July 21, 2010

Nelson Pereira dos Santos by Darlene J. Sadlier

With Nelson Pereira dos Santos's body of work deeply rooted in an aesthetic as well as political and social consciousness, it is not surprising that Darlene J. Sadlier analyzes the trajectory of dos Santos's cinema through a similar paradigmatic approach of integrating film form with historical context. Brought up in a middle-class, cinephile household in a rapidly modernizing (and consequently, culturally vibrant) postwar São Paolo, dos Santos's involvement with the left movement in the 1940s was incited more by humanism - particularly, with respect to the socioeconomic disparity and underdevelopment of the sertão (northeast) region - than opposition to the authoritarian government of Getúlio Vargas. Despite working towards a law degree, dos Santos had spent his academic career pursuing filmmaking, traveling to Paris to embark on a makeshift film studies crash course (after a failed attempt to enroll at the renowned IDHEC [Institut des hautes études cinématographiques]), and taking on documentary projects commissioned by the Communist party. It was during these lean years working in cash-strapped productions that dos Santos, now living with his young family in a Rio suburb near the city's largest favela, conceived the idea for Rio, 100 Degrees - a film that confronted the unvarnished reality of life in the slums that, until then, had remained below the periphery of social discourse on everyday life in the city (even as the favela maintained a visible presence atop a hill):

In contrast to the aerial shots of the tourist sites, the camera takes a position low to the ground to photograph the favela from the base of the hill to the top. This angle enables dos Santos to give audiences a better sense of the size and steepness of the hill as well as the closeness and poverty of the wooden shacks, which lack even running water. We see a boy walking up the hill with a can of water on his head and several others making their way down narrow paths and onto the paved streets filled with marketplaces, cafés, and palm trees. These few shots make clear that the favela is quite close to the city; but life in the metropole is so much richer that it seems like another planet.

In the essay, Rio, Zona Norte, Mandacaru Vermelho, Boca de Ouro, and the beginning of the Cinema Novo Movement, Sadlier examines dos Santos's early, transitional films that, while entirely different in their scope (and levels of critical and commercial success), reveal recurring themes and methodologies that would resurface throughout his body of work: race and indigenous identity versus assimilated Western culture (Rio, Zona Norte), landlessness and migrant workers (Mandacaru Vermelho), and a translational approach to literary adaptation (Boca de Ouro). Also, by locating these films within the chronology of Cinema Novo, Sadlier makes a salient point on dos Santos's precedence with respect to the birth of the movement, correcting the common misconception that aligns his cinema squarely with the emergence of Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, and Arnold Jabor under the rubric of Cinema Novo.

Sadlier expounds on Dos Santos's translational approach to adapting literature in her detailed analysis of Vidas secas. Based on the novel by Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos (whose autobiographical novel, Memories of Prison, would later be adapted by dos Santos in 1984), dos Santos not only took advantage of the novel's cyclical structure to rearrange the self-contained stories for dramatic effect, but also dispensed with much of the characters' philosophical inner monologues in order to retain a more visceral connection with the nature of poverty.

Between and within sections, characters' thoughts and moods often undergo swift, radical changes, revealing their curiosity about language and undermining certain stereotypical notions about "primitives" derived from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. In fact, Ramos's novel is as much or more concerned with the "human and contradictory" language and consciousness of the retirante (peasant migrant) as it is with the brutal landowning system of the Northeast.

...Dos Santos's film dramatizes this scene in its entirety [an episode in which the oldest son struggles with his mother's explanation of the concept of inferno], but it somewhat downplays the boy's curiosity about the words and his desire to understand what he does not know, giving greater emphasis to the ironic relationship between the word 'hell' and the boy's immediate surroundings.

In Culture and Cannibalism: Como era gostoso o meu francês, Sadlier frames How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman within the context of cultural extermination as a result of the military government's attempts to bring "civilization" to the indigenous people as part of its national development campaign. By drawing on colonial history, the cannibalism serves as an allegory for the consumption of one culture by another - a phenomenon that speaks directly to Brazilian society's continued emulation of European culture long after the country's independence. (Note: The equation of cannibalism with cultural consumption also appears in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma).

Sadlier further proposes an intriguing corollary that by filming from the perspective of the indigenous tribe, dos Santos is recreating a historical record that had been erased from "official" history through a process of what critic Raymond Williams describes as "selective tradition" in which culture is redefined by the prevailing attitudes of contemporary society (and that, by nature, reinforces these biases and aspirations).

Viewed in these terms, dos Santos's film is less interested in distorting a canonical text than in revealing what that text omits. Its documentary-like or "anthropological" style directly participates in an effort of reinterpretation by providing the viewer with a simulation of what has been lost, not just in time but also through the selective cultural process. Dos Santos's solidarity with the Tupinambá can therefore be described as an ideological position in powerful contrast with the interests and values of the dominant class in Brazil, which has always identified with Europeans, especially the French.

The collapse of populism in the 1960s also coincided with dos Santos's divergence from a purely leftist agenda towards a more humanist cinema, a transition that is reflected in the fabular dimension to Ogum's Amulet:

Although dos Santos had long been aware of religious practices in the favela, his approach in his earliest films was strictly Marxist, focusing on social class and race while implicitly dismissing religion as an opiate of the masses. O amuleto de Ogum makes clear not only the centrality of religion in the lives of the poor but also the ways in which umbanda reinforces class solidarity and gives a kind of power to individuals who are caught in a violent and corrupt world.

Stadlier also illustrates this ideological shift in her analysis of Memories of Prison and Cinema of Tears. In Memories of Prison, dos Santos creates early ambiguity on the identity of the author and main character, Graciliano Ramos, by placing him in the milieu of the general prison population, in essence, democratizing the attribution of "hero" to all the prisoners. In Cinema of Tears, dos Santos's Latin American contribution to the BFI's Century of Cinema project (on filmmaker searching for a lost film that connects him to a tragic episode from his past), he embraces the escapism of popular studio-produced films and their ability to connect with the audience.

The actor's search through the archive is also, of course, a fictional device that allows dos Santos to show brief clips, most of them in pristine condition, of wonderfully evocative black-and-white films of the studio era. By this means he pays tribute to a generation of directors, cinematographers, and stars who became internationally famous largely because of their work in melodramas. Although the content of these films had little to do with the social reality of the moviegoing public, the Mexican melodramas were among the highest-quality films made in Latin America. In effect, dos Santos who began his career as a neorealist and a symbol of the Latin American New Wave, takes a revisionary approach to a genre that, like the chanchada [musical comedies], was often criticized by the Left because of its association with Hollywood.

Posted at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, Film Related Reading

June 27, 2010

Short Notes from The Calm After the Storm: Making Sense of Lebanon's Civil War

Ready To Wear Imm Ali (Dima El-Horr) is a delightful, understated comedy that like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention and Randa Chahal Sabag's The Kite, finds brittle humor in the absurdities of everyday life under a protracted occupation. Ostensibly chronicling an enterprising woman's efforts to launch a fashion boutique in a bucolic farming village and her malfunctioning neon sign, the film effectively conveys the climate of secrecy and distrust as ordinary people struggle to find some semblance of independence and self-determination in the face of uncertainty, transforming her confusion into a potent commentary on empowerment and solidarity.

While Falling from Earth (Chadi Zeneddine) suggests affinity with the films of Theo Angelopoulos in its intersection of personal and national history, the film finds greater kinship with Hector Faver's Memory of Water in its interweaving elements of documentary, fiction, and imagination. As in Faver's film, Falling from Earth is equally poetic and frustratingly heavy-handed in its elliptical and allusive tale of an aging, disconnected exile who parses through the rubble of his tormented past in an attempt to come to terms with his mortality and legacy.

Of the three short video works in the Akram Zaatari program, All Is Well at the Border proves to be the strongest entry, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Ici et ailleurs in its tale of two cities and the alienating, fragile peace of a status quo struggle for power and control. By presenting modern-day Lebanon as a collage of scarred streets, demolition, and reconstruction accompanied by the testimonies of former political prisoners during the occupation, Zaatari creates a potent allegory for the Palestinian conflict and a haunting survey of war's subtle, yet indelible imprint on physical and human landscapes.

The second offering in the Zaatari program, Red Chewing Gum is more experimental and abstract in its execution than the quasi-documentary, All Is Well at the Border, a spoken word rendering of two estranged childhood friends and the memory of an encounter with a chewing gum peddler. Punctuated by the repeated refrain, "no sugar left" as the peddler discards his used gum into a cardboard box, the film serves as a metaphor for the fracture and irreparable damage of the Lebanese civil war.

The least effective entry in the Zaatari program is Crazy for You, a survey of the mating ritual told from the perspective of working class men in modern day Lebanon. Colorful and forthright in its stories of romantic conquests, Zaatari treads a culturally taboo-breaking, if banal road in examining the country's decidedly mixed message towards modernity and socially progressive attitudes - a dichotomy that Zaatari wryly reinforces in a bawdy drinking song of machismo strength - one that can withstand the weight of a collapsing wall - shot against the rubble of a dilapidated house.

Part autobiography and part refiguration of turbulent history, Randa Chahal Sabag's Our Imprudent Wars, like Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost, is a clear-eyed and probing assessment of the personal toll of a family's lifelong activism and resistance. Born to intellectual, globe-trotting parents, Sabag would bear witness to the tumult resulting from her family's commitment to social engagement - first, in her parents' militant, left-leaning politics, then subsequently, in her older siblings' involvement with the militia during the Lebanese civil war. Struggling to reconstruct her family's ambiguous and ever-shifting circumstances during the war, Sabag presents an incisive analogy to the murky politics, inflexible ideology, and dubious alliances that led the protracted civil war itself.

The militancy of ordinary people during the civil war and occupation of southern Lebanon also provides the framework for Sabag's Souha Randa, a fascinating portrait of (then) recently liberated radicalized student turned communist revolutionary, Souha Bechara who, at the age of 21, was arrested after her failed assassination of provisional officer, General Antoine Lahad. Following Bechara as she readjusts to her former life - albeit this time, as a national hero - in a newly liberated southern Lebanon, the film interweaves historical footage with Souha's emotional visit to Khiam prison where she once languished and was repeatedly tortured. With the prison now transformed into a teaching museum commemorating the struggle, the contrasting images of Khiam (made all the more visceral by Bechara's account of her ordeal) creates an insightful juxtaposition - facilitating a constructive dialogue to a new generation in its acknowledgement of turbulent history and celebration of renewal.

Posted at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, Lebanese Cinema

April 17, 2010

Last Train Home, 2009

From the seemingly mundane (if logistically nightmarish) objective of documenting the annual mass exodus of migrant workers from industrial cities as they return home to their rural villages in time for the Chinese New Year, Lixin Fan poignantly captures the dissolution of family in the face of globalism, poverty, and disenfranchisement in Last Train Home. Shot from the perspective of factory workers Changhua and Sugin Zhang over the course of three years as they travel for their only trip home to Guangzhou in the Sichuan province for the year, the film understatedly reveals the toll that their absence has taken on the children they have left behind. For their adolescent son, the separation has led to a need for affirmation, trying to win his parents' approval by repeatedly rehashing his accomplishments in school (feeding off their constant nagging on the importance of a good education). For Qin, their strong willed teenaged daughter, her grandparents - now only her grandmother - are her true parents and are entitled to her deference, rejecting their attempts at discipline and authority. With Qin eager to assert her independence and leave the village to try her hand at factory work, the Zhangs' relatively benign drama of getting home each New Year holiday becomes a potent commentary on the broader cultural significance of rapid industrialization on traditional values of family, caring for elders, and providing a better life for the next generation. Rather than auguring the promise of a new year, the holiday becomes a paradoxical signpost for what has been irreparably lost in the pursuit of progress and economic relief. As Fan poetically remarks during the Q&A on the parents' enduring sacrifices and hardship for their family, "they burn their candles out so that their children's light could shine brightly."

Posted at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, New Directors/New Films

April 11, 2010

I Am Love, 2009

With its baroque interiors and saturated compositions, Luca Guadagnino's sprawling I Am Love recalls the melodramas of Luchino Visconti in its lush and operatic, if oddly clinical and overwrought treatise on passion, identity, and destiny. And like Visconti's The Leopard, a majestic dinner party also foretells the end of a way of life: the retirement of Milanese textile magnate, Edoardo Recchi (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his decision to cede the reins of the family business to his son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) as well as Tancredi's oldest son, Edo (Flavio Parenti). With her husband and son now immersed in the day-to-day operations of the company and her only daughter, Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) studying abroad, Tancredi's Russian-born wife, Emma (Tilda Swinton) is confronted with the isolation and boredom of her increasingly empty, well-appointed household (in one episode, Emma tries to engage her attendant, Ida [Maria Paiato] in a conversation, but is respectfully cut short, mindful of their class difference). Embarking on an extended holiday through the Italian countryside en route to Betta's photography exhibition, Emma's senses are soon re-awakened by the change of scenery, and with it, a newfound liberation and resurfaced identity away from the Recchi clan. Guadagnino deploys an arsenal of familiar, allusive, piecemeal plots in lieu of a tightly woven narrative to convey Emma's rekindled passion and reconnection to her past (including the use of an intrusive, swollen musical soundtrack): the equation of food with the senses (Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate), the coupling in the wilderness as a reflection of essential human desire (Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus), the tragedy of discovery and rejection (Louis Malle's Damage). Rather than a modern day take on the classical melodrama by interweaving storytelling and evocative imagery, I Am Love proves to be as fragile and diffused as the façade of its hermetic, carefully constructed beautiful world.

Posted at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2010, New Directors/New Films

April 10, 2010

Dogtooth, 2009

In Yorgos Lanthimos's previous film, Kinetta, an amateur film crew converges at a resort hotel in the off season to reenact accident and crime scenes, blurring the bounds between reality and staging in their obsessive attention to detail and complete immersion in their inscrutable project. In a sense, Dogtooth proves to be an extension of these themes of isolation, psychological ambiguity, and constructed reality. Each day, after their father (Christos Stergioglou) drives away from the gates of their secluded house in the suburbs, the older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), younger daughter (Anna Kalaitzidou), and son (Hristos Passalis) follow a strict regimen of tape-recorded (creative) vocabulary lessons (one that oddly assigns new definitions to everyday words), prescribed meals, and physical activities under the watchful eye of their mother (Michelle Valley). As in Kinetta, their motives remain unclear, and only the performance of the absurd ritual betrays their anxiety and longing. During the Q&A for the film, Lanthimos indicated that his initial idea was a science fiction in which families were being outlawed, and the lengths that people would go to in order to keep their own family intact. Intriguingly, the temporally indeterminate setting - represented by rotary dial telephones, cassette recorders, and VCRs - not only alludes to the film's conceptual origin, but also reinforces the children's hermetic existence that, like the obsolete household gadgets, is equally carefully preserving and repressively stunting.

Posted at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, New Directors/New Films

April 5, 2010

Sound and Fury, 1988

While the highly stylized, oneiric sequences in Sound and Fury portend Jean-Claude Brisseau's preoccupation with erotic imagery, his visceral, unsentimental portrait of childhood alienation nevertheless aligns closer to the naturalism of Ken Loach's Kes and Jean Eustache's Mes petites amoureuses than the surrealism of his later films. Indeed, Bruno's (Vincent Gasperitsch) initiation into his new life in the suburbs proves to be as mythological as the shrouded women that occupy his waking dreams, greeted by a real-life trial by fire as he runs a gauntlet of burning doormats that have been set ablaze by his reckless neighbor, Jean-Roger (François Négret). Arriving at an empty apartment with a bird in tow following the death of his guardian, Bruno's aimlessness is further compounded by his mother's frequent absences from home (communicating with him only through assorted notes that she leaves behind), a sense of isolation that further draws him to Bruno and his equally dysfunctional, yet fiercely devoted family. Another surrogate also surfaces in Bruno's life. Struggling to keep up with his grade level, Bruno's idealistic teacher (Fabienne Babe) offers to tutor him after school and becomes a neutralizing influence to Jean-Roger's increasingly destructive antics. But when Jean-Roger's household is upended by the news of his older brother's (Thierry Helene) decision to move out, Bruno once again finds himself caught up in the entropy of his friend's unraveling life, torn between a need to belong and to be loved. By relegating his now familiar (and arguably indulgent) images of ecstatic angels into the periphery, Sound and Fury is perhaps Brisseau's most accessible and honest film, retaining the intriguing, provocative nature of his body of work without the distraction of overripe sexuality that has diluted his later films (most notably Secret Things and Exterminating Angels).

Posted at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, New Directors/New Films

April 4, 2010

Victor... Before It's Too Late, 1998

In Sandrine Veysset's Victor... Before It's Too Late, social observation and whimsicality oddly - but seamlessly - converge into a bracing exploration of family, connection, and healing. From the opening sequence of an anxious Victor (Jérémy Chaix) staring out at mobile airplanes with both wistfulness and fear that segues into a shot of him running away in the dark of night after a seemingly surreal act of violence, Veyssett creates something of a eccentric realist fable. Rescued by carnival attendant Mick (Mathieu Lané) who promptly deposits him at the door of a prostitute, Triche (Lydia Andrei), Victor soon finds a kindred spirit in the troubled young woman, bound together by a mutual history of parental abuse and sublimated dysfunction. Veysett ingeniously captures the ambiguity between reality and imagination to reflect Victor's confusion and uncertainty over the adult world around him (a sense of dread that is also reinforced by him wearing a red coat that evokes images of Red Riding Hood traversing the forest), striking a delicate balance between gritty realism and fractured fairytale that, like Mick's traveling carnival, offers respite in its fleeting moments of mundane grace.

Posted at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, New Directors/New Films

March 7, 2010

Morphia, 2008

Adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov's collection of autofictional stories, A Country Doctor's Notebook, Aleksei Balabanov's Morphia is an unvarnished portrait of rural Russia at the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution. Told from the perspective of an idealistic young doctor, Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin), Morphia retains the humor and texturality of Bulgakov's prose to underscore Polyakov's difficult and overwhelming adjustment to the isolation of life in the country where he has moved to serve as the region's only physician. Still uncertain over his medical skills (often running back from the clinic to his nearby study in order to review textbooks on the medical procedures that he is about to perform) and struggling to cope with the backwardness of the community that often endanger his patients (in one episode, the parents of a girl suffering from acute asphyxia refuse to consent to an emergency tracheotomy, arguing that such a procedure would cause certain death), Polyakov finds unexpected respite in a morphine injection that had been administered by head nurse, Anna Nicolaevna (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) to treat an allergic reaction. However, as the demands of his job continue to mount, Polyakov's dependence soon turns into full-blown addiction, leading him to increasingly desperate and reckless acts when a war-driven medical rationing threatens to cut off his supply. By emphasizing the intersection of personal and national history, Balabanov not only captures the social conditions that enabled the revolution, but also establishes Polyakov's obsession and paranoia within the context of his seemingly more altruistic efforts to educate the rural community, not unlike the agitprop trains that toured the countryside to spread the gospel of the revolution (note that Polyakov is first seen arriving by train). In essence, by correlating Polyakov's self-destruction with his idealism, Morphia also serves as a pointed allegory for the dysfunction that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union - a tragicomic denouement to a noble social experiment that, like the film's flawed, well-intentioned hero, had lost its way.

Posted at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, Film Comment Selects

Air Doll, 2009

During a poignant encounter in Hirokazu Kore-eda's idiosyncratic, yet droll and resonant contemporary fable, Air Doll, a reclusive doll maker, Sonoda (Jô Odagiri) tells a troubled inflatable doll turned video store clerk, Nozomi (Du-na Bae) that the main difference between her and a human being is biodegradability. In a way, Sonoda's simplified differentiation between burnable and nonburnable trash captures the essence of Air Doll as well, exploring not only socially reductive gender roles, but also the meaning of being human in a culture of technology, mass production, and consumption that substitutes connection for instant gratification. At its most basic is Nozomi's role as a sexual surrogate for her owner, Hideo (Itsuji Itao) who, despite naming her after a former girlfriend, prefers to avoid the emotional entanglements of a real-life relationship. Another is her misdirected attempt at goodwill towards an insecure receptionist that alludes to the problems of aging in a youth-obsessed society, having been increasingly marginalized at work, replaced by her younger coworker. Another is her friendship with an elderly man who relies on a portable breathing apparatus for survival, recasting the notion of the human body as a network of biological functions within the modern reality of artificial life support systems. Another surrogacy emerges in the brooding Junichi's (Arata) fetishistic attraction towards her, implied in his continued obsession (and perhaps guilt) over a lost love. It is this recurring convergence of organic and synthetic, structure and plasticity throughout the film that is also reflected in the bookending image of a young woman awakening to find beauty in the mundane, a transitory affirmation of humanity in the face of obsolescence and disposability.

Posted at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, Film Comment Selects

March 6, 2010

Land of Madness, 2009

In its idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary, self-confessional, and deconstruction, Land of Madness is a droll and refreshing throwback to Luc Moullet's early essay films like Anatomy of a Relationship and Origins of a Meal. Returning to his bucolic, ancestral hometown in the Southern Alps, Moullet embarks on a whimsical, homegrown investigation of the region's disproportionally high rate of mental illness. Proposing that this geographical hotbed forms a pentagonal "land of madness" - one that, for some unknown reason, has an inactive center that, like the eye of a hurricane, defies the phenomenon - Moullet suggests some suspect pathologies, perhaps mutations caused by a Chernobyl-styled irradiation, or behavioral adaptation to a medical affliction, such as a prevalence of goiter that would have invariably led to a culture of "slowness". Moullet then expounds on his theory by presenting a string of bizarre crimes that have occurred over the past century at the vertex towns - some motivated by passion, theft, or revenge, others remaining unsolved mysteries. As in his earlier essays, Moullet concludes with an intersection of personal experience and social observation that recontextualizes the basis of the argument and leads to further debate (with his wife, Antonietta Pizzorno) - in this case, a harbored family grief over a relative who had committed a senseless murder.

Posted at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Filed under 2010, Film Comment Selects