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.