Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Spain

  • Jose Luis Guerin: Rediscovering the Quotidian

    Jose Luis Guerin: Rediscovering the Quotidian

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    “I am not an ideologue,” José Luis Guerín says matter-of-factly. “I need characters.” Judging by the lukewarm response that has greeted his latest film, Guest, it’s a dicey stance for a director of art house cinema to take these days. Early reviewers have praised Guerín’s images but questioned the structure of the film, which often finds him wandering through Third World cities and inviting conversations about hot-button topics like immigration, colonialism, and religion. That he does so without any pretense of deep sociopolitical analysis makes Guest something of an anachronism: it’s a politically-interested film in an observational mode, more humble and curious than didactic.

    In 2006, after premiering his previous film, In the City of Sylvia, Guerín decided to spend a year traveling the world by accepting every festival invitation he was offered. He carried a consumer-grade DV camera with him wherever he went and very gradually built a “recording journal” of his travels: Venice, New York, Bogota, Havana, Seoul, São Paulo, Cali, Paris, Lisbon, Macao, Jerusalem. (Fans of Sylvia will recognize the return of one of its signature shots: a close-up of journal pages blowing in the breeze.) Along the way, he encountered a few familiar faces—Chantal Akerman and Jonas Mekas make memorable appearances in Guest—but spent the bulk of his time in public spaces, talking to locals, visiting their homes, trying, as he told me, to be a traveler rather than a tourist.

    By his own admission, Guerín approached this film with few preconceptions and was content, instead, to discover leitmotifs and organizing principles in the editing room. What emerged in the process are general themes: homelessness (both literal and metaphoric), mythmaking, melancholy/nostalgia, and alienation—specifically, the alienating effect of the cinema. Guerín aspires with Guest and with his work, generally, to counteract this tendency, to make the workaday routines of life new again. That’s one reason for Guests’s black-and-white photography. “Color is not neutral,” he said after the first screening in Toronto. “I wanted the film to be a series of portraits.” It’s Guerín’s Modernist bent, I think—his commitment to form—that gives Guest its heft.

    Guerín’s English is slightly better than my Spanish and French, so we spoke slowly and laughed a good bit. With his encouragement, I’ve expanded some of his answers without, I hope, losing his cadence.

    * * *

    HUGHES: In the Cuba section, there’s a homeless man who’s very upset about the homeless problem, and he says that all the Cuban government cares about is tourism. The word “tourism” can have negative connotations, while “guest” is more positive.

    GUERÍN: Well, this was my situation. For that year, I was just a guest. I went where I was invited. This was the pact I made. Each time I arrived at a festival, I would see on this small table beside my bed my credentials with my photo and the word “guest.” A guest is nothing—maybe it’s positive, maybe it’s negative. You can be a guest traveler or a guest tourist. Maybe I’m also a tourist, but I chose for my movie to try to be a traveler—to concentrate on faces, on humans, on characters.

    The great benefit of traveling is that it gives you the capacity to recreate your own street, your own space, your own city—to rediscover the quotidian. Ordinary life! This is the essential material of cinema. Usually, you walk down the same street each day; eventually you cannot see your own city. But when you travel and walk an unfamiliar road, there are constant surprises and small discoveries. These discoveries exist on your own street as well, though. For a filmmaker, this change of perspective is important because it’s the opposite of exoticism. A tourist is looking only for the exotic. A traveler is looking for something singular that is also recognizable from their own life.

    HUGHES: You’ve cited the Lumière Brothers and Italian Neo-Realism as this film’s heritage. Are Chris Marker and Agnès Varda also part of your heritage?

    GUERÍN: Of course. Chris Marker is very important to me, but we are very different. Marker is a worker of words. His voice-overs confront the image in a dialectic. It’s his own genre. He’s a poet and an ideologue. I am not an ideologue. Marker is concerned primarily with ideas; I need characters.

    In this sense, my heritage is closer to King Vidor and the Italian Neo-Realists. But like all filmmakers, or like anyone who loves the cinema, in my everyday life and when I travel, there is a constant dialog going on between my imagination, which has been formed by books and movies, and life. This is a great function of art—to help you rediscover life. Too often it’s the opposite: cinema creates alienation.

    For example, when I first arrived in New York, I realized I could not make an image of the city. I was already carrying an accumulation of cinematic images and imaginations. I didn’t see New York; I saw the image of New York. This is why I included the scene of Portrait of Jennie. [In Guest, Guerín watches William Dieterle’s 1948 film in his New York hotel room.]

    HUGHES: You’re obviously not an ideologue like Marker, but you are a Spaniard who is traveling through the Spanish-speaking Third World and choosing to take your camera into public spaces and into homes. So the film might not be arguing from a particular ideology, but it’s still explicitly political.

    GUERÍN: Colonialism, you mean? Of course. Yes, of course. What most interests me is the legacy of Spain on the imagination of these countries. “Print the legend!” {laughs} The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance! “Print the legend.” There are so many ideas and stories about the influence of Spanish people. The past, finally, is a legend.

    HUGHES: I love the man who points to the statue of Simón Bolívar and says, “He’s Roman from the neck down.”

    GUERÍN: Yeah, yeah, yeah! And he even remembers the size of Bolívar’s shoes! {laughs} This is important, though, because it points to the idea of a popular culture [the unique culture of a particular people], which is disappearing in Europe. It’s finished in Europe. All of these incredible people in Latin America evoke the Europe of my childhood. In them you see the characters of Rossellini and De Sica, the films of the ’40s. Or the American Great Depression. You see people from Vidor, William Wellman, and John Ford.

    It’s a curious thing. I know the good Cuban cinema of the ’60s but nothing of, say, classic Chilean film. But these European and American films help me to see the people of Latin America. Do you remember this film, Human Remains, with Spencer Tracy and directed by Frank Borzage? [Human Remains is a direct translation of the Spanish title given to Man’s Castle (1933).]

    HUGHES: No, I don’t know that one.

    GUERÍN: Oh, it’s a very good movie. Spencer Tracy plays a man who is out of work and walks around wearing one of those signs [a sandwich board]. You can see that in Brazil, in São Paulo—a lot of men out of work and trying to sell gold [jewelry]. It’s too long a story for now {laughs} but this Borzage film is very good, with a social perspective.

    HUGHES: I love his silent films. Such beautiful melo…

    GUERÍN: Melodramas, yes. {laughs}

    HUGHES: One of the leitmotifs running through Guest is the work of daily life. We see women chopping onions, making bread, washing clothes. The struggle is similar from country to country.

    GUERÍN: There are different levels of poverty, though. For example, in Bogota, where there are storytellers and poets in the street, this is quite different from the people who have been evacuated from war. In Palestine, a specific political situation has provoked this poverty.

    That’s true, though. When I’m looking for a composition, I’m looking for a complimentary relation. For example, the second part of the film focuses mostly on women. And in these women you can see a sequential development. You see a homesick and lonely Philippine immigrant working in Hong Kong, and you see in Columbia a woman who is dreaming of immigrating, maybe to Spain. These are different relations with immigration, but there’s a unity here also.

    I’m looking for similar qualities, similar gestures. For example, the women making bread—this is a visual unity across cultures. This is the structure of the movie. It’s this diversity, these fragmentary parts, with a corresponding sense of narrative evolution, sometimes more secret, sometimes more evident.

    HUGHES: One visual unity you create is with a particular composition. You shoot the groups of women evangelists in tight closeups with their faces overlapping. It’s the same composition you used at the café and tram depot in In the City of Sylvia.

    GUERÍN: It’s like a collage—a lot of faces in profile but, finally, it’s one face. This is a very powerful visual solution discovered by the Renaissance painter Giotto. Two faces: the face of Joachim and the face of Anna, organized as a single head. It’s a very good idea—the repetition and opposition of faces. The visual discourse of In the City of Sylvia is in this image.

    HUGHES: Your films make me very conscious of something that is basic and fundamental to the job of a director: choosing where to put the camera and what to point it at. In Guest, Jonas Mekas talks about “chance.”

    GUERÍN: Ah, yes, yes. Choice versus chance. Jonas Mekas is the film’s Oracle. I need to explore, every time, this limit between control and chance. This, for me, is the most important aspect of cinema. I think the history of cinema revolves around this idea: How much is control? How much is chance? In the Lumière Brothers? In Jean Renoir? In Hitchcock? In Ford? One function of contemporary cinema is to go further with this conflict.

    All of my cinematographic ideas are born in this dialectic. For example, in In the City of Sylvia—and maybe this is naïve and too simple—but I wanted to shoot a fictional movie on a streetcar. I love streetcars in the cinema. Murnau’s Sunrise, for example. I would organize a sequence by writing dialog and working with the actors, but then there would be a confrontation with chance. Absolutely. Chance. I shot on an ordinary tramway. One part of it was for ordinary people, one part was for the shoot. {laughs} I hadn’t the money to take over the entire tramway.

    Now, for me it’s a big revelation to see my work in the script and with the actors confronted by this other movie—this real window. You might see one moment of the scripted scene when the tramway stops, or you might get one phrase or one word of the dialog. You might see the actress’s face in darkness or in light. All of these elements change the essence of my mise-en-scene.

    One side of this is control, and I love this tradition in the cinema—Murnau, Hitchcock, Ozu, filmmakers who controlled the elements in a studio. But I also love Flaherty and the direct cinema and the Maysles brothers. The tramway is emblematic of my illusion of the cinema. I need to be the first spectator. Cinema is a site of revelation. If I knew everything about my movie while writing the script, I would lose my desire to make it. It should be a revelation.

    HUGHES: Those are the most exciting moments in Sylvia—those very brief glimpses of faces in the windows, all of them possible Sylvias. It’s a classic spectator experience. They remind me of Bernstein’s story in Citizen Kane.

    GUERÍN: Yes, yes, although that story is even more like the other film, Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia. I remember those moments very well. {smiles}

    HUGHES: One last question. The old man in Cuba, “Don Quixote,” you met with him twice? [“Don Quixote” is an aged, homeless Cuban man who still carries his original Communist Party membership card.]

    GUERÍN: Yes.

    HUGHES: Did you ask him to bring photos the second time?

    GUERÍN: No, no, no. He always carries with him all of his objects or belongings. That’s a curious question. These men represent something very human. They’re poor and in a problematic situation. But I see something more in them, something deeply human. Chaplin is maybe the best portrait of the human condition? And in this man I came to see something of the same sense.

    Usually, the characters in Guest are people who came to the camera. It’s not me who came looking for them. It’s very curious. They are complicit. They want to speak. They probably need to communicate. They want to make something together. They’ve lost their original land. It’s a sign of the times, the end of rural life—which comes back to that loss of a popular culture. They’re outsiders, between spaces, unable to integrate into city life.

    “Don Quixote” remembers all of the people he’s left behind, his lost home, like John Wayne in The Quiet Man. {smiles} There are metaphors in my status as “guest.” I’m very comfortable, bourgeois, but I’m also complicit with them. These are the people I prefer.

    HUGHES: He’s very noble, “Don Quixote.”

    GUERÍN: Yes, yes, yes. It’s curious. Like many of the men in Guest he carries a memento of a woman. The film is filled with men who are alone and women who are alone. Maybe that’s why they want to talk to the camera. {laughs}

    HUGHES: Nostalgia?

    GUERÍN: And melancholy.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 7

    2007 TIFF Day 7

    By the midpoint of Une vieille maitresse I already knew that Catherine Breillat would be my next project. I’ve always been a bit intimidated by her reputation, I think, which is why I chose this film to be my introduction to her work. A period piece reputed to be relatively tame by Breillat’s standards, Une vieille maitresse proved to be one of my great surprises at the festival. The film is built around a classic love triangle. The rakish Ryno de Marigny is soon to wed Hermangarde, a precious young aristocrat, and, so, has agreed to abandon his ten-year affair with Vellini, a stereotypically hot-blooded, dark-haired Spaniard. In this battle between a Man, his Madonna, and his Whore (and the archetypes were surely part of the appeal for Breillat), there’s a kind of dialectic created between the public sphere of mannered, polite society and the private places where desire and emotion are freed. Much of the film’s action occurs in a flashback, as Marigny recounts his relationship with Vellini to Hermangarde’s grandmother, a disarmingly frank “18th century woman” (as she describes herself) who acts as his confessor. The posh parlor where Marigny tells his tale exists somewhere between the two spheres of conflict, and Breillat seems as interested in the seductions that occur there as she does with anything that happens in Marigny’s bedroom.

    Which isn’t to say that the goings-on between the rake and his women are anything less than fascinating. Une vieille maitresse features a show-stopper of a sex scene, a verbal and physical battle between Marigny and Vellini that leaves them both exhausted and satisfied — temporarily, at least. Mid-coitus, Vellini begins to tease Marigny about his most recent lover, a woman he admits is bumbling and cold in the bedroom. The power struggle between them is brilliant to watch, as each tests and transgresses the other’s limits. It probably goes without saying that Asia Argento steals every scene, but Breillat’s staging of their bodies, more than anything else, is what has provoked my curiosity about her work.

    Redacted. In March 2006, a small band of American soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl then murdered the child and her family in order to cover up their crime. If you’re imagination is so withered that, after reading that sentence, you’re unable to extrapolate from it the many and various tragedies it contains, maybe you should go see Redacted. Brian De Palma seems to think it will help. (If irony and righteous anger are good enough for De Palma, they’re good enough for me.)

    Dans la ville de Sylvie* opens with a long, static medium shot of the film’s nameless protagonist sitting alone on his bed, staring intently into the distance. By the end of the seventh day of TIFF, I’d become accustomed to shots like this. The long, static take has come to define an aesthetic that’s en vogue at international festivals these days. (I wonder if it isn’t becoming a new “Tradition of Quality,” in fact.) But there was something slightly different about this particular image, because the character was clearly thinking intently as well. Rather than being a purely formal experience, another moment of cinematic contemplation, this was also narrative. And, sure enough, after several minutes of staring silently, the protagonist (director Jose Luis Guerin calls him “the dreamer”) completes his thought, takes up his pencil, and scribbles into his notebook. He’s a poet and artist, we learn, and he’s recently arrived in Strasbourg, the French town where, six years earlier, he’d met a young student named Sylvie.

    I knew I’d found my favorite film of the festival when, two or three minutes into an early sequence at a streetside cafe, it became apparent that we wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. Guerin was having too much fun with that old cinematic war horse, the Kuleshov Effect, forcing his audience into the perspective of “the dreamer” and, in the process, making one of those films sure to pique the curiosity (and possibly the outrage) of the Mulveyites: a film about men looking at women. It sounds so simple (and simple-minded, even) now that I’ve described Sylvie, but the film is so perfectly executed that, even on a second viewing, I found myself completely seduced by it. And I use the word “seduced” quite deliberately. There’s no denying the male, heteronormative gaze adopted by Guerin’s camera, and I worry that I’m too quick to defend a film that has given me only what the cinema always gives me: free license to oggle women. But something curious happens over the course of Sylvie. By the final sequence, which echoes the earlier cafe scene, we’ve been retrained in a new way of looking. Perhaps I should only speak for myself here, but I felt my gaze become desexualized. The women who walk into and out of “the dreamer’s” frame are no longer just obscure objects of desire. Instead, each takes on that same strange character we find in Tarkovsky’s heroines. I usually name the shot of Margarita Terekhova sitting on the fence in Mirror as my all-time favorite movie image, and the last ten minutes of Sylvie plays like an avant-garde remix of it.

    * a.k.a. En la Ciudad de Sylvia or In the City of Sylvia. Why her name changes from Sylvie to Sylvia I don’t know, because it’s definitely Sylvie in the film.

  • The Great Films, Part 1

    The Great Films, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Un Chien Andalou

    Un Chien Andalou

    Over the years, I have, of course, heard and read a great deal about Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (1929), but until Friday I had never actually seen it. Created in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Bunuel’s first film is most remembered today for one of its opening sequences, which cuts between shots of a razor blade, a woman whose left eye is being forced open, and a thin line of clouds passing before a full moon. Just as we’ve become convinced that the cloud and moon will serve as a symbolic gesture, comfortably eliding the violence implied by the sequence, Bunuel cuts to a close-up of the eyeball being sliced open. The scene still works, more than seven decades later.

    My favorite discussion of the sequence can be found in Virginia Carmichael’s Framing History, where she compares Bunuel’s film to E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a novel that attempts to make sense of the early Cold War years. There’s a remarkable and disturbing moment in the novel when the title character reaches over to burn his young wife with a car cigarette lighter. Instead of showing the horrible scene, though, Doctorow (through his narrator) attacks the reader, writing:

    Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in the black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred? (60)

    Carmichael on the scene:

    What seems merely gratuitous cinematographic aestheticism on Bunuel’s part becomes something more radically critical in a political sense when considered as [Daniel’s] symbolic discovery of the function of symbolism in history to mask the horrors of reality—realities such as Stalin’s purges, the U.S. government’s knowing exposure of government workers to high-level radiation. (143)

    So much of contemporary filmmaking is about misdirection, about exciting the emotions and disregarding the consequences. I appreciate Bunuel’s film for its refusal to let us off so easily, though I must admit that, as with so much of Modernist surrealism, I found myself often stunned by the images but unwilling to engage in the intellectual gamesmanship necessary to decode them. I’m sure that great articles have been written that carefully trace contours through the fifteen minute film, but I couldn’t find the motivation to do so myself.