Laughing Upon Arrival

THE DAY HE ARRIVES
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/7/2011, 4:15 p.m.
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/8/2011, 7:15 p.m. 

By Kelsey Brain

The title of Hong Sang-soo’s latest feature, THE DAY HE ARRIVES, gives the premise away but little else. From the opening moments, we are stranded alongside Seonjun, a former film director on a visit to Seoul after having taken up a teaching position elsewhere. With the sharpened sense of a traveler in unfamiliar surroundings, we become sensitized to the smallest gestures and faintest hints of emotion that betray the impulsive, panicked and infantilized emotional lives of him and his peers. Hong both identifies with and keeps a clinical distance from Seonjun, and he creates a liminal zone between farce and tragedy that makes one laugh and wince simultaneously.

In terms of his deadpan approach to human relationships, Hong is masterfully simplistic. Constructed as a series of individual episodes, we experience every scene anew, and must regain our bearings through ironically distanced observations, wherein the humor arises. A few scenes even begin so identically that they initially seem like replays or alternate takes, which makes the subtle (or not-so-subtle) inconsistencies of Seonjun more effectively felt. Framed and edited with a dry, knowing sense of human relationships, the overall story acts as a penetrating commentary that pokes fun at the characters. 

With a minimum of camera setups, Hong creates complex scenes that, for the viewer, puncture the surface of the characters’ pretences while, for the characters, keeping them intact. For instance, early in the film, Seonjun stops outside an apartment building. “Is she still living here?” he muses. She, Kyungjin, is not excited to see him again. His small talk devolves into a spectacular outburst of groveling, which she strongly resists until she too breaks down. This is captured in a single, unembellished shot, the very indifference of which makes it hysterically funny.

From the brief moment of high-strung, emotional melodrama, the scene abruptly cuts to a placid image of their shoes by the front door. Pacified by an experience the editing has quietly passed over, Kyungjin meekly accedes to Seonjun’s declaration never to meet again. Finally, we’re left watching the pathetic moments of their goodbye capped with Seonjun’s patronizing yet ironically sensible last words, “Be strong.” With a cheesy wave he’s gone, and their relationship is back to how we found it.

Hong isn’t interested in explaining the characters or in passing judgment. In the above-mentioned scene, there are changes throughout, but nothing definitive. What we see is the inconstant and ever shifting desires of characters, which may not make them easy to pin down but does maintain a reality that is fully comprehensible and fundamentally human, not to mention hilarious.

Kelsey Brain lives and works in Los Angeles.

7 November Permalink

Strains of Confinement

THE DAY HE ARRIVES
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/7/2011, 4:15 PM
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/8/2011, 7:15 PM

THREE AND A HALF
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/5/2011, 1:00 PM
Chinese 1, 11/8/2011, 4:15 PM 

By Katie Datko

A reoccurring motif in this year’s programming lineup is confinement. Sometimes it’s figurative like in Cristián Jiménez’s BONSÁI where Julio, the main character lives in self-imposed isolation. Other times it’s more literal, as with Luc Besson’s gala film, THE LADY, about Burma’s intrepid champion for democracy Aung San Suu Kyi or Jafar Panahi who managed to smuggle THIS IS NOT A FILM out of the country in a cake while awaiting the verdict of his trial in Iran. Two other films where this theme plays out is Hong Song-soo’s THE DAY HE ARRIVES and Naghi Nemati’s THREE AND A HALF.

In Hong’s film, the main character, Sungjoon (Jun-sang Yu) is trapped within the origami-like folds of a recurring plot. A former film director-turned-professor who comes back from the countryside to visit Seoul, he is part of a repetitive narrative that consists of banal conversations, chance encounters and uneasy relationships. Its black-and-white imagery at first seem dynamic, infusing energy into the storyline. But as each piece of the story unfolds, the relationship between the various parts become tenuous—the plot turns back on itself, almost but not quite to the point of being monotonous. Sungjoon is held captive by his inability to move forward, essentially swathed in an unending cycle of critical junctures that never meet any resolutions.

THREE AND A HALF is a stirringly claustrophobic film: three women on furlough from prison try to escape Iran. In interviews, director Nemati claims the women are convicts, but in the film itself, it’s never clear what their prison is—for one of the women, it’s a relationship, another, social constraints. Shot mostly in close-ups with a few mid-shots, the camera mirrors the suffocating space the main character, Hanieh, pregnant and sick, inhabits. She’s constricted not only by her actions, but by those of the men in her life. As the movie opens with a blurred close-up of Hanieh crying and gun shots in the background, it’s also the ambient sound that smothers us, louder than usual, reminding us of Hanieh’s instability.

In both films not much backstory is provided, yet in each film we get a sense of how the main characters’ pasts inform their present. Neither character is truly sympathetic—there is something unhinged about both Sungjoon and Hanieh. Each is a victim, captive by their own misdeeds. Watching them navigate their restrictions and limitations causes us to wonder if freedom is a possible or if it is an untenable illusion.

Katie Datko is an LA-based writer who has written for the L.A. Weekly, DailyOm.com and the LohDown on Science.

6 November 11 Permalink

An Apocalyptic Elegy

THE TURIN HORSE
Chinese 6, 11/7/2011, 12:30 PM
Chinese 6, 11/9/2011, 1:00 PM 

By Bernardo Rondeau

Few directors could conclude their oeuvre with a film about the end of the world and get away with it. The exception is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose grave and contemplative epics set the pace, if not quite the tone, for Béla Tarr and varied other “slow” filmmakers. Tarkovsky transitioned from damp, weathered Soviet mysticism to crisp, Baltic fatalism in THE SACRIFICE. Dying of cancer, exiled and working under the benefaction of Ingmar Bergman (while also employing Sven Nykvist, the brooding Swede’s cinematographer, and Erland Josephson, his leading man) Tarkovsky is certainly cut some slack for this often leaden epic of psychological and global catastrophe. Then there is Tarr.

The director appears to be in fine health, works in his home country and has a loyal stable of collaborators (composer Mihaly Vig, co-screenwriter László Krasznahorkai and all around co-conspirator Agnes Hranitzky). Perhaps that explains the lack of any distinct cause—THE SACRIFICE’s atom bomb—for the spellbinding immersions in miasmic effect that is THE TURIN HORSE. Regardless, if the filmmaker’s pledge to retire from filmmaking is to be trusted, the film brings to a triumphantly humble close an inimitable body of work that stretches over three decades.
 
Not quite a declarative full-stop, THE TURIN HORSE is an astoundingly lucid and assured crystallization of Tarr’s themes, tropes and climates. Purportedly about the creature who, suffering under the whip of its master, was embraced by Friedrich Nietzsche on the streets of Turin in the winter of 1889, THE TURIN HORSE is hardly the kind of “untold” or “secret life” story this kind of set-up would suggest. Is the film even about the Turin horse? Or is it about a horse whose suffering and decline, like that of his donkey cine-cousin Balthazar, stands in for a greater spiritual ache. Is it the proverbial Turin Horse? Does the film’s title designate a type rather than an individual? (Likewise, Nietzsche’s gesture has long been read by historians as the signal call of the philosopher’s descent into madness, though some particulars on this fateful encounter remain subject to speculation.)
 
Tarr locates the film in a landscape far removed from the sumptuous, Alpine splendor which Nietzsche adored. The film is almost entirely set in the single-room farmhouse shared by rangy Ohlsdorfer and his stern-faced daughter—proprietors of the film’s titular equine—the adjoining barn and, for exterior, the weathered stretch of land that encircles it, with rolling hills out of Anthony Mann by way of THE SEVENTH SEAL. The sole landmark is a well whose depths take on cosmic proportions at one of the film’s few turning points.

After a baritone voiceover, a rare piece of narration for Tarr, places the film in the context of the Nietzsche incident, the eponymous beast lunges through the black-and-white frame, hulking forward, whipped by bitter winds, dead leaves and the seasick drone of Vig’s strings. The father, driving the horse from his mount on the lorry, is a grizzled scrawl compared to the black mass of brawn and hair before him. This first shot is a trademark Tarr distillation: over one traveling take, a world is formed, peopled and set in motion. From this moment, Tarr sets a brief calendar: five days in five chapters. Father and daughter go about their grueling routines as small disruptions—the horse protests, a visitor in search of brandy spews an End Times dirge, gypsies descend and leave behind a troubling book—slowly give way to cataclysm as something wicked their way comes.

Though unlike Tarr’s prior single-set feature, 1985’s AUTUMN ALMANAC, the new film is entirely devoid of inter-relational conflicts, chamber intrigues or even much dialogue. This winter almanac, taking place across five days, has allegorical heft somewhere between Old Testament and Old World fable. The father is one-eyed and with a lame arm, scraggly and scrawny, and is often seen laying on his hard cot through Quattrocento perspective. The daughter, largely mute and tireless, labors inside the house. This Jeanne Dielman of the steppes is resolved to repetition: boiling potatoes, collecting water from the well, and dressing dad in a convolution of layers.

The film firmly inhabits the same forlorn, grey-skied, grimly-inhospitable hinterland of SATANTANGO, Tarr’s 1994 seven-and-a-half hour opus, which lies on the fringes of the dead-end villages of 1988’s DAMNATION and 2000’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. All of these three prior films in some way envision a greater, communal space—a village, a bar, a police station. THE TURIN HORSE stays put in near total isolation. Outside, an agrarian dystopia. No crops, everything ashen and worn.

Tarr is a poet of the inclement and the film has a storm of mythic resolve. Whipping by day, howling at night, it is the film’s great special effect, second only to Tarr’s roaming camera which makes labyrinths of the Ohlsdorfer home’s open-plan. The world of THE TURIN HORSE is falling into ruin. (Perhaps this is the apocalypse’s next stop after devastating the vacated township of SATANTAGO.)

All the while the horse is quietly and devastatingly erased. Perhaps instead of Bresson’s burro, this film’s animal avatar is more similar to the the talisman-like whale carcass of WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. Its commanding scale, disarming vulnerability, and incriminating silence making it a portentous emissary from the sublime.

Perhaps the film’s greatest revelation, amid the splendor of its coal-faced chiaroscuro and its bravura tracks, is the presence of a narrator, an omniscience. Does it bring a new understanding to Tarr’s prior films and help to lend an agency to this lingering, weightless camera which sees through floors (AUTUMN ALMANAC) and witnesses disparate events simultaneously (SATANTANGO)? If Tarr’s characters are always doomed to Sisyphean cycles, toiling in circles, being prey to charlatans, and trying to find exits from their diminished lives through despairing acts of petty criminality, what roles does this omniscience play?

SATANTANGO is Tarr’s most epic orchestration of his themes of rural alienation, foolhardy resolve and mud-splattered drudgery, and WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES its more elaborately-plotted, condensed variation. THE TURIN HORSE addresses these same themes with the clarity and concision of an elegy. Come armageddon, come.

Bernardo Rondeau is Coordinator of Film Programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He programmed the first-ever Béla Tarr retrospective in Los Angeles.

5 November 3 Permalink

Imposing Culture Across Generations

A SEPARATION
Chinese 6, 11/6/2011, 6:15 PM

THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD
Chinese 3, 11/6/2011, 7:00 PM
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/8/2011, 10:00 PM

By Kenneth Morefield

It is fitting that ten years after September 11, 2001, a pair of films depicting life in foreign countries can remind us how similar are the problems, longings and fears of people from different cultures, how fear is not the same thing as evil, and how righteousness is not the same as justice. There are no winners and losers in THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD or A SEPARATION, only survivors who are marginally more or less damaged by the choices they have to make.

Asghar Farhadi’s A SEPARATION is a riveting domestic drama that works equally well as character study or social critique. An ensemble cast without a weak link helps illustrate an infuriating—at times almost despair inducing—culture where a caretaker has to call a religious hotline to confirm whether or not it is a sin to change the pants of an elderly Alzhiemer’s patient who has wet himself, and where a woman who applies for a job without her husband’s permission can face legal sanctions.

Viewers maybe be used to scathing, implicit critiques from contemporary Iranian films but what separates A SEPARATION from films like OFFSIDE, WHEN BUDDHA COLLAPSED FROM SHAME, or MY TEHRAN FOR SALE is the way that it manages to have empathy for men and women, rich and poor alike, showing how good people caught in a web of harsh circumstances can eventually succumb to accumulated pressures created by just trying to survive.  Evil lies less in the human heart than in the structures that compel people to harden themselves lest their best instincts be exploited.

The heart of the movie may be in a scene where the daughter attempts to understand how her parents, her father especially, must wrestle with shades of gray in a culture that only sees sin and white (and punishes accordingly). As the ripples of the internal separation continue, nearly every character is forced to draw and test the lines where personal integrity meet unfair, at times horrific, circumstances.

Joshua Marston’s THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD may be more muted in its criticism of culture, at least tonally, than is A SEPARATION, but it shares with Farhadi’s film the intergenerational cast of characters that allows it to explore how cultural traditions get imposed on—and eventually passed to—the young. 

Set in Albania, the film introduces viewers to a world that is in many ways a hodgepodge of the modern and the ancient. Dad still delivers bread to local consumers via horse-drawn cart, but the kids play video games on console systems and send video messages to one another via the newest cellular phones. At first it appears as though the old ways and the new coexist fairly well, but when the patriarch of the family resolves a feud, Kanun (a set of oral laws dating back centuries) takes precedence over civil or political laws and influences the day-to-day life of the community members.

The theme of parental violence enmeshing and entrapping the young will draw inevitable comparisons to last year’s indie darling, WINTER’S BONE, but emotionally THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD more resembles Marston’s feature film debut, MARIA FULL OF GRACE. It shares with that film a more detached, documentary-like curiosity in the logistics of the system being portrayed. How are intermediaries selected? Under what conditions are temporary amnesties (“besas”) offered and revoked? What happens when traditional gender roles are reversed? (Rudina comes home from a long day of “work” to chastise Nik for making a mess in the family home. Nik, by default, must try to nurture his younger brother who is caught at home with him.)

Kenneth R. Morefield is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University in Buies Creek, NC. He is the editor of and a contributor to Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I and II (2008, 2011, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He is also the editor and founder of 1More Film Blog.

4 November 1 Permalink

A Calmly Observed Masterpiece

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
Egyptian-Rigler, 11/6/2011,  1:30 PM
Chinese 1, 11/10/2011, 3:45 PM 

By Maria Trakovsky

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA, a new film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is a moody, meditative and sensitively shot masterpiece that takes place in the Anatolian grasslands. It is both a calmly observed, slowly unfolding mystery about a nighttime police investigation and a contemplative study of various moral, ethical, philosophical and more routine questions that we deal with in our lives.

The film defies genres and speaks lyrically about subjects that many people avoid: illness, death, regret, memory, guilt, contrition, sacrifice and sorrow. There is also humor and hope in this work. Although the title suggests a fairytale, there are no clear heroes, villains, or an onscreen love story (unless you count a policeman’s cellphone ringtone—the melody from LOVE STORY). Instead, what Ceylan establishes is minimal: a group of police officials, including a medical doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) and a busy urbane prosecutor (Taner Birsel), take two suspects on a trip, traveling in a procession of cars on dark, desolate roads. With this eerie nightscape, lit only by the harsh lights of the vehicles and some sudden lightning from a passing storm, he quickly creates a strange, saturnine atmosphere. 

This film is an invitation to join a police team on an outing that turns out to be a very long night’s journey into day. Many scenes are full of an uneasy foreboding and an almost supernatural quality. Some are not for the faint of heart. At first, we barely notice the main prisoner as he is introduced, sitting in the back seat of a police car. But when given time to study him, we see an exhausted, sunken face full of profound suffering and a resigned martyrdom. He looks as if he has just stepped off an El Greco painting. We sympathize with him immediately, and are surprised at ourselves for doing so. He is so extremely tired that he constantly dozes off. The policemen guarding him don’t look much better. There is a weariness to them, and circles under their eyes. Most men in this tale are spent and burnt out by life, but take this as an almost normal state of affairs. 

While Ceylan uses his signature spare style for much of the film, there are a few unexpected zooms that jolt the viewer and magnify the overall unnerving tone. As the night stretches on, the police grow increasingly tired and agitated. The situation escalates. As tempers flare, only the highest-ranking member of the group, the Prosecutor Nusret (who is haunted by his own private sorrow), keeps order in the night. The ultimate frailty of these men is brought into constant relief against the endless expanse of fields and hills, with whispering trees, grasses and streams.

This director is able to make things look both real and ethereal at once, and to illuminate several lives for us in the process. His characters struggle with universal concerns: family, career, love and loss. But they also deal, as we all do, with life’s little chores: the need to pick up a prescription for a relative, for instance. Ceylan easily blends the mundane with the sublime.

As dawn nears, the team decides to take a break at a nearby village. When their host offers them a chance to refuel with some lamb, hot tea and conversation, he brings up another classic problem that cuts across countless cultures and eras: the village youth are emigrating, leaving the countryside for cities, he complains.

There are very few women in this film, but when they do appear, they do so to great effect, as in this village sequence. A young woman offers some tea to the tired travelers in a scene so full of beauty and magic that it could easily be in a fairytale. Is it real? Hope flickers as does unsteady light from an oil lamp. A short dream sequence adds mystery to this segment and intensifies its phantasmagoric force.

Ceylan supplies his film with generous doses of humor. He manages to overlay the film’s funniest moments onto some of its most chilling mise-en-scène, with hilarious social commentary on police and their procedures. We may also laugh at the contrasts between what is seen onscreen and what the Prosecutor “objectively” describes in his fancy dictation for an official police report. In this way, the director teases us about the “official-ness” of all bureaucracy.

As it winds down, ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA moves into inhabited spaces: streets, buildings, rooms, corridors and offices. Everything is demystified by daylight, but empathy and hope continue to coexist with violence. A cook feeds a hungry boy breakfast. The doctor’s final actions may also be seen as an act of kindness and pity. In the end, Ceylan gives us the freedom of interpretation, rather than a moral lesson.

Maria Trakovsky is an artist and educator living in Los Angeles. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from NYU and can be reached at mt1433@nyu.edu.

4 November Permalink

Turning the Camera: The Virtual Life of a Filmmaker

THIS IS NOT A FILM
Chinese 1, 11/4/2011, 7:15 PM

ARIRANG
Chinese 3, 11/5/2011, 2:15 PM
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/7/2011, 7:00 PM 

By Hye Jean Chung

What to do when a filmmaker can no longer make films? Simple. Make films about not being able to make films. If you are as talented, acclaimed and laureled as Jafar Panahi and Kim Ki-duk, the result is a contemplation on a variety of political and philosophical issues that range from totalitarian regimes, film aesthetics, human rights, human nature, resistance, betrayal, life and death. And their films, THIS IS NOT A FILM and ARIRANG, demonstrate of course that it is not a simple matter to flip a creative block—whether self-imposed or legally enforced—into a rich source of inspiration. For both, turning the camera toward oneself is an act of defiance or a last resort, filled with resolution if not desperation.

Although the two filmmakers are both preoccupied with the common creative struggle of blocked productivity, their circumstances are vastly different. As many might know, award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been under house arrest as he awaits the verdict of an appeal against a six-year jail term and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, interviews, and international travel (it was turned down last October in a Tehran appeal court). THIS IS NOT A FILM documents a day in his life, as he calls his lawyer, converses with the film’s co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (who has also been arrested after the making of this film), feeds the family’s pet iguana, surfs the Internet, looks outside the window, watches DVDs of his films (CRIMSON GOLD and THE CIRCLE, both banned in Iran), and most poignantly, enacts a verbal and performative version of a script that the Iranian government has prohibited him from making into a film.

The title’s negation of its identity as a film shakes up political, aesthetic, and philosophical issues that filmmakers, critics, and scholars have grappled with since the earliest days of cinema. What is film? How can the filmmaker use film as storytelling medium, aesthetic form, captured reality, or political platform? What are the ethical dimensions of making a film and claiming it as such?

In THIS IS NOT A FILM, Panahi reads from his script, which tells the story of a young girl, Maryam, who is locked in her room by her parents. Rather than simply relying on verbal descriptions, he creates a visual image of the film via video clips of an apartment he found while location scouting and the actresses he cast for the role, and he puts tape on his living room carpet to demarcate the dimensions of the girl’s cramped living space. Absence is as telling as presence in the spectral embodiment of Maryam and her surroundings in the yet-to-be-made film, as well as in the ending credits that name only Panahi and Mirtahmasb, with the rest filled with ellipses (replicated by Panahi’s own absence at the film’s premiere at Cannes earlier this year). It is evident that the girl’s predicament mirrors Panahi’s own. Although his apartment is much larger than Maryam’s tiny room, a cage is still a cage.

As Panahi explains how vertical imagery in a sequence from THE CIRCLE supplements the actress’s mental state, his energetic enthusiasm momentarily wanes, and in a rare display of despair, expresses frustration toward the primarily verbal rendering of his script. (“How can I tell the sense and feeling in this kind of film?”) Seemingly by force of habit, he continuously records interior shots of his apartment and the view outside his window with his iPhone—a ubiquitous presence in the film as one of his few modes of communication with the outside world. As fellow filmmaker Mirtahmasb jokingly remarks, “it matters that the cameras stay on”—whether intentional or not on the part of the translator, the visual emphasis speaks volumes here.

Acclaimed Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk would most likely agree, as he demonstrates in his drama/documentary ARIRANG, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes. Here Kim takes on three roles: filmmaker, actor, and spectator. And his three personas do not stay quietly within their separate domains; they watch, converse with, and even laugh at one another—at times jovially, at others derisively. Although he lives in solitary seclusion in a run-down hut, with only a stray cat as company, he is not quite alone. A bevy of ghosts share the space with the filmmaker-turned-hermit in the form of Kim’s memories, movie posters, and DVDs of his films, as well as Kim’s doppelganger and his talkative shadow.

Kim has been amazingly prolific in the past, making 15 films in almost as many years, so perhaps it is not too surprising that he is going through a fallow period of creative energy. ARIRANG was made three years after the release of his last film, DREAM, which was partly responsible in dragging Kim down to his current funk. (An actress almost choked to death while shooting a scene.) Craving inspiration, Kim turns the camera on himself, declaring “I want to make a film now!” Most of the film consists of Kim berating himself for being unproductive, oscillating between self-pity and self-indulgence, and describing his disillusionment with a voracious capitalist system that breeds betrayal and uniformity. Variety’s Leslie Felperin describes the experience of watching the film to “being stuck next to a drunk in a bar who keeps reminding you he used to be famous, all his friends are bastards and he now understands the meaning of life.” In one particular sequence, Kim launches a drunken, profanity-laden tirade, not unlike a Youtube video meltdown in its wincingly raw and embarrassingly honest portrayal of a man struggling to regain control.

It is ambiguous, however, whether Kim ever loses control as a well-established storyteller with a calculatingly canny talent for creating dramatic tension. In the film, he describes his creation as drama, not documentary, and he deploys crosscutting editing techniques to create an unsophisticated but still convincing illusion that he is having a two-way conversation with either his flesh-and-blood doppelganger or his shadow. After one such emotional exchange, he watches the footage of these conversations (reminiscent of Albert and David Maysles’s 1970 documentary, GIMME SHELTER), maintaining enough critical distance to laugh at his “performance.”

The circumstances of his character in ARIRANG, that is, himself, also follow his trademark portrayals of outsiders who are set apart from the rest of the world in a spatial and temporal warp. In a word, he is directing himself, using the film medium to re-sharpen his creative technique and critical eye, and to reinforce to himself and by extension, the audience, the questions every filmmaker asks: Why do I make films? What do I want to say? With whom do I want to communicate? Equipped only with a handheld camera and deprived of anything else readily available to a director on a conventional film set, both Panahi and Kim turn the camera toward themselves as a source of inspiration, and set out to answer these questions as best they can. 

Hye Jean Chung is a film scholar/writer who can be reached at robinjean9@gmail.com.

4 November 2 Permalink

A Phantasmagorical Tour of Philosophy

FAUST
Chinese 1, 11/4/2011, 9:30 PM
Chinese 6, 11/6/2011, 12:15 PM 

By Paul T. Bradley

No one would dare call Alexander Sokurov breezy and lighthearted and no one would expect to walk away from one of his films chipper and content. Instead, one expects to shuffle away ponderous and spellbound—which is what makes FAUST such a perfect Sokurov film. The intellectually faint of heart need proceed no further. 

Faust serves as an epilogue to Sokurov’s historical trilogy concerning corrupt leaders: Hitler in MOLOCH (1999), Vladimir Lenin in TAURUS (2001), and Japanese emperor Hirohito in THE SUN (2005).

This film loosely follows the classic German myth’s framework: a dispirited doctor is tempted by a misshapen and somewhat mystical charmer into giving away his soul to satisfy his lusts and his curiosity. Beyond the basics, Marlowe, Mann, and Goethe fanboys will find little foothold to their favorite, earlier interpretations. Sokurov, instead, fills in between the lines of this classic framework with a mesmerizing illumination of the liminal space between Russian and western European philosophy. He attempts an epic synthesis of Russian thought through the German lens that once influenced it so thoroughly. 

As a brief introduction—Russia has benefited (or perhaps suffered) from a surplus of philosophy. In czarist and communist Russia it was philosophy that served as the ultimate measure of truth and the foundation of all political and economic change. For the Russia of most present-day adults, loyalty to the teachings of Marx’s dialectical materialism was the prerequisite of civic loyalty and professional success. No worker, farmer, scientist, politician—or even artists and writers—could succeed in their respective fields without specific philosophical preparation, be it through Stalin, or the Germans that underpinned that thinking—Marx, Kant and Hegel. 

Further to that, philosophical ideas in Russia rarely matured into proportionate, autonomous systems, because it was the license of the State to carry them out and elaborate them in a standard, systematic way. Russian thinkers digested these systems into a stream of unpredictable, impulsive, existential thinking which attempted to go beyond the systems—to undermine them rather than unite them. Since the official state philosophy functioned as a mechanism of power, it was the task of non-official philosophy to advance anti-totalitarian modes of thinking, deconstructing the principles of standardization.

So in that sense, Sokurov is advancing a mature rejection of philosophical authority at every turn in FAUST.  This Mephistopheles can easily consume his cup of hemlock and survive, perhaps the grandest middle finger to Plato’s foundations of totalitarian philosophy.  While it is indeed a meditation on the gaps of reason in human power, it is not merely a philosophical film.

Sokurov has the most sublime respect for visual verisimilitude in contemporary film—he does not strive for a realist or stylized visual style, but a visual style that faithfully captures the era in which a story is set. For example, in FAUST, he shows the characters and events as their contemporaries would have shown them, perhaps even through a black-mirrored Claude glass, evening-out the harsh separation of tones. The film has the washed and dark look of a Northern European mannerist—or perhaps a 19th century Slav like Jan Matejko. 

As a master of images, Sokurov is an unflinching grotesque. There are a myriad of visual puns and gruesome treats. These are greasy fingers grabbing salty meats, probing hands tearing apart corpses, and bloody homunculi gasping for their last breaths. Here there are puerile delights and defecation is best done in desecration rather than in mere bodily function—why waste an opportunity to befoul something precious like a church? 

All told, FAUST is equal parts painterly revivalism, a somewhat dour philosophical meditation, and rampant vulgar fun. This film may be life-changing in the sense that it cinematically scratches a philosophical cut into the roof of your mouth…a cut that might heal if you weren’t so compelled to keep poking it with your tongue. You won’t leave happy, you won’t leave sad—you will leave pensive and partially unhinged—but, y’know…in a good way.

Paul T. Bradley is a freelance writer, cinefile and former ditch-digger. He is a regular contributor to LA Weekly’s arts section, where he covers haute nerdery, semi-refined vulgarity and hastily-scrawled, pro-Los Angeles jingoism. He reluctantly tweets from @paultbradley.

4 November 5 Permalink

Rwanda By Rwanda

KINYARWANDA
Chinese 6, 11/5/2011, 1:15 PM
Chinese 3, 11/7/2011, 7:00 PM

By Joey Ally

Between April 6 and July 4, 1994,  nearly 1,000,000 Tutsi Rwandans—or 1/10 of the total Rwandan population—were murdered at the machetes and machine guns of their Hutu countrymen.  The Western world withdrew their citizens and troops, tuned into the terror from the comfort of their home televisions, and did nothing.  This period is now known as the “100 days.” 

In contrast to the West’s slack-jawed, impotent stillness during the Rwandan genocide, Hollywood has spent the time since buzzing with pure Rwandan solidarity—films like Oscar heavyweight HOTEL RWANDA, HBO entry SOMETIMES IN APRIL and AFI FEST 2007 Grand Jury Prize winner MUNYURANGABO have given the public tenable frames of reference through which to communicate with this human tragedy.

Until recently, however, the Rwandans themselves have been markedly MIA from this dialogue.  KINYARWANDA—the first Rwandan-produced film period, let alone about the genocide—has changed that, and the resulting film is astounding even insomuch as it exists at all.  It is unavoidable that those Rwandans making film at this stage—only 17 years after the crimes against humanity were committed—either witnessed the genocide themselves or are very young filmmakers who have grown up in a world committed to healing the community that remains. Imagine if we had given a camera to a Jewish Holocaust survivor still living in Germany in the first two decades post-WWII. What would a film like this look like?  What themes would be important to the survivors themselves?  Would the outcome be simply too devastating to be watch?

The results, in the case of KINYARWANDA, couldn’t be more unexpected. The film tells the story of the Muslim community’s actions, a lesser-known but tremendous narrative. In the early days of the genocide, the Mufti, or highest Muslim leader, of Rwanda issued a Fatwa prohibiting violence and calling the Muslim community to shelter all Tutsi.  Remarkably, the doors to the Grand Mosque of Kigali, among others, remained open to all who sought refuge, regardless of ethnic classification or religion.

Rwandan filmmaker Ishmael Ntihabose—the film’s creator, executive producer, and champion—recorded post-genocide interviews with survivors owing their lives to this mosque, and American Alrick Brown honored this Rwandan story in his delicate screenplay and direction.  Eschewing overt displays of violence, vilifying of the Hutu Interahamwe and the international community, and self-pity, KINYARWANDA instead focuses on the notions of community and forgiveness. 

With a narrative that bounces between the genocide and the years later Gacaca trials (Rwanda’s community-based answer to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions employed in South Africa post-Apartheid), the film focuses on six titled vignettes of everyday Rwandan life during the genocide whose characters overlap as the film progresses and many make their way toward the Mosque. It is in the juxtaposition between these early tableaus and the violence ominously buzzing ever-close—a near first-kiss between Rwandan teenagers just a stone’s throw from a group of Tutsi’s kneeling for slaughter; a hutu/tutsi couple fighting over the most universal of relationship issues even as they plot escape to a safety zone—that KINYARWANDA finds its voice.   We are reminded that those living in Kigali at the time of the genocide were actually alive—that they were real people with real people problems attempting to survive in the face of madness.  This is what the post-dialogue has been lacking, and what only a Rwandan production team could provide: an honest, complex look at life as it really was during the 100 days.

Even more striking, no Rwandan is left unconsidered.  The character of Emmanuel (embodied richly and subtly by the standout Edouard Bamporiki, a Rwandan filmmaker, actor and poet), a Hutu member of the Interahamwe death squads, is considered just as delicately and empathetically as are those fleeing the horror.  It is this portrait above all the others that denotes how far Rwanda has come since those harrowing days, and gives credence to the process of the Gacaca trials.  In spite of Emmanuel’s crimes, he is characterized not as a monster, but rather as a child of Rwanda who was swept up into the insanity, and who must be welcomed back into the arms of his nation in order for Rwanda to again be whole.  He simply states at the Gacaca trials, “I want to be a good neighbor to you again.”  There is no more powerful set of syllables uttered the entirety of the film.

KINYARWANADA, then, is unusual in many ways.  Besides being the first—of what will undoubtedly be many—truly Rwandan film, it is a war film with few explosions, a genocide film that shows little death, and a portrait of a city in peril that shares its focus and its compassion equally between perpetrator and victim. It may not be a perfect film—the synthesis of the vignettes in the second half feels a bit hurried, some of the performances underwhelm, and certain scenes feature a questionably out of place usage of slow-motion to emphasize the action—but where this film succeeds, it soars. In a hushed yet commanding tone, the film demands its place in the cultural dialogue on the Rwandan genocide. It is poignant, unique, unexpectedly uplifting, and not to be missed.

Joey Ally is a writer and actor who comes from New York City, lives in Silver Lake, and has driven cross-country three times in the past year-and-a-half.  Joey was Jesse Pinkman for Halloween, and can be found on twitter at @joellenally.

3 November Permalink

Cut to Experience

ALMAYER’S FOLLY
Egyptian-Spielberg, 11/4/2011, 9:30 PM
Chinese 3, 11/6/2011, 3:45 PM

By Kelsey Brain

Chantal Akerman’s film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, ALMAYER’S FOLLY, achieves an emotional intensity left unexplored by its literary source. Published in 1895, Conrad was motivated by a journalistic impulse to expose the corruption and tragedy he had witnessed during his time in the British merchant marines. Akerman plays down the causal relationships of Conrad’s plot, opting instead for an intuitive editing style that allows the viewer to explore the sensual and emotional presence manifest in human existence.

Gaspard Almayer, the titular character and only white man living in an isolated region of Malaysia, operates a desolate trading post ideally located to have the least amount of trade possible. He obsessively seeks wealth and prestige, yet fails to profit from his absurd business ventures and is faced with a reality with which his ideals do not match. He resorts to outbursts of impotent rage, which cumulatively show their effects on his mixed-race daughter Nina’s life, imprisoning her within his standards of European propriety.

Through her cinematic reworking, Akerman undermines the novelistic plot to create an emotional intensity absent from the book. We expect a story, but what we get instead is a more involving experience. Time and place shift without sure points of reference—sequences cut between different locations in the past, present and future—and the contrast between movement and static images, light and darkness, awakens us to a more sensual relationship with the material. Anachronistic details also shift the viewer’s focus outside the narrative, while also clearing the way for a more honest and personal encounter with the characters. 

Since the scenes are no longer heavily burdened by their narrative duty, the viewer becomes the emotional continuity. Though this can be frightening at first, as the film goes on, it begins to feel liberating. Whereas Almayer is confined to his imperialistic ideals, Akerman challenges us to experience the world as it is. Such active participation charges the film with the potency of living existence.

3 November 2 Permalink