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Foreign Borne Identities: The 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

June 11, 2007

Conspicuously absent at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the subject of the Iraq War has slowly receded as the flashpoint topic of political filmmaking. Whether a matter of over-saturation or simply fatigue at the implacable pace of the ongoing tragedy in the Middle East, the war no longer dominates documentary film discourse. And such is the case with the 18th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, being held at New York’s Walter Reade Theater from June 15th to the 28th. Of the 21 films and three shorts being screened, only one takes Iraq as its subject (James Longley’s short “Sari’s Mother”). While it’s not central to the program, the U.S. policies adopted because of the war (and 9/11) haunt the edges of a number of entries, including one of the opening night films, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s formally adventurous “Strange Culture.”

Documenting one of the most egregious breaches of civil liberties in post 9/11 America, Leeson tells the story of University at Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz, suspected bio-terrorist. During one horrific night in 2004, Kurtz’s wife died unexpectedly from heart failure. When the medics arrived, they noticed (legal) bacteria cultures that Kurtz was to use for an art exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They called the FBI, Kurtz was held, and he entered a legal nightmare he hasn’t fully escaped from. With the case still ongoing, Kurtz isn’t allowed to speak on certain issues, so Leeson hired Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan for re-enactments of that material. Eventually the two actors break character, inserting their own commentary and joking with their real life models. There’s a looseness to this structure that allows Kurtz’s nerdy humor and relentless optimism to shine through, making the film the story of an individual, not merely a trembling victim of incompetent government forces.

While President Bush’s domestic policies failed Kurtz, his broad foreign policy to democratize the Middle East offered a hope to many that has yet to be realized. Two elections fully backed by the U.S., in Afghanistan and Palestine, are investigated in “Enemies of Happiness” and “Hot House,” respectively. In the former, Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad follows Afghani parliamentary candidate Malalai Joya in the run up to the 2005 vote, the first in 35 years. Joya is an extraordinary figure, a 28-year-old firebrand who had gained notoriety for being tossed out of the Grand Council of tribal elders for railing against corrupt warlords. In a country in which women’s rights is a new concept, Joya is hugely divisive, and has to employ a security team to escort her to nearby villages (outlying towns are too dangerous). She had already survived four attempts on her life by the time film picks up her story. As she urges rural women to vote, rescues a teen from marrying an 80-year old opium dealer, and shares tears with a 100-year old (female) veteran of the mujahedeen against the Russians, it seems like grassroots democracy has a chance to succeed. With the recent resurgence of the Taliban and the increasing weakness of the Karzai government, this hopeful sketch now looks like a mirage.

“Hot House” documents the 2006 Palestinian elections from a unique perspective — the inside of Israeli prisons. Fourteen Palestinian prisoners were elected to parliament, nine of which were members of Hamas. Director Shimon Dotan gained an incredible level of access to the inmates in the weeks before the election, eavesdropping on their discussions while outlining the martial discipline with which each subgroup runs their lives behind bars. Dotan’s basic premise is that the Israeli prison system politicizes extremists. The prisoners are given a free education from the Hebrew or Open Universities, and since two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been to jail, there’s a tightly knit network of support for any former or current inmate who runs for office. This is the network that helped thrust Hamas into a commanding majority in parliament, and forced the U.S. to withdraw all aid to the territory.

A country where free elections won’t occur anytime soon is Belarus, one of the most repressive governments in the world. “A Lesson of Belarusian” is a shot-on-the-fly account of the elections of March 2006, widely criticized by the U.S. and E.U. as unfair. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka changed the constitution so he could run for a third time — and used brutal strong-arm tactics to silence the opposition. The film follows the student movement centered around an outlawed school, the Lyceum. Banned for teaching the Belarusian language and its history (instead of the dominant Russian), the institution goes underground to agitate for the opposition leader Alyaksandr Milinkevich. A stunning indictment of Lukashenka’s regime, “A Lesson of Belarusian”‘s nervous cameras catch the pervasive fear and resentment of the populace, culminating in the massive demonstrations on Election Day and the ruthless beatings that followed. As with Joya, all the buoyant optimism of Election Day has come to naught. Lukashenka’s grip on power is as tight as ever, and the opposition is splintering. Just last month Milinkevich was voted out as leader, to be replaced by a rotating group of four that advocates engaging with the authoritarian government.

The most rigorous film in the series is “Manufactured Landscapes” (opening June 20th at Film Forum in NYC), directed by Jennifer Baichwal. It examines the effect China’s rapid industrialization is having on its landscape, seen through the eyes of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Graced by luminous photography of gutted ships, mountains of recyclable waste, and strip-mined valleys, it forces the viewer to confront the contradictions of globalization: these images of uncanny beauty, the result of great leaps in human intelligence, are also polluting the world that nurtures that same intelligence. The gargantuan scale of China’s modernization is embodied by the Three Gorges Dam, the largest ever planned, which has flooded numerous towns (one of which, Fengjie, is the subject of Jia Zhangke’s latest film, “Still Life”). With its energy needs outpacing its supply, China will do anything for help, including importing oil from the Sudan.

The closing night film, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” focuses on the genocide in Darfur as viewed by Brian Steidle, a Marine who took a job as cease-fire monitor with the African Union. Sadly, the film is in love with souped-up zoom-ins on maps and obviously staged scenes of Steidle popping off rounds. The basics of the conflict are covered adequately, with terrifying footage of a Janjaweed fighter reciting their slogan before an attack: “Kill the slaves.” Steidle became an impassioned advocate of U.S. intervention, and the film threatens to turn him into a hero, with far too much footage of him giving speeches and interviews stateside. When the Sudanese are finally allowed to speak for themselves, their eloquence erases any memory of the previous self-congratulation. For Steidle it’s the Iraq War that keeps the U.S. from stopping the slaughter. That’s a questionable proposition, but one indicative of the symbolic power the war still retains. It’s the open wound that bleeds through all current events.

Guy Maddin on “Brand Upon the Brain!”

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

May 7th, 2007

Guy Maddin’s latest — silent — celluloid concoction can only be called an event. Already a hit on the festival circuit, “Brand Upon the Brain!” will descend upon theaters in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in the coming months, escorted by an orchestra, a foley crew and a live (celebrity!) narrator. It’s another delirious genre mash-up from the Canadian filmmaker, one that tells the sordid tale of one “Guy Maddin,” a child raised in a lighthouse orphanage by his psychotically protective mother and catatonic father. He falls under the spell of a cross-dressing sleuth, who investigates those curious holes on the back of the orphans heads… As purely entertaining as any of his previous work, it’s also his most haunting, as youthful mythmaking is turned into chiaroscuro nightmare, and the adult “Guy’s” obsessive remembrance leads him into absolute loneliness.

How did your association start with the Seattle-based The Film Company, the production company for the project?

I got a call in the middle of the night, like one of Josef Stalin’s henchman calling and saying “We want you!” — but what they were calling about was something pretty wonderful. As it turns out, The Film Company is a kind of crazy, quixotic, utopian not-for-profit, the only not-for profit film studio in the world as far as anyone knows. They have this weird little manifesto whereby they refuse to accept submissions and scripts from other filmmakers, they just approach them with the green light already flashing. You have been approved to film your project, the only condition is the project can’t exist yet, you have to start thinking about it the minute you accept the invitation. They can detect if a script’s been sitting around in a drawer for a while, if it’s got other producers’ breath on it. As it turns out, I didn’t have anything kicking around, so I had to create something specifically for them. They said they’d supply everything, so I didn’t even ask what the budget was.

Did they give you a deadline?

I’m an impulsive decision maker with everything, but especially when I’m on set. If things feel right, they feel right within the first couple of seconds. The more I have a chance to think about things, the more hesitant, the more cowardly, everything becomes. They told me I’d be shooting in a month. And that meant since I work in a highly artificial manner which requires sets and props, I had to get a script in shape soon, immediately. Luckily I had a plane ride to Paris, a long plane ride, to daydream. I remember reading a New Yorker article about the teen detective genre and its origins. The origin of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

I decided to make this movie as much of an autobiography as possible, but I needed some sort of fictional construct for it. I decided very quickly that my childhood would be the subject, specifically this central episode of my childhood where my mother and sister were conducting a vicious war over the speed with which my sister was growing pubic hairs. I thought that turning one of the main characters into a teen detective might just be the MacGuffin that Hitchcock always used. He’d always inject something that’s not quite true into something to make everything more true. Then it was a matter of things falling into place during that plane ride, and then as soon as I landed I went to my distributors in Paris and e-mailed my treatment to the Seattle people and they started building sets.

What was George Toles’ involvement in writing the screenplay?

Before I got on the plane he started suggesting some other fictional relationships. We share writing credits all the time but sometimes he writes way more than I do, sometimes I write more. We have a writing credit kind of like Lennon/McCartney. George is more than just a collaborator, he’s the guy whose voice I hear everything I read in. He taught me how to read. So when I’m reading a book, it’s George’s voice doing all the characters, so he’s a collaborator even when he’s not collaborating actively. He’d be a collaborator even if he got hit by a bus.

Where did you meet him originally? How did you start working together?

I met him when my first marriage broke up back in 1980. As is often the case, my marriage had killed off all my friendships, so I found myself in need of new friends. The one friend I had left from my pre-marriage days had become a friend of his (he’s a film and English lit and theatre professor at a university back in Winnipeg). I started hanging around his film classes and theater productions, and the next thing I knew I was submerged Elia Kazan-style in a world of plays and theater and books. Before that all I used to do was go out night-clubbing and listen to British Invasion music. Very scenester, but without any real heft, any literary or filmic history to back it up. I started listening to vintage music. And all of a sudden I became a voracious consumer of all things pop cultural of the 20th century. I met him at a time when I became explosively inquisitive about all of those cool things.

Can you tell me about your other collaborators, starting with your editor, John Gurdebeke?

We started working together on another auto-biographical piece called “Cowards Bend the Knee,” and we discovered this, kind of by accident, this kind of facsimile of human memory that we prefer to use rather than the conventional flashback. More synaptical, neurologically based. We discovered it by just fast-forwarding through the rushes while we were binning them — on the computer, when you fast forward through things, you not only see things faster, the images are more like the way a stone skips across water, it’ll touch down upon an image and then skip a whole bunch and not show them to you. Quite often you’d go speeding past something you’d want to see, and then I’d go “no, no John, back up”, and then he’ll back up, and he’ll go past it again. And then forward again, so you slowly go scratching back and forth, more like a DJ, over the image.

We discovered that this process was really fetishizing the moment. I said, “you know what, this is the way I really remember things.” If I want to relive a favorite moment, I can skip ahead too quickly, and then go no, no, slow down, I want to approach this in really delectable slowness. And then I’ll go back and walk back and forth on it until all the flavor is sucked out of it and then I’ll go racing off to the next episode. You can only present facsimiles of memories of real life, that’s art’s job. This is a cool facsimile, really neurological seeming. It’s as good as any, besides… the flashback’s been used so much. Why not tap into our nerves?

At what point during the process did you decide you were going to do a live performance?

I guess I’d always wanted to do it. Things kind of occurred to me during the nine days of shooting in Seattle, but often I would just quietly mention I wanted something and it would show up. And so one day I passive-aggressively mentioned “I’d really like a live music performance,” and then it was discussed. Then I started adding foley artists, a singer and a narrator, and then I realized we would have to make this into a live event. The narrator strikes some people as an impurity, as it’s a silent film, but I learned from reading Luis Buñuel’s autobiography “My Last Sigh” that it was very common to have explicators to help viewers new to editing…

In Japan they did it all the time…

Yeah, the Benshi, there’s one left, the last Benshi. She studied at the feet of the last Benshi master, she’s considered the last Benshi master. I was thinking of getting her, then I thought, no, no, there was too much exposition for intertitles to handle alone, so I decided to dump most of the expository duties on to the intertitles, and let the narrators handle the seasoning. Isabella Rossellini and the original narrator in Toronto have very musical voices, so you could rationalize them as a 12th musical instrument in the pit.

How did you start working with Isabella Rossellini?

I met her once in Central Park, actually — and I’m not a very forward person, especially with celebrities. But, we’re both dog lovers, as it turns out, and just as she was coming towards me, she stopped to pet a Labrador Retriever, and started a conversation with its owner. And I thought, that Lab’s cute enough, I’ll use that as an excuse, so I started petting it too. I looked down, and she was basically ignoring me, but she had allowed the dog to hold her hand in its mouth, and I thought, aw, I’ll put my hand in the dog’s mouth too. And pretty soon both of our hands were in this big drooling dog tongue, in intertwinement. Very slippery. Before we knew it, the dog and its owner were gone, and we were left with our hands hanging in the air, dog spit dripping off. By that time I had worked up the confidence to tell her I knew her ex-husband a bit, or that I didn’t really know him, but that he bought one of my films for his archives, “Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” and that I was a filmmaker making a film, and that I had a part screaming to be played by her, an amputee beer baroness. We discovered we both loved Lon Chaney and silent films. We became instant friends, and it has been that way from then on.

I already see in B&W when I’m looking through a movie camera, and all of a sudden if she moves her head a micro-millimeter, the decades will fall away and my knees will buckle and she’ll become Ingrid or Roberto. She’s a time-traveler and you really need to have your seat-belt fastened when you’re filming her. When she walks around, she brings her own nimbus with her, wherever she goes. It can be as superficial as a little pulsing flash of similarity to Ingrid, especially when she’s talking, but she doesn’t really look like Ingrid. I made a movie where she plays her mother, and you have no trouble telling them apart. Ironically she looks less like her when she’s playing her. The vocal impersonation is spot-on, because there are no two people who have that Scand-Italian accent like them.

Do you consider and “Brand Upon the Brain!” and “Cowards Bend the Knee” to be your most autobiographical films?

They’re literally autobiographical. I’d say this one is 96% true. That’s not a promotional strength in any way — because why should my life be interesting? — but I did have a very Grand Guignol, melodramatic childhood and it’s a pleasure, an almost unalloyed pleasure to get it out. Sometimes I feel almost completely crushed with guilt that I’ve betrayed my family, broken a commandment. At least, it seems I’ve dishonored my mother sometimes. But it would come off if I had the courage to show it to my family as some sort of fantasy, and most people don’t recognize themselves in their own depictions of themselves.

So you haven’t shown it to your family?

My brother, who’s not in the story, has seen it. He said it hurt a bit, because people he loves are in it. But there are people who watch it and say that it is their life too. And Geraldine Chaplin, who narrated it for me in Buenos Aires recently, said “this feels like my life and yet my parents were wonderful to me, and it just feels like an übermother and überfather.” She said somehow it was her autobiography as well. That was the biggest compliment to me. By being specifically about myself I was trying to capture the essence of the way we make sense of the world as children, the way we construct false models of the world that become myths to ourselves. It was really important to me for that to work, and for viewers to feel like it was their childhood, even though they didn’t grow up in a lighthouse or have an abusive mother.

Well, becoming aware of your own sexuality is something everyone goes through…

I was trying to reassure the mother of a 13-year-old boy last night that he probably wasn’t getting into trouble right now, he was probably just masturbating for the fourth time that night. She didn’t really want to hear it but then I finally had to say…that’s what you do if you’re normal. Would you rather your son not learn until he was 21, like a certain friend we both knew? And she was like, “no, I want my son to masturbate now.”

I think that’s an important lesson…

Well, here’s hoping he’s masturbating as we say these words.

Are you doing more of these autobiographical pieces, or will you move away from it for a while?

I might have to move away. I notice whenever I make a film that I kind of use up that subject or setting. It’s as good as therapy, I don’t think it does work through anything at all, but it just makes you tired of it. The act of filming and editing things turns it into so much footage that needs to be dealt with, and by the time you’ve finished the whole process, you’re tired of it. So whatever scars I have from childhood didn’t heal over, I just got bored of looking at them. I’m ready to move on.

I do feel like an adult now, it’s strange. I quit having these dreams I used to have about my father that just kept picking at me with unfinished business about his death. I quit having them right after making the movie. I suddenly quit saving things, I found it easy to throw out my old baseball cards, and records — I all of a sudden got rid of my past, and I was a notorious pack rat and collector. My apartment was like a museum, it looked like the Quay Brothers had filmed there. Not anymore. Now my apartment looks like an Ikea showroom.

I think “Brand Upon the Brain!” is the most emotionally involving of your films so far, maybe because of how autobiographical it is…

Well, it’s something I’ve been trying to work towards but there’s been so much artifice, so much perceived irony and distance in my early movies, I’ve finally figured a way of getting past that. For some people it’s probably still too irony-clogged, but I think that the two can co-exist. I’ve been devastated by Douglas Sirk movies, and most people are, if they’re being honest. They can co-exist, and I’m just stubbornly going to keep fucking trying to make people accept that. It’s taking us a while to recover from that dalliance with postmodernism where emotional involvement with art was considered verboten. But let’s face it, that’s why it exists. Bedtime stories are there to scare and enchant, and those are the stories that count. You don’t want to tell a story to a child to make him think about form. And we’re all children.

An 80-Year Backstage Pass

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

December 26, 2006

The advent of sound in cinema made the movie musical possible, but also created a vexing question: how to have characters burst into song without causing the audience to burst into laughter? What was fine on stage became an unexpected problem on screen — some degree of realism was needed to keep the viewer focused on the plot instead of on the incongruity of an off-screen orchestral swell (audiences quickly tired of revue-style films which, like a vaudeville show, ran act after act with no connective narrative tissue). The simplest answer was to film the lives of Broadway performers, so that stage numbers could be folded in as an organic part of the story. The template for the backstage musical crystallized in “The Broadway Melody of 1929,” which told the story of a sister vaudeville act that hits it big and then breaks up because of a love triangle. The film was a massive hit that spawned countless imitations. The backstage musical has gone through plenty of mutations since then, but it’s really the only remnant of a once dominant genre to survive the demise of the studio system. The latest iteration is the early Oscar favorite “Dreamgirls,” which follows a strikingly similar story arc to the “Broadway Melody” of 77 years earlier.

Instead of a vaudeville act, “Dreamgirls” is focused on a Motown girl group whose rupture also comes about because of a man and his fickle heart (and thirst for power) — the manager played by Jaime Foxx. It’s not just the tried and true story formula that “Dreamgirls” has inherited from its forebears, but a whole history of technical and directorial innovation. According to Richard Barrios in his loving history of early musicals “A Song in the Dark,” “Broadway Melody” was the first musical to use pre-recorded sound and playback. Producer Irving Thalberg demanded a re-take of the big musical number, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll,” the only scene shot in Technicolor (the rest of the film is in black and white). Thalberg, wary of the costs in hiring the orchestra again, decided to re-use the recording of the first shoot and play it back over the re-take. Before this, orchestras played live into microphones right next to the stage. This created far more freedom for the director in terms of camera angles and movement, and saved a hunk on the budget.

By early 1930, theaters were saturated with backstagers, and audiences were tiring of the device. In March 1930, as Barrios notes, a headline at Billboard magazine proclaimed “Back-Stage Stories Bane to Exhibitors.” Studios scrambled to cut out musical sequences from completed films in order to avoid the backlash. The cycle seemed to have run its course in a remarkably short amount of time.

The genre didn’t bounce back until 1933, with the success of “42nd Street” and “Gold Diggers of 1933,” a remake of “Gold Diggers of Broadway” (1929) made by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley (who directed the numbers). The major difference in these films is the increasingly artificial (and spectacular) musical sequences that strained the realism of the stage setting to the breaking point. Berkeley’s use of bird’s eye views, for example, was a perspective impossible for the filmed audience to see. The injection of frank depictions of sexuality (until the Hays Code buttoned up everyone’s brassieres) didn’t hurt either.

That year the groundwork was also being laid to move the musical sequences off the stage and into the world of the performers, the baby steps of which were taken in “Flying Down to Rio,” where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first teamed up in a minor role. Their subsequent decade-long box office dominance altered the landscape, with films now gaining boldness about where to insert the spectacle. Musical numbers were still firmly integrated into the plot, usually spurred on by the flirtatious one-upsmanship of Astaire-Rogers, but no longer confined by the absolute verisimilitude to which “Broadway Melody” had clung, and at which Berkeley had slowly chipped away.

Enter MGM. The studio responsible for “Broadway Melody” in ’29 went on to exemplify the genre through the 40s and 50s, with their vaunted “Freed Unit”, manned by the producer (and former lyricist) Arthur Freed and a roll call of talented collaborators including directors Vincente Minneli and Stanley Donen, and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Their lavish productions attempted every kind of musical, from folk (“Meet Me In St. Louis,” 1944) to historical pastiches (“The Pirate,” 1948). Their biggest successes, though, were of the backstage variety with “Singin’ In the Rain” (1952) and “The Band Wagon” (1953). The genre had evolved to the point of self-referentiality and self-parody, those early attempts at filmed song and dance now looked at with nostalgia and humor. No more needs to be said about the former, but “The Band Wagon,” which takes Broadway as its setting, looks back even further than the advent of the sound film, pining for the days of unpretentious vaudeville performance, where star Fred Astaire got his start.

With the fading of the studio system in the 60s, the musical was doomed. Its lifeblood was in the trained hands of backstage artisans working with factory-like precision. With the breakup of vertically integrated studios, it was impossible to muster all the manpower needed and make it affordable. The days of the musical as a popular art form were numbered. Adaptations of big Broadway hits were trotted out once in a while to modest returns — but original material was hard to come by. Dramas with musical elements returned to prominence, with the success of films like “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) and “Flashdance” (1983). The full-fledged musical survived only in a variety of animated features.

With the success of “Moulin Rouge” (2001) and the film adaptations of “Chicago” (2002) and now “Dreamgirls” (2006), there’s been a mini-resurgence of the backstage form financially, if not artistically. The hyper-stylized “Moulin Rouge” runs with the self-reflexive form of backstage musical initiated by “Singin’ In the Rain.” The latter two works are more aligned with the “Broadway Melody” school, stage-bound works content to ape their original Broadway productions. But with the massive success of Disney’s TV movie and album “High School Musical,” along with the musical-inflected spectacles of “Drumline,” “You Got Served,” “Stick It” and “Step Up,” it’s the teen dance genre that seems the place to look for a “42nd Street”-style resurgence.

2006 Top Ten

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

December 18th, 2006

1. Inland Empire

2. Climates

3. L’Enfant

4. Pan’s Labyrinth

5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

6. Breaking News

7. Clean

8. Inside Man

9. La Moustache

10. Stick It

“Inland Empire” and “Stick It” would make a canny double bill. In their own ways, through muddy nightmare and candy-colored dream, they examine the use and abuse of the female body (by Hollywood and the gymnastic-industrial complex) while gleefully celebrating the performers’ reclamation of their own agency. Both are love letters to their actresses — with Lynch’s howling ode lifting Laura Dern to cinematic sainthood, while Jessica Bendinger’s sprightly hiccup of a movie turns Missy Peregrym into more of a sassy film girl scout leader.

Any of the following could have slipped into the bottom three depending on my mood: “Three Times,” Dave Chappelle’s “Block Party,” “Volver,” “The Proposition,” “The Hidden Blade,” “Miami Vice,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” “Borat,” “Running Scared” and “A Prairie Home Companion.”

The film event of the year, hands down, was the American Museum of the Moving Image’s screening of “Out 1,” Jacques Rivette’s legendary 12 1/2 hour whatzit. Only the sixth time it’s been shown in theatres since 1971, it pits two rehearsals of Aeschylus against a rapidly expanding conspiracy plot traced back to Balzac’s “The History of the Thirteen.” The fiction multiplies like a fungus and lingers in the brain for weeks.

What I’m looking forward to in ’07: Jia Zhangke’s “Still Life” (if any distributor is brave enough to pick it up) and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

“Essential” Moviegoing

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

November 20, 2006

Seeing the Janus icon before a movie builds the same kind of anticipation for the art-house crowd that the hopping lamp of the Pixar logo elicits from amped-up children (and some adults). Janus has acquired the cream of the world’s art cinema for 50 years, cultivating a large library while adapting to each advancement in viewing technology, from 16mm to laserdiscs to DVD. The repertory houses in NYC have filled their schedules with Janus gems this autumn, from the Walter Reade’s comprehensive series that ran alongside the New York Film Festival to the IFC Center’s upcoming year-long Weekend Classics tribute. For those of you in the rest of the world, Criterion has released a handsome 50-film set entitled “Essential Art House,” the discs nestled alongside a 240-page book of comprehensive background notes. The ideal way to view these masterworks, though, is on the big screen. These are films to lose oneself in — pausing them to eat dinner or scold the kids could easily disrupt their subtle rhythms.

The IFC Center begins their series on November 22 with a new 35mm print of Agnès Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7,” a French New Wave wonder from 1961 — also the year of Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” and Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad.” “Cléo” hasn’t established a foothold in the pantheon like those two, but it should. Corinne Marchand plays Cléo, a vain Yé-Yé pop singer (like Chantal Goya in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin Féminin”), who impatiently wanders the Paris streets for two hours until she calls upon her doctor for the results of an unnamed medical test. She believes she has inoperable cancer. Taking place in an approximation of real time (it runs a little over an hour and a half), the film follows her encounters with friends, lovers and strangers as the clock winds down until she discovers the result. Considering the subject matter, it is improbably buoyant, as Varda expertly employs the language of the New Wave, from location shooting to jump cuts to multiple narrative digressions (most famously, Godard and Anna Karina act in a silent comedy short that Cléo watches at a theater).


Early on it’s not clear if she’s simply being dramatic — Varda packs the early scenes with mirrors: Cléo eyes herself at every diner, haberdasher, and shop window. This illness could be a childish ploy for attention — a conclusion her composer and lyricist come to when they crash her place, donning fake hospital attire complete with oversized syringe. Their arrival marks the first tonal shift, from mournful soul-searching to a light-hearted musical comedy. Scored by the great Michel Legrand, it soars with clever wordplay, hummable tunes, and an elegantly tracking camera. Then the lyricist suggests she sing his latest work, “Cry of Love,” whose opening piano trills foreshadow the swooping melodrama of Legrand’s work on Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (Demy would marry Varda in 1962). The camera pans past the two guests and tilts up towards Cleo, framing her against a black background as she laments the death of a relationship. It’s a stunning moment — for me and for Cléo, as afterward she rips off her wig and stalks out, hiding her moment of self-realization underneath a tantrum. Her façade is breaking down.

The final third of the film completes her transformation, as she bends her will for the love of another — and there’s no more romantic meet-cute scene in history than when the hyper-articulate Antoine seals their fate over a bridge. The test result comes in — but by then it’s beside the point — the final shot of euphoric union could make any hardened pseudo-intellectual’s heart go pitter pat.

After “Cléo,” the IFC Center offers up the Japanese horror story “Kwaidan” (1964), Carlos Saura’s “Cria Cuervos” (1976), Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), and Jean Cocteau’s enchanting version of “Beauty and the Beast” (1946). More is promised, so happy viewing.

“Babel,” the new “Crash”

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

October 30th, 2006

It’s the scariest time of the year, and not only because of the healthy release of arterial spray in “Saw III.” Yes, Oscar season is upon us, where Hollywood’s self-important social conscience rears its bloated head for a few looks toward relevance. After the embarrassing Best Picture victory for “Crash” (the funniest movie of 05), the question arises of what “issue” film will bear the middlebrow crown of improbable success this year: Philip Noyce’s “Catch a Fire,” Ed Zwick’s “Blood Diamond” and Todd Field’s “Little Children” all have (or did have) a shot, but the film best positioned to repeat “Crash”‘s success is “Babel,” Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s latest multi-character network narrative. Iñárritu won the Best Director prize at Cannes, and Rex Reed has already deemed it a masterpiece. With the wrinkly visage of Brad Pitt, a seemingly resonant theme about inter-cultural miscommunication and the imprimatur of two hip Mexican auteurs, the Academy will adore it. Put it in the pantheon!

Unfortunately, it’s a massive failure as a film, despite being markedly better than “Crash.” Director Iñárritu and screenwriter Arriaga have cornered the market on the multiple overlapping stories structure ever since “Amores Perros” racked up festival awards in 2000. They’ve suffered diminishing returns since, with the flaccid “21 Grams” and now the dispiriting “Babel.” This latest film takes place in four countries and follows four different tales. Cate Blanchett is accidentally shot on a vacation in Morocco with her husband Brad Pitt; the two young shooters are chased across the desert by local police; in California Blanchett’s children are being watched by a nanny (Adriana Barraza) who takes them to her son’s wedding in Mexico; and a teenage girl, Chieko, (Rinko Kikuchi) mourns the death of her mother in Japan by rebelling against her morose father (Koji Yakusho).

The first three stories are directly linked, in plot and theme: they are concerned with the barriers of language and borders, and the violence rendered because of them. Pitt calls for medical help, no one comes, the nanny tries to reason with the Border Patrol, tragedy awaits. The fourth section’s narrative connection is tangential and revealed late in the film, and is also thematically separated, as Chieko represses her grief at the loss of her mother and channels it into acts of reckless sexuality. There’s no border of language or nation — just that old sentimental saw “the borders of the heart.”

It starts off well enough in the Pitt-Blanchett segment, the arbitrariness of violence framed by two bored Moroccan youths just shooting a little target practice. Inside of the bus where Blanchett is felled, a genuine sense of panic erupts as dust-caked Pitt rages impotently at uncomprehending passersby. Here the theme is organic to the action — something which becomes increasingly rare as the film rolls on. Arriaga and Iñárritu soon privilege grand statements over believable human behavior. As the shooting steamrolls into an international incident, “Babel” descends into self-parody (spoilers ahead).

Gael García Bernal, the nanny’s nephew, races past customs into the U.S. (because the guard was getting a little pushy) and dumps Barraza and the two children by the side of the road. This gives Iñárritu the opportunity to barrage the viewer with low-angle slo-mo shots of Barraza tottering in the desert sun, wailing and looking for the presumably starving kids. It’s completely over-the-top and a huge tonal shift from the relative social realism of the rest of the segment. Here action services theme, but what use is it if it detaches itself from the world we live in? The characters become automatons acting out rote scenarios (there’s no time to add depth with all of the cross-cutting) so Iñárritu can film garishly nihilist climaxes to prove his rather trite point — which runs something like: Rich Americans are miserable, Moroccan kids are miserable, Mexicans are miserable, and the Japanese are miserable and tremendously horny. Note the lack of elaboration — it’s the filmmakers’ fault, not mine.

Guy Maddin’s “Brand Upon the Brain!”

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

October 23rd, 2006

Guy Maddin’s latest fever dream of a film, “Brand Upon the Brain!,” descended upon the Walter Reade Theatre on October 15 to close out the Views From the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film Festival. In tow were an orchestra, a team of foley artists (for live sound effects), and Isabella Rossellini, who would perform the narration for the film, which was, as you may have guessed, silent. It went out with a bang, or to be more precise, a bang! No director today is as fond of the exclamation point as Maddin, the Canadian cinephile and creator of strange celluloid objects. His works are borne out of a mixture of silent movie melodrama and self-conscious camp — a mix of Frank Borzage and John Waters. The subjects range from incestuous psychodramas in the Alps (“Careful,” 1994) to Depression-era musicals starring beer-filled glass legs (attached to Rossellini in “The Saddest Music in the World,” 2003). The often outrageous material is played with absolute conviction, and is always tied to themes of family strife (recently it’s been missing fathers) and sexual repression, lending his films an unexpected emotional heft amid their giddy excesses.

His new film is no different. In the Fall issue of Cinema Scope, Maddin describes how the Seattle-based “The Film Company” offered him a budget to make a film before they even saw a script. They gave him complete freedom, the only restrictions being he had to shoot it in two weeks and use local actors. He had to scramble for a story, and earlier in the article he describes the image that spurred his imagination: “A lighthouse positively swollen with the unseemly sexual desires of children — and their parents!” From this charged thought a whole seamy narrative was woven, circling around the main character “Guy Maddin” (Eric Steffen Maahs) (after the screening the director claimed the film is autobiographical, like his hockey peep show “Cowards Bend the Knee” (2003)). The unseemly desires center around a teenage sleuth harpist, Wendy Hale (Katherine E. Scharhon), who’s investigating Guy’s overbearing mother for abusing the kids in her orphanage (and how!). Guy’s in love with Wendy, but she only has eyes for his Sis (Maya Lawson). Gender-bending, bosom-baring and slurpy sound effects filled the room until an orphan revolt, re-animation of the dead, and a barrel of brain nectar shuttled the film to its close. Maddin packs a whole serial’s worth of plot twists into its 95 minutes — and all of it is scored to the hypnotic tempo of Jason Staczek’s pulsing score and Rossellini’s formidable voice.

The actress, nattily decked out in a dark suit and red tie, deftly navigated the film’s hysteric rhythms without a wink of condescension while always returning to nail down its mournful refrain: “The past! The past!” (Rossellini has become a bit of a muse for Maddin, appearing in “Saddest Music” as well as the delightful short essay-film “My Dad is 100 Years Old,” which celebrates the work of her increasingly neglected father, Roberto). In the framing story Guy returns to the lighthouse after 30 years — and hallucinates visions of Wendy, including brief flashes of color (flowers! her lips!) in the midst of the grainy black and white Super-8 stock. Like Alain Resnais’ superb festival entry “Private Fears in Public Places,” which is diametrically opposite stylistically, it is an adult story about loneliness that leaves its characters adrift in the final scene, enclosed in Spartan spaces filled only with regret. Resnais opted out of the cannibalism scene, though. Both are without distributors as of this writing.

“Imprint,” Takashi Miike’s snuff film “Rashomon”

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

September 28, 2006

Of all the bloody stumps and bared bosoms of the “Masters of Horror” series on Showtime, those depicted in “Imprint” were a bit too bloody and bare even for indulgent cable execs (the discarded fetuses were rumored to have been the tipping point). Banned from airing during the series’ run in the U.S. (it aired on Bravo in the UK), Takashi Miike’s snuff film “Rashomon” finally hits our shores thanks to this week’s loaded DVD release. As with all of Miike’s voluminous output (he has three other ’06 films on his resume), it’s a mixed bag — with scenes of genuine terror, outrageous camp, and stomach-turning violence.

“Imprint” was adapted from the Japanese horror novel “Bokee Kyotee” by Shimako Iwai — a straightforward tale of past misdeeds haunting the present. American vagabond Christopher (Billy Drago) travels to a remote island/brothel to find the woman he loved and lost, Kimomo (Michie Ito). In her place he finds a nameless prostitute (Youki Kudoh) with a facial deformity who informs him how Kimomo died. She changes her story multiple times, with each alteration depicted in flashback. Soon both of their histories are excavated, and it’s a nasty, vicious, and viscous business.

The time period is strangely ahistorical, with Edo period architecture clashing with electric paper lamps. It feels like a whorehouse for the modern tourist, where one can get the kicks of old-time misogyny with the comforts of the industrial revolution. It is a bit of a dream world — an unreality the actors bring into their work. Drago (“The Untouchables”) has one of the great under-utilized faces in Hollywood. Cavernous, skeletal, and strikingly blank, his stare is its own slasher flick. Utilizing this strength, Drago’s performance is akin to pantomime, marking each emotion with wide loping gestures over his guttural drawl. It’s highly theatrical, and clashes with Kudoh’s more naturalistic approach (until her head is peeled back, of course).

Amazingly, Kudoh is the only actor in the film who could speak English (other than Drago). Everyone else learned their lines phonetically from a linguist. This lends a disembodied quality to their performance, and it’s either a brilliant reflection of their loss of humanity, or just an extremely cheap way to hire actors. Probably more of the latter, but selected moments pay off: especially with the repeated scenes of the Buddhist monk speaking to Kudoh’s character as a child in flashback. He unrolls a parchment depicting the tortures of hell, and says, “Pretty scary, huh”, stuttering over the “s” in scary. It’s funny but laced with menace — and during the second flashback the undertones in the scene become even more ambiguously evil.

Miike can’t abide ambiguity long, so there’s a torture set piece to put us cerebral folk in our place. It is epic cruelty, inflicted upon Kimomo by a jealous older prostitute (curiously, played by the book’s female author Iwai). It’s pulp exploitation that would fulfill any adolescent male’s fear and loathing of femininity (in an interview on the disc, he said only lonely rural kids in Japan watched his films before he became a cult star overseas), but one can’t deny that it’s bravura filmmaking — meticulous in its structure and its violence.

The DVD is packed with extras that are actually worth watching, including an hour-long interview with Miike (hilariously titled “I Am the Film Director of Love and Freedom”), where he talks about being pigeonholed as a horror director in the West, and his refusal to refuse any project offered to him. Also included is a making of doc, a feature on the makeup, and audio commentary by American Cinematheque programmer Chris D. and writer Wyatt Doyle.

An Appreciation of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

September 15, 2006

He stands, with perfect posture, brandishing a 2×4, a scimitar, a rail gun — searching for an endpoint to a tale test-screened and ghost-written until it’s been sapped of any life and coherence. And yet there he is, a presence curiously untainted by all the Hollywood accoutrements. His physical solidity is continually undermined by a penchant for self-parody — this whole hero bit is absurd, ain’t it (as he snaps a goon’s arm in two). So he flashes his shark’s grin, grits those incisors, and does what he can. And what he does is carry a film — not into greatness, but at least to hearty pulp, the kind that leaves a bewildered smile on the face of audience members, because the effort and love were there if the material was not. This isn’t the age of the action hero — times are too depressing, too conspiratorial — but The Rock soldiers on, his solid sobriquet reflecting his endurance of the industry that lacks an Aldrich or Fuller to expand upon his voluminous gifts.

Today he’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, character turned man, as the grip of huckster/genius Vince McMahon loosens and more sober screenplay choices open up. Next is the male weepie “Gridiron Gang”, a bit of football uplift that leaves enough sharp edges to make the plot-mush go down smoother. The Rock inhabits the role of the coach convincingly, the troubled kids turning to organized sport mirrors his own youthful misadventures, and his craft betters with each turn of the spool. He cries with grit and yells with tenderness. Legitimacy might not improve his films — but he’s courting it whole-heartedly. He wants to be liked — that’s what made him a star in the WWE/F. His showmanship was unparalleled, each rote punch and kick caricatured into a shimmering shimmy of exaggerated power. Every motion underlined, but not put in quotes — because this fight, while choreographed, was serious for the fans and therefore serious to him — no one worked harder in the ring, took as many bumps. The Rock is a stickler for realism, at least when it comes to blows — listen to him boast on “The Scorpion King” or “Walking Tall” commentary track on the commitment to those sequences — the consultations with Army Special Forces types and doing his own stunts. His background forbids anything else.

This sticks out — the fact he has a background. Today stars want to be stars as kids — all actors know is acting. The Rock is an exception — he made his living playing football in the Canadian Football League until a bum shoulder forced retirement. Then he played cities all over the world as “The Rock” in the ring, honing performance, timing, expression. Every move he makes speaks to this experience, adds weight to when he puts the pads on in “Gridiron Gang” to challenge a kid to knock him down (and even this dramatic moment is undercut by the sight of his frame bursting out of the high-schoolers jersey).

The films got better — “The Rundown” (2003) was graced by Christopher Walken’s cracked monologues, while The Rock further honed his self-deprecating muscle-man persona, aided by the jibes of Sean William Scott. Another wrinkle — he refuses to use guns (until the corpse piling climax), a principled stand also taken up in “Walking Tall” (2004), his most emblematic work. It contains quick and dirty fight scenes, campy humor, and a rigid belief in the value of hard work — a bizarre combination embodied in the smirking, chiseled visage of the man himself. Johnny Knoxville takes over the Scott role in cutting him down to size.

He internalized the sarcastic conscience of Scott/Knoxville in the “Get Shorty” sequel “Be Cool” (2005), explicitly parodying the self-image that he had already so thoroughly deconstructed in straighter films. But his performance is brilliant — as gay bodyguard Elliot Wilhelm, he outs his love of performance, no longer masked under blood and guts. No, here he just emotes — spectacularly so in his one-man rendition of a scene from “Bring It On,” playing both sides of a cheerleader bitch session. It dwarfs the rest of the film by its utter fearlessness — what comparable box-office draw would have the confidence to pull off such a feminizing stunt? It’s remarkable, and his version of Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” might even top it.

“Doom” (2005) was cheap red meat for his core audience, bland, workmanlike, and thoroughly forgettable (despite the fact his hero turns psychopathic villain) — but then he went and starred in Richard Kelley’s infamous “Southland Tales” (2006), an apocalyptic satire so derided by critics at Cannes it may never see the light of day. He plays an action star stricken with amnesia — a further elaboration of Elliot Wilhelm, the chiseled body stricken by an identity crisis. Let’s hope Sony doesn’t mutilate it too badly.

The Rock is the ideal post-modern action star — a self-referential comedian who breaks down his image at every turn yet manages to satisfy our (my) primitive urges for beat downs with earnest conviction and immense physical prowess. He’s utterly fascinating and completely ignored, but hopefully “Gridiron Gang” will turn the expected buck and some middlebrow maestro (Ridley Scott? Paul Haggis?) will cast him in some piece of revolting Oscar bait. With a modicum of control over his projects afterward, the matinee adventure film, driven by character and wit, would ease back into theaters, and our afternoons would be richer for years to come.

Idle Hands – Bryan Barber’s Small Screen Showpieces

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

August 25, 2006

There is no art form as critically ignored as the music video. So expect plenty of terse parentheticals this weekend regarding Bryan Barber, the vid vet who directed the Prohibition-set, OutKast-starring musical “Idlewild” that opens this Friday. With the help of the cultural memorialists at YouTube, I’m going to sketch a (very) brief history of Barber’s work on the small screen to fill the gap.

Friends with the group since “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” came out in 1994, Barber’s been a key factor in the evolution of OutKast’s image from Dirty South stylists to the P-Funk retro-futurist look they promote today. Compare André Benjamin’s Atlanta Braves jersey in the now classic “Player’s Ball” (1994) to his glam carnival barker in Barber’s “The Whole World” (2001). Much of this change has to be attributed to Benjamin’s artistic mutation, as he embraces the performative excesses of Prince and George Clinton over, say, the Goodie Mob — but Barber’s ability to massage pop iconography with a loving wink melded perfectly with Outkast’s own entrance into the pop lexicon (peaking with “Hey Ya”).

Even before he perfected this style with “Roses,” Barber was experimenting with homage/satire of pop images. He helmed a number of videos accompanying films, from the mundane (Kelly Clarkson’s “The Trouble With Love Is” from “Love, Actually”) to the bizarre (OutKast hanger-on Sleepy Brown’s “I Can’t Wait,”, with André starring as “Chamelio Salamander”, from “Barbershop 2”). His first full-length culture riff was for Southern rapper Bubba Sparxxx and his single “Deliverance” in 2003 (watch the video). The template is the Coen brothers’ “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” For the most part it’s played straighter than its model, Bubba stalking through the dustbowl as an escapee from a chain gang (without Clooney’s mugging). The tune loops an acoustic guitar riff as Sparxxx hits the chorus: “I’ve been travelin’ for some time/With my fishin’ pole and my bottle of shine.” It’s a perfect fit of lyric and milieu, except Barber and Sparxxx replace the Coen’s parade of caricatures with a more rooted sense of place (while keeping the randy Sirens). “Can you recall a time people loved you unconditionally?/Toast in the new south, this one is for history” Sparxxx ends holed up in an old barn, and before the credits hit, he and his crew burst out in modern dress, drawing a direct line between the struggle to remain upright from the 30s to today.

A few months later — “Hey Ya” (watch the video) hit TV, and insinuated itself into every unwilling eardrum across the U.S. This time Barber takes a more playful attitude — adopting the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan performance as a showpiece for André Benjamin’s particular brand of charisma. It’s bright, over-caffeinated, and delightfully absurd (the three-man chorus dressed as jockeys are a personal favorite). The next single off “The Love Below” was “Roses” (watch the video) a sophomoric little ditty about being resentful of a popular girl’s distracted attentions. Not Dre’s finest work — but it’s certainly one of Barber’s. Borrowing from “Grease” and “West Side Story” this time, it’s set at a 50s era high-school talent show — with Andre, tight-pantsed and wearing a lettered jacket (more Olivia Newton-John than Travolta), leading his “Love Below” fellows in a tune. This is intercut with Big Boi leading a group of “Speakerboxxx” thugs (his side of the double-album) smashing mailboxes on the way to the show. They call each other out and rumble — while the girl everyone’s pining for runs out with a rich, fey interloper. It’s a clever play on the critical merits of both albums, and on the increasingly strained relationship between the two members, which has caused a flood of speculation on the future of the group — which will only increase with the release of “Idlewild,” the album, on which they co-wrote only four songs together.

Since those reputation making successes, Barber’s been busy: having Destiny’s Child watch themselves act in a fake “Sex and the City” episode for one of their final videos together in “Girl,” and dolling up Christina Aguilera like a flapper in this year’s “Ain’t No Other Man,” in which he seemed to borrow the speakeasy set (and cinematographer) from “Idlewild.” For those concerned about such things — it’s nominated four times at the upcoming MTV Video Music Awards.