensive, publicly-supported downtown complex.

    When the article was finally published, the night before the festival wrapped, the Globe and Mail buried all 6,000 words of it behind the website paywall. I suspect they did so because the final piece is something of a dog bites man story. Tracing the history of the festival all the way back to a “liquid lunch” at the “famed Carlton Hotel” in Cannes, where Toronto lawyer Dusty Cohl first pitched the idea, reporters Barry Hertz and Molly Hayes describe TIFF today as an organisation that has outgrown its original charge and, as a result, is feeling the pains of mission creep. This rocky transition period, Hertz and Hayes argue, has been exacerbated by changing market forces, particularly the growing pressures put on brick-and-mortar exhibitors by streaming services, and by the very real financial responsibilities TIFF took on when it staked its future on the Lightbox, including payments on a $46 million provincial loan. One notable insight from the article is that TIFF’s decision to devote valuable ground-floor space to museum-style installations has proven costly. They have since laid off most of that staff and plan to use the area, instead, for events and press conferences.

    Geddes is not mentioned by name in the piece. Nor is Jesse Wente, who announced soon after the festival that he was stepping down as head of programming for TIFF Cinematheque after eleven years with the organisation. Rather, Hertz and Hayes refer only to an “exodus of senior staff”, noting that “three of TIFF’s four vice-presidents and two departmental directors have left since 2016.” Despite on- and off-the-record conversations with more than 40 TIFF employees, both current and former, along with “two dozen other individuals close to the organization”, the authors only hint at the precise causes of the exodus. Michele Maheux, the long-tenured Executive Director and COO, and presumably the person best equipped to address the question, suggests that the overall turnover rate of 18% is typical for an operation that employs so many people under the age of 30. The article doesn’t include any comments from her about the leadership changes. The only insight I can add comes from having spent the last 20 years working for another large, publicly- and privately-supported organisation (a university in the States). That Handling will have directed TIFF for just shy of 25 years strikes me as both remarkable and quaint, as large cultural and educational institutions have in recent years joined their counterparts in the private sector by rotating through CEOs, and by increasing executive compensation, at an accelerating pace. Judging by the article, many of the skills that earned Handling his reputation, in particular his taste and cinephilia, are viewed as less valuable, in a very literal sense, by today’s board. “They now need to keep business top of mind,” one source said. As an aside, I’ll add that over the years I’ve considered program notes by Handling a real recommendation when deciding what new films to see at TIFF. I hope the same is true of his successor.

    The 2017 festival was the 14th in a row I’ve attended, so I can say with some confidence that much of the rest of article is a rehash of the same complaints and controversies that boil up every September in Toronto. I’ve catalogued many of them myself over the years in my reports for Senses of Cinema. Early on TIFF embraced its brand as “the people’s festival”, setting itself up in the process for annual charges of encroaching elitism and ticket-gouging. A decade ago, when I attended TIFF as an uncredentialled film buff, I paid $715 for an out-of-town package and attended 36 non-gala screenings. This year, the same experience would have cost a little over $900, for a reasonable annual inflation rate of about 2.5%. Like nearly every other TIFF attendee, I’ve never been invited to join TIFF Noir, which for $35,000 buys members privileged access at the festival, and judging by the one on-the-record comment Hertz and Hayes got from a Noir member – “Money does make the world go round.” – I’m not sure I would want to. Yes, the lines are occasionally long now; the lines were occasionally long in 2004, too. I remember because while waiting in them I often chatted up strangers who told me about the good old days when TIFF was “the people’s festival” and there weren’t so many long lines.

    Likewise, debating the size and quality of TIFF’s program is a long-relished parlour game in Toronto, as it is at every film festival. My personal grievance this year, and every year, is with individual curatorial decisions – for example, Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable finding a spot in the fest at the exclusion of better French films like Claire Denis’s Un beau soleil intérieur (Let the Sun Shine In), Serge Bozon’s Madame Hyde (Mrs. Hyde), Philippe Garrel’s L’amant d’un jour (Lover for a Day), and Arnaud Desplechin’s Les fantômes d’Ismaël (Ismael’s Ghosts). Granted, the debate reached a head last year when Variety critic Peter Debruge described the 2016 edition’s 296 features and 101 short films as a “dumping ground … with hardly any discernible sense of curation.” TIFF seems to have taken note, reducing the total program by about 14% (less than the reported target) and eliminating entirely the Vanguard and City to City programs – both wise choices, in my opinion. Variety responded with a post-fest headline that must have raised some eyebrows in Lightbox offices: “Why the Toronto Film Festival Felt Smaller Than Ever.” The click-bait headline is a bit of a misdirection, however. While authors Ramin Setoodeh and Brent Lang join the trade paper chorus in bemoaning the fest’s “staggering 255 features”, most of which screened without much notice, their real target was the paucity of good films, echoing complaints made earlier this year in Sundance, Berlin and Cannes. It’s worth noting that when describing the competition for buzzy fall titles, Hertz and Hayes take an easy and justifiable shot at TIFF for its opening night film selection, Borg/McEnroe (Janus Metz), but the two openers to which they compare it unfavourably, Venice’s Downsizing (Alexander Payne) and NYFF’s Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater) also premiered to poor reviews.

    The most interesting part of the Globe article, and the section most relevant to this report on the Wavelengths program, is its relatively detailed accounting of TIFF’s weeks-long Olivier Assayas retrospective. Hertz and Hayes dug up some raw numbers – $1,200 in ticket sales for the kick-off screening of Cold Water, another $1,000 for Clean, $630 for Irma Vep – and report that “subsequent screenings averaged about 65 people.” They then pivot to the Lightbox’s new-release programming, which also “failed to catch fire.” That reporters who wax romantic about the days of “liquid lunches” would also frame the success or failure of the Assayas retro in standard box office terms shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess, but still it’s disappointing. Whether there exists a sustainable business model that will allow TIFF to remain “the people’s fest” and a robust international film marketplace and a year-round exhibitor in a pricy real estate market and a champion for “transformative” cultural experiences (to quote Handling) is a question baked into the history and culture of the organisation. The challenges facing TIFF are only exacerbated, though, by a public discourse that defaults to the anaemic language of entertainment journalism whenever it broaches the subject of cinema. Perhaps not by coincidence, the best new feature I saw at this year’s festival was Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, in which Frederick Wiseman documents a similar debate writ large. (Where is Wiseman’s Festival?)

    We’re 130 years into the life of motion pictures. Cinema needs to be advocated for and publicly and privately supported at an institutional level, just as painting, sculpture, theatre, opera, dance and music have long been supported. Contrary to a theme running through the Globe article, I would argue that a “die-hard film geek” – one with tremendous interpersonal skills and leadership acumen, a rare combo, I’ll admit – is exactly who TIFF needs to lead this charge, because cinema must be advocated for in an aspirational voice that elevates the medium. (And by the same token, excluding Denis, Bozon, Garrel, and Desplechin from a program of 255 features is not only a lapse of taste; it denies audiences and critics the opportunity to engage with the medium’s greatest artists and to place their new films – even when they’re disappointing! – in the context of their larger body of work.) In my 2014 report I commended TIFF for integrating into the festival some messaging about its role as a year-round arts institution worthy of philanthropic support. That kind of direct appeal has been less conspicuous since, which makes me hope that the recent hiring of a new major gifts officer is step one in a larger effort to significantly ramp up their annual support and major gift fundraising efforts. Those of us on the outside of the gate might be tempted to scoff at members of TIFF Noir, but their access fees subsidiae, in a roundabout way, decidedly non-commercial programming like TIFF’s recent Kidlat Tahimik retrospective. We in the philanthropy business call this the 90/10 rule: 90% of gift dollars come from 10% of donors. It might seem crass to state this all so openly, but this is part of the model necessary to establish and sustain institutionalised support of cinema and, hopefully, expand that support beyond large metropolitan areas.

    When TIFF announced it would be trimming the festival program in 2017, my first concern was for Wavelengths. If the board and leadership were considering a “pivot away from transformative cinematic experiences toward brand-friendly marketing opportunities”, as the Globe article puts it, then the fest’s strand of experimental programming would seem a likely focus of attention for hawkish budget-cutters. Indeed, The New York Film Festival decided this year to not bring back Explorations, a similar program of formally daring features, after a trial run in 2016. Now in its 17th year, and its 12th under the direction of programmer Andréa Picard, Wavelengths exemplifies the notion of cinema as art, full stop, and as such is absolutely essential to TIFF’s broad mission.

    When the 2017 Wavelengths program was announced there was, surprisingly, one bit of good news: the four programs of short films had been moved from cinema 4 to cinema 3 at the Lightbox, adding nearly 50% more seats. Always tough tickets to get, each of the four screenings still approached a sell-out, and the projection team skillfully managed the complicated, multiple-format programs. Wavelengths did absorb significant cuts, however. The feature count dropped to 12 this year, down from 14 in 2016 and 16 in 2017, and video installations were eliminated entirely. In my 2016 report I argued that Picard’s championing of gallery work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shambhavi Kaul, Ana Mendieta, Sharon Lockhart, Albert Serra, and others was a kind of declaration – that this work “is significant and that Wavelengths is now a global platform for avant-garde work of significance.” Seeing Mendieta’s short films in both a cinema and a gallery was revelatory last year. I wish the same treatment had been afforded to Erkki Kurenniemi, whose short film Florence (1970) preceded Blake Williams’ Prototype, or to Anne Charlotte Robinson, whose Pixillation (1976) played in the second shorts program and whose work is being restored by the Harvard Film Archive. TIFF was for years the only major festival in North America that programmed installations alongside celebrity-packed premieres. The elimination of Future Projections, as it was called from 2007-2014, seems both unwise and unnecessary, as what little amount, relatively speaking, it cut into to the fest’s bottom line would pay for itself in branding and communication value.

    Note: The Wavelengths shorts programs were especially strong this year, so the remainder of this report will spotlight a few films of particular interest. From the features lineup I’ll add a quick recommendation for five standouts: Narimane Mari’s Le fort des fous, Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang, Pedro Pinho’s A Fábrica de Nada (The Nothing Factory), Williams’ Prototype, and Bruno Dumont’s Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc (Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc).

    Onward Lossless Follows is the latest in a series of films by Michael Robinson that meld his on-going preoccupations with kitsch and pop culture ephemera with what we, during my long-ago Southern Baptist days, called “givin’ testimony”. Line Describing Your Mom (2011), Mad Ladders (2015) and the new film are each narrated by found audio recordings of visionaries – a dreamer, a prophet and a preacher, respectively – whose slow drawls share a cadence and an unshakable conviction. In Onward Lossless Follows, Robinson pieces together footage he’d collected over the past decade, some of it found (stock images of women cheering in front of laptops, a “stranger danger” video, black and white science education films), some of it original (16mm footage of the beach and woods at Headlands State Park where he later shot Circle in the Sand [2012], lo-def video of a neighbour mowing his lawn). On the surface, Onward Lossless Follows is a dark, disturbing piece in the “amusing ourselves to death” vein, presenting a world decimated by climate change while each of us discovers our own bliss in the sensual, pseudo-religious pleasure of computers, phones and other assorted digital beeps that occupy so much of our attention. But as the preacher rails against the modern world for putting its faith in science, the particular register of his voice touches a euphoria that manages to counterbalance the film’s melancholy and cynicism. “Young man, you look miserable!” he chides. “There’s no help in starrrrrs.” And he’s not wrong. Robinson resolves the film’s tension by turning the “stranger danger” video into an impossible love story and by transforming TV news footage of a horse being airlifted out of a ravine into a moment of ecstatic splendour that, lord willin’, might just redeem us all.

    Onward Lossless Follows opened Appetite for Destruction, the first of the four Wavelengths shorts programs. In her program notes, Picard describes its six films as “rebellious, even mischievous forms of resistance” to the “pessimistic prognoses” of the day. Fern Silva’s The Watchmen made for an especially good pairing with Onward Lossless Follows. On 14 October, 2016, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner ordered the closure of F-House at the Stateville Correctional Center, an hour outside of Chicago. The last Panopticon-style facility in operation in the United States, F-House was built in 1922 and was described by a prison watchdog group as a “sensory nightmare” and “unsanitary, inhumane, and degrading for prisoners and staff alike.” Silva uses the prison as a jumping off point for a sci-fi-inflected reexamination of Foucault’s metaphor some four decades after Discipline and Punish. The visual material of The Watchmen includes footage from Stateville, along with images of Old Joliet Prison a few miles away (most notably a shot of John Belushi’s character being released at the beginning of The Blues Brothers [John Landis, 1980]) and a massive, decaying array of Panopticons at Presidio Modelo in Cuba. More mysterious are three found audio recordings that together narrate a kind of “Invaders from Mars” story. In the first, a man recalls seeing visions of blue light pulsing in the night sky. In the second, a paranoiac is comforted by a woman who tells him, “Look! Look at the picture on the television set. You are calm. You are watching a rerun.” And in the third, a police officer reports to his dispatcher that he’s experiencing a form of mental paralysis during a stop. “They” get out of their car, approach his cruiser, and blind him with a bright flash. As the officer loses consciousness, he asks, “Are you the watchmen over this place? Are you the watchmen over this place?” The Watchmen is bookended by images of a nude man standing alone in nature. Is this the watchman? And, if so, is he a liberating or destructive force? Silva’s film is so fascinating because it’s populated by glaring metaphors that resist simple explanations. Like the women in Robinson’s stock footage, who are doomed to spend eternity masquerading the appearance of rapture, humanity in The Watchmen is pretty well fucked and in need of salvation. The final image is from the centre of one of the ruined Cuban Panopticons. As the camera spins, faster and faster, the window slats of the distant prison walls become like the photos in a zoetrope. That the cells are abandoned and the walls are crumbling suggests progress of a sort, but the experience is too frenzied and dizzying to offer much assurance.

    Walter Benjamin’s story, “Fantasy Sentences” (1927), imagines a game between a man and an 11 year-old girl. He gives her five words: “pretzel, feather, pause, lament, doohickey”; she intuits connections and conjures meaning from them: “Time curves like a pretzel through nature.” Dane Komljen’s Phantasiesätze (Fantasy Sentences) borrows not only Benjamin’s title but also a palette of images from the story, along with its formal interest in ellipses or parataxis, a rhetorical strategy that avoids connectives between words – “I left. She cried.” as opposed to hypotaxis, “When I left, she cried.” The film opens with a garbled audio recording of a Russian storyteller who describes, in apocalyptic terms, the grotesque transformation of a man into an animal – “his skin tears open, blood flows. The skin slides to the ground.” Komljen then cuts to a montage of 8mm home movies, in black-and-white and colour. In the first few, children and their parents sled happily outside Soviet-era, brutalist housing complexes. We then see them in more idyllic settings – picking berries, canoeing, learning to swim, petting horses. Komljen’s next transition, away from the traditional pastoral, is signalled by a shift to lo-def digital. He softens the transition by bridging the audio, which is simple, natural sounds of wind and birdsongs. Finally, Komljen moves to hi-def video, returning us, presumably, to the site of the first home-movie images. Long since abandoned, the buildings have been reclaimed by nature. Phantasiesätze is in dialogue not only with Benjamin’s notion of history as human catastrophe and progress but also with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). There are formal similarities – the electronic score, a hand-held shot through a wooded path that mirrors the railcar journey into Tarkovsky’s “Zone” – but the loudest echo is Phantasiesätze‘s final image, a three-minute static shot inside a decaying room in the ruins of Chernobyl. The audio recording returns, now even more distorted, as if the tape had been found all these years later, warped by the elements and portending calamity. Like Tarkovsky’s stalker, author and scientist, we the viewers are left alone there in the room, on the threshold of revelation.

    The first few images in Rawane Nassif’s Turtles Are Always Home could be mistaken for footage from a camera test video on YouTube. Wide-lensed and hyper-saturated, the opening shots are from the perspective of a slow moving boat, floating down a concrete canal. The camera looks up at passing pastel buildings and at a blue, cloudless, graduated-filtered sky. It’s stunning. Perfect. Like Venice, but immaculate and deserted. There are no signs of life until the second cut, when the camera moves onto land and the sounds of lapping water are replaced by a rumbling jet engine. A plane passes low overhead, and then another. The Pearl, a man-made island in Dohar, Qatar, boasts nearly 300 shops and restaurants on its website, and a recent article in Gulf Times reports that more than 25,000 people now call the island home, but in Turtles Are Always Home, Nassif documents its Venetian-themed Qanat Quartier district in an early, unspoiled stage of development. Pitched in sales materials as “an intriguingly complex area in which a true Riviera lifestyle can be enjoyed,” Qanat Quartier is as rich and “intriguingly complex” an example of the simulacrum as you’re likely to find. Nassif, however, is after something else. (Which is not to say she’s not also fascinated by the simulacral nature of The Pearl; this film should find a place on many a philosophy and critical theory syllabi.) Rather, she wants to observe and understand – and by doing so leave a trace of herself on – this place, her latest temporary home. “My dear country is a suitcase and I am always a traveller,” Nassif sings over the final shot, reinforcing the metaphor of the film’s title. She trains her camera on the art-directed photos of light-skinned models and luxury goods that shroud the windows of empty storefronts, and then, by pulling focus or tracking backward, brings her own reflection into relief. It’s an uncanny and bracing viewing experience that manifests the simultaneous pleasure, melancholy, and anxiety of dislocation.

    Turtles Are Always Home screened in the second Wavelengths shorts program, Fluid Frontiers, which borrowed its name from Asili’s closing film. Asili in turn borrowed the title from Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker’s 2016 book, A Fluid Frontier, a collection of essays that explore the legacy of slavery and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River region. It’s a ripe subject for Asili, who has said Fluid Frontiers will be the final installment in his five-film series about the African diaspora that began with Forged Ways (2010). Drawn to the area by an invitation from Media City Film Festival’s Mobile Frames residency program in Windsor, Ontario, and nursing an interest in Detroit’s Broadside Press, a publisher of radical black poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, Asili travelled back and forth across the Ambassador Bridge and invited strangers on both sides of the border to read poems in front of his camera. Asili often shoots from a low angle, which allows the reader a privileged perspective relative to the viewer and at the same time situates the reader in a particular, emblematic context. The strategy also makes for some stunning graphic compositions. In the first reading, a black man is silhouetted against an indigo sky and the straight lines of a street lamp, like a figure from an Aaron Douglas painting. In another, the reader stands in front of a brick wall that advertises “Chene Liquor. Beer. Fine Wine. Money Orders.” The readings in Fluid Frontiers are similar to the long-duration shots of smokers in James Benning’s Twenty Cigarettes (2011) in that they capture each subject’s gradual transition from “performer” to “real” person and activate, by way of sync-sound recordings of passing traffic or chirping insects, the unseen space just outside of the frame. Another interesting precedent is Nicolás Prividera’s Tierra de los Padres (Fatherland, 2011), in which visitors to the La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires read poems and letters that tell the often violent and tragic history of the region. As in Fatherland, the most affecting moments in Fluid Frontiers come when the reader stumbles – these are all cold, first takes – into some personal connection with the written voice he or she is speaking into existence. The inscrutable expression on the face of a bookstore clerk after she reads from Sonia Sanchez’s We a BaddDDD People (1970) is magical, like a phantasmagoric conjuring of Harriet Tubman and Sanchez and a thousand other black women too.

    Kevin Jerome Everson’s Brown and Clear was shot at his uncle William Wanky Everson’s place. I don’t know how people in Northeast Ohio refer to rooms like this. It’s not a bar, exactly. In the South we’d probably call it a joint. Everson buys bourbon and vodka, rebottles it, and then sells it by the glass outside the scrutiny of local liquor boards and accountants. Brown and Clear consists of only two shots (pun intended?). The first is a static, underexposed closeup of seven empty, backlit bottles neatly arranged so that the one furthest in the background is visible in sharp, shallow focus, while the bottles nearest to the camera are made abstract by bokeh blur. (Everson has an enviable knack for making warm, grainish images with a digital camera.) The bottles are different shapes and have different labels, some of which are visible through the glass. Uncle Everson then fills each bottle with bourbon, beginning in the foreground and working his way back. When he finishes, much of the backlight has been blocked out by the “brown” and the screen is mostly dark. The shot is a variation on the simple genius of Everson’s Ninety Three (2008), in which an elderly man blows out his birthday candles in slow motion, eventually leaving the theatre or gallery in total darkness. The second shot is again a shallow-focus closeup of bottles, but this time the camera is handheld and active. We see William Everson’s hands as he fills bottles with vodka and screws on the caps. We also hear him for the first time. When one cap doesn’t fit he says, “I’m gonna have to go behind me and get two more tops, okay?” Everson grunts “mhmm” in reply, and with that brief exchange the film suddenly unfolds in ways that exemplify the thorny pleasures of Everson’s best work. Brown and Clear is typical for Everson in its documentation of African-American labour and an alternative economy that are hidden from (a white, gallery-going audience’s) view. Everson’s immense body of work is also always a documentation of his own labour and of his evolving, complex relationship with “home”. With that “mhmm”, what begins as a formal experiment transforms into a portrait of kinship. I can imagine Everson fighting the urge to respond, “Man, you’re fucking up my shot,” just as when his uncle wipes down the bar and says, “Okay?” I can imagine him thinking, “Are we done yet?” There’s an impatience in both voices but also experience and pride.

    Two minutes into Wojciech Bąkowski’s Yeti, the filmmaker appears in a medium closeup, staring directly into the camera – presumably the camera on his Nokia cellphone. Like every other shot in the film, he’s framed in portrait mode. His clean-shaven head – which along with a black mock turtleneck, black jeans, and black shoes comprise his signature look – rotates mechanically from side to side as cutout images of his passport and that Nokia phone dissolve into view, superimposed to his right and left. It plays like an homage to 40 year-old visions of a 21st-century future, a mashup of THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Video-making is only one part of Bąkowski’s practice, which also includes performance, audio installations, animation and music. Yeti fits somewhere in the middle, as the most compelling moments are essentially documentation of his performed interactions with spaces in and around his apartment. He triggers the motion detectors that control the building’s lights and doorlocks. He taps the back of his head against a wall and shuffles forward and backward, up and down a single step. Over each shot he superimposes more cutouts of more products. I’ll admit to not being completely in tune with Bąkowski’s project, but the image of him as one more glitching automoton in a world of branded consumer goods is uncanny and playfully unnerving.

    “The Internet Has Lost Its Damn Mind About The New Pink iPhone,” declared Buzzfeed on 10 September, 2015. Four days later The New Yorker put its own spin on the story with Rebecca Mead’s “The Semiotics of ‘Rose Gold’,” in which we learn that rose gold is an alloy of gold and copper that has fallen in and out of fashion over the past few centuries. Mead ticks off the names of high-end designers who currently sell rose gold products – Piaget, Van Cleef & Arpels, Diane von Furstenberg, and Alexander Wang – before concluding that we live in a “rose-gilded” age “in which a technology company can make fifty billion dollars in a fiscal quarter, largely on the strength of persuading people who already have a phone … that they need to buy a slightly different version.” Mead is among the company of philosophers, sociologists, academics and novelists who are referenced explicitly in Sara Cwyner’s Rose Gold, which had its international premiere in Wavelengths after screening as part of Cwyner’s solo show at Foxy Production in the spring. All of that context is necessary, I think, for describing the film, which is densely crowded with images and aphorisms. Rose Gold begins with the sound of a woman inhaling as if she’s about to speak; instead, a man speaks “for” her: “They invented this colour, rose gold, and I’m mesmerised. A new object of desire.” Throughout the seven-minute film, the soundtrack splices together readings of texts that have been grouped by subjects or themes: clocks, advertising, the Hoover Dam and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Melamine kitchenware, the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape, the children’s book Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, and on and on. “His” voice dominates, but “hers” chimes in as well from time to time. After transcribing it all, I can’t spot any obvious motivations for why particular lines are spoken by a woman. Cwyner, whose show included a number of collages, seems to layer audio with a collagist’s sensibility, modulating the harmony and dissonance of voices as sound. The images, likewise, come at a rapid-fire clip. Most were shot in her studio space and feature assorted totems of pre-digital life: along with her collection of Melamine cups we see rotary phones, Avon perfume bottles, analogue clocks, costume jewelry and other thrift store finds. Rose Gold is a beguiling piece of false nostalgia. Cwyner is both disgusted and fascinated by the aesthetic/ideology that would produce something as magnificently gauche as Trump Tower, as we all are. For such an analogue film, the pleasure of watching Rose Gold is actually akin to the adrenalin rush of opening your smartphone and hearing that deafening chorus of social media and advertising voices. “And always the feeling that there is too much to handle,” he and she say, their voices overlapping, just out of sync.

    The third program, Figures in a Landscape, ended with Flores, Jorge Jácome’s 25-minute, alternate-reality fantasia on flowers, iconography, beautiful male bodies and the colour purple. In a first-person voiceover, “the filmmaker” informs us that he has travelled to the Azores islands in order to document the hydrangeas that have so completely overrun the landscape, all inhabitants have been forced to evacuate for Portugal, leaving behind only a small military force and some entrepreneurial honey makers and flower merchants. Jácome and co-writer David Cabecinha work a few faux-documentary devices into the film – a man is seen and heard putting on his lavalier mic, a worker in the honey factory turns away when she sees the camera pointing in her direction – but the conceit is primarily an excuse to create strange and sensuous purple-stained images of men and honeybees in an otherworldly landscape. With its references to the church, colonial history and the military, Flores invites ideological readings, but that seems a relatively unproductive critical path to take. Jácome is deeply indebted to Claire Denis, and the film’s politics, along with many of its images, are second-generation copies of Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004). I offer that as a back-handed by sincere compliment. “I had a dream you could use in your film,” a soldier tells the filmmaker, “a dream in which our camouflage was purple and blue instead of brown and green.” Flores is a mesmerising viewing experience that, like Denis’s more abstract work, brings into being the logic and splendour of reverie. This film is a hell of a calling card. (That’s another back-handed but sincere compliment.)

    Dan Browne’s Palmerston Blvd. was filmed over the course of a year in a single room of his downtown Toronto home. It opens with a wide, eight-second, time-lapse shot of a bay window with a table, three chairs and a few potted plants beneath it. Light levels are set to reveal the contours of the room, so the sunny world outside is overexposed and barely defined. With the first cut, the camera is repositioned nearer to the table and turned 45 degrees to the left, giving us a better view of two chairs and a large tree just outside the window. Over the next 15 minutes, Browne varies shot durations and camera setups but sticks to this basic strategy: documenting the changing light (and life) of the room and the neighbourhood around it in accelerated time. Palmerston Blvd. is so neatly conceived, I wondered if the viewing experience might seem redundant, or if the concept might not be able to sustain the relatively long run time. In fact, it was the highlight of the fourth and final shorts program, As Above, So Below. Working within tight formal restraints, including silence, Browne was forced to focus his creative attention on the limited set of tools at his disposal and constantly reinvent familiar images. I especially like a shot four minutes in, when he finds a new composition from a slightly lower, slightly skewed angle that turns the window frames into a kind of cubist collage. Gradually, other signs of life appear – first the family cat, and then split-second glimpses of Browne and his partner, and then finally, near the midpoint of the film, an infant swing and high chair. Seven years ago at Wavelengths, I found myself crying unexpectedly during a screening of John Price’s Home Movie, a 35mm, hand-processed study of his growing children. I explained afterward to a friend that Home Movie expressed a particular sensation I’d experienced daily during the five months since my first child was born. I called it a “nostalgia for the present” – a constant, conscious realisation that this moment is already gone and that someday, maybe soon, maybe in the distant future, I would desire deeply to return and reexperience it. I already felt the ache. Palmerston Blvd. has the same effect. When winter snows arrive and the halcyon light falls lower in the sky, the room becomes every warm room, with the sounds of a hissing radiator or the smell of a furnace. And when, at the end, the signs of Browne’s life are removed one by one – the toys and then the plants and then the table and chairs – it provokes a deep-in-the-bones feeling of loss, not only for a particular home (that universal, melancholy experience of locking a door for the last time) but also for a particular domesticity, for a particular light.

  • TIFF 2016

    TIFF 2016

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    The 2016 Wavelengths shorts program opened auspiciously with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Sangrienta (Bloody Silhouette). Made in 1975 in Iowa City, the two-minute, Super-8 film begins with a high-angle shot of Mendieta stretched out on her back, nude and still, on a charcoal-colored creek bed. She lies at the centre of the frame, tilted a few degrees counterclockwise. A small portion of the rippling creek is visible in the top right corner of the image. Brown oak leaves and grey stones lie scattered about her. With the first of three jump cuts, Mendieta then vanishes, leaving a sculpted trace of her body in the soil. With the second cut, her carved-out silhouette becomes filled with sanguine liquid, like aspic in a mold. And then Mendieta reappears, this time face down, her right arm submerged in red, the bottoms of her feet stained with dirt and crimson.

    Because Silueta Sangrienta was shot at a low frame rate, light darts unnaturally through the trees and the film reads as something akin to stop-motion animation. Time is trackable only by the shifting shadows, and the three cuts are syncopated and surprising. Each of the four images functions primarily, then, as a graphic composition – a portrait, an absence, a gouge of colour, a body – and Mendieta’s montage provokes (in the best sense of the word) not just the ideas at play in the piece but a visceral reaction. Made in the wake of the brutal rape and murder of a University of Iowa nursing student, Silueta Sangrienta is transgressive and sorrowful. The third shot constitutes more than half of the film’s runtime, so when Mendieta finally cuts to the image of her motionless body, the splash of red lingers in the viewer’s eye, like a superimposition. It’s striking and violent and strange.

    Silueta Sangrienta screened alongside another of Mendieta’s short films, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece, 1976), in which the artist’s silhouette is rendered again, this time as a sparkling sculpture in the night. Dozens of small, red fireworks trace the line of Mendieta’s form, with a cluster near the heart. The film begins at the moment of ignition, explodes with light and colour, and then ends, seconds later, in darkness. The Estate of Ana Mendieta recently completed a comprehensive digital preservation of her 104 films, a number of which have been included in recent exhibitions, but seeing them screened at full 2K resolution in a proper theatre was a rare treat. In Anima, Silueta de Cohetes, for example, a car could be seen passing in the background (it’s not visible on the screener) and the mountain horizon was more prominent (this is another of Mendieta’s body and landscape works).

    A few blocks away, at CONTACT Gallery, five more of Mendieta’s shorts (in addition to Silueta Sangrienta) and two photo collections, Untitled: Silueta Series (1976) and Volcan (1979), were on display in a tightly curated installation, Siluetas. The contrast between the two venues was instructive. At CONTACT, the films were projected at lower resolution and in relatively small dimensions, looped side by side on the walls of a naturally-lit gallery (I visited during the day). Mendieta didn’t consider herself a filmmaker; rather, the films were for her primarily a means of instantiating her process. And indeed Siluetas confirmed that in a gallery setting her work loses much of its innate filmness. The pieces spoke, instead, in the formal language of video documentation – not terribly different in a categorical, experiential way from watching clips of the same films in an adjoining room, where Ana Mendieta, Nature Inside, a short documentary by her niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, looped on a flat screen monitor.

    Raquel was in Toronto to oversee the installation, and she mentioned after the first Wavelengths shorts program that, even for her, seeing the films in a theatre on a large screen was something of a revelation. That the films of an artist of Mendieta’s stature have so seldom been considered in this context testifies to the potential consequences of preservation efforts such as this (there are obvious pros and cons to the films being more widely accessible in digital format). It also speaks to the value of good programming. Over the past decade, Andréa Picard has fashioned Wavelengths into a grand critical project. When she took over in 2006 (co-programming that first year with Chris Gehman), Wavelengths was eight pages in the Toronto International Film Festival’s two-inch-thick program; now the Wavelengths brand, for lack of a better word, extends beyond short-film programming to features (fourteen this year) and installations (four, by Mendieta, Cyprien Gaillard, Albert Serra and Sharon Lockhart). While the fingerprints of other TIFF programmers can be spotted from time to time, Wavelengths now very much reflects Picard’s particular interests in the art world beyond the film festival ghetto. I make that assumption based on first-hand observation – I’ve attended every TIFF during her time there – and on Picard’s work as a critic, particularly the dozens of essays, interviews, and artist profiles she’s contributed over the years to Cinema Scope magazine.

    The spotlight on Mendieta is typical of Picard’s programming in that it advocates for important recent work – in this case the preservations – by bringing it to a larger stage. Wavelengths has always had the feel of a secret outpost, hidden away amidst the celebrity chaos, but this is TIFF after all – among the largest and most rabidly reported festivals in the world. This year, in order to ensure best projection quality of the 16mm films, the Wavelengths shorts programs were moved to a smaller theatre at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which made the always scarce tickets even more difficult to come by. Still, among the nightly crowds were a not-insignificant number of critics and programmers, many of whom also saw the CONTACT exhibition and will, no doubt, share Mendieta’s work with an even larger audience. I don’t feel qualified to write at length about Serra’s Singularity, having spent less than an hour there, but Picard’s installation of the five-screen, twelve-hour piece, originally commissioned for the 2015 Venice Biennale, was similarly strategic (I say “strategic” without any cynicism or irony). TIFF has programmed three of Serra’s feature films, including The Death of Louis XIV (La mort de Louis XIV) this year, but the Singularity installation was a kind of declaration: that Serra’s work is significant and that Wavelengths is now a global platform for avant-garde work of significance. Picard’s curation in 2015 of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archives) at the Art Gallery of Ontario made a similar statement. That Wavelengths continues to expand its mission with such ambition, and that it manages to do so within the institutional machinery of the Toronto International Film Festival, is impressive. I have to wonder how much of an inspiration it’s been to the New York Film Festival’s selection committee, whose new features program, Explorations, kicked off this fall with six films, five of which had their North American premiere in Wavelengths.

    Short Films

    Good programming is especially critical with the curation and sequencing of shorts, and Mendieta’s films certainly benefited from the context in which they were presented. The first Wavelengths program, “The Fire Within,” included six other pieces, all of which were directed or co-directed by women. Silueta Sangrienta was followed immediately by Ana Vaz’s Há Terra!, in which her camera hunts for a young woman who hides in the tall grass of the Sertão, a highlands region of northeast Brazil. In voiceover, the woman recounts two stories about this landscape. In the first, she’s bitten by a snake while picking fruit with her sister, which causes her foot to swell with each cycle of the moon. In the second, she describes a former mayor, Big Felipe, who ran others off the land by threatening them and burning their camps. The title refers to a line of dialogue borrowed from Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca (1981) that Vaz injects into the soundtrack from time to time, creating a conversation of sorts between the coloniser/hunter and colonised/prey. Vaz has been interested recently in “cannibal metaphysics” – the idea that consuming an enemy can lead to a new perspective. “The Other is a threat,” she has said, “but also a possibility of seeing through different eyes.” If Há Terra! has a sound-as-brickwork logic (to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer) that veers toward didacticism, it’s also leavened by Vaz’s rich, saturated 16mm images, which turn the woman’s shirt an impossible red and draw an association between her and the feathers of a bird we see later in the film. At this particular screening, it also recalled Mendieta’s red liquid. These are not just symbolic associations. Rather, this is the sublime, psyche-triggering, primary red of giallo films and Hans Hofmann paintings, a burst of sensation that short-circuits reasoning.

    Camilo Restrepo’s Cilaos is shot in the grainy, warm brown style of a 1970s blacksploitation film. A musical in miniature, it concerns a woman’s journey to find her father and fulfill her mother’s deathbed wish for vengeance. Soon, however, she discovers he’s already dead, at which point the film becomes a kind of ceremonial incantation, a calling forth of ghosts. When we first hear the woman (Christine Salem) sing, she’s framed in a close-up against a black background. Her tall afro is lit from behind, and the only other light catches her eyes and left cheek. “It’ll drive him crazy to see a woman stand up to him,” she whispers, recalling with sadness and anger her mother’s final words. Cilaos is, among other things, a portrait film: Restrepo loves faces, especially Salem’s, which he often shoots from a low angle and in high contrast. The effect recalls Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) and countless earlier aesthetic precedents, from Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) to the cover of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Salem, who hails from Réunion off the eastern coast of Madagascar, is a transfixing screen presence, and the final scene, in which she and two musicians wake the spirits with a Reunionese maloya, is great fun in the most basic sense – it’s one hell of a performance – but it’s also charged with an uncanny sense that the material world really might crack open before us.

    “From where I was standing, I could actually hear this man trying to talk to [the cop]. And the sound he was making is a sound I will never forget.” In Kevin Jerome Everson’s Shadeena (2016), Shadeena Brooks recounts the 2010 murder of DeCarrio Antwan Couley, which she witnessed from her front porch. The bulk of the film is a four-minute shot of Brooks, who reenacts the scene of the crime as she talks, mimicking the murderer by leaning over and pretending to fire off bullet after bullet, “Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap!” When she recalls the “sound [Couley] was making,” she points unconsciously toward her left ear, then Everson cuts to the closing titles, punctuating her testimony. Everson intervenes in Shadeena by editing the sound so that her voice falls briefly out of synch until the first shot is fired in her story, which foregrounds the performance of it all. Brooks has told this story many times over the years, and she tells it well.

    Shadeena is an intriguing piece in its own right, but it’s also a useful intertext for Ears, Nose and Throat, which was one of the highlights of Wavelengths and is among Everson’s very best films. Here, Brooks again narrates her account of Couley’s murder, but Everson shifts his focus from Brooks the storyteller to Brooks the witness/survivor. Ears, Nose and Throat opens with a series of night-time images of a street, presumably the location where the shooting occurred. The sequence eventually resolves to a low-angle shot of a street lamp, which reads on subsequent viewings as Couley’s dying vision. Everson then cuts to Brooks, who is in an examination room, listening as a doctor explains that her hoarseness is caused by a weak vocal cord. Again, it takes Brooks four minutes to tell her story, but this time Everson lays it over an image of her in an isolated sound booth as she takes a hearing exam. A beep in the left channel of the soundtrack is greeted by her raising her left hand. With a beep in the right channel, she raises her right hand.

    Everson mentioned during the Q&A in Toronto that Ears, Nose and Throat was inspired in part by that gesture, by the raising of her hand, which reminded him of seeing Brooks swear to tell the truth in court (Couley was a close family member of Everson’s). In the context of the film, however, it transcends simple symbolism. As in Shadeena, Brooks seems haunted most by those dying sounds. “From my porch to where they were standing, I can hear him, like, trying to breathe and trying to talk,” she says. Her voice trails off as she finishes the story. “And then the ambulance came.” Her shift to the present tense is terrifying – “I can hear him.” Rather than cutting away to titles, this time Everson returns to the examination room, now in a tighter shot. It’s silent. The doctor busies himself in the foreground, slightly out of focus. All attention is on Brooks’s face. Ears, Nose and Throat is a self-consciously beautiful film, almost romantically so, and it culminates in this epilogue, which is sympathetic and haunting and full of grace. The film ends just as Brooks glances at the camera, which would be a cliché if it weren’t such a gut-punch.

    After the screening of AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN, Manuela De Laborde said that making the film was for her like “returning to Montessori.” I almost applauded because one of the chief pleasures of the film – it was for me not only the highlight of Wavelengths but of all new cinema in 2016 – is its pedagogical form. By that I mean it reveals, reworks and illuminates the essential components of the modes in which she’s working: abstraction, sculpture and the materiality of celluloid. Like a musical theme and variation, AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN introduces ideas then spins them in new contexts by recalibrating the rhythm of the film and by modulating the degree of complexity in the individual compositions and the montage. It’s quite a feat.

    AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN begins with abstracted shots of an unidentifiable surface that recalls a lunar landscape. The camera and filmed objects are still, but the screen seems to dance because of the magnified, blown out film grain. The only sound is hissing white noise, and each cut is separated by varying lengths of darkness. This opening section, then, presents two foundations of cinema in relatively pure form: image and duration. De Laborde simplifies (if that’s the right term) the abstraction by using an all-blue colour palette, presenting each image as if it were a stand-alone work, like paintings hung a few steps apart in a gallery. Then, at the two-minute mark, a flash of light reveals that the oddly shaped patch of blue we’re staring at is the blunt end of a sculpted object. Along with introducing new content to the film (it’s no longer just visual abstraction; it’s now about the object), De Laborde also uses that reveal as a jumping off point for a playful exploration of the sculpture. The pace of the editing quickens and then slows. She juxtaposes different perspectives of the object, cutting between shots of varying magnification and frame rates. In essence, she has introduced montage to the mix.

    For the remainder of AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN‘s 24-minute runtime, De Laborde continues along this line of enquiry. The blue palette is joined by red. The soundtrack is activated by electronic tones. One image is recomposed in real time as other shapes and colours are superimposed upon it. Gradually the sculptures become objects of contemplation in and of themselves. In that sense AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN is very much a sculpture film in its attention to the surfaces of things, and that includes the emulsion on its celluloid. The film ultimately resolves to total abstraction, ending on screens of red, blue, and black, again animated by dancing grain. As a critic, I remain at a loss for objectively evaluating a work like this, but AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN is one of those rare instances when an experimental film’s rhythms felt intuitively true and right to me. It ended precisely when I wanted it to and not a moment sooner.

    Feature Films

    The publication of correspondences between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Ceylan created a small sensation in 2008. Two of the most important German-language poets of the post-war years, Bachmann and Ceylan met in the spring of 1948 in Vienna, lived together in Paris for two months in 1950, and reunited briefly in 1953 and 1957. The nearly 200 letters, postcards and poems they exchanged over two decades, however, reveal for the first time the true depth of their feelings for one another and the complexity of their relationship, which lasted until Ceylan’s suicide in 1970. Their story has all the stuff of an Oscar-baiting biopic. Ceylan was a German-speaking Jew in Romania when Fascism swept through Europe. He survived his years in a labour camp, but his parents did not. Bachmann was the daughter of an Austrian Nazi and made her way to occupied Vienna after the war in hopes of joining the literati. In 1952, he married artist Gisèle Lestrange and soon after had a child; she had a years-long relationship with author Max Frisch. Each eventually met a tragic end: Ceylan drowned himself in the Seine and three years later Bachmann died from complications of barbiturate addiction and injuries suffered in a fire. Through it all, they carried on their correspondence, confessing their frustrations and jealousies, both personal and professional, and expressing with disarming clarity their longing for one another.

    With The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten), Ruth Beckermann has found a brilliant cinematic analogy for Bachmann and Ceylan’s story. Staged almost entirely within Funkhaus, a Nazi-era recording studio in Vienna, the film features singer-songwriter Anja Plaschg and actor Laurence Rupp, who read snippets of the correspondences directly into microphones. We only discover this after six or seven minutes, however, when an engineer interrupts to adjust their mic stands and then announces, “Take eight, rolling.” Until then, Beckermann cuts between Plaschg and Rupp, shot reverse shot, in low-angle close-ups. Rather than the scripts they hold in their hands, they appear to be staring into one another’s eyes. In those opening moments, the performances seem mannered and intentionally anti-dramatic but they still translate as acting, in the biopic sense. Beckermann skillfully complicates this dynamic by accompanying Plaschg and Rupp on their smoke breaks and on walks through studio soundstages and the commissary, where we witness, in documentary style, a “real” encounter between two artists in their 20s. “In the beginning, [Rupp] didn’t take [Plaschg] seriously as an actress, and she didn’t take him seriously as a person, but that changed,” Beckermann has said, and much of the pleasure of the film is in the tension of that transformation. Rupp is a natural leading man, with Tom Hiddleston charisma – never moreso than when the earnest and reticent Plaschg mocks his flirtations.

    In the opening titles of The Dreamed Ones, we learn that Bachmann and Ceylan never wrote to each other of their war-time experiences, but Shoah haunted their lives and reverberates through the film. In an early letter, Ceylan confesses his loneliness, complaining that anti-Semitic Paris “has forced me into silence.” Bachmann, for her part, refers casually and with some bitterness to the sight of her home being bombed. “I risked everything and lost everything,” she writes of their relationship. After reciting that line, Plaschg jolts back from the microphone and hides her tears behind the script. I’m not sure how to classify Plaschg’s performance, exactly, but it’s a remarkable thing. She is unnervingly present onscreen, especially in close-ups. (I experience a small shock each time Beckermann cuts to a wide shot and we see how small Plaschg is – like watching a fierce performance by Isabelle Huppert.) In one of the documentary asides, Beckermann frees Plaschg to interpret Bachmann. “The role of the lamenter… got to be too much for her,” she tells Rupp. “Nothing ever slipped out” between them. The film rests in this –Plaschg’s uncanny empathy, in the pain she experiences for Ceylan and Bachmann, who were too scarred to express themselves.

    In Austerlitz, Sergei Loznitsa goes to actual sites of the Holocaust. The film is built from 30 or so long-duration, static shots that were filmed in and around the camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, now transformed by time into tourist destinations, complete with snack bars and audio tours. Loznitsa intervenes little, instead standing his camera on a tripod and observing quietly the movement of bodies through these sacred spaces. Simple in concept, Austerlitz encourages some measure of quiet contemplation, provoking in those of us with even a basic familiarity with post-war philosophy questions about memory and the problems of creating art under the shadow of Shoah. However, by seating us at a distance, by forcing us to observe the throngs of tourists rather than the sites, Loznitsa makes a stinging and unambiguous argument. Posing under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate with a selfie stick is not problematic; it’s grotesque, a mockery, a kind of fascism in its own right. Righteous anger is, I think, Loznitsa’s defining characteristic as a filmmaker, and I say that as a compliment. Austerlitz, however, is simple to a fault and would be essentially the same film at half the runtime.

    In the first act of Angela Schanelec’s Der traumhafte Weg (The Dreamed Path), one of the film’s four main characters, Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson), leaves his girlfriend in Greece to tend to his dying mother. The sudden health crisis reunites Kenneth with his father, now elderly and nearly blind, who asks him during their first significant conversation, “Do you still take drugs?” It’s a typically equivocal moment for Schanelec. There’s no reaction shot of Kenneth, only a close-up of his hands, which hold a chocolate bar. “Yes,” he replies, without affect. Moments later, in a dialogue-free sequence of shots, we learn the father’s motives for asking. Kenneth stands alone inside a derelict building, watching through a window as a small parade passes by. Schanelec then cuts to a close-up of neatly folded bills on the corner of a table. Someone then enters (we never see his face), takes the money, and replaces it with a vial of morphine, which Kenneth places in his pocket. Cut to a young woman sitting alone in a dank stairwell, the space briefly illuminated by sunlight as Kenneth (presumably) opens and closes a door off-screen. We then see Kenneth alone at a restaurant, finishing a meal and trying, unsuccessfully, to suppress his sobs. Finally, Schanelec cuts back to the hospital, first to a shot of patients walking past the small chapel and then to a wider shot of Kenneth carrying his mother’s limp body, his father following close behind.

    Writing about The Dreamed Path demands this degree of attention to the specific details of shots and sequences because the essence and emotional life of the film are in those juxtapositions and in the odd geometry of its ellipses. Comparisons with Robert Bresson are ubiquitous, but Schanelec’s mise-en-scène is even more graphic and still, and her montage more associative. Her images cut against each other like panels in a comic book or like Chris Marker’s photos in La Jetée (1962), each one a singular, crafted object. The most mysterious shot in the sequence described above is the girl on the stairs. The rest can be explained in symbolic or narrative terms (this represents or this happens), but the brief glimpse of the girl suggests other, equally vital possibilities for the film to explore – other dreamed paths, so to speak. (Also, Schanelec’s use of light to mimic a door and expand off-screen space is both lovely and clever, generating a sudden, unexpected Hitchcockian thrill.)

    Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú drops us immediately and without much guidance into the privileged world of Punta del Este on the southern coast of Uruguay, where children spend their days swimming and surfing while their older siblings and friends make out on the lawn and organise barbecues. Gradually, the film settles its focus on three young women: Lara (Lara Tarlowski), a teenager in that most awkward stage of adolescence; Laila (Laila Maltz), who is adrift, with little clue what to study or how to live; and Katia (Katia Szechtman), who returns from vacation to an amiable social life in Buenos Aires. Solnicki, making his narrative debut after two documentary features, works in a festival-friendly mode, with non-professional actors speaking seldom and functioning primarily as figures in his designs. His compositions are often balanced and planimetric and his colour palate is a few degrees on the cool side. Solnicki’s style and world-building recalls Yorgos Lanthimos minus the jolt of transgression that charges so many of the recent Greek films. Solnicki seems most interested in simply watching the women as they explore the architecture of their different worlds – the beach-front estates of Punta del Este and the Styrofoam and sausage factories where Laila and her friends settle for work. In a typical shot, Laila stands in front of a large exhaust fan on a factory rooftop, a moment that is unmotivated except as an excuse to see her hair blow and to listen to the rumbling noise of the machine.

    Kékszakállú borrows its title from the murderous villain in Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), which is notable, given that no specific danger threatens the women. Rather, the title hovers over the film symbolically, imbuing with masculine menace a more general anxiety – the prospect of stepping, ill-prepared and with uncertainty, into adulthood. In his director’s note, Solnicki refers to the “supposed white paradise” of Punta del Este as a “kind of involuntary hell”, and the film’s final image, of Laila escaping at night by ferry, is a stunner that certainly invokes Stygian dread. If its surface-level economic critique never quite lands, Kékszakállú does, however, suffuse the women’s lives with disarming pathos by laying Bartók cues over several scenes. Solnicki’s use of Bartók activates otherwise unexceptional images from the film – Lara eating from a cereal bowl, an usher standing alone in an opera house, Laila shielding her eyes from the sun – in the same way Claire Denis’s use of Benjamin Britten mythologises the legionnaires in Beau Travail (1999). It’s difficult to overestimate the effect those brief snippets of music, scattered throughout the film’s 72-minute runtime, have on the overall shape and experience of Kékszakállú. Without them, it’s one more slow-cinema study of ennui, indistinguishable from the pack. With them, it’s a lively curiosity and a compelling calling card for its director.

    Fellow Argentinian Matías Piñeiro returned to Wavelengths for the third time in four years with Hermia & Helena, the latest in his series of films that sample playfully from Shakespeare. Agustina Muñoz stars as Camila, a theatre director who relocates from Buenos Aires to New York City for a fellowship. There she passes her days translating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and wandering between brief encounters with past loves and potential new ones. Inspired in part by his own relocation to the States, Piñeiro cuts across time throughout the film, juxtaposing Camila’s new life – its loneliness, transience, and winter snow – with the family and friends she left behind.

    Piñeiro is a reckless practitioner of kitchen-sink cinema. Like Viola (2012) and The Princess of France (2014), Hermia & Helena is bulging with ideas and diversions, as if the script were pasted together with scissors and glue from a year’s worth of jotted notes. The results are more than a bit uneven, but one section is worth special notice. Camila decides to contact her birth father, which precipitates a weekend trip out of the city to his small-town home, and the resulting scenes are unlike any I’ve seen from Piñeiro. The father’s house is a century old, with white walls, creaking wood floors, and a ticking grandfather clock. Piñeiro slows his pace to match the Bergman-like setting, even inventing an excuse for Camila to explore each silent room and indulge her curiosity before her father arrives. Silence is in short supply in Piñeiro’s films. Typically, his actors deliver their lines at a practiced pace, not so much reacting to others in a scene as reciting in their presence. (Performers lacking in star-power charisma often don’t come off especially well in these films.) When the father (Dan Sallitt) comes home, the sense of space and quiet remains, even during their conversations. In one especially nice image, Piñeiro frames Muñoz in a medium shot from a fixed camera position (both relatively rare for him), catching Sallitt in a reflection, ghost-like. They then play a question and answer game, each taking turns, and it’s an uncommonly free (improvised?) exchange. Piñeiro holds on Muñoz for more than two minutes as they begin to talk, withholding the first reverse shot as long as possible so we can enjoy the subtle transformations of her expression. When she asks if he’s told anyone about her after all these years, her wordless response to his answer touches a pathos that I hope we see more of from Piñeiro.

  • TIFF 2015

    TIFF 2015

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    The 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program included Mark Lewis’s short film, Black Mirror at the National Gallery, in which two bulky, fully articulated machines – one manipulating a round mirror, the other a camera – roam unattended and with immaculate precision through galleries dedicated to 18th-century Dutch landscapes. It’s an unnerving viewing experience. For most of the film, we see two distinct depths of field simultaneously: the walls and paintings beyond the frame of the mirror, and the reflected image within the mirror itself. The former is objective and familiar; the latter is strangely subjective, as if the Martin Szekely-designed mirror apparatus were a sentient spectator, choosing with taste and curiosity the paintings most deserving of its full attention. Lewis has said that one of his goals with the project was to experiment with the very notion of composition:

    I want the machine—and in Black Mirror at the National Gallery this means the camera, the mirror, the apparatus that carries the mirror and moves it through the space, and even the space itself—to come up with a composition through a collaborative exercise. The idea that the machine already has these possibilities programmed inside of it is something that feels right to me.

    Lewis returned to Wavelengths this year with Invention, a feature-length compendium of short films that were shot on location in Toronto, São Paolo and the Musée du Louvre. Again, Lewis’s camera moves with servo-controlled elegance, this time floating, panning and rotating through gallery spaces, city skylines, late-night streets and office lobbies. On a few occasions, Lewis adds a touch of narrative to the edges of the frame by way of human figures – characters, really – who perform for the camera, or who are, at the very least, conscious of being filmed: a man shovels snow so that he can trick-ride his bike; a couple has a long, seated conversation on a pedestrian-packed elevated freeway; a crowd forms around an injured cyclist. These small human touches are welcome additions to a film that is always in danger of being little more than a cinematic sideshow or, worse yet, derivative (like other critics of Invention, I can’t ignore the most obvious precedents in Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, 1971, and Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle, 1992).

    The patchwork structure of Invention is a problem for the larger piece – some sections are considerably more interesting than others – but Lewis’s project is a usable contribution to our ongoing and oft-vital discussions of power, privilege and spectatorship, not only in the cinema but in our image-mediated lives, generally. Lewis’s mechanical eye draws a stranged new attention to the omnipresence of closed-circuit surveillance, smartphones, dashboard cams, drones and the myriad other digital cameras that seem always to be hovering nearby. Should Lewis go to work for Big Brother, we can at least take consolation from knowing that our lives will be documented exquisitely before they’re uploaded into the cloud. One especially disorienting shot tracks down a spiral staircase at magic hour and plays like an extended variation on the “upside-down shadow” theme (to borrow a musical analogy) from Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011). It’s all quite lovely.

    Viewed within the context of Wavelengths 2015, there was something downright quaint and comforting about the aesthetic and intellectual remove we get from Invention – as if Lewis had stepped aside, relinquished some measure of authorial control (and responsibility) and simply loosed the machines to generate the modernist images “programmed inside of” them. The pleasure I experience while watching Invention is relatively uncomplicated and almost purely formal. As the camera rotates, for example, I can feel the image steadily approaching a balanced, more ideal composition. Lewis often pauses the camera’s motion at these moments, allowing the viewer to enjoy a measure of harmonic resolution (to borrow another musical analogy). It’s an interesting idea – that resolving visual tension in a balanced composition can function as a caesura, mimicking a cut within a long take.

    This kind of purely formal pleasure was in relatively short supply in Wavelengths this year, with a few notable exceptions. Daïchi Saïto’s Engram of Returning, which closed out the four evenings of short-film programs, is a mighty explosion of a movie – 19 minutes of 35mm CinemaScope images blown into super-saturated, deep-black abstraction. Engrams, I’ve learned since returning from Toronto, are neurological remnants of lived experience: researchers have hypothesised that traces of memory are scattered throughout our brains, etched onto neural tissue. Saïto, in essence, conjures new trace memories for his audience by offering hazy glimpses of landscapes that are never fully graspable, like half-remembered dreams. (An engram is a nice analogy for all of cinema, I think!) The visceral thrill of Engram of Returning owes much to Jason Sharp’s circular-breathed saxophone score, which is ruthless and mesmerising. The overriding effect of the film is primal and ancient, like recovering memories of some past-life visit to Sun Ra’s promised land.

    Björn Kämmerer’s seven-minute film, Navigator, is different from Engram of Returning in nearly every respect – it’s silent, concrete, immaculate – yet the viewing pleasure is much the same. Beyond evoking the most basic question, “What am I looking at exactly?” both bypass comprehension completely and burrow straight into sensation. (After years of eagerly anticipating every opportunity to see a new film by Charlotte Pryce, I’m still at a loss for describing them. Needless to say, her latest piece of golden, hand-processed “natural magic,” Prima Materia, fits into this category as well.) Navigator is meticulously assembled from close-ups of rotating, beveled glass, presumably a Fresnel lens in a lighthouse. Kämmerer’s intervention is in the editing, which establishes a rhythm through crosscutting lighter compositions against dark, and then explores endless variations of movement along the x- and y-axes. As in Black Mirror at the National Gallery, movement and light are difficult to track precisely because the rounded, reflective surfaces constantly invert perception – we see light and its opposite, movement and its opposite. Notably, Kämmerer doesn’t vary the duration between cuts until the final shot of the film, which gives the piece a constant pulse. In her program notes, Wavelengths curator Andréa Picard compares Navigator to Cubism, which is true enough. It’s also a cinematic analogue to a Steve Reich chamber piece.

    In his overview of the Wavelengths short programs for The Notebook, Michael Sicinski noted a telling demographic shift in this year’s lineup. While Picard has consistently programmed young and emerging filmmakers, and rarely with even a hint of tokenism, Wavelengths has, over the past decade, been an important showcase for the elder statesmen of avant-garde cinema, including Robert Beavers, James Benning, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Peter Hutton, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, and Jean-Marie Straub. This year, Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpus played alongside a restoration of Paul Sharits’s 3D Movie, and Invention and new films by Chantal Akerman, Guy Maddin, and Tsai Ming-liang screened among the selection of mid- and feature-lengths films. The Wavelengths program as a whole, however, skewed significantly younger in 2015: the “median age,” Sicinski writes, “is somewhere around 33.”

    I’m not qualified to speculate on the causes of this shift, but I’m intrigued by an apparent correlation between that programming decision and another shift in the lineup – that is, away from traditionally formalist art (structuralist films, optical experiments) and toward areas of the avant-garde that are more explicitly didactic, ideological and symbolic. To describe Invention as “quaint” and “comforting,” and to say that Navigation “bypasses comprehension” is, potentially, to damn with faint praise, which is not at all my intent. Rather, if curation is an act of criticism itself, in that it lays so many of the ground rules for the resulting conversations, then – and I say this as an observation rather than a critique – Picard seems to have biased the discussion somewhat this year.

    Destabilising Images

    Case in point: the psychological and aesthetic dissonance of experiencing the disembodied camera-machines of Invention so soon after watching Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

    With his first two features, Two Years at Sea (2011) and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013, co-directed with Ben Russell), Rivers proved himself a compatriot of Lisandro Alonso, carrying his Bolex into remote regions of the world to document the hard-scrabble lives of solitary men. Like Alonso’s, his films exist somewhere in the murky middle of the non-fiction/narrative spectrum – that place where anything resembling anthropological documentary tends to be described as “problematic”. Or problematising, in the active, political sense: Alonso and Rivers are well aware of their cinematic and critical lineage, as are Russell (also in Wavelengths with his short film, YOLO), Denis Côté (also in Wavelengths with his short film, May We Sleep Soundly), and, to name just one prominent off-shoot of this movement (if “movement” is even the right word), Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, J.P. Sniadecki, and the other members of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. This is a smart and self-conscious bunch, these children of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, and judging by the Wavelengths lineup, their numbers are expanding by the day.

    With The Sky Trembles, Rivers’ effort to problematise the experimental docu-fiction form folds in on itself in delirious fashion. It opens in Morocco, where the filmmaker Oliver Laxe and a small crew are shooting his follow-up to You All Are Captains (2010). Rivers is a sympathetic and astute behind-the-scenes observer, cutting between extreme long shots of landscapes and more intimate portraits of the filmmaker and his cast and crew. The new film, Las Mimosas, is about a young man who leads a troubled expedition through the Atlas mountains, and there’s a suggestion of analogy between the character and Laxe himself. In a recent interview with Filmmaker Laxe says of one particularly challenging day on set: “It was a very critical moment, when you see that you are working on a project for four years and because you were maybe too ambitious you are making a disaster. I was asking myself, ‘How did I bring all of these people to this place?’” Of course, Rivers is aware also of the third layer of this analogy – that the protagonist of Las Mimosas is analogous to Laxe and Rivers and, by extension, to other filmmakers like Alonso and Russell who package these images for festival audiences around the world. To drive the point home, Rivers cuts near the end of The Sky Trembles to a handheld walking shot that melds his camera’s point of view with Laxe’s. It’s one of the only subjective shots in the film but one that seems inevitable and necessary.

    Thirty minutes into The Sky Trembles Laxe climbs into his Land Rover and drives off alone. Rivers watches from a distance at first, panning from a fixed position to follow the truck’s movement, until Laxe turns a corner and disappears from sight. With a jarring cut, the point of view then jumps to the back seat and the soundtrack erupts with metal guitars blasting from the truck’s speakers. The drive, which lasts several minutes, functions symbolically as a journey through a liminal space, during which Laxe transitions from “Oliver Laxe, the director, performing some version of his own life” to “Oliver Laxe, the actor, performing in a fiction.” More specifically, he steps into the role of the Professor in Paul Bowles’ “A Distant Episode” (1947). As in the original short story, he is a personification of colonial alienation, overconfident and naïve. He wanders unaware into danger and soon finds himself beaten, bound and gagged. His captors later cut out his tongue, fit him in a hooded suit covered with tin cans, and force him to dance for their amusement.

    The remainder of The Sky Trembles tracks closely with Bowles’ story. The film is so interesting and important, however, because of the new complications that are activated by Rivers’ translation of the scenario from one form (literature) to another (cinema). In “A Distant Episode” Bowles offers scant description of the Professor’s costume or his dancing:

    That night, at a stop behind some low hills, the men took him out, still in a state which permitted no thought, and over the dust rags that remained of his clothing they fastened a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together. One after another of these bright girdles was wired about his torso, his arms and legs, even across his face, until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales… He was now brought forth only after especially abundant meals, when there was music and festivity. He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of “program” to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity.

    I quote at length in order to illustrate Bowles’ voice, which is ironic (“their sense of ritual” is a loaded phrase, certainly) and plain-spoken. The same could be said of Rivers’ style, and yet Laxe’s embodiment of the “King of the Tin Cans”, as his captors call him, is uncanny and knotted in ways that are erased by Bowles’ prose. Each time he appears on screen, the tin can man exists simultaneously in three states. He’s a character – a tortured, desperate man who is gradually losing his humanity. He’s a symbol – of colonialism, generally, and of one specific contemporary symptom of it (the arthouse, docu-fiction filmmaker). And he’s a rendered art object – a brown and silver mass of cloth and metal that jangles noisily when Laxe moves, that reflects light unpredictably, that is framed in particular compositions and edited at a particular rhythm, and that is itself both a symbol (the refuse of industrialism) and a real thing (rusted tin cans that threaten to cut and infect the wearer). To a certain extent, the process of experiencing and interpreting filmed images is always a negotiation between these three states. Watching the King of Tin Cans dance, however, is an exceptional case because the negotiation is so disconcertingly self-conscious, immediate and unrelenting. I suspect I’ll be using the tin can man as an example for years to come when I find myself in a conversation about the messiness of interpretation.

    The Sky Trembles, as a whole, traps viewers in this interpretive flux, which is a radical move only because its line of criticism is so focused on the particular problems of representation at this moment (whatever we want to call this stage of the West’s war on terror) and in this context (the festival-friendly art film). In the first act, Rivers shows Laxe working with a non-professional actor, telling him precisely where to walk and how to deliver the line, “The sheikh is gone!” There is a rehearsal, some discussion, and then a live take, which Laxe observes through a monitor. Later, members of the crew fold dozens of cardboard boxes that are eventually used to break the fall of a stuntman, who plummets, again and again, from a cliff, while Laxe films from below. The boxes are then dissembled and neatly stacked. These are standard, making-of scenes that reveal the labor and intentionality of filmmaking. So when Rivers intercuts portraits of aging Moroccan men, the images read, likewise, as objective, documentary moments. Viewers might be aware that a British man is behind the camera and choosing which footage to include and in what sequence, but everyone involved here (Rivers, his crew and his subjects) is participating in a common cause, the making of a film. They’re not equals, certainly, but they’re all willing collaborators, joined in fraternity. Indeed, Laxe has described the first section of The Sky Trembles as, “a beautiful homage to our profession.”

    When The Sky Trembles transitions, midway through, from documentary to narrative, the shift is not signaled by a corresponding transition in form. Rivers’ cinematographic style remains consistent throughout, extending even to small details such as a droning, non-diegetic music cue that plays over two contemplative shots of the Moroccan skyline. The first instance is one more behind-the-scenes observation, the second is an establishing shot in a fiction. That the two shots could be swapped with little to no discernable effect on the larger film is what makes The Sky Trembles so deeply interesting. Rivers has taken the Kuleshov Effect to its logical extreme: instead of limiting the object of re-interpretation to one blank expression, as Hitchcock does so famously with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954), Rivers destabilises every image, whether a face or a gesture or a landscape.

    That destabilisation is the truly radical act. In adapting “A Distant Episode”, Rivers has cast three non-professional “locals” as Laxe’s kidnappers and tormentors, which is a textbook example of problematic contemporary cinema, in that it transforms the men – even if always self-consciously and ironically – into one-dimensional representations of the terrifying, unknowable Other. They slice out Laxe’s tongue and feed it to a dog, fire warning shots at his feet to make him dance, and sell him off for profit, all without a trace of mercy or regret. We in the audience are made to stare at their laughing faces, which have been turned ugly by the context of the scenario and by the dictates of their director. And there’s the rub. Like Laxe on the set of Las Mimosas, Rivers has scripted every line of The Sky Trembles, staged every scene, rehearsed every stunt. The three men who torture the King of the Tin Cans are also collaborators in the process, brothers in arms. They likewise exist simultaneously – and at all times – as characters, symbols and objects. Their portraits could be swapped with those in the first part of the film with little to no discernable effect. They exist somewhere in the interpretive flux between fact and fiction.

    The Sky Trembles ends with a long shot of the King of the Tin Cans running across the desert toward the setting sun. He waves his arms as he flees, and his howls can be heard over the clattering cans. Because Laxe is between the camera and the only light source, he’s little more than a dark silhouette at the centre of the frame, more graphic element than actor. (The effect reminds me, fittingly, of the ghost monkeys in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives, 2010). In “A Distant Episode” the Professor’s final escape is witnessed by a French soldier, who calls him a “holy maniac” then lifts his rifle and takes “a potshot at him for good luck.” Rivers omits those last two details but the final image is from the perspective of two soldiers, who turn and watch as Laxe passes. The sudden shift in point of view is critical because it takes The Sky Trembles beyond even the ironies of Bowles’ story. When, after nearly three minutes, Rivers finally cuts to black, the King of the Tin Cans is utterly destabilised and foreign. He’s barely a character, barely a symbol. Instead, he’s now essentially a black spot on an orange horizon. It’s as unsettling a representation of existential terror as I’ve ever experienced.

    Distant Episodes

    After the screening of The Sky Trembles, I joked with another critic that the film might put Rivers and other filmmakers like him out of work. Its inside-out critique of docu-fiction representation is so thorough and final, I wondered what was left to say. (It’s worth noting that Alonso’s most recent feature, Jauja, 2014, seems to signal a shift away from this style of filmmaking.) Rivers offered an answer of sorts – and a not especially satisfying one – at Wavelengths with A Distant Episode (yes, really), a 17-minute companion to The Sky Trembles. Another behind-the-scenes project, it’s quite similar to the feature in terms of content. Again, Rivers intercuts long landscape shots with observational footage of the cast and crew at work, including familiar sequences in which the director, Shezad Dawood, rehearses an actor and another performer prepares for and then executes a small stunt. In A Distant Episode, however, Rivers abandons the docu-realistic style and instead conjures from the material a kind of fake artifact. The black-and-white, hand-processed footage is scratched and pulsing with imperfections, and the soundtrack has been replaced by silence and by occasional music cues from Pere Portabella’s Cuadecuc, vampir (1970), which is itself a self-conscious deconstruction of genre filmmaking. Dawood’s project, Towards the Possible Film, appears to involve astronauts who wash ashore on another planet, which lends a playfulness to A Distant Episode that certainly distinguishes it from The Sky Trembles. Inspired by Morocco’s long history as a film location, Rivers gets a bit lost in the funhouse-mirror artifice of it all – the false facades of an abandoned movie set, the nostalgic kitsch of 1960s sci-fi, and the formal signifiers of the avant-garde.

    Certain shots in A Distant Episode could be mistaken for footage from the silent era, and in that sense it’s reminiscent of Guy Maddin, who also had a new feature and short film in Toronto this year. The Forbidden Room (co-directed by Evan Johnson) has received more critical attention, but the short, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton (co-directed by Evan and Galen Johnson), is the more interesting of the two, I think, and the parallels between it and A Distant Episode are notable. As Maddin explains in voice-over, the film was born of financial necessity. Crippled by the ballooning costs of The Forbidden Room, he signed on to make a behind-the-scenes featurette that would eventually accompany the release of Paul Gross’s big-budget Afghan war film, Hyena Road (which also premiered at TIFF!). Maddin soon found himself in the Jordanian desert, disgusted by the situation –”Everything about my visit is gross, hideous” – and daydreaming of ways to salvage both the project and his dignity: “All I can do is dream of taking Paul’s actors and sets for myself, gratis, and shoot my very own ultimate war-movie cine-essay, a formally radical, ill-tempered retort to Paul’s digestible adventurism.”

    And that’s what he does, in a roundabout way. Maddin and the Johnsons convert much of the footage to high-contrast black-and-white and then mimic digitally the imperfections of well-worn celluloid, the end result being a film within the film that looks remarkably like Rivers’ short. In one scene, a platoon of soldier-actors makes its way across a rocky landscape accompanied by vintage-sounding electronic music that would be at home on that same Cuadecuc, vampire soundtrack. (Could it be? I honestly don’t know. Wheels within wheels.) But Maddin, never more serious than when making a joke, seems to tire of the idea after six minutes and renders the first battle scene in the style of a 1980s video game, with super-saturated color and laser beams, and then gradually works his way back to more familiar thematic territory: hockey and movies. War movies, in particular, appealed to Maddin as a child, he tells us, “with their thrills and romance, camaraderie and cool uniforms, all the pomp and ceremony of real war but without real death.” And with that, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton blossoms into the cine-essay he’d imagined, a very moving and very funny analysis of the costs (in the most biting and ironic sense) of war.

    Rivers’ frequent collaborator, Ben Russell, filed his Wavelengths dispatch from Soweto, South Africa, where he teamed with the Eat My Dust youth collective on YOLO, a playful short that employs mirrors and pre-roll sound to capture, in a structuralist turn, the collaborative work of filmmaking. As a mirror passes in front of the camera, we catch glimpses of rooflines, a face, and an azure sky. The world beyond the mirror changes with each pass – sometimes it’s a white brick wall, sometimes brown, sometimes the image is upside down, sometimes not, sometimes we see people at work or play, sometimes no one is present at all. How Russell achieves these effects – more mirrors? hidden cuts? flipping the image itself? – remains a mystery, like an illusionist’s secrets. YOLO was shot in the ruins of the Sans Souci cinema, which in 1948 became one of the few public spaces where black South Africans could gather, and was later a site for organising collective political resistance. In the final seconds of YOLO, we see some of the kids playing soccer and dancing to pop music, while Russell can be heard (asynchronously) saying, “You’re just going to press it down, and I’ll tell you when to put the mirror in.” It’s one more behind-the-scenes, self-reflexive moment in a festival chock full of them, but here it’s also a passing-on of the tricks of the trade, which given the context is both an act of memoriam and empowerment.

    A Foreigner. And Not.

    When asked if he felt like a tourist when shooting Las Mimosas in Morocco, his home for the past decade, Oliver Laxe replied:

    No. We have to attack this subject from a different point of view. First, I think any artist is a foreigner—and this is a good thing. When I was born in Paris, I was Spanish, and when we came back to Spain, I was French. Of course, you suffer through adaptation, but with time you realize it’s a good position, a good distance from which to watch things. You have to be a foreigner. I’m a foreigner in Morocco too—and not.

    Laxe’s defense of cosmopolitanism as an artistic (and political) first principle summarises nicely a strain of thought that animated much of the best work in Wavelengths this year – hence my earlier suggestion that Picard’s programming had biased the critical conversation somewhat in favour of work with an explicitly economic or historical bent. To watch all of the films in Wavelengths meant spending six hours with Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes’s three-part, carnivalesque satire of Portugal’s descent into austerity. Closely related was Night Without Distance, in which Lois Patiño blows out his digital images and then negative-reverses them (Command-I in Photoshop) in order to defamiliarise his story of smugglers preparing for a late-night journey through the Gerês Mountains between Portugal and Galicia. Paris-based, French Guyana-born artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes a more scholastic approach with his first feature, Sector IX B, in which a young anthropologist whose research confines her to the antiseptic halls of a museum takes an ancient drug and becomes lost, a la Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974), in colonial memory and sensation.

    Another standout among the Wavelengths features was The Other Side, Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini’s latest distant episode in the American South. His absurdly problematic portrait of God-and-guns “white trash” in Louisiana is a vital testament to the limits of empathy at a moment when American politicians are calling for the rounding-up of Muslim immigrants and refugees. Also impressive were two features shot just below the U.S. border. Nicolás Pereda’s Minotaur is set almost entirely within a Mexico City apartment, where three young adults are stricken with a pathological and decidedly bourgeois ennui. Pereda choreographs them – and their put-upon housekeeper – like alienated wanderers in an early Tsai Ming-liang film. In Santa Teresa and Other Stories, one of the real discoveries of the fest, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias transforms Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel 2666 into a difficult-to-classify mash-up of fiction, non-fiction and essay about corruption and violence in Ciudad Juárez. In only 65 minutes Santos Arias manages to weave together a variety of image formats, blends documentary footage with staged scenes, and intercuts a performance by the activist Judith Gomez and a series of crime-scene postcards by the artist Ambra Polidori. The result is tangled, sorrowful, and bracing.

    Santos Arias exemplifies the cosmopolitan spirit of Wavelengths in that he was born in the Dominican Republic, was educated in Scotland and the United States, and made his film in Mexico. The same could be said of Yto Barrada, whose latest short, Faux Départ, screened with Sector IX B. Born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, Barrada has lived most of her life in Tangier. It should come as little surprise then that, having had a similar foreigner-and-not experience to Laxe’s, she would also echo his sentiments. “My French passport is my most important document,” She has said:

    I’m in a position of incredible power because of my ability to leave. That possibility changes everything. My ability, because of my work, to articulate things, that’s another privilege: to name the disease and to point at the symptoms. I just lift the rock and the termites and the holes are everywhere. My role is to transfigure them through what I can do, which happens to be art. I have the perception, but the perception is nothing unless you do something with it.

    When I described Rivers’ A Distant Episode as a fake artifact, I had Barrada’s film in mind. Faux Départ recalls Farocki’s In Comparison (2009) in that it celebrates the labour and craft that undergirds third-world economies. Instead of brick-makers in Burkina Faso, Barrada observes the Moroccan artisans who fabricate fossilised relics for the tourist market. It’s a ready-made metaphor, heavy with irony, but Barrada, like Farocki, focuses on the work rather than the workers and avoids editorialising. When, near the end of the film, she shows a craftsman laying out the tools of his trade, the gesture is uncommonly dignified and arresting.

    And then there’s Behrouz Rae, whose work directly addressed the experience of crossing borders. During a Q&A, Rae mentioned that both of his films in Wavelengths, Untitled and The Reminder, were conceived with a traditional three-act structure. At one minute each, the results are like haiku. In Untitled, we see Rae’s hands place small pieces of paper face down on a white surface: on the right, a single rectangle; on the left, two items, each with a torn edge. Next we’re shown an atlas opened to a map labeled, “Retreat of Colonialism in the Postwar Period,” which Rae uses to illustrate, using a pen and ruler, his migration to California from his native Iran. Finally, Rae re-places the pieces of paper, this time face up, revealing old, black and white photos of an elderly white woman and a black man. A simple voiceover builds to this moment: “I got my green card. I came to the United States of America. And discovered two major colors, white and black.” The sentiment and irony are both fairly simple, but Untitled packs a bruising punch because of its tactile, intimate presence. Like Jean-Paul Kelly’s The Innocents, which screened in Wavelengths last year and employs the same technique of arranging photos by hand, Untitled makes literal the very private process of choosing and ordering images from which autobiographical, independent cinema is made. We hear not only Rae’s voice but also the sounds of his hands and objects as they brush across the filmed surface, as if we were sitting there alongside him. In the silence immediately following the final cut to black, Untitled‘s sounds and images collide and generate a new, unexpected sensation – not irony or cynicism but bitter disappointment.

    The Reminder also opens with a voiceover, this time in Farsi, but the original voice is soon drowned out by its English translation. An adult man addresses his mother in a letter, recalling the day fifteen years earlier when, while moving out of their home, he stared at her portrait and imagined himself walking, breathing, smelling and hearing just like she did. “I thought you were not looking at anything but me in this world,” he says. Rae illustrates the letter with a classical shot breakdown: a wide shot of a young boy looking up at an old photo; a medium close-up of the boy, who stares intently; and an eyeline match to a close-up of the photo. Rae then zooms in and the photo dissolves to a portrait of a man, revealing striking similarities in the two people’s facial features. The zoom and two more cuts – to the boy’s face and back to the photo again – are accompanied by a music cue that recalls a Hollywood film noir, as does the final, cryptic line: “Please destroy this letter like other things that have been destroyed.” The Reminder is a classic, Rebecca-like mystery reduced to its essence, and its core elements – nostalgia, regret, saudade – are invigorated by political anger and by the suggestion of violence (who has ever wished to “destroy” a letter?).

    Coda

    Finally, a too-brief word for Chantal Akerman, the matron saint (though she surely would’ve scoffed at the term) of border crossings, homesickness and cosmopolitan filmmaking. There’s a haunting scene in Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) in which Akerman’s heroine, a young Belgian filmmaker who is struggling to make a home in France, steps from one train car to another and is surrounded, suddenly, by passengers who haunt the space like ghosts of the Holocaust. It’s a paradigmatic moment in Akerman’s cinema, at once autobiographical and universal – a profoundly moving expression of dislocation and trauma, both personal and historical. Akerman, as we see first-hand in what is presumably her final film, No Home Movie, was forever on the move, shooting films, promoting films, installing films, writing, teaching, and lecturing throughout Europe, North America, Asia and seemingly all points in between. In No Home Movie she reports back to her mother in Belgium via Skype. “There’s no distance in the world,” Akerman tells her, as if hoping it might be true.

    The Skype calls are one of the many formal touches that allude to News from Home (1977), in which Akerman reads letters from her mother, Natalia, over images of New York City. In the earlier film, Natalia’s expressions of concerns for her daughter are sweet if occasionally overbearing. In No Home Movie, her concerns remain but are revealed through extraordinary tenderness. After the film’s premiere in Locarno, Akerman said, “I knew she loved me, but when I see that Skype moment, it’s really like a love affair between us.” Much of the film consists of conversations between the two, usually at a small kitchen table where Akerman sits with one foot tucked up her, like a child. They discuss the family and their lack of religious faith (echoed in occasional shots of a desert in Israel) but navigate around the details of Natalia’s experiences in the concentration camps. Instead, Natalia prefers to remember Chantal as a mischievous, brilliant, beautiful child. Near the end of No Home Movie, we watch from the distant perspective of a tripod-mounted camera as Natalia sleeps in her recliner. Akerman takes a seat on the floor beside her, camera in hand, and looks up at her mother through the small LCD display (yes, this is another making-of scene). Akerman’s sister Sylviane is also there, busying herself in the next room, but she calls out, “Mama, tell us a story. Mama, wake up and talk to us.” Natalia stirs in her sleep and mumbles, as if in a dream, but the words never come. This is, as far as I know, a unique scene in all of the cinema. In real time, we observe as a life’s stories become lost to the world. It’s devastating, and with Akerman’s passing, doubly so.

  • TIFF 2014

    TIFF 2014

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    “WTF is this movie?!”

    I scribbled this note midway through I Am Here, Fan Lixin’s trainwreck of a documentary about Super Boy, an American Idol-style talent show that is a ratings sensation in China. I walked out of three feature films at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, each of which was more competently made than I Am Here, but none was as fascinating. Assembled from one-on-one interviews with the contestants, backstage observations, broadcast footage, and fabricated adventures (the film begins and ends with three of the boys walking through the desert, for some reason), I Am Here was surely edited by a committee whose sole concern was protecting and selling the brand. Each sequence feels focus group tested, as if the entire film were compiled algorithmically based on Youku analytics data. Say what you will about shows like Super Boy, but after two decades, its approach to storytelling and montage has become so refined it’s nothing for the editors at Big Brother and Survivor to introduce and individuate ten characters before the first commercial break. After 88 minutes of I Am Here I knew only Ou Hao (the guy with the circle earrings) and Hua Chenyu (the one with the lenseless black frames). In other words, I Am Here isn’t even good reality TV.

    Two days later I saw Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, which proved to be my favourite film of the festival, and by a wide margin. The juxtaposition was instructive. Costa works independently with a miniscule budget and shot Horse Money with a camera that can be had on eBay for $400. (1) After the screening he told the audience, “The problem with digital is you have to do so much more to get something interesting… To get some truth or emotion with light, it’s hard today. It takes more work.” In her festival blurb, TIFF programmer Giovanna Fulvi calls I Am Here a “sharp commentary on the changes occurring in contemporary Chinese culture.” Putting aside for a moment the question of how a film like I Am Here even gets programmed at a festival as prestigious as Toronto, I suppose I would agree with Fulvi that the film is a “sharp commentary” but only in an ironic or extra-textual sense. At the risk of hyperbole, I felt at times during the screening of I Am Here that I was witnessing the death throes of cinema. The pretty vacuousness of its images and its radical incoherence are symptoms of this age, I think. Never has it been easier for us to generate compelling images; never has it been harder to imbue them with meaning. During his Q&A, Costa mocked the Dolby trailer that preceded every film at TIFF, calling it “fascism”. I wish he’d seen I Am Here.

    Dana Burman Duff’s Catalogue, which screened in the Wavelengths experimental shorts program, addresses this image problem head-on. Shot in black and white and on 16mm, the film at first appears to be a study of domestic space along the lines of Jim Jennings’s Close Quarters (2004), with long static shots of silk curtains, jute rugs, and high-dollar linens. After a few minutes, however, Duff reveals her game: there at the top of an image are the words “Velvet Drapery Collection”; later, two pillows are tagged with product descriptions. Catalogue is old-fashioned in the sense that its central questions are nearly a century old. Where are the lines separating commercial work (home décor magazines) from “high” art (avant-garde film programs)? What cultural and economic forces determine those lines? And to what extent must an artist intervene in the manipulation of found material in order to claim ownership of the new work? (Duff crops and reframes the catalogue pages, her decoupage pops, and the vibrating gears of her 16mm camera bring a semblance of life and motion to the sterile photos.) But Catalogue is timely as well, as it reminds us not only that we’re inundated constantly by sponsored images, but that so many of them are so damn beautiful. Just look at the light in those photos the next time you’re solicited by Pottery Barn.

    “My friends who don’t know a thing about cameras or photography regularly post interesting pics on Instagram,” another filmmaker from the Wavelengths shorts program told me. The breakneck evolution of smartphones, consumer-grade digital SLRs, and photo editing apps, combined with Pinterest and other curating-for-the-masses platforms, have enabled users – and I use that word deliberately – to make a pastime of cultivating their visual taste. The average Instagram user might not know terms like shallow focus, tilt-shift, or Kodachrome but he or she knows which filter will produce the most likes. It’s a learned aesthetic calculation. By the same token, I Am Here includes a few moments of striking imagery, especially in the on-the-road sequences, and I suspect that fans of Super Boy have already begun grabbing sequences from the film and posting (or Weibo’ing or Weixin’ing or QQ’ing) edited stills, GIFs and video snippets, finding new contexts for the images and creating new juxtapositions of their own. That I Am Here is a jumbled disaster of a narrative feature is, in many respects, beside the point. A feature film of this sort is just one more content delivery system, and one that can now be marketed with the TIFF “Official Selection” laurel icon.

    Which makes a film like Horse Money all the more remarkable. Costa’s latest collaboration with a community of Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon opens with a silent montage of still photos by Jacob Riis, a muckraking journalist and social reformer who documented the lives of the working poor in turn-of-the-century New York City. I learned Riis’s name and the subject of the photos only after the screening; they’re presented in the film without context or explanation. I had assumed the images were dusty remnants of Portugal’s past, as if Costa were only making the (familiar) point that historical progress is slow and tragic, that our institutions and economic systems continue to fail the same people in the same ways. However, the montage also recalls, formally, the opening of Costa’s second feature, Casa de Lava (1994), which introduces the topography and people of Cape Verde by cutting together footage of volcanoes with portraits of Cape Verdean women. Costa scores Casa de Lava‘s opening montage with a Paul Hindemith viola sonata, self-consciously announcing his position as an outsider (this is the music of cultured Europe rather than post-colonial Africa) and aligning himself artistically with the modernists. The Riis photos are, likewise, a kind of declaration of principles. Costa is himself something of a muckraker, and the images in Horse Money are similarly sublime, haunted and material.

    Costa cuts from the last Riis photo – an image of a cramped alleyway with eight people staring back toward the camera – to a full-colour shot of a painting of a young black man, which creates the effect of an eyeline match. Horse Money is very much a film out of time. To say that the painting acts as a transition from past to present wouldn’t be quite right, as the first person we see, Ventura, is himself caught in a liminal space. Now in his early 60s, he seems to exist simultaneously in the present moment, in 1974 when he was nineteen years old and caught up in Portugal’s revolution, and in all points in between. Since we last saw Ventura in Colossal Youth (2006) he’s developed a tremor in his hands: “I know a bunch of hospitals,” he tells a doctor before rattling off the names of several. The stark white walls of the new housing development in Colossal Youth have been replaced here by a different bureaucratic dystopia, the indistinguishable lobbies, cafeterias, elevators and hallways of our modern healthcare facilities. On those rare occasions when Ventura does step out into the world, it’s an equally strange and symbolic space, littered with monuments, faceless military forces, and rubble. “You’re on the road to perdition,” a woman tells him.

    Aside from a brief appearance by Lento, the friend tasked with memorising Ventura’s letter in Colossal Youth, none of the other major characters from Costa’s previous Fontainhas films feature in Horse Money. Instead, he introduces Vitalina, a woman in her early 50s who has recently flown from Cape Verde to Lisbon to bury her husband. She speaks in a raspy whisper and her face is, for now, incapable of expressing much beyond grief and exhaustion. Costa’s style has evolved steadily through the years, and the move toward Cubist-like compositions in Colossal Youth (the signature shot of Ventura dwarfed by the angular towers, for example) now predominates, culminating in a remarkable close up of Ventura’s and Vitalina’s faces in profile. (2) They talk about their loves and losses in intimate detail. “Did you get Zulmira a full wedding dress?” she asks him, tears in her eyes. “Did you buy her undergarments? Headpiece and shoes?” When the voice of Zulmira, Ventura’s long-lost wife, comforts him later in the film, Horse Money fully reveals itself as a Gothic melodrama – and a deeply stirring one at that.

    Just Shy of Greatness

    That TIFF might be confronting some image problems of its own was apparent from their new tagline, “This is your festival”, which reads as a direct response to the annual stream of editorials that decry TIFF’s betrayal of its original position as “the people’s fest” thanks to rising ticket prices and policy changes that put a heavier premium on gala screenings. As a goodwill gesture, TIFF and the city of Toronto shut down five blocks of King Street during the opening weekend, creating a pedestrian-friendly refuge in what has become, since the unveiling of the TIFF BellLightbox four years ago, the most congested area of the festival. What I found even more interesting, though – and I say this as a communications professional in the non-profit world – is how TIFF’s marketing efforts this year shifted emphasis to the organisation’s status as a year-round arts charity. It’s a difficult message to deliver amidst the marketing noise of the festival itself, and when I heard people discussing it at all their comments were predictably cynical. I admire the effort, though, and thought it was well executed. I suspect it will change the conversation about TIFF ever so slightly; more importantly (for TIFF’s board of directors, at least), it will affect perception among the donor class who attend a few festival screenings each year and can afford to make transformational gifts. If those donations help sustain the TIFF Cinematheque eleven months out of the year, then it’s a small win for cinema culture, cynicism be damned.

    Festival politics aside, “witnessing the death throes of cinema” is hardly the experience I was anticipating when I booked my eleventh consecutive trip to Toronto. While I Am Here was certainly the only film that turned my thoughts apocalyptic, and while the best films I saw were indeed exceptional, the lineup as a whole was among the least satisfying of the past decade. Given the size of TIFF’s program (284 features, 104 shorts), generalisations like mine should be taken with whole handfuls of salt, but more often this year than in any I can remember, the go-to conversation starter at TIFF – “Seen anything good?” – was greeted with, “Good, yeah, but not great.” And that sentiment seemed to be shared across the broad spectrum of programs, from the avant-garde to the mainstream. While I tend to avoid higher-profile films, knowing they will eventually receive wide distribution, I usually return home from Toronto with a good sense of which films will soon be getting an Oscars push. The buzz for 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012), and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), for example, was unavoidable, just as TIFF always hopes. This year, when The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum) won the People’s Choice Award, I had only a vague sense that it was one of those Benedict Cumberbatch movies.

    Like many North American critics, I visit Toronto, in part, to catch up on titles that premiered at Cannes, a tactic that TIFF is now actively discouraging by front-loading the press schedule. (During the morning slot of the first day, seven films I wanted to see screened simultaneously.) My general disappointment with this year’s lineup owes something, I’m sure, to the unusually high number of well-reviewed films that played in Toronto but that I wasn’t able to see, including David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars, Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Pascale Ferran’s Bird People, and Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan. In some instances, the Cannes holdovers I did manage to schedule only added to my disappointment – not because they were bad, necessarily, but because they fell so far short of my expectations. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep is a major step back from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), I think. A too-long film buoyed by a few very good scenes, Winter Sleep is essentially a Woody Allen movie (a portrait of the artist as conflicted, self-absorbed, aging intellectual) with too few jokes. Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is also too long, but it’s bigger fault is that it borrows the central premise of Julia Loktev’s far superior The Loneliest Planet (2011) and then turns that film’s greatest strength – subtext expressed through ambiguous gestures – into pages and pages of festival-friendly, on-the-nose text. At least it’s funny.

    Most of the fall premieres I saw at TIFF also landed in the good-but-not-great camp. The latest in his on-going Shakespeare project, Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France is a loose translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost that focuses all of the play’s romantic intrigues on Victor (Julian Larquier Tellarini), a young stage director who returns to Buenos Aires after a trip abroad and immediately becomes entangled (or re-entangled, or potentially entangled) with each of the five actresses in his troupe. The film opens with a stunning, high-angle shot of an amateur football match that, had it been screened as a stand-alone short film, would have been a highlight of the fest. The rest of The Princess of France, however, fails to maintain the same formal and aesthetic heights. Piñeiro’s own troupe of actresses are never less than a pleasure to watch – after seeing her here, in Piñeiro’s Viola (2012), and in Santiago Mitre’s The Student (2011), I now look forward especially to every new appearance by Romina Paula – but Piñeiro is at his best when he’s observing groups of people, their faces falling into and out of frame at various depths of field. He finds a rare and distinct magic in those moments. His voice is less clear in more traditional dramatic stagings, of which The Princess of France contains many, and Tellarini lacks the screen presence necessary to carry so much narrative weight. The various competing relationships lose their tension as a result, and the film turns a bit flat.

    Viola includes a wonderful scene in which two actresses are rehearsing an exchange from Twelfth Night, and as they repeat their lines again and again, the performed seduction gradually becomes real. At least among the two Piñeiro films I’ve seen, it’s the most effective use of repetition as a formal device, which seems to be an ongoing concern for him. The Princess of France restages on several occasions a scene in which Victor picks up his backpack from under a tree, and with each recurrence he’s pitted against another of the women in his life. In that sense, The Princess of France could very well be a Hong Sang-soo film. Hong’s latest, Hill of Freedom, concerns a Japanese man named Mori (Ryô Kase), who returns to South Korea in hopes of reconciling with a former love, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa). In the film’s opening moments, Kwon drops a bundle of letters sent by Mori, which is Hong’s narrative justification for jumbling the chronology of events and exploring, once again, the fickleness of memory, perception and affection. Hill of Freedom is charming and laugh-out-loud funny, but at just barely an hour it’s something of a trifle.

    Like his previous film, Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, which world-premiered at TIFF to mostly rave reviews, is an impressive display of style in service of a clever short-film idea stretched to feature length. Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) are a couple who enjoy a little S&M, one of them more enthusiastically than the other, and it’s that imbalance that makes the scenario so interesting. Cynthia, the would-be dominatrix, punishes Evelyn for her mistakes by locking her in a trunk or pissing in her mouth, but her every action is scripted, quite literally, by Evelyn. As we watch them perform their duties repeatedly throughout the film (to say The Duke of Burgundy has a cyclical structure would be an understatement), it all begins to seem routine – boring, even.

    That’s the point, of course. Strickland is interested in how long-term relationships become defined by everyday habits, and The Duke of Burgundy is at its best when it foregrounds those expressions of generosity, intimacy and tenderness that make love a worthy effort. More often, however, the film is a catalogue of sensations. Strickland indulges his every aesthetic fetish – ‘70s Euro softcore, Bunuelian absurdism, Stan Brakhage! – and has great fun doing so, but watching The Duke of Burgundy is a bit like link-hopping on YouTube. As with I Am Here, the film’s best moments are, in fact, the simplest to reproduce. For example, a striking, golden image of a hand clutching bed sheets, accompanied by a loud, pulsing soundtrack is arresting but ephemeral, like a run of the mill music video. (I had similar reservations about Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin last year. That both films indulge male fantasies adds to my concerns about the directors’ reliance on sensation, but that’s a subject for a longer essay.) The last 30 minutes of The Duke of Burgundy are a patchwork of such scenes with sparse connective tissue. Strickland manufactures transitions out of musical montages, padding out the film with recycled images and ideas. Eventually, his brand of pastiche also begins to seem routine – boring, even.

    Something in the Atmosphere

    As usual, one of the highlights of TIFF was the annual four-night gathering at Jackman Hall for the Wavelengths shorts programs. Interestingly, it’s there, a few blocks north of the main hub of activity, amongst the relatively close-knit community of avant-garde enthusiasts, that TIFF still feels most like “the people’s fest”. If the films on average weren’t as strong as in recent years, there were several notable high points, especially in program two, “Something in the Atmosphere”. Borrowing its name from Mike Stoltz’s nostalgic 16mm portrait of Florida’s mythic-turned-kitschy “Space Coast”, the program was cohesive despite a lack of any easily identifiable unifying principles, either formally or thematically. Short film programming is such a tricky business. (3) Often, as in this case, I think the best sequences of films can be justified simply as an instantiation of the programmer’s taste. In her notes, Andréa Picard describes the tone of these seven films as “slightly amiss, uncomfortable, and, in some cases, surprisingly alluring,” which seems about right to me. Along with Something in the Atmosphere and Catalogue, the program also included Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s The pimp and his trophies, a 35mm memoir about her grandfather’s brothel, which brought to mind a slightly more sympathetic version of Heinz Emigholz’s grotesque D’Annunzios Höhle (2005); Relief, Calum Walter’s latest mash up of analogue printing, digital imaging and frame-by-frame animation (Walter’s use here of images from a car accident grounds thematically the technique in ways that are lacking in his earlier film, Experiments in Buoyancy [2013]); and Beep, Kim Kyung-man’s Brechtian interruption of North Korean propaganda films. The remaining two, Blake Williams’s Red Capriccio and Jean-Paul Kelly’s The Innocents, are especially deserving of attention.

    At a festival starved for new images, it was a pleasure to encounter three filmmakers of different generations, including Williams, who wrestled playfully with the mechanics and possibilities of 3D. (4) Earlier this year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival premiered digital restorations of Canadian animator Norman McLaren’s stereoscopic films, two of which also screened in TIFF’s Short Cuts Canada program: O Canada (1951, directed by Evelyn Lambart using a technique invented by McLaren in 1937) and Around is Around (1951). In the latter, which was the first-ever stereoscopic animation, McLaren used a cathode-ray oscilloscope to generate wave forms and graphic, geometric patterns. I won’t pretend to know exactly how Around is Around was made, but it was, quite simply, the most delightful ten minutes of the festival. Also delightful – and confounding and funny and unexpectedly moving – was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, about which I can only say, after a single viewing, that it is filled with nothing but new images. (The recurring shot of fingers wrapped around the rails of a gate is uncanny in exactly the way I’ve always wanted 3D to be uncanny but never is.) Even relative to Godard’s post-Histoire(s) work, Goodbye to Language is uncommonly dense. I hope to write about it some day, but only after doing the hard work of excavating its stacked layers of images, sounds, dialogue, quotations, music and stereoscopic effects.

    In his artist’s statement, Williams explains that his latest video borrows its structure from Stravinsky’s and Tchaikovsky’s capriccios, which are “playfully shaped from clashing staccatos and glissandos, and prone to sudden, dramatic tonal shifts.” It’s a clever move because it frees Williams to experiment within loose but essential formal constraints. Red Capriccio races through three movements in barely six-and-a-half minutes, and it’s the juxtapositions between them that make the larger piece so compelling. The first and longest section is constructed from handheld shots of an unmarked police cruiser (a Chevy Caprice, natch) that is parked on an empty street at night with its lights flashing. Playing variations on this theme, Williams cycles several times through a sequence of images of the car, modifying shot lengths and anaglyph effects with each return. Around the three-minute mark, he cuts to a montage of footage shot by travelers as they speed down the mostly vacant Turcot Interchange, a labyrinthine network of highway overpasses that first opened to traffic in anticipation of the 1967 Montreal Expo. The final and most mysterious section is a series of three shots: an image of a small suburban house that is illuminated first by a spotlight on the right and then on the left; a demonstration of a lighting rig inside a small and empty disco; and, finally, a sports car spinning recklessly in tight circles.

    Red Capriccio, like most of Williams’s recent work, is assembled from material that he has scavenged from the Internet and then converted to anaglyph 3D. Many a Swan, which screened at Wavelengths in 2012, treats the found, two-dimensional images as pieces of paper, folding and bending them like origami. In Baby Blue (2013), he experiments – in the true sense of the word – with parallax, exploring the 3D effects that result when objects move horizontally through the frame at various speeds and at various depths of field. Red Capriccio continues this inquiry into the fundamental components of anaglyph 3D by focusing on blue-red separation. The flashing lights of the police car, for example, are a keen and quintessential demonstration of the mechanics of anaglyph. Williams’s interest in form, however, serves only as a starting point for these videos. He is a structuralist, but only in the sense that the structure prescribes certain boundaries within which his other ideas are confined. (The Internet is an inexhaustible source of material after all.) In other words, while the 3D effects in his recent videos are essential and compelling, they don’t alone determine the ultimate success or value of each individual work.

    To be frank, Williams’s experiments with anaglyph don’t interest me nearly as much as his montage and his taste. Before rewatching it recently, I had only vague memories of Many a Swan, with the exception of a moment near the end when Williams cuts from a noisy, syncopated, and rapid-fire sequence of images to a silent, slow-motion shot of origami master Akira Yoshizawa folding a swan. It’s the video’s big reveal, as it explains the title and contextualises many of the work’s larger ideas, but that cut – the way it made me catch my breath and shift my perspective – is where Williams’s true talents lie. Red Capriccio is the best of his 3D videos because it contains the highest concentration of those moments. By the same token, Baby Blue is the weakest, I think, because the formal ideas are more interesting than the montage. Red Capriccio‘sfootage of the Turcot Interchange is alien and beautiful, recalling the 18th– and 19th-century paintings of “fantastical and sublime” architecture that inspired Williams. More impressive, the two-minute sequence builds imperceptibly (on a first viewing) toward an astonishing cut to black. Having now watched Red Capriccio a half-dozen times, I find myself anxiously anticipating that cut because the leap from that sequence to the final section is both logic-defying and ineffable. It makes me smile like an idiot. That the last shot of Red Capriccio favourably recalls Denis Lavant’s dance at the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999) is, perhaps, the best compliment I can give Williams.

    The first section of Jean-Paul Kelly’s three-part film, The Innocents, is a nearly seven-minute shot of two hands methodically placing and then removing dozens of printed photos, each of which has been pierced in one or more spots. The cutout holes vary in size and location, and each has a small, conspicuous ring of colour around it. The photos also vary greatly – in style, source and content – but gradually a few themes emerge: sites of violence and decay (an abandoned home, soldiers, bombed out buildings, a bullet-riddled body), homosexuality (gay porn, intimate selfies, protests for marriage equality) and media representations that conflate the two (Anderson Cooper, political hearings, Chelsea Manning, In Cold Blood, Glenn Greenwald). The middle section, shot on 16mm, is a silent restaging of snippets from With Love from Truman (1966), Albert and David Maysles’ documentary interview with Truman Capote. In Kelly’s version, a tattooed, muscular man in a white tank top and with a plastic bag fitted loosely over his head imitates Capote’s gestures, a marker in one hand, a highball in the other, while Capote’s bon-mots on form and style display below as subtitles. The final two minutes of The Innocents recall the opening section with a series of grainy, scratched 16mm images of coloured circles against a white background.

    Kelly offers a clue to his strategy with the first image in the opening series, David Boudinet’s “Polaroid” (1979). Boudinet’s photo of blue, sheer curtains in near-darkness also appears on the title page of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which Barthes attempts to better understand and explain his own subjective, sentimental experience of photography. In it he proposes a useful distinction between studium – the culturally-learned, political and intended content of an image – and punctum, which is a “sting, spack, cut, little hole… that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Kelly’s printout of “Polaroid” has been pierced midway down the image, just to the right of centre, which excises a small section of the photo where the curtains are slightly torn. In this opening series, then, Kelly has literalized punctum, systematically removing from each photograph that mysterious thing that “fantastically ‘brings out’” the true nature of the image.

    Truman Capote is a complicated figure, and Kelly’s film is in part a critique of the man, both as an artist and gay icon. The Innocents foregrounds the ease with which Capote justifies his treatment of violence in In Cold Blood (“I chose [the brutal murder of a family] because it happened to accommodate an aesthetic theory of mine”) and distances himself from his own moral responsibility, as if the words on his page materialised magically (“style… comes naturally, like the colour of your eyes”). But Kelly’s larger concern is the systematic and sensational representation of the gay male body as something dangerous and pathological – a form of political exploitation that can be traced back well beyond Capote’s “poetic” depiction of murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Like Camera Lucida, The Innocents speaks in a subjective voice – presumably, these are photos that bruise and sting Kelly personally – which makes the final section all the more affecting. Barthes wrote, somewhat controversially, “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes” (p. 53). This characteristic distinguishes photography from cinema, he argues. The closing images of The Innocents are a counter argument to Barthes, I think, as they force viewers to experience retroactively the disorienting, “ill-bred,” and “lightning-like” chill of punctum.

    Discoveries

    One pleasure of attending a festival as large as TIFF is stumbling upon filmmakers like Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, the husband and wife who co-wrote and co-directed Sand Dollars (Dólares de Arena). Set in a beachside town in Guzmán’s native Dominican Republic, the film concerns a love triangle between twenty-something Noelí (Yanet Mojica), her unemployed boyfriend (Ricardo Ariel Toribio) and Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), an aged European ex-pat with whom Noelí has had a years-long romantic and financial relationship. I say “pleasure” because from the film’s opening shot, a beguiling close up of an old man singing in a nightclub, I trusted Cárdenas and Guzmán, trusted their taste and perspective. The first cut, to men playing Bocci on the beach, establishes with remarkable efficiency both the style of the film and the rules of the world in which these characters operate. Sand Dollars is leisurely paced, and Cárdenas and Guzmán’s camera is attentive to bodies and gestures, to the routines and transactions of daily life in this economically- and racially-divided paradise.

    Cárdenas and Guzmán introduce Anna by first leading viewers through the resort where she and other wealthy ex-pats bide their time. Noelí wanders in with an easy familiarity, changes into a bikini, and then finds Anna on the beach, where they enjoy a swim together. When they return to the room, the arc of the story is already written on Anna’s face. Chaplin’s wistful eyes and fragile expression, hallmarks throughout her long career, leave little doubt that every moment of joy she experiences will be fleeting. Such is the bargain she’s made, exchanging money for time, affection and a fool’s hope in love. Sand Dollars sidesteps the major traps of films like this: owing to Cárdenas and Guzmán’s observational style, the characters come to embody certain tendencies of their post-colonial condition without ever becoming cogs in an allegorical machine. If the film occasionally feels too familiar – Sand Dollars fits comfortably into the “post-Dardennes international film festival film” genre – that’s a small complaint. I’m eager to see what Cárdenas and Guzmán do next.

    In many respects, Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole is a film we’ve all seen dozens of times before. Nicole (Julianne Côté) is one more descendent of The Graduate‘s Ben Braddock, a suburban 20-something drifting aimlessly and reluctantly toward adulthood. When we first meet her, Nicole is getting dressed and attempting to sneak out after a hookup. “Will I see you again?” the guy asks. “What for?” she answers. It’s a typical response for Nicole, who is reticent, passive-aggressive and profoundly melancholy.The film follows her for a few days one summer when her parents are away on vacation. She’s living at home and working at a thrift store, where she sorts clothes with the same bored detachment that characterises so much of her life. During the day, Nicole hangs out with her best friend, Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent), or listens to her older brother rehearse with his band. A chronic insomniac, she spends her nights wandering through the neighbourhood, peering curiously into the lonely lives of the strangers on her street. If Tu dors Nicole were prose, it would be in the spare, wistful style of Raymond Carver, which is what makes the film such a pleasant surprise.

    Tu dors Nicole takes its title from a line in the penultimate scene, when Nicole is woken up by the mother of a young boy she’s babysitting. “You’re asleep, Nicole,” she whispers – the most literal wake-up call in the history of coming-of-age movies. It’s a hard-earned line, though. Lafleur’s style recalls a number of filmmakers – Wes Anderson’s perpendicular camera angles and balanced compositions, Hal Ashby’s long-distance cutaways, Jim Jarmusch’s sound designs – but it avoids being derivative by virtue of the film’s subjectivity, which is aligned intimately with the main character. Tu dors Nicole is about the gradual build-up and explosive release of pressure in the life of a young woman, and much to his credit Lafleur builds that same tension into individual scenes and into the larger narrative. All of Nicole’s repressed pain and desire are manifest in the world around her – in the jammed bicycle lock she shakes violently while talking to Véronique, in the music and conversation that seeps through the walls when she tries to seduce the band’s drummer, in the loud lawnmowers and electric fans that seem to pollute every moment of potential quiet. The film’s turn to magical realism in the final image, then, is less surprising than inevitable and necessary.

    Soon-Mi Yoo’s Songs from the North, which premiered at Locarno and screened in TIFF’s Wavelengths features program, opens with a striking piece of found footage of highwire acrobats. The camera is positioned at a great distance, as if from the far side of a stadium, which turns the performers into small and illuminated figures against a deep black backdrop. An acrobat falls, there’s a gasp from the audience, and then a jarring cut to radically different found footage, this time from, presumably, a 1980s-era propaganda film about North Korea’s rocketry program. That cut, and the logical and aesthetic juxtapositions it generates, is a worthy introduction to Songs from the North, which swings constantly throughout its relatively brief running time (72 minutes) between numerous modes of discourse: a talking head interview, text inserts, original documentary material, and a broad range of found footage, including North Korean fiction films and television broadcasts.

    In her interview with Adam Cook, Yoo classifies Songs from the North as a “poetic essay” and describes the challenge of taking on a subject as complex as North Korea: “It is always tricky, when dealing with such loaded historical and political issues, to know exactly how much information you should provide without turning your film into a lecture.” Her solution is to speak very little in the first person: the text inserts are seldom more than a sentence and we hear her voice only occasionally in the documentary sequences. She presents her argument, instead, through the curating of images and sounds and, most importantly, through her montage. Ideally, in a poetic essay such as this each cut functions as a koan, creating a dissonance that transcends logic while still leading the attentive viewer toward a (relatively) specific end. That Yoo scarcely achieves that ideal is, perhaps, too easy a criticism. Indeed, I found myself falling into the film’s rhythms and experiencing the collective weight of its images just as Songs from the North ended. But the film is both too much and too little; there are too many voices (I understand why Yoo includes the interview with her father but it breaks the film’s form) and too few images (I can’t not compare the experience of watching this film to Andrei Ujica’s three-hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu [2010]).

  • IFFR 2014

    IFFR 2014

    This piece was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    “Most of the filmmakers I cover don’t get paid to make their films, so why should I expect to get paid to write about them?” – Michael Sicinski

    To get straight to the point: if the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam rolled out a disappointing slate of feature-length premieres, as has been reported, it certainly offered other cinematic pleasures. I say “if” because I saw only four feature premieres, and two of them, Jean-Charles Fitoussi’s On Music or the Dance of Joy and Julian Radlmaier’s A Proletarian Winter’s Tale, are quite good. This should go without saying, but my perspective on the event, like that of any critic reporting on a festival as large and diverse as IFFR, is necessarily limited by my experience with the fest (this was my first trip to Rotterdam) and by my particular programming choices, which were in turn determined by the schedule (what I could see), by my taste (what I wanted to see), and by editorial obligations (what I had to see).

    Fortunately, as an unpaid correspondent for Senses of Cinema I’m relatively free of the latter. Michelle Carey, who edits these festival reports, gave me free reign, as usual, so I spent the eight days between the unveiling of the hefty program and my arrival in Rotterdam pouring over the schedule, researching its hundreds of titles and filmmakers, the majority of whom were unknown to me, and plotting an angle of attack. First, there was recent work by established auteurs that I was eager to see on a big screen: Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me, Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy, Júlio Bressane’s Sentimental Education, Raya Martin’s How to Disappear Completely, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s Love is the Perfect Crime, and Aleksei German’s Hard to be a God all met or exceeded my expectations. There were two major retrospectives, of German avant-garde filmmaker Heinz Emigholz and contemporary Danish director Nils Malmros: I managed to see only one collection of shorts from the large but incomplete Emigholz retro, but his bitter and grotesque D’Annunzios Höhle (2005) was among the very best films I saw at IFFR; I will write at length about Malmros, for me the great discovery of the fest, in the next issue of Senses. And, finally, there were the more than 200 films in the Signals: Regained and Spectrum Shorts sections, which I sampled strategically and in large doses. By the end of my week in Rotterdam I’d seen a bounty of very good films and few bad ones.

    Which is not at all to discount the legitimate complaints leveled against this year’s program. In the first of his two reports for The Notebook, Michael Pattison describes his experience of covering feature premieres as “a laborious trudge through a swamp of works ranging from the unremarkable to the better-avoided.” Reporting for IndieWIRE, Neil Young points to the 2014 lineup as further evidence of IFFR’s steady and regrettable decline, which he attributes largely to the appointment of Rutger Wolfson as Director in 2009. Similar sentiments could be heard from other Rotterdam veterans in theatre lobbies and bars throughout the city. While I had a very good experience overall, I should add that I did walk out of the third feature premiere I’d scheduled and the fourth was an interesting but forgettable mess.

    I suppose I’m in the camp of critics Young refers to in his piece for IndieWIRE, the writers “who concentrated on the retrospective elements [and] tended to beam smug grins at those of us plugging away at newer titles.” The disadvantages of being an unpaid correspondent, especially a non-European covering a festival in the Netherlands, should be obvious – they’re obvious on my most recent credit card statement, certainly – but the status of amateur critic does afford me, quite literally, the luxury of covering truly non-commercial cinema, which by most accounts is IFFR’s greatest strength. Freed of the pressure to sell my writing to outlets that traffic in feature reviews, I was able to cover, instead, artists who often return home from festivals to academic positions and other assorted day jobs, as I do.

    Michael Sicinski delivered the comment that opened this report during a panel at the 2010 Houston Cinema Arts Festival, where he, Phillip Lopate and Gerald Peary discussed the state of arts criticism. Knowing Michael, I suspect he would prefer that I replace “amateur” in the previous paragraph with “pro bono,” as it implies a certain degree of professionalism, along with the sense that criticism can on occasion be an act of service to film culture. Acknowledging the material conditions that determine how a festival like IFFR is covered and to what ends is, I hope, not necessarily tantamount to smugness.

    The Nostalgic Pleasures of Flutter and Wow

    Andrew Lampert’s G is the Dial, which screened in the “Epilogues” program of Signals: Regained, offers a playful take on the ubiquitous “end of film” debate. Laughter can be heard off-screen as Rose Borthwick and Yvonne Carmichael, two British women in their early-30s (I’d guess), sip beers and struggle to load a 16mm projector. Lampert assembles the 6-minute video from jump cuts, which obscures the real duration of their effort and turns it, instead, into a series of small discoveries. It begins as trial and error. They load the supply reel backwards and pop the lens out of its housing. They turn every knob, engage the motor, shut it off, raise and lower the angle of projection, until finally the film threads its way through and an image comes into focus. “What the fuck! It’s so good!” one of the women exclaims at the sight of it. G is the Dial is both a celebration of film projection – we share the pleasure of the women’s accomplishment – and a kind of media anthropology. Lampert reminds viewers, in the most direct way possible, just how mechanical analogue projection really is.

    I was born in 1972, which puts me at the tail end of the last generation that learned to load a projector in elementary school. By the mid-1980s most of them had been pushed to the back of storage closets, and the hand-pulled screens at the front of every classroom were collecting dust, replaced by rolling carts of TVs and VCRs. In certain respects, my love of film is nostalgic in the true, unironic sense of the word – a sentimental yearning for some past happiness – and after spending the first three days of IFFR watching some two dozen 16mm shorts, nearly all of which were made by filmmakers of my generation or older, I began to recognise a similar wistfulness and delight among other audience members. The majority of Rotterdam’s shorts programs screen at the LantarenVenster, which is separated from the other venues by a long, cold walk over the Erasmus Bridge. As a result, festivalgoers who make it to the LantarenVenster tend to stay there, milling about the lobby between screenings, talking movies, eating burgers, and drinking Grolsch. I haven’t attended enough festivals to know if this is universally true, but IFFR’s avant-garde shorts programs and retrospectives, like the Wavelengths program at the Toronto International Film Festival, function almost as microfests within the larger event, with their own character and community. It’s part of the fun.

    And “fun”, frankly, is a word too seldom used to describe avant-garde cinema and the people who admire it. Last September, Lampert skewered this very idea when he introduced El Adios Largos to a packed house at Wavelengths. The film, which also screened in IFFR’s “Epilogues” program alongside G is the Dial, imagines that Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) has been lost to time and exists only in a black-and-white 16mm print that has been dubbed into Spanish. Lampert, who really is a film archivist (and is also a self-described performance artist), presented this scenario matter-of-factly, with Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard by his side, acting as straight woman. Eighty percent of the audience looked on in self-satisfied disbelief as Lampert spun his yarn about discovering Altman’s lost masterpiece and throwing himself into the painstaking work of restoring it. I laughed a little too hard, probably – partly at Lampert but mostly at the bewildered crowd around me.

    El Adios Largos, it should be noted, is a smart and arresting film. Using a computer rotoscoping technique, Lampert maps onto the image blocks of solid colour that shift and warp according to the whims of an algorithm. Along with commenting on the current state of film archivism, the effect is often genuinely beautiful, as in a moment when Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe visits the women who live next door, and a girl who is spinning and dancing in the background is transformed by the rotoscoping into a ghost of the Lumière brothers’ serpentine dancer (1899).

    I suspected that IFFR’s “Silver” program would, indeed, be a fun event when I walked in to take a seat and found two 16mm projectors set up in the theatre. Richard Tuohy closed out the program with a live performance of Dot Matrix, in which he projects two black-and-white animations onto the same area of the screen. He made the animations by rayogramming sheets of dots that are more commonly used to create Manga screen tones, and because the dots are printed onto the full width of the 16mm film, they pass over the sound drum and create a percussive, frenetic soundtrack. Each film offers up a seemingly inexhaustible variety of patterns and rhythms, and because they’re projected slightly out of phase – they overlap for the most part, but one film is slightly to the left of and above the other – the two sets of dots bounce and collide, generating a wildly exhilarating optical experience. With Tuohy there in the theatre, live-mixing the two mono soundtracks into a kind of stereo (the sound of two running projectors also adds to the “score”), Dot Matrix has the kinetic energy of a concert and is different with each screening.

    “Silver” was, in fact, one of the very best short film programs I’ve ever attended. Tomonari Nishikawa’s 45 7 Broadway, which opened the program, establishes its form in the first few seconds. Discreet shots of Times Square are layered in superimpositions – one red, one green, and one blue – mimicking basic RGB colour production. As each shot is added to and removed from the image, Nishikawa also mixes in and out discreet soundtracks, building and dissembling an audio-visual collage from the material. After introducing this basic theme, Nishikawa works playfully through a number of variations, transforming one of the world’s most photographed street corners into a deeply strange and pulsing piece of pop art. On occasion, all three layers are identical, but Nishikawa’s process of shooting black and white film through colour filters and then optically printing them onto colour stock throws everything just slightly out of alignment, causing the image to quiver and dance. Times Square offers up a trove of visual textures and human activity, and when Nishikawa’s handheld camera passes over a Broadway marquee, a crowd of pedestrians, or even a simple subway grate, the images recall both early movie experiments (I was reminded of the famous collages in Murnau’s Sunrise and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera) and Roy Lichtenstein’s work with Ben-Day dots. 45 7 Broadway is a beautiful thing, a singular city symphony in miniature.

    Pablo Mazzolo’s Photooxidation was the most intense thirteen minutes I spent in Rotterdam. A curious study of the sensations and mechanics of sight, the film opens with a loud, low-frequency hum and a small burst of round, red light that strobes and rattles in the darkness. It’s a primordial image akin to pressing your eyes tightly shut when you first step into daylight. We then catch flashes of recognisable images: a city skyline, a montage of people on the street, some of whom acknowledge the camera. These opening sequences are uncannily, disorientingly subjective, and the effect culminates with a jolting cut to an extreme close-up of a young boy, who smiles and stares blindly past the camera, his eyes bulging and distorted. The shot of the boy is difficult to describe: it’s simultaneously joyous, affectionate, shame-making and grotesque.

    The cut to the blind boy functions as a logic-defeating eyeline match, momentarily situating Photooxidation’s dizzying perspective in a fixed, impossible subjectivity. Mazzolo’s real accomplishment with Photooxidation, aside from his impressive facility as an image-maker, is the film’s structure, which supports this associative montage and gives the larger piece a sense of progress and inevitability, something missing in too many experiments of this length, I think. In its second act, the film moves to a night scene, and the soundtrack, always loud, turns increasingly aggressive. Mazzolo assembles a beautiful and chaotic montage of car taillights and restaurant windows that streak the screen in red, yellow, white and blue against black – an almost nightmarish inversion of Nishikawa’s Times Square. Mazzolo then returns to the shot of the boy and caps the night sequence with a low-saturation image of light passing through tree branches, which introduces nature as an organising principle for the final act. This move toward the Transcendental – the film ends on a field of tall grass – would risk approaching cliché if the images themselves resolved symbolically, or only symbolically. Instead, they remain tangled, private, transcendent.

    “Silver” was rounded out by new films from Eve Heller (b. 1966), Charlotte Pryce (b. 1961) and Esther Urlus (b. 1961). I note their birthdates only to reinforce this notion of contemporary 16mm work having an inherently nostalgic character. Heller’s Creme 21 is a dense essay on subjectivity and time that is chopped together with footage from 1970s educational documentaries. The montage is stuttered, the images are scratched and muddy, and the soundtrack pops and warbles. Creme 21 is an analogue, YouTube-era remix of exactly the types of films we all watched and listened to in those public school classrooms. A Study in Natural Magic is a typically exquisite piece of silent, hand-processed rapture from Pryce. Here she shoots flowers in time-lapse and extreme close-up, spinning them, like Rumpelstiltskin, into gold. The delicacy of Pryce’s work only increases its value for the 16mm fetishist.

    I was unfamiliar with Urlus before the fest, so I was grateful to have three separate opportunities to see her films at IFFR. Chrome was a stand-out among the decidedly uneven “Vertical Cinema” program, Rode molen was the strongest piece in the very good “Artist Present” program, and Konrad & Kurfust, my favourite of the three, brought a welcomed bit of historical analysis to “Silver”. Inspired by the story of German eventer Konrad Freiherr von Wangenheim, who fell off his horse during the 1936 Olympics but still managed to lead his team to gold, Urlus’s 7-minute film recreates that moment, in a manner of speaking. Konrad & Kurfust opens with the sounds of a race – a galloping horse, cheering spectators, wind whistling in the trees – and then a body falls briefly into view. Urlus, a former eventer herself, shot the film underwater, so we catch occasional low-angle glimpses of a horse swimming by. Most of the images, though, are obscured by what appear to be small bubbles – making it something along the lines of a silent film-era liquid light show.

    Urlus’s work is truly experimental, in the sense that each project is an attempt to learn and reclaim an unusual or lost technique of colour film production. Made from a method patented by the Lumière brothers, Chrome is a lovely piece of abstraction formed by microscopic grains of colored potato starch. Rode molen is, in Urlus’s words, “a research into motion picture printing techniques. . . . Depending [on] what developing process is used the colors mix in two ways: additive or subtractive.” (I won’t pretend to have the technical knowledge necessary to expand on this.) Konrad & Kurfust is an experiment with homemade emulsion, including a technique first developed during World War I that uses instant coffee. As a result, this new work feels as though it might have been found moldering alongside a print of Triumph of the Will on some archive shelf, a brittle piece of nationalistic ephemera that somehow managed to survive the eventual disgrace of its heroes.

    The Jodie Mack Experience

    “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; it is with them that I take those walks in the country at the end of the day.”

    – Philip Roth

    If the avant-garde world were to advertise for a “Director of Cinema Advocacy” (job prerequisites include: sense of humour, familiarity with analogue technologies, ability to make direct eye contact with strangers, MFA), it would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Jodie Mack. An Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College, Mack has, in just the past three years, enjoyed solo screenings at Views from the Avant-Garde, BFI London Film Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Los Angeles Filmforum, Anthology Film Archive, and more than a dozen other galleries and festivals. “Let Your Light Shine”, the five-film program that screened in Rotterdam, garnered strong reviews throughout 2013, including that rarest of feats for an a-g filmmaker, a cover feature in a major film magazine (Phil Coldiron’s piece in Cinema Scope #57). Mack has earned this attention by virtue of her filmmaking, but she’s also a dynamic personality. If Richard Tuohy’s Dot Matrix had the feel of a concert, “Let Your Light Shine” was part rock show, part stand-up routine. She and Andrew Lampert should find a used Econoline and take their act on the road.

    The rock show comparison comes directly from Mack. The program, she said, was sequenced like a classic arena concert, with two opening acts (New Fancy Foils and Undertone Overture), a headliner (Dusty Stacks of Mom), and two encores (Glistening Thrills and Let Your Light Shine). The metaphor speaks less to the form or content of the films than to Mack’s artistic and personal voice, which is equally fluent in high culture and kitsch. During the post-screening Q&A, she joked with the audience and prodded us for questions, jumping from well-informed and earnest declarations about post-psychedelic art to naming her favourite hip-hop songs. I had a stupid grin on my face throughout “Let Your Light Shine”, entranced by the beauty and craft of what I was seeing, and also regretful that my three year-old daughter wasn’t there to take it all in with me. Accessibility in art is not necessarily a virtue, of course, but Mack’s talent for bringing lightness and a sense of play to the labour-intensive, old-school animation tradition of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye gives her work a rare and infectious vitality.

    New Fancy Foils, as it turned out, was the perfect introduction to Mack’s work. The 12-minute film opens with a sequence of shots of similar duration (7-8 seconds), each of them a two-dimensional graphic design of varying colours. It’s not until a minute into the film that Mack shows us a label that reveals that we’re actually looking at pages from a mid-century book of paper samples, the kind of thing a designer would flip through with a client. At that point, the pace of Mack’s cutting accelerates and New Fancy Foils blossoms into a master class on rhythm and graphical variation. This, I think, is one of the great pleasures of avant-garde cinema – the notion that a film can teach a viewer how best to watch it and, in the process, change the way we see, more generally. Mack is not a structuralist per se, but she very deliberately foregrounds her own process. Here, for example, she shows us whole pieces of paper before cutting them into strips, meticulously arranging the pieces, rearranging them, and then rearranging them again. The sheer effort involved in this work, let alone the artistry of it, can’t go unnoticed. New Fancy Foils is silent, but in our Command-C > Command-V world its ethic is DIY punk.

    Midway through New Fancy Foils, as the piece begins a long crescendo, there’s a montage of solid-coloured paper that is edited so quickly it begins to create the illusion of a prismatic effect. Mack does something similar throughout Undertone Overture, a rapid-fire film constructed entirely from images of tie-dyed material. Scored with the sounds of crashing waves, Undertone Overture is relentless. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen two-dimensional animation that so uncannily achieves a semblance of three-dimensional movement. (As an aside, I rewatched both of these films via online screeners after returning home from Rotterdam and found the experience not only categorically different from seeing them in 16mm but borderline useless. The refresh rates and compression algorithms can’t keep pace with Mack’s fastest sequences, and the films are neutered as a result.) I especially like the prismatic moment in New Fancy Foils because it ends with a relatively long shot of a page covered in everyday sales copy, which acts as a jarring intrusion of the literal into what had been pure abstraction. To say that the content of these images is irrelevant would be going too far – Mack clearly enjoys rehabilitating domestic curios and psychedelia, and I suppose one could mount a defense of this project along ideological or historical lines – but the “actualness” of the image, as Nathaniel Dorsky calls it, is what is essential here.

    Revealing actualness is at the core of Mack’s best work. The paper in New Fancy Foils and the fabric in Undertone Overture are metonyms for the material of cinema – movement and texture and rhythm and hue – but they are also always essentially paper and fabric. The same could be said of Glistening Thrills, in which Mack builds a fanciful cinematic wind chime from inexpensive holographic stickers. (I hope that sentence doesn’t read like a backhanded compliment; Glistening Thrills is everything its title implies.) Dusty Stacks of Mom and Let Your Light Shine are both very good, but they suffer by comparison due to their relative de-emphasis on the actualness of the films’ material. Practically speaking, Let Your Light Shine doesn’t even have material: its white-on-black images were designed on a computer and then shot directly off of the monitor before being optically printed onto 16mm. (Watching the film while wearing cheap prismatic glasses is a hell of a lot of fun, though.)

    In Dusty Stacks of Mom, Mack scours the warehouse of her family’s soon-to-close memorabilia business and assembles a towering heap of posters, programs, buttons and photos. At 41 minutes, it’s Mack’s longest film to date, and her most ambitious. An ambivalent send-up of the psychedelic era, Dusty Stacks of Mom is structured around Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, for which Mack has written new lyrics that address, among other things, post-recession America and the fickleness of pop fandom. At most screenings, Mack sings along with the soundtrack from a seat in the audience, which blurs the lines that have traditionally separated avant-garde cinema from low-culture events like planetarium laser light shows. Dusty Stacks of Mom is also distinguished from the other films in the program in its use of location shooting (nearly all of it was filmed in the warehouse) and in its experiments with human “material” (Mack’s mother appears in the film as one more piece of stop-motion animate-able stuff). Dusty Stacks of Mom, however, is most successful when Mack returns to the techniques of New Fancy Foils and Undertone Overture, as in two sequences that work over a pile of rubber bands and wads of white paper. I’m reluctant to fault Mack for expanding into other styles of filmmaking; that her on-location image-making is not yet on par with her two-dimensional animation is hardly a fault.

    The Lighting Round

    To the list of factors that affect festival coverage, I suppose I should also add word count (how much I can write). While I’m grateful for having been able to spend my week in Rotterdam hitting the program’s high points, covering avant-garde shorts is a frustrating business because it so quickly turns into a numbers game. To put it into perspective, during those three hours I spent watching Hard to Be a God, I could have watched twenty more shorts by twenty more filmmakers. As it stands, I’ve managed to see nearly 70 of the shorts that played at IFFR, most of which are deserving of critical attention, but covering that many films is impractical. Instead, I’ll close with a few inadequate words on a few notable programs.

    “Vertical Cinema” was among my most anticipated events at IFFR. Ten experimental filmmakers from Austria, the Netherlands, and Japan were commissioned to make 35mm films to be projected onto a screen that had been rotated 90 degrees. Because the films were projected in CinemaScope ratio, the resulting image towered some sixty feet over the viewers who packed into both sold-out shows at Arminius, a cathedral-turned-meeting space. As I alluded to earlier, “Vertical Cinema” was a disappointment, if only because too often the individual films were not fundamentally vertical. Esther Urlus’s Chrome is gorgeous, a wonderful film, but it would be essentially the same if projected horizontally. The same could be said of Joost Rekveld’s #43, Rosa Menkman’s Lunar Storm, Manuel Knapp’s V~, Walzkörpersperre by Gert-Jan Prins and Martijn van Boven, and Bring Me The Head Of Henri Chrétien! by Billy Roisz & Dieter Kovačič. The latter was especially frustrating because it opens with a snippet of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), its famous CinemaScope images now shrunken to a fraction of their original size. This led me to expect an extended exploration of the medium itself – something along the lines of Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) – but Roisz and Kovačič soon abandon Leone for data moshing and compression artifacts. I understand the cost and complexities of working with film, but I was surprised by how many of the films in “Vertical Cinema” were blown up to 35mm from native digital sources.

    The overall effect of “Vertical Cinema” was also diminished by a general sameness in the program. Nearly all of the filmmakers, it seems, approached the project with the goal of manufacturing an ecstatic experience for the audience, and they relied too heavily on noise soundtracks to achieve it. We were told at the start that earplugs were available, and I soon wished I’d grabbed some – not because I don’t like that style of score but because a 90-minute program can’t sustain that level of intensity. It exhausts and numbs the senses. The exceptions to this rule were Deorbit, Makino Takashi & Telcosystems’ cacophonous whatsit, which really does achieve rapturous heights, and Johann Lurf’s Pyramid Flare, which was the only silent film and the only docu-realistic piece in the program. (I ask this sincerely: what percentage of avant-garde films would be improved if they screened silently? Twenty-five percent? More?) “Vertical Cinema” is such a timely concept, as Facebook, Instagram, and Vine are normalising portrait and square aspect ratios for moving images. If great vertical filmmakers are to emerge, I suspect that’s where we’ll find them.

    “Resonating Spaces” was a welcome opportunity to revisit two of the best films that screened at Wavelengths, Nick Collins’s Trissákia 3 and Robert Beavers’ Listening to the Space in My Room, along with new work by John Price and Laida Lertxundi. Trissákia 3 is a silent, 16mm study of shadow and light, in both the literal and metaphoric senses. Shot in and around the ruins of a Byzantine church in Greece, the film reminded me of a photo I’ve always loved, Brett Weston’s “Broken Window” (1937), which turns the jagged hole at the centre of a shattered piece of glass into an anxiety-causing and impossibly black absence. In Trissákia 3 Collins reverses the effect by shooting from within the shadowed ruins through holes and cracks in the crumbling walls. Ancient icons are still visible within the church, but they’re sterilised by the film, which exalts, instead, the hallowed light that illuminates them. The latest additions to Price’s Sea Series continue his experiments with hand-processed 35mm. Here he shoots fairly typical beach scenes – children splashing in the water, canoes and toy boats, a lighthouse – but the aged stock and handmade techniques turn them into moving versions of James Whistler’s Nocturnes. I didn’t see anything more beautiful all week.

    Finally, I attended the “Drive with Care” program because I was intrigued by the publicity images and one-sentence description for Joel Wanek’s Sun Song: “Experience pure poetry on a silent bus journey from night into day in Durham, North Carolina.” As it turned out, Sun Song was the lone standout in what was otherwise a weak and scattershot program. After the screening Wanek talked a bit about the Alabama-born jazz musician Sun Ra, who claimed that he must have been born on another planet – how else to explain the treatment he and other African Americans received here on earth? Sun Song is a kind of naturalistic sci-fi film that imagines a journey back home to some forgotten, more perfect world. Wanek, a recent graduate of Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program, shot Sun Song over six months during daily rides on public buses. He’d shoot in the morning on the east-bound route and in the evenings while headed west, so that the bus was always driving directly into the light. The film begins in the dark, early morning hours and ends awash in a warm glow.

    When I interviewed Dorsky a few years ago, I mentioned that a shot in his film Sarabande (2008) reminded me of those times as a child when I would lie in the back seat of our station wagon at night, staring up at the passing street lights and telephone wires. He smiled: “It’s something primal, right? It’s a moment that has no purpose, except that it’s pure is-ness.” Sun Song is one of those projects that is so perfectly conceived there’s a risk that the film itself might be redundant. But its genius is in the execution, in its particular manifestation of is-ness. Wanek is not another Walker Evans, who famously carried a concealed camera onto Depression-era New York subway trains in order to capture the “true” faces of passengers. The subjects of Wanek’s portraits are active participants in this journey, which lends the images a curious grace and dignity, and the world they inhabit is cloistered, commonplace and sublime. Wanek’s shots of streetlight passing rhythmically over the bus’s sparkling, everyday, slip-resistant floor would not be out of place in Dorsky’s recent work – they have that quality and are that beautiful. And the final three minutes of Sun Song are as exciting and as impeccably edited as anything I’ve seen in years. It’s the most radical depiction of space travel since the highway scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972)! That Wanek was able to produce such a mature, surprising, and deeply human piece so early in his filmmaking career (Sun Song was his MFA thesis project) gives me great hope. Films like this are justification enough to celebrate avant-garde shorts programs at our major festivals.

  • TIFF 2013

    TIFF 2013

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    By coincidence, the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival began and ended for me with strikingly similar images. The first film I saw, Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain, opens with a minutes-long shot through a wall of ceiling-to-floor windows. The camera is positioned within Panahi’s seaside home and is focused on a point in the middle distance, where we see a man climb out of an SUV, lift a heavy bag, and then, with some amount of effort, make his way toward the villa. The man (Kambuzia Partovi) eventually enters the room and proceeds to cover the wide panes of glass with dark curtains. After doing the same to every other window in the three-story home, he opens his bag to reveal a dog he’s smuggled away from the city. In the film’s signature image, dog and master then sit together on a long, low table in silent contemplation of the black curtains.

    Eight days and 40 films later, I wrapped the festival with a late-night screening of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, a beautiful and harrowing chimera of a film. It ends with a twenty-minute sequence built from only two shots and featuring two characters (Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi), who stand motionless amidst the rubble of an abandoned concrete building. The first image is a low-angle, medium shot of their faces; the second is a reverse shot from a high-angle perspective several meters behind them. In the first, we see them staring without expression at some point beyond the camera; in the second, we see the focus of their attention: a painted mural of a barren field with mountains in the distance.

    That Panahi’s curtains and Tsai’s mural mimic the two dimensions and wide aspect ratio of a cinema screen is, presumably, no coincidence at all. As was the case with This is Not a Film (2011), Panahi was forced to make Closed Curtain within the tight constraints of his house arrest in Iran. After premiering Stray Dogs at the Venice Film Festival, Tsai announced the film would likely be his last. Both men are in their mid-50s and have been making films for more than two decades, both have been forced to work under increasing restrictions (political, financial, or otherwise), and both have made the transition from film to digital video. They should, perhaps, be forgiven if their latest work is preoccupied by the idea of cinema.

    And at a festival where only one of the 288 programmed features was projected on film, Panahi and Tsai were hardly alone. The analogue holdout, Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s La última película, was screened for press and industry on the first morning of the fest, where it was greeted positively, for the most part, and with a mixture of nostalgia and resignation. The print, which as far as I know had never been shown to an audience, looked beautiful, and if I was disappointed at all by the technical experience of the screening, it’s owing to the projection booths at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox, which are sealed so effectively I wasn’t able to hear even a hint of the turning reels (my own particular cinephile fetish).

    The digital tide has turned quickly in recent years, and with tremendous force, but its final triumph – at this festival, at least – came with a proverbial whimper. In a telling anecdote, Daniel Kasman, in his interview with Frederick Wiseman for The Notebook, asked the 83 year-old director if he felt there was a profound difference between shooting on film, as he’d done for more than four decades, versus video. When Wiseman dismissed the idea (“there’s an enormous amount of garbage about that”), Kasman responded, “I’m sure there is but the reason I ask, I just feel as a film goer coming into this age that people are taking digital for granted for the most part, that the question should be asked before people forget to ask” (my italics). A related anecdote: the night before the public premiere of La última película, Peranson told me he was concocting a scheme to burn up part of one reel within the projector so that the audience would see celluloid melt. It didn’t happen, but as a farewell gesture to the century-old medium at the heart of TIFF, a funeral pyre would have been a spectacular way to go.

    Inspired by Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and by L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller’s The American Dreamer (1971), La última película is a difficult film to summarise fairly. Real-life writer-director Alex Ross Perry stars as a sardonic and absurdly over-confident filmmaker who travels to Mexico with a small crew, intent on using the world’s last remaining reels of film stock to shoot an apocalyptic spectacle. They arrive in late 2012, just in time to join the throngs of tourists, true believers, and hawkers of trinkets who gathered at Mayan ruins to welcome the end of the world. There’s much drinking and improvised rambling in the style of Hopper at his most egomaniacal and paranoid, and all of it is captured on an assortment of cameras: 16mm, Super 8, hi- and standard-def DV, iPhones.

    The resulting film feels handmade, like a patchwork quilt, and most of its finest moments are born of small formal gestures that call attention to the character of a particular stock or video format. I especially like a sequence in which a young woman walks through a cemetery at dusk and begins to sing “La Llarona,” a traditional folksong about a mother who is trapped between the living and the dead, doomed to wander the earth until she finds the children she murdered. As the woman turns and disappears into the darkness of a crypt, the image momentarily pops with a flash of light. Whether by happy accident or through post-production meddling, a few frames of the stock have been overexposed – a phantom image in a film overrun by ghosts. It’s a remarkable and genuinely moving sequence. Her song accompanies a montage of crucifixes, landscapes and footage of an elderly man dancing in the street. The images stutter from dropped frames, and the soundtrack has the hiss of aged analogue. Typical of the film, Peranson and Martin further complicate the moment by cutting later to a more distant perspective, shot on hi-def DV, that reveals members of the crew huddled on the floor around her, laughing about having just run out of film.

    La última película reminds me of those carnivalesque postmodern novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s chaotic, idea-packed, and frequently funny, but it’s also always on the verge of collapsing into a too-simple, juvenile pastiche. As with those pomo novels, evaluating a film like La última película is a challenge because the criteria are ever-shifting. The film is self-aware to a fault, anticipating and absorbing every critique with a wink and a nudge. “People are going to look at this and think that I was out of control,” Perry’s character says in the first of his many direct addresses to the camera. “That I didn’t know what I was doing, I was lost in my own visions, that I wasn’t conveying anything.” He could be a character in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, the object of our loving derision, but when the seams of Peranson’s and Martin’s low-budget production show, as they do on occasion, he also serves as an ironic narrator, a sly reminder that the filmmakers are in on the joke. To its credit, La última película is often hilarious, particularly a scene in which Perry strolls among the ruins, spewing insults under his breath at the crowds of “white people with dreadlocks.” “I hate America,” he says, suddenly more Bill Hicks than Dennis Hopper. “The end is overdue.”

    But La última película only occasionally functions as pure parody. Its finest moment might be the opening shot, a hand-held close-up of “Mayans” with painted faces. They’re standing along a busy street at night, presumably posing for pictures in exchange for tips. In a single, long take, the camera drifts across their faces, eventually landing on one young man, who turns his gaze directly into the lens and strikes a grave and practiced pose. Eventually his mouth cracks into a smile and he laughs, “I’m tired.” The image is human and defamiliarising, and it introduces ironies that become tangential concerns of the larger film, including the nature of performance, the reification of history, and the fraught relationship between spectators and filmed subjects. Peranson’s other professional roles as a festival programmer and editor of Cinema Scope magazine, and Martin’s experiences as an independent filmmaker in the Philippines, give them an insider’s perspective on these issues, particularly the now-ubiquitous practice of trotting out developing-world poverty for the edification of Western art-film audiences.

    It’s in these constant shifts in tone that La última película is both most alive and most frustrating. Midway through the film, Perry asks his Mexican guide if he’s ever watched a woman take a bath without her knowledge. That experience of seeing “someone at their most vulnerable and their most exposed” is the character’s guiding ambition as a filmmaker, and it’s also, I think, both a genuine goal of La última película – their conversation is intercut with a disarming shot of a young woman posing self-consciously for the camera – and a good-natured dig at a certain tendency of world cinema on the festival circuit. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana, which played alongside La última película in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, is a feature-length riff on just that idea. Spray and Velez put a camera in a Nepalese cable car and filmed a series of static portraits of whomever happened to make the ten-minute journey up or down the mountain. Like Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965, 1966), the “Americans” chapter of Jon Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987) and James Benning’s Twenty Cigarettes (2011), Manakamana operates under the notion that eventually (duration is important here) all subjects will drop their camera-ready poses and reveal their “real” faces. It’s the same principle that makes the opening shot of La última película so ambiguous and charming – the transformation of the Mayan warrior’s expression as he tries, and fails, to hold back his smile. Perry punctuates his drunken, late-night discussion of film aesthetics with a straight-faced declaration of what he thinks about when he sees people: “Tub, bubbles, soap, sponge.” And there’s the rub: the character’s dull-witted smugness – all by design and intended for comedic effect – bleeds too often into the voice of the film itself, further muddying its already messy discourse on the values of cinema.

    A Consistent Voice

    2013 marked my tenth annual trip to Toronto, and I think it’s fair to say that the city has changed more during that time than the festival has. The airport shuttle approaches downtown from the west, and each year I’ve watched with interest as more and more of the real estate along the northern edge of Lake Ontario has been redeveloped into condominiums, all of them indistinguishably tall and glass-covered. An October 2012 report named Toronto “North America’s new high-rise metropolis”: its tally of 147 on-going construction projects was more than twice that of the second-place city, New York, and seven times that of Vancouver, which came in third. The massive influx of new residents, most of them young (the median age in downtown Toronto is now 35), can be felt on the streets and subways, which are noticeably more crowded, and in the shops and restaurants, which are more abundant and diverse. This year, I interviewed Jia Zhangke at the offices of his Canadian distributor, Films We Like, and given his career-long preoccupation with the radical transformation of China’s landscape, the location proved especially apropos. We sat together in a quaint, three-story brick building, surrounded on all sides by high-rise construction projects. The recording of our conversation is punctuated by jackhammers.

    TIFF got in on the real estate boom itself a few years ago, when filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his sisters donated some property on the corner of King and John, right in the heart of the entertainment district. The site, which for decades was home to their father’s car wash, has been rechristened Reitman Square, where you’ll now find the TIFF Bell Lightbox and its adjoining 42-story luxury condominium development, Festival Tower. A second, even taller building, Cinema Tower, is under construction immediately behind the Lightbox. (The Cinema Tower’s developers are currently taking reservations for units with names like The Spielberg, The Tarantino, and The Nolan.) As I’ve noted in past TIFF reports, the opening of the Lightbox in 2010 shifted the festival several blocks to the south, and, indeed, many of the theatres that were in use during my first trip to Toronto – the Varsity, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Cumberland – are no longer part of the festival circuit at all. The drift southward continued this year, when the bulk of non-gala public screenings were moved from the AMC up on the corner of Yonge and Dundas to the Scotiabank multiplex located two blocks from the Lightbox. I suspect that decision will be revisited by festival organisers in the coming months, as crowds at the Scotiabank frequently overwhelmed volunteers and caused unprecedented (in my experience, at least) logistical problems.

    Certainly, the past decade has seen TIFF solidify its reputation as a marketplace and as a launching point for awards season. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said are among the handful of films that came out of this year’s festival with that unmistakable momentum, aided in no small part by the marketing power of Warner Brothers and Fox Searchlight and by the star power of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock and James Gandolfini, in one of his final roles. In fact, TIFF’s greatest accomplishment in recent years might be its brand management. The “tiff.” wordmark is now inescapable in Toronto, and not just during a few weeks in September. Thanks to its real estate ventures and its year-round programming at the Lightbox, including museum-quality exhibitions (Tim Burton and Grace Kelly have been featured in the past, David Cronenberg: Evolution is currently running, and Stanley Kubrick has been announced for fall 2014), TIFF is much more than just one of the world’s largest and most important film festivals; it’s become a cultural institution.

    Despite the evolution of its parent brand and the transformation of its home city, however, the festival itself has changed quite little in the years I’ve attended. Flipping through the 2004 catalogue, I’m struck most of all by the consistency of the programming. Indeed, several of my favourite films at this year’s festival were made by directors who were also programmed nine years ago: Claire Denis with Bastards and L’Intrus, Jia with A Touch of Sin and The World, Gotz Spielmann with October November and Antares, Catherine Breillat with Abuse of Weakness and Anatomy of Hell, Lav Diaz with Norte: The End of History and Evolution of a Filipino Family, and Peter Hutton with Three Landscapes and Skagafjördur. A few of the programs have changed over the years – Real to Reel is now TIFF Docs, Visions was folded into Wavelengths, Canadian Retrospective has been replaced by TIFF Cinematheque (and expanded to include international retrospective titles) – but the voice of the festival is still driven by a small team of programmers, nearly all of whom have been with TIFF for more than a decade. In his festival wrap-up for IndieWIRE, Robert Koehler notes that, in that sense, TIFF has remained loyal to its original mission as a “festival of festivals.” With its massive program, TIFF is able to spotlight the world’s leading auteurs, roll out the red carpet for movie stars, curate programs of avant-garde shorts, trend-hop with issues-oriented documentaries, delight the late-night crowd at Midnight Madness, and screen restored classics. “You’re going to one festival, but you’re really going to many festivals at the same time,” Koehler writes. “You pick how many you want to attend.”

    Discoveries

    One of my favourite festivals within TIFF might be called “Up and Comers”. Among the many ways TIFF distinguishes itself from the other major fall festivals in Telluride and New York is by the sheer volume of its world premieres. The pressure to show films first – Toronto proudly unveiled 146 features in 2013 – gives programmers license to take more chances on first-time filmmakers. It’s a point of pride for the festival, I think. On a number of occasions, I’ve heard programmers bring established directors on stage with an introductory comment along the lines of, “We’ve shown all of his (or her) films here at the fest, going all the way back to their debut.” An entire section of the festival, the Discovery program, is dedicated to first features, and over the past decade it has brought attention to a number of directors who have since gone on to become “names” in contemporary world cinema, including Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees, 2004), Giorgos Lanthimos (Kinneta, 2005), Joachim Trier (Reprise, 2006), Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero, 2008), Steve McQueen (Hunger, 2008), Radu Jude (The Happiest Girl in the World, 2009), and Athina Rachel Tsangiri (ATTENBERG, 2010). Because of the large number of world premieres, the final TIFF schedule is always a thick catalogue of intriguing unknowns. The Discovery section alone typically includes 25 to 30 features, and more debuts are scattered throughout other sections. In an effort to improve my odds of choosing wisely, I’ve gone so far as to devise a complex scoring system that gives added weight to first-time filmmakers. This year I saw five films by new directors and was especially impressed by the talent on display.

    Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is not only the best first film I’ve seen this year, it’s among my favourite features of 2013. Cat premiered at Berlin in February, and it’s a credit to the quality of the filmmaking that nearly a year later it continues to be programmed at prestigious festivals (Vienna in October; AFI Fest, Lisbon, and Taipei in November). It’s a small marvel, really – a perfectly conceived and executed study of an extended family who gather in a small apartment to prepare and enjoy a meal together. Particularly on a first viewing, “study” seems just the right word to describe Zürcher’s style. The film’s action is confined mostly to a cramped kitchen, which he cuts at right angles, often shooting from a waist-high position a la Yasujiro Ozu. His static camera tends to focus on a single face from a medium distance, while other bodies move in and out of the frame, busily chopping onions, washing dishes, and mending loose buttons. (I mean “bodies” literally. We frequently see only a torso as someone passes momentarily in front of the camera.) At first glance, Zürcher’s style feels removed and clinical. It’s not until several minutes in, when the mother who is hosting the dinner begins to tell a story about going to the movies, that the deep strangeness of the film takes root. It’s the first of several such reveries. The mother (Jenny Schily), her two older children, and a niece each share stories that are of vague but profound significance to them personally but that fall mostly on deaf, uninterested ears. Within the context of this quiet, elliptical film, however, each of the stories generates the dramatic power of a car chase or explosion.

    Rather than Discovery, The Strange Little Cat was screened in Wavelengths, TIFF’s section devoted to “daring, visionary and autonomous voices.” Having now seen Zürcher’s earlier short films, I think it’s a perfect description of the 31 year-old. Much has been made of the fact that Zürcher conceived of Cat in a seminar with Béla Tarr, but the qualities that make his film so distinctive are all there in the earliest work: the confined spaces, the dialogue that is rich in concrete images but that seldom functions as exposition or conversation, a playful affection for things (orange peels, sparrows, spinning bottles, moths, toy helicopters), a fetish for ponytailed women, and most of all a style of portraiture that creates a distinctive kind of communal subjectivity.

    Early in the film, for example, when the husband and younger daughter leave to run errands, the camera watches from the kitchen as they make their way down a long hallway and exit through a side door. Zürcher lingers there for a few seconds, relishing the first moments of silence in the film, before cutting to a stunning shot of the mother, who is standing completely still, framed by the light of the kitchen window. She’s lost in thought, with an obscure and curious expression on her face. However, rather than moving to her perspective (what is she staring at?) or into a close-up, as traditional continuity editing would lead us to expect, Zürcher instead cuts to the older son, who is looking at his mother, unnoticed, from across the room. It’s a Zürcher trademark: an eyeline match in reverse. The portrait of the mother is a small point of entry into her subjectivity and also the subjective perspective of her son. The cut forces viewers to revisit the previous shot, to recontextualise it, to actively create a relationship between the two images and the characters framed within them. Zürcher’s montage constantly demands this kind of re-association, as the film’s perspective drifts from character to character. As a result, the film packs a much stronger emotional punch than its 72-minute runtime would suggest.

    If Zürcher shares anything with Tarr, it’s the Hungarian’s dark humour and his unsettling ability to expose the tangled mess of affection, bitterness and alienation that characterises so much of human relations. The Strange Little Cat has drawn comparisons with Chantal Akerman’s early work, and while Zürcher’s movie doesn’t take a violent turn quite like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), it certainly stands alongside that film in its meticulous attention to domestic routines and the barely-suppressed animosity they can mask. In one of the film’s opening shots, the youngest member of the family, Clara (Mia Kasolo), sits at the kitchen table, jotting down notes on a grocery list. When her mother turns on a blender, Clara lifts her head and yells – a wide-mouthed, piercing scream. As soon as the appliance is shut off, Clara stops with a giggle and turns her attention back to the list. It’s a cute moment, a quirky character detail typical of the film, but it’s also just slightly grotesque. In a film this quiet and low-key ­ – the only non-diegetic music is a recurring snippet of the song “Pulchritude” by Thee More Shallows – Clara’s scream is a shocking burst of expressionism that becomes all the more disturbing a few minutes later, when she is slapped suddenly by her mother. There’s a palpable and anxious hostility in The Strange Little Cat that threatens constantly to throw the tone of the film out of balance. Miraculously, it never does. The family laughs through dinner and then parts with hugs and kisses, stubbornly oblivious to the dangers that surround them.

    The Strange Little Cat is a rare exception to the rule for debut films at TIFF, in that it doesn’t fit neatly into one of a few immediately recognisable categories. I laughed out loud last year when I saw that TIFF had programmed a film in Discovery called Eat Sleep Die (Gabriela Pichler, 2012) because that title so perfectly encapsulates, with tongue in cheek, a genre of modest-budget art cinema that has gained traction – at least among festival programmers – in the wake of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s success. Shot mostly in natural light, with handheld cameras and non-professional actors, these films are typically small character studies that follow one person (usually under the age of 30) through a series of trials and tribulations before ending on an ambiguous grace note. (Pichler’s film, by the way, is better than most). I have a weakness for these films, mostly because they’re often born of a humanistic sensibility combined with a socio-political urgency, but also because there’s a pleasure in finding new variations on the theme.

    Juraj Lehotský’s Miracle, for example, is well worth seeing despite the fact that it hits every genre beat. The film opens at a moment of crisis for the lead character, a troubled teen named Ela (Michaela Bendulová), who has been drugged by her mother and forcibly removed to a correctional facility. Over the next 70 minutes, she suffers every manner of betrayal, degradation, and violence, and Lehotský shoots it at all in what A. O. Scott calls the “neo-neo realist” style. Even the critical language for describing these films is becoming clichéd: Miracle is cool and unflinching, and Lehotský, whose early work was in documentary filmmaking, remains driven by an admirable impulse to expose the hardscrabble lives of Slovakia’s disenfranchised. As is often the case with better films of this sort, Miracle is redeemed by its lead performance. Bendulová, who was discovered in a re-education centre like the one we see on screen, has a remarkable stone face, and when we discover, first, that her lack of expression is partly due to her constant effort to hide her rotting teeth, and, second, that Ela is pregnant, the experience of watching her on screen becomes heightened in complicated and exciting ways. The film swings suddenly to the centre of the fiction/non-fiction spectrum, with Bendulová – her body, her presence – overshadowing the character she’s been asked to play. Aran Hughes and Christina Koutsospyrou’s To the Wolf, which screened in TIFF’s City to City program, is another 2013 debut in this general mode. More observational and still than Miracle, it follows two poor shepherding families as they struggle to survive in a remote Greek village. Aping the style of Pedro Costa’s and Denis Côté’s recent work, To the Wolf ends on a dark note that feels blatantly allegorical rather than inevitable, which robs the film of some of its emotional potency.

    Faced with overwhelming programming choices, another tactic for improving the odds of finding a diamond in the rough is to prioritise films that involve known talent in key creative roles. This year, for example, I watched three films at TIFF that were shot by Agnès Godard. (Notably, all of them were shot on video.) Bastards is the eleventh collaboration between Godard and Claire Denis, and it’s the director’s best work since L’Intrus (2004), I think. Godard’s other two collaborators, surprisingly, were first-time filmmakers, Moroccan writer-director Abdellah Taïa and Mexican writer-director Claudia Sainte-Luce. Both Salvation Army and The Amazing Catfish fall into another genre popular among Discovery programmers: the loosely fictionalised autobiography. Like many films of this type, Salvation Army and The Amazing Catfish are self-contained and sentimental, but both Taïa and Sainte-Luce succeed in boring straight to the emotional core of their stories.

    Taïa’s film revisits two periods from his life, beginning with his adolescence in Morocco, where he pines for the attention of his cultured older brother and discovers his own homosexuality, before jumping forward a decade to his post-college years in Geneva, where he struggles to find a home, both literally and metaphorically. Taïa does all of the little things right – the things that too often hamstring debut films. In the second act of Salvation Army, the young adult Abdellah (Karim Ait M’hand) interacts with only three or four other characters, but each role is rounded and perfectly cast. A scene in which Abdellah shares a cigarette with a kind, genial stranger on a park bench would have been cut from most films, as it serves no specific narrative function, but here it’s an unexpected reprieve and a simple opportunity to watch Abdellah smile. The Amazing Catfish likewise recreates a moment in its director’s life, when Saint-Luce was in her early-20s and found herself absorbed into the family of a single mother of four who was dying of cancer. The film is always right on the verge of slipping into treacle. Each kid has a readymade defining characteristic (the practical one, the suicidal one, the glamour-obsessed pre-teen, the quiet child with sorrowful eyes), and it ends with them all piling into an old Volkswagon for one last trip to the beach. It’s the kind of film that, with the right marketing and distribution, could find a large popular audience. (Judging by the official poster, it appears their goal is to make it the next Little Miss Sunshine.) But Saint-Luce and Godard understand that the key to this melodrama is the mother and, by extension, the massive hole that will be left in the lives of her children after she’s gone. The film succeeds in that regard because of Lisa Owen, who brings to the role an almost supernatural vitality and warmth. I ran from an early-morning screening of Salvation Army, which ends with a brilliantly staged and deeply moving shot, into a neighbouring theatre for The Amazing Catfish, and I don’t mind admitting I was an emotional wreck for the rest of the day.

    Utopian Visions

    In my heart of hearts, I don’t know if I go to festivals for private or shared experiences. I think it might be a wild goose chase for the latter. Rather, could it be that we want to be in proximity of other people’s private experiences for a change?

    In his final post from Toronto, written during the long flight home to Vancouver, Adam Cook manages to capture that evanescent something that brings me back to TIFF each year. What I most appreciate about his piece is Adam’s shameless (in the very best sense of the word) openness and sentimentality. Ideally, I would write this report each year during the shuttle ride back to the airport, when images from the films are still fresh in my mind and I’m still physically and emotionally exhausted by it all, when the people and landscape of Toronto are still passing by my window, and when I want nothing more than to go home and see my wife and daughters and nothing more than to stay just one more day to watch one more film with friends. Adam’s observation that a great film festival is simultaneously communal and solitary taps into something essential about cinema itself, I think. Nathaniel Dorsky, whose latest films, Song and Spring, played in Wavelengths, once told me, “In my aloneness I feel the ultimate kind of poignancy and the deepest sense of mystery. . . . And so, like anything that you feel with great tenderness and with great heart, you want to share it.” For all of its marketing and glamour, TIFF remains the best opportunity I’m aware of to see a sizable cross-section of the very best of contemporary cinema, and to see it in excellent theatres with excellent projection, surrounded by large, appreciative audiences, and in close proximity to the artists responsible for the work. In that sense, TIFF is a trip to a museum with friends and fellow travellers, a chance to sit alone with piece of art that is beautiful or upsetting or of great mystery and poignancy and then share that experience in myriad ways.

    If I’m veering toward the maudlin here it’s because the films were especially good this year, and because many of them were exceedingly heartfelt and utopian in their concerns. Tsai Ming-liang and his alter-ego, Lee Kang-sheng, have been a welcome presence in my life as a cinephile for more than a decade, and as a last goodbye Stray Dogs is pure catharsis, the most direct and visceral of Tsai’s melodramas. Closed Curtain transcends the literary staginess of its conceit mostly because of Jafar Panahi’s compelling on-screen presence. As in This is Not a Film, we get to watch him in close-up as he surveys a room and imagines its cinematic potential, knowing all the while – experiencing it through his Chaplinesque eyes – that his own artistic potential has been limited by stupid political oppression. Lav Diaz’s Norte: The End of History is both an allegory of fascism and a tremendous piece of theodicy. Its images of Angeli Bayani pushing a vegetable cart are among the finest cinematic instantiations of common grace since Robert Bresson’s Balthazar. Even very different films like Ben Russell and Ben River’s A Spell to Ward off the Darkness and Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves grapple with our pervasive soul-sickness. Russell and Rivers propose utopian communities and spiritual/aesthetic ecstasy as alternatives; Reichardt’s approach is more cynical and existential: she reinvigorates well-worn conventions from film noir and heist pictures to analyse the problems of radical political action in the era of late capitalism.

    That the film festival experience is ultimately a string of private moments, only some of which can be shared, has never been more apparent to me than with Götz Spielmann’s October November, a film that was greeted with indifference and mild disappointment by many in the critical community. It’s a fairly simple story of two adult sisters, both successful and miserable in their own ways, who confront the growing tension in their relationship when their widowed father takes ill. The script holds few surprises, and even after a profound family secret is revealed, the film actively resists ramping up narrative tension. As a result, critics have faulted October November for being dramatically inert, especially when compared with Spielmann’s previous feature, Revanche (2008). I’d argue, however, that the two films are essentially the same, with identical preoccupations, both cinematic and metaphysical. I’m a great fan of Revanche, and October November was the best feature I saw that had its premiere at TIFF.

    A few minutes into October November, the younger sister, Sonja (Nora von Waldstätten), an up-and-coming film actress, returns home after having dinner with a co-star. Her apartment is all straight lines, right angles, cool colours, and buttoned-up perfection. She’s a woman of immaculate taste, in pulled black hair and a form-fitted blue dress. Spielmann and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht shoot interiors with a Modernist touch, recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper, with their posed, isolated bodies and mixed colour palettes (warm and cold light somehow coexist in many shots). After her dinner date, Sonja steps into an elevator and the doors close behind her, but instead of cutting immediately, Spielmann leaves the camera fixed in the empty, stark lobby for a few extra seconds. It was precisely that moment – that formal gesture, that specific image composition – when the film began to open up for me.

    As in Revanche, Spielmann works here in archetypes, establishing a distinct but not uncomplicated dichotomy between the urban and natural worlds. Sonja is soon called back to the family’s mountainside inn, where her sister Verena (Ursula Strauss) tends to their father, her own family, and occasional guests, many of whom are making a pilgrimage to the site of a Christian cross. “So many pilgrims these days,” the father says. “People are looking for something, so they wander about.” If the religious content is even more overt in this film – both Revanche and October November mourn the loss of a family patriarch who has a more traditional faith – it’s integrated into an even more complicated network of allusions. The ghost of Ingmar Bergman looms especially large here, with Cries & Whispers (1972) being the most obvious influence. The father’s prolonged death throes echo Harriet Andersson’s screams of agony, and the final shot of October November, which features both sisters on a wooden swing set, is, I assume, a direct reference. It’s hard not to think also of Bergman’s The Silence (1963), with its estranged sisters and dilapidated country inn, and of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). October November is, indeed, a Gothic story in the 18th century mode, a film about long-suppressed desire, psychological chaos, and in the words of David Morris, “a sublime utterly without transcendence. . . . a vertiginous and plunging – not a soaring – sublime, which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere.” Cries & Whispers ends with a kind of cheat. Harriet Andersson’s character is, in a sense, reincarnated by the reading of a letter she left behind. Bergman shows her and her sisters in an idealised moment and redeems the film’s bleak tone with a typical (for him) ode to human affection. The final image of October November offers no such comforts. Sonja and Verena’s final embrace is accompanied only by the sounds of wind blowing through trees and a piece of dissonant piano music. I’m still devastated by it.

  • Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    This interview was originally posted at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Frederick Wiseman’s second documentary, High School (1968), was at the time of its release an unprecedented glimpse into America’s public education system. Throughout his career, Wiseman has bristled at the terms used to describe his style—direct cinema, “fly on the wall,” cinema-verite—but his decision to observe teacher-student interactions from a position of apparent objectivity upended the traditional models of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather than a top-down statement of administrative priorities, High School is a kind of tangential conversation between Philadelphia teenagers and the adults who were charged with educating and enculturating them. As a result High School remains compelling today. The film is a time capsule of a tumultuous moment in American history, to be sure, but it’s too human and too deeply felt to ever become a dusty museum piece.

    Forty-five years later, Wiseman’s influence on documentary filmmaking is inescapable. Yet no one makes films quite like his, and certainly not as well or with as much intelligence and curiosity. In 2010, Wiseman arrived on the campus of The University of California, Berkeley, intent on adding another feature to his on-going series about institutions. He happened to start the project during the darkest days of America’s economic recession, when state legislatures across the country were divesting in public education. At Berkeley is a four-hour, wide-ranging portrait of that moment. He and his small crew spent time with university administrators, with student protesters, and in a variety of classrooms and research facilities. “The movie is what I felt about Berkeley,” he told me.

    I spoke with Frederick Wiseman at the Toronto International Film Festival, where At Berkeley received its North American premiere.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I should start by saying that I’m a cinephile and fan of your work, but like a lot of film writers today, I do this as a freelancer. In my day job, I’m communications director for the University of Tennessee Foundation, where I spend most of my time reminding the people of Tennessee, our alumni, and the state’s legislators about the importance of public higher education.

    WISEMAN: Oh, well, then you’re familiar with all of the issues!

    HUGHES: Yeah, this might be a bit of shoptalk for me.

    WISEMAN: That’s interesting. That’s fine. Get them to show the film in Tennessee.

    HUGHES: Is that an option? Your films typically show in the States on PBS. Do you have other distribution plans in mind?

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it’ll be shown on PBS in January, but it’s not the same thing. It’s much better to see it projected. It’s opening commercially in New York, and it’s being booked around the country. I’m hoping the film gets booked in state universities because the issues are the same everywhere.

    HUGHES: When you were here in Toronto a couple years ago with Boxing Gym (2010), you said during the Q&A that one reason you were drawn to the gym was because the guy who ran it was such a good teacher.

    WISEMAN: Richard Lord, yeah. I thought Richard was a great teacher and a great psychologist because he knew how to deal with the people in the gym.

    HUGHES: I would guess that 30-40% of the new film is teachers in the classroom, which is a rare sight in films—I mean, to really get to watch people do the hard work of teaching and mentoring.

    WISEMAN: I’m interested in teaching, and I’ve observed teaching in a variety of circumstances, not only the high school movies and Boxing Gym but Near Death (1989), where you see the senior physicians introducing the residents and the interns to a variety of ways of dealing with people—and the families of people—who are dying. I mean, it’s an obvious consequence of making movies in institutions where knowledge is being passed on.

    And Berkeley has great teachers, so that was certainly part of the attraction to this subject. I was making a film about a university, so I wanted to show teaching in action.

    HUGHES: Another perk of shooting at Berkeley is that you have very articulate subjects. I assume that was part of the attraction too?

    WISEMAN: Well, sure, because sometimes I’ve had very inarticulate subjects! A necessity for a good teacher is the ability to talk clearly and convincingly on a subject. The faculty at Berkeley is something like 3,500 people and there are 5,000 courses, so there was a lot to choose from, and I make no claims in the film that it is a representative sample, because I don’t know how to do that.

    HUGHES: One of the men in the film—maybe he was a vice chancellor?—says, “The coin of the realm is articulate argumentation.”

    WISEMAN: The provost. Yeah, a crucial statement. Reasoned argument.

    HUGHES: You arrived in Berkeley during the recession, when the California legislature was accelerating its divestment in public higher education. It all felt eerily familiar to me. In 2008, about 27% of University of Tennessee’s operating revenue came from state appropriations. By 2012, it had dropped to 18%.

    WISEMAN: Berkeley was at 16% when I made the film; it’s now 9%. Really, it’s becoming a type of privatization. It’s complicated because the states’ economies are in bad shape, but also I think there’s a . . . you know more about this than I do . . . but I have a sense that there’s, well, two things: One, there’s an effort to apply a cost-benefit analysis to courses, so if there’s only six people taking Portuguese, why offer Portuguese, or if there are ten people in a political science class and 500 people in an engineering class, why do we need political science?

    But there’s also a political . . . there may be, I don’t know if I’m right . . . but there may be a political agenda behind that. In a sense, dumbing down the nature of the education so people aren’t aware of the historical aspects and traditions of the United States, or the way the government is supposed to work, or what the founders had in mind with the Federalist Papers, blah, blah, blah. And that’s very dangerous.

    HUGHES: Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, recently said, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” In a single stroke, he dismissed the grand tradition of classic liberal arts education.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it is dismissing it. That’s the point. But the question is whether that’s just for economic reasons or whether it’s a political agenda behind it, and I don’t want to answer that question.

    HUGHES: You’re implying you think there is.

    WISEMAN: I think for some people. I mean, the Koch brothers, for example, have an interest in that sort of thing. I’m not just implying it. I think for some people there is that agenda. How widespread it is, I don’t know.

    HUGHES: Fitting, then, that you would choose Berkeley as your subject. That campus, probably more than any other in America, has a tradition of inter-generational conflict and direct political action. The ghost of Mario Savio haunts your film in complicated ways.

    WISEMAN: See, but that’s interesting, because one of the things I discovered while I was there was that most students, I mean 85-90% of the students, don’t participate in those things. But because of what was going on in the ‘60s, there’s this myth about Berkeley. My guess is that even in the ‘60s most of the students weren’t participating. And certainly not now.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting, though, that the very thing that Savio was railing against nearly 50 years ago—the collaboration between public higher education and the military-industrial complex—is perhaps even more prominent today.

    WISEMAN: And part of that is a consequence of the lack of funding. The state funding has been replaced by research funding—sometimes by large corporations, sometimes by the military. But I must say, my impression was at Berkeley that when they took that kind of funding there were no strings attached. They went where the research led them, not where the funder wanted them to be. They weren’t producing results to support the point of view of the funder.

    HUGHES: Every time you cut away to a construction project on campus, I imagined a new building going up with a donor’s name on it. I was hoping the film would touch on the role of private gift support.

    WISEMAN: I couldn’t get access to it.

    HUGHES: Really?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: Interesting. So, what was your process for getting access to the university?

    WISEMAN: Generally speaking, I had access to everything that was going on except insofar as somebody didn’t want to be photographed. But the person in charge of fundraising thought that it would interfere.

    HUGHES: I’m sure it would.

    WISEMAN: So I didn’t have access to that. Despite the fact that the final film . . . they love the final film. There’s a reception this afternoon for Berkeley alumni in Toronto, who are going to be shown excerpts and be told about the film.

    HUGHES: That’s great. Doesn’t surprise me at all.

    WISEMAN: [Smiles] Well, because it came out alright, from their point of view.

    HUGHES: I know you’ve talked about this a lot over the years, but how do you find the shape of a film like this? What are your shooting and editing habits?

    WISEMAN: I just figure it out. I mean, there are no rules. For instance, within a sequence I have to feel that I understand what’s going on, and then I have to decide what I think is most important. Then I have to figure out a way of shaping the sequence, editing it down, summarizing it, synthesizing it in a way that is fair to the original even though it’s much shorter than the original.

    I mean, a sequence in real time might be an hour and a half. Some of those cabinet meetings were an hour and a half, two hours. In the film, it’s six, seven, eight minutes. I have to edit them so they appear as if they took place the way you’re watching it, even though it’s 30 seconds here, five seconds there, and then I jump twenty minutes ahead. But I have to edit in such a way that it looks like it all happened the way you’re watching it.

    So that’s within the sequence. Between the sequences I have to figure out the overarching themes and the dramatic moments. An abstract way of describing what I tried to do is I tried to cut it at right angles so you’re always surprised by what comes next. And at the same time, in terms of the rhythm of the movie, I have to think about quiet moments. I mean, after a dramatic scene I don’t want to go to another dramatic scene, so I may use cutaways of the campus or whatever.

    But when I use cutaways to the campus, I use them for a variety of purposes: sometimes to show movement from one place to another, other times because I need a quiet moment, or it might be that I want to show that everyone has a cell phone. Particularly for those transition shots, there are multiple purposes.

    HUGHES: In those shots, you’re also making very specific choices about how to depict the campus.

    WISEMAN: That’s true of everything.

    HUGHES: Sure. So, occasionally we see people working in corporate-style offices, for example, but you also return often to a large lobby or foyer . . . I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it has beautiful Spanish arches.

    WISEMAN: Right, right.

    HUGHES: And in those aesthetic choices of representation you’re also adding your voice to the film. Is that fair to say?

    WISEMAN: Sure, because I want to show the architecture. I want to show the students sitting on the floor. I like the shot of the light coming down through the arches. I need a transition between two classes. All of those things are elements in the choice of that shot or that group of shots.

    HUGHES: Okay, but a beautiful shot of light coming down through those arches also brings a point of view to the film. Yesterday I was discussing this with a friend who described At Berkeley as very fly-on-the-wall and free of advocacy . . .

    WISEMAN: There is no advocacy. “Fly on the wall” is a term I object to. There was no advocacy going on in the sense that I never asked anybody to do anything.

    HUGHES: Just from talking to you face-to-face, though, I get the sense that you’ve become invested in the subject. Would you describe yourself as an advocate for higher education?

    WISEMAN: I’d describe myself as a filmmaker. I mean, I think I’ve realized as a consequence of making this film—I don’t think I ever thought much about public education before I made the film—but as a consequence of the experience, and having the opportunity to listen to these administrators at Berkeley discuss these issues, I learned something about the issue.

    The project originated because I thought a university would be a good addition to the series I’ve been doing on institutions. It’s a natural consequence of doing High School, and universities are important in American society, in any society. So the impetus for doing the film had more to do with wanting to do a movie that fit into the institutional series. But I wanted to pick a public university because that raised more issues.

    HUGHES: One storyline in the film is Berkeley’s effort to reduce spending through operational excellence and process engineering. It’s probably my favourite aspect of the film—and I’ve never really thought about my own university in this context—because in that sense, the campus becomes a microcosm of post-recession America . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: Where the lowest wage earners . . .

    WISEMAN: They’re the ones who get . . . yeah.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene where students are discussing the cost of attending Berkeley, and a middle-class girl breaks down . . .

    WISEMAN: She cries.

    HUGHES: She feels the same squeeze experienced by so many over the past five years. Were you surprised to find that connection?

    WISEMAN: I was surprised only in the sense that I was ignorant of the issues. But having had access to so much of what was going on at the university, I’m less ignorant.

    HUGHES: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau is a compelling character on screen. I imagine when you meet people like him, you must think, “This guy will help the film. We have something here.”

    WISEMAN: He’s the one who gave me permission to make it. He was the first person I met. He was the person I contacted in order to get permission.

    HUGHES: Was he aware of your work?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: So that helps.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, he was aware of the films, and he was very open. I wrote him a letter, basically saying, “Can I make a documentary of Berkeley?” and explaining the circumstances and the funding and all that, and he wrote me back, “Come and see me.” I went to see him, and I had lunch with him and the provost, and at the end of the lunch they said, “Okay.”

    HUGHES: That was a tremendous risk for them.

    WISEMAN: Oh, it was. We talked about that. But, you know, obviously he trusted me. He told me explicitly at the end, when it was over and he saw the movie, he was glad his trust was not misplaced. The movie is what I felt about Berkeley. If I’d felt something else about it, it would’ve been in the movie.

    HUGHES: He seems to have that rare talent to make very difficult decisions but to do so with tact and wisdom.

    WISEMAN: Well, he’d been a dean at MIT and president at the University of Toronto before he went to Berkeley. He’s a very smart man and had a lot of experience.

    HUGHES: I enjoyed watching his response to the student protestors because he’s sympathetic to them—just like I’m sympathetic to them—but his biggest frustration is that there’s so little at stake for them.

    WISEMAN: Right. And he compares it to his own experience in the ‘60s. I think he’s also concerned, basically, about their ignorance of the real situation.

    HUGHES: Part of my job is public relations, and nothing is more frustrating than when the other side gets the basic, underlying facts wrong.

    WISEMAN: It was amazing to me how badly wrong they got them at Berkeley, because to make a principled demand for free tuition at this point . . . it’s a fantasy. It wasn’t a question of the university withholding. Free tuition just wasn’t in the cards.

    HUGHES: In the film, at least, Chancellor Birgeneau’s heart seems to be in the right place.

    WISEMAN: Exactly! I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s exactly how I felt. One of the interesting things for me about making the film was that I was with a group of people who cared. I think that’s just as important a subject for a film as people who are callous and indifferent.

    HUGHES: Because of where I sit in my job, I’ve seen all sides of those debates . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: . . . and I can say that it’s very rare to meet someone who has dedicated his or her life to higher education and not cared deeply about it. It was nice to see that on film.

    WISEMAN: I felt the same way. It was nice for me to get to experience it.

  • TIFF 2012

    TIFF 2012

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    “Where OMG Meets WTF.”

    This was the first tagline I spotted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Others included “Where Fantasy Meets Reality”, “Where Indie Meets Epic”, “Where Wow Meets Huh?” and “Where Seeing Meets Believing”. In other words, TIFF’s continuing mission to be the “all things for all people” film festival has now been written into its public relations. And the raw numbers bare it out: 337 films from 72 countries, including 146 world premieres; hundreds of visiting actors and directors, including red carpet-friendly stars like Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Ryan Gosling and Marion Cotillard; and 4,280 industry delegates representing 2,563 companies from 81 countries. All of these figures represent statistical increases over the previous year, which if the TIFF media office is to be believed, is necessarily a good thing. At the end of the festival, even before the prize winners had been announced, TIFF issued a press release touting the festival’s strong U.S. and international film sales. For 2013 they should perhaps add “Where More Meets MORE” and “Where Bang Meets Buck”.

    Unlike other major film festivals, TIFF has never put a high premium on jury awards. The Prizes of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) went to François Ozon’s In the House and Mikael Marcimain’s debut feature, Call Girl, and the various Canadian prizes went to Deco Dawson’s Keep a Modest Head(Best Canadian Short), Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (Best Canadian Feature) and Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral and Jason Buxton’s Blackbird (Best Canadian First Feature). The most coveted prize, the BlackBerry People’s Choice Award, went to David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook with a runner-up mention to Ben Affleck’s Argo. Other recent Peoples Choice winners The King’s Speech (2010), Precious (2009), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and American Beauty (1999) have used the award to kick start successful year-end Oscar campaigns, and the Weinstein company appears to be charting the same path with Playbook.

    Along with its many premieres, Toronto also hosted the first North American stops for a number of high profile films that had already played in Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and Venice. Because of the late publication date of this piece, and for the sake of brevity, I’ll be focusing primarily on fall premieres and on smaller films and retrospectives that are less likely to have received widespread critical coverage.

    The End of Visions

    The most significant programming change at TIFF this year was the folding of the Visions section into Wavelengths. Wavelengths has traditionally been limited to only six screenings, all held during the first four nights of the festival, with a dedicated focus on avant-garde cinema. Each year, Andrea Picard programs twenty to thirty shorts, along with at least one feature-length film such as Ruhr (James Benning, 2010), Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell, 2009) and Schindler’s Houses (Heinz Emigholz, 2007). Because each Wavelengths program screened only once, and because the screenings were typically held at Jackman Hall, a few blocks removed from the primary venues, Wavelengths has always felt like a separate festival within TIFF, with its own particular, enthusiastic audience. Last year there was some question as to the future of Wavelengths, so it was a great relief to see Picard back again and to be greeted by a typically strong selection of films.

    The Visions program, which was intended for features that “push the boundaries” of mainstream cinema, has been another consistently strong section at TIFF and has included such films as The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011), Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo, 2010), To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009), and Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008). I suspect Wavelengths and Visions were combined this year primarily for practical, branding purposes, but as a result of the move the new Wavelengths now has more room for oddly shaped films that fall somewhere between avant-garde shorts and “daring, visionary” features. In all, Wavelengths included 53 films this year, ranging from one minute to two-and-a-half hours. An especially welcomed development in the realignment was a new opportunity for programmers to pair featurette-length films as double bills. It was a natural extension of Picard’s excellent work as a creative and thoughtful curator and had the added benefit of bringing filmmakers like Mati Diop, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, and Matías Piñeiro out of the “experimental” ghetto and introducing them to a wider audience through multiple public screenings at more highly-trafficked TIFF venues.

    Wavelengths: Features

    Of the feature films in Wavelengths that had already played at other festivals, my favourite by a wide margin was Nicolas Rey’s Anders, Molussien, a hand-processed, 16mm study of technology and totalitarianism that is assembled randomly before each screening: its nine reels can be built into 362,880 different films. My interview with Rey and a longer discussion of Molussia can be found elsewhere in this issue. I also very much enjoyed Bestaire, Denis Côté’s quiet, suggestive portrait of wild animals and their human caretakers, and Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, which reminded me, strangely enough, of Eraserhead in its treatment of crippling, new-parent anxiety. If I was slightly disappointed by two of the most talked-about films on this year’s festival circuit, it’s perhaps owing to too-high expectations. Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is beautifully photographed and features a brilliant sound design, but I wanted the film to be more formally daring or more politically complex or more opaque than the relatively simple film Gomes made. Memory, history, guilt, privilege, religion, symbols of captivity, dreams of hairy monkeys, a black woman improving her literacy by reading Robinson Crusoe (of all things!) — Tabu plays like a primer on post-colonial issues, all rendered in glamorous shades of grey. Tabu is something of a step back, I think, for Gomes after the hypnotic, joyous, rambling Our Beloved Month of August (2008). Leviathan, by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, is a singular cinematic experience, to be sure. Filmed at sea with a dozen consumer-grade DV cameras, it tackles one of the most documented of all human endeavours, fishing, by exploding it into abstraction. Especially when viewed on a large screen and in a loud theatre, Leviathan is by turns stomach-churning, curious, gruelling and wondrous.

    Two hours into Wang Bing’s Three Sisters, the best of the feature-length fall premieres in Wavelengths, there’s a shot that recalls his previous film, The Ditch (2010). Yingying, who at 10 is the oldest of the three subjects of the documentary, has been left behind to live with her grandfather in their small village after her father returns to the city in search of work, this time taking Zhenzhen (6) and Fenfen (4) with him. Their mother is gone for good, having left for another man and other opportunities. Yingying sits alone in her windowless, one-room house, lit only by the faint grey sunlight from an open doorway. She’s curled up at the small table where she eats her meals and occasionally attempts to complete her homework. (In another scene we see her pretend-mouthing the words of her lessons while her classmates recite in unison.) She stares straight ahead and, as she does throughout the two-and-a-half-hour film, sniffs and coughs like clockwork. This is Yingying’s home but it could just as well be the underground dugout where the prisoners sleep in The Ditch, Wang’s fictional recreation of China’s labour camps of the 1950s. There’s the same loneliness and hunger, the same daily struggle to fend off decay and despair.

    Wang introduced Three Sisters as “a simple film” that “might be too long”. I appreciate his humility (a hallmark of his filmmaking, too), but I think he’s wrong on both counts. There’s nothing simple about this precise assemblage of footage collected during several visits to the girls’ remote farming village, and the length of the film is, in fact, essential to its success. The sisters live a life of miserable poverty, but Wang rescues their story from the now-standard tropes of miserablist cinema and poverty tourism by respecting the temporal rhythms of that life and by acknowledging his own problematic role as a visiting observer. Yingying is never pitied by the camera (although her situation is nearly always pitiable); instead, she’s made dignified by it. We watch from a distance in long, unbroken shots as she struggles to carry a basket, throws a load of pinecones on her back, and slowly, patiently chops firewood. There’s a lived-in-ness to her movements that can only be represented on screen because Wang understands that cutting any of those behaviors into a sequence of shots would rob her work of its honour. The difference between a three-minute, unbroken shot of a feather-light girl hacking at a tree branch and a 20-second shot of the same followed by an elliptical cut to a woodpile is the difference between documentary and fiction.

    As a work of drama, Three Sisters rises and falls with the returns and departures of the girls’ father, a world-weary young man with a kind smile and a deep affection for his daughters. It’s a bit of a shock when he first appears, one hour into the film, because Wang withholds explanation of his absence until a later conversation. When, in an early scene, one of the younger girls threatens her sister with, “I’m gonna tell daddy”, it’s unclear whether her threat is valid or if she doesn’t yet understand the permanence of death. Soon after he arrives, though, we see him sitting at that same small table with one of the girls on his lap and the others seated close beside him, each smiling and grateful, and that one moment of tenderness puts the entire first act of the film in relief and makes his inevitable departure all the more cruel. He buys new coats and shoes for Zhenzhen and Fenfen and washes their legs and feet in hopes that they can remain clean just long enough to make the long walk to the bus stop. Wang follows them onto the bus, rides along for a few miles, and then leaves them to their journey.

    The bus scene is worth noting because it’s the one moment in Three Sisters when Wang’s presence is commented on by another person in the film. The father, visibly nervous for the trip and for the commotion he is causing, explains that he already bought tickets for himself and his two daughters, but the bus driver is more concerned about “the guy with the camera”. It’s an important moment because it acknowledges explicitly what is obvious throughout Three Sisters – that there’s no such thing as “fly on the wall” observational cinema, that Wang and his occasional crew are affecting the conditions of their little social experiment simply by being there and looking. A few minutes after the shot of Yingying alone at the table, we see her again outside, high on a hillside, walking a few yards in front of the camera. Eventually she stops, sits, and looks out across the valley. The camera also pans to take in the view. It’s a remarkable scene because without being sentimental or naïve, it manages to share her experience of something beautiful as she shares it with Wang. It’s a generous act on both of their parts.

    Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticised representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a fiction-creating voiceover and soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone is transformed into a mysterious contact awaiting a clandestine meeting. With a few well-timed gunshot sound effects, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

    Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory”, and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated from Portuguese as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.) The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamour and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, camp drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the piece — is described in this too-long film but too seldom felt.

    Wavelengths also featured the premiere of Far from Afghanistan, a new omnibus film by John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, Minda Martin and Soon-Mi Yoo that offers multiple perspectives on the war that has now raged for more than a decade. The film was directly inspired by Far from Vietnam (1967), which screened in a beautiful 35mm print in the TIFF Cinémathèque program. A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that had resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

    Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’ contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing and complicating a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a close up of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanised war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

    That Far from Afghanistan pales in comparison with the film that inspired it is hardly a damning critique. I can’t think of another piece of agit-prop made in the past 45 years that wouldn’t suffer the same fate. But I wish it were a better film in its own right. Gianvito opens the piece with “My Heart Swims in Blood,” in which he juxtaposes shots of bourgeois comforts (shopping malls, tanning beds, pedicures, dogshow groomers) and a middle-class American man (Andre Gregory) trying to sleep against dry, voiceover recitations of first-hand accounts of civilian deaths and news reports concerning the war. Jost‘s segment, “Empire’s Cross”, is a straight-forward collage that combines split-screen images of 9/11 and bomb-sighting footage with a soundtrack that mashes up military radio transmissions, Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech, and ominous music. Inspired by the testimony of a U.S. Army war veteran, Martin’s “The Long Distance Operator” is a narrative short about the men who “pilot” drone attacks from a base in the American southwest. Using footage attained via WikiLeaks and employing actors who are veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Martin explores the emotional trauma suffered by the pilots while also foregrounding the horrifying absurdity of drone warfare.

    My two favourite segments of Far from Afghanistan are also the most simple conceptually. In “Afghanistan: The Next Generation,” Yoo cuts together archival footage from a variety of film stocks and video, and the running voiceover has the official tone of a National Geographic documentary. Only at the end of the segment does Yoo identify the source of her found footage, a U.S. Information Agency film about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It’s a simple but devastating irony, and Yoo’s montage exposes the cruelties that are otherwise elided by the formal conventions of State-sanctioned propaganda. Like Gianvito and Martin, Wilkerson uses his segment to bring the war home but does so more directly and with unapologetic pathos. “Fragments of Dissolution” is built from interviews with women who have lost family members under tragic circumstances. We see two of the interviewees, a young widow and a middle-aged mother, whose husband and son, respectively, committed suicide after serving overseas deployments. The other interviews are heard only in voiceover. As we listen to women describe, with deep sorrow and anger, the children, brothers, and friends who died while warming themselves beside portable space heaters, Wilkinson shows long, static, black-and-white images shot within their burned out homes. Each death was the result of an “illegal hookup”, according to Detroit Edison, who had shut off the victims’ power for lack of payment. Wilkinson’s segment subtly but powerfully recalculates the costs of the West’s latest forgotten war.

    Wavelengths: Featurettes

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

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

    That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola sets a new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favourites take place in a theatre dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the classic love triangle. The closest formal analogy I can think of is the café and tram sequences in Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (2007), in which faces fold into and out of one another at different depths of field. Viola was paired nicely with Gabriel Abrantes’s Birds, a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti.

    Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards, which was reflected in the mixed reviews that greeted its premiere at Cannes. Shot at a hotel in northern Thailand near the border with Laos, the film is built from casual conversations, most of them held on a patio overlooking the swollen Mekong River. Placid in tone and self-consciously informal in style, Mekong Hotel is also deeply moving, especially in the final minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work become embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in the region’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” the mother says. “I hate that my life has become this.” 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.

    Mekong Hotel was paired with Mati Diop’s Big in Vietnam, which in some respects is the messy, opaque 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 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. Big in Vietnam certainly confirms the promise Diop showed in Atlantiques (2009), one of my favourite films of that year. She’s a digital native with a remarkable talent for finding new and exciting images with low-grade video. Two shots in particular, one taken from aboard a seaside Ferris wheel, the other a long, overexposed tracking shot, are among the finest I saw at the festival.

    Wavelengths: Shorts

    The title of the first Wavelengths shorts program, Under a Pacific Sun, alludes to Thomas Demand’s two-minute trompe l’oeil work, Pacific Sun, which uses paper models to restage the eerie movement of furniture aboard a cruise ship rocked by stormy seas. Each of the film’s 2,400 frames was shot individually and at great effort. The result is a breezy curiosity, a viral video inspired by a viral video. The rest of the program was quite strong, however. I especially enjoyed the pairing of Shambhavi Kaul’s 21 Chitrakoot and Fern Silva’s Concrete Parlay, two smart and playful found footage pieces. Kaul’s source material is video from a popular Indian TV show of the 1980s, a fantasy series that used rudimentary chroma-key effects to create otherworldly vistas. I appreciate the catholicity of Kaul’s approach. The footage can’t escape its cheesy, of-its-moment-ness, but the pleasures of 21 Chitrakoot have little to do with kitsch. The film is nostalgic for lost visionary imaginations in a way that recalls steampunk. That Concrete Parlay is likewise concerned with images of “the Orient” is obvious from its central, organising symbol, the magic carpet. Silva includes the carpet in two forms: found footage from an anonymous, low-budget children’s film and a green-screen tourist attraction in Egypt. Images of the magic carpet serve as bridges between the 18-minute film’s sections, transporting viewers across space and time, culminating with a stop at Tehrir Square during the revolution. Concrete Parlay ends with a sequence of high-angle landscapes that were shot, I assume, from the vantage of a hot air balloon we see being inflated earlier in the film. Into this footage Silva cuts a close-up of a man staring off at an animal in the distance, making the images momentarily subjective and reminding us that as tourists we’re always only looking at.

    The third shorts program, I Am Micro, was among the very best I’ve seen in my eight years attending Wavelengths. A collection of portraits (loosely defined), the screening featured Nicky Hamlyn’s time-lapse diptych, The Transit of Venus 1 and 2 (2005, 2012), which offers an instructive study in contrasts. The first is stark white movement across a black background; the second captures the movement of clouds across a stunning sunset. Vincent Grenier’s latest video, Waiting Room, was shot entirely at his son’s pediatrician’s office. It’s fitting, I suppose, that it was programmed alongside a film by Nathaniel Dorsky, as both filmmakers teach viewers how to observe the world immediately in front of them with greater curiosity and reverence. The highlight of Waiting Room is a sequence near the end when Grenier discovers that the pulsing bursts of light from an overhead fluorescent bulb are falling in and out of rhythm with the frame rate of his small, consumer-grade camera, revealing that what appears to the naked eye as constant white light is, in fact, waves of yellow. (Ernie Gehr’s Departure, which screened in the Under a Pacific Sun program, plays with DV frame rates and naturally-occurring visual rhythms in similar ways.) Class Picture, by the Filipino artist collective Tito & Tito, is, as the title implies, a portrait of twenty or so school children posed on a beach. The one-sentence program note claims that the process for making it involved converting “a single 16mm colour strip into washed-out 35mm.” Beyond that, I don’t have a clue what I was looking at, but Class Picture is sublime. The image seems constantly on the verge of vanishing into the ether, a fitting expression of childhood.

    The film that gave the program its name, Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia’s I Am Micro, opens with a slow tracking shot in a darkened room. As the camera glides from left to right, the tall, narrow windows directly in front of it take on the appearance of frames on a strip of film. It’s a remarkable and fitting image for I Am Micro, which is an ode to cinema and a lament for the Indian independent film industry. Shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, the very material of the film registers consciously as an act of defiance. Its lush, grainy, black-and-white images of an abandoned film lab look like they were rescued from the 1950s, fragments of a lost treasure, and Goel and Heredia’s interview with Kamal Swaroop gives voice to the economic realities and requisite personal sacrifices that greet independent artists in India. (Swaroop has himself managed to complete only two films, Ghashiram Kotwai in 1976 and Om Darbadar in 1988.)

    The program also included two films that can be more easily classified as portraits. Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Me too, too, me too) is the latest of Friedl vom Gröller’s studies of her aged mother, now bed-ridden and lost in dementia. Piss-tinted and shaking as if the film had jumped a sprocket, the image is reminiscent of an Expressionist horror picture. Gröller’s mother at one point rolls over and looks directly into the camera, and that stare combined with the terrifying, nonsensical ramblings of her roommate generate a gut-punch of anxiety — anxiety tied to death and human decay, generally, but also to that shameful ambivalence felt by an adult child for his or her dying parent. Ich auch, auch, ich auch is as concise and masterful an expression of dread as one is likely to encounter. As a kind of antidote to Gröller’s film, Picard also programmed selected video works by Francesca Woodman, all of them shot in her studio while still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Despite the spectre of Woodman’s suicide only a few years later, these self-portraits are delightfully engaging. The videos are black-and-white and warped by time, but they capture the joy of artistic experimentation and discovery. “Oh, I’m really pleased!” she says to her camera operator after standing up and admiring the pattern her naked, paint-covered body left on the studio floor. The sound of her voice, playful and proud, is revealing in ways her famous photographs can’t quite match.

    I Am Micro concluded with Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, my favourite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe”. It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. His camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits (of filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss soon before each passed away) and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin emerges from shadows on the other side of the glass. Only after the mannequin vanished again did I notice, at the top of the reflected image, clouds passing in front of the sun. It’s the essence of Dorsky’s cinema reduced to a single shot: shadows and light transforming before our eyes into something else, something revelatory, edifying, and ineffable.

    Fall Premieres

    Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbre, Marco Bellocchio’s Dormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. His daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter, praying to God for a miracle.

    As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence, unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

    Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Olivier Assayas’ own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows 17 year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Bellocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humourless. Boring, even.

    I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

    I won’t pretend to 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, and that he’s an important figure in Portuguese Modernism. Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from 104 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, Oliveira’s film plays out like A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stagy even relative to 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 labours 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 a fellow critic at TIFF refer to it as a script table-read.) The opening moments are fantastic, though. The first shot 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. (I must admit this allusion to the film’s title was obvious to me only in hindsight.) After a quick, impressionistic recreation of one of João’s crimes, 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 — although no reminder is more shocking than watching the aged faces of Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau.

    Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Christian 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 / close up / point of view. Here, Petzold 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 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. Likewise, 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 much later in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

    The easy response to Joss Whedon’s low-budget take on Much Ado About Nothing is that there’s nothing in the film that wasn’t already on the page. And that’s probably true, I suppose, but the film is so much fun, and it was so obviously made for fun, that I can’t really fault it for just being charming and droll. Whedon’s signature here is that he approaches the material as he would any other romantic comedy, and as usual he proves especially good at inventing excuses for his actors to behave like real people in a hyper-real scenario. The cast seldom just deliver lines; they deliver lines while cleaning up bottles after a party or strumming a guitar or dripping with pool water or walking back and forth to the pantry while fixing a pot of coffee. Every high school English teacher who has ever tried to convince his or her students that Shakespeare was the sitcom writer of his day now has proof, all the way down to a spit take and pratfall.

    Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers is an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked even 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. Sightseers concerns a 30-something couple, Tina (Alice Lowe) and Chris (Steve Oram), who set off on a long-planned, idyllic RV tour of Northern England. After Chris gets away with accidentally killing a man who had earlier insulted him, the two instigate an increasingly ridiculous murder spree. Wheatley has a sharp eye, and he and cinematographer Laurie Rose make exceptional use of the 2.35:1 widescreen frame, giving epic scope to this relatively small story. If I can convince myself that Sightseer’s jocular sadism is all in the service of a coherent allegory — the misguided self-sacrifice of relationships and working-class anger are the best bets — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film.

    Other Discoveries

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

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

    One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Sébastien Betbeder’sNights with Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar. In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairytale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the park fence night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the daytime when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists and picnickers. And Betbeder also includes a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination and obsessive love.

    KazikRadwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, executing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34 year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home. The key word there is “intimate”. Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the cinematographic style of Tower emphasises real physical proximity. Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking. Tower is in many respects a classic “first film”. It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realised the film would stop rather than end. Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move, but I’m eager to see what he does next.

  • Nicolas Rey: differently, molussia

    Nicolas Rey: differently, molussia

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Nicolas Rey’s third feature film, differently, Molussia (2012), is an adaptation of a novel he’s never read. Written between 1932 and 1936, Günther Anders’s The Molussian Catacomb analyzes the rise of fascism by way of a series of parable-like conversations between two men imprisoned deep beneath the surface of Molussia, an imagined country. Unlike Anders’s later philosophical work, with which Rey is quite familiar, the novel has never been translated into French or English. Curious about the book, Rey enlisted the help of a German-speaking friend, who selected and translated a few chapters, and from that material, Rey then chose eight sections to adapt. The resulting film is built from nine reels of 16mm, one reel per chapter, along with a wordless interlude. (“Lud is the Latin root for ‘play,’” Rey told me. “I think the film has an element of play in it.”)

    Rey introduced differently, Molussia at the Toronto International Film Festival by reading a long quotation from one of Anders’s later essays. In it 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, must be done. Once a technique is discovered, it must be marketed until a need for it is created, which can then be exploited for profit. Rey quoted Anders again during the post-screening question and answer session: “Nothing discredits a man more quickly than critiquing a machine.”

    Rey’s previous film, Schuss! (2005), explores how the radical innovations of the early-20th century improved manufacturing processes and made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey finds a metonym for this historical development in a French ski resort that flourished alongside the burgeoning aluminum industry. The majority of the images in differently, Molussia are static shots of landscapes and architecture that were filmed within a short driving distance of Paris. Because the locations in Schuss! are so essential to the content of the film—Rey returns again and again to shots of skiers at the resort, transforming them into grotesque embodiments of decadence—I asked him if any of the places we see in differently, Molussia have a similar historical significance.

    “Well, not in the sense that they relate specifically to fascism of the 1930s.”

    He smiled while drawing out those last three words. Rey describes the experience of reading his friend’s rough translations of The Molussian Catacomb as a “shock”: “these writings from the ‘30s also sounded contemporary to me.” In my own notes from the screening, I compared one of the stories, an ironic and maddening debate in a café, to the kind of ideological nonsense that now pollutes Facebook during an election season. Rey’s images of machines transforming the land, of computers predicting the future, of fences, vacant parking lots, and lifeless Modernist architecture—these images turn our contemporary moment into a beautifully strange and absurd dystopia.

    differently, Molussia is also timely in that it foregrounds the material of film at a moment when digital production, distribution, and projection threaten to sound the death knell for celluloid. The defining formal innovation of differently, Molussia is that its nine reels are assembled randomly for each screening, meaning that there are 362,880 potential versions of the film. Rey argues that this is a formal expression of Anders’s critique, that the very possibility of alternative narratives “opens something” in the viewer’s experience. But the randomness also makes audiences conscious of the handmade quality of this and every other film that has been pieced together and broken apart in a projection booth. “Handmade” is an especially apt descriptor for differently, Molussia, which Rey shot and processed using donated, outdated film stock. In his notes he describes the manual effort required to achieve the final result:

    “At first, it was so difficult to obtain an interesting image with [the old stock] that I considered dropping the idea of using it. But after a year of experimentation, I ended up finding an appropriate process and printing procedure: A grainy, rough, atemporal image as fascinating as paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.”

    Through his work at L’Abominable, a non-profit, artist-run film lab near Paris, Rey has become an outspoken advocate for analog film, and, indeed, he became most animated during our conversation when the subject turned to the economic realities of film production, preservation, and curating.

    I spoke with Nicolas Rey on September 9, 2012, the day after differently, Molussia screened in Wavelengths, TIFF’s program of experimental films.

    * * *

    HUGHES: You mentioned last night after the screening that in your efforts to read The Molussian Catacomb you tried to teach yourselfGerman?

    REY: I started taking courses just like anyone would to learn a language. But, of course, I soon realized that I wouldn’t be proficient enough to read literature. So I thought I’d trust Peter Hoffman to pick a number of chapters. I was glad that he liked the idea of collaborating on the film.

    I became friends with Peter earlier because he translated Schuss! in German. He’s a very good French speaker, and he knows my films. Peter and Nathalie, my partner, then roughly translated the chapters he had selected. Very roughly. And then I must say—I always forget to say this—what a shock it was to discover the text, because before that I only had a very rough idea of what the book was about. I felt close to Anders in many ways. And that is why I trusted—had faith—that I would relate with the book enough to be able to make the film. People who had read it would explain what it was about, but when I had the chapters Peter had chosen I felt very close to it. It was a very strong meeting.

    HUGHES: How did you identify with it? Was it the politics? The writing style?

    REY: A combination. In a way it’s very straightforward and witty. But these writings from the ‘30s also sounded contemporary to me. I was very impressed by that and happy to have found such a gem. Anders had a very clever understanding of what happened in Germany in the ‘30s. This understanding of the politics was the very base structure of his thought and of his way of seeing the world and of tackling problems.

    Even his philosophical writing is not academic at all. Parts are theoretical, but very often it’s straightforward and witty as well. So I already had a feeling for who he was as a writer from the other books I had read in translation.

    HUGHES: I was surprised to hear you say thatwhat we hear in the film is often a recitation of the entire chapter.

    REY: Yeah, some chapters are very short. Anders often says it’s a bit like 1001 Nights. The chapters are numbered: day 1 and then night, day 2 and then night. And it goes on like this. Each time it is one full short story. Sometimes it’s just half a page. Sometimes it’s ten pages. But, yes, most of the time it’s the full chapter. “Back to Nature” is just the beginning of the chapter.

    HUGHES: Can we use “Back to Nature” to talk about how you find your shots? It’s the only section that includes portraits, right? We see people working at computers?

    REY: I began with the idea that I would shoot the imaginary country of Molussia. That’s how I proceeded, in my head, to figure out what I would film. I realized, as I gathered the visual material, that there would be a feeling of distance in the image. This seemed appropriate because the book stages prisoners who speak about that country, although they are in prison. They speak about the outside world. A lot of the film is landscape shots, but I thought, “A country is also people, right?” So I tried to also film a few sections that would have people in it.

    How do I find shots? It’s just things I’ve been thinking about filming. I have ideas like this, and if they don’t fit into one film, they’ll fit into another. It comes back to memory at a point when it feels right. I’d had the idea of shooting weather forecasters for some time. Don’t ask me why. [laughs] It was important to me, also, to film people in front of computers as an update of Anders’ critique of technology. I mean, he died in 1992, but I think the Internet would have killed him. Also, weather forecasters tell you the future. It all fits in nicely, I think. You don’t see many people behind computers in films, although so many fields now involve being behind a computer.

    HUGHES: All day, every day.

    REY: All day, every day. We’re slaves to computers, but if you try to resist it . . . [laughs] . . . I don’t know. I escaped television completely—I’ve never owned a television, I never watch television—but I use computers as much as . . . [laughs] . . . well, too much.

    HUGHES: There’s also a beautiful image in “Back to Nature” that is more typical of the style of the film. I think it’s . . .

    REY: The pillar, yeah. It’s a bridge, a freeway bridge.

    HUGHES: You joked last night that you just drove around to film an imagined country. So you saw that bridge and pulled over? That’s the process?

    REY: Yeah, that’s the process. Totally. I mean, we drove over with Nathalie—she was with me for most of the shooting—and we had the cameras in the trunk and the sound equipment, and we’d pull over whenever something struck my eye or if we found a place where we thought the sound would be interesting. Most of the film [laughs . . . I don’t know if I should say this . . . most of the film is shot less than 100 meters from the road.

    There was also the option of the spinning camera and the option of the wind camera. The wind camera has windmill blades of this diameter [extends arms two or three feet], the smallest windmill blades you can buy. Kristof designed and then we built this setup so that the blades are geared up to the mechanical Bolex. If there’s no wind, you can’t film, so you have to find a place where it’s windy enough to drive it because it takes a lot of wind to drive the camera. Once you find the right spot, you get out of the car and you pull out everything, you install it on the tripod—there’s a good brake on it so it doesn’t start before you want to—and then you release the break and step away, because it’s kind of dangerous when it rotates. You don’t want to have your arm in the way.

    The camera finds the direction of the wind, and if there’s a lot of wind it goes fast in the camera so it will make slow motion, and if it goes slower it will accelerate. The exposure also changes. If it’s going fast, the exposure will be faint, and if it’s slow the exposure will be very strong on the negative so it will be a clear image. For example, it’s very clear in the section in the tall grass, because there the wind was very shaky, so the exposure changes a lot. Next to the sea, the exposure is more constant because the wind is more constant.

    So, yes, we would drive around and use whatever apparatus was the right one.

    HUGHES: Along with the voiceover, the soundtrack is built from a variety of natural and mechanical sounds. Did you collect those on the road, too?

    REY: I usually don’t record synched sound. Although there is synched sound in this film, in particular, because when Peter Hoffman reads the text, that is synched sound that I shot by myself. It was a nice performance. [laughs] A one-man crew shooting sound film. That’s me sitting beside him, triggering the camera. So, I don’t record synched sound, but I usually record sound on location when I film the image—sometimes at the same time, sometimes I film but don’t record, sometimes I just record.

    HUGHES: You said you’d pull over whenever something “strikes your eye.” There are some beautiful images in this film, and I’m wondering what role, if any, beauty plays in your project.

    REY: In the beginning, I didn’t know what exactly I would film. It just built up along the way. It’s not that I would look for something specific. I would know that certain things would fit in because they would relate to other things I had already shot. Other things would be variations. It’s very intuitive. It was just a matter of, I think, trusting that my sensibility would meet up with Anders’s. That was the chance I took—that there would be some relation. Although I had a few shots in mind, like the weather forecasters, I trusted it would work because there is a kind of correspondence between us.

    HUGHES: I saw differently, Mollusia with a friend last night, and when I asked him what he thought of the film he said that after the first two reels, he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it. But by the third, his mind began to race as the structure of the film began to reveal itself. I had a very similar response both to this film and to Schuss! These are the only two films of yours I’ve seen, but would you say this self-conscious structuring and the repetitions are essential to your work?

    REY: My first film, Soviets Plus Electricity (2002), was shot while travelling by train from Paris to the Pacific Ocean through the northern regions of Russia that were an area of deportation. The film is chronological in the image and chronological in the sound. The sound is like a vocal diary, like aural notes of the journey, and the images are shots along the way separated by black leader. But the time frame of the sound and image are different, so you hear things that you see later or that you’ve seen earlier, or sometimes in the middle of the reel you’ll be at the same place in the image and the sound. The way it’s shot structures itself along the way because I didn’t plan how I would film before I left. I left out of the blue to make that trip.

    In general, when you make a film that is outside of conventions, it takes time for the person watching the film and listening to the film to find his position and to build the film in his head, because eventually that is where it is built. And it takes time. For different people, depending on a number of factors—ranging from the kinds of films you’ve seen to your current state of mind—it will take a different amount of time. Some people never find their way. Those are the people who leave. And I don’t blame them! Even when I edit I feel that. Sometimes it’s hard for me to be in the right position as a viewer. I think that’s true of all of the films I’ve made. It takes a little time to adjust to the film, to discover what position the film proposes.

    Also, you know, the order of the reels you saw yesterday was a rough beginning. The first two reels were the most engaging in terms of sound, they’re very chaotic, and then it eases off along the way and ends with the only story that doesn’t have direct philosophical speech in it, the sailor’s story.

    HUGHES: One of the chapters includes the line, “To begin a story is already a fabrication.” Had you already settled on the idea of randomizing the assembly of the film before discovering that line? Was it one more little point of connection between you and Anders?

    REY: I was settled on the randomness very early, but I was interested in that chapter not just because of that line but because I think that’s what relations are. It’s a very brilliant point.

    HUGHES: Is the randomization essential to the politics of the film? To your and Anders’ critique of totalitarianism?

    REY: I think so. The way the audience sees it, knowing it could be in another order, this opens something. It goes through your mind, “Oh, but this could have gone before what I just saw.” I’m interested in the variety of visual and aural experiences you can create with cinema. I’ve been a watcher of experimental films for a number of years, and I think that’s really something experimental film explores and can keep exploring. Although I think my films are maybe somewhere apart from experimental film now.

    HUGHES: In what sense?

    REY: Well, because I think the term “experimental” has now become historical. It’s time for the landscape to be remapped. When I hear “experimental” it’s like having a very old map. [laughs] I think it’s time for a certain corpus of work to be defended but not under the banner of “experimental”—under new banners.

    HUGHES: And are you willing to propose new banners?

    REY: No, no, no, I’m not. I don’t curate enough to really be able to think deeply enough about that. I don’t watch enough films. It feels a bit like it has a lot of weight, “experimental.”

    HUGHES: “Weight” in what sense?

    REY: I’m happy that the Wavelengths program here at TIFF has opened up. I was happy to see the crowd watching my film. I could feel they’re not necessarily the people who go out to see experimental film, and I very much like that. I like that the audience for my film can be wide and not used to watching that kind of cinema.

    HUGHES: What are your opportunities now for showing this film?

    REY: Well, I’ve been very lucky that this film has been shown, and is going to be shown, in a large number of festivals. Imagine trying to convince a producer today to make a 16mm film by saying, “It’ll show everywhere!” But we’ve shown it at about twelve festivals since Berlin, and there’s more coming.

    It’s very important to me to prove that you can still make films on film. There’s something very important about this. What’s at stake is organizing the possibility to continue producing on that medium. And showing films on that medium for people to curate. I’m surprised there’s not more questioning about that. Everyone has thrown up their hands and said, “It’s over. It’s over.”

    Of course, it will never be the same, and the industry will never come back completely We’ve set up a website, filmlabs.org, that is dedicated to artist-run film labs. L’Abominable is one of them, but there are many—27 worldwide, I believe—from Australia to Niagara Custom Lab here in Toronto. In the past fifteen years, equipment has become more and more available, sometimes for free because it was put out on the sidewalk. It’s just a matter of being at the right place at the right time to pick it up. We are trying to organize ourselves, as filmmakers, so that we can use it and make our work ourselves in a way that, while small, will also be very new in the history of cinema. I prefer to look at in that positive way rather than as the “twilight of cinema.”

    It’s not easy. It takes a lot of dedication, a lot of time. It takes proficiency in a number of fields, it takes people who are willing to do this, it takes places that are large enough to accommodate labs when you have no money. I’m sorry to be so materialistic, but we when we were evicted at L’Abominable, I faced this directly and was lucky enough to convince a city council next to Paris to give us space. So now we have space for at least a few years, where we’ve set up our equipment and will be able to make films.

    But even on the curating side it’s getting difficult. I’m amazed that cinematheques are willing to show films on digital formats, presented as “preservation.” They’ve abandoned showing the work in its original format. There was a big conference at the French Cinematheque and I didn’t hear them say, “We’ll show the films on film as long as we can. We’ll fight for that.” Not at all. Only the film museum in Vienna has made a strong stand on the matter.

    There’s a documentary festival in Lussas in France called Etats Generaux du Film Documentaire, and this summer they showed António Reis films, which are beautiful in 35mm. But they weren’t allowed to edit the reels together. Cinematheques hold prints but they won’t lend them because they’re too afraid that people will damage them. Prints cost so much, and they don’t have funding to strike new ones. They have funding only for digitization, and circulation is supposed to be digital. Preservation on film has become a secondary concern. It’s scary. In Lussas, it was shown in a small village from a truck that is like a travelling cinema. But since they didn’t have two projectors, there would be a kind of intermission after every reel and people got disgusted by the 35mm because they thought, “Well, this is shitty,” you know? It’s revolting, I think.

    I’m sorry. I get . . . [laughs]

    HUGHES: I was just about to say that you get more animated talking about preservation than about your film? Is that part of . . .

    REY: It’s totally part of what I do every day with the lab. I don’t have to get angry about my film, but I am angry about this situation. It goes back to the quote about totalitarianism that I read last night. I hope that showing a 16mm film makes a point.

    HUGHES: Wavelengths is always the highlight of this festival for me because it’s such a rare opportunity—especially for someone like me who lives in a relatively small town in the USA—to see grainy 16mm films and to hear the projector and to be reminded constantly that you’re watching film.

    REY: It’s a different medium in terms of perception, and it’s also a very different medium in terms of the work it requires, the practice, especially for filmmakers like us who process and print our own prints. Video has nothing to do with being confronted by chemicals and heavy machines. I hope we will find a way to continue. And I hope that people who show film will be keen on making it possible to show it.

  • TIFF 2011

    TIFF 2011

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    Festival Business

    The opening weekend of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival also signalled the beginning of TIFF’s second year in the $200 million dollar TIFF Bell Lightbox. The public side of the facility features five theatres, a ticket office, two galleries, a store and two cafés; the upper floors hold office space, private screening rooms, areas for press conferences, and a rooftop patio that brings a hint of movie-star flavour to the experience. (During one of my interviews up there I became convinced TIFF had bussed in models from South Beach for set decoration.) Cinephiles and critics are a notoriously finicky and cynical bunch, so there were lingering and inevitable grumblings about how the festival had “sold out” to real estate developers and deep pockets, but for two weeks in September each year, the Lightbox is exactly what Toronto needed. Along with providing several outstanding new theatres, it also solves countless logistical problems, especially on the press and industry side. As promised, the Lightbox has remapped the landscape of the festival. The once-popular Varsity theatre, which last year marked the northernmost edge of the fest, was finally dropped completely from the circuit, as the majority of public screenings continued their move south to the AMC and press and industry screenings were relocated to the Scotiabank. This year, TIFF also outfitted the Broadway-style Princess of Wales Theatre with state-of-the-art audio and projection, giving the festival one more venue on King Street for high-profile public events.

    As far as I know, no one threw a birthday bash for the Lightbox, but it has certainly become the focal point of the festival’s identity. Audiences were treated to two Lightbox-related trailers before each screening, one a general branding and marketing piece, the other an advertisement for a gallery exhibit of Grace Kelly memorabilia, “From Movie Star to Princess”. That exhibit is, I think, a useful illustration of how TIFF’s current artistic direction, especially in terms of year-round programming, walks the fine and well-worn line between engaging cinema culture and serving commercial interests. Princess Grace brings glamour, name recognition, and popular appeal to the Lightbox galleries, while also giving the Cinémathèque license to show films by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Fred Zinnemann. It’s a nice metaphor, also, for the festival proper, which, especially in recent years, has established itself as an increasingly important marketplace and launching ground for Oscar winners, while simultaneously working to maintain its reputation as North America’s most important showcase of world cinema. As far I could tell, TIFF managed to accomplish both this year. Clooney, Pitt and Gosling all looked great on the red carpet, apparently, and I saw a lot of very good films.

    City to City

    After stops in Tel Aviv and Istanbul, TIFF moved to Buenos Aires for its third annual “City to City” (CTC) program. Advertised as “an exploration of the urban experience through film”, CTC is a welcome addition in Toronto if only because it’s one more curated section of the catalogue. The festival’s massive size and its everything-for-everyone approach is, of course, both a blessing and a curse. TIFF watchers (yes, such people exist—I am one) have been known to gripe about the seemingly arbitrary programming distinctions: to cherry-pick one example, this year Bruce McDonald and Robert Guédiguian were deemed “Masters”, while the latest films by Ermanno Olmi and Terrence Davies showed up in “Special Presentations”. More significantly, screenings of repertory films have been almost completely eliminated from the festival due to the shuttering of the “Dialogues” program, at which filmmakers, actors, and other significant figures would introduce and discuss landmark films – Max Von Sydow on The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960), for example, or Sidney Lumet on The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946). CTC addresses both of those concerns. In each of its three years, CTC programmers have taken a commendably catholic approach, balancing commercial films with more difficult fare, recent work with a few from the vault. I was especially pleased to see Pablo Trapero’s Mundo Grúa (Crane World, 1999) in this year’s lineup, although I didn’t choose to see it again (the double-edged sword of repertory programming). In the fall issue of Cinema Scope, Argentinean film critic Quintín accuses TIFF of having a “paternalistic” regard for his home city and yet still praises many of the specific programming decisions. I can’t speak to the quality of the lineup as a whole, but by coincidence I ended my fest with three films from the program, all of which I quite liked, and all of which benefited significantly from the juxtaposition.

    The best of the films I saw in City to City— and one of the real highlights of TIFF, in general— was Nicolás Prividera’s Tierra de los Padres (Fatherland), although, frankly, I feel poorly equipped to discuss it in the detail it deserves owing to my scant knowledge of Argentina’s political history. Fatherland opens with a montage of black-and-white archival footage arranged sequentially from early-20th century film to recent video, most of it depicting war and civil unrest. The montage is set to a spirited rendition of the Argentinean national anthem and anticipates, in miniature, the overarching goals, both formally and rhetorically, of the film as a whole. Prividera ends the opening sequence by cutting to a high-angle shot of La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires’ wealthy Recoleta neighbourhood. Opened in 1822, the cemetery soon established itself as the final resting place for members of the city’s ruling and cultural elite. The more than 4,000 elaborately ornamented, above-ground vaults there include those of Eva Perón, Oliviero Girondo (whose poem “Atonement” features prominently in the film), and several presidents, governors and military leaders. Except for the closing sequence, a questionable helicopter-eyed shot that situates Recoleta within the larger context of Buenos Aires’ geography, both literally and economically, the remainder of Fatherland takes place within the high, marbled walls of the cemetery.

    After glancing at its description in the TIFF catalogue, I expected Fatherland to echo Forever (2006), Heddy Honigmann’s curious and sympathetic essay film about people who make pilgrimages to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Instead, Prividera’s style owes more to James Benning’s brand of structuralism and to John Gianvito’s recent tour of forgotten American gravestones and monuments, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007). Prividera recruits volunteers, presumably locals touring the cemetery, to read brief poems and snippets from letters, novels, essays, speeches and other historical texts that he has pasted into a thick red book. Each reader is staged in a static, precisely composed shot and recites his or her passage with little emotional expression. The duration of each shot is determined by the length of the reading, and Prividera adds syncopated beats to the rhythm of the film by regularly inserting documentary tableaux: friends singing sentimentally in front of Peron’s tomb, a busload of school children taking a guided tour, a young couple giggling and snapping photos as they emerge from an open vault, workmen cleaning and maintaining the grounds.

    Fatherland is interesting enough as a history lesson and as an ambivalent study of national memory; what makes it minute-to-minute compelling, however, is its form. Like Benning’s RR (2007), which finds infinite spatial variations in American landscapes, Prividera’s compositions are arresting as images in their own right, and the film’s repetitive structure trains viewers to spot the occasional, telling changes to the formula. For example, early in the film, a young man reads matter-of-factly from Juan Manuel de Rosas’ 1835 inauguration speech. It begins like so many of the shots that preceded it, but then the reader recoils ever so slightly, shocked at the words he’s hearing from his own voice. In the speech, De Rosas announced that the legislature had signed over to him absolute authority and that this concentration of power was necessary in order for him to save the country from itself. (When De Rosas was finally overthrown eighteen years later, the new national constitution included the “Suma del poder público” [Sum of public power], which made any future efforts to concentrate power in the executive branch a crime of high treason.) That brief pause by the reader, and the slight change of expression on his face, would be easily overlooked in other films; here, it’s a shock. Fatherland is most effective in moments like this, when it creates original and confrontational juxtapositions: a young member of the modern, educated upper class speaks in the voice of his country’s dictatorial past while only a few feet away, just outside the frame, working-class men scrub away at monuments to the dead for the benefit of tourists.

    One recurring theme at TIFF this year, particularly among the generation of filmmakers who remember 1968, was a wistful nostalgia for a time when meaningful political engagement seemed possible — revolutionary, even. In that context, Santiago Mitre’s directorial debut, El estudiante (The Student), was a fun change of pace. Mitre, who co-wrote Trapero’s Leonera (Lion’s Den, 2008) and Carancho (2010), is too young to be nostalgic (he was born in 1980) and too cynical to treat institutional politics as anything but the fuck-all world it is. Echoing a tale told in so many political biographies, Mitre’s hero, Roque (Esteban Lamothe), first becomes involved in a student movement because he’s trying to get laid. Paula (Romina Paula), a beautiful and committed teaching assistant, serves as Roque’s Virgil, leading him by hand (and another, more vital organ) through the Inferno of backstabbing, sloganeering and self-interest. Mitre’s script has often been compared by American critics to Aaron Sorkin, but the only similarities I see between the two are the word count and the coming-of-age thrill that flavours Roque’s first tastes of power. Sorkin’s four seasons of The West Wing are unapologetically romantic: the morally-correct politicians are always the smartest and most quick-witted people in the room. The Student makes no real effort to justify in moral terms — or even to explain — the goals of Roque’s maneuverings. There’s endless talk about “reform”, but as far as I can tell, the only real goal is to get one aging career politician a promotion. The Sorkin comparisons more likely stem from Mitre’s directorial style, which, though not yet in the league of David Fincher, does show a real knack for propelling narrative. Esteban Lamothe and Romina Paula are great on screen, both individually and together, which is essential for a film like this that, ultimately, is about getting fucked.

    Along with Crane World, the other open-vault film in this year’s City to City was Hugo Santiago’s Invasion (1969), which has, in recent years, re-entered circulation for the first time in decades after the discovery of a print in France. Co-written with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Invasión sits somewhere on the paranoid-dystopia spectrum between The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962) and Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), although it’s not nearly as good as either. The film concerns a small cadre of middle-aged men who look like bored bureaucrats but who are secretly scheming to steal a truckload of radio equipment from the nameless, vaguely defined totalitarian forces who rule the land. The best and most absurd scene takes place in a sterile white room with three televisions bolted to the wall. One of the men has been captured and is being slapped around on a chair while an elderly woman mops around him, secretaries come and go delivering memos, and the sounds of typewriters and Morse code can be heard in the background. The banality of evil, indeed. The defining pleasure of Invasión, though, is its chaotic style. Cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich, who went on to work with Marguerite Duras and Louis Malle, shoots Buenos Aires in stark, grainy black-and-white, and Santiago’s cutting turns the narrative into a bewildering calamity. There’s desperation in every image, and the heroes are always literally on the run — the best of the many chase scenes takes place in an abandoned railway car, for no apparent reason. Later, a getaway car is blown up on the side of the road, again for no apparent reason. Whether this is a critical exploration of authoritarianism or simply sloppy filmmaking can be debated (I and most of the critics I spoke to in Toronto leaned toward the latter), but the resulting film remains a fascinating curiosity.

    Wavelengths

    In each of the eight years I’ve attended TIFF, the most expertly curated section has been Wavelengths, its program of avant-garde films. Much of the credit for the program’s success, both in artistic terms and in gross sales (it’s become a consistent sell-out over the last few years), goes to Andréa Picard, who officially announced during the fest that this would be her last year at the helm. Rumours about the move had begun to swirl in late summer, and the annual, close-knit gathering of experimental filmmakers, critics, cinephiles and friends at the Art Gallery of Ontario certainly did nothing to tamper them. But rumours be damned. Regardless of the reasons for Andréa’s departure, it’s a major loss for TIFF, and one that will be felt acutely by those of us who have come to consider Wavelengths the reason to attend Toronto. During her five years as sole curator, she invited onto the stage of Jackman Hall the likes of Michael Snow, James Benning, Nathanial Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Jim Jennings and David Gatten. She championed brilliant younger filmmakers like Ben Russell, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Eriko Sonoda and Jennifer Reeves. And she supported the work of Toronto filmmakers, bringing much deserved attention to John Price, Chris Kennedy and Blake Williams, among others. On the last night of Wavelengths, before introducing his rapturous new film, The Return, Dorsky acted on behalf of most of us in the room when he gave Andréa a kiss and thanked her, sincerely, for the difficult and creative work she’s performed over the past few years.

    There were 25 films in Wavelengths this year, far too many to cover in detail. I’ll focus, instead, on a few standouts. The highlight of the first Wavelengths program, “Analogue Arcadia”, was Edwin Parker, Tacida Dean’s quiet and affectionate study of American artist Cy Twombly, who passed away just a few weeks before the screening. Dean shoots Twombly in grainy 16mm, alternating between close-up inserts of his hands or the sculptures and tools around his Virginia studio and longer shots of him at work, which on this particular day involves paying bills, a brief discussion of Keats with a visiting Italian curator, and lunch at a local diner. Twombly moves softly and speaks softly, and Dean watches it all patiently from a distance, squirrelling her camera away in unlikely places in the hope of capturing some nugget of insight from the 83 year-old. That’s what these portraits of the artist are for, right? Dispelling myths and stealing wisdom? Taking Twombly’s given name, Edwin Parker, for the title of her film suggests that Dean is more interested in the person who became the artist — or, perhaps, at this stage in his life, the man who remains after the artist. She implies that what connects the two, Edwin and Cy, might be something as simple and indescribable as taste. “I like that. [pause] I like that,” Twombly says with a sudden spark in his eye while looking at something just outside the frame. Edwin Parker ends, fittingly, with a kind of eulogy, a solemn and graceful shot of his studio after dark, where his sculptures stand in testament.

    The only feature-length film in Wavelengths this year was James Benning’s collection of video portraits, Twenty Cigarettes. As he travelled the world, Benning staged friends and acquaintances in front of various flat backdrops (an apartment wall, a graffitied steel fence, a sheet of plywood), asked them to smoke a cigarette, and then walked away, leaving them alone to interact with the camera however they pleased. The duration of each shot is determined by the smoker: in the opening minutes, for example, we watch Sompot Chidgasornpongse (a frequent collaborator with Apichatpong) struggle slowly and hilariously through his very first cigarette, while other, more practiced smokers make relatively quick work of it. The cigarette, of course, is a gimmick, the excuse Benning needed to get people in front of his camera and make them drop their pretenses and reveal their “real” faces. “The guard is down and the mask is off,” Walker Evans wrote, describing his own surreptitious photos of Depression-era subway riders. Evans’ book, Many Are Called, is a precedent for Benning’s work here, as is Jon Jost’s essay film, Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), in which Jost invites strangers to pose for a photo and then pretends to fix a problem with the camera while his subjects “perform” nervously in front of it, first growing irritated and then, eventually, becoming bored and expressionless.

    Benning became interested in shooting faces again, he says, after revisiting Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965-66) for the first time in many years and after remaking two of his own films, One Way Boogie Woogie (1977, 2004) and North on Evers (1991, 2010). Twenty Cigarettes is certainly a more intimate experience than Warhol’s shorts. The simple, repetitive compositions and depthless backdrops focus the viewer’s attention squarely on the smokers’ faces, and the images eventually shrug off any would-be cinematic iconography. A few of the smokers attempt to strike a pose (filmmaker Thom Andersen is probably the most successful), but the deliberate awkwardness of the exercise frustrates their efforts. An attractive woman drops her femme fatale pout after the smoke repeatedly drifts into her eyes, causing her to squint and flinch. A young man maintains his tough-guy attitude for as long as he can muster it before finally giving in, stubbing out his cigarette halfway through, and walking away. “I feel like I know them all well now,” Benning says about the smokers. “It’s a funny thing. When I watch it now there’s a point in each shot when I feel the person.” That intimate connection between the filmmaker and his subjects proves to be both a strength and a weakness of Twenty Cigarettes. When I spoke with Benning after the screening, he seemed a bit sentimental. We talked more about the people in the film than about shot duration, off-screen space or digital technologies. In his attempt to “map the world into a package of cigarettes”, he’s made a kind of autobiography at one remove. Twenty Cigarettes is nostalgic and sweet, even, but it lacks the formal invention that makes Benning’s best work so impossibly compelling.

    The third Wavelengths program, “Serial Rhythms”, was a prototypical Andréa Picard collection. It included new work by several filmmakers who she has supported consistently over the years (Price, T. Marie, Kevin Jerome Everson and Rose Lowder, whose Bouquets series continues to be among cinema’s most perfect things) and also featured this year’s lone avant-garde “classic”, a restored print of Sailboat (Joyce Wieland, 1967), which struck me as an exercise in semiotics leavened by a punk rock wink. The 3-minute film shows a grainy blue image of sailboats passing at a distance from left to right, while the top half of the frame is dominated by the word “Sailboat” in block white type. The real discoveries of the program, though, were Jonathan Schwartz’s A Preface to Red and Karen Johannesen’s Resonance. Shot in Turkey, Schwartz’s film is part ethnography, part Vertovian collage. It opens on a field of red brakelights in a nighttime shot of traffic before moving into daylight and a series of portraits, street scenes and bits of abstraction. The thrill of the film — and it really is an exciting viewing experience — is generated by the cacophonous soundtrack, a mixture of electric white noise, thumping dance music, sirens, and distant voices, and by Schwartz’s associative cutting. Resonance is a fine illustration of Picard’s curatorial fondness for op art. (“Serial Rhythms” was a physically demanding program to sit through. My eyes ached when it was over.) Constructed from blown-up 8mm images of porch railings against a brick wall, the film is a rapid-fire, pulsing object. Johannesen introduces the basic material of the film — horizontal and vertical lines, warm sunlight and shadow, positive and negative space—in the opening seconds, then works through evolving variations on the theme, causing the screen to shake and grow.

    When I first read a description of Blake Williams’ Coorow-Latham Road, which closed out the fourth program, “Space is the Place”, I worried that it was so perfectly conceived that the description alone was enough, that actually watching the 20-minute video might seem redundant. Using Google Street View, Williams stitched together some 3,000 individual clips of a deserted highway in Southwest Australia, reconstructing the 46-kilometer route from the town of Coorow, named for the aboriginal word for a local stream, to Latham, named for an early English settler. The concept is thoroughly contemporary, relying on 21st-century technologies for its raw material, but Williams’ process for joining the images — Picard dubs it “spectral bookbinding” — harkens to the 19th century and the earliest days of the Kinetoscope. William’s formal strategy proves a fascinating and clever approach to the content. By no means an explicitly political film, Coorow-Latham Road does, however, foreground the colonialist history of the area by giving us a new (in the Modernist sense) perspective on the Outback, by which I mean both the literal geography of the place and also the “landscape” as a time-worn subject of art. The duration of the film is essential in this regard. Images fly by in silence, morphing impressionistically from one to the next, and for minutes at a time there are no signs of human life whatsoever. Williams very gradually pans (if that word is even appropriate here) to the left until even the last remnant of culture, the road itself, is beyond the edges of the frame. Google’s algorithm for interpolating the area between photos is optimised for urban and suburban spaces, so as the landscape streams by, it fractures occasionally into geometric shapes reminiscent of skyscrapers, an ironic visual metonym for “progress”. Watching Coorow-Latham Road proved, in fact, to be a singular experience, even within such a strong program of avant-garde films. It is simultaneously thought-churning, anxiety-causing and beautiful.

    Vive la France

    As usual, Toronto was the first stop in North America for most of the Cannes premieres, which this year included an especially strong slate of French films. Given that this report will be published nearly seven months after Cannes, I’ll devote the majority of it to titles that premiered in Venice and at TIFF, but I do want to make brief mention of two titles in particular. Bertrand Bonello’s L’Apollonide (House of Tolerance) is the best of the bunch. Set in a Paris brothel at the turn of the century, it combines an anthropologist-like attention to the day-to-day routines of prostitution with an overwhelmingly sensuous visual style. This film is dripping with warm colour and lush fabrics, but they’re not just set dressings or fetish objects. L’Apollonide is a melodramatic reimagining of the Grand Guignol that generates staggering emotion from its images. Bonello wisely avoids loading the narrative with back stories for the women of the brothel or the wealthy men who visit them there and, instead, records their faces, gestures and small talk, which speak so eloquently of their dreams, pain, and disappointments.

    Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan), which also played at Cannes, is, like so much of his work, a fascinating and frustrating mess. Now six films into his career, I’ve begun to think of Dumont as a novelist at heart and a mostly failed image-maker. On occasion he creates startlingly original visions that burrow immediately to the core of his obsessions — think of Freddy and his friends vibrating rapturously as they practice drumming in La vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus, 1997) — but too often, especially in recent years, there has been a disconnect, I think, between his apparent intentions and his cinematographic style. Dumont told audiences in Toronto that the title of the new film could be treated as two separate words, that he was interested in “outside” (the camera only briefly moves indoors) and “Satan”. And so he shoots David Dewaele wandering without expression through the grey, desolate dunes of Boulogne sur Mer on France’s northern coast. Dewaele’s unnamed character is a prophet or a healer or a visionary of some sort; he’s also a jealous and vicious murderer. Dumont has often been described as a transcendentalist filmmaker (including by me), and Hors Satan certainly fits somewhere in that camp. He even makes allusions here to Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955) and to Tarkovsky’s final two films, Nostalghia (1983), in a test of faith scene that recalls Erland Josephson’s walk with a candle, and The Sacrifice (1986), when Dewaele envisions an apocalyptic fire. But even compared with Dumont’s previous films, Hors Satan feels like a calculated provocation, begging audiences to question, both intellectually and viscerally, the limits of faith or ethics or whatever it is that makes us draw a line between good and evil. I just wish the film itself offered more guidance and wisdom on the subject. Without it, Dumont comes off as a bit of a bully and a bore.

    At the midpoint of Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval’s previous feature film, La question humaine (Heartbeat Detector, 2007), Mathieu Amalric’s corporate psychologist is taken by some younger colleagues to a late-night rave, where he drinks too much, kisses the wrong woman, gets in a fight, and blacks out. It’s a familiar genre convention made new and strange by Klotz’s mise en scène. Every film noir detective eventually abandons objectivity and “makes the case personal” but never has that on-screen transition been so ecstatic and otherworldly. Klotz and Perceval’s latest, Low Life, exists somewhere in the same psychological, political and aesthetic realm as that rave, an anarchic, strobe-lit, techno-beat space where youth act on instinct and chase the sublime. In their press notes, Klotz and Perceval claim to have made the film for their children’s generation, who were born into a “globalized mess” of a world mediated by technology and devoid of meaningful political agency. The filmmakers temper their nostalgia with a genuine admiration for today’s 20-somethings, who are “more lucid, braver than most” and who “make up other ways of resistance.”

    Low Life begins as a street-level view of a student political movement before narrowing its focus to one couple in particular. Carmen (Camille Rutherford) and Hussein (Arash Haimian) meet when she and her friends confront the police at a squat for illegal immigrants where he has been helping out however he can. When Hussein receives word that his permanent refugee status has been denied, he and Carmen retreat into isolation, spending days together in bed behind a locked, hidden doorway. That plot summary begs comparisons with Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel, 2005) and The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), but Low Life is more directly indebted to the horror films of Jacques Tourneur, particularly I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Night of the Demon (1957). In the latter, men die for simply holding a cursed piece of paper (the film has often been read as an allegory for the loyalty oaths of the anti-Communist era); in Low Life, the curse is real: having the right papers in 2011 is for many quite literally a matter of life and death. Klotz shot Low Life on a Canon digital SLR and the results are a little unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth [2006] is the nearest point of reference). Most of the action takes place after dark, and Klotz’s high-contrast, desaturated palette of greens, yellows and browns turns Lyon into a gothic underworld, something akin to a Straub adaptation of Ann Rice. Low Life received mixed-to-negative responses when it premiered in Venice, but it was my favourite film at TIFF.

    Low Life also contains the single most striking image I saw at the festival. It comes near the end of the film, when a young, black immigrant paints his face white and performs a voodoo ritual. Klotz shoots him in a low-lit close-up. The paint has dried and begun to flake away, giving the boy’s face the appearance of a puzzle with missing pieces. It’s terrifying and uncanny, and a prime example of Klotz’s tendency to structure his dramas around brief, ecstatic interludes. By coincidence, the day after I saw Low Life, I encountered echoes of that image at the end of another zombie movie (of sorts), Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly. Akerman’s loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel ends with a minutes-long shot of the title character, a middle-aged Dutch trader in Southeast Asia who has been driven to madness by his own foolishness and avarice. Drawn to the jungle by promises of wealth, Almayer (Stanlislas Mehrar) marries out of self-interest and then, in deference to the wishes of his benefactor, surrenders his daughter, who he genuinely loves, to a distant boarding school. By the end of the film, he’s penniless, broken, and alone — “living dead all these years,” he says caustically.

    When I spoke with Akerman at TIFF, she actively resisted crediting the source material and claimed, instead, that the film owes as much to Murnau’s Tabu (1931) and to her own biography as it does to Conrad. Her reconfiguring of the original text reminded me most of Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Saragasso Sea, which foregrounds the racist assumptions in Jane Eyre by inventing a life and psychology for Charlotte Bronte’s exotic “madwoman in the attic”. Akerman’s film likewise rounds out the two female characters who are given short shrift in Conrad’s novel, Almayer’s estranged, Malaysian wife (Sakhna Oum) and their mixed-race daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion). By simply casting the wife’s role — by giving her a body and a voice — Akerman exposes all of the tragedy in her situation that Conrad elides. Akerman also shifts the balance of the novel’s perspective by moving more scenes to the city and, in doing so, gives more weight to Nina’s story. When Nina is finally evicted from the strict, Catholic boarding school, Akerman follows her in a long tracking shot through a dark, busy street in Phnom Penh (Cambodia stands in for Malaysia). Marion walks like a model, with her neck straight and her shoulders arched, and Akerman allows us the time and opportunity to really watch her. It’s a powerful moment of rebirth for a young woman who has spent the majority of her life “in jail” (Akerman’s words), but her triumph is short-lived. When Nina finally confronts the father who abandoned her, she tells him bitterly, “They taught me to walk like a real girl.” A contemporary, sympathetic reading of Conrad’s novel might commend it for its critique of the dehumanising tendencies of colonialism, both on the colonised and the coloniser, but Akerman goes a few steps further. By rebalancing the dynamics of the central relationships, she finds — surprisingly, perhaps — greater sympathy for everyone involved.

    Philippe Garrel’s latest, Un été brûlant (That Summer), begins with a fantasy. We’re first introduced to François (Louis Garrel), who is drinking alone and moodily (it’s Louis Garrel after all) on a sunny afternoon, before Garrel cuts to a high-angle shot of a fully nude, reclining Monica Bellucci, who slowly reaches out her hand toward the camera. Bellucci, we eventually learn, plays Angèle, François’s movie-star wife. Theirs is a tempestuous relationship marked by jealousy, betrayal and also deep, genuine affection. François is a recognisable Garrel “type”: artistic, melancholic, charming, reticent and philandering. Angèle is a bombshell and makes no apologies for it (it’s Monica Bellucci after all), but in her marriage, at least, she’s also sincere and solicitous. When François invites Paul (Jérôme Robart) and his girlfriend Élisabeth (Céline Sallette) to come live with them for the summer in Rome, Un été brûlant appears to be making that familiar turn into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory, where the outsiders act as both a mirror and a catalyst, provoking a final, furious confrontation. And in some ways, that is, indeed, what happens, but Garrel’s compassion for each of the four characters prevents the film from becoming schematic. Like Klotz and Perceval, Garrel looks upon the next generation with both wonder and concern. There’s a moving and deep sadness in this film. It’s that familiar soul sickness that plagues so much of Garrel’s work. But unlike, say, La frontière de l’aube (Frontier of Dawn, 2008), which is so self-contained and dire, Un été brûlant exists in a larger world, where joy and sacrifice can offer absolution. Credit for the difference between the two films goes equally to Willy Kurant’s beautiful colour photography; to the invention of Paul and Élisabeth, who offer glimpses of an alternative to François’s despair (between this film and L’Apollinade, Céline Sallette was the star of the fest); and to a brief, unexpected, final on-screen appearance by Maurice Garrel, whose laughter and kind gaze haunt the film.

    Other Fall Premieres

    I saw a handful of other features that premiered in either Venice or Toronto, and among them were the only two films at the fest I actively disliked. Steve McQueen’s Shame stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a wealthy New York businessman whose sex addiction begins to intrude into other areas of his carefully compartmentalised life. Carey Mulligan plays his sister, a pixie-ish, down-and-out lounge singer with razor-scarred wrists. Through their manic-depressive interactions, we’re gradually given vague glimpses into Brandon and Sissy’s shared and presumably tragic past. “This film features a sex-addicted character, but it’s actually about much more,” Shame’s defenders would argue, and I suppose I see their point. But McQueen’s artifice-obsessed visual style, questionable plotting (particularly a homophobic turn near the end), and Harry Escott’s bombastic score keep getting in the way. The only time Shame really came to life for me was during a long scene between Brandon and a coworker who he’s met for a date. Fassbender’s uncanny charm plays against him in interesting ways as he struggles, awkwardly, to maintain his pose.

    The other major disappointment of the fest also came from England. I was intrigued by the prospect of Andrea Arnold directing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights because her first two films, Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009), are visually interesting but poorly plotted. I’d hoped that being constrained by a classic text would rein in her histrionics, and, indeed, for the first half hour or so the film does produce an exciting frisson. By casting young, working-class non-actors in the lead roles, and by making Heathcliff black rather than the “gypsy” of Brontë’s novel, Arnold defamiliarises a tale that has become bloated over the years with stuffy British airs. Watching Hindley Earnshaw act out his sadistic cruelty on Solomon Glave’s young black body — Arnold shoots with the same hyperrealism that characterises her other films — is a decidedly unusual viewing experience and one that forced me to rethink the Heathcliff creation story. The novelty, however, soon wears thin as Wuthering Heights follows the course set by Arnold’s first two films, collapsing into a frenzied mess in the final act.

    Two more auteurs premiered adaptations of classic texts this fall, both of them grotesque, absurd, and, on occasion, surprisingly stirring. Alexander Sokurov’s Faust opens with a CGIed descent through the clouds and a God’s eye view of a small mountain town whose Expressionistic design recalls Murnau’s famous telling of the Goethe tale. Sokurov then cuts to a close-up of a rotting cock. “Where is the soul?” Faust asks, leaning his face in close to the flayed corpse. Rather than concentrating on the consequences of Faust’s famous bargain (which, ultimately, don’t seem particularly grave), Sokurov is more interested in the motivating temptations. Mephistopheles appears in the form of a hunchbacked moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), who leads Faust (Johannes Zeiler) by the hand through the town — and through an endless, rambling discourse — before finally stumbling upon a soul-worthy prize, one night with the beautiful and innocent Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk). Sokurov packs his 4:3 frame with bodies that are in constant, stumbling motion. For the majority of its 130 minutes, Faust exists in a claustrophobic and deeply unpleasant world, which makes the few moments of clarity, particularly one radiant and silent close-up of Gretchen, all the more moving and sacrifice-worthy.

    Guy Maddin’s Keyhole is a gangster-style adaptation of The Odyssey set entirely in Ulysses Pick’s (Jason Patric) family home. Accompanied by an eccentric menagerie of characters, including a beautiful drowning victim and her tied-up lover, Manners, Ulysses sets off for the top floor in hopes of reconciling with his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini). Along the way they encounter ghosts of the dead and visions of trauma from the past. There are monsters to be fought, including a hilarious-if-juvenile joke of a Cyclops, and we eventually learn that Manners is, in fact, Ulysses’s lost son. Keyhole is a perverse and barely coherent explosion of Freudian chaos, even by Maddin’s own standards, and the critical consensus has been mostly negative. What saves it, I think, and what makes it very much a Maddin film, is the final reel, when the ghost story fantasy fades, leaving only the home, an epic battlefield. In the end, Keyhole is Manners’ story, and the emotional core of the film is that primal desire for the domestic security of childhood.

    The most pleasant surprise of the fest was Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, which begins in the vein of Antonioni before settling into something much smaller and more intimate. Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are an engaged couple backpacking through eastern Europe. The film opens as they arrive in a small town in Georgia, where they spend an evening drinking and dancing before deciding to hire a local, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), to lead them on a four-day hike through the desolate Caucasus mountains. Alex and Nica are by every indication a warm and committed couple. Loktev devotes the entire first half of the film to documenting the particular ease they share with one another — the way they pass familiar glances when in the company of strangers, or the simple pleasures they enjoy when climbing rocks together and making love. When the couple and their guide set off into the wilderness, Loktev breaks the narrative into chapters, dividing the sections with long, painterly shots of the imposing Georgian landscape accompanied by dissonant strings. These chapter breaks only heighten the increasingly palpable sense of dread and danger that characterises the first half of their journey.

    I was frustrated by Loktev’s first narrative feature, Day Night Day Night, because her decision to elide the specific political motivations of her central character, a would-be suicide bomber, turns the film into a prolonged exercise in Hitchcockian suspense. The deliberate ambiguity there seems provocative in the worst sense of the word. The Loneliest Planet turns on a similarly ambiguous provocation, but it works brilliantly in the context of this specific relationship. At the midpoint of the film, two men stumble upon the couple’s camp, and after exchanging heated words with Dato, the older of the two raises his AK-47 and points it at the young lovers. Alex, in a flash of instinct, pushes Nica between himself and the gun before immediately recognising his mistake and stepping back in front of her. It’s an unexpectedly literary turn for a film like this, the kind of obnoxiously symbolic moment that would doom a Hemingway hero. But Loktev does something remarkable with it. Instead of taking the expected turn toward increasing conflict and violence (I worried briefly I was in for another Gerry [Van Sant, 2002] or Twentynine Palms [Dumont, 2003]), Loktev simply continues documenting their relationship. They walk on in silence now, traumatised by the event and by Alex’s “shameful” behaviour. I use scare quotes there because the film forces us to judge Alex and also to examine our own gendered standards. The film is most interesting, though, as a portrait of a loving relationship in a moment of crisis. Alex follows Nica through an abandoned house, desperate to reach out and comfort her but familiar enough with her behaviour to know that it’s not yet time. Dato, unexpectedly, becomes a temptation for Nica, an embodiment of the petty, what-if fantasies we all have when we fight with our partners. Loktev wisely leaves the fate of the couple undecided, which is precisely why the film works so well. Long-term relationships last because both people commit to the struggle of forgiveness and reconciliation. The Loneliest Planet gives us every reason to believe Alex and Nica can survive as a couple, but will they?

  • Lisandro Alonso: Who’s John Ford?

    Lisandro Alonso: Who’s John Ford?

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

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

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

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

    * * *

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

    ALONSO: You mean the girl?

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

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

    HUGHES: How did you find it?

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

    HUGHES: How long did you stay with them?

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

    HUGHES: Yes.

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

    HUGHES: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ALONSO: … which part? [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: Well, both, I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    HUGHES: Do you know Pedro Costa’s films?

    ALONSO: [Smiles] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    HUGHES: I assume he went back to the ship.

    ALONSO: How does he get there? By walking?

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

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

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

    ALONSO: Like The Shining!

    HUGHES: He gets lost in the labyrinth!

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

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

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

  • Albert Serra: Iconic Images

    Albert Serra: Iconic Images

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Like Hamlet’s two doomed friends in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Three Kings who wander through Albert Serra’s El Cant dels ocells (Birdsong, 2008) are tangled in an existential snarl. Were one of the Wise Men to wander too far away from his companions, one suspects they would all suddenly lose their essential Three Wise Men-ness and vanish in a cloud of smoke. They inhabit, as Serra describes it, an absurd “land of nowhere”, a fleeting moment of historical time and space in which Christianity is relatively free of ideology and meaning, and among Serra’s many remarkable accomplishments in the film is his discovery of a cinematographic analogy for that moment.

    In an era when the long take has become a hallmark of world art cinema, Serra tests the limits of each composition. The Wise Men are, at one moment, bumbling sojourners on a fool’s errand and, at the next, genuine icons of faith and devotion. Serra’s camera stands at a distance, watching it all with an amused but reverent curiosity. His images are simple and lovely – filmed reflections of one King’s observation early in the film: “At times we’re awestruck by the beauty of things.”

    * * *

    HUGHES: I grew up in a very pious Christian home, and it occurred to me while watching your film that I really only know the story of the kings through a few iconic images.

    SERRA: These are truly iconic images.

    HUGHES: I assume that is something that interested you? Since so little is known about the wise men, you have great freedom to interpret them however you like.

    SERRA: What interested me was to mix into the film different atmospheres. So, in the film there is humour but at the same time there is a seriousness. There are some classical, iconic religious images, especially in the shots of the Virgin Mary (Montse Triola) and Joseph (Mark Peranson), which I took quite seriously, but at the same time there are also profane shots. The risk of the film, what I love about it, is the mixture of these two atmospheres.

    We are talking about three men. (1) Christianity has not been born yet. All of the ideology, what Jesus means, we added later. We’re talking about the pioneers. Just three men who probably feel stupid, you know? They don’t know why they are going to see this child, or where they’re going, or how long it will take. They’re following a star to find a small child in order to adore him. There is something absurd here, something profane, because Christianity doesn’t yet exist.

    But, at the same time, it’s the beginning of everything. At this moment, Christianity is being born but it hasn’t yet grown up. We’re in this land of nowhere. It’s an absurd situation because they don’t know Christianity will become this big thing, but at the same time they know they are looking for something very important.

    HUGHES: You keep using the word “absurd”. My first note, midway through the opening shot, was “Beckett”.

    SERRA: Yes, of course. Absurdity in cinema today is something provocative. We are used to seeing narrative films where every shot is related to the shot before and to the shot we will see next. My taste for films is nearer to the way you read a poem. When you read a poem, you don’t expect every verse to have an obvious meaning. Perhaps it’s only a suggestion. Perhaps it’s only there because a word has a particular sonority or creates a particular image or atmosphere. You don’t expect each line to be perfectly comprehensible.

    My film, like a poem, has freedom inside of it, but at the same time it’s very calculated. Each shot is carefully worked by the author, but always with some freedom inside it. It’s like a koan – one image colliding with another.

    I shot 110 hours and edited it myself. You have to be very sensitive to edit all of this material. The film was clear. It took me two months to build the structure of the film and then I edited for another four months, but I only cut one image! The work of this four months was editing the length of each shot.

    This is important. I am one of the only filmmakers today who works on the set without a monitor. I use digital technology but in an old school way. Like [Luis] Buñuel or [Carl Th.] Dreyer or [Yasujiro] Ozu or [Pier Paolo] Pasolini, I never saw one image of the film before I finished shooting. The old masters never saw footage until it had been developed at the lab. I discover the film later, when there is nothing else to do.

    This is important because it’s a question of faith – faith in the film. You have to be more attentive to the details, to the atmosphere of the film. If you are looking at a monitor, you do not really feel the film. You see an image, but you do not feel the film. How can you make a decision looking at a small monitor? A lot of filmmakers react to what they see in the monitor and begin to doubt themselves, make changes. They don’t feel the film.

    HUGHES: There seems to be a whole class of filmmakers today who trust long takes to reveal mysteries about their characters.

    SERRA: It’s easy to shoot someone’s face, I think. One of the points of Birdsong is trying to find some magic in images shot from very far. It’s more difficult to keep the power of the film without first shooting close-ups. In my earlier films, there are a lot of close shots of faces, and I thought, “Well, let’s try changing things a bit, because perhaps it’s too easy.” A face is always interesting. The viewer is trying to discover, “What is this character thinking?” But put him further away and it’s much more difficult to keep that magic.

    HUGHES: I wanted to ask you about one really long shot, where the three men are walking off toward the horizon. Did you adjust the camera at all in that shot or is it just the naturally changing light?

    SERRA: No. The magic of this shot … When I began editing I was scared that people would get bored watching this shot, but what I’ve discovered is nobody gets bored. [Laughs.] Nobody. Nobody! Even the most primitive, stupid spectator keeps looking and keeps wondering, “What’s happening?” And it’s ten minutes. No, eleven. Eleven minutes!

    So, why does it work? The entire film, but this shot in particular, has the right percentage of freedom inside mixed with the right percentage of necessity or structure. How did I do this? This is important to understanding the whole film. I gave the actors a walkie-talkie and told them, “Go away. I will tell you what to do. You will listen and react.” The rules on set were: “Never look at me, never talk to me, and never stop acting. You’re tired? Fine. Get a drink. Or fall asleep. Do what you want to do, but never look at me, never talk to me, and never stop acting.”

    So, I sent them off walking across the desert with the walkie-talkie. And there they go. Walking. Walking. And then I started speaking jumbled words. And I could tell they were saying to each other [whispers], “Mother? Wall? Tree? What is this? The walkie-talkie must not be working.”

    I’m saying something that’s completely unrelated, you know? But they have to react. Each reacts in his own way. And, five or ten seconds later, I say, “Please! A mother! Tree! Sky!” And they all stop and think, “Tree? Sky?” But they stop and look off at the sky.

    So, in this shot, I got the right percentage of real freedom – because they really don’t know what to do – but at the same time there is some kind of necessity because you feel that they are following something. They are following my absurd instructions. They didn’t understand what I was saying, but there is something imperative in their walk.

    I used this technique many times in the film. It’s very beautiful. I used it with Mark Peranson’s scenes. He speaks Hebrew, right? The Virgin Mary speaks Catalan. They do not understand each other. I didn’t worry about translating, but, when you read the subtitles, they’re okay, like intuition. Again, the actors have a level of freedom, because they really do not understand exactly what the other is saying, but at the same time they are bound by necessity. They are performing the roles of Mary and Joseph, so they can’t do exactly what they want.

    This is all related to the first point of our discussion – this mixing of a serious and religious side with a more profane and free side.

    HUGHES: When we finally see the pieta, you shoot it from above and behind Mary.

    SERRA: Yes. We got that in one shot. I wanted to make a simple film, like paintings from the Middle Ages. It’s not narrative. It’s one image … stop … another image. It’s like if you were in a church and saw Middle Age paintings side by side. Very simple.

    HUGHES: One of the other iconic images is of them spotting the star. You stage it so that they strike a pose, pause, reposition themselves, strike another pose, pause and so on.

    SERRA: That shot is very humoristic, but also serious. And you never really know what to think of the atmosphere of any single moment.

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you describe Birdsong as one of the first truly religious films in many years.

    SERRA: It’s true.

    HUGHES: In what tradition of religious films would you like to see your film included?

    SERRA: I don’t know. The tradition of Dreyer, [Roberto] Rossellini, Pasolini, maybe.

    HUGHES: What distinguishes their films from others? What makes them truly religious?

    SERRA: Well, they are not “truly religious” films, no? Great art, I think, always has ambiguity and a richness that allows viewers to apply many points of view. Pasolini was a Communist and he made religious films. Rossellini was engaged politically but made The Flowers of St Francis [Francesco, giullare di Dio, 1956].

    HUGHES: I thought of St Francis many times while watching Birdsong.

    SERRA: It has the best ending in film history. Do you remember? When they have to decide where to go, all of disciples, to spread the word of St. Francis? Do you remember? [Serra stands up and begins walking in a small circle, re-enacting the scene.] They start doing this, until they fall. And when one falls, that is the direction they must go. Do you remember? I think that is the best ending in all of film history. It has that beautiful ambiguity. It’s serious – they really do want to go and spread the word of Christ – but the moment is also poetic and humorous.

    HUGHES: There’s one especially poignant line in Birdsong. One of the wise men picks up a stone and says, “At times, we’re awestruck by the beauty of things.” I love that word “things”. It’s a material beauty.

    SERRA: We are talking about three wise men, who were supposed to be magicians or men of great intelligence, but it’s the simple things. In St Francis, there is the scene where one man is accidentally burned and begins to complain and curse, and another man says, “Oh, do not bother Brother Fire.” This kind of purity and innocence is magic, and it’s what I wanted to create in the atmosphere of my film.

  • Claire Denis: Dancing Reveals So Much

    Claire Denis: Dancing Reveals So Much

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    The centrepiece of Claire Denis’ 35 rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2008) is a long sequence that takes place in a small, mostly-empty restaurant. It is late at night and the four central characters have wandered in for a drink after their car breaks down in a rainstorm. Alex Descas plays Lionel, a middle-aged widower and train engineer who’s spending the evening with his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a former lover (Nicole Dogué), and Noé (Grégoire Colin), his long-time neighbour and surrogate son. The scene is, as Denis describes it, “a sort of tragedy, in a family sense”, but it’s rendered with staggering joy and tenderness. The turning point comes as The Commodores’ “Nightshift” plays over the radio. Lionel hands Joséphine to Noé and then watches silently as his daughter dances away with another man.

    Directly inspired by Yasujiro Ozu’s Banshun (Late Spring, 1949), 35 Shots of Rum is a departure from the epic, conceptual adventures of L’Intrus (The Intruder, 2004) and from the abstract video experiments of Vers Mathilde (Towards Mathilde, 2005). It is a smaller, more intimate film – closer in spirit to Vendredi Soir (Friday Night, 2002) and Nenette et Boni (1996). Denis’s preoccupation with outsiders and with the sociopolitical forces that determine their lives remains, but, with the exception of one scene in a college classroom, it remains inexplicit. This is a love story – or, in fact, several love stories – told in small gestures and commonplace tragedies.

    * * *

    HUGHES: 35 Shots of Rum was a bit of a surprise.

    DENIS: Really? I’m a little bit flabbergasted because last night the screening was great, and I think most of the audience really loved the film – it was kind of warm and soft when I came up for the Q&A – but there were a few stupid questions. I was terribly shocked. One question was, “We are people from North America and, if we see a character filmed from behind, it means something is going to happen.” And I said, “Yeah, I agree with that. It’s another way to look at someone.” And then the woman went on: “And if it’s only to fall off a bicycle [or something relatively insignificant], then it’s a little bit unfair.”

    I consider that a very interesting question, in that maybe the stereotypes [about black people] are much stronger than I thought. I told her that this way of looking at people has long existed in painting. It’s a sort of way of being with them. From a French point of view, it means that anything might happen to them, but not necessarily being shot or stabbed.

    HUGHES: Over the years, I have learned that I need to see your films twice because I tend to spend 30 or 40 minutes reading them incorrectly.

    DENIS: I’m sorry. It’s not on purpose.

    HUGHES: No, it’s one of the things I love about your films. Like your audience member, I think I was imposing suspense onto the film that wasn’t there.

    DENIS: Maybe the suspense comes from introducing the main four characters, their lives, but leaving the links connecting them untold. I thought that maybe if the story began by introducing a very together group – a father, a daughter, a neighbour – and their own rituals, it could create its own suspense. I was not trying to invent suspense.

    HUGHES: Audiences have been conditioned to expect a major conflict, whereas your film is about genuinely loving, supporting relationships.

    DENIS: But it’s also a sort of tragedy, in a family sense. It’s the major separation. It’s probably the worse separation since the mother died. They have built this sort of balance in their lives, their small rituals, and, whatever happens afterwards, they will be marked by that day forever.

    HUGHES: When my father-in-law passed away a few years ago, we found a frame on his desk at work. On one side of the frame was a photo of my wife as a four-year-old ballerina; on the other side was a photo of her on our wedding day.

    DENIS: Yes. Although I can say the film is a homage to Ozu, it’s also the story of my mother and my grandfather. He was a widower and he raised my mother. Now my mother is 80, and my father is sort of weak and is a dying man. When she’s sad in the night, she will call me or my brother or sister, and often she will tell us, “Well, probably the man who was the most important man in my life was not your father but my father.” We know she dearly loves her husband in a husband-and-wife way, but getting older she has a new perspective.

    HUGHES: After seeing Vers Mathilde and the videos you made with Sonic Youth, I was expecting your camera to be more kinetic. You mentioned Ozu. Did he influence your work with [cinematographer] Agnès Godard here?

    DENIS: It’s not Ozu. I spoke with Agnès about bringing back Ozu, but obviously I would not have set the camera like him. I felt the film demanded a certain type of calm, and also handheld, so it’s sort of breathing. But my main desire was to make it simple and solid, because all of the characters are black, and I wanted to make it very clear to the audience that they do not live like clandestines. They have a real life, they are settled, they are French. And I thought if the camera were shaky, it would make their life shaky.

    HUGHES: Was your first decision to make a film about a black family, or did you begin with the idea of casting Alex Descas as the father?

    DENIS: Remembering my grandfather. My grandfather came from Brazil and he was a very attractive man. He was non-French, not typically French. He had a sort of elegance. Of course, his wife, he met her in France. He came from Amazonia and, so, had this dark air, and he was also very gentle. As a grandfather, he would take me on his bike. He was the best grandfather. A prince. And I thought the only actor I really could imagine being as good as my grandfather was Alex.

    Also, a long time ago I told Agnès, “Alex, for me, has something close to Chishu Ryu”, the father in Ozu’s films, a sort of aloofness or secret. Then I met Mati [Diop] for his daughter, and little by little I found out that, without making a concept, it could normally organize the circle of relationships. I wanted it to not be a concept but to realize they were French, that they were there. There was nothing else to see. In France, whenever you see dark-skinned people, it’s always violent. And I thought, “Yeah, this also is true.” I think the real thing is that there is a community that is French and also has black skin, that is integrated but also rejected.

    HUGHES: I was interested to see the shots of the retirement party, where there are large groups of only black people.

    DENIS: In the commuting trains, many drivers, men and women, are from the Caribbean, like in the post office. But I made it most, so it was clear. I think when you make a mixture of black and white in film, it’s like, “Ha! This is a well-balanced film!” It’s like Benetton. One Asian person, one black person. It’s like advertisements. So, I made it really clear. [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: One of my favourite moments in any of your films is Grégoire Colin’s dance scene in U.S. Go Home, so it was great fun to see him dancing again. As soon as that scene began, I thought, “Now this is a Claire Denis film.”

    DENIS: [Laughs.]

    HUGHES: I also had the biggest smile on my face when “Nightshift” kicked in.

    DENIS: [Laughs.] Me too! Such a great song.

    HUGHES: How did you settle on that song?

    DENIS: Immediately! Writing the script, I thought, “This is a father dancing with his daughter. What will give that push so that Noé [Colin] will catch her? And what will make the father think, ‘Okay, this is it. I’m going to be the one to move. My daughter will not, so I will be the one to move.’”

    Honestly, I had no hesitation. The song is soft and warm and sexy and enveloping. For me, it was a very important song. When I asked Stuart Staples, the musician from Tindersticks [and Denis’s long-time composer and musical supervisor], about my choice, he said, “I agree completely!” It was nice, also, because the first idea of “Nightshift” – although I like the song – came because I thought there was a sort of “night shift” happening in the scene.

    HUGHES: Also, the song is literally a remembrance of loss and tragedy.

    DENIS: Yes.

    HUGHES: Your films are so much about bodies in motion and in relation to one another. Those are always my favourite moments in your films – when you fix your camera on your actors’ bodies.

    DENIS: But you know, it’s not involuntary – of course, it’s voluntary – but I’m a complete amateur. Apart from being, since I was a teenager, addicted to music and dance and nightclubbing, I never thought about choreography. And it’s only because, after a while, choreographers came to me and said, “We are interested in your work.” Like Bernardo Montet, with whom I made Beau Travail. I was not aware. I was just doing it the way I felt it.

    Maybe I was lucky also to find actors and actresses who were shy actors ready to let something go in the dancing scenes, like many people. I remember when I was young, a teenager, and going to parties and dancing, that girl, that boy, both very shy, suddenly revealing so much by dancing.

    HUGHES: On YouTube, there’s a video – I don’t know who shot it – of Denis Lavant in a rehearsal space, working, I assume, with students. Have you seen it?

    DENIS: No.

    HUGHES: It’s fascinating. For example, at one point he falls and gets back up again, falls and gets back up again, but always gracefully. His students try, and they keep slamming their heads on the floor and hurting themselves. There’s such beauty and mystery in just watching Lavant’s body.

    DENIS: But we never rehearsed the dance scene at the end of Beau Travail. I told him it’s the dance between life and death. It was written like that in the script, and he said, “What do you mean by ‘the dance between life and death’?” So, I let him hear that great disco music [laughs], and he said, “This is it.” So, we didn’t need to rehearse. I would be there, and I would let it go. He said, “You don’t want us to fix some of it?” I thought it was better to keep the energy inside, because if we started fixing some stuff then we would have made many takes. And we made one take. But he was exhausted at the end.

    HUGHES: Your films are often filtered through a character’s subjectivity. In 35 Shots of Rum, there’s just that one shot of the father and daughter on horseback.

    DENIS: I thought it was a dream.

    HUGHES: It was the one moment that seemed to slip out of a more objective camera position.

    DENIS: It’s because of the Goethe poem [“Der Erlkonig”] about the father riding his horse with his baby, who is dying of a high fever. I felt that because of the German wife. He holds his daughter and he feels the horse is too slow and maybe he will be too late to the next village to save her. The poem is more famous for being sung in a Schubert liede.

    HUGHES: This is Mati Diop’s first film?

    DENIS: She is not an actress. She is studying to be a film director. She has already made two short films, and she’s the daughter of a musician in Senegal, Wasis Diop, and the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, the famous film director from Senegal who died ten years ago.

    HUGHES: How did you talk her into acting?

    DENIS: I met her. I saw one of her films and, of all the girls I met with Alex, she was the one I really trusted. I didn’t want her to be only pretty. I wanted her to be brave and intelligent.

    HUGHES: Apparently you have almost finished another film, White Material. When will that be released?

    DENIS: In the winter, I guess.

    HUGHES: Based on what I’d been able to find out about the two films, I was kind of surprised when 35 Shots of Rum was announced for Toronto. I’d expected the other one to be finished first.

    DENIS: The other one is not finished because it needs much more work. 35 Shots was short shooting, easy editing.

    HUGHES: Isabelle Huppert is in the new film?

    DENIS: Yeah. We get along well. I really love her.

    HUGHES: She’s one of the few actors or actresses who I think of as an auteur herself. She can command a film.

    DENIS: She’s not commanding. She’s a very intelligent actress. She is guessing and she’s inventing a relation with each director that creates an addiction to her. She’s not commanding because that would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction. Somehow the film becomes … her. Commanding would be too easy, you know? It’s much more seducing the way she’s doing it.

    HUGHES: What kind of character is she playing for you?

    DENIS: A woman who is brave and stubborn and doesn’t want to realize the country she is living in, in Africa, is at war. There is a war surrounding where she works and she should leave. She is staying for the worst.

    HUGHES: Have you ever read Nadine Gordimer’s novel, July’s People?

    DENIS: Yes, but I don’t like Nadine Gordimer. I’ve met her a few times and our chemistry … We didn’t experience Africa the same way.

    The only person I can feel so much is Doris Lessing. Nadine Gordimer is too dictatorial and she has no heart. I prefer [J. M.] Coetzee. Gordimer is forcing something and I can’t stand that.

  • Tren de Sombras (1997)

    Tren de Sombras (1997)

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “It isn’t life, but its shadow, it isn’t movement, but its silent ghost.… This, too, is a train of shadows.”
    – Maxim Gorky

    José Luis Guerín’s fourth feature-length film, Tren de sombras, is, like so much of the Spanish director’s work, a challenging and mesmerising hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: Seventy years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of Tren de Sombras, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. Much to his credit, Guerín, as he’s proven throughout his career, is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigour, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-Matrix, pop philosophy discourse.

    Tren de sombras begs comparisons with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and also, I suppose, with all the other narrative films that followed suit by revolving their plots around some formal aspect of the cinema (mise en scène, editing, sound design, etc.), thus foregrounding it in a self-reflexive, self-critical, and, one might cautiously add, postmodern way. Films like Blow Up, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) and, more recently, the work of Michael Haneke (Code inconnu [2000] and Caché [2005]), transform filmic materials into forensic artefacts, physical evidence to be meticulously examined and deconstructed. Attention to form is the hallmark of Guerín’s cinema, as demonstrated clearly in his latest films, the companion pieces Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia and En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (both 2007). The former is a silent, autobiographical, essay film constructed mostly of still, black-and-white, documentary photographs that harkens back not so much to Chris Marker, who famously used a similar technique in La Jetée (1962), but to Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century innovators of the “moving image”. In Unas fotos, Guerín wanders the streets of Strasbourg, chasing the ghost of a woman he met there more than twenty years earlier. Each photograph reconstructs and, in a sense, supplants a particular memory, transforming it, like one of Muybridge’s horses, into a single, extended frame in Guerín’s slow-moving picture. En la ciudad de Sylvia is a more traditional narrative film, shot in colour 16mm and blown up to 35mm, but it’s no less concerned with form. Here, Guerín again re-enacts his search for lost love in the streets of Strasbourg. However, the act is now made multivalent – curious, humane, nostalgic, voyeuristic – not unlike cinematic spectatorship in general.

    Likewise, the very subject of Tren de sombras allows Guerín to explore, both literally and metaphorically, the meaning of images. In Fleury’s footage, we see his extended family at their large home near the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, relaxing as if on holiday. They hike to a site overlooking a lake and picnic there. The children ride bicycles, play with dogs, and perform magic tricks. On several occasions the family poses for portraits. It’s only in the second half of Tren de sombras, after the author of the film begins to re-sequence shots, blow-up images in order to reveal lost details, and freeze particular frames, that we begin to detect something amiss among the Fleury clan. As in Antonioni’s film, there’s a fetishistic thrill to watching the clues become revealed through real, mechanical processes. Gérard Fleury rarely steps out from behind his hand-held camera, so nearly all that we witness in the old footage is from his first-person point-of-view (it’s similar to Unas fotos in that respect). The “author” first becomes fascinated by and suspicious of Fleury’s sister-in-law and pays particular attention to two shots of her, one on a swing, the other in a passing car. The author rewinds those shots, slows them to half speed, juxtaposes them in a split-screen, enlarges her face, and freezes the frames in which her eyes make direct contact with the camera (and by analogy with Fleury). What shared secrets are revealed in that glance? The mystery appears to be on the verge of revelation.

    Guerín, however, pushes the experiment even further than Antonioni, veering out of narrative filmmaking altogether and toward the truly avant-garde. To say that Guerín is fascinated by the texture of film is a literal truth. Near the end of Tren de sombras, the author’s use of Fleury’s footage becomes more playful, the pace of the jump-cuts more frantic, and the relationship between images more unpredictable and fractured. In a word, everything begins to disintegrate – the Fleury family relationships (or our tentative understanding of them, at least), the satisfying order the author had briefly conjured with his editing, and the literal, physical record of what we are studying – that is, the film itself. In Tren de sombras’ most compelling sequence, Guerín moves into pure abstraction, finding a Stan Brakhage-like beauty in the scratched and disintegrated material of the found footage. It’s a fascinating modernist turn for Guerín, a kind of escape from chaos into the aesthetic realm. In this sense, Tren de sombras would be at home programmed alongside the work of contemporary avant-garde filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky, and David Gatten.

    Like Guerín’s return to Strasbourg decades after his first encounter with Sylvia, Tren de sombras is also structured around a return to the scene of the crime: the village of Le Thuit and the estate where Fleury’s footage was shot. The author brings with him actors in period costumes and recreates scenes from the decayed home movies. He reverses angles, finding new clues and new shared glances. But even more interesting are the contemporary shots that seem totally unmotivated by the through-line of the plot. Again with one foot in the avant-garde, Guerín devotes considerable screen time to images of abstract beauty found among the prosaic. Several shots from a long sequence that takes place in the old home at night during a rainstorm would not be out of place in a Nathaniel Dorsky or Jim Jennings film. And one image in particular, the light cast by a passing car moving slowly along an interior wall, not only returns multiple times in Tren de sombres but also in the opening moments of En la ciudad de Sylvia, evidence that Guerín is still haunted by a train of shadows.

  • New Directions: The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival

    New Directions: The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    In the weeks preceding the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), there was, among industry watchers, critics and amateur cinephiles alike, a shared curiosity – and in many corners concern – about the changes afoot. 2008 was shaping up to be something of a transition year for the fest, the last hurrah before the grand unveiling of the TIFF Group’s Bell Lightbox, a $200 million dollar downtown commercial and residential development that promises to dramatically alter Toronto’s cinematic landscape. If the Lightbox opens as scheduled in time for TIFF ‘09, the festival will complete its shift several blocks to the south, a move that began in earnest this year with the addition of the new AMC 24 multiplex at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas and the elimination of the single screen at the Royal Ontario Museum further north. However, the full extent of the changes was not felt by loyal festival-goers until it was announced that, for the first time, individual donors would receive preferential treatment in the lottery for tickets, and passholders – those in the public who, year after year, shell out hundreds of dollars to see thirty or forty films – would be required to pay full price for additional tickets if they wished to attend screenings at the Elgin Theatre (a.k.a the Visa Screening Room). The move threatened to tarnish TIFF’s reputation as the most democratic of the world’s great film festivals. Toronto Sun critic Bruce Kirkland called the changes “a farce” and demanded the TIFF Group “give the Toronto film festival back to the people.”

    TIFF has been reorganising internally as well. In December 2007 Noah Cowan was named Artistic Director of the Bell Lightbox, after serving four years alongside Piers Handling as Co-Director of the festival, and longtime programmer Cameron Bailey was promoted into Cowan’s former post. In an interview with Indiewire two weeks before the festival began, Bailey dismissed the notion that the programming team had given greater priority to premieres, and he noted, instead, the tremendous variety of international cinema on display. “One of the things I’m proudest of is we have 64 countries represented this year,” he said, “which is up significantly from last year when we had 55.” By the time the final schedule was announced, the slight shifts in programming emphasis could be objectively measured. The Discovery program, which spotlights emerging filmmakers and thus features a higher percentage of premieres, had doubled in size, while Vanguard and Visions, the programs dedicated to work that pushes boundaries in terms of content and cinematic form, were each reduced by half.

    Whether this rebalancing of programs represents a long-term change in creative direction for the festival or simply a new approach to marketing remains the subject of some speculation. Of the 19 films in last year’s Visions program, nearly half would likely have been reclassified as Contemporary World Cinema or Special Presentations by ‘08 standards. To cite just one example, Hana Makhmalbaf’s Buda as sharm foru rikht (Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame) screened last year in Visions, while Samira Makhmalbaf’s more challenging Asbe Du-Pa (Two-Legged Horse) was programmed in Contemporary World Cinema. Even more curious was the conspicuous absence of many well-regarded films by established auteurs, including those whose work has been actively supported by TIFF in the past. Both of Lucrecia Martel’s previous features, La Cienaga (The Swamp, 2001) and La Niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004), played at TIFF, but La Mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) was a no-show. Likewise, Hong Sang-soo’s Bam gua nat (Night and Day) and Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube (Frontier of Dawn) were also missing, as were a host of films that had premiered in the Un Certain regard and Director’s Fortnight programs at Cannes, including new work by James Toback, Raymond Depardon, Joachim Lafosse, and James Gray. Again, whether these absences resulted from increased competition with other festivals (Telluride, Venice and New York, in particular) or out of a desire to rebrand TIFF for industry buyers is unclear. As a consequence, though, there was a shared feeling on opening day that TIFF had already fallen short of its goal of being North America’s premiere showcase for the best in world cinema.

    Note: Because the Cannes ‘08 lineup has already received so much critical attention, I’ve focused the majority of this festival overview on films that premiered at Toronto, Venice, Berlin and Locarno. My favorites among the Cannes films not mentioned below were Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale), Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, and Albert Serra’s El Cant dels Ocells (Birdsong). I also greatly admired Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, and Steve McQueen’s Hunger. The single best narrative film I saw at TIFF was Claire Denis’s 35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum), which premiered out of competition at Venice. (See next issue of Senses of Cinema for my interviews with Denis, Serra and Alonso).

    Wavelengths

    In its third year under the direction of Andrea Picard, the Wavelengths program, which spotlights experimental film and video, got even stronger. As in 2007, all six Wavelengths screenings were sellouts, and those of us who crammed into the auditorium at Jackman Hall each night were treated to many of the very best films the festival had to offer. Among the featured filmmakers were Nathaniel Dorsky, Jean-Marie Straub, Pat O’Neill, David Gatten, Jim Jennings, James Benning and Jennifer Reeves. As has come to be expected, Wavelengths was formally rigorous – Picard is a curator with a particular and learned taste – and with only one exception, Astrid Ofner’s Sag es mir Dienstag (Tell Me on Tuesday), which would have been too long at half the length, the program presented a forceful argument on behalf of the avant-garde. In a year when the quality of narrative filmmaking experienced something of a lull, the Wavelengths films were consistently astonishing, didactic (in the best sense of the word) and knotted.

    The opening shot of James Benning’s RR divides the frame precisely down the middle. A train passes to the left, beginning at a vanishing point in the exact center of the screen, and on the right is a commercial street in a small American town. The street runs parallel with the tracks, and between them is a gravel area where several cars are parked, each one facing the road. Little changes while we watch the train rush toward us until, finally, a truck comes driving up the road from the bottom-right corner of the frame and parks in the gravel. However, instead of pulling forward a few feet of the spot and then backing into it, as I would have done, the driver saves time by driving directly into the lot, swinging around in a wide arc and then pulling into his spot from behind. That’s when you notice that all of the cars are parked at the same slight angle, that they’ve all followed that same arc, that this is how things are done in this particular town. RR was, for me, the high point of the festival. Built from 43 shots like the first – long static takes of trains entering, passing through, and then exiting the frame – RR is like a variation on the Wallace Stevens poem: there are, one realises while watching this film, at least thirteen ways of looking at a railroad. These trains are documentary, Americana, music and noise, autobiography, commerce, pedagogy, elements of design, and on and on. They are also a farewell of sorts for Benning, who has announced that this will be his last project to be shot on film. RR ends with an extreme long shot of a freight train passing through a landscape dominated by towering windmills. The train cars, as they stream by, look uncannily like frames of film, and the windmills spin slowly like the reels of a projector. The train comes to a stop as the last few feet of 16mm celluloid work through the mechanism behind us. There are no end credits, just a quick cut to black, so the print in the final seconds is scratched and scarred, a physical reminder of what will be lost in our digital century.

    The other long-form Wavelengths film was Jennifer Reeves’s exceptional dual-projection work, When It was Blue. Assembled from two synchronised 16mm films projected onto a single screen, Blue is a complex patchwork of cinematic material and experimental processes. Found footage bleeds into hand-painted imagery; documentary shots are blown into high-contrast, black-and-white etchings; the natural world is rendered as abstraction. Reeves’s subject, generally speaking, is human ecology. Symbolically, the film models a kind of return to Eden. But the experience of watching When It was Blue is much more difficult to describe. Part of its affect is attributable to its length. At 67 minutes it is four or five or ten times longer than most of the other films in the program and, therefore, made very different demands on the viewer. I’ll admit to being relatively new to avant-garde cinema – and even newer to writing about it – but watching Reeves’s film reminded me most of seeing Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1962-64) for the first time. When It was Blue is a powerfully visceral experience. As Reeves pointed out during her Q&A, with two projectors running simultaneously, her film is literally twice as bright as a typical screening. Blue is physically difficult to watch at times, but it’s clearly that added ability to layer light that makes the film so dynamic, beautiful, and anxiety-causing. The epic length also allows Reeves more room to modulate the rhythms both within individual shots and sequences and between movements. The rhythms are further punctuated by Skúli Sverrisson’s Steve Reich-like score. Seeing When It was Blue accompanied live by Sverrisson was another high point of the festival.

    All told, 22 short films screened in Wavelengths – too many to discuss at length here. Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2003) made a return to Toronto in a beautiful new 35mm print. O’Neill’s 23-minute portrait of Southern California is a kinetic showcase of his printing and compositing skills. His film acknowledges all of the L.A. clichés – the palm trees, beaches, freeways, and movies (by way of snippets of film noir dialogue) – but still manages to defamiliarise them. Eriko Sonoda’s Garden/ing was a really pleasant surprise. Shot entirely in her home and from only a few camera positions, Garden/ing takes an age-old subject of art, the still life, and uses it to explore what it might mean to create handmade films in a digital age. I’ve now seen three Jim Jennings films at TIFF, Close Quarters (2004), Silk Ties (2006) and Public Domain (2007), and yet I’m no closer to being able to describe their beauty. Jennings’s latest is a brief study of New York City that is constantly surprising, inventive, and sublime. I was glad to finally see two of Ben Russell’s films, Black and White Trypps Number Three and Trypps #5 (Dubai). The former is both a reinvention of the concert film and a staggering portrait of ecstasy; the latter operates on the Gertrude Stein principle: a neon sign is a neon sign is a neon sign. Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s A Flash in the Metropolitan takes a familiar experience, the act of walking through a museum, and makes it strange. The formal gimmick of the film is that Nashashibi and Skaer work in total darkness, only briefly illuminating artifacts with flashes from a spotlight. Doing so allows them to precisely control our exposure to each image, and so the film functions best as an experiment in rhythm – the rhythm of real time that we experience in the theatre but also a kind of biological rhythm. I could practically feel my eyes dilating and constricting. Finally, Wavelengths opened with a pairing of two landmark filmmakers, Nathanial Dorsky, who brought two new films to Toronto, and Jean-Marie Straub, whose Le Genou d’Artémide is his first film since the death of Danièle Huillet. In my post-screening conversation with Dorsky, we discussed his work and Straub’s.

    Premieres

    Although I saw very few narrative films that had their world premiere at TIFF, my favourite among them was Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which is earning much-deserved praise for Christian McKay’s genuinely uncanny performance in the title role. That anyone – anyone – could so closely resemble Welles and so effortlessly reproduce his barreling voice would have been unimaginable before this film, but McKay’s greater feat is his knack for the raised brow, the glimmering eye, and the sly smile – or, in a word, the charisma – that makes the young Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man so electric. Linklater has consistently alternated between work-for-hire studio pictures like School of Rock (2003) and The Bad News Bears (2005) and smaller films developed in-house, such as Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Me and Orson Welles falls somewhere in between. The adaptation of Robert Kaplow’s novel was shepherded for several years by Linklater’s longtime associates Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo and was financed independently. (As of this writing, the film has yet to secure American distribution). Linklater’s formal style is typically unassuming, but the central story of an idealistic teenage artist (Zac Efron) echoes his career-long concern with the creative life, particularly in the final scene, in which Efron and a young writer walk off into the future, determined to become engaged passionately with the world around them. Linklater has great fun with the material, inserting occasional allusions to Godard and Carol Reed, and his recreation of Welles’s production of Julius Caesar captures much of the transgressive excitement that made it such a sensation seventy years ago.

    In Between Days, the debut feature from Korean-American filmmaker So Yong Kim, was a highlight of TIFF in 2006, and her follow-up, Treeless Mountain, continues in the same impressive, quietly observational style. Kim returned to South Korea to shoot this autobiographical story of two young sisters whose destitute mother abandons them with relatives when she sets off to find their father or work. Kim restricts the scope of the film to the older sister’s point of view, and her real achievement is eliciting such a convincing performance from six year-old Hee Yeon Kim. As in In Between Days Kim avoids the use of non-diegetic sound and shoots her fiction like a student of the Frederick Wiseman school of documentary filmmaking. She creates two utterly convincing worlds, one in and around the impoverished home of the girls’ aunt, another at their grandparents’ farm, but there’s a nagging slightness to the film. Treeless Mountain is, finally, a “child in peril” story and shares the genre’s ready-made appeals to audience sympathy, along with its fleeting pleasures.

    By comparison, Pablo Augero’s remarkable debut feature, Salamandra, which premiered at Cannes, approaches a similar subject from a slightly different tack. In the film’s opening sequence, six year-old Inti (Joaquin Aguila) plays alone in the bathtub of his grandmother’s well-appointed apartment. His toys are an American tank and brightly-coloured magnetic letters with which he spells out, in an ironic moment recalling late-‘60s Godard, “U.S. Army”. His comfort and security is broken a moment later when his mother (Dolores Fonzi) returns unexpectedly from prison and whisks him away to El Bolson, an isolated hippy commune in Patagonia. Aguero, like Inti, was raised among the anarchy and recklessness of El Bolson. “When your life is endangered, you become more alive to the sensations around you,” he said after the screening, and it’s much to his credit that the dizzying cacophony he creates in Salamandra is downright overwhelming. While promoting For Ever Mozart (1996) Godard attacked Western governments for their exploitation of others’ suffering in order to promote political agendas: “We made images in the movies, when we began, in order to remember. TV is made to forget. We see Sarajevo, okay, we forget in two seconds. The same moment that we are looking, we forget.” Child in peril stories, like “Feed the Children” commercials, are typically designed to appeal to the simplest and most disposable of emotions: pity. While Inti and his mother are both deserving of our pity, Aguero precisely counterbalances that response, eliciting also our admiration, fear, disgust, respect, and curiosity. Salamandra is certainly difficult to forget.

    Belgian director Fien Troch’s second feature, Unspoken, premiered in TIFF’s Visions program and was a considerable disappointment. Four years after the disappearance of their young daughter, a man (Bruno Todeschini) and his partner (Emmanuelle Devos) are slowly disintegrating. Each struggles with loss, regret, guilt, and anger, but their struggles remain … wait for it … unspoken. At the risk of being glib about a film that takes seriously the consequences of tragedy, Troch seems to have determined that, by simply shooting the faces of actors who are pretending to suffer, her camera will somehow discover, as if by intuition, an essential truth about suffering. Unspoken, however, is too anemic in its characterisations, too ham-fisted in its symbolism, and too predictably offensive in its plotting to find any such truth. (If “offensive” seems a bit strong, I’ll just add that Kornel Mundruczó’s Delta was the only feature I saw at TIFF that includes a more unnecessary and ugly sexual assault on its heroine. The less said about Delta, the better.)

    Another great disappointment of the festival was Bodhan Slama’s The Country Teacher, which received its world premiere a week earlier in Venice. In his previous film, Something Like Happiness (2005), Slama had demonstrated an exceptional economy in his shot-making, using a small handful of intricately choreographed crane shots to capture the seismic shifts occurring in the lives of his characters. In The Country Teacher, that choreography has become conspicuous and awkward. Again and again, his performers hit their marks and recite their lines like well-trained recruits. The style works well enough with seasoned professionals (Pavel Liska is surely one of the great screen actors working today), but Slama’s elaborate shot setups cramp the worthy efforts of his amateurs, particularly the young actor Ladislav Sedivý, whose shaky performance undermines the affect of several scenes. The bigger problem here, though, is the script. Liska plays the title character, a young gay man who has moved to a country town in order to teach and to escape his past life. Once settled, he befriends a widow (Zuzana Bydzovská) and her teenage son (Sedivý), a troubled boy who inevitably becomes the object of his teacher’s desire. The last act of The Country Teacher is a study in slapdash writing, with several characters behaving as if they have suddenly stepped into a different movie, and with a reconciliation that is dishonest and contrived. As an aside, both The Country Teacher and Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan, which I saw back-to-back one afternoon, end with scenes in which the protagonist aids in the live birthing of an animal. It’s not an experience I would care to repeat.

    Disconcerting in a completely different way was Nuit de Chien (Tonight), the latest feature from Werner Schroeter. A film that can legitimately wear the cliched descriptor “Kafkaesque”, Tonight depicts the night-long journey of returned war hero Ossorio Vignale (Pascal Greggory), who hopes to find his lover and escape with her before their city crumbles in a vague and ever-shifting revolutionary struggle. Vignale wanders into bars, faces down tyrants, rescues a beautiful child, and encounters several femmes fatales – in other words, he’s a kind of noir hero but one trapped in an absurdist wonderland. Unlike other films in this genre – say, Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) – there’s no easily-defined menace here, no corporate bureaucracy or sinister conspiracy pulling the strings. Instead, events in the film turn at random on base acts of human cruelty and irrational political ambition. It’s a senseless and violent world, and Schroeter renders it in a shocking Technicolor that harkens to the heydays of radical political cinema in the early-1970s. I’ve rarely been affected so viscerally by a film’s colour palette: in one overlit shot of two women who have been sexually assaulted, Schroeter’s use of high contrast red and white actually made me light-headed. His images are classically Surreal – arresting, confrontational, and defamiliarising.

    Michael Winterbottom’s Genova also alludes to cinema of the 1970s. A direct homage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Genova is about a middle-aged professor (Colin Firth) who moves with his two young daughters to Italy after their mother’s tragic death. It’s another interesting experiment from Winterbottom, who over the past decade has averaged more than a film per year. Shifting the dynamic from the loss of a child in the original film to the death of a wife and mother here allows Winterbottom to explore the very different emotional tolls taken on those involved. Genova, like its predecessor, is particularly interested in the ways sexual desire presents itself – almost against the sufferer’s will – as a manifestation of the identity confusion and desperate loneliness that accompanies such a loss. The memorable sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now haunts this film as well, both in Firth’s flirtations with an attractive Italian student (Margherita Romoe) and, much more interestingly, in the bittersweet coming-of-age of his teenaged daughter (Willa Holland). Of Winterbottom’s previous films, Genova most resembles, stylistically, 9 Songs, particularly in its use of documentary-like handheld photography and jumpcutting, and both films, I think, share a sympathetic fascination with the pains and mysteries of human intimacy. The ghost in Genova isn’t scary or dangerous but the world it haunts certainly is.

    Aging Auteurs

    The most illuminating juxtaposition at TIFF this year was two autobiographical essay films by aging auteurs, Terrence Davies’ Of Time and the City and Agnes Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès). Davies’ return to filmmaking eight years after The House of Mirth (2000) has been widely lauded since the film’s debut last spring at Cannes. Of Time and the City is an elegiac ode to his childhood home, Liverpool, assembled from found footage, still photos, and contemporary digital video. That Davies’s tone would be nostalgic and bitter is perhaps to be expected – as he documents in the film, Liverpool is enmeshed in his memories with his lapsed Catholicism and his burgeoning homosexuality – but by the final sequence, when he crosscuts images of Liverpool’s classical architecture with the ugly youth who now populate his lost home, Davies has revealed (and seems to be stewing in) his utter disdain for and disengagement from the modern world. Certainly one’s disappointment with life is a suitable subject for art, but the simple beauty of the film’s images and musical cues, in combination with the dulcet rumblings of Davies’s deep-throated recitations of poetry, artfully mask his reactionary bile – at least if the captivated, teary-eyed audience with whom I saw the film is to be trusted.

    By comparison, Agnès Varda, who turned eighty last May, remains as curious, witty and creatively engaged as ever. Varda was in Toronto with two films this year, Les Plages d’Agnes and her very first feature, La Pointe courte (1954), which screened in the Dialogues program. It was a clever pairing, as her latest work is a pensive reminiscence about family, loss and art-making, ordered around her lifelong love of the sea. Some of the film’s most charming moments take place in La Pointe courte, the small Mediterranean fishing village where she spent part of her youth and where she set her first fiction. Varda tracks down two boys from the original film (now both in their sixties) and reenacts a scene in which they pull a cart through narrow streets. Varda outfits the cart with a screen and projects onto it her images of them as children – one more moving (in every sense of the word) reflection in a film filled with mirrors, portraits and discarded bits of celluloid. As in her other work of the past decade, Varda here is observant, self-deprecating and blithe, which makes the wistful sequences, particularly her remembrances of Jacques Demy, all the more affecting.

    Other Films of Note

    Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche was perhaps the most perfectly scripted film I saw at TIFF. What begins as a standard-issue “lovers on the run” movie blossoms in the final acts into something unexpected and genuinely satisfying. Johannes Krisch plays Alex, an ex-con who earns his keep by running errands for a brothel owner. The drudge work allows him to stay in close contact with his lover, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a Ukrainian prostitute. When their scheme to begin a new life together goes tragically awry, Alex escapes to his grandfather’s farm in the country, where he hides away, doing chores and plotting his next move. Revanche represents a significant leap forward for Spielmann, whose previous film, Antares (2004), is handicapped by its interlocking stories and gimmicky, circular narrative. Here, Spielmann appropriates popular, B-movie conventions but applies to them the same formal rigour and sensitive humanism that we expect to find only in the art house cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and the like. Actually, the Dardennes are an especially useful point of reference. While Revanche might lack so neat a moral dilemma as Le Fils (The Son, 2002), Spielmann matches them in terms of execution and suspense. (What the Dardennes did for the lumberyard, he’s done for the woodpile.) I’m tempted, even, to argue that Spielmann has performed a more difficult task: while the wonders of Le Fils are discovered in each silent, ambiguous gesture – in the shear physical presence of Olivier Gourmet – Revanche reveals those ambiguities both through the bodies of its actors and through the pages of dialogue they speak. Particularly in a festival environment, where the majority of the films I see are of the slow, contemplative variety, I forget how satisfying great dialogue can be.

    Jerichow, the latest from German director Christian Petzold, is another smart, well-crafted genre film. One more variation on the Postman Always Rings Twice theme, it concerns a love triangle between Thomas (Benno Furmann), a veteran of the Afghan-Soviet war, Ali (Hilmi Sozer), a Turkish immigrant who owns a small chain of convenience stores, and Laura (Nina Hoss), the beautiful young woman who married Ali years earlier when he agreed to pay off her debts. Like Revanche, Jerichow wears the trappings of a pulpish noir but transforms gradually into a poignant and politically acute meta-commentary on the genre. Thanks largely to Sozer’s performance, Ali transcends the role of vengeful cuckold and, instead, comes to embody a particular immigrant experience. Jerichow teaches us how we watch film noir, reminding us how easily our sympathies and biases conform to established narratives. When Petzold dismantles that narrative in the film’s final sequence, we are forced to recontextualise Ali and to imagine new, more recognisably human, motivations for his jealousies, nostalgia, and bitterness.

    Finally, Mijke de Jong’s Het Zusje van Katia (Katia’s Sister), though far from perfect, is certainly deserving of some critical attention. The film revolves around the performance of Betty Qizmolli, who plays a socially awkward and emotionally impaired teenager. She, her mother (Olga Louzgina) and her older sister Katia (Julia Seijkens) are Russian immigrants living in Amsterdam and surviving on the mother’s earnings as a prostitute. Andrés Barba, the author of the novel on which the film is based, has been commended for his ability to adopt the perspective, if not the actual voice (it’s written in the third person), of a young girl whose innocence and naivete are debilitating. She is a Holy Fool so far removed from the moral complexities of the world that she is literally nameless: when asked in the opening moments of the film what she wants to be when she grows up, the girl can only answer “Katia’s sister”. A friend complained near the end of the festival that he’d seen too many films with “their hearts in the right place”, and this was, for me, a curious exception to the rule. De Jong is working with what is, essentially, a parable, yet her solution to the problem of adaptation is to commit completely to an aesthetic we’ve come to equate, post-Dardennes, with “realism” – natural lighting, handheld photography with a shallow depth of field, and a slightly overexposed and desaturated image. De Jong’s camera rarely leaves the girl’s side or shoots her from a distance of greater than a medium shot. We don’t watch the world in this film, we watch her watching the world, and it’s that formal discipline that keeps Katia’s Sister from falling apart under the weight of its premise.

  • The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “Since its beginnings, many hundreds of thousands of Marines have prepared for war here, practicing their war-fighting skills in the challenging terrain and climate of the Mojave Desert. In the early days it was primarily seen as a place for artillery units to unmask devastating firepower in training. Subsequently, it has been home to numerous tenant commands, earning a reputation as the premier combined-arms training facility in the Marine Corps.
    – History of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms (1)

    “The H1 and H2 were created to handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges. So, that’s just what the AM General Test Track in South Bend, Indiana serves up. On the same course where the U.S. Army and Allied Forces have trained drivers, you’ll face twisted, muddy terrain and also learn recovery techniques. Unfortunately, after the training is over, you will in fact, [sic] have to return to civilization.”
    – The Hummer Driving Academy (2)

    Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) begins amid the traffic of a congested Los Angeles freeway. David (David Wissak) is driving; Katia (Katia Golubeva), his girlfriend, rests in the back seat. They are leaving the city, headed east, deep into the Joshua Tree National Park, where David plans to scout locations for a film project. Once there, they settle quickly into routine: their days begin with a long trek into the desert, followed by a few hours of exploration and then the long drive back to Twentynine Palms, the small town where their motel is located. There they swim, have sex, shower, watch television, eat dinner, fight, and make up, in roughly that order. As in his previous films, La Vie de Jésus (1997) and L’Humanité (1999), here Dumont is interested in the mundane details of human experience. His camera lingers patiently on David and Katia’s bodies with a naturalist’s curiosity, capturing something of their boredom, their desire, their frustration, their jealousy, and their confused affection. (David, an American, and Katia, a Russian, converse in a mix of half-understood English and French.) Even in the final minutes of the film, when the Edenic isolation of the desert is ruptured by outside forces, Dumont refuses to quicken his pace. Audiences are forced to observe everything – the ordinary and the terrifying – unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylised photography. Dumont has once again given us “large and startling” figures and has left us to sort through the consequences (3).

    While Dumont’s “humanity under glass” approach to characters has carried through each of his films – Freddy and Marie, Pharaon and Domino, David and Katia are all similarly flayed under the director’s scalpel – his latest film marks something of a departure, as his move from the small French town, Bailleul, to the American southwest necessitates a new palette of cinematic iconography and, more significantly, a new socio-political context. Reviewers of Twentynine Palms have, almost without exception, called attention to the former, citing Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) as a few of the film’s most obvious forebears (4). But while appropriating “American film imagery”, as Dumont admits to deliberately doing, he also comments on that imagery, deconstructing the culturally-coded messages that each image carries. “I can’t understand half of what you’re saying”, David tells Katia, but he could as easily be speaking to Hitchcock’s motel room, John Ford’s desert mountains, and the heart of Boorman’s darkness. Hollywood’s visions of violence, cowboy masculinity, and the never-ending battle between good and evil have long been mythological tropes of America’s political identity (and they have obviously gained currency in the 21st century); in Twentynine Palms, Dumont calls attention to the artificiality of those tropes and to the dehumanising effects they mask. The end result is a film equal parts high-minded allegory and kick-in-the-guts sensation. Dumont, perhaps more than any living filmmaker, deliberately challenges audiences to reconcile those tensions, or, if not reconcile, to at least experience, in all its fullness and complexity, the sudden disorientation such tensions inevitably inspire.

    When all is said and done – after the endless driving, the pain-faced orgasms, the countless miscommunications, and the brutal, brutal violence – Twentynine Palms is, I think, really a film about a red truck. Specifically, it’s about David’s red H2, a sports utility vehicle modelled after the US Army’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (pronounced Humvee). Loaded with high-end comforts, including a nine-speaker sound system, DVD navigation, and standard leather seating, the “Hummer” is capable of producing 325 horsepower and 365 pounds of torque. Its welded steel frame, ten inch ground clearance, and 40 degree approach angle give it the appearance of being one of the toughest, most agile off-road vehicles on the market. “In a world where SUVs have begun to look like their owners, complete with love handles and mushy seats,” Hummer’s website announces, “the H2 proves that there is still one out there that can drop and give you 20.” But the H2, despite its rugged appearance, is little more than a new face on an old idea – a significantly modified version of General Motors’ oldest line of SUVs, the Chevy Suburban (a name thick with allegoric potential). The H2′s base price is just over US$50,000.

    There is a danger, of course, in pushing this metaphor too far. A truck driven more often through upscale neighbourhoods than over rocky terrain, a truck with an American military pedigree and a soccer dad clientele, a truck whose name was inspired by a euphemism for fellatio – the Hummer is ripe for juvenile Freudian analysis and for simplistic pronouncements about the ethical problems of the postmodern simulacrum. Had Dumont been less patient with his material, had he treated it with too little grace or honesty, Twentynine Palms would likely have collapsed under the weight of such a symbol, becoming not a study of, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil, but a banality itself. Dumont avoids that trap (for the most part) by calling little attention to the Hummer as symbol, with only a few notable exceptions. For instance, during their drives through the desert, David often stops to allow Katia to take the wheel. On one such drive, she scrapes paint from the side of the truck, then infantilises David by laughing at his anger. The brief conflict mirrors the gendered struggle that defines so much of their relationship, and it would not require too great a stretch to read David’s meticulous waxing of the Hummer as an attempt to reconstruct his masculine authority. (Welcome to Psychology 101, where “waxing a Hummer” is never just waxing a Hummer.)

    It’s the nature of that masculine authority, however, and the particularly American myths that determine it that seem of greatest import in the film. In the same California desert where novelist Frank Norris’s McTeague dies as a result of his greed and jealousy, where John Wayne eternally rides horses and fights “savages”, where the US Marines “unmask devastating firepower in training”, David adopts the appropriate pose, driving his army-like truck and fucking his beautiful girlfriend with a near-bestial desperation. “We can fuck and fuck, but we can’t merge”, Dumont says (somewhat disingenuously, I think) on the Blaq Out DVD release (R2), reducing David and Katia’s troubling relationship to a universal platitude. But David and Katia are not Adam and Eve, or Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina, or Freddy and Marie; they are characters trapped at the nexus of conflicted American types, old and new: rugged individuals and conspicuous consumers, democratic liberals and unilateral militarists, Western gunslingers and West Coast hipsters. Is it any wonder they’re both a touch schizophrenic?

    Unlike, say, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), with its satiric commingling of images of American military power, “Old West” masculinity and myths of redemptive violence, Twentynine Palms consigns many of its targets to spaces just beyond the edge of the screen. The most striking example is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, which is alluded to only in the title of the film and in one key sequence. While eating ice cream, David notices Katia admiring a Marine in uniform. “You wouldn’t want me to shave my head like them?” he asks. She laughs, then tells him, “If you do, I’ll leave you”, but her answer offers David little comfort. Katia admits to finding Marines “really handsome”, and her laughter – to David, at least – is patronising. He sulks, then launches into a tirade about their conversations lacking a “logical progress”, before she interrupts him with the words, “I love you”. Tellingly, he responds, “I want you”. (The film’s dialogue, though cliched at times, does work a bit better on screen than when transcribed.)

    David’s thin frame, shag haircut, and fashionably-dishevelled wardrobe put him in stark contrast to the “proud, fighting men of the US Marines” who surround the periphery of Twentynine Palms. Alone with Katia, however, he (over)compensates for any apparent lack. Dumont’s cinematographic style is never more clinical and his worldview more deterministic than in his stagings of sex. Not only do David and Katia never truly “merge”, but each appears barely cognisant of the other’s presence. Bodies become entangled; orgasms are loud, primal. Sex, for Dumont, is an act of self-gratifying violence predicated on domination. “The poor thing”, Katia says after David describes an episode of The Jerry Springer Show in which a father admits to sexually abusing his daughter. David’s casual response – “Who?” – is perhaps the film’s most chilling moment, for it portends something more base and destructive than the “desensitising effects of the media” against which cultural critics on both the left and the right rage (though that is certainly one element of Dumont’s critique). David’s nihilism puts him closer in line with the morally ambiguous heroes of Hollywood’s Old West: Ethan Edwards (John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956) and Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992), for example – men who kill because they can. In David’s case – and, again, at the risk of slipping headlong into bad Freud – sex and murder have become indistinguishable; the symbolic Colt revolver has been replaced quite literally by the signified, and David, to borrow from Bill Munny, has always been “lucky in the order”.

    Lucky, that is, until the final minutes of the film. Twentynine Palms ends with two acts of outrageous violence that, even upon first viewing, feel both genuinely shocking and strangely inevitable. During their final drive through the desert, David and Katia are chased and brought to a stop by three men who pull them from their truck, beat them, and sodomise David. After a three-minute, agonising shot of Katia crawling naked toward David, Dumont cuts to the motel room, where they have returned, alive but badly injured. David refuses to call the police, presumably because of his shame, and sends Katia to fetch dinner. When she returns, he emerges suddenly from the bathroom, pins her to the bed, and repeatedly stabs her. The final image is a long, high-angle shot of the desert. David is naked, facedown in the sand, dead, the Hummer parked beside him. A police officer wanders near the body, and we hear his voice as he calls for an ambulance.

    Were the film to end ten minutes earlier, with David and Katia still driving, still miscommunicating, still struggling to capture a glimpse of some impossible communion, Twentynine Palms would be another in a line of cinematic meditations on modern alienation, more L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) or Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994) than Psycho. The seemingly random brutality of the violence, however, and the symbolically-charged manner in which it is staged, shift the film much closer to the realm of socio-political allegory. In that sense, the “attack” sequence is key. As in a classic Old West ambush, the savages appear from nowhere. Aside from a few early glimpses, David and Katia are unaware of their menacing white truck until it rear-ends them and forces them to a stop. The sequence might be boiled down to three shots. The first is a low-angle image of David’s face. He’s looking back over his right shoulder, screaming, helpless to stop the attackers’ truck from pushing their own. The look on David’s face is familiar to us by now, having already seen it on several occasions during his sexual climaxes. The second is a long shot of the two trucks coming to rest. Dumont films it from behind and to one side such that the perspective becomes slightly distorted. David’s H2 – the militaryish SUV designed to “handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges” – suddenly resembles a toy beside the attackers’ massive pickup truck. The third is the image of David being raped, his bloodied face buried in the sand. Dumont positions the two men beside the back of the Hummer, which, metaphorically speaking, has also been sodomised. Not coincidentally, the attacker is also shot from a low-angle, and his face also contorts with a scream when he ejaculates.

    At a moment when depictions of American violence, both real and imagined, tend to be commodified (as in the Hummer) or hyperstylised (as in The Matrix [Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999]) or sanitised for our protection (as in television coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), Dumont’s treatment is relatively unfiltered and uncompromising. Audiences are subjected to long takes of “real” brutality; the director only subtly imposes his editorial voice to guide the viewing. In a film that plays so self-consciously with America’s mythologies, that experience is genuinely disconcerting, for it deconstructs those myths by accosting viewers with unfiltered sensation, the best remedy, Dumont implies, for intellectual distance and moral apathy. Twentynine Palms fits comfortably into the “art film” genre, and, as such, it will likely be appreciated by those most willing to rationally dissect its network of symbols and allusions. The textbook psychosexual connotations of the attack sequence, for example, are just too overt to be ignored. And yet, watching a Bruno Dumont film is, first and foremost, a visceral experience. We are forced to sit uncomfortably and observe the beating and rape of two people, fighting all the while the learned urge to avert our eyes. Thus, when David springs from the bathroom and savagely murders Katia, we might, in a somewhat detached manner, explain it away with allusions to Lacan and the dissolution of the fictional unity of David’s masculine subjectivity (and his failed attempt to reconstruct it through violence and the shaving of his head); but the more immediate sensation is horror – horror at the spectre of violence, horror at the depravity of its nihilism, horror at the sudden realisation that so many of America’s defining tropes have made of such violence a point of pride and national unity. In that sense, Twentynine Palms is timely and urgent in a way that Dumont’s earlier (and, in my opinion, better) films are not. His appeal to transcendence is now grounded in history, at a moment when America’s myths are being written on the world.

    Endnotes

    1. See MCAGCC/MAGTFTC History and Unit Information, accessed July 2004.
    2. http://www.hummer.com
    3. See my article, “Bruno Dumont’s Bodies”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, March–April 2002.
    4. I would add the “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) as well. Notice how David crouches ape-like in the desert, his knees above his waist, and how Dumont films the murder, the knife rising and falling like the bone in Kubrick’s film.
  • Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “I was born in Ogden, Utah, the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled toward growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”
    – Hal Ashby

    The temptation, when writing about American filmmaker Hal Ashby, is to reduce his life and career to any of a number of ready-made, Hollywood formulae: the small-town boy done good who works his way up from the studio mailroom to the Academy Awards stage; the 1960s free spirit who champions individual rights in a world of oppressive authority and takes his fair share of lumps in the process; the cautionary tale of regrettable indulgences and falls from grace. Unfortunately, the relative dearth of critical and biographical writing currently available about Ashby makes such a trap unavoidable. This, despite the awards, the misty paeans from his collaborators and, most importantly, that amazing streak of films in the 1970s, a streak that rivals those of his more famous contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. With The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979), Ashby proved himself a prodigious talent. That he disappeared behind a string of disappointing pictures in the 1980s and died before redeeming his reputation has led many critics of the Hollywood Film Renaissance to dismiss Ashby as a filmmaker who lacked a coherent voice or who was simply the competent beneficiary of remarkable collaborations. This essay will, I hope, become part of a larger critical reappraisal of Ashby’s films, for they document, with equal parts grace and polemic, a moment in America’s history that was defined by precisely that dichotomy.

    No biographer has yet made a subject of Hal Ashby, which is surprising considering the quality and influence of his films and the dramatic circumstances of his life. Soon after discovering his father’s body at the age of twelve, Ashby dropped out of school and began working odd jobs; by seventeen he had already been married and divorced (the first of his four failed marriages). According to Peter Biskind, whose Easy Riders, Raging Bulls offers the only readily-available discussion of Ashby’s life, the young Mormon decided in 1950 to leave the cold winters of Utah and Wyoming behind and to head off for the golden skies of California (1). After arriving in Los Angeles, and after three hungry weeks of fruitless efforts there, Ashby visited the California Board of Unemployment and requested a job at a film studio. He was sent first to Universal, where he worked in the mailroom, but by 1951 he had become an apprentice editor at Republic. He later moved on to Disney and then to Metro, where he met Jack Nicholson, then an aspiring unknown.

    Ashby’s film school was the editing room. “It’s the perfect place to examine everything,” he told Michael Shedlin. “Everything is channelled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it’s staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – Why do I like this? Why don’t I like this?” (2) After working as assistant editor under Robert Swink on William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956) and The Big Country (1958) and George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Ashby began to gain attention for his own cutting of films by Tony Richardson (The Loved One [1965]) and Norman Jewison. Ashby and Jewison would collaborate on four films: The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which Ashby won a Best Editing Oscar, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). It was Jewison, also, who recommended his friend to direct The Landlord, a project under development at United Artists. Thus Hal Ashby came to make his first film at the age of 40. “If I had it all to do over again, I would rather go at it a different way,” he later said. And, predicting the generation of young American filmmakers who would emerge in the 1970s, he then added: “I say, Good Lord, go out and somehow raise the money to make your own projects. It’s not easy, by any means, but the potential is there for becoming just as good a filmmaker in a much shorter time. I feel very strongly about this” (3).

    The Landlord is an outrageous debut, a film that, 34 years later, still feels daring, both stylistically and politically. Beau Bridges plays Elgar Enders, who at 29 leaves his opulent family estate and buys a row house in a New York City ghetto. His plan is to remodel the home once he has evicted its tenants, including Marge (Pearl Bailey), Mr. and Mrs. Copee (Louis Gossett Jr. and Diana Sands) and Professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart). When we first meet Elgar, he is reclining on a lawn chair, sipping brandy. He looks directly into the camera and tells us: “It’s just that I get the feeling that we’re all – I mean everybody, black, white, yellow, Democrats, Communists, Republicans, old people, young people, whatever – we’re all like a bunch of ants, see. See, the strongest drive we have as a true life force is to gain territory.” All of his preconceptions and values – racial, political, economic and otherwise – are tested, though, once his life becomes entwined with those of his tenants. Ashby’s skills as an editor, now freed by his creative control over the picture, are on display from the opening moments, as he crosscuts between high contrast footage of a racquetball game and the softer, more natural tones of the African-American neighbourhood, a visual motif that continues throughout the film. That divide between the white world and the black is heightened also by Ashby’s treatment of his characters: the Enders he turns into absurd and often hilarious caricatures; the tenants are afforded greater sympathy. The end result is an often brilliant, occasionally uneven film that (ridiculous as this might sound) resembles late Buñuel’s attempt at a blaxploitation film.

    Capsule reviews of The Landlord typically describe it as a bildungsroman in which an emotionally stunted white man comes of age through his first-hand encounter with the realities of African-American life. Elgar “grows fond” of his tenants, such reviews claim and, by witnessing his blossoming romance with a woman of mixed race, viewers are to learn something about the possibilities of racial reconciliation in America. What we actually learn, though, is just the opposite. Ashby’s film plays like the cinematic equivalent of Radical Chic, Thomas Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held in the well-heeled home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein. Like the “limousine liberals” who gathered there on Park Avenue to sip wine, write cheques and discuss – in the measured tones of the New York Review of Books – the “race problem”, Elgar is unprepared for the messy radicalism that greets and, even more significantly, that excludes him. “See, children? Some people can’t learn what we learn,” Professor Duboise tells a room full of students who are already well versed in the rhetoric of Black Power. Ashby captures this tension in a brilliant sequence near the end of the film, when Copee, who is threatening Elgar with an axe after learning that his wife is carrying Elgar’s child, stops and slowly lowers his weapon. Rather than turning his attention to the film’s protagonist, however, Ashby instead stays in a tight shot on Copee, and we’re made suddenly aware that the film has been his story all along. The white, liberal audiences that watch The Landlord root for Elgar because, like him, they (we) believe that their idealism and distant sympathies can somehow make the world “colour blind”. By forcefully shifting the film’s perspective from Elgar’s to Copee’s, Ashby reveals just how naive and politically charged such a position really is.

    Ashby inherited his second feature project, Harold and Maude, when executives at Paramount decided that Colin Higgins was too green for the job. Higgins, who wrote the screenplay while still a film student, had hoped to direct the picture himself but acknowledged that the project was never really his to lose. “I was going to make a half-million dollar film and they wanted to make a million-and-a-half dollar film,” he told Shedlin (4). The thematic similarities between The Landlord and Higgins’ script made Ashby a logical, if somewhat risky, choice for the studio. The story of a twenty-year-old rich kid who learns to love life through his encounter with a woman sixty years his senior, Harold and Maude delights in everyday transgressions: uprooting trees from manicured suburban streets and returning them to the forest; parading a yellow umbrella past the dark faces of a funeral line; flipping a bird to repressive authority figures, whether they be mothers, priests, psychiatrists, soldiers or highway patrolmen. That the film manages to do so without surrendering to the carpe diem-like sentiment that has made a respected actor of Robin Williams is testament to the fine performances of its leads, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, but also to Ashby’s deft direction, which transforms Higgins’ dark satire into a Brothers Grimm fable (mixed, perhaps, with a Charles Addams drawing or two). As with fairy tale, the moral of Harold and Maude is ultimately less important than the telling of the tale itself. The pure joy of Ashby’s story-telling frees the film to transcend its often banal symbolism and preachy didacticism, creating a filmed world that, like that of Wes Anderson, Ashby’s most gifted disciple, allows for the possibility of grace and childhood wonder in a fallen, cynical, adult world.

    And Ashby’s is, most certainly, an adult world. When, two-thirds of the way through the film, we learn that Maude is a Holocaust survivor – and we learn this only from a wordless, one-second shot of the identification tattoo on her forearm – the context within which the film is operating suddenly blossoms to include not only Nixon’s America but all of the impossibly tragic 20th century. Like Walter Benjamin who, in his famous description of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” imagines the angel of history propelled irresistibly forward by the storm of progress “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”, Harold and Maude demands that viewers experience a glimpse of hope despite the tragedies of the past (5). Ashby accomplishes this to best effect in the final sequence, in which he dismantles and intercuts three events: Harold and Maude’s arrival at the hospital, Harold’s agonising wait for news of her death, and his high-speed drive up the California coastline. Accompanied only by Cat Stevens’ song “Trouble” and by the roaring engine of Harold’s Jaguar-cum-hearse, the sequence is marked by a tragic inevitability. There’s no question of Maude’s survival, no possibility that this dark fable will be appended with a Disney ending and yet, despite the sadness, Harold walks away in the end strumming his banjo, and the film is rescued from the nihilism of its day.

    Ashby’s follow-up is less optimistic. In The Last Detail, “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), two Navy “lifers”, are chosen to escort Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. Only 18 years old, Meadows has been court-martialled and sentenced to eight years for attempting to steal $40 from the base’s polio charity. Badass and Mule intend to deliver their prisoner as quickly as possible and spend their per diems and remaining leave in New York City, but they’re soon charmed by the young Meadows and become increasingly troubled by their mission. Written and produced during the dark, closing days of the Vietnam War, The Last Detail employs the picaresque structure of the standard World War II-era service comedy but undercuts its cliched devices at every turn. When a drunken Badass attempts to teach Meadows to be a signalman, for instance, Ashby drowns their dialogue (and much of the scene’s potential humour) in the sounds of gunfire and explosions emanating from the war film playing on the hotel room television. It’s an ironic reminder of the “good war” that precipitated America’s disastrous involvement in Southeast Asia and that helped to define masculinity and heroism for men of Badass and Mule’s generation. Those definitions are repeatedly called into question throughout the film: Badass’ attempts to seduce a young hippy (Nancy Allen) with his anachronistic tales of military adventure fall flat; Mule’s justification for his tour in Vietnam – “Gotta do what the Man says” – is less noble service than mindless obedience; Meadows’ first trip to a whorehouse ends with the most premature of ejaculations. When Badass and Mule do finally hand Meadows over to authorities at Portsmouth, they head home spouting their hatred for this “motherfucking chickenshit detail,” but there’s little doubt that the home they’re heading back to is in Norfolk. Unlike the wealthy Elgar and Harold, these blue-collar warriors have no other options.

    The standard critical line on The Last Detail is that its many and obvious merits are attributable, first and foremost, to the quality of Ashby’s collaborators, Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne chief among them. Towne certainly deserves much credit, both here and in his next teaming with Ashby on Shampoo, but the film soars on the strength of Ashby’s direction, and particularly on his restraint of Nicholson. By casting 6’4” Quaid and 6’2” Young in the supporting roles, Ashby turns Badass into an embodiment of aggressive overcompensation; Nicholson has never looked so small or his shtick so impotent. And when the actor does launch into full-on “Jack” mode – as when he trashes their motel room in a vain effort to rouse Meadows’ anger – Ashby refuses to allow Nicholson’s persona to subsume the character. Instead, he cuts abruptly to a quiet moment of Badass and the young seaman together on the edge of the bed, now bored and contained. Such a jumpcut works here only because Ashby’s verite approach with actors and with the staging of key sequences, an approach employed to even greater effect in Coming Home, allows room for freedom and improvisation. That so many actors – Quaid and Young, but also Cort, Gordon, Lee Grant, David Carradine, Peter Sellers, Jack Warden and Bruce Dern, among others – delivered arguably the best performances of their careers in Ashby films is perhaps the finest testament to his gifts as an actor’s director.

    As with The Last Detail, Ashby is often treated by his critics as merely a hired gun for his work on Shampoo, offering competent but unexceptional direction in what is essentially a Robert Towne and Warren Beatty picture. Beatty stars as George Roundy, a hip Hollywood hairdresser whose reputation is built as much on his prowess in the bedroom as in the salon. As the film begins he’s torn between three women: his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), his ex Jackie (Julie Christie) and Felicia (Grant), a client whose wealthy husband Lester (Warden) holds the purse strings to George’s dream of owning his own salon. When all five characters attend the same election night party, Shampoo collapses quickly into a sexual farce straight from the Restoration stage. But the film is seldom laugh out loud funny. Instead, Shampoo plays like a melancholy answer to The Graduate – complete with original Paul Simon music – except that Ben is now no longer fucking just Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, but also every other bored, vain housewife in the neighbourhood. The youthful naiveté and reckless adventure that mark those final, iconic moments of The Graduate have been replaced by disillusionment, pathetic posturing and moral apathy. When George tells Jackie, “I don’t fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun,” he’s accusing her of whoring herself to Lester, but he’s also deluding himself. George is the biggest whore of the lot, and he pays the highest price for it.

    Of the films he made in the ’70s, Shampoo feels the least like a Hal Ashby picture. It’s too restrained, too closely bound to the tight structuring of Towne and Beatty’s remarkable screenplay. At times, there is also an uncharacteristic staginess to the blocking of actors, as in the first scene between Christie and Warden, where they move unnaturally around Lester’s office, self-consciously hitting their marks in synch with the choreographed movements of the camera. Ashby’s films come alive, instead, when his actors are allowed room to move, as when George flies into a rage outside of a bank that has just denied him a loan. Here, Ashby shoots Beatty in an extreme long shot, watching silently from across the parking lot as the actor rips off his jacket and tie and throws them both into a trashcan.

    Such long shots are a trademark of Ashby’s films: Elgar standing in the street with his child in his arms, Maude’s introduction at the first funeral, Badass and Mule wrestling Meadows to the ground, Bob undressing at the beach in Coming Home, Chance walking off across the water in Being There. The extreme long shot serves, for Ashby, the same function that the close-up does for many filmmakers – heightening emotion at critical moments in the narrative – but it does so without forcing a shift to a particular character’s subjective perspective (Ashby, in fact, very seldom cuts on an eyeline match). We remain always detached observers, judging and, occasionally, sympathising with characters, but never coming to see the world exclusively through their eyes. Shampoo also makes effective use of popular music, another Ashby trademark. Except for the Paul Simon song, which returns like a Greek chorus five times in the film, the only other non-diegetic music is The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” which plays over the opening scene and returns again for the closing credits. Released in 1975, within months of Nixon’s resignation, and set seven years earlier on the day he was first elected, Shampoo is an elegy to the wasted potential of America’s cultural revolution. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is wistful nostalgia, as ironic as the final words we hear uttered by the President-Elect on George’s television: “A teenager held up a sign that said ‘Bring Us Together,’ and that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset. To bring the American people together.”

    While Shampoo is, at times, stylistically different from Ashby’s other pictures of the era, it continues his investigation of the theme that most dominates his work – that is, the cost, both literal and metaphoric, of individual freedom and integrity in a world dominated increasingly by oppressive, dehumanising economic interests. Bound for Glory, then, is a logical, if ambitious, next step in that project. A document of four years in the life of folksinger Woody Guthrie – the “dustbowl” years when he was travelling through the southwest, living with and singing to camps of migrant workers – the film is part hagiography, part Waiting for Lefty-like agitprop, part old fashioned Western. Joseph McBride, writing for Film Comment in 1976, called it “a majestic film, the most ambitious film made in the United States since The Godfather Part II, and one of those rare pictures which are made with the lavish resources, meticulous care, and concern for epic breadth that characterize the way the great Hollywood movies used to be made” (6). While McBride might be accused of hyperbole, Bound for Glory remains a remarkable film, and it is an interesting artefact from Hollywood’s Film Renaissance. After the massive commercial success of Shampoo, Ashby had carte blanche for his follow-up, and he used that muscle to rescue the Woody Guthrie project from years of development problems and script rewrites. At a production cost of nearly $10 million and starring David Carradine, then known mostly for the television series Kung Fu and for low budget films like Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975), Bound for Glory was a sizeable risk for United Artists. It’s difficult to imagine a studio taking such a gamble at any time other than the mid-1970s, those few years when adventurous filmmaking was still occasionally rewarded at the box office and when studio heads had yet to learn the various lessons of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980).

    What is most striking today about Bound for Glory is Haskell Wexler’s photography, which turns Depression-era California into one more of Ashby’s many worlds of the haves and have-nots (7). Los Angeles, with its green lawns and sparkling sheen, couldn’t be more different from the small Texas town where Guthrie begins his voyage and where everything – even the people, it seems – is covered by an inch of dust. Wexler shoots it all in soft, muted tones; the sky is as brown as the desert landscapes through which Woody travels, slowly, for the first third of the film. Like Ashby’s and Wexler’s next collaboration, Coming Home, much of Bound for Glory was filmed with long lenses that pull characters into focus against an impossibly expansive backdrop. When Woody sits down to play his harmonica, for instance, he and his chair appear to float above a desert highway that stretches, in a dead-straight line, from Arizona to the Atlantic. The long lenses also allow Ashby and his crew to stay far-removed from the action, capturing the spontaneous “performances” of his lead actors and his large cast of extras. A two minute montage of such images lends the campground sequences, in particular, a documentary-like feel; Wexler and Ashby would later return to this technique for Coming Home‘s Fourth of July picnic sequence.

    In many ways, Coming Home epitomises Hal Ashby’s cinematic style, and it is also his most personal film. The project was conceived by Jane Fonda with the help of screenwriter Nancy Dowd, and was originally intended for John Schlesinger. When he left the project, however, the screenplay was reshaped significantly by the circle of talent who would eventually bring it to the screen: Fonda, Ashby, Wexler, Jon Voigt, producer Jerry Hellman and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert Jones. They were united by their opposition to the Vietnam war and by their concern for the veterans who were returning to an America unable or unwilling to reacclimatize them to life back home. Told as a love triangle between a young woman (Fonda), her Marine husband (Dern) and the paralysed vet (Voigt) she meets while he is overseas, Coming Home confronts head-on what had been treated already as a sidebar in Harold and Maude, The Last Detail and Shampoo: the lingering wounds – physical, psychological, emotional and political – from America’s involvement in Vietnam. The film earned Ashby Best Director nominations from the Academy and from the Director’s Guild; Voigt, Fonda and the team of writers won Oscars for their efforts; and Dern, Penelope Milford (as Sally’s friend, Vi), Don Zimmerman (editor) and the film itself were all likewise rewarded with Oscar nominations.

    If Coming Home is guilty, at times, of over-earnestness or of slipping into polemic, it is rescued from such potentially fatal missteps by its many fine performances and by the filmmaker’s palpable respect for his characters. Even Dern’s disgraced Bob, a Marine who could so easily have been reduced to a caricature, becomes instead a tragic figure capable of eliciting our deepest sympathies. Dern’s desperate delivery of the line, “What I’m saying is I do not belong in this house!” is one of the most affecting moments in any of Ashby’s films and it encapsulates, in a single breath, the crisis of the dislocated veteran. Ashby and Wexler once again blend dramatic set pieces with documentary style footage, most notably in the opening sequence, when Voigt’s character, Luke, listens quietly as a group of actual, paralysed vets discuss their very real feelings about the war. That same sense of verisimilitude also informs many of the scenes between the lead actors, as when Fonda and Voigt stroll down the boardwalk, discussing Bob’s impending return. On the DVD release of Coming Home, Wexler remarks that the scene was shot with an 800 millimetre lens from a distance of more than 400 yards, freeing us, once again, to remain distant and relatively objective observers, and allowing the actors room for spontaneous improvisation. The film’s showpiece, however, comes in its final sequence, when Ashby crosscuts between Luke’s speech to a group of draft-eligible teens, Sally and Vi’s trip to a grocery store, and Bob’s walk into the ocean, all of it accompanied by Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was”. Like the finale of Harold and Maude, this sequence balances tragedy – is Bob swimming off to his death? – with painful progress. Despite the still-lingering wounds of war, Sally’s new-found independence and Luke’s charity suggest that Ashby retains some measure of hope for healing.

    The last of Ashby’s signature films is Being There, his adaptation of the Jerzy Kosinski novel. After publishing Being There in 1971, Kosinski swore that he would never allow it or any of his other work to be filmed, but after learning that a movie project was in the early stages of development, and after experiencing first-hand Peter Sellers’ aggressive campaign for the lead role, the author set to work on a screenplay of his own. Ashby’s final product is, by most accounts, a smashing success, both as an adaptation of a much-respected novel and as a film, judged on its own merits. The story of Chance, a simpleton gardener who stumbles into America’s most powerful spheres of influence, Being There is a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation’s public discourse by television’s empty images and content-free rhetoric. Such ideas were nothing new to Ashby, who had been toying with similar themes in his own work for years. In The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home, in particular, characters are unable to free themselves from the constant barrage of political speeches, commercial advertisements, and reportage that emanate from the televisions, billboards, and radios that seem to have them surrounded. When Sally asks Bob what combat was like, his response echoes the main argument of Being There: “I don’t know what it’s like; I only know what it is. TV shows what it’s like; it sure as hell don’t show what it is.”

    For Ashby, the great challenge of Being There was sustaining its absurd premise for two hours without allowing it to slip, even for a moment, into farce. “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad. Peter’s character is a sponge. He imitates everything he sees on television and everyone he meets. In one scene, he imitated the voice of a homosexual. It was very funny, but we couldn’t allow it. It would have destroyed the balance” (8). Ashby’s film, like Sellers himself, plays the comedy straight-faced, refusing to rob the character of his allegoric simplicity by making of it little more than a cheap joke. Chance is, instead, the ultimate straight man, a tabula rasa against which his associates’ ridiculous behaviour might be exposed. In the film’s funniest scene, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) – the wealthy, sex-starved woman who first tempts Chance into the world of earthly delights – tries to seduce her guest while he watches a passionate romance on television. When the program ends, however, Chance is no longer able to imitate the “appropriate” behaviour and so he flips the channel, leaving Eve confused and frustrated. “I like to watch,” he tells her, which sends Eve to the floor, where she masturbates to climax. Ashby builds additional layers of commentary and humour onto the scene by having Chance flip to an aerobics program, whose instructor encourages viewers to “explore slowly.” By the end of the scene, Eve is panting on the floor, unaware that Chance is standing on his head, just like the woman on television. Self-indulgence and superficiality have never seemed more absurd.

     

    Being Thereis a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby’s enviable run during the 1970s. Commenting on Kosinski’s prescient novel, Barbara Tepa Lupack writes, “while Kosinski did not live to witness the Chance-like candidacy of H. Ross Perot, conducted largely via television time purchased with his own millions, he surely must have appreciated the irony of actor Ronald Reagan’s two telegenic terms in office as well as understudy George Bush’s subsequent lacklustre performance in the White House” (9). Ashby’s career, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was derailed by sweeping changes in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood and in America at large. The studios, now on the lookout for blockbuster box office returns and wary of signing over creative control to “cost no object” directors, turned their attention away from smaller, more personal films like Ashby’s. Reagan’s America likewise awoke to a “new morning”, conveniently ignoring the traumatic events that had defined the previous decades. For Ashby, who had embodied the country’s counter-cultural spirit in thought and deed, the “Me Decade” must have been catastrophically disheartening. In an era of conservative piety and institutionalised greed, Ashby’s politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity’s potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism.

    Ashby finished his career with a string of largely forgotten films. He reunited with Haskell Wexler for the first two: Second-Hand Hearts (1981), starring Robert Blake and Barbara Harris, and Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), a character study of two gamblers written by and starring Jon Voigt. Like the rest of Ashby’s final work (and The Landlord), neither is currently available on any home video format. He also directed Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), a by-the-books document of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 tour, and followed it with The Slugger’s Wife (1985), an irredeemably bad translation of Neil Simon’s abysmal screenplay (10). The poor quality of the film is frequently attributed to Ashby’s growing dependence on drugs and alcohol, which had precipitated a physical collapse during the Stones’ tour. Because of his increasingly unreliable behaviour, films were taken from him during post-production and given to others for final editing. Ashby’s final feature, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), however, marked something of a return to form for the director. An adaptation of Lawrence Block’s popular detective novel, the film is an entertaining piece of film noir, with Jeff Bridges as the hardened ex-cop and Rosanna Arquette as his femme fatale. Though burdened by the stylistic influence of TV’s Miami Vice and by James Newton Howard’s cloying, synthesized score, 8 Million Ways to Die comes to life at surprising moments, particularly in the final act. When Bridges confronts the young drug kingpin, played by Andy Garcia, we are reminded of Ashby’s gifts as a director of actors; they appear to have set aside Oliver Stone’s screenplay and discovered a more palpable energy in their improvisations. Ashby’s final production was Jake’s Journey (1988), a television project developed by ex-Python Graham Chapman. After filming the pilot, both men were prevented by poor health from continuing their collaboration.

    Hal Ashby was diagnosed in early-1988 with a cancer that spread rapidly to his liver and colon and to which he succumbed, finally, on December 27. Ashby’s death at 59 prevented him from witnessing the re-birth of independent cinema that energised America’s filmmakers, young and old, during the early-1990s. Imagine how different our appraisals of Robert Altman’s career might be had it ended with Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Secret Honor (1984) – had it ended before he made The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Or, imagine how different our opinion of Francis Ford Coppola might be had he not retreated to his vineyards and re-emerged as an acclaimed producer of others’ films – had his career ended with One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Rumble Fish (1983). Hal Ashby personifies, better than any other director, Hollywood’s Film Renaissance of the 1970s: its moral ambivalence and political rage, its stylistic audacity and deeply human voice, its supernova of energy that could not possibly burn so brightly for very long.

    Endnotes

    1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York, Simon, 1998. Unfortunately, because Biskind’s book has become so influential, and because it is (sadly) the only text that devotes more than a few sentences to Ashby, what little we know of the director’s personal life has been reduced to a series of sensational anecdotes. There’s Hal the chain-smoking, hyper-obsessive editor, sitting at his Moviola for twenty-four hours at a stretch; Hal the recluse, holed-up in his beach house, unwilling to talk to anxious producers; Hal the Hollywood rebel, who promised to use his Oscar as a door stop; Hal the drug-addicted depressive, who fought suicidal tendencies throughout his life and whose addictions cost him several high-profile projects in the 1980s.
    2. Michael Shedlin, review of Harold and Maude, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 1972, p. 53.
    3. Shedlin, p. 53.
    4. Shedlin, p. 52.
    5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken, 1985. p. 285.
    6. Joseph McBride, “Song for Woody”, Film Comment, November/December 1976, p. 26.
    7. Wexler, in fact, was fifth in a line of talented young DPs to work with Ashby. He was preceded by Gordon Willis on The Landlord, John Alonzo on Harold and Maude, Michael Chapman on The Last Detail, and László Kovács on Shampoo.
    8. Quoted in “Chance Encounters: Bringing Being There to the Screen” by Barbara Tepa Lupack in Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, New York, Hall, 1998, p. 214.
    9. Lupack, p. 213.
    10. If watching Rebecca DeMornay sing a synthesizer-backed cover of Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” was not the most depressing moment of my film-watching life, then it’s only because I could imagine Ashby enjoying the irony of it all.
  • Great Directors: Tsai Ming-liang

    Great Directors: Tsai Ming-liang

    This essay was orignally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    The River (1997), Tsai Ming-liang’s third feature-length film, opens with a static shot of a vacant, two-way escalator. After twenty seconds or so of silence—the diegetic drone of the escalators is the only sound we hear—a young woman begins her descent down the left side as a young man climbs to the right. They share an unexpected glimpse of recognition in passing, then turn toward each other, their bodies still being pushed in opposite directions. It’s a paradigmatic instance of Tsai’s storytelling: a nearly wordless exchange between two souls who are, paradoxically, isolated among Taipei’s six million inhabitants and drawn together/pulled apart by its contemporary, technological landscape. That the woman, upon reaching the lower level, immediately turns and ascends back to where her old friend awaits, suggests the possibility of grace—even if fleeting—that bleeds through so much of Tsai’s otherwise bleak and alienating vision. In his world of water-soaked apartments, anonymous sexual encounters, mysterious and catastrophic disease, and desperate loneliness, Tsai clutches tightly to a strange and joyful faith in the potential for genuine human communion, a communion that is rare indeed but occasionally worthy of the effort.

    Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town. The son of a farmer who also operated a stall in the city center, Tsai speaks fondly of his relatively carefree childhood. “The main benefit I got from having lived there, in Kuching, for that period” he has said, “was the very slow pace of life, giving me time to develop my interests and enjoy myself.” (1) The analogies here to Tsai’s distinctive film style and narrative concerns are too rich to ignore. Even by the standards of his New Taiwanese Cinema contemporaries, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai’s films are, as some would say, deliberately paced. Cutting together long takes, often of static medium and long shots, he unabashedly requires each viewer to slow down and patiently experience another’s life, thereby avoiding the dictatorial imposition of classical continuity editing that would lead inevitably, in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, to “a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.” (2) Instead, Tsai’s camera lingers near his subjects in an almost documentary fashion, observing their behavior with relative objectivity, just as the director himself came of age freely observing and admiring the slow movements of Malaysian life.

    At twenty, after finishing high school and becoming “a bit of a gigolo”, Tsai left Kuching at his father’s prodding and resettled in Taiwan, where he entered Taipei’s Chinese Culture University to study film and drama. (3) There, he was first exposed to European cinema and, specifically, to auteurs such as Truffaut, Fassbinder, Bresson, and Antonioni, the four filmmakers to whom Tsai is most often compared. “I think European films are closer to me because they are about modern life and ordinary, modern men,” Tsai told Nanouk Leopold. “And I have the idea they are more realistic, true to life.” (4) Although cataloguing their particular influences might be a tad reductive, the contributions of each director to Tsai’s style is clear: Truffaut’s sweet humanism; Fassbinder’s loyal troupe of collaborators, along with his gender and sexual preoccupations; Bresson’s precise attention to the bodies of his non-professional actors; Antonioni’s alienating urban landscapes. For Tsai, the films of the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema, in particular, were convincing evidence of film’s potential as a vehicle for personal expression. He emerged from that experience with a new enthusiasm for the film director as a guiding and influential artistic voice.

    Tsai graduated from the university in 1982, an interesting moment in Taiwan’s recent history. Three years after America first enacted the Taiwan Relations Act—which formally recognized the People’s Republic of China and severed official diplomatic ties with Taiwan—but five years before the decades of marshal law were finally brought to an end, Taiwan was in a state of flux, moving slowly but progressively toward democratization (which it would finally achieve fully in 1996 with the election of President Lee Teng-hui). For Taiwan’s emerging generation of artists and filmmakers, that social and political flux resulted in greater access to alternate sources of financing and a renaissance of independent filmmaking. Tsai immediately began work in the theater, where he staged four original plays, including A Wardrobe in the Room (1983), a one-person show in which Tsai himself starred. The drama concerns a young man who voluntarily isolates himself from the city that surrounds him, a motif that would later come to dominate Tsai’s films. He also busied himself by writing screenplays for film and television, work that led to his first significant experiences behind the camera.

    Between 1989 and 1991, Tsai wrote ten teleplays, eight of which he also directed, either in whole or in part (this according to the appendix of Tsai Ming-liang, published by Editions Dis Voir in 1999, the only existing book-length study of the director). Tsai now views that period as a fundamental apprenticeship during which he found his voice as a director. There, for instance, he first discovered the remarkable tensions created by mixing professional actors with amateurs, and there he also first explored the use of documentary technique in narrative films. Unfortunately, Western audiences have had precious few opportunities to see Tsai’s early work. Only two of the television films were included in a recent touring retrospective (2002). Chris Fujiwara has described the first, All the Corners of the World (1989), as “a study of a family of movie-ticket scalpers [that] provides early drafts of images and situations that will recur in Tsai’s films, including a roller-rink scene, motorbike vandalism, an elevator ride in a love hotel, and a mannequin floating in water.” (5) The other, Boys (1991), is most notable for introducing the talents of Lee Kang-sheng (aka Hsiao-kang), who has gone on to star in each of Tsai’s features.

    Along with the various teleplays, Tsai was also at work on the script for his first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), which he describes as an attempt to “make a feature that was even more documentary, even more real, about everyday life in Taipei.” (6) The story of a disenchanted youth (Lee) who drops out of school after becoming obsessed with a local petty criminal (played by Chen Chao-jung), Rebels introduces what have since become the hallmarks of Tsai’s style: a preoccupation with the fractured nuclear family, which is explored onscreen by Lee, Miao Tien as his father, and Lu Hsiao-ling as his mother, all of whom return in nearly identical roles in The River and What Time Is It There? (2001); an attention to the rootless nihilism of Taipei’s youth; the juxtaposition of contemporary mores and traditional Eastern religion, most often enacted in the mother’s ceremonial adherence to Buddhist ritual; an interest in sex as an immediate but ultimately unsatisfying act of catharsis; and a symbolic obsession with water.

    Rebels also exemplifies Tsai’s distinctive approach to narrative, which deliberately exploits and subverts traditional notions of dramatic tension. In one sequence, for instance, Lee trails Chen and his partner-in-crime into an arcade, where the two young thieves force open video games to steal their motherboards. When the boys complete their job and escape from the arcade, Lee is left alone, locked in for the night, waiting to be discovered. Tsai employs standard continuity editing here—cross-cutting from a shot of Lee asleep on the arcade floor to another of a security guard arriving for duty—but he then elides the expected confrontation and deflates the scene’s tension by cutting to a shot of Lee walking safely down a Taipei street. Later, we see Lee alone in his bedroom, posed with a handgun in his outstretched arms. But, again, the expected violence never materializes, or at least not as Tsai had led us to imagine it. Instead, like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, his films turn viewers into self-conscious observers of strange, complex behavior—less stereotypically cinematic, more unpredictably human.

    In Vive l’amour (1994), Tsai’s follow-up, Lee and Chen return, this time as street vendors who are drawn together by a vacant, upscale apartment and the young realtor, May Lin (played by Yang Kuei-mei, another of Tsai’s regulars), who fails repeatedly in her attempts to rent it. The film ends with two stunning sequences that illustrate all that makes Tsai’s vision so fascinating. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-kang crawls into bed with Ah-jung (Chen), who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, forcing us to watch—trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense—as Hsiao-kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy. Tsai then cuts to his heroine, who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. May Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The shot lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.” (7)

    The River is Tsai’s bleakest film and also his most explicitly transgressive. After the escalator scene described above, Hsiao-kang accompanies the young woman to the set of a movie on which she is working, where he volunteers to float lifelessly in the Tanshui river, imitating a corpse. The remainder of the film concerns his and his family’s attempts to cure him of a mysterious neck pain that becomes progressively debilitating in the weeks that follow his swim. As in The Hole (1997), in which Taipei is plagued by a millennial health epidemic, here Tsai explores the emotional and psychological resonances of an inexplicable pain that carries both symbolic and corporal weight. Lee’s neck condition acts, first, as a metonymic manifestation of other ails, chief among them the collapse of the family, which in many of Tsai’s films stands in as a microcosm of contemporary society. The River dissects the traditional nuclear family with brutal frankness, culminating in a complex and difficult, but undeniably brilliant scene that shocks viewers into confronting the consequences of dishonest living, failed communication, and psychic alienation.

    But Tsai refuses to slip completely into allegory here, denying us the safety of symbolic distance. Lee’s pain, instead, is always present, always excruciatingly real. In that sense, Tsai’s camera is like the Naturalist’s pen—like Flaubert’s and Zola’s—observing (almost clinically) bodies, faces, and superficial behaviors in an attempt to explain something of the human experience. In Vive l’amour Tsai first began “researching” his characters in isolation, a conceit that he develops further in The River before taking it to extreme lengths in The Hole. “That’s why I like filming bodies in these solitary situations so much,” he has said, “because I think that a person’s body only really belongs to them when they are alone.” (8) Thus, Tsai’s films are populated with shots of the mundane rituals of life—isolated characters eating, pissing, watching television, masturbating, smoking, working, mopping up spills, crying. At one point in The River, Lee sits alone on a hallway bench, where he is finally overcome by the burdens of pain. As in the final shot of Vive l’amour, we are left to watch helplessly as he convulses and, in exasperation, rocks his head into the wall behind him. Here and elsewhere, Lee is the ideal subject for Tsai’s experiments. His slow movements and measured expressions make him something of a Tarkovskyan figure, one who is “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” (9)

    Lee’s body is also on remarkable display in The Hole, in which he and Yang Kuei-mei perform a cinematic dance—quite literally in places—that blends slapstick comedy with profound pathos. Part of the seven-film “2000 Seen By…” series, The Hole marked Tsai’s return to features after the 1995 documentary, My New Friends, a portrait of two HIV-positive men. Perhaps reflecting that documentary experience, The Hole is set in the final days of 1999, when an enigmatic virus forces the government of Taiwan to quarantine large sections of Taipei. Lee and Yang remain, however, and their lives become entwined after a utility worker drills a hole through the floor that separates their apartments. In many ways, The Hole marks a significant departure from the films that preceded it. While Tsai’s central thematic concern (urban alienation) and his palette of symbols (water, in particular) remain on prominent display, The Hole offers portents of grace and promise that are only hinted at in his previous work. Tsai deviates most radically here in his use of fantasy-fueled musical dance sequences that meld nostalgia—harkening back to the popular Hong Kong films of his youth—with playful irreverence. Typically, Tsai eschews musical scores so as to not “shatter the reality” of his cinematic worlds. (10) The Hole, however, has only one foot in reality from the outset; the other is firmly planted in Yang’s and Lee’s projected desires (which, by the way, are awfully fun to watch).

    The Hole is also a significant departure for Tsai in that the film’s simple plot—two neighbors pine away in isolation, perpetually separated by an artificial barrier—necessarily eliminates any possibility of the two leads having sex. Sex is an appropriately complicated issue in all of Tsai’s other films, which prominently feature impersonal and unfulfilling sexual encounters. Dennis Lim suggests that, in comparison with the films of his more explicitly political Taiwanese contemporaries, Tsai’s are more concerned with “personal fumblings—often stemming from romantic longing and sexual confusion.” That confusion becomes manifest in frequent one night stands, visits to gay saunas, extramarital affairs, the mimicking of pornography (which plays like a training video in the background of several scenes), and, at its most extreme, incest. In Tsai’s fourth film, however, “the hole” itself, standing as it does between Yang and Lee, becomes that obscure object of desire (and surely it doesn’t require a Freudian analyst to remark on the metaphoric implications of that hole). The film’s penultimate sequence might be the most extraordinary of Tsai’s career. In a static long shot, we see Yang crumpled on the floor of her apartment, exhausted and water-logged. From just beyond the top edge of the frame, Lee’s arm extends down toward her. She notices and reaches for it; they make contact, and he pulls her up, presumably into his life. Such a simple, fairy tale-like image, but, especially given the context of his otherwise dystopian vision, that moment of communion breathes unexpected optimism and life into Tsai’s oeuvre.

    In What Time Is It There?, Tsai’s most recent feature, that promise remains, though tempered somewhat by the pains of tragedy and loss. The film is, in many ways, the logical culmination of his career thus far. Lee returns here as a Taipei watch vendor who is mourning the sudden death of his father (Miao Tien). In an early scene, Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a beautiful young woman preparing for a trip to Paris, convinces Hsiao-kang to sell his own watch to her. Their brief encounter inspires in him a sense of longing, which he acts upon by systematically resetting clocks to Paris time and by watching, again and again, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). While Hsiao-kang pines away in Taiwan, Shiang-chyi wanders through Parisian cafes and Metro stations, adrift in the rituals of loneliness: listening silently to the late-night sounds of an upstairs neighbor, longing for contact with random strangers. To this strange pairing, Tsai adds Hsiao-kang’s mother (again Lu Hsiao-ling, though now using the name Lu Yi-ching), a woman paralyzed by grief who also seems to find relief only through ritual, both religious and domestic.

    In one of the film’s most touching scenes, the mother dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband’s empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”, she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It’s another trademark Tsai moment: his camera again remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics has been to reduce these signature scenes to simple meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao-kang’s mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like so many of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai’s style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope. Our efforts are rewarded in full in the closing moments of the film—the most transcendent of Tsai’s career, thanks in part to Benoit Delhomme’s stunning photography and Miao Tien’s remarkable face—when that same strange beauty returns and What Time Is It There? transforms unexpectedly into a romantic ghost story and an ode to eternal love.

    If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.

    Endnotes

    1. Danièle Rivière, “Scouting: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang”, Tsai Ming-liang, Paris, Dis Voir, 1999, p. 79
    2. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, New York, Knopf, 1987, p. 20
    3. Rivière, p. 81
    4. Nanouk Leopold, “Confined Space – Interview with Tsai Ming liang”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 20, May–June 2002, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html
    5. Chris Fujiwara, “Of Space and Solitude”, The Phoenix, 21 February 2002, http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/02164886.htm
    6. Rivière, p. 88
    7. Dennis Lim, “Tsai Ming-liang Opens the Floodgates”, The Village Voice, 25 June 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0126/lim.php
    8. Rivière, p. 103
    9. Tarkovsky, p. 17
    10. Rivière, p. 111
    11. Chuck Stephens, “Eastern Division Highlights”, Film Comment, January–February 2003, p. 68.
  • Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “For the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”
    — Flannery O’Connor

    In the “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman boldly proclaims the scope of his project: the forging of a distinctly American poetic tradition. For Whitman, the genius of America can be found in the “common people. Their manners speech dress friendships [sic] — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy . . . these too are unrhymed poetry” (712). His proclamation marked a radical departure from earlier forms and secured his position as the poet laureate of American romanticism. By elevating emotion over intellect and the wild and natural over the tamed, Whitman assaulted his readers, forcing them to abandon pretense and acknowledge their shared humanity and the moral responsibility that accompanies it.

    Echoes of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” can now be heard in the work of French filmmaker, Bruno Dumont, who turned from academia to the cinema out of a need to reconnect with people. Speaking of his first feature, La vie de Jésus (1997), Dumont contrasts his own approach to filmmaking with the ‘cerebral’ navel-gazing that he feels characterizes much of contemporary French cinema:

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. . . . The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. (Walsh)

    Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a democratic spirit, celebrating the “common people” in all of their rich complexity. In La Vie de Jésus and its follow-up, L’Humanité (1999), Dumont has restored . . . well . . . humanity to the screen, and in doing so, has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. Instead of simply turning a hand-held camera on ‘real people’ living ‘real lives,’ a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television, he has, like Whitman, rediscovered the transcendent and the beautiful in the common, by giving us stunning and often shocking images of the body—here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic—and by forcing us to respond truthfully and viscerally to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. Dumont’s films slowly erode the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. For Dumont, wrestling with the intellectual and political consequences of that emotional response remains an essential but always secondary step. It should come as little surprise that L’Humanité was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes in 1999, while Sam Mendes’s American Beauty—a film that, in many ways, adopts a strangely similar humanist stance—won a Best Picture Oscar the following year. It appears the majority of audiences have surrendered the ability to recognize sincerity (or, perhaps it has atrophied), objecting loudly when asked to do so. Instead, audiences either opt for or are steered toward easy satire and emotional distance, not to mention Kevin Spacey-sized performances to truthful ones. Ricky Fitts claims in Mendes’s film that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world that I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of contemporary society’s manufactured emotions. Dumont refuses to let us off so easily.

    Central to Dumont’s project is his faith in the power of cinema to return us “to the body, to the heart, to truth.” That faith secures his position in the lineage of filmmakers whom he most admires: Rossellini, Bresson, Pasolini. I might also add to the list Tarkovsky, who, like Dumont, saw the cinematic image as a potential vehicle for the revelation of truth through the simultaneous experience of complex and contradictory emotions. (“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Whitman would laugh.) By privileging the audience’s instinctual, visceral responses, and by doing so within the assumed customs of contemporary European ‘art’ cinema (a questionable categorization, I realize), Dumont deliberately places his viewers in an exasperating position and dares them to find a way out: trained to ‘read’ the complex images of the art house with the intellectual rigor of something akin to New Criticism, they fall immediately into the trap of struggling to decode messages, unravel symbols, and impose order, often where little exists. Dumont, however, frustrates the viewer at every turn by lending those messages an impenetrable ambiguity. So instead, we are forced to confront the stunning complexity of emotions that his films wrestle from each of us: empathy/revulsion, desire/pain, longing/fear, awe/confusion, transcendence/alienation. For his films to touch our hearts and reveal truth, as he desires, they must first shake us free from our expectations by confronting our senses.

    That Dumont has succeeded in this, his first goal, is evidenced by the critical response to his work, which reads like a cinematic Rorschach test. The polarized voices that were heard most loudly at Cannes made their way into the pages of Sight and Sound by way of “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” a point/counter-point article in which Mark Cousins calls the film “one of the best . . . of the last ten years,” and Jonathon Romney responds by denouncing it as “an unsubtle film and a coercive one.” In separate reviews, Richard Falcon finds the end of La vie de Jésus “almost unbearably and inexplicably moving”; Stuart Klowans calls L’Humanité “off-putting and yet so immediate.”

    Dumont elicits these varied responses through a film style that combines the naturalistic, nonprofessional performances of social-realism with austere, Kubrick-like camerawork. As Tony Rayns remarks in his review of L’Humanité, and as most viewers have likely noticed, Dumont’s second feature is a “virtual remake” of its predecessor. Both are set in Bailleul, the small town in northern France where Dumont was raised and where he continues to reside. Both are concerned with the lives of the working class. And both display Dumont’s trademark cinematographic blend of lush widescreen landscapes, glossy-eyed close-ups, and clinically objective (and graphic) stagings of sex. [Brief plot synopses follow.]

    La vie de Jésus concerns the tragic fate of Freddy (David Douche), an unemployed twenty-something who spends his days collecting welfare checks and aimlessly riding his motorbike alone or with a gang of friends through town and the surrounding countryside. He lives there with his mother (Geneviève Cottreel), who is as disillusioned and as distant as he. Their first interaction, minutes into the film, is typical of their relationship: with Freddy standing before her, she stares past him at television coverage of an epidemic in Africa. “What a shame,” she sighs, responding to the visual messages on TV while ignoring those on her son’s face. Freddy’s only relief from the oppressive boredom comes from his participation in a marching band, his meticulous care for a pet finch, and his carnal relationship with Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), a young girl who works as a grocery cashier and who lives on Freddy’s otherwise vacant street. When Marie welcomes the attention of Kader, an Arab boy, Freddy retaliates violently, kicking him to death on the street.

    Like Freddy, the protagonist of L’Humanité lives alone with his mother in a working class section of Bailleul. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent, called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and child and that he seems to suffer from a heightened sensitivity to others’ emotional pain. He apparently has only one friend, a neighbor named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon accompanies them to dinner and on a trip to the sea. He rides his bicycle, tends his garden, and improvises on his electric keyboard. Occasionally, he also devotes some energy to his investigation, and, by the end of the film, the case appears to be solved.

    When reduced to simple plotlines, both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité sound like standard fare: one a social drama concerning disillusioned youth, the other a classic police procedural. They diverge most radically from the norm, though, in their treatment of their ‘heroes’, a label I feel comfortable applying to Freddy and Pharaon only because Dumont clearly sees them as such. They are heroes born of the same stock as Hemingway’s, Eliot’s, and Antonioni’s: characters desperate to discover communion, beauty, and purpose in an alienating and amoral world. Dumont reminds us constantly of their brutal plight by lingering on shots of their bodies, which appear broken and almost grotesquely malformed. Freddy’s body is scarred by frequent falls from his motorbike and is ravaged by epileptic seizures. He is like a younger version of Pharaon, whose sunken chest, stooped shoulders, and hollow eyes lend him the appearance of a man twice his age.

    Dumont’s characters are, in fact, ‘embodied’ by their physiognomies. The director spent ten months casting L’Humanité, then recreated his original ‘prototype’ characters based on the performers’ specific appearance and mannerisms. “I directed them based on what came from within them,” he has said. “I observed their body language and composed my shots around it” (Erickson). One recurring motif in both films is a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up. The shots typically last ten to fifteen seconds with little movement and only diegetic sound. For instance, near the end of La vie de Jésus, when he is notified by a police inspector that Kader has died during the night, Freddy sits hunched over in a chair, glancing up slowly to acknowledge the news. As in much of the second half of the film, Freddy is shirtless. The pronounced scratches on his shoulders and arms and the positioning of his body lend him the appearance of one being flogged. A similar image occurs in L’Humanité, when Pharaon leans over to work the soil in his garden.

    Dumont’s broken heroes personify his idealized vision of “the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of . . . emotion.” Both Freddy and Pharaon are, on several occasions, overwhelmed by swells of inarticulate rage. Twice, Freddy lashes out by silently kicking a brick wall. In both instances, Dumont frames him in a long shot, suggesting that these outbursts are as much a part of his routine existence as are his moped rides and band practices. Likewise, the most powerful moment in L’Humanité comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream that is eventually drowned out by the noise of a passing train. A “barbaric yawp,” indeed.

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanité is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. The movie detective is an archetypal Western hero: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy for others of which, Dumont suggests, very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity—to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it—but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body. Dumont reinforces Pharaon’s longing for connection by again lingering on shots of the body, but now from Pharaon’s subjective point of view: his boss’s sweat-soaked neck, his mother’s hand as she peels potatoes, Domino’s and Joseph’s bodies in the throes of sex, his own hand as he pets a nursing sow.

    This desperate pursuit of human connection is universal in Dumont’s world. Even Joseph and Domino, whose relationship is obviously driven by sex, are drawn together by some instinctive, biological need. Dumont does not censure this primal urge, though. In fact, again like Whitman, his controversial treatment of sex—including a penetration shot in La vie de Jésus —tears down the socio-religious barriers that often prevent us from acknowledging the base desires (words suddenly stripped of their negative connotations) that fuel so much of our behavior. Dumont does suggest, however, that a higher order of connection is attainable, but not without difficulty and sacrifice. In an outdoor cafe scene, we watch as Domino attempts to reach Joseph. She sits silently for several seconds before finally whispering, “I love you.” He’s able to respond only by stroking her hand, then Dumont cuts quickly to a shot of them having sex. A similar moment occurs in La vie de Jésus, when Freddy and Marie float over the countryside on a sightseeing chairlift. “Do you love me, Fred?” she asks. “Sure, I love you. Forever.” They kiss, but both appear more at ease in their embrace than in conversation. When they talk, they sit as far removed from one another as their chair will allow.

    The scene on the chairlift is notable because it exemplifies Dumont’s cinematographic style. Seeing his films for the first time, one is left a bit shaken by the graphic sexuality, by the brutality of the violence, and by the absurdity of his heroes. This, again, is the first goal of his project: to elicit a truthful emotional response from the viewer, even if that response is revulsion. But there’s also a formal beauty in Dumont’s films, a beauty that becomes more pronounced with subsequent viewings. During Freddy and Marie’s chairlift ride, Dumont cuts frequently to their subjective points of view. We see, from their perspective high above the ground, another of Dumont’s trademark images: an extreme long shot of the landscape, the widescreen frame divided by land and sky. The motif recurs with considerable frequency in both films, perhaps most notably in the opening of L’Humanité, a static shot that lasts nearly a minute as we watch Pharaon, dwarfed by the immense landscape, run from one side of the frame to the other.

    Dumont’s attention to landscapes, specifically, and to the natural world, in general, again harkens to Tarkovsky, who saw humanity’s increasing alienation from nature as symptomatic of its tragic loss of divine faith. Dumont has denied any personal belief in the existence of God, but has admitted to a fascination with the human history of Christ, evidenced most clearly in the title of his first film. In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Dumont’s camera acts as a mystical agent, offering the audience a glimpse of the transcendent that remains just beyond the reach of his characters. My favorite moment in these films comes just after one of Freddy’s epileptic seizures. He is with his friends, standing beside a road outside of town, when his body seizes, jerking him to the ground. The camera begins near eye level in a medium shot, but then cranes up slowly, rocking slightly from side to side as it climbs, floating over the boys until finally settling on another landscape. It’s a moment of breath-taking beauty that unites Dumont’s preoccupations with the body, the heart, and truth.

    A similar mystical effect is created by Dumont’s frequent subjective shots of the sky, which seem to embody, visually and emotionally, his characters’ search for meaning, a search that is then transferred to the viewer. The first of such shots occurs early in L’Humanité: upon hearing of the rape and murder of the young girl, Domino turns her gaze to the sky, as if searching for some explanation for the abominable act. Thirty minutes later, Dumont echoes that scene, when Joseph and Pharaon stand together, staring out at the sea. Hearing a voice, they both look back and to the sky, where they see Domino looking down at them from atop an old fort. By placing Domino in the position that we might assume to be filled by God (or fate or any number of mystical guiding principles), Dumont lends the image an ambiguity that refuses simplistic resolution.

    The same could be said of a scene near the end of La vie de Jésus, when Marie and Kader seek privacy in a section of a park that “smells like piss.” Finally alone, Marie embraces Kader and asks for his forgiveness. He looks upward, then, after a cut on an eye-line match, we see the sky as if through his eyes. It’s a beautifully complex sequence, one obviously rife with New Testament allusion. Much of the scene’s power is generated by a lovely close-up of Marie’s face pressed against Kader’s shoulder, a shot to which Dumont returns throughout L’Humanité in Pharaon’s many strange embraces. That beauty, and the potential connection that it seems to suggest, is tempered, though, by the aura of inevitable violence that surrounds the couple. The embrace is a desperate gesture for Marie, and one that, even after repeated viewings, I can only explain by acknowledging the powerful desperation I experience sympathetically each time I watch it.

    In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Flannery O’Connor defends her preoccupation with grotesque characters and absurd situations by claiming, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (806). A devout Catholic, O’Connor wanted to awaken her readers from the apathy and intellectual arrogance that blinded them to God’s presence in their lives, to force them to experience what Herman Melville called the “shock of recognition.” In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Bruno Dumont confronts his viewers from a similar tack. The final skyward glance in La vie de Jésus is Freddy’s. After escaping from the police station and once again wrecking his motorbike, he lies rigid on his back, hidden by tall grass. Dumont’s camera stares down at him as the scene begins to darken, leading us to expect another fade to black. Instead, he cuts to Freddy’s view of clouds drifting across the sun. What follows are two images that return us once again to the body: first, a close-up of an ant walking across his skin (a similar shot occurs in L’Humanité); then, a shot of his hands, dirty and broken beyond their years. As with the notorious final sequence of L’Humanité —Pharaon sits alone, inexplicably handcuffed, after Joseph has been accused of the murder—Dumont leaves Freddy’s fate unresolved. And we are left to wrestle with the consequences. I can’t rationally explain Pharaon’s behavior, nor Freddy’s. Dumont’s world, like O’Connor’s, is recognizable but distorted, heightened, surreal, which might also describe the way I feel when the credits roll: overwhelmed by the experience, but strangely alive to the possibility of something more.

    Works Cited

    Cousins, Mark, and Jonathon Romney. “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” Sight and Sound 10.9 (2000): 22-25.

    Erickson, Steve. “Oh, the Humanité!” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Time Out New York June 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Falcon, Richard. “La Vie de Jesus/The Life of Jesus.” Rev. of La Vie de Jesus, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 8.9 (1998): 55.

    Klawans, Stuart. “Columbo This Isn’t.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. The Nation. 10 July 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Flannery O’Connor: Selected Works. Ed. by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 801-06.

    Rayns, Tony. “L’Humanite.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 10.10 (2000): 46-47.

    Walsh, David. “Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus.” 20 Oct. 1997. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton, 1973.