New York Film Festival – R. Emmet Sweeney

SHIP OF FOOLS: THE LONG VOYAGE HOME (1940)

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October 13, 2015

The Long Voyage Home (1940) was self-consciously an art film. An atmospheric bummer adapted from four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, it was the first movie made for John Ford’s independent production company Argosy (co-founded with Merian C. Cooper). This offered Ford an unusual amount of freedom, and co-producer Walter Wanger commissioned prominent fine artists (Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Luis Quintanilla, Georges Schreiber, and Ernest Fiene) to come on the set and paint whatever they wanted. In the biography Searching for John Ford Joseph McBride quotes the director as saying “I didn’t like the idea at first, but the artists proved to be a grand bunch of guys.” Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland did their own painting with light, making The Long Voyage Home his most visually experimental film. There is the deep focus that Toland made famous the next year in Citizen Kane, plus low-light chiaroscuro and trick shots like anchoring the camera to the floor of the ship so the audience has a plank-level view of a storm, the waves crashing over the lens. It screened on 35mm (a UCLA restoration) in the Revivals section at this year’s New York Film Festival, but it is also streaming on Criterion’s Hulu page, if you are digitally inclined. At points the film feels like a workshop, to try out techniques Ford was unable to use on his bigger studio pictures, which gives The Long Voyage Home its patchwork quality. And yet Dudley Nichols’ sensitive script is able to tie the anecdotal structure together, and it remains a profoundly moving experience of unmoored men at sea, fruitlessly trying to claw back to land.

The Long Voyage Home was shot in thirty-seven days for $682,495 at the Goldwyn Studios lot, as well as aboard the freighter S.S. Munami at Wilmington Harbor, CA. Eugene O’Neill was friends with Ford and proposed bundling his seafaring one-acts into a film. Dudley Nichols updated it to WWII, gathering a group of O’Neill’s dead-ender sailors on The Glencairn as they travel from the West Indies to Baltimore and on to England, transporting explosives through a war zone. It is an ensemble cast that includes Thomas Mitchell as Driscoll, a gregarious Irish rouster, John Wayne as Ole, a sensitive, big-hearted Swede, and Ward Bond as Yank, a bullet-headed brawler. In the digressive narrative room is given to the stories of Smitty (Ian Hunter), an alcoholic escaping his past, and Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald), a failure come to terms with his lonely life at sea. John Qualen and Billy Bevan are also on board to provide some nosy comic relief.

None of them have managed to figure out life on land, so they continually sign up for more journeys on the ocean, in perpetual avoidance of the “real” world on solid ground. Instead they drink and brawl and pine nostalgically for the old days of drinking and brawling. The crew pairs off in friendships, with Driscoll and Yank as best friends and world travelers, even if they can’t remember half of their trips. Smitty and Cocky continually end up on deck with each other, as the rest of the crew gets blasted. Smitty is nervous, sweaty and haunted, the most noirish character of the bunch. The crew invents an elaborate backstory for his secretiveness, one that expands in complexity until they start believing his is a Nazi spy. Most of their time is occupied inside of these fantasies. Smitty’s refusal to participate marks him as an outsider. The truth is sadder than any of them can comprehend. So they ignore it and move on. a_wa1094

John Wayne gives one of his most unusual performances, taking on a Swedish accent and playing Ole as a sweet, slow-witted goofball. He is a lovable giant, and the characterization runs counter to the All-American athlete persona he had been cultivating for years. But for John Ford he would do anything. Wayne was still finishing off his Republic Pictures contract, and had to shoot the drama Three Faces West for twenty days before taking on Long Voyage Home. Insecure at his talent for accents, he asked Ford for help. As quoted in Scott Eyman’s John Wayne: The Life and Legend, Ford responded: “Well, Jesus, all right if you want to be a goddamn actor. You don’t need it.” But Ford hired Danish acting coach Osa Massen to help him out, and if the accent isn’t quite accurate, her instruction put Wayne at ease, and his performance of wide-eyed innocence is one of the most delicate of his career. Though it was a glorified supporting part, Wayne was still given top billing, probably due to the smashing success of Stagecoach in 1939.

Ole has plans to quit the seaman life and return home to his family in Sweden. It is the crew’s solemn vow that they will protect him on shore leave and make sure he gets on the ship home. He has failed many times before, getting caught up in drink, getting in debt, and returning to work to pay off his debts. But for all of the men, Ole is a symbol of freedom, the only one who could conceivably forge a real life on land. Everyone else has had their family and friends die off or disavow them. The ship is their entire world. And the way in which Toland shoots them it feels like a moving mausoleum. Toland reserves his low light shots for the bridge, the tools of navigation bathed in darkness. They hyperreal qualities of deep focus here emphasize the empty spaces, of lost crew members and phantom memories. The most representative sequence is the shot of the raging storm that crashes onto the camera, which anticipates the GoPro techniques of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s immersive boat film Leviathan. There are no actors in the shot, it is emptied of everything but the water. The crew of the Glencairn are disappearing, and they will all eventually be subsumed in the ocean. The shot is a foreshadowing of future absence, and for most of the crew, not an unwanted one.

THE 2015 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

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October 6, 2015

To stud its carpets with stars, the 53rd New York Film Festival has turned to the biopic. It opened with The Walk, Robert Zemeckis’ recreation of Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center tightrope walk, gave a centerpiece slot to Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs, and closes with Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis movie, Miles Ahead. Though I haven’t managed to see those high-gloss productions, biographical approaches extended throughout the festival and into many of my favorites. Manoel de Oliveira’s Visit, Or Memories and Confessions is a wistful and austere reflection on his life, his career, and the house he lived in for forty years. Hong Sang-soo puts another of his wayward film director characters through a structural ringer in Right Now, Wrong Then, and the weight of history and mortality is felt in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, set in his hometown of Khon Kaen, Thailand, and which he has described as “a search for the old spirits I knew as a child.” Soldiers afflicted with sleeping sickness dream away their lives in a makeshift hospital, situated on top of ‘an ancient burial ground. Those sleepy spirits of history seem to have wandered throughout the festival and through the avant-garde Projections sidebar, much of which is on Weerasethakul’s somnambulant wavelength.

“It’s a film by me, for me. Maybe I shouldn’t have made it. Either way, it’s done.” So says Manoel de Oliveira near the start of Memories and Confessions, in a voice-over written by novelist and frequent collaborator Agustina Bessa-Luís. It is a film of reluctant revelation. Shot in 1982, Oliveira ordered it not be shown until after his death, which sadly occurred this past April. The NYFF screening was its North American premiere. The film is structured as a tour of Oliveira’s Oporto home, built for he and his wife Maria Isabel (still with us at age 97) after their marriage in 1940. An unseen male and female walk through its environs, comparing the garden trees to guardians and the house as a ship – to these interlocutors it is a shapeshifting landscape occupied by spirits. They hear noises of its previous inhabitants, one of them being Oliveira the friendly ghost, tapping away at his typewriter. He turns in an artificially startled manner toward the camera, as if on an awkward public access show, and tells the story of his life. He screens home movies of his four children, lingers over portraits of his wife, and walks us through the economic failure of his father’s hat factory that put him into debt, leading to the sale of the home. Maria Isabel is only shot outside in the garden, cutting flowers. Asked by an offscreen voice what it is like to be married to a filmmaker, she replies, “it is a life of abnegation”, with a hint of a Mona Lisa smile on her face conveying the years of stresses living with a “man of the cinema”. Manoel has numerous copies of Da Vinci’s masterpiece stashed around the house – perhaps it reminds him of his wife? Though only 72 at the time of shooting, the film seems like a summation, a wrapping up, as he strolls through a Portuguese film studio and reflects on his own insignificance as the roll of film ends, cutting to white screen and the sound of flapping celluloid. He would go on to shoot twenty-five more features.

Cemetery of Splendour is also about the energies and spirits that can adhere to a space. Apichatpong Weerasethakul grew up in the small town of Khon Kaen in Thailand, where his parents were doctors. For the film he merged all of his childhood landscapes into one: his wooden home, the patients’ ward where his mother worked, the school, and the cinema. The movie is about a temporary rural hospital that cares for soldiers with sleeping sickness that no other wards will take. Their building is a rotting old schoolhouse that still displays remnants of its past: chalkboards, toys, and textbooks. The doctors utilize an experimental therapy using colored fluorescent lights that are said to tame the patients’ dreams, and perhaps ease them back to consciousness. Volunteer Jenjira (Weerasethakul regular Jenjira Pongpas) develops a close friendship with patient Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), who scribbles enigmatic koans in a notebook in between narcoleptic sleeps. An encounter with the psychic Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) forges a mental bond between Jen and Itt that traverses dreams and reality, with Itt guiding Jen into the world of warring kings, buried in the ancient cemetery underneath the hospital. At the same time Jen leads Itt through the ruins of the school where she once attended, weaving history and myth together, all part of a lost Thailand that Weerasethakul is mourning.

At the beginning of the short video Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, Guy Maddin is mourning his career. Unable to complete funding for his next feature (what would become The Forbidden Room, part of the NYFF main slate), he decides to take a job as a director of a behind-the-scenes video for Hyena Road, a big-budget Afghanistan war movie. Maddin decries how Hyena Road’s catering budget could fund most of his features, so he soldiers on, even deigning to act as an extra corpse in one particularly humiliating long shot. But this being a Guy Maddin film (co-directed with Evan and Galen Johnson), things don’t stay linear for long. He decides to cobble together his own war movie with random shots of extras and and some lo-fi CGI lasers, morphing the hero-worshipping Hyena Road into some kind of subversive sci-fi freakout where the Afghan extras are the leads. Maddin makes it personal by pulling in his childhood hockey heroes Tim Horton and Guy Lafleur (he intones “Lafleur, Lafleur” as if the name itself held the key to the universe), and ends with Lafleur’s bumptious disco song “Scoring” while a talky drone interprets the lyrics.

Hong Sang-soo is a serial self-portraitist, always depicting sensitive male artist types in various states of self-examination or self-delusion. In Right Now, Wrong Then he follows famed art film director Han Chun-su (Jung Jae-young) the day before he is giving a post-screening lecture in the small town of Suwon. He spends it with painter Hee-jung (Kim Min-hee), who he is strenuously attempting to seduce. They have coffee, retreat to her workshop to discuss her work, have dinner, and attend a small party. Through it all Han is working from an established script, using practiced lines from old interviews to create the seamless patter of an intellectual pickup artist. Hee-jung is initially charmed, then slowly irritated by his insecure mansplaining. But this is not the end – as Hong cycles the timeline back to the beginning and replays each scene, with Han subtly altering his approach. Each detail is magnified in this second go-round, each thread of conversation a possible fork in the narrative that sends it down new paths. Han displays more confidence in his own thoughts the second time around, speaking thoughtfully and honestly rather than relying on recycled ideas, baring his body and soul. As Han begins to listen to Hee-jung’s perspective, Hong shifts his camera to her – though it framed Han more centrally in the first half. It all sounds very simplistic and binary, but in action it is a marvel of subtlety of Jung and Kim’s performances. The first half was completed and screened for them before they shot the second, and their reactions seem to play off that first encounter, a teasing flirtation both with each other and with the movie itself.

The Projections programs of experimental films also dealt with the self, especially Laida Lertxundi’s Vivir Para Vivir, which attempts to render her body through cinema. Mountain peaks are connected to the peaks in her cardiogram, which are both seen and heard on-screen. It is a bold, sensuous kind of embodied cinema, ending with a blast of color timed to a recording of an orgasm. Alee Peoples’ Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies is a casual bit of urban photography, as Peoples documents an unusual marketing technique around her north Los Angeles neighborhood: busty female mannequins which hold motorized signs for a variety of small businesses – income tax accountants and gas stations alike. In an economically depressed landscape of empty billboard signs, these intrepid inanimate ladies still hawk their wares, absurd emblems of sexism that have held onto their jobs longer than most. The most unique and haunting work I saw in the festival was Lois Patiño‘s Night Without Distance, another short playing in Projections. Shot in the mountains on the Galicia/Portugal border, it envisions the smuggling trade as ghostly emanations of the landscape. Patiño used color reversal stock and then presented it in negative, creating uncanny silvery images that look like they came out of the video game Metal Gear Solid. That impression is further solidified by how the spectral figures, speaking of secret meetings and escapes, use stealth like that game’s Solid Snake. The long takes of smugglers waiting in crevasses and by creeks take on depth and volume, with physical textures vibrating across the frame. The travelers seem to speak in code, traveling towards a point beyond time, ghostly smugglers wandering the borderlands of perceivable reality. It conjures the same spell as Cemetery of Splendour, leaving me suspended in its waking dream of cinema.

NYFF: THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)

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October 7, 2014

For director Michael Powell, The Red Shoes was “mostly a sketch for The Tales of Hoffmann“. So far the sketch has eclipsed the full painting, with The Red Shoes a repertory film staple that plays regularly around the country (you can catch it in my cinema-starved hometown of Buffalo on November 17th!), while The Tales of Hoffmann has endured decades of neglect and chopped up film prints. Its relative obscurity should begin to lift, now that a new 4K scan of the original camera negative has been performed by the BFI, with support from The Film Foundation and StudioCanal. The stateside premiere of the restoration occurred at the New York Film Festival, introduced by superfan Martin Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who was married to Powell until his passing in 1990).

The Tales of Hoffmann is a deliriously beautiful film about male fantasies of female perfection. Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) invents women to match the romantic ideal he has of himself, all of whom emerge from a mediated perceptual and meta-cinematic schema. Olympia (Moira Shearer) is a mechanical doll who looks human when Hoffmann views her through ornate (3D?) glasses. Giulietta (Ludmilla Tcherina) is a devil’s handmaiden who steals Hoffmann’s soul by having him stare into a mirror. Antonia (Ann Ayars) is a thwarted opera singer whose mother’s statue comes to life. Absorbed in his own vanity, Hoffmann is not granted unmediated sight, and so ends up drunk and alone.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were after something they called a “composed film”, a gesamtkunstwerk of music, dance and film that grants each their individual freedom but operates in concert, working without dialogue, but through purely expressive gesture. Their test of this concept was the climactic dance in The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffmann was to be its fruition. The choice of subject matter was brought to them by conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. According to Powell the original idea was to record with him “a wonderful performance of the singers of the opera, and then make a film of it with dancers . Simple as that.” They adapted the Jacques Offenbach opera into a new English translation (by Dennis Arundell), and hired both voices and bodies for each character. Powell wanted “a performance, not a recording”, so he strayed from operatic singers and chose singer-actors for the vocals to which the actors would lip-sync. Only Rounseville’s Hoffmann and Ann Ayars’ Antonia sung their own parts. They recorded the score separately, and then shot the film according to the music’s rhythms, giving the director of photography and actors more freedom than they had since the silent era. It is not just the camera movement that is calibrated to the music though, but equally the actor’s movement inside the frame (dance choreographed by Frederick Ashton), as well as the rhythmic editing of Reginald Mills.

Instead of trying to mitigate the artificiality, of the enterprise, they emphasize it, with painted backdrops and fantastical set designs by Hein Heckroth. This overt “staginess” attracted significant criticism. Siegfried Kracauer called it “nothing but photographed theater”, and that seemed to be the prevailing viewpoint until the film became nigh impossible to see. Distribution was nonexistent through the 60s, and when prints did get out, they were in B&W and missing the third act. That’s how Scorsese first saw it on the “Million Dollar Movie” on local NYC television, beginning a lifelong obsession. He named Robert Helpmann’s face as an influence on Taxi Driver. Schoonmaker related how Scorsese would screen the film endlessly during the editing process of Raging Bull, and would get enraged when MoMA would ask for the print back, because another director was requesting it. It turned out George Romero was another Hoffmann fanatic, and was analyzing it in the run-up to his film about traveling renaissance fair/ motorcycle gang , Knightriders (1981).

Act 1, “Olympia”, takes place in a mechanical doll studio that Hein Heckroth gave a Fauvist explosion of color. Hoffmann is agog at the ingenuity of it all, lost in his own perceptual whirlwind. The inventor Coppelius (Helpmann) twirls him through demonstrations of his amazingly lifelike puppets, which come to life underwhen Hoffmann dons garish glasses, some with pearls stringing down. They are a cinematic talisman, allowing the inanimate objects to come to life under his gaze. The camera rises up into the rafters to display the puppet master pulling the strings – but what are wooden dolls up there turn into prancing humans on stage – and one in particular catches Hoffmann’s eye. To him she is too real to be fake, or simply too beautiful not to reflect his idea of reality. In any case, it’s Olympia (Moira Shearer) reclining on a hammock, her aquiline features and aerodynamic limbs lying still in anticipation. It is clear this is a body that can do damage. And she does, swirling like a top but needing to be constantly wound up by her handlers. Shearer is a marvel, not just as a dancer but a comedian, able to execute lithe ballet maneuvers at one end of the stage, and then collapse like an accordion at the other. Hoffmann is helpless at her cold, inanimate beauty, a dumbfounded idiot who thought he found the perfect woman. He is humiliated at the revelation of her not-aliveness, and she is eventually torn limb-from-limb in a scene of sadistic doll violence.

Act 2, “Giulietta”, gets supernatural, and begins to bring out the German Expressionist strains in Heckroth’s designs and Robert Helpmann’s Nosferatu garb. It takes place in Venice, and Giulietta is a leggy siren luring Hoffmann towards her. In a disorienting sequence, Powell and Pressburger cut back and forth between Giulietta’s disembodied head superimposed on the canal singing a ghostly tune, and Giulietta’s physical body in a gondola rowing for home. Here again is the spirit/body split, the woman multiplied into parts that Hoffmann can then separate and filter through his own ego. In this fable of betrayal she steals his soul for a neck full of diamonds. His soul is taken when he looks into a mirror, and his image disappears. His sight is blinkered and uncertain, his love a delusion. It’s only when he skewers a man with a saber and cracks the mirror in two, that his soul is restored to him. It did not, however, give him intelligence.

Act 3, “Antonia” is Hoffmann’s best shot at capturing reality. There are no disruptions of his sight, only his empathy. Antonia is in ill health, and has been advised not to sing for fear of her weak constitution. Her father isolates her in the bedroom, alone with a statue of her late grande dame mother, once a famed opera singer. Hoffmann arrives to declare his love and burst into song, and the satanic Dr. Miracle (Helpmann, again, with his menacing widow’s peak) has similar designs to nefarious ends – he wants her to sing until she dies, so she can join her mother. Miracle is a weird amalgam of Dr. Caligari madman and Dracula force of nature, able to summon Antonia’s body to instantaneously appear at his examining couch when she is off in another room – yet more imagery of the segmented female body. She is not in control of herself – and her mind starts cracking. Her hallucinations escalate until she is sharing a duet with her dead mother in a medieval wood, sharing a mournful duet before suffering the same fate – a brutally beautiful escape.

The restored Tales of Hoffmann will screen at NYC’s Film Forum in early 2015 and presumably tour the country after that. It’s a bewitching, profoundly strange work, both radically free and conservatively stagebound. Kracauer wrote that it is both “a spectacle that transcends the possibilities of the stage”, but “built from miraculous studio effects, it shuts out any miracle the camera may reveal. The ripple of a single leaf suffices to denounce its treacherous glamour.” It’s a gorgeously suffocating work, and there’s truly nothing else like it.

THE 2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: GONE GIRL AND TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

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September 30, 2014

The New York Film Festival opened this past Friday night with the sadistic comedy of remarriage Gone Girl (which is released nationwide October 3rd). It trails success in its wake, adapted from Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel, which has occupied the majority of bedside end tables in the United States. It is the second straight bestseller that director David Fincher has adapted, following his glacial Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Gone Girl is another story of female victimhood and bloody revenge, except this time the narrator is highly unreliable. If you are one of the zeitgeist-less few not to have read the story, it concerns the unraveling marriage of struggling writers Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamunde Pike). After Amy goes missing after an apparent home invasion, a massive investigation is launched to find her, with the evidence continuing to pile up against Nick. What follows is a thorough autopsy of their lives together, their union a sustained performance of mutual denial and dishonesty, an act that Amy internalizes to such a degree that she stages a much larger, more entertaining production in response. Fincher and Flynn jettison the balanced 50/50 POV split from the novel and filter the majority of the narrative through Nick’s perspective. This simplifies the story but also flattens Amy into a sociopathic cipher, one who can too easily be dismissed as a hysterical female. But Rosamunde Pike’s performance is ferociously controlled, betraying no loss of agency. If men want Amy to play a part to salve their fragile egos, she will oblige only until a better role comes along, whereupon she can trash their script and obliterate them.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night depicts a different kind of determined female. Sandra (Marion Cotillard) returns to work after a bout with depression, only to find her job at a solar panel factory will be eliminated. In an either/or vote, the union chose to receive a 1,000 EUR bonus over Sandra keeping her job. Sandra successfully lobbies for a re-vote after rumors of tampering, and has a weekend to convince each individual employee to forego the bonus and keep her on staff. The film is a kind of moral procedural, the question re-framed through each employees’ personal circumstances. Sandra troops through the Dardennes’ terrain of Seraing, Belgium on foot, bus and car, continually wilting and re-forming under the stress and humiliation of her position. The handheld camera sticks tight to Cotillard (who, with this and The Immigrant is in perpetual close-up this year), whose face is a Richter scale of emotional tremors.

Gone Girl is a David Fincher movie and is thusly a very good-looking one, working again with DP Jeff Cronenweth (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Fight Club). Though it opens and closes with a shallow-focus close-up, the majority of the film emphasizes maximum visibility, with a lot of long shots that encompass glass, television monitors and security cameras. Much of the film has to do with the media frenzy that accompanies Amy’s disappearance, as she was the model for a popular children’s book series written by her parents. The tabloid talk shows push the trashiest and most outrageous narratives of the case, including at one point speculating on Nick and his twin sister Margo (an acerbic Carrie Coon) engaging in “twincest”. And though the movie runs a robust 150 minutes, Fincher and editor Kirk Baxter utilize a clipped editing style that always cut a beat or two before I expected. Even the opening credit titles flash on and off far quicker than usual. This clipped style kept me off balance – as if the film was proceeding ahead of me and I was scrambling to catch up. It was fun to feel that off kilter, though the tempo distends in the climactic latter stages into something more conventional.

The acting tends to be as controlled and clipped as the editing, especially the investigative team led by Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney. Dickens is a superb no-bullshit cop, forever with an oversized styrofoam coffee cup in her hand and a bloodhound twitch in her eyes when clues passed her field of vision. She has no wasted gestures, words or syllables. She leaves those to her assistant (Patrick Fugit), who seems to speak entirely in pithy putdowns. The only one in the cast who lacks this tightness is Ben Affleck, whose Nick floats in a boyish fog. When Amy disappears he doesn’t so much as shrug, while at the station he speaks to the police with distanced deference, as if arguing a speeding ticket rather than helping a search for his missing wife. It is an impressive bit of smarminess for a major star, but he doesn’t manage to sustain it. As Nick takes on the mantle of victimhood, Affleck becomes a genial joker, instead of the self-regarding a-hole the movie needs to balance its battle of the sexes. When the couple reforms, the movie becomes less about how spouses deform themselves to sustain relationships, but about the subjugation of Affleck’s good ‘ol boy to Rosamunde Pike’s world-devouring wife.

In Two Days, One Night Sandra is no Amy. Living in a healthy relationship with husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), she has no ability to dissemble in front of her fellow workers. It takes her entire force of will to knock on each door, and put herself under their pitying, guilty glares. She knows that her question will instill guilt, and each bonus voter is a fount explanations and justifications, some understandable, others not. Each encounter has the tension of a heist sequence, just that the stakes are much higher. Money is tight all over, and Sandra is asking these people to give up a year of gas bills. It is the rare film where bills have a physical weight, that conveys the suffocating anxiety that money problems can instill – the complete helplessness. Her path through the town in Two Days, One Night is stop-start as that force of will crumbles, having to be built up again by Manu or her few encouraging co-workers. Then there are the brief moments of happiness. Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev) weeps at getting a chance to reverse his vote to Sandra – and as she walks away breaks into uncontrollable smiles, Cotillard’s body a brief lightning rod of joy. The other burst occurs inside of Manu’s car, as Van Morrison’s “Gloria” crackles over the radio. The whole car bursts into song, Sandra giving herself up to the chorus, trying to escape into the tune.

THE 2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: HILL OF FREEDOM AND JAUJA

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September 23, 2014

The fifty-second New York Film Festival begins this Friday night with the world premiere of Gone Girl, the David Fincher adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s ubiquitous spousal murder mystery. But the early highlight of the thirty-film main slate concerns another missing woman, although in a less-outwardly-thrilling scenario. Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom, which screens the evenings of 9/30 and 10/8, concerns an unemployed Japanese intellectual in Korea, searching for an absent woman he once loved. It’s another variation on Hong’s recent string of films about travellers and transitional spaces (Our Sunhi, In Another Country, The Day He Arrives) where drinking is the main form of communication. Hill of Freedom works hilariously well as a fish-out-of-water comedy, but also contains pockets of melancholy about time’s passage, professional failure, and the inadequacy of language. It is currently without a distributor, and unlikely to acquire one, considering how poorly his sparsely distributed output has done stateside.

There is another gone girl in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (screening 10/7 and 10/9), when the daughter of a colonial Danish military engineer (Viggo Mortensen) scampers off into the Patagonian wilderness. In his three features La Libertad, Los Muertos and Liverpool, Alonso has chosen landscapes first and built narratives around the spaces and the habits of its people. Jauja is his first period piece, and an imaginative leap from the patient everydayness of his previous films. With nods to The Searchers and Heart of Darkness, Jauja follows the engineer as he plunges deeper into a country he doesn’t understand, ending in hallucinations and a legacy of confusion.

Hong Sang-soo has been paring his films down to the essentials. Never one for excess, in recent years his films have limited themselves to a few city streets, a few self-loathing men and women, and a narrative built on repetition. Hill of Freedom constricts itself to couple of blocks in Seoul, mainly taking place at a guest house and at a coffee shop. Mori (Ryo Kase) is a Japanese visitor staying at the guest house, and is searching for Kwon (Seo Young-hwa). Mori met Kwon two years before, but is only now convinced of his love for her. But unbeknownst to Mori, Kwon is off in the mountains for health reasons, so he is forced to mope around town, communicating in limited English with his deep-in-debt guest house buddy Sangwon (Kim Eui-sung) and the profoundly unhappy owner of the coffee shop (named “Hill of Freedom). The story is told in flashback, from letters that Mori wrote to Kwon after his departure from Seoul. As Kwan is leaving the post office, she drops the letters on the stairs, shuffling them out of chronological order. The film proceeds in the order Kwon reads the letters, so they jump back in forth in time during Mori’s stay. The ghost that haunts the film is the one letter Kwan leaves on the staircase – perhaps the one that reveals the truth of Mori’s intentions, but more realistically documents another night of inebriated rambles.

Mori carries a dogeared book with him throughout his visit, which he seems to treat as a sacred text, or maybe more as a binky to calm his nerves. In one of his many awkward, flirtatious conversations with the coffee shop owner Youngsun (Moon So-ri) he informs her that it is a philosophical treatise that claims “time is not a real thing.” But that “at the end, you cannot escape this frame of mind, because our brain evolved this way.” He believes that time is an illusion, a construct of our consciousness, that perhaps in reality, outside of ourselves, events occur in the shuffled manner of the narrative. It is our brains that constantly seek to arrange them in order. Mori is a failure at this kind of arranging, and at this order. He is an unemployed loner wandering Seoul, his only hope a woman he last saw years ago and who might want nothing to do with him. And in some ways Mori seems to live in his own pocket of pre-Internet time. The settings are clearly contemporary, but no one uses a cell phone, Mori hand writes his letters, and there is nary a computer in sight.

Then there is the film’s blunt use of language. The movie is almost entirely in English, the common ground for Japanese-Korean relations in this film. But this limits their vocabulary, so each conversation is abrupt and direct. Every conversation seems to begin with the question, “Business or pleasure?” Mori hems and haws through each iteration, his visit having possibly to do with neither, ending up as more misery than pleasure. When his guest house manager tells him the banality, “I hope you will enjoy your stay”, Mori cannot respond in kind. Instead, he says, “It’s not always easy to enjoy, except when I am lucky.” The bemused manager replies, “You know, I was just saying that”, implying it was a rhetorical question. But Mori is incapable of deflecting or armoring his meanings with the subtleties of his native languages. He is forced into direct statement, as are his interlocutors. Sangwon insists that Mori admit to being sad. Mori considers people to be “great” or “poison”, with no shades of grey in between. This forced directness creates quick bonds between Mori and Sangwon, who get blitzed and dream of happiness, as well as between Mori and Youngsun, whose attraction seems to be borne out of mutual melancholy. It ends as it has to, in the middle, unresolved, our minds having to put all the broken pieces together.

Jauja is equally concerned with blowing minds as puzzling them. With its pulsing colors and immersive deep focus cinematography, it’s cinema-as-sensorium. There’s a vibrant interplay in Alonso’s frames (in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio) between background and foreground, usually with Viggo Mortensen in the front, his visage staring out beyond the horizon. It is 1882 on the Patagonian coast, during the “Conquest of the Desert”, a bloody campaign to drive the indigenous peoples out of the jungle, to make the region safe for European settlers. Mortensen plays Dinesen, a Danish engineer who will plan the future European-style cities that will replace the wiped-out cultures. He is there with his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjork Agger Malling), who soon absconds into the jungle with a young soldier. As Dinesen follows her deeper into the country, rumors persist that an ex-soldier, Zuluaga, has gone mad and gone “native”, slaughtering the Europeans he comes across. Fugitive signs of Ingeborg emerge and dissipate, but Dinesen trudges on into something like madness. He is like Ethan Edwards in his metastasizing hatred of the indigenous population, and the obsessive chase for his lost girl that is less an act of courage than of bloodlust. The deformity of the European colonial project seems to alter the landscape as well as his body, from watery shores crenellated with rock formations, to the dried out gray of the mountains. By the end Mortensen is a ragged wandering ghost, led by an undernourished dog to some kind of afterlife. The ending is a time-and-space shifting mystery that lays beyond my grasp, images of a fecund forest overgrowing the past, drawing me back in.

THE 2013 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 8, 2013

In its 51st edition the venerable New York Film Festival is testing its boundaries. While still a small, tightly curated affair compared to the industry bacchanals of Toronto and Cannes, they’ve been slowly increasing their scope. There are 36 official selection entries this year, thirteen more than 2011, and have expanded the Revivals and Views of the Avant Garde sections to the point where they could stand on their own. A mammoth Jean-Luc Godard retrospective is also running concurrently with the festival. The official selection was heavy on the Brits this year (with four, although I didn’t see any), and otherwise tried for their usual balance of star power (Captain Phillips) and experimentation (Norte, the End of History, all of Views).

The Centerpiece screening was the world premiere of Ben Stiller’s The Secret World of Walter Mitty, the second adaptation of James Thurber’s short story, following the 1947 Danny Kaye vehicle. Stiller’s directorial outings, from The Cable Guy (1996) to Tropic Thunder (2008), have been dark and masochistic comedies about pop culture’s corrosive power. Mitty, on the other hand, is a nostalgia piece, mourning the transition from analog to digital. Having little relation to Thurber’s moody miniature, Stiller’s Mitty takes the daydreaming office drone and shunts him into a world-hopping, mountain climbing journey of self-discovery, kind of a middle-aged male’s Eat Pray Love. Where Thurber’s story ends with Mitty fantasizing about his own demise, Stiller’s closes with all of his dreams coming true.

It is bafflingly saccharine coming from Stiller, who had previously spent his acting capital to make scathing commentaries on self-help sludge such as this. Yet it is clearly a deeply personal work, sincere in its efforts to convince people to re-connect with the world. It is also very well crafted, especially the first third. The opening shot is wordless, with Stiller’s Mitty sitting at his laptop, stymied in his attempts to update his eHarmony profile. In one striking shot, he paces into the background and goes out of focus, forcing the audience to stare at an empty, perfectly quiet frame. It’s astonishingly bold for a $100 million would-be blockbuster. Fox hedged their bets by ladling on product placement. In addition to eHarmony, there are prominent cameos by Papa Johns and CinnaBon.

Mitty is the negative asset manager for Life Magazine, who is publishing their last issue before becoming online-only. Prone to fantasies of action-movie heroics – he usually inserts co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) as his damsel in distress. While Mitty’s daily routine is framed in long shot with a smoothly tracking camera, when he leaps tall buildings the camera goes all Greengrass, turning into the handheld quick-cut style so favored by today’s action auteurs. The film is loaded with these clever visual ideas that contrast old and new, yet they are in service to a story that is thuddingly conventional. The reliably funny Wiig is reduced to arm candy, her role to prop up the self-pitying Sillter. The rest of the superb cast, including Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn and Shirley McClaine, are equally underserved.

On the other end of the budget spectrum is Lav Diaz’s Norte, the end of history, a four-hour immersion into the Filipino justice system. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it tracks the parallel stories of a nihilistic law student dropout and a saintly laborer. Fabian (Sid Lucero) is disgusted with the state of his country, ravaged as it is by official corruption. He advocates violent revolution on the grassroots level, and puts his ideology into action when he murders the local money-lender he is indebted to. Unbeknownst to him, Joaquin (Archie Alemania) threatened the usurer with violence earlier in the day, and he is immediately arrested for the murder. Joaquin and his wife had planned to open a restaurant, but a leg injury sucked up their funds and put them in debt. Unable to afford a decent lawyer, Joaquin is convicted and sent to prison for life. Diaz shifts back and forth between these parallel tracks, as Fabian digs deeper into his ideological rabbit hole, where violence becomes an end in itself, while Joaquin works to salvage a life in prison, forging friendships through his selfless aid to others. Diaz captures a wide swathe of Filipino society, from lawyers’ cafe bull sessions to working class dinner preperation, all captured in Diaz’s patient long takes. There is a palpable tension as the two narrative lines bend towards each other, their joining a flashpoint that might put an end to it all. Norte was acquired by Cinema Guild for U.S. distribution, and it will be the first film by Diaz to be released in the United States – a true cause for celebration.

Hong Sang-soo movies also put me in a celebratory mood. This prolific Korean profiler of indolent man-children makes one of his chatty humiliation fests a year, and they keep getting funnier. Nobody’s Daugher Haewon continues his shift towards featuring female characters, which started in Oki’s Movie (2010) and continues through the most recent Our Sunhi (2013). Haewon is at loose ends after her mother moves to Canada, her identity seeming to drift away with her. She’s only halfway present in all her relationships, from her intermittent affair with a married professor to her rapid infatuation with a teacher on vacation from San Diego. Even her consciousness is in doubt – the film is either a lucid dream or a sleepy reality.

Also taking place in a liminal dream state is Stranger By the Lake, a minimalist thriller from French director Alain Guiraudie. An isolated stretch of shoreline is used as a gay cruising ground, where Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a regular. He develops an intense crush on Michel (Christophe Paou), who looks like Tom Selleck circa 1985, but who is always engaged with other men. Franck returns day after day, Guiraudie depicting this daily routine as a kind of incantation, and the woods up on the hill as an enchanted fairy land, a mystery world of lush greenery and pitch black shadow. The sex is explicit but natural, outgrowths of the land. When Franck witnesses Michel soil this sacred space with a criminal act, he is attracted and repelled. Michel becomes a monster stalking through the once-sacred land, inviting all with him to disappear into the darkness. The film’s bewitching mix of naturalism and fable is inherent to Guiraudie’s work, which will hopefully gain a wider audience when Strand releases Stranger by the Lake early next year. See That Old Dream That Moves (2001) his lyrical short feature about the closing of a factory, if you can find it.

Also recommended with public screenings still to come: Corneliu Porumboiu’s hilarious meta-movie When Evening Falls in Bucharest or Metabolism (no distributor, wrote about it here); James Gray’s gorgeous turn-of-the-century melodrama The Immigrant (Weinstein); and Catherine Breillat’s autobiographical poison pill Abuse of Weakness (no distributor, wrote about it here).

THE 50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 2

February 5, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 2, 2012

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The 50th edition of the New York Film Festival opened this past Friday night with a Gala 3D screening of Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi. While that digital projection was warmly received, later that weekend the first showing of Brian DePalma’s Passion was canceled because of an intransigent DCP (Digital Cinema Package). As the NYFF, like festivals worldwide, becomes dominantly digital, attending some of the few celluloid screenings starts to feel like a modestly defiant gesture. Two 35mm dinosaurs, Manoel de Oliveira’s The Satin Slipper (1985) and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012) use Portugal’s colonial past as their subject, with both using archaic forms to emphasize themes of negation and evanescence.

Booked as part of the festival’s Masterworks sidebar, The Satin Slipper (1985) is an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s 12-hour 1929 play, which Oliveira whittled down to a svelte 410 minutes. It is only the second time that the uncut film version has screened in New York City, following a brief run at the Public Theater in 1994 (Stephen Holden’s NY Times review: “not easy viewing”). It was programmed for the New York Film Festival in 1985, following its premiere in Venice, but according to associate Film Society programmer Scott Foundas, U.S. distributors Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (of Cannon Films) would only consent to show a cut version of two and a half hours. Other titles Golan and Globus would produce/distribute in 1985: American Ninja, Invasion U.S.A. and Death Wish III. One can’t help but imagine a Cannon Christmas party with Manoel de Oliveira brushing elbows with Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson…

The opening line of Claudel’s opus is, “the scene of this play is the entire world”, which he attempts to capture through the strivings of 50 plus characters at the turn of the 17th century. It takes place after the disappearance of the Portuguese King Sebastian on his colonialist mission in Africa, after which King Philip II of Spain brought Portugal under his power, part of his expansion that also led him to the Americas. Against this backdrop of overreach and excess Oliveira focuses on its inverse, the painfully unrequited love between Don Rodrigue (Luis Miguel Cintra) and Dona Prouheze (Patricia Barzyk). Rodrigue is the rogue whom King Philip nominates to be Viceroy of the Americas, to rule in his stead. Meanwhile the beautiful Prouheze has been married off to the much older judge, Don Pelagio (Franck Oger), whom she honors but cannot love. To restrain her emotion, and maintain loyalty to Pelagio, Prouheze places one of her slippers with a statue of the Madonna, so that if she is tempted by lust she will approach evil “with a broken foot”. Pelagio, aware of her emotional distance, will send her to Africa to control the smitten Don Camillo in order to hold the line against the Moors. Separated by oceans, Rodrigue and Prouheze nurse their love over the decades – living lives of negation and sacrifice, hoping to be reunited in death.

In an “Author’s Note” to The Satin Slipper, Claudel writes, “The most carelessly crumpled back-drop, or none at all, will do.” Oliveira takes this to heart, staging the play as if on the budget of a community theatrical troupe, with a mostly static camera shooting long speeches with few edits, as if returning to the style of early cinema, the one-shot films of Edison or Lumiere. Only the presence of sound and the scattered slow zooms indicate this is a modern feature. The ocean is created by spinning sheaths of blue papier-mache on giant rollers, stalked by cardboard whales, while mountain ranges are simply sketched backdrops. Oliveira’s Satin Slipper is very playfully self-reflexive, pointing out the artificiality of its constructions at every turn – far more so even than his previous tales of unrequited love, Amor de Perdicao (1979)and Francisca (1981, both adaptations, of Camilo Castelo Brancoo and Agustina Bessa Luis, respectively).

He opens the film with a tour-de-force tracking shot of a crowd entering a theater, stand-ins for the viewers about to sit for close to seven hours. After a narrator, never to re-appear, introduces the play (his tongue planted in his cheek), the doors fling open and the viewers enter. The camera backs up into the theater, rolling slowly down the aisles, until it tilts upwards, revealing actors in Renaissance dress standing stock still in the balcony. Eventually one of these actors descends, and the camera pans left as he climbs up on the stage, the curtains parting to reveal not a stage set, but a film screen. He speaks of the constellations of stars visible to Don Rodrigue, tied up on a ship that is equidistant between the Old World and the New. After the camera zooms close to the image of Rodrigue on the screen, Oliveira cuts for the first time, to the image of the projector, its light shimmering over all in the audience.

As Rodrigue is reflected by the light of the moon and stars, the audience is bathed in the flickering glow of the projector, the distance between the fictional and the real collapsing. It’s constructive to compare this scene to the opening of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, which also begins in a theater, except those viewers are passive and motionless, dulled by the clichés that Carax will enliven for the rest of his film. Oliveira is not bemoaning the state of cinema but attempting to cultivate an active viewer, as he is quoted in Randal Johnson’s Manoel de Oliveira: “My perspective is precisely to put the spectator in the action. In this way, the spectator goes from a passive, manipulated attitude to an active attitude in which he should draw his own conclusions and undertake a criticism of what he sees.” He is attempting to thrust you into the drama as it unspools, to share the light of the stars and the projector. There are the alienation effects of a jester who is shown painting backdrops and writing characters “who exist before I am finished”, and then he is able to immerse you in the emotion of the piece, seen to no greater ends then the monologue of a woman in the moon. In a long take, while slowly zooming in, Marie-Christine Barrault’s face appears in the firmament, straight out of Melies, but speaking of “never” as a kind of eternity, sacrifice as transcendence – and one begins to recognize and identify with that spark of religious belief that once lit the world ablaze.

In Tabu, Miguel Gomes is also concerned with old forms. It is a film split in two, both shot in black and white. Part One, (entitled “A Paradise Lost”, in 35mm) follows the aging human rights activist Pilar (Teresa Madruga), as she deals with the growing dementia of her neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral), and the seeming indifference of Aurora’s black maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso). The second half, “Paradise”, imagines Aurora’s past life in Africa, shot in hazy, grainy 16mm. This second half is narrated in voice-over, with the images from Africa granted sound effects but no sync dialogue, giving the impression of memories half-remembered, of potent emotions but vague details. This final section is set in the 60s, just prior to the African wars of independence that wrest the Portuguese colonies free of the domination that had bound them since the days of King Sebastian.

Gomes has reversed the order of these chapters from Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), in which the “Paradise” of a lovers’ tryst in the South Seas is then a “Paradise Lost” in Chapter 2, as they attempt to adapt to life on a French colony. In placing the Lost Paradise first, Gomes shades every action in the romantic Paradise with the knowledge of its ultimate outcome – his lovers are every bit as doomed as Rodrigue and Prouzhe. For a film suffused with themes of loss, the decision to shoot on 35 and 16mm becomes a part of the grander narrative. The frames on which these women are captured, stuck in silver nitrate, are now as fragile and disappearing as the narrative in which they enact. And while Oliveira could not have forseen it while he shot The Satin Slipper, his use of 35mm has become yet another distanciation effect, its depth and beauty another indication of what our present age has lost.

THE 50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 1

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September 25, 2012

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The 50th New York Film Festival, which runs from September 28th – October 10th, marks the end of an era. Richard Peña, the Program Director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, as well as the Festival’s Committee Head, is retiring after 25 years, to be replaced by the well-respected critics and curators Kent Jones and Robert Koehler. This year’s main slate, made up of 32 features from around the world, presents directors that Peña has long championed, including Alain Resnais (You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet) and the late Raul Ruiz (Night Across the Street), but also features artists poised to take their place in the fest’s firmament. Christian Petzold makes his long overdue main slate debut with the meticulously stunning Berlin Wall-era drama Barbara, while the astonishingly productive image-grabbers from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab make their second main slate appearance, following Sweetgrass (2008) (Foreign Parts was a sidebar selection in 2010), with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s immersive fishing documentary Leviathan . Also making his second appearance is Leos Carax, with his weary ode to cinema Holy Motors, his first feature since Pola X (1999), which was his NYFF debut. Petzold is a classicist, the Ethnography Lab a group of experimentalists, while Carax is a bit of both – a provocative trio to kick off this year’s festival.

Barbara is the most unassuming feature of the three, a slow-boil suspense film in which the most action occurs in the eyes of actress Nina Hoss. She plays the title character, an East Berlin doctor in 1980 who is banished to a country hospital after being incarcerated for an unknown crime. Even at this distant outpost she is hounded by the police and forced to endure humiliating searches, as she plans to escape with the help of her slick West Berlin boyfriend. Only the attentions of the sympathetic wreck Dr. Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), and the decrepit state of a teen girl abused at the Torgau workhouse crack her determination to leave.

Petzold presents a world that is manifesting Barbara’s justifiable paranoia, one that constantly pokes and prods at her inviolable wall of privacy. He generally frames her in medium shot, with Hoss placed in corners, her eyes slathered in mascara so they pop out of her pale face, looking with the same intensity as the doctors in the reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulip that hangs in Dr. Andre’s office. She is alert and pensive, scanning a mise-en-scene that is rebelling against her. Her apartment’s electrical outlets blow out, the doorbell sounds like a clattering death rattle (and usually portends worse), and her bike’s tires pop at regular intervals. Then while at the office, she has to aid Dr. Andre in a lumbar puncture – with work the only place she can project her fears outward. Otherwise she is in constant surveillance of her environs, woman as prison-guard tower. Nina Hoss presents Barbara as an imposing edifice, a stone-faced sphinx who speaks in brief bursts, transmitting as little information as possible. But her eyes tell the tale, climaxing in an ecstatic close-up in the hospital, in which encrustations of anxiety fall from her face, and Barbara is ready to accept her fate.

The fate of the fish in Leviathan is never in any doubt. They will end up on our tables and in our bellies. Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel are interested in how they get there – not the facts of it, though, but the experience, and from every conceivable perspective. The duo used waterproof digital cameras and tied them to fisherman’s heads, shoved them into a pile of the writhing new catch, and dipped them underwater on long poles off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Herman Melville worked as a whaler in New Bedford, and used the town as a model for Moby Dick, in which great whales are called “leviathans”.

This association reflects on the changing industry in New Bedford, which was the number one dollar value fishing port for the 12th consecutive year, thanks to the sea scallop industry, although it’s a long way from the dominant whaling port it was at the turn of the 20th century. But while the fish are smaller, the sense of awe is still present, as Castaing-Taylor, Paravel and sound designer Ernst Karel cut between the brute reality and industrial noise of life on the boat with the awesome beauty and gurgling solitude of the nature outside of it. When the cameras bob up and under the surface of the water, catching flickering visions of seagulls manifesting out of the dark, it looks as if the world is being created before your eyes. The filmmakers told Dennis Lim in the NY Times that while Melville, as well as philosopher Thomas Hobbes (“life is nasty, brutish and short”), were the original touchstones of their work, it was the original, biblical sense of leviathan as sea monster that ultimately animated their vision. It is a primal, visceral and overwhelming work, one of those artistic breakthroughs that intimates what it might have felt to view the Lumiere’s train riding towards you for the first time.

If Leviathan feels like something bracingly new, Holy Motors is obsessed with the old – with old films, old actors and old age. After years of failing to secure funding for his work, Leos Carax fueled all of his rage at the business and love for the medium into this weary spectacular. Denis Lavant plays Oscar, a burnt-out itinerant actor who travels in a stretch limo around Paris (which has a similar tomb-like quality to that of Cosmopolis), heading to nine “appointments” in which he performs scenes in a variety of genres, from softcore porn to tearjerking melodrama to a grandly romantic musical reminiscent of Jacques Demy. His whole life is performance, and performance is life, acting for an invisible crowd that we see in the opening scene lolling contentedly in their seats.

This is no celebration, though, for Oscar is exhausted, as Michel Piccoli notes in a crucial cameo. These forms and characters that Lavant so imaginatively embodies are losing their force – these grand emotions are as outdated as the lugubrious limo that creeps through town. Oscar’s tour is a joyous kind of eulogy, a superb rendering of these spectacles that is also their last. He straps on a motion capture suit, a human disco ball in a dark room, and engages in an intensely erotic pas de deux with a similarly outfitted blonde. Their bodies heave and contract as one – but their efforts result in the slick, inhuman CG of writhing dragons. Later, a movingly melancholic Kylie Minogue breaks out into a heartsick ballad, singing of her past love for Lavant, a gorgeous number in which Carax tracks the camera up a desolate building onto the roof, where they part. All that is left afterward will be some broken glass on the sidewalk, another performance ended. In Holy Motors cinema still works, and gloriously so, but it is fated to die anyway. The film is Carax’s form of mourning this passing, and here’s hoping this film and his career will have a lengthy afterlife.

In the coming weeks I’ll discuss the sidebar programs, including the Views From the Avant-Garde program and an ultra-rare screening of Manoel de Oliveira’s The Satin Slipper (1985) , along with more selections from the main slate.

THE 2011 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 2

February 1, 2020February 1, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 4, 2011

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The 49th New York Film Festival is strutting into its first full week, rolling out red carpets and doling out free espresso to its star and art-struck audience. As posh as the whole experience is, this shouldn’t hide the adventurousness of the programming, which is rivaled in NYC only by Migrating Forms and the New York Asian Film Festival. I will try to capture the scope of the event with a bunch of short reviews (as opposed to my longer appreciation of DREILEBEN last week). Luckily, almost all have U.S. distribution, so they should eventually be available at a Netflix queue near you.

This is Not a Film (2011, directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb). Screens Oct. 13 at 6PM. Distributed by Palisades Tartan.

The film of the year is an unassuming thing, shot on an HD digital video camera (and an iPhone) in Jafar Panahi’s apartment. In December 2010 Panahi was arrested and charged with “harming national security and anti-Islamic Republic propaganda.” He is now under house arrest while appealing a 6 year prison sentence and 20 year ban on traveling or making films. This movie’s existence is a miracle, smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival in a cake, but perhaps more miraculous is its aesthetic rigor. What in the film looks like an afternoon was shot over four days, Mirtahmasb saying in the NY Times, “I refer to Godard, who said if you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction.”

It is an interpretation of Panahi’s daily life, as he putters about his apartment, bickering with a neighbor’s dog and his daughter’s invasive pet iguana. These amusing slices of life about the banalities of home imprisonment are pushed against by two major set-pieces, impeccably staged and performed. The first is Panahi acting out a scene from his new script, which the government will not allow him to make. He stops and starts, alternately inspired and despairing as he blocks the movements of his young female character, using masking tape to mark off a blueprint of the set. It is a tour-de-force of creative power and destruction, constructing a film in our heads and then letting it disappear. The closer has Panahi enter the elevator with the janitor’s relative, who is taking out the trash. This young man was in the apartment when Panahi was arrested, and tries to tell the story of that night. But he is continually interrupted by his job, ringing doorbells and corralling garbage. Panahi follows him all the way outside, but the young man never finishes his story, subsumed by his job (which Panahi is filming with his iPhone, breaking the law of his house arrest) and the sound of the fireworks outside, part of the Persian New Year festival which Iranian authorities have tried to outlaw for its Pagan origins. The sequence is a heady nexus of how work is art and art is culture and all of it is silenced.

***

Le Havre (2011, directed by Aki Kaurismaki). Screens Oct. 5 at 9PM. Distributed by Janus Films.

Bela Tarr: “[Le Havre] is deep, sad and full of jokes, but every joke is very painful. That’s what I like.” I like it too. The swift-moving sadness of aging and the succor of community are the two poles of the latest charming cinephile-bait from the Kaurismaki factory. Set in an anachronistic present of fedoras and analog cameras, Le Havre tracks the stooped steps of Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms) as he tries to nurse his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) back to health and help illegal African immigrant Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) get to London. Marcel is a shoe-shiner, staring downward at the parade of Converse sneakers that refuse his services. His age and his skills are now both cruel (but funny!) jokes. He and his neighborhood snap to life when they learn of Idrissa’s case, working off the sense memory of all the French Resistance movies they’ve seen (as well as Marcel Carne and Arletty’s Children of Paradise (1945) made during the Occupation). Their lined faces (and what faces!) spark to life as they get a chance to act the hero for once in this benighted cutesy town. What begins in the cold reaches of Jean-Pierre Melville-ville ends in pure Hollywood-land, a place for miracles.

***

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) Screens Oct. 8th at 5:30PM. Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

An epic ramble through the Turkish criminal justice system and the ethical brambles of a doctor and lawyer, Anatolia moves from macro to micro with elegance and astonishing formal control. Roughly speaking, the first half deals with physical illumination, the second with mental. It opens with a group of law enforcers: cops, the D.A., the coroner and their lackeys, driving suspected murderers around to find the corpse of their confessed victim. This takes all night and into the day, requiring a ballet of lights to illumine the plowed ground. The first shot is a slow zoom into a smudged window, indicating that there will be no clear sights of the truth. The captain (Yirmaz Erdogan, fuming and stamping “like a handful of bees”), continually reorients his truck’s search lights for the right angle, while a quick thunderstorm produces other revelations, not under investigation. As the doctor pees, lightning flashes, and an ancient statue stares at him, another, more permanent, judge of their actions. This play with light culminates in a stopover to a small village, in which the electricity goes out. The mukhtar, or village chief, has his daughter light lanterns and bring tea to the civil servants, and her face is the ultimate revelation. Each stares, agog, at what is clearly an angel come to Earth, another vision of the infinite during their trudge towards the irreducibly mortal. After the corpse is retrieved, everyone comes down to earth, engaging in uncomfortable bureaucratic wrangling and the reality of the lives they left behind.

***

You Are Not I (1981, directed by Sara Driver). Screens Oct. 6th at 9PM. No Distributor.

This maniacally creepy independent, an adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story, was thought lost after a leak in a New Jersey warehouse destroyed the negative. But wait! A print was found in Bowles’ holdings, and is now restored in its high-contrast grainy B&W glory (Jim Jarmusch was the DP and co-screenwriter). A nervous mental patient (Suzanne Fletcher) escapes her hospital, and wanders past a horrific car crash en route to her sister’s house. She desperately wants to eject her frazzled sibling and replace her, to create space for the patient to live alone in her own head. Driver sets a mood that is dreamlike and elliptical – the crash is a pile-up of abstracted forms on grass, and the corpses are lined up like dominoes. We are witnessing the world through the patient’s frazzled brain, so every image is unreliable. The closer is Erasherhead-hysteric, with trembling old ladies and the buzzing non-score by Phil Kline. It’s a authentically disorienting experience.

***

Twenty Cigarettes (2011, directed by James Benning). Screens on Oct. 9th at 9PM. No Distributor.

A minor but enjoyably playful video from the minimalist master James Benning. Last year’s festival brought his debut on digital, Ruhr, a massively beautiful meditation on duration. Twenty Cigarettes is more of a lark, a way for him to work and hang out with his friends at the same time, kind of an avant-garde Ocean’s 11. Benning shot portraits of twenty subjects smoking a cigarette. He cut only when they completed, at their own pace, with cigarettes as a timepiece. They are all positioned in front of flat backgrounds (except for filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, who is framed in front of sky), and the fun is in detecting personalities in the style of smoker. So you have the reluctant smokers, the speed demons, and the ones, usually older, who luxuriate in their cigs and extend the movie”s running time (it’s 99 minutes). It’s in conversation with Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, although Benning’s subjects are not performers, but fellow artists and friends. Warhol’s films have the sense of a happening, of a communing with wild spirits, where Benning’s film is just companionable, a sitting down and getting back in touch with friends you didn’t know you had. Which is not a bad way to spend a night at the movies.

THE 2011 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 1

February 1, 2020 robertemmetsweeney2 Comments

September 27, 2011

nyff 2011

The 49th New York Film Festival begins this Friday, September 30th, with a main slate of 27 features and an abundance of sidebar and retrospective screenings, including a massive survey of Nikkatsu Films. All of my favorite entries so far share an obsessively detailed sense of place, locations that subsume central characters and emerge as active agents of memory, myth and fate. Dreileben, a group of three features made for German television, is set near the Thuringian Forest, folkloric heart of German culture, and former home to Wagner, Schiller, Bach and Goethe. Ancient fables are invoked as templates for the tragic circlings of the unlucky few who come in contact with a man-made monster. The Turin Horse utilizes a perpetually wind-thwacked dust bowl as a bluntly metaphorical vision of the barren, anxious souls of its poverty-stricken leads, while Two Years at Sea follows the hermit and former merchant seaman, Jake Williams, as he goes his silent bearded way in the beatific and lonely Caingorm Mountains of Scotland.

Dreileben began as a series of e-mail exchanges between directors Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler, which were published in Revolver magazine in 2007. All three men are grouped under, or have pushed back against, the “Berlin School” of German cinema. Marco Abel wrote in Cineasteabout the genesis of this somewhat misleading description: ” The label, coined by German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland, originally referred to what is now known as the first generation of the Berlin School: [Angela] Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Thomas Arslan. All three attended and graduated in the early 1990s from the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb)…and were taught by avant-garde and documentary filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky.” The style is associated with cool, restrained dramas that analyze the minute psychological dramas of everyday life, and are generally ignored by local audiences. Hochhäusler was part of a second wave of directors, who studied at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, along with Benjamin Heisenberg (The Robber) and Maren Ade (Everyone Else). The turn to genre subjects (The Robber and Arslan’s In the Shadows), as Dennis Lim (NYFF programmer) notes in a Cinema Scope piece, could be “partly a reaction to the marginalization of the early films.”

Dominik Graf has criticized the Berlin School for their avoidance of emotion, as he told Abel in an interview in Senses of Cinema: “This is part of my debate with the Berlin School directors. I tell them that I have the feeling—not always!—that they are not doing anything in order to move away from their glass-like, distanced position towards the world and feelings.” Dreileben is the extraordinary result of this generational debate.The three films circle around one motivating event: the escape of convicted killer Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt) from a mental hospital. The first film, Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead, profiles a bitter affair of one of Molesch’s young potential victims. The second, Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, follows a police psychiatrist around anyway, who is on the case of pursuing Molesch, but also gets entangled in a decades old love triangle. The closer, Hochhäusler’s One Minute of Darkness, tracks the killer as he stumbles through the Thuringian woods, a gentle monster roused to violence by the fumblings of the humans around him.

Beats Being Dead is the zombie-like love story between Ana (Luna Mijovic), a working class Serbian immigrant, and Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a brilliant medical student screwing around for a summer, working at an empty hospital (which Molesch eventually visits). Petzold based the story on the German myth of Ondine, the water nymph who would lose her immortality if she bore a mortal man’s child. Ana and Johannes meet, in various states of undress, by the water. They gravitate to each other instantly, magnetically, their mutual seduction occurring during a series of hypnotic walks to and fro, down the tree-lined paths that separate them physically and economically. The spectre of money and class is never far from the surface in Petzold’s films (see his Postman Always Rings Twice adaptation, Jerichow), and here it is the key that wakes them both up from their trance. Ana, with mascara streaming down her face, has been felled from the euphoric heights of love and made human. Johannes, less than that.

Don’t Follow Me Around is Graf’s play for a communicative cinema, shot in soft, sun dappled 16mm, shifting from the hard-edged 35mm and HD of Petzold and Hochhäusler. In it, police psychologist Johanna (Jeanette Hain), travels to the forest to investigate Molesch’s disappearance, and stays with her old friend Vera (Susanne Wolff) and her husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic). During long nights of wine-fueled reminiscence, they discover they had both loved the same man before they met, sending them deeper into the past. The presiding myth here is of Emperor Barbarossa, mentioned by Johanna’s father before she leaves. He says that Emperor Frederick of Barbarossa, “and all his soldiers have been sleeping for 1,000 years in the mountains, waiting for Germany to finally become an empire again.” Johanna’s father says this as a historian’s idea of a joke before her departure, but what Graf’s story awakens is not an ancient leader but repressed memories. Johanna’s lost love emerges as a ghost by her side, an unwanted guest to eliminate with as much prejudice as Molesch, still roaming the countryside.

The trilogy comes to a brooding close with One Minute of Darkness, in which the forest emerges fully as a character – magical, threatening and aloof. Here Molesch is Barbarossa, stumbling into a tourist’s bedroom that contains maps of the Emperor’s caves and a book of “Wagner’s Thuringen” on the desk. He faces the myths, and he goes on to embody them. His gambol through the verdant wood has him hallucinate a masked creature and tend delicately to a young runaway, as sympathetically as Karloff’s Frankenstein. In Hochhäusler’s patient thriller, Molesch is cross-cut with lumpy inspector Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Kirchberg), the man who had imprisoned him the first time on circumstantial evidence. The jumps between Molesch and Kreil are between incantatory fantasy (the shape-shifting forest, a satanic inferno) and banal reality (a family BBQ). These two strands, woven throughout the whole series, come thudding tragically together as Ondine comes undone, the immortal brought down to the cold earth.

***

The Turin Horse and Two Years at Sea are two disparate versions of the solitary life. In the first, the outside world is a face-wrinkling terror that is best seen through a window, the dividing line between a father and daughter and encroaching obsolescence. In the second, there is no difference between outside and inside, as winding branches and tall grass take over lounge chair and an RV is magically lifted in the arms of a tree. Bela Tarr claims that The Turin Horse is his last film, and it acts as a summation of his work. It begins with the story of Nietzsche’s last sane days, written by frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai. Nietzsche sees a horse being beaten by its owner. He rushes to stop the abuse, weeping. He would spend the rest of his days as an invalid. The narrator goes on, “of the horse, we know nothing.” Thus begins the Old Testament penitence of the father and daughter. The silvery B&W cinematography by Fred Kelemen begins – a low angle of the bedraggled horse, with matted hair like a stray dog, pulling the carriage of Ohlsdorfer, the father (János Derzsi, whose craggy bearded visage has the perpetually stunned look of oncoming senility like Richard Bennett in The Magnificent Ambersons). Thus begins a murderous daily routine in gale force winds, with Ohlsdorfer returning home to his gouged-out shack, with walls that look like they’ve been gnawed on by muscular beavers. His already wizened daughter (Erika Bók) undresses him, cooks him his nightly scorched potato, and shuffles off to bed.

This is their entire life, both of them perpetual work machines chipping away at their life expectancy one day at a time. Tarr sets up the visual dichotomy early on, of inside/out. The camera, and the characters are constantly peering outside its frame, denoting an absolute otherness to the nastiness outside. The daughter sees their first guest, a nihilist philosopher-drunk over to buy some palinka (a Hungarian fruit brandy), depart through the precious window. His thunderous presence dissipates to a shadow seen through glass, his sub-Nietzchean pronouncements (twisting Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” and death of God pronouncements into a world of eternal subjugation – similar to how the Nazis perverted his work) already forgotten. Ohlsdorfer had already called “rubbish” on him anyway. Their only purpose, their only thoughts, are geared towards work. And once the horse stages a quiet rebellion, refusing to eat or move, their lives of sullen, productive enervation now become entropic and drawn to dissolution. Eventually they go through the looking-glass, and become the travelers on the other side of the window, searching for an escape. Presumably finding only worse deprivations on the other side of the hill, they return, irrevocably changed. The camera, for the first time, shows the outside of the cabin, and the daughter looking out, trapped.

Jake Williams, the subject of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea (in the Views from the Avant-Garde) program, is totally, frighteningly free. Living alone in the Scottish mountains, he is shown cleaning, reading, chopping wood and sleeping – without saying more than a few words. His living quarters have become intertwined with the nature around him, birds and plants and insects have as much a foothold on his property as he does. Shot in anamorphic B&W (although projected on compressed video, sadly), the film is immersive and cordial. It’s clear that Jake wouldn’t mind if you napped along with him, lulled along by his blissed out existence. The pacing gets so gently buzzed it’s no surprise when his mini-RV gets raised heavenward by unseen hands (or winches). The film consists of staged re-enactments of Jake’s daily life, with hints of his past appearing in photos lying on a desk. Stills of children, a woman, an old man shoveling snow, these are the narratives and mysteries that clang around in Jake’s head that we don’t have access to. We project stories onto his invitingly open face, or at least I did, of a wife who couldn’t hack the back-to-nature bit and hustled her kids back to civilization. Or maybe the photos were simply (likely) planted by Rivers to enact such fevered speculation. Whatever the reason, it is a film that encourages such idle thoughts and wild guesses. Filled with flickering light and the squiggles of processing stains, Rivers is playing with the form as well as narrative expectations, mirroring the play of light on leaf with light through film. This comes to the fore in the astounding final shot, a long take of Williams’ face as he nods off in front of the fire, his eyelids and the flames both fluttering, closing to another day and to my prying eyes.