Sunshine Cleaning (Jeffs)

For all its claims to being a realistic look at life for a working class single mum in small town America, Sunshine Cleaning is a fantastical, revoltingly glossy film that looks down on its characters and their predicaments. When Rose decides that her son's route to happiness and success is dependent on him going to private school, she enlists the help of her slacker sister Norah and together they decide to set up a crime scene clean up company to raise funds. The narrative briskly sidesteps the problems a woman such as Rose might encounter in setting up a business, racing on to plenty of jovial icky moments about how awful it is to clean up the blood of a recent suicide. There's also time for philosophical reflection that work in this industry leads one to consider: "it feels wrong that we're throwing everything away - it's like we're erasing her".

Whenever the sisters walk into a house that appears to need an arduous and tiring clean the filmmakers quickly utilise the Sundance aesthetic of bright lights, snappy edits, and indie soundtracking to montage their way out of darker territory. There's a similarly clinical feel in the continual striving to balance moments of humour with a sadder, more wistful tone that quickly saps all energy from the narrative. The characterisation is paper-thin and dreadfully tiresome, with the requisite fuckups and breakdowns appearing at exactly the moment you'd expect. This facile and inane drama is aimed squarely at the middle classes, purporting to reveal what life is like for those on the bottom, but ensuring that they be beautiful, upwardly mobile people for whom success and happiness is easily achievable if only one can believe in the American dream.

Interview With Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa was in London earlier this month to coincide with a period of increasing interest in his work. His debut feature Blood (1989) was recently released by Second Run on DVD and a complete retrospective of his films was held over two weekends at Tate Modern. Such a retrospective is the ideal setting for these beautiful and challenging films, particularly as a means to track the stylistic developments and common threads that run throughout his career.

Blood is Costa's most classical film, a noirish tale shot in rich chiaroscuro that channels the spirit of many of the director's influences, from Murnau to Tourneur to Bresson, and introduces the interest in families and place that pervades each of his films. Costa's focus has since turned towards the poor immigrants from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde and the Fontainhas slum on the outskirts of Lisbon where many of these people were subsequently relocated to.

After Down to Earth (1994) and Bones (1997) Costa moved away from using a full film crew and went to stay with some of the people living in Fontainhas for long stretches of time, filming hundreds of hours of footage over many months as they played semi-fictionalised versions of themselves. This led to In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006), two masterpieces that magically and devastatingly transform truth and fiction into new realms, creating a blisteringly direct portrait of a community whose inhabitants still retain their mystery.

Costa has also made two documentaries. Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001) observes Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet during the editing process of their film Sicilia! and his most recent film is Ne Change Rien (2009), which follows the French actress and singer Jeanne Balibar as she rehearses, records an album, and performs her music live.

Do you enjoy attending retrospectives and talking about your films?

Yes, because when you talk about something you learn a lot and find yourself saying things you'd never thought about. I try not to be repetitive and instead go a little bit further and try and discover something new. In a situation like this retrospective at the Tate I'm relating and making connections between the films so that's nice for me too, and is one of the best parts of having the films shown together.

So it becomes part of the process to help you move on to the next film?

That's especially true in my case because my films are now like Chinese boxes. There's an obvious connection because I use the same people and shoot in the same place. Sometimes I discover there was something I'd never thought about at length, where just a word in a film can give you an idea. It's a little bit like how with Colossal Youth the French title is not that at all, it's Youth on the March. For me that's like a metaphor of the process, walking and thinking. Making films is also a way of walking. It's nice to have a programme that's not only for the audiences but also for me, even if I don't see the films themselves.

Do you ever go back and watch your own films?

I never watch them again. There's only one I'm more or less comfortable watching, and that's the film I made about Straub and Huillet. I can always learn from them.

Did you go to film school?

I was in film school when I was young but I hated it. I went there to learn about lenses, editing, how things work, but not theory or film history. I don't think film history is the crap we've been told. You read that Chaplin is old or that there is a chronology. With theory of course there are great people writing, but sometimes it's not the film critics, it can be a philosopher, sometimes it’s a musician, or maybe it's a poet that gives us the best text.

What were your interests growing up?

My first project was music. I was lucky when I was younger because there were a lot of things happening, the excitement of so many great bands with great lyrics. At the time the experience of listening to something by Wire and PiL was amazing. It was like seeing a Godard film. It was another world where you would get out of the movie theatre. It was a time when the person next door would probably do something amazing, but it wasn't a commercial competition. There was also a political revolution in Portugal at the same time, where the fascist dictatorship ended and the streets were full of anarchists, communists, and socialists, so from the ages of 13 to 22 I had everything, the music, the cinema, the politics, all at the same time. What this made me see was that John Ford was a hundred thousand times more progressive and communist than so called left wing documentaries saying things like “film is a gun”, and “change the world”. It was Ozu and Mizoguchi and Ford that were saying that really, you just had to be patient and see it well.

What was about these filmmakers that inspired you?

I'm very attached to a beautiful formula written by Serge Daney, one of the best French critics who I had two or three classes with in Lisbon. He said that with the movies that we like, it is the films that see us. Of course it is you that is watching the film, but the film sees you, it watches you grow up. The film tells you something, to live this way and talk that way. I knew I would like to live in the worlds that some filmmakers showed me, and I could also see immediately that certain films were not for me, because they weren't watching me. It's a very beautiful formula, maybe a bit vague or poetic, but you feel it immediately. Films by Straub and Godard knew what I was feeling. It's something you recognise, it's like a sect, a club. You feel like you belong to this club and not the other one. With my own films it's the same feeling. If it feels right it is like the images and the sounds are watching you and protecting you, showing you the way to do this or that. It's not the script, it's not your ideas. It's something more real and integrated and in time. It's more in life.

How did you come to make Ne Change Rien?

I thought this film was going to be very special and different from the others I've made, but in the end the ideas and the form are not really so unlike all the things I've been doing. It began as a friendship with Jeanne Balibar. We met seven or eight years ago at a film festival. We were always watching films together and discovered a common sensibility, and then one day she asked me to do a video for a song off her first album. The idea then came for me to be there while she was rehearsing. When I filmed her in concert I didn't want to do a film like Shine a Light with the camera turning upside down, and I wasn't interested in doing a 'making of' that you have on DVDs with guys in the studio telling jokes and drinking beer.

How did your approach for this film compare to the documentary you made about Straub and Huillet?

When I was there with Jeanne and the musicians I had the same approach as with the other film, discreetly moving around with very small equipment, being really close without disturbing them and trying to keep an eye on what's happening in the microsecond. It's so small that the moment where you cut is the time when something happens. It's so small that you miss it. For both films it was the same fascination because I was watching people I like. What I'm doing is turning these guys into monuments. It's almost like doing a fiction film because you want them to come out so good, like actors, where you can cut off all the bad parts and the things they don't do so well. I want Straub and Balibar to be bigger than life, bigger than themselves and bigger than the image you have of them. The structure I made is very fictional because they have to come out like heroes, like the great people I always thought they are, and there was no disappointment.

What was the shooting process like for In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, the two films you've made without a film crew?

The shooting takes a very long time, and this changes everything for me. For Colossal Youth we shot every day for two years except on Sundays. I felt for the first time in my life like I was working. I made my first films in five or six weeks and it was a luxury environment I was uncomfortable with. I thought I was too slow to make a film in this time. I always had the feeling that in the last week of shooting I would begin to start discovering the film, realising that we had done everything wrong, so I would have to be asking the producer to give me two or three more days. Of course it's not that I'm really a slow filmmaker, but that I just don't want the shooting to end. I want the complication of life to be a part of the film, to make the film. When we started filming Colossal Youth Vanda told me she was pregnant, and a year later her child ended up appearing in the last shot of the film. Of course you can't script this or suggest such an idea to a producer!

How did you persuade the inhabitants of Fontainhas to let you stay with them and film them for so long?

I had to show them that the film could be possible in another way, without a film crew and the trucks and the money, that it could be possible for me alone with a camera. They had to see how difficult it was for me. They had to see that I came at 9am when they opened the coffee shop and the barber shop and that at 7pm I would close the door. I had to show them it was a common street. That was decisive.

Did you feel conflicted about making In Vanda’s Room when there are so many drugs around?

Vanda has been into drugs since she was 15 and it's something you can't avoid. It's daily life. She smokes heroin and cocaine like I smoke cigarettes, so if you're with her for an hour you have to see it. For me as a filmmaker, there was a moment where there was an ethical problem that I dealt with silently and alone, asking how it could be done. It's not that I want to show the drugs, but I cannot avoid it, and so In Vanda's Room tries to be something else in terms of production and organisation. I am trying to do something more human though. It was not going to be a film about drugs. It was about the place, about the room, about a kind of family and a world seen through my eyes. It's not the real Fontainhas or the real Vanda, but it's my eyes seeing her and her watching me. A lot of people dislike In Vanda's Room because they don't feel I have the right to film those people that way. I've been accused that the film is too beautiful and criticised because we don't explain how they get the money to buy drugs, but that's simply because money doesn't have a value there. They don't have money and so they have to find it, and normally they find the money and then they spend it immediately on drugs. It goes up in the air.

In most films that show junkies the camera will start turning as soon as they start smoking and we go into this daze and the characters get stupid. For me this was not the case. They were always thinking about serious things. I did not think and plan all this. I just said let it be, knowing that drugs will be there for Vanda and for a lot of people, but taking care that we were not going to make films like anyone else and that these people will think and talk like other people. A lot of documentary filmmakers think you have to make an ugly film, that ethically I have no right to turn them into heroes, but that's what I wanted. The lesson I learnt from Chaplin and Ford is that people have to walk out better than they walk in. Ventura has to be bigger than John Wayne.

How do you determine the right distance to keep when you're filming?

I don't believe a camera can solve or discover the mystery of anybody. It's very fake, so I don't pretend I'm close. The distance I keep is just a focal thing, it's not meant to say I know this person and I want you to feel how he's feeling. In the case of Ventura the distance is something I cannot avoid. I could never say I understand him or I know what he felt. I'm not black like Ventura or from the same social class. I was not born on Cape Verde and I've never been 20 years into taking Cocaine, and they tend to tell me that every second. He said to me at the end of shooting very simply, “don't ever think you can know me because you have a camera”. I think that's one of the best principles and lessons you can learn to make film, to think about the distance that will be created between you and what you want to film, and perhaps accepting that it’s very wide between me and him, a deep and long everlasting ocean of mystery that neither of us will cross. But of course that doesn't mean that he's not interested in the work. It doesn't mean that we're not friends.

Do you plan to work with these people again?

It's their expectation. When a film is almost over we're ready for the next one. It's about them demanding something, and I've no reason to go away. I think my next film with them will be about young kids, a younger generation. In the last shot of Colossal Youth Ventura is lying on a bed more or less moaning something and Vanda's newly born daughter is beside him making some sounds, and I thought that this is probably a good dialogue. I take it as a sign that Ventura finally rests and this new face appears and has this strange coded language that we don't understand.

Can you speak about the films you chose to accompany the retrospective at the Tate?

If I do this kind of thing it's about giving the viewer tools that are really proposals saying 'you can do a film this way'. In the case of Jean-Pierre Gorin's Routine Pleasures it's a shoestring budget, two guys and that's it. With the Jean Eustache film The Pig you see the most amazing way of watching a very ancient ritual of killing a pig, and you see it's really about the people, not about the animal. I chose Straub for more practical reasons, because Sicilia! is the film that I documented the editing of in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Straub and Huillet are the filmmakers that give you the feeling that films are meant to be worth something. The Warhol film I show is called Beauty, a film I saw recently and it's just like In Vanda's Room, the difference being that he made it without thinking for one second whereas I took two years of pain and blood.

Notes on Zabriskie Point

Beauty

Zabriskie Point is a film of astonishing beauty. Antonioni has the ability to place a series of landscapes, objects, or (most importantly) faces in a majestic arrangement of patterns that send me into an oneiric trance. The success of his films depend on this, because it’s essential that the dreamy turns his narratives take (orgies in the desert, exploding houses, magically appearing men with magically appearing cans of paint) appear natural to the development of the film, so that these ruptures aren’t an abandonment of narrative logic but work as a development of Antonioni’s unique mode of storytelling. Narrative is not left behind in his films; it just heads to unexpected places. One becomes wowed by the beauty the frame contains, and astonished by the way Antonioni frames it, so that the car, the mountains, hair, fire, a TV set, and on and on, all become interchangeable. A landscape is a face, a face is an object, an object is a landscape.

Acting

Are Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin bad actors? It depends on your definition of the word bad. There’s no doubt that the way they move through the landscape feels unreal, that their voices are stilted and that most traces of charisma have been scooped out of them. But if we see them less as actors and more as models, their casting makes perfect sense. Mark and Daria are important because of what they represent, not because of what they are. It is essential that they behave as vacantly as the faces adorning the endless billboards in the city and as blank as the parched landscape of Death Valley.

Escape

Zabriskie Point is deeply concerned with the futile desire to escape. Wherever these bodies move, Antonioni ensures that they are always folded into a landscape or set off against it. In the city their bodies are framed in tight close up, the camera whizzing past people as they mesh together in a haze, whilst their voices swell to one long, unrelenting rumble. The city is jammed full of adverts, on billboards and TV and radio, rendering all bodies lost in a sea of information. The move to the desert leads the camera further away and higher up, turning them into insects as they yet again disappear into their surroundings.

Suspense

The famous scene from North By Northwest in which Cary Grant is attacked by a mysterious jet in a vast expanse of Indiana countryside finds its modernist echo in Zabriskie Point. The suspense is drained. Animated peril transforms into a vacant smile.

Utopia

Is the desert a utopia? This article published in Senses of Cinema suggests so, and tends to reduce the film into a series of binary oppositions in which the city/cops = bad and desert/students = good. This sort of attitude not only dampens the power of this film but short changes the complexities within. For sure the film falls cleanly on the side of the students, but Mark’s boyish adventure into the desert is hardly a revolutionary act. Daria prefers to listen to rock music than be politically active, and her final act of defiance is shrouded in fantasy. There are policemen in the desert and students in the city, and while the orgy takes place there is a reality that exists a few miles away.

Endings

Reaching out towards a pure cinema:

The Ontology of the Photographic Image

The cinema is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were. Those categories of resemblance which determine the species photographic image likewise, then, determine the character of its aesthetic as distinct from that of painting.

from What is Cinema by Andre Bazin

All Over Me (Sichel)

All Over Me was screened at the ICA this month as the final film in the inaugural Pout Film Festival, timed to coincide with Pride London and aspiring to showcase the best of queer cinema. Originally released back in 1997, it’s the first and (as far as I can tell) only film directed by Alex Sichel, which seems a real shame considering this coming of age tale possesses an earnestness and intelligence that’s sorely lacking in a lot of recent American Indie filmmaking. Portrayals of sexually confused adolescents are highly prone to verge on the side of caricature and cliché, so it's refreshing to witness such assured characterisation, mainly thanks to a witty, sensitive script and a superb central performance from Alison Rolland. Rolland acts out scenes with a wonderful complexity that nails the swelling of emotion teenagers feel as they explore their sexual feelings.

Rolland plays Claude, a teenager living in New York who divides her time between working in the local pizza shop and hanging out with her best friend Ellen. They spend their evenings listening to the riot grrrl records that soundtrack Claude’s life as she tries to get together a group of her own. The arrival of two men send the friends down different paths. Ellen becomes involved with a cruel, possessive boyfriend while Claude's new next door neighbour is a gay guy who sparks an assertion of her queer identity. Ellen’s life falls apart as she takes ever increasing amounts of drugs and becomes witness to a too-predictable crime that occurs after the two men meet. Claude wants to save her friend, but is beginning to strike up a relationship of her own.

The film’s low budget works to its advantage for the most part, with a small cast, minimal locations, and basic camerawork ensuring the main focus is on a realistic portrayal of Claude and Ellen’s psychology. Unfortunately it hinders when the film intermittently resembles a half hearted pot-boiler that stretches both narrative credibility and the acting ability of some of the supporting cast.

The most refreshing aspect of All Over Me is that it refuses to allow its characters to be reducible to categories. There are no cool people and no nerds here. The result is that Ellen and Claude are opened out, able to live and breathe as they try to find their way in the world.

Wonderful Town (Assarat)

Wonderful Town tells a well worn tale of a love affair that's pulled apart by a jealous relative. Set in Takua Pa, a Thai town that was devastated after the 2004 tsunami, the relentlessly slow manner in which the romance blossoms is painful to behold, lacking the passion, intensity, and transcendence a film this sparse demands.

The two leads are defined by their occupations. Ton is an architect who is sent to the town to oversee the construction of a new building. A constant traveller, he has a freedom that is distinct from Na, who lives in and runs her family's mostly empty hotel, leading a lonely and insular existence. Her brother is a washed up ex-gangster who seemingly has nobody left to terrorise in Takua Pa's empty streets.

Thin on dialogue and glacially paced, the film struggles in vain to accrue power through weakly developed symbolism (waves, roads, empty houses) that never feels appropriately connected to the narrative, existing merely as a way to fill the void that lies at its heart. The violent twist in tone in the final minutes is similarly incoherent and evidently a means to provide a jazzy finish to the uninspired hum that precedes it.

A Day At DC's

Here's a link to a post that I assembled for Dennis Cooper's blog, in which I assembled a selection of some of my favorite short films. He's a writer who's not only published some of the greatest American fiction I've ever read, but created a blog that's one of the most exciting and rewarding places to hang out on the net.