OPENING IMAGE

two quotes and a poem

2010-11-08T20:22:00.003Z

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

2010-05-28T13:19:00.002+01:00

link

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

2010-05-28T13:15:00.002+01:00

link

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

2010-05-28T13:12:00.001+01:00

link

'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

2010-05-28T13:01:00.003+01:00

link

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

2010-01-29T18:07:00.007Z

link

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

2010-01-25T21:09:00.003Z

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

2010-01-19T14:37:00.007Z

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.

Architecture: Trylon and Perisphere

2010-01-14T13:55:00.008Z

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.

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 -

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

100 Greatest Homes In The World

Bill Gates House

15 Most Bizarre, Exotic and Amazing Houses

The Upside-Down House, Poland

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)

2010-01-13T14:01:00.004Z

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.

Music: 2009 Favorites

2010-01-12T09:17:00.004Z

Maybe one day I will pluck up the courage to write about music, but until then:

1. The-Dream - Love vs. Money [Def Jam]

2. DJ Quik & Kurupt - Blaqkout [Mad Science]

3. Electrik Red - How To Be A Lady Volume 1 [Def Jam]

Jim O Rourke - The Visitor [Drag City]

5. Emeralds - What Happened [No Fun]

6. Tim Hecker - An Imaginary Country [Kranky]

7. Sunn o))) - Monoliths & Dimensions [Southern Lord]

8. Staff Benda Bilili - Tres Tres Fort [Crammed]

9. Fever Ray - Fever Ray [Rabid]

10. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion [Domino]

Another 10:

Baroness - The Blue Record

Group Bombino - Guitars From Agadez Volume 2

Mariah Carey - Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel

Converge - Axe To Fall

Group Doueh - Treeg Salaam

Lindstrom & Prins Thomas - II

Moritz Von Oswald Trio - Vertical Ascent

Pill - 4075 The Refill

Taylor Swift - Fearless

UGK - UGK 4 Life

Film: Trouble In Paradise (Lubitsch)

2010-01-11T15:59:00.001Z

Watching Trouble in Paradise last night, it struck me anew how Ernst Lubitsch really was one of the great innovators of the early sound period. Released in 1932, the 'Lubitsch touch' is all over this picture, and it sure marks him out from many of his contemporaries -seemingly invisible editing that makes scenes flow seamlessly, laugh out loud comic touches that enliven every setup, and most importantly, a genius way with language, a delight in how meaningful and meaningless words can be.

What gives this film a certain boost over the many movies that followed in its wake was the timing of its release - eighteen months later and the enforcement of the Hays code would have stamped all over a film this amoral. The plot concerns two thieves ingratiated in the higher echelons of Venetian society who scope each other out and fall in love. The 'Count' then falls for the enormously wealthy Madame Colet, a perfume manufacturer him and his lover are supposed to be stealing from. The partner swapping that ensues happens free and easy, as does the theft, and there's never any question of criminal or romantic justice being served.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Trouble In Paradise is the proliferation of phatic utterances, with language acting merely as a way to fill air. It's a great celebration of the possibilities of sound in the cinema, as well as a hilarious riff on the function of language in bourgeois life - take for example the many montages of people absentmindedly responding to any-and-everything Colet says ('Yes Madame Colet', 'Yes Madame Colet') or the nonsensical chatter of the policemen when interviewing Monsieur Filiba. What's fascinating is how all this innuendo and amorality seeps in under this noise through the great punning and wit of the dialogue, the language flowing as effortlessly and seamlessly as the camera. This way of playing dirty underneath the surface of language must have been hugely influential to the directors of the great screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, who had to find ever more elaborate ways of sidestepping the era of censorship the code heralded.

Nature: The Naked Mole Rat

2010-01-08T14:46:00.010Z

As a Friday treat, I here present a small assemblage of text, images, and videos pertaining to one of the most frighteningly fantastic creatures on this earth. I was first introduced to the naked mole rat in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Errol Morris's superb documentary that's a portrait of four eccentric men and their professions - a lion trainer, a robot scientist, a topiary sculptor, and an expert on this great animal. I must revisit and write about this film - hilarious, hideous and deeply thought provoking, it's also an example of how revolutionary associative editing can be, subtly allowing the viewer to pull together these individual stories to create a gestalt that speaks to man's desire to assert control over the world.

So then, the naked mole rat is unique in that it's a mammal that's eusocial, with an organisational structure similar to ants and bees. Naked mole rats live in colonies of around 70 in number. The workers at the bottom of the chain dig tunnels, others collect food, and a select harem tend to the queen. The naked mole rat is the longest living rodent (up to 28 years). It feeds only on tubers and its own faeces. What I personally find so fascinating about the naked mole rat (aside from the transcendent ugliness) is their machine like intelligence, the rigorous work ethic that ensures the safety of each colony, and just how adaptable the mole rat is to its surroundings. A mole rat is instilled to think of themselves as part of a larger organism, and will always sacrifice him or herself in service of the rest of the colony. The National Geographic website describes the naked mole rat as looking like a 'bratwurst with teeth', but come on, this is really the male vagina dentata!

Text

Smithsonian Profile

San Diego Zoo Profile

Scientists Discover Gene That 'Cancer-Proofs' Naked Mole Rats Cells

Video

What a goon!!

FUCK FUCK FUCK NASty

Art in London in 2009

2010-01-07T13:33:00.004Z

I was meant to go see the Turner and the Masters exhibition at Tate Britain last night, but when you're a little older and wiser and it's snowing down hard and the tube is sporadic, you know it's probably best to stay home and safe. So that's what I did - I finished Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, a book I perfectly enjoyed and admired but hardly got excited about. It's similar to Madame Bovary in its detailing of a woman and her eventually disastrous relations to the society she lives in, slightly more impressive in its critique of 19th century conservatism than MB, but way less sumptuous prose and kind of a slog to battle through the last quarter when the narrative is so predetermined (possibly the fault of the translation TBF). I'll probably watch the Fassbinder adaptation later this week. What else? I played freekickfusion for maybe half an hour (too long). Me and Soph realised that poached egg on toast is a great starter for an evening meal. We watched the Louise Bourgeois documentary The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine, which was really quite excellent. What an amazing artist! Her sculptures are so full of narrative energy, be they minimal or extravagant. There's few people I can think of who make such a visual impression on me with their art. It was an excellently made documentary too, never ground down in biography, plenty of scenes showing Bourgeois at work and lots of fascinating (and often fierce) insight into how she thinks about art and life

So anyway, today I was going to write about the Turner exhibition, but instead of that here's a list of the best art shows I went to last year (in no order):

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at Tate Modern

Gerhard Richter: Portraits at National Portrait Gallery

Iza Genzken: Open Sesame! at Whitechapel Gallery

Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow: After Awkward Objects at Hauser and Wirth

David Claerbout at Hauser and Wirth

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting at Hayward Gallery

Jane and Louise Wilson: Unfolding the Aryan Papers at BFI Southbank Gallery

Poetry: Frank Bidart's 'Valentine'

2010-01-06T15:26:00.007Z

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How those now dead used the word love bewildered
and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt
love until he understood love

Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found
within his chest

something intolerable for which the word
because no other word was right

must be love
must be love

Love craved and despised and necessary
the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft
father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain
wild regret

---

Frank Bidart is known for his extraordinary ability to 'fasten the voice to the page', most noticeably in dramatic monologues that unspool from the minds of people often in a state of torment - Vaslav Nijinsky, Ellen West, Herbert White. What's so interesting in 'Valentine' is how Bidart knuckles into the difficulty that 'the voice' finds in expressing itself through language. The boy's inability to satisfactorily fasten his hopes and desires to language is really devastating - he's a man grown cynical because of the way the word love has been (ab)used in the world, leaving him cut off from private access all it signifies.

Bidart's a poet who also finds the act of expression difficult. His poems gestate over a number years while he waits for the right words to fall into place, so there's a neat metaphor playing out here about that artistic process too. I love how the poet is structuring what's otherwise free verse into two line stanzas, like it's his way of keeping some control over the twisting and turning, unhinged voice.

There's a great interview with Michael Silverblatt here, where you can listen his awesome recital of this poem at right on the eight minute mark.

Painting: Johannes Vermeer's 'The Astronomer' (1668)

2010-01-05T16:00:00.023Z

I mentioned yesterday how Edward Snow's Vermeer really opened my eyes to the myriad ways of looking at paintings (and all art for that matter) when I read it last summer. He writes with such grace and dexterity, tending to leave aside biographical information to burrow directly into an artist's work, looking real deeply, hitting on so many intricate details to bring out each painting's full power - it's an incredible, moving monograph that I recommend unreservedly.

Inspired by Snow's rhapsodising, I took a fresh look at the two Vermeer paintings the National Gallery in London have in their collection, and they just blossomed in front of my eyes thanks to his inspirational insights. The Vermeer book is particularly great because it isn't obsessed with telling you what to think - it's equally concerned with showing ways how to think. The fact that Lady Standing at a Virginal and Lady Seated at a Virginal are maybe two of the least interesting Vermeer paintings (to me at least!) meant I was extra keen to go the galleries that are showing his work that I do unreservedly love. So it's unsurprising that one of the highlights of my Paris visit last October was seeing Vermeer's The Astronomer in the Louvre. It's a painting that Snow only mentions in passing, and so here, inspired by Snow's ways of seeing, is a brief note of my own about a painting that constantly rewards my fascination:

Because of the intricate connections between Vermeer's paintings, maybe it's worth mentioning how The Astronomer sits within the rest of his oeuvre. With an artist who has just over 30 works attributed to him it's not too difficult a task. Most explicitly it pairs up with The Geographer, a painting of most likely the same individual as in The Astronomer who's equally engaged in the pursuit of knowledge (on the ground instead of the stars). Like so many of Vermeer's paintings, the subject is a solitary individual, but The Astronomer and The Geographer are the only ones of males. As with all but two of his works the setting is an interior, seemingly the same room as The Geographer, but then again all interiors in Vermeer appear to be the same.

Anyway, one of the exciting aspects of this painting is how there's a constant set of transferences between stillness and movement. It takes on the appearance of a fairly peaceful scene with a scholar settling down to work. His right hand rests on the celestial globe and the stars seem within his grasp - he's a real encapsulation of the Enlightenment ideals. But look again: see how his left hand is positioned on the table, and it seems as though he's had to steady himself from toppling out of his chair. As the shadows engulf the joint of his elbow it appears as though his left hand will give way. Is he steadying himself on the table because he can't comprehend the magnitude of the stars? Is the globe steady in the astronomer's hand or is it unstable, spinning towards or away like the Girl With A Pearl Earring?

His hands reach out to create a triangle in the centre of the painting that foregrounds The Astronomer's central concerns, acting as a prism that ultimately balances the conflicting impulses the work triggers, especially between the knowable and unknowable - see how the right hand (pointing upwards) is touching the globe that links to the light and the stars, whereas the left hand (pointing downwards) is touching the table cloth that heads down to the ground. Hazy light from above plays off against the raw materials at hand. Or is this a triangle of Heaven (globe), Hell (cloth) and Purgatory (the man)?

The painting cuts great diagonal swathes from the top left to the bottom right of the canvas. The light in the top left hand corner streams down into the room, as do the books on top of the cabinet. There's a similar motion with the shadows the cabinet creates as well as the line of the astronomer's back. Is the line heading up or down? Are these books of knowledge tumbling down to the ground? Is the light cascading into the room or is it being held in check by the astronomer's light-dappled face that returns its glare? It's these kind of complexities and beautiful balancing acts that make Vermeer's art resonate so deeply.

Make Way For Tomorrow (McCarey)

2010-01-04T15:03:00.013Z

A new year and new resolutions: I here do vow to write one blog post a day Monday to Friday for all of 2010. For this to actually happen I'm sure enough going to have to loosen up, chill out and just let the words flow out of me like some grand old linguistic spigot. I love films, so I no doubt will write about them. But there's so much more to life than the movies! Great literature, music, art, photography, architecture, and then there's travel and fashion and women and money and all the other Sunday supplement titles you find in the newspaper. Then of course there are my friends and my family and Sophie, who I will also no doubt write about. When I started this blog a long while back I did a lovely introductory statement and then clammed up for a good month, so fuck that shit and let's get rolling:

I'm still not able to shake the sadness of Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow, a film that's so beautifully and achingly upsetting that I don't know if I can bear to watch it again. How often do you encounter a Hollywood film (or any film for that matter) that treats aging and the aged as a serious subject for enquiry? There's Tokyo Story (which I'm really excited to watch again this month during the BFI's Ozu retrospective, partly to see how these movies connect) and Up that spring immediately to mind, but after that I'm struggling. This is a work of art which feels utterly out of time in its approach, a film for all times in highlighting the horror and the inevitability of how the young forget their elders. Bark and Lucy are an old, loving couple who are forced to move out of their house due to debts (there's a wonderful and amusing subplot hinted at throughout about how the guy who's evicting them is doing so out of spite because Lucy loved Bark instead of him - man I would have loved to see that film too in McCarey screwball style a la The Awful Truth!), but none of their five children are willing to take them both in at the same time. They split up into different homes, and spend time being shifted round to their very ordinary, but utterly selfish children and their families. What's remarkable is how the audience (likely youngish) are also shifted into the position of being irked by Bark and Lucy, especially in the extremely uncomfortable scene when Lucy persistently swings in her squeaking rocking chair that disturbs the bridge class her son George's wife is hosting. This scene really understands the horror that the presence of the old bring out in the young.

That annoyance the audience feels with this doddering old woman is part of what makes it hurt so much when in the final half hour the pair meet for what looks like one final time (of course the pain of this film also stems from the world-beating acting from the two leads). Bark is being sent to the other side of the country to one of the children in California whereas Lucy will be sent knowingly but without her husband's knowledge to an old person's home after he gets on the train. (It's interesting and crucial that the reason she's being sent isn't due to her frame of mind or even her health, but because her son George and his wife have convinced themselves that their own kids wayward impulses are due to Lucy's presence in the house).

There's a great moment in the restaurant that they visit before they say goodbye to each other where it seems as if they're about to kiss, but then Lucy turns round and gives a wry smile (to the camera?) before they back away. So many great elements to this scene e.g. how Lucy and Bark are playing along with the disdain they assume is felt towards them by the characters/the audience, but of course it's a real funny and witty reflexive moment too.

I never used to be much for the way objects and paintings and music placed in the background of films (or paintings etc.) are used to symbolise what's taking place in the foreground, but that's all changed after reading Edward Snow's magisterial book on Vermeer, where he really gets in deep to his paintings and demonstrates the necessity of taking everything into account. Maybe for that reason, the most hardhitting and heartrending moment for me was in the penultimate scene when the kids are all gathered round worrying about why Bark and Lucy haven't returned for a farewell dinner (they decided to forget their children for once and enjoy themselves alone). They begin to realise how much they've neglected their parents and right there, just above their heads is Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners:

I first became aware of this wonderful painting in Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I, then last October I was lucky enough to stumble on it without prior knowledge of its location in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris (I'd mainly gone to see the Courbet's). Bam!

This painting is a stunner and it relates so perfectly to Lucy and Bark and the way the viewer responds to the film - first you glance at the painting and they look crippled, like hunchbacks even. But then you really get into the painting and you see the strength in their posture, strong backs and arms, sturdy and proud. Then you imagine these women out in the field every day, gleaning wheat, and they appear as if heroic statues. They're just like Lucy and Bark, oscillating in the viewer's mind between pathetic and heroic, all dependent on the way that you look at them. The great achievement of Make Way For Tomorrow is in showing us the right way to look.

This film isn't yet available on DVD so I made do and watched on Youtube here. The image and sound quality are fairly strong, but as you'd expect it's a soft image and there's occasional grain. Afterwards I was reading about the film online and whaddayaknow it's actually going to be released by Criterion next month with lovely cover art by cartoonist Seth (the pic at the top of this post). Maybe I'll buy it if I can bear the pain a second time, but you, if you haven't seen it, you must!

The Gold Diggers (Potter)

2010-01-01T19:42:00.015Z

The Gold Diggers is the debut feature length film directed by Sally Potter, a deeply mysterious and staggeringly beautiful work that follows the quests of two women as they seek answers to two connected riddles. Ruby (Julie Christie) is an actress who begins asking questions about her identity when she meets Celeste (Colette Laffont), a typist in the City who makes enquiries of her own about what lies behind the figures she works with. The narrative is always ambiguous, but The Gold Diggers is extremely direct in its sustained interrogations into notions of female performativity, as well as the connections between money, gold, and women, all objects of exchange.

Like many debut features The Gold Diggers contains a riot of cinematic cross-referencing, but Potter’s skill is in her ability to offer a critique of the films that have obviously inspired her. The all-female crew acts as a rejoinder to the male world of filmmaking, and the results of Potter’s collaborations are breathtaking. Babette Mangolte’s stunning black and white photography brings out the beauty of the unfamiliar worlds Ruby and Celeste enter into, and Lindsay Cooper’s score is so in tune with the actor’s movements that it keeps the film constantly on the edge of becoming a musical.

This BFI release is the first time the film has appeared on DVD, and it’s accompanied by five early short films that demonstrate how Potter’s vision bloomed into the main feature. The 60 page booklet includes appreciations by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Sophie Mayer, as well as a long interview with the director.

Sunshine Cleaning (Jeffs)

2009-11-13T15:11:00.004Z

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

2009-10-16T13:15:00.005+01:00

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

2009-08-10T15:22:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-31T16:01:00.000+01:00

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)

2009-07-16T13:24:00.002+01:00

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)

2009-06-29T17:36:00.006+01:00

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

2009-06-28T10:48:00.006+01:00

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.

The Mongrel Muse

2009-06-03T19:50:00.010+01:00

Ever since the cinema began, aestheticians have sought to define 'pure cinema', the 'essence' of cinema. In vain. The cinema's only 'purity' is the way in which it combines diverse elements into its 'impure' whole. Its 'essence' is that it makes them interact, that it integrates other art forms, that it exists 'between' and 'across' their boundaries. It is cruder and inferior to every other art form on that form's 'home ground'. But it repairs its deficiencies, and acquires its own dignity, by being a mixture.

from Films and Feelings by Raymond Durgnat

Sparrow (To)

2009-06-02T09:57:00.012+01:00

Closing this years Terracotta Far East Film festival, Sparrow is a light and madcap buddy movie in which a group of petty thieves come to the rescue of a woman in the clutches of a rival gang. Cartoonish characterisations and a lack of cohesion in tone and pacing don't deter, imbuing the movie with a fun and freakish quality that's frequently engrossing.

Directed by the ever prolific Johnnie To, who here eschews his more typical violent gangster films for a foray into calmer territory, Sparrow was a personal project that was shot on and off over a couple of years in between other films. It's evident that To is deeply attached to the fast developing Hong Kong that serves as the setting, the shooting of the film acting less as a way for him to tell a story than as a means for him to document and preserve a city as it fades from being the recognisable home he once knew.

A sparrow is both a slang term for a pickpocket and a symbol of bad luck, so it's unsurprising that soon after one flies into and then settles in pickpocket Kei's living room, a series of unfortunate events unfold for him and his friends that make up the criminal gang. They each become seduced by the charms of the same woman, finding themselves inexplicably drawn to her, and ending up with a whole host of injuries, faces bandaged and arms broken. It turns out that she's desperate to escape the clutches of her lover Mr Fu, the head of a rival pickpocket group, and the plot proceeds to a showdown between them. For large patches the film proceeds without dialogue and tends to opt for fun slapstick scenarios, most notably a series of chase scenes, one of which culminates with all parties trapped in a lift, playing hide and seek amongst a bystander carrying a precariously balanced fish tank.

Key to the film's success is the score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux in which they provide a swooning jazzy soundtrack that sustains itself throughout the whole picture. Sparrow contains a nod to Umbrellas of Cherbourg in its final sequence, and it too feels like a musical, not just by virtue of the ever present soundtrack, but also thanks to the insistent rhythms to which the characters shuffle. In the extended final showdown between the two groups, the action is slowed down and edited to make the characters glide across the rain soaked streets in time to the score.

It's very easy to get immersed in To's world thanks to his inventive and highly charming style that tends to successfully smother the paper thin characters and run of the mill plot. Sparrow is a fun and dreamy ride, albeit a forgettable one.

Elevator (Dorobantu)

2009-05-15T12:59:00.007+01:00

George Dorobantu’s debut feature is a short, not too sharp drama about a couple of Romanian teenagers who find themselves holed up in the broken down lift of an abandoned factory after they go there to make out.

Made for only €200 and set entirely within the four walls they’re trapped in, Elevator suffers from an inability to work a way out of its financial restrictions, opting for weak and cheap camera effects instead of delivering a smart script. Lines about how their situation ‘isn’t like it is in the movies’ elicit immediate groans, as does the inevitable schmaltziness when they reminisce about their parents. If the intention was to produce some action movie fluff, then lines like this can quite easily be glossed over, but it’s clear that Dorobantu wants us to really care about these people – he’s as interested in the characters themselves as the situation they’ve been placed in.

The realism is too quickly undercut by the occasional montages that act as a transition between scenes. A haunting refrain accompanies the kids seen howling and scrabbling at the walls, their faces splintering and the camera juddering in a misjudged attempt at building atmosphere.

However scrappy and underdeveloped the film feels, it’s admirable that Elevator tends to play down the horror story dynamics of the situation in favour of allowing the characters to develop mutual tenderness. When the female lead remembers some leftover food she has in her satchel and eats it secretly, her actions don’t get discovered, turning the picture into a primal horror film.

The performances from Cristi Petrescu and Iulia Verdes are strong, managing to pass off the dud lines they’ve been given without causing too much pain for the viewer. There’s a sweet tenderness between them that engages, especially in the long final scene which flashes back to them chatting and flirting with each other in the lift before they realise it’s broken. It’s easily the most rewarding scene in the film, and so it’s a shame that these characters weren’t developed further.

Little White Lies Review

The Shaft (Chi)

2009-05-15T12:48:00.007+01:00

In Zhang Chi’s affecting drama, a mining town acts as the centre point around which a family’s dreams and regrets unfold. Split into three sections wherein the focus of the narrative alternates between a father and his two children, The Shaft

details their despondent lives as they struggle to liberate themselves and escape from the darkness of the mines into a more optimistic future.

Throughout this debut feature, the same images of a group of men heading down into the mine shafts are repeated; the monotonous rhythms of humans bustling and steel clattering set as a counterpoint to the similarly routine lives of the family. The father has spent his whole life in the industry, and his two children are desperate to avoid his fate. Although the daughter is in a loving relationship with one of the miners, she knows her future prospects look bleak. When the chance arises to escape the relationship and start afresh in Beijing, she’s left to make a difficult but inevitable decision. The son similarly wishes to leave for Beijing, and believes one day that he’ll become a world famous singer. What looks to be an opportunity to make the move is quickly thwarted by conmen, and when later he’s seen drunkenly singing at a karaoke bar, it’s clear that his lousy voice was never going to enable him to fulfil his dreams. The father is left only with regrets of the past, spending his retirement on the internet searching in vain to find his long gone wife.

Chi uses a subtle and effective gift motif to highlight how the family members’ lives are connected. The daughter is given a pair of red shoes by her boyfriend that she later throws in the river; the son refuses the vitamin tablets his dad offers in the hopes that they’ll help him succeed at school; and the father ignores his children’s urgings that he go on a holiday away from the town. Each time, their potential happiness and contentment is denied. The children are so desperate to escape from the mine that they ignore the potential benefits available if they stay in the town, while the father is so attached to where he lives that he’s unable to let go of his past and forge a new future.

The Shaft was shot on DV, and has a grimy quality that’s suited to the material. The characters appear as if watched through CCTV, conversations occurring off-screen as the camera moves about mechanically. The film contains some beautiful, striking imagery, not least the final scene in which the father finally decides to leave the village. He’s seen in a succession of increasingly long shots, zigzagging along an endless road, both literally and metaphorically struggling to escape from his home. It’s an image that brings together the three threads of the narrative, acting as an overarching symbol of the difficulties they end up facing in moving towards a new life, reaching a new destination.

Little White Lies Review

Michael Nyman and Motion Trio - Films To Write Music To

2009-04-14T10:07:00.005+01:00

(still from Andrzej Zulawski's The Third Part of the Night)

---

When music scores are mechanically grafted on to what’s on screen in narrative cinema, they tend to represent less an integral part of a piece of art than a distrust of the audience’s ability to respond to an image in a meaningful way. It suggests to the viewer that without the soundtrack mapping the contours of the image, the film would fail in conveying the emotional register it desires.

It's a tendency that haunts the closing event of this year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, in which Michael Nyman and Motion Trio collaborated for a night of exultant, mostly winceworthy music at the Barbican. Titled Films to Write Music To, the event showcased a series of Nyman’s scores along with a new commission made specifically for the festival. Nyman and his orchestra were joined by Polish accordion group Motion Trio, who added plenty of queasy jauntiness to the proceedings. Tonight the compositions tend to follow a popular film score tradition of overblown, tasteless mush. Blind to the possibility of showing a little restraint, these are ever erupting pieces that always seem to be scrabbling to match the exact feeling of each of the scenes being soundtracked.

In the first part of the concert Nyman speeds through a series of extracts without visual accompaniment from some of the films he’s scored, most of them directed by Peter Greenaway. On stage, Nyman plays with his back to the audience, hands looking puppeteered as they move up and down, hammering the same notes hard and fast. The music is characterised by a repetitive restlessness, minimal in that Nyman is prone to repeat a simple phrase throughout each piece, but relentless in each extract's attempt to continually invade each individual feeling of the film being scored, moving between pitches and tempos at a reckless rate. Given no room to breathe and stretch out, these five minute snippets ceaselessly head towards a fist pumping euphoric vibe as the strings inevitably start soaring just beyond the halfway mark. Nyman has the propensity to staple together the music and the image, instead of cutting them both some slack and allowing each form to create its own magic. The one mellow piece that’s played is a welcome respite, prettily discordant with a feeling of aimless wandering that offers a little subtlety that's much more exciting and evocative than the rest that’s offered here.

After the interval, visuals are set to two longer compositions. The first, commissioned to commemorate the opening of the TGV North-European train line, is a real catastrophe. Asked to provide some footage for this evening’s event, Nyman consulted his “archive” and presented some night time grainy footage shot looking out of, ahem, a train. Blown up onto the big screen, this nastily pixellated mess of buildings and lights glaring in the dark was so overpoweringly awful that it rendered any vague potential power of the music redundant.

This was followed by a new commission in which Nyman created a soundtrack to short extracts from twenty Polish films, in what was easily the most successful section of the evening. Scenes were edited in fairly interesting ways to emphasise thematic and scenic links between the movies. The music skittered along nicely and mostly found the right feeling, sound and image at last collaborating together to develop a meaningful rhythm.

4 x Little White Lies

2009-04-03T10:40:00.003+01:00

Here are links to four blog posts I've written for Little White Lies over the past month:

Unfolding The Aryan Papers

Preview of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

La Rabia

Snow

Masters of Cinema

2008-12-12T09:00:00.004Z

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)

2008-10-27T10:17:00.006Z

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)

2008-08-28T08:44:00.005+01:00

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)

2008-04-18T13:59:00.004+01:00

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)

2008-04-08T16:29:00.003+01:00

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)

2008-03-19T15:29:00.005Z

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.

2008-03-03T10:30:00.013Z

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.