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writing reports, or eating) highlight the absurdity of living a life mired in petty bureaucracy, enforcing an outdated law he expects will soon to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.