Masters of Cinema

I have a short blog post up at the Little White Lies blog - you can read it here: http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/blog/masters-of-cinema/

Why the entry I wrote had to be edited so it begins "Forget Criterion" I have no idea...it's the sort of unwarranted putdown I have no interest in.

I'm happy enough to accept the rest of it as my own though.

Of Time And The City (Davies)

Liverpool's status as Capital of Culture may have gone to its head. The new Terence Davies film is being presented to the audience at the city's Philharmonic Hall as a World Premiere, never mind that it's already played at Cannes, Edinburgh, Toronto, and other film festivals the world over. Presumably the logic here is that if it hasn't been shown in Liverpool then it hasn't really been shown in the World, right? The film's editor Sol Popadopolous tells us before the film starts that "this is the screening that matters…Cannes was nice, but you're the ones we've made the film for. It's your reaction that counts". This statement seems like a cruel lie. It’s echoed in Terence's introduction where he states that he "made it with his heart", because if there's one thing the film seems to sorely lack it's a heart.

This is something that I thought would be unthinkable to say about a film by Terence Davies, a director whose mindblowing oeuvre is defined by its passion, its beauty, and its singularity. In The Terence Davies Trilogy, Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Davies uses film to mine his own past, open up his autobiography and interrogate the way memory affects his own recollections. They're experimental films, forgoing plot to develop with their own internal dream logic, progressing as if the camera is filming Davies own mind, drenched in song, dialogue from the past constantly invading the present, forming a mosaic that presents the truest representation of Experience I've seen on film. Davies shows us how we make sense of experience, he shows how it's constructed, how it develops over time, how the past continually haunts the present.

In a scene from The Long Day Closes, a camera looks directly down onto 12-year-old Bud, swinging on a pole back and forth like a metronome. He represents the slow ticking of time, his body swaying back and forth between childhood and adulthood. A Debbie Reynolds weepy starts playing, the camera begins tracking to the left, and various perfect match-cuts take us through his life, the cinema, the school, the church, the house, and back to where we began three minutes before, a perfect circle formed over the course of one song, in what's made to feel like one long shot. We see Bud's world, Terence Davies world, our world, contained in a song, in a shot.

It has been 16 years since The Long Day Closes was released, with only two literary adaptations made in the intervening period. The slow revelation of the director's autobiography over time is one of the reasons his body of work is profound and revered. Extra layers of memory, reflection, and different ways of approaching Davies’ past are developed film to film, and so the release of his first overtly autobiographical film since then is cause for great excitement.

In October 2006 Davies was interviewed by the Guardian and a return to filmmaking seemed unlikely, with two completed scripts but no green light. Funding was provided for Davies to make Of Time and The City, a film about Liverpool to mark its year as Capital of Culture, with a budget of only £250,000. Maybe it was too much to hope that this film would be another masterpiece, but what I couldn't have expected was that the film would undercut so many of the attributes that make his work special.

Davies’ new film is a documentary about Liverpool, his birthplace and his childhood home. Subtitled "a love song and a eulogy", the film is composed of archive footage bookended by about 10 minutes of new footage shot by the director of modern Liverpool. Davies provides a voiceover where he talks about the city and his childhood, describing the social change that’s taken place since he was younger. This is interspersed with quotes read out from various writers and poets such as T.S. Eliot and Friedrich Engels.

Given Davies' past utilisation of immaculate framing and beautiful colour palettes it comes as a shock to see him make modern Liverpool look so ugly. And no, it's not Liverpool itself that's ugly but the way he decided to shoot it. The opening and closing sequences look like a lazy promo shoot for the tourist board, garish colours and awkward framing that jars with Davies over-the-top, arrogant and ironic voiceover. Davies might be playing a joke to express his feelings about his first film in 8 years only being possible as a commission to give Liverpool a leg-up - OK, well I'll show you the city how you think it should be seen - but in the end it's the audience who have to suffer through this footage. It's a sign of what’s to come – Davies spends a large majority of the documentary treating various things with disdain. He wants to find ugliness and does, denouncing religion, the monarchy, what Liverpool has become, the youth of today(!), but offers little insight, rarely speaking intelligently or thoughtfully about the city and his feelings towards it.

The film is a visual essay in the mould of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, all concerned with place and how we deal with histories both private and public, although Of Time and The City contains none of the dizzying inventiveness of Maddin's film and much less of the depth and insight that Marker's work offers. Both Maddin and Marker manage to blur the lines between fiction and documentary in a manner that Davies doesn't get close to here. His previous work succeeds so well because it takes place in a dream state, aware that memory creates fictions. Here he asserts too much control over himself and the past, attempting to claim it as an objective fact. This idea is the antithesis to his previous films. In Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes we see the workings of the mind on screen, with voices and songs from the past merging with the present, memories overlapping, the camera tracking gracefully in one shot from moments taking place in the present into the past. It's remarkable and it's profound because the audience is shown how slippery and insecure truth is rendered by time, and so subsequently a capital T truth reveals itself from these 'fictional' films. Davies takes the personal and explodes it out onto the screen. In Of Time and The City the opposite occurs. He takes public footage and makes it private, trying to attain control over it.

I wish that Davies' selection of archive footage had been interrogated, that a dialogue had opened up between him and the images he selected, that questions had been asked about what it means to see 'real' footage and how this conflicts with his idea of reality and his past. This doesn't happen. Instead, the image is relegated to following Davies voiceover on a lead. It's telling that the moments of beauty in the film occur when Davies stops talking and allows the images to speak for themselves.

These moments are rare. Davies' laments come across as lectures, the beautiful combination of word, image and song that exist harmoniously in previous films seem laboured here, pressed onto one another instead of just existing together. Davies forgets how to make us feel. For most of this documentary the voiceover is posturing, all irony projected outwards onto others, lacking the self-reflection and analysis that Davies’ audience has come to expect.

Love (Makk)

Directed by Karoly Makk in 1971, Love is a Hunagarian film that blew me away when I saw it last night - I want to write about how it deals with truth and lies, fiction and reality:

As the film begins, a camera tracks an old and frail lady confined to her house. In long, drawn-out shots she wakes up and spends her time sitting around doing nothing much. Occasionally she gets up and walks a few steps, taking a look out of the window. As time creeps along and the woman nears death she becomes restricted to her bed. But her life isn't quite as static as it may appear. Interspersed throughout this inactivity are images and sounds that register for snatches of a second, from the ordinary (a clock ticking, a piece of fruit on a table, rain hammering on cobblestones) to the extraordinary (six men riding on horseback through woodlands). The viewer is left to infer that these fragments are being conjured from inside the woman’s head, images remembered and dreamt.

Throughout the film the viewer is placed in a position that alters between the external and internal, the real and imagined. As the camera observes the woman from afar the sense of confinement and physical stillness is heightened, trapped behind windows and laying dormant in bed. When this inactivity is punctured by the images she internally conjures we see a woman brought magically to life, her mind exploding onto the screen. The camera flits seamlessly between making us look at her and through her, so that these divides between inner and outer, fiction and reality eventually break down, and with the help of the beautifully paced editing the viewer becomes completely attuned to the rhythm’s of the woman’s life.

The woman is waiting for the return of her son Janos. She is visited regularly by her housekeeper and her daughter-in-law Luca, both of whom look after her. Much of the film’s focus is centred on Luca’s day to day life, trying to get by as she loses her job and her friends desert her. Luca leads her mother-in-law to believe that the reason for Janos’ absence is because he’s a successful filmmaker currently shooting in America, awaiting the premiere of his new film before he can return. One of the many emotional knockouts in Love is based around a letter written by Janos that she receives – our eyes become those of the old lady as we look through a magnifying glass with her as she reads the letter, until suddenly images start to take the place of the words she’s reading, images that rhyme with those we’re hearing, pictures of children, America, and picture-houses start flashing before our eyes. The film stuns in its power to visualise the workings of memory, of the mind. We hear her reading the letter out loud while simultaneously being able to discern her muttering and mumbling the same words in the background. In this sequence the film succeeds in bringing to life the very act of her reading the letter inside her own head – it’s an astonishing moment that displays the beauty and sadness of this woman forced to live out life in the mind.

What gives these scenes extra heft is that it transpires this life she is living out internally is itself a fiction. The letter has been written by Luca to disguise Janos’ true fate. Although details aren’t explicit, it becomes clear that Janos is neither a filmmaker nor outside of Hungary. He is a political prisoner who is described as a “traitor and a conspirator” by the guards that eventually release him. “Why did he have to meddle in politics?” asks Luca’s mother. It’s clear that the film is referring to the events surrounding the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. However, what’s explicit in the film is still vague enough that the story could apply to places throughout the world. The scenes of officialdom and the dialogue regarding Janos’ status as a traitor have a universal reach.

The film tackles not only the fictions we create in our own minds, but also those we create for others. One of its major triumphs is that the moral ambiguities surrounding Luca’s decisions to lie to her mother-in-law aren’t interrogated. The viewer is directed isn’t directed towards conclusions but are left to find their own way. Luca conceals her poverty by replacing old flowers she has given to her mother-in-law in the past and passing them off as new. A critical point occurs during a desperately long shot of the mother that tightens in on her face as she begins to cry out for Janos, cries which force Luca into emotionally manipulating her, threatening that she’ll ask Janos to halt work on his film and cable him to come home.

Love makes me think of Joan Didion’s line “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”. It's a film that deals head on with the notion of living through the stories we tell and it brings up some fascinating questions about whether it’s acceptable to lie to those we love if it can keep their mind exploding.

Lola (Demy)

Lola is a cabaret dancer living in Nantes, and she’s the centre of both the film and the affections of the three male leads. There’s Roland, a layabout and a dreamer who loved Lola as a teenager. Then there’s Frankie, an American sailor who has struck up a relationship with her on his travels through France. Finally there is Michel, the absent father of Lola’s child who disappeared seven years back.

It’s the film’s self-consciousness that turns this story of first loves into something more interesting than the by-numbers fluff that a brief outlining of the setup might suggest – it’s a fantasyland full of people that are dreaming of playing their life out as though it’s a romantic Hollywood movie, and this counteracts movingly with the disappointments of their everyday existence. It’s what gives the film’s cute finale some weight. It’s as though Lola has forced her way into a movie screen to make things turn out happy ever after.

The main joys come from the interactions between the characters, how their paths cross (or don’t), how connections and inversions reveal themselves as the plot unfolds, how their dreams and remembrances rhyme. A wired network is created that really lights up if you give in to its charms.

The way it’s all wrapped up is pretty seductive too. Jacques Demy’s gliding, graceful direction is a perfect partner to Raoul Coutard’s gorgeous cinematography, and backed up by Michel Legrand’s greasy, romantic score it makes for completely hypnotic viewing.

Although the plot and its characters are cut out of some very familiar cloth, Lola lights up the screen, it glistens and it sparkles and it’s thrillingly alive.

The Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)

I’m not versed at all in the Italian neorealism movement and haven’t seen any films by De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti. It’s a huge gap that I’ve wanted to go about filling for a long time, so last night I checked out Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a film that tends to be regarded not only as one of the pinnacles of the movement, but cinema itself.

Here’s the basics: Antonio Ricci is an unemployed man living in Rome who’s given a job as a bill poster. He needs a bike for the job, so to make some money he has to pawn his and his wife’s bed sheets. Then he and his son Bruno set off to work. It doesn’t take long before his bike gets stolen, and so begins Antonio and Bruno’s journey to retrieve the bike, a journey that takes them all over the city, meeting all sorts of inhabitants: thieves, beggars, the unemployed. By the film’s end, broken, dejected and desperate to keep hold of his job, Antonio attempts to steal a bike himself.

I’ll quickly get the hysterics out of the way and say that I found this film to be one of the most involving, intensely moving films I’ve seen for a long while. It travels with such humanity and grace, and is so note-perfectly acted, directed, scripted and scored that it’s going to be impossible for me to go near doing it justice here. But you’ve got to try.

The film comes across to me as a blown up miniature. It’s a film about something that might seem trivial, unimportant: “it’s nothing, it’s only a bike” we’re told by the policeman to whom Antonio reports its theft. But of course it’s not just a bike, it’s Antonio’s job, it’s his life, and it’s a search that elevates his struggle to the highest reach.

The film is shot in a loose style that works wonders to portray the conditions of the working class inhabitants of post-war Italy. The camera mixes tight close-ups of Antonio and Bruno with long gliding shots that position them within the society they’re living in. The tight shots force us to look at these characters, this struggle, and almost every facial tic gave me a great emotional hit. In the long shots we catch glimpses of other conversations, other stories, other lives that we know are just as important and vital what we’re witnessing up close. A boy that Antonio thinks is his son is pulled out of the river, and we share the fear, but it’s not Bruno, and the story moves restlessly on. We often see Bruno and Antonio walking off into the distance away from the camera. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but it seems as if the film is playing around with some of the conventions of the walk-into-the-sunset finale seen in countless Hollywood films, but here of course it's not that easy, this is reality...the searching continues, life carries on. The Bicycle Thieves avoids following a traditional quest narrative in which we would see the bike retrieved and justice served. Instead the journey that takes place is Bruno’s transformation into a criminal – it is about the destruction of honour, and it’s a desperately sad portrayal of Man and the times he is living in.

The film is intensely humanistic – Antonio’s reluctant belief in a fortune teller who predicts that the bike will be found “quickly or not at all” proves his undoing. He walks outside, collars the first man he sees and incurs the wrath of the innocent man’s family and friends. His belief in mysticism forces him to make a rash, uncontrolled decision that sidetracks him from reality. In a different scene Antonio walks into a religious ceremony and chases a beggar around a church - what use is religion to Antonio? – how will it help him find his bike? make a living? live?

Another function of mixing long and close shots in the film is that it highlights the dichotomy between Antonio as an individual and as part of a crowd. The film uses this idea to awesome effect. In the opening shot he’s picked out of a crowd of men looking for work. From this point on there’s a struggle between Antonio as an individual and Antonio as part of a crowd. He strives to make his own way and to exist outside of the poverty around him, but it’s not easy. After losing his bike he becomes part of the herd who queue for buses. The rain forces him against a wall in line with hundreds of others. He’s portrayed as an honourable man that’s pushed back into line by external forces, and in the final shot, right after he is disgraced and humiliated for attempting to steal a bike himself, the film pushes him back in to a crowd for a final time, his position is sealed.

One of the major reasons the film hit me so hard is that it’s so driven and purposeful, that it isn’t until the screen goes black that you feel able to take stock of what's unfolded and unravel what the film has put you through, and it’s an overwhelming, extraordinary experience. I realised that until the final scenes I’d been attempting to look at the film hopefully, assuming order would be restored, but the devastating finale forces you to reassess, to realise that this has been a journey that’s been heading downwards, not up. And like life, it hurts.

There Will Be Blood (Anderson)

I thought it’d be nice to kick-start this blog with a bit of negativity, so here’s a look at one of the major problems that I had with There Will Be Blood. The main issue I have is with simplicity being masqueraded as complexity. It’s what I find most problematic with the film, and it’s something that runs through a bunch of different areas. In my eyes, it results in making the picture rather messy and incoherent.

Firstly, the acting: Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano have had high praise for their performances and I find it pretty frustrating that this is the case. It seems to me that their acting style is at odds with what PT Anderson is going for in the film. Throughout, Anderson presents Plainview to the viewer as a sealed box. He’s a character that remains unknowable to the viewer, from his wordless opening scene to the rather louder grandstanding finale – we know little of his past, nothing of his “real” family, friends etc. - only simplistic fragments of his outlook on life (I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people). It doesn’t take long to realise which route Plainview is heading down, that his accumulation of wealth and power is going to intersect with his decline as a man. It’s a simple story, and Plainview is a simple man, and that’s fine, but Day Lewis’ performance is desperate to imbue complexity in Plainview where there isn’t any need to. His manner is oppressively expressive, every twitch and vocal intonation is so over the top, so intent on proclaiming importance that it undercuts the predetermined narrative arc that Anderson sets Plainview on course for.

There’s been much praise of Johnny Greenwood’s score for the film, but what reason people have found to be delighted eludes me. Unless the score is meant to be ironic, I see no reason to have bombastic, spazzy arrangements to accompany Plainview’s “action” scenes, and a jaunty little number after we witness him caving in Eli’s skull. Greenwood’s wild and uncontrolled score undercuts any dramatic intensity that Anderson manages to build up – when Plainview runs to save his “son” from the fire Greenwood goes for a sledgehammer approach and it jars terribly with Anderson’s careful, controlled direction. For large chunks of the film, the score seems completely at odds with what’s taking place, and complicates what’s happening on screen unnecessarily.

It’s obvious from watching the film that PT Anderson has great talent for directing, and there are some scenes in the film that play out remarkably. The choreography of certain extended shots are breathtaking, with the camera roaming around the characters like they’re positioned within a boxing ring, a stylistic trait that rhymes wonderfully with the sparring characters at the centre of the film. At other points, his style seems clumsy and lacks cohesion. For a film that seems intent to focus almost exclusively on Plainview, I see little need for the scenes that get inside the child’s head so that we too can hear what he hears (or rather, doesn’t). For a film that seeks to place the viewer on the outside, I see no purpose for these sections at all - trying to flesh out and complicate the film in areas where it doesn’t need it, it makes much of the action extraneous and the film as a whole seem bloated.

Does the film have anything to say about capitalism, religion, family? The film positions itself in a manner to suggest that it does, but in reality there’s very little chew on. It’s a film that looks like and has the feel of an epic, a film that will touch on big issues, pitting Plainview vs. Sunday, Business vs. Religion. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the film is never going to escape from the small scale interactions between the characters – it’s a film that speaks loudly but doesn’t have anything to say. Plainview may be unknowable to the viewer, but unlike Citizen Kane (a film it shares quite a few similarities with) it doesn’t tell us anything about the impossibility of knowing a man. The film doesn’t give us any reason to think what is taking place on screen might actually mean something. Look at how the film wrong foots the viewer for much of the film by having Paul Sunday and his brother Eli being played by the same actor. The film toys with the viewer for much of the film, leading them to consider that the brothers may in fact be one person (which turns out to be untrue). If Anderson is going to play games with the viewer, he should at least have something interesting to say, but there’s no insight into brotherhood, no probing of ideas about mutability, nothing. So why does Anderson have one actor play both of the brothers then? It serves no function other than unnecessarily complicating what unfolds – it adds nothing, develops nothing – it just unnecessarily confuses the viewer, covering up what is overly simplistic by making it appear complex.

For the past few months, off and on, I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog about film. The reasons are typical: to do something creative, to stave off boredom, to create a container for the hours I'm spending watching and reading and thinking. As with most of the plans I've ever had, I've been hesitant. One of the reasons for the hesitancy is confidence - Do I have anything original to put forward? Can I write intelligently enough and thoughtfully enough about an artform I'm only just starting to find my way with? I decided that I'd give myself a few months until I felt better prepared to put what I have in here out there. I've been becoming even more passionate about film - watching, reading, thinking as much as possible, but still the same questions and worries keep dogging me. In the end I realised that of course these worries are going to persist, and that they'll keep on persisting until I start to write and create this container - that the confidence, thoughtfulness and intelligence will (hopefully) come after I spend some time stabbing around in the dark on this blog...So here it is: I hope that if you find me here you'll bear with it, and that after a while you'll start to see some light.