two quotes and a poem

Gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again. - Judith Butler


An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. the more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought. New ideas come from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings, from those who live in retreat and are not plunged into the sound and fury of repetitive discussion. All the money that is scandalously wasted nowadays on colloquia should be spent on building retreat houses, with vows of reserve and silence. - Michel Serres

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Tear it Down by Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

the heart knows.  By redefining the morning,

we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

We can break through marriage into marriage.

By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

But going back to childhood will not help.

The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls

of the garbage tub is more than the stir

of them in the muck of the garbage.  Love is not

enough.  We die and are put into the earth forever.

We should insist while there is still time.  We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already 

in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Rotterdam Film Festival: Day Five

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Today I saw two highlights of the festival, one documentary and one fiction, both about institutional ideology, lessons taught and learnt, the power of rhetoric, and the way in which this plays out on a micro and macro level.

Fiction first: Police, Adjective is a sustained examination of the minutiae of a police procedural concerning three pot-smoking schoolchildren and the cop, Cristi, who has been assigned to investigate. Appalled at the attention he’s expending on a low level crime that could see one of the kids jailed for years, his repetitive movements from school to police station to family home (each equally banal, spending long stretches ‘investigating’, writing reports, or eating) highlight the absurdity of living a life mired in petty bureaucracy, enforcing an outdated law he expects will soon to
disappear.

This dryly humorous, biting satire of the Romanian legal system is a bildungsroman tracking Cristi’s indoctrination into the autocratic language of the law and the home. Childlike, he receives lessons about grammar, symbols and images from his partner after questioning the meaning of lyrics in a pop song, forced into accepting the song’s cliched metaphors about love. The private then shifts to the public in the penultimate scene, where Cristi meets with ‘the boss’ he’s expended so much effort avoiding, forced to have his definition of ‘conscience’ written on a blackboard and compared to that in the dictionary. Given an ultimatum of either quitting the police department or following the law (an aleatory language where seven years means three-and-a-half and ’squealing’ must be referred to as ‘denouncing’), the final shot shows him detailing on a blackboard the sting operation he’d attempted to refuse, his own morality subsumed into an inflexible code, his schooling complete.

Russian Lessons is the sort of major documentary that would have been snapped up by the BBC in times gone by, but the broadcaster is now the subject of the film’s ire in this sustained attack on Russia’s involvement in the 2008 war against Georgia, as well as the misinformation spread in the media about its origins and consequences. Filmmaker’s Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya enter South Ossetia from separate sides, documenting the devastation caused, recording testimonies, and tearing into the lies propagated by Putin’s government and their subsequent acceptance by the West.

They detail a catalogue of falsities, from skeptical claims of “up to 2000 dead” to the blame being directed towards Georgia for bombs dropped by Russian forces. A contextual section is spent documentating Russian war crimes committed in Abkhazia in 1992 and this history’s erasure, before a final call states the necessity for a move from cynicism to conscientiousness. The filmmakers’ journey towards each other and the manner in which their investigations combine is a striking metaphor for the movement from ignorance into the awareness that the film inspires and demands. This only gives extra heft to an urgent film that demands to be released far and wide.

Rotterdam Film Festival: Day Four

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Since I'm used to watching an optimum of one film a day, rattling
through four in 10 hours is beginning to be a little enervating.
Although there's a certain charm in being forced to make snappy
dogmatic judgments before a film's pleasures or otherwise are swiftly
erased to make way for another, it sure would be nice to let something
settle for a few hours.  All this mental headache has been compounded
by the incessant rain and snow that's neatly coincided with a big gash
appearing in the sole of my right shoe, which is turning what would be
a quick trip between theatres into a drawn out muggy nightmare.  But
so it goes, and on to the movies!

'Independencia': The producer of Raya Martin's film spoke before its
screening in the 'After Victories' strand of the festival about how
the absence of a substantial Philippine film archive provided the
impetus for reimagining a lost history, to create a picture that
fantasizes how a 1940s melodrama might have appeared. The result is a fable set during the American occupation of the Philippines shot in
lush black and white, with plainly fake backdrops, theatrical emoting
by the actors, and even an insertion of a fake newsreel that abruptly
splinters the narrative, which follows three generations of a family
as they hide out in a forest hut. Soundtracked by an insistent
melancholic score, the bulk of the screen time is devoted to observing
the flora and fauna of the beautiful landscape the set designers have
created, yet this pictorial obsession with artifice smothers the
political urgency the title promises, save for the tragic final shot
of a young boy who at least makes some small step towards
independence.

'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans': Nicolas Cage provides a
towering performance in 'Bad Lieutenant', playing a ludicrously
depraved, drug addicted police officer who transforms a run of the
mill detective case from shit into gold, erupting in bodily tics and
verbal mania as he shuffles through the streets of New Orleans with a
chronic back problem.  The joys of this wilfully perverse film are
generated from the perpetual displacement of meaning through reversals of signification, top and tailing the signifiers of the crime genre to render everything askew.  This is a sequel to Abel Ferrara's original
that Werner Herzog claims not to have seen and a film set in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that could pretty much have been
located anywhere.  Cage's cop continues to rise through the ranks as
his activities become increasingly nefarious, joining forces with the
people he's supposed to prosecute, busting the public so he can score
a fix of heroin, threatening to cut off oxygen to an innocent old
lady, investing every scene with wild, hypnotic rhythms.  Shot through
with successive jolts of kinetic energy, this film thrillingly nails
the experiential alienation of moving through an alien world.

'The Ape': This burst of sharp materialism from Jesper Ganslandt has
little aspiration and suffers from a severe paucity of ideas.  The
handheld camera remains fastened to the protagonist's face throughout
every scene as he wakes up extremely agitated and covered in blood,
but nonetheless tries to get on with an ordinary day, even though it's
palpable that something incredibly bad has happened.  Taking a cue
from Mike Leigh's methods of filmmaking, lead actor Olle Sarri was
unaware of how the plot would develop day to day, placing him in the
same state of confusion as the audience.  There's no doubt it provides
his performance with some vitality, but the procession of events are
so dramatically thin and Ganslandt's obsession with the slow reveal so
one-note that this comes off as a distinctly sub Dardennesian bore,
morally and psychologically inert.

Rotterdam Film Festival: Day Three

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'Ruhr': James Benning's new film consists of 7 fixed shots set in the
Ruhr district, West Germany. Ranging in length from a few minutes to
an hour, 'Ruhr' is his first to be shot digitally, allowing for a
temporal freedom wherein events can be freely manipulated and
condensed, no longer subject to naturally unfolding time. This is
most striking in the immense final shot (90 minutes of footage edited
down to 60) of a coke-processing tower in Schwelgern, the sun setting
unnaturally fast as five times over it erupts, sending billowing steam
swirling in the atmosphere. The first six shots are similarly
concerned with process. Narrative builds through repetitions of
movement within landscapes, revealing the automatism of a steel plant,
of cars passing through a tunnel, of men praying. The fascination of
Benning's film resides in the act of looking deeply, attempting to
resolve the feelings of aesthetic beauty and machinic horror each
image generates.

'Oxhide II': This was a real discovery, both a demonstration of how to
make a rigorously structured film that blossoms with feeling, as well
as offering a crash course in how to make dumplings. The simple set
up - 9 stationary long takes around a table, moving 45 degrees
clockwise between each scene to complete a circle come film's end - is
transformed into a humorous, quietly virtuosic family drama. Liu
Jia-yin's second feature is set up as a quasi-documentary, with the
filmmaker and her parents playing themselves (though working from a
script) as they cook a meal in real time, talking about food, the
family business, and life. The camera is often positioned directly
level with the table edge so that legs and heads are obscured, yet the
stylistic rigidity isn't arbitrary tricksiness, as the camera is
always carefully positioned to follow the family's movements around
and beneath the table. 'Oxhide II' magically transforms the simplest
of objects into a majestic stage, so that the everyday act of cookery
is all that's required to yield a grand narrative.

'Land of Madness': Luc Moullet uncovers a 'pentagon of madness' as he
travels round the Southern Alps and listens to tales of madness,
murder, and severe cabin fever in rural France. He's a wonderfully
surreal, cordial host who initiates his journey by relating an
incident of psychosis in his own family history, before moving on to a
succession of bizarre tales of how solitude leads to acts of
outrageous carnage. His freewheeling, idiosyncratic mode of filming
bears resemblance to Agnes Varda's recent documentaries, both loose
members of the French New Wave who use a primitive aesthetic to create an intimacy between themselves and the material. Moullet is a
wandering man who, faced with the sheer horror and absurdity of life,
can do nothing but laugh.

Rotterdam Film Festival: Day Two

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For the first screening of the day I headed to The Venster cinema for
the premiere of Separations, a documentary recounting the history of
filmmaker Andrea Silva's family through interviews, photographs, and
home videos.  The source of Silva's interest lies in the rootlessness
of her family history, her mother fleeing Nazi Germany with her
parents at the age of three and subsequently raising five children in
Sao Paolo, three of whom now live in Europe (including Andrea).
Bringing her siblings back to Brazil to their parent's home, they
touch on the issues of identity and displacement that have recurred
through each generation.  Andrea's mother was previously a
psychiatrist (who herself suffered an episode of psychosis five years
ago) and she's plainly the most fascinating family member of the
group, threatening to assert control over her daughter, most notably
in a sublime moment where she demands Andrea come from behind the
camera and allow herself to be filmed as they talk.  'Separations' is
an intensely personal home movie that's clearly been made as an
attempt to resolve the private family traumas that departures entail,
yet it also offers the viewer ample space to reflect on the wider
political and social histories that their story represents.

Later on I saw John Gianvito's 'Vapor Trail (Clark)', an encyclopaedic
history of Clark Air Base, a former U.S. military base in the
Philippines that turned large areas of Luzon into an ecological
disaster area.  Gianvito interviews numerous civilians who were moved
to Clark after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, relatives of
the dead and the living victims of the disease and toxic contamination
that the base wrought.  Long stretches are spent following Myrna and
Boojie, two members of the People's Task Force, a campaign group set
up to force the U.S. government to recognise their responsibilities in
the clean up of the bases, as well as to force the Philippine
government to properly represent their people.  Gianvito uncovers the
mass ignorance of the Filipino-American War in the people he
interviews, which presumably led him to include the narration, quotes
and photographs interspersed throughout that relate the war's history.
 By juxtaposing past and present, 'Vapor Trail (Clark)' decisively
demonstrates how American imperialism in the 19th century has direct
links to the tragedies now unfolding, both causing a long trail of
death and destruction, with history disappearing into air.  This is a
fearless masterpiece that howls to the viewer.  Neglecting blunt
rhetoric, it's power erupts from the restrained passion of the
campaigners, from the devastating testimonies, from the endless shots
of children's gravestones, from the whispering of the wind.

Rotterdam Film Festival: Day One

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After spending only a few hours in Rotterdam it’s evident that the city is a near perfect venue to host such a large festival. It’s compact enough to crisscross between screenings quickly on foot, and although the city is lively, there isn’t an abundance of other cultural distractions to tempt you away from the cinema. Of course it’s also held in late January, when it’s so cold that there’s nowhere else that you’d rather be than in a movie theatre all day long.

The Korean drama Paju was the opening film of the festival and it sold out long ago, though I was lucky enough to score entry to the ’sneak preview’ shown simultaneously at the Pathé cinema. After spending a couple of worrisome hours making my way through the 400-page catalogue, making futile attempts to keep the longlist of films I want to see within some realm of possibility, it was good to have the burden of choice removed, if only for one evening.
The film shown was Eighteen (which I hadn’t planned to see), winner of the Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema at Vancouver last year. Unfortunately this coming-of-age drama about young love in Seoul is troublingly rote in the narrative line it draws from Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong’s breakup through to an eventual reunion.
First time director Jang Kun-Jae has a fussy style that dilutes any power the actors formulate, flitting from sedate tracking shots to camera phone footage with little justification. Representational of Tae-Hoon’s impulsive and erratic energy, there’s use of voiceover, flashback, slo-mo, and fade-to-black, yet this only yields fatigue, the image unfastened, baggy, and a deviation from the leaden narrative that’s unfolding beneath.

What’s disappointing is that Jang Kun-Jae often has a great eye for small details – the speed Tae-Hoon eats fast food, the frequent spitting, the way he looks at Mi-Jeong’s photos on her dresser – that give more away about his characters than the overarching concerns of maturation and parent-child divisions. Framing a year of adolescence so schematically does a disservice to the emotions Eighteen attempts to illuminate.

On Day 1 proper I plan to see Tiger Awards nominee Alamar and the premiere of the new John Gianvito documentary, so check back for more updates.

Preview: Rotterdam Film Festival

hyperlinks:

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On Wednesday I head to the Netherlands for the 39th International

Rotterdam Film Festival, where there’s a typically huge and varied

line-up of movies on offer.  Here’s a brief glimpse at the separate

strands that make up this year’s Festival:

VPRO Tiger Awards Competition

The competition consists of a selection of 15 films by first or second

time directors, each vying for 3 top prizes of equal value.  Potential

highlights include the biopic of a Japanese manga artist ('Miyoko')

and Ben Russell’s formalist study of two Saramaccan brothers

journeying up the Suriname River ('Let Each One Go Where He May').

Bright Future

This is the platform for newer filmmakers who aren’t selected in the

main competition.  There are countless films to go at here, some well

known ('Police, Adjective', 'The Ape', 'Adrift') and others receiving

their first screening in Rotterdam.

Spectrum

Spectrum shows work from more experienced filmmakers, and I’m beyond

excited at the prospect of seeing new films by Luc Moullet, Pedro

Costa, James Benning and Tsai Ming-Liang.  There are also movies I

didn’t get the chance to see at the London Film Festival last year

such as Claire Denis’ 'White Material' and Bruno Dumont’s 'Hadewijch'

that I’m hoping I can find the time for.

Signals

The rest of the line up for the festival (aside from 200 short films

which I haven’t even glanced at yet) consists of a series of sidebars

each organised around a theme, showing films old and new.  There’s a

focus on war films that includes Samuel Maoz’s 'Lebanon' and Lu

Chuan’s 'City of Life and Death', although my eye is firmly set on the

world premiere of John Gianvito’s 'Vapor Trail (Clark)', a four and a

half hour epic that investigates the ecological disaster caused by a

US military base in the Philippines.  If this is anything like his

previous two features it promises to be one of the real highlights of

the festival.  In the other areas of the Signals strand there’s a huge

spotlight on African cinema, Sai Yoichi and Kiju Yoshida

retrospectives, and various screenings associated with the Pompeu

Fabra documentary movement.

I’m hoping I have the courage to forego some of the more familiar

names that will most likely find their way into the UK soon enough in

order to shine light on those less familiar.  I’ll report back as the

week progresses to share what I find.

Bigger Than Life

 *

Wallace Stevens: Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of it-
self;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of
 night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as
  stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass. 

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Architecture: Trylon and Perisphere

from Wikipedia:

 

The Trylon and Perisphere were two modernistic structures, together known as the "Theme Center", at the center of the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940. Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world's longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called "Democracity" which, in keeping with the fair's theme "The World of Tomorrow", depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere. 

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I'm rapt by the vision of Trylon and Perisphere.  The impulses of Man -

• Trylon: extending upward, closer to God, higher and higher, a vision of reaching the stars, or maybe becoming a God, centering everything that surrounds.  Trylon is endless, a structure that can never be completed, ceaseless striving and motion. 

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Timeline Of The World's Tallest Freestanding Structures 1939 -

Empire State Building / New York / 448 Metres / 1931-1967

Ostankino Tower / Moscow / 540 Metres / 1967-1976

CN Tower / Toronto / 553 Metres / 1976 - 2007

Burj Khalifa / Dubai / 828 Metres / 2007 -

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• Perisphere: to contain the world, sealed, a symbol of a space for living that Trylon creates.

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100 Greatest Homes In The World

Bill Gates House

15 Most Bizarre, Exotic and Amazing Houses

The Upside-Down House, Poland 

 

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• The elevator: connecting two worlds, building horizontally and living in the sky.

• The aftermath: the future held in check by the necessities of the present - Both buildings were subsequently razed and scrapped after the closing of the fair, their materials to be used in World War II armaments.
  

• The future: the fear that as Trylon becomes more powerful it will one day puncture Perisphere,

or collapse.

Film: Russian Ark (Sokurov)

What's immediately striking about Russian Ark is the formal audacity of this much heralded movie, a tour-de-force 100 minute sequence shot in which the viewer is sent on a journey through the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, encountering figures from Russian history as well as being offered a tourists view of the art and artefacts the museum holds.  The eye that the viewer sees through is that of a dead soul (perhaps), who's guided round the museum by another drifter, a wonderfully sarcastic French diplomat known as the Marquis.  Russian Ark feels more like a work of dance or architecture than cinema - dance thanks to the mind-bending choreography of the camera that gracefully and ceaselessly works its way through the cast of thousands; architecture because by the finale the Hermitage feels completely mapped as a system.

I was initially hesitant to embrace this movie, seeing it as little more than an exercise in pure style, kind of like the flipside to a movie like Avatar - where the style is fantastical and marvellous and addictive, but little more than beautiful ornate packaging for an empty box.  Yet the more I think about it, the more this film fascinates me.  There's a wonderful Raymond Durgnat essay in his collection Films and Feelings in which he forcefully argues that it's impossible to separate form and content from each other and that they're essentially the same thing. It's an idea which has been highly instructive in my readings of films, and can be neatly woven into the fabric of Russian Ark.

The decision to shoot in one shot begins to feel like an act of necessity when you think of the Hermitage's functioning as an organism. In much the same way as The Shining's Overlook Hotel and Last Year In Marienbad's chateau, the camera's insistent glide over each and every surface makes the Hermitage feel alive.  The body of Russian Ark is one that welcomes and resists.  Utterly rooted in Russian history, it openly rewards the viewer's prior knowledge - if you know Russian history you're quite likely Russian, and the movie opens its arms out to you.  On the other hand, if your knowledge is weak and you're an outsider, the pleasure is resisted.  You see this resistance playing out when the diplomat turns to the camera and asks 'Was that Pushkin?' long after he's disappeared from screen.  The outsider receives the knowledge too late for it to be meaningful.

Sokurov wanted the narrative to be experienced "in a single breath", which is a great way to convey the heady rush and eventual suffocation you begin to feel as the shot unfolds.  When we follow Catherine the Great out into the snowy night it feels like a release, a blast of air that refreshing after the stuffy opulence.  The comfort and wonder of living inside this body gives way to frustration and a desire for liberation, so the longing for the camera to cut operates as a metaphor for the desire for release from the closed off nationalism that the Hermitage can represent for Russians, a repository for art(ifice) cut off from the rest of the world.  This idea is realised in the beautiful final moments when the viewer exits the Hermitage and looks out onto the sea - Russia, adrift.