Since I will not be attending the annual Spanish Cinema Now program at Walter Reade this year, it's time to close out my 2005 Journal with my Senses of Cinema submission for their annual World Poll of 'Favorite Film Things' for the year.

My Top Ten for 2005 (in preferential order):

La Blessure (Nicolas Klotz, 2004)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005)
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005)
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel. 2005)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)
L'Intrus (Claire Denis, 2004)
A Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, 2005)
A Trip to the Louvre (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2004)

Honorable mentions:

State of Fear (Pamela Yates, 2005)
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)
Seoul Train (Jim Butterworth and Aaron Lubarsky, 2004)
The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)
L'Enfant (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005)

Posted by on Dec 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (23) | Filed under 2005

After recently seeing Yvonne Rainer's Film About a Woman Who... for a second time, I still found that all the words I could muster for this dense, overlapping, fractured, and impenetrable, but somehow idiosyncratically transfixing film was something of a stream of consciousness outline, jotting down passing observations with the idea that, by encapsulating them into discrete packets of information, I could continue to re-arrange them like puzzle pieces towards forming a more cohesive overarching picture. This intrinsic difficulty in trying to assign words to a particularly multilayered and experiential work that is also infused with impenetrably autobiographical elements is also evident in Shelley Green's analysis for the film in Radical Juxtaposition: The Films of Yvonne Rainer. Composed of individual essays for each of Rainer feature length films, from Lives of Performers to Privilege (the book was published in 1994 and does not include MURDER and murder from 1996), the coherence of the essays similarly reflect the trajectory of Rainer's films, as they evolved from more abstract, mixed media performance pieces towards a more central narrative-driven, multi-themed expositions. But perhaps the key to understanding Rainer's work is that there isn't always a key: an underlying modus operandi that pervades much of the avant-garde movement that is reflected in her comment, "Incongruity can transform the banal into the fantastic. Two images – familiar in ambience but incongruent in time – when juxtaposed, create a third reality".

One aspect of Rainer's filmmaking that does appear consistently within her films is to capture the nature of performance, from Lives of Performers which visually and thematically represents the filmmaker's transition from dance to film, to her later, more expositional works. At the core of these performances is to present the intrinsic nature of social behavior, one that seeks to suppress human fears and desires in order to lead an socially idealized life of eternal performance. It is within this context that Jack's interminable (and indecipherable) monologues throughout The Man Who Envied Women can be seen as a kind of social filibuster, an impenetrable wall of verbal performance - an assumed persona - that serves to distract from the underlying hollowness of the speaker.

It is interesting to note that Green also underscores the recurring theme of decapitation in The Man Who Envied Women, both literally, in a New York Times article of beheaded peasants in South America, and metaphorically, in Jack's empty verbal prestidigitations. In the subsequent film Privilege, the author uses the term "unhooked" to describe the physiological and emotional changes that the retired dancer, Jenny experiences with menopause: the idea of liberation from body and from biological processes, as well as psychologically, from the social competition of desirability. However, these themes empirically define a similar phenomenon: the extension of Rainer's central theme of performance (or conversely, one's psychological, biological, intellectual, or emotional liberation from the act of performance). It is this integral theme that also characterizes the actions of the unnamed heroine in Film About a Woman Who..., a sentimental ambivalence and indecision towards her lover and social role that Rainer manifests through a fragmented deconstructive celluloid world that, similar to the heroine's reality, is a reflective figment of her own imagination.

Posted by on Nov 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Film Related Reading

Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen's remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author's recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais' collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same year as Resnais' collaborative film with another nouvelle roman author, Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour), the film opens with a shot of a covered body on a gurney being loaded into the coroner's van accompanied by an off-screen narrator's explanation of what appears to have been a shooting accident during a hunting trip. The fourth wall is broken, and the film proceeds in flashback as the narrator begins to interrogate each hunter on the circumstances surrounding the incident - a beautiful woman named Guri (Benedikte Liseth), her husband Bjørn (Rolf Søder), and her spurned (or perhaps, current) lover, Bjørn's best friend, Knut (Tor Stokk) - filling in the details of their complicated shared history in alternating narrative turns, the reality of the nature of their shared intimacy tempered by individual perception (or perhaps, by a sense of guilt or complicity in the tragedy) and fractured by the altered perspective that invariably comes with each change of speaker. The inscrutable trio's informal testimonies begin to organically diverge, veer off in stream-of-consciousness tangents, be willfully suppressed, entangled in fanciful imagination, or become occluded in the haze of imperfect memory and subsumed desire, collapsing the planes of memory and imagination to a singularity where truth becomes malleable, and reality itself becomes as ephemeral as a waking dream.

Posted by on Nov 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

Although annotated with a running time of 98 minutes, the print for Uwe Jens Krafft's Raid on the Bergen Express that was screened for the program turned out to be a British cut of the film that clocked in at slightly less than one hour. With that reservation noted, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of the film in its current form. Ostensibly a hybrid of sorts between romantic comedy and action/caper film as two young men - a recently (albeit probationally) promoted newspaper advertising manager named Tom and a humorless, by-the-book officer named Lund - vie for the affections of Gerd, the daughter of the general manager for the national railroad, the film starts auspiciously with a long distance ski jump contest between Tom and Lund, a head-to-head competition that portents their romantic rivalry over Gerd. Unfortunately, the seamless choreography of this sequence is subsequently broken by what appeared to be gaping plot holes, with Tom inexplicably recruiting his friends for a plot to raid the Bergen Express on April 1st. Is his motivation to take revenge on Gerd's father who placed his promotion on contingency? Or perhaps it is to outwit Lund by staging a daring raid under his watch? Although the film does provide a resolution to these questions, the tidy denouement does little to reconcile the ethical quagmire that the actions in the film represent, an absurdity that would likely have been tempered if the missing sequences somehow deployed humor in order to justify the seemingly extreme measures concocted by the hero in order to win a girl's heart.

Posted by on Nov 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

Two of the earliest surviving silent films in the Norwegian Film Archives were included in the program, the first of which is Gunnar Sommerfeldt's epic ode to rugged individualism and self-reliance, The Growth of the Soil, based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by internationally renowned native author, Knut Pedersen Hamsun. Tracing the pioneering adventures of Isak (Amund Rydland), a man seemingly without a past who came upon a clearing in the woods of a "No Man's Land", far away from traces of civilization and decided to claim the area as his own, Isak's life becomes a contemporary parable for the birth of civilization, marrying an "unwanted" woman from a distant village named Inger (Karen Thalbitzer), endlessly toiling on their self-created frontier utopia, forging an enduring friendship with the district sheriff and his assistant after paying a state-ordered visit to the property in order to settle ownership, and becoming the reluctant founding father of a burgeoning town after the government decides to build a telegraph station within his property in order to connect two neighboring cities. Retaining the neo-romantic tone of Hamsun’s novel, the film is infused with a certain element of mysticism, fantasy, and suspension of disbelief, creating an oddly stilted atmosphere and logical incongruence that is at once realistic, yet otherworldly, intimate yet impersonal (a dichotomy that is perhaps best encapsulated in Inger sending Isak away on errands throughout the film, only to return in complete surprise to find that she had given birth to a child, apparently unaware of any of her pregnancies).

Posted by on Nov 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

One of the clear highlights of the Norwegian cinema series for me was Liv Ullmann's personal appearance for the introduction of her film debut as lead actress in what would prove to be the final film by Norway's first female director, Edith Carlmar, The Wayward Girl. Admitting that she initially found it odd that program director Richard Peña had chosen this somewhat (then) scandalous, low budget independent production by the husband and wife production team of Otto and Edith Carlmar, Ullmann subsequently realized that it would be an exciting opportunity to re-visit the film some 47 years later to see, not only to see how much she had changed since then (as she noted, the film was made five years before she met Ingmar Bergman and changed the course of her professional and personal life), but also how much society had changed since that time, when members of her own fairly religious family tried to keep the film from getting distributed after they had caught wind that she had appeared nude in some scenes. (Ms. Ullmann does, however, note that her grandmother was quite supportive throughout the entire ordeal and proud of the film and that, in fact, she had invited all of the residents in the wing of her nursing home to the screening after which, she jokingly adds, they never spoke to her again.)

Ullmann's anecdotes of the notoriously parsimonious Carlmars were also refreshingly candid, engaging, humorous, and delightful, such as her first contact with the Carlmars to express interest in the role (after having just finished a stage production in the title role of Anne Frank in a provincial theater company) upon which she was granted an interview with the provision that she pay for her own airplane fare in case they decide not to cast her (later on, she was also told that she was to provide her own wardrobe as part of her salary). Fondly remembering that the first question ever posed to her by the Carlmars was to ask if she was a virgin (which, she reasoned that if she had told the truth, that they would not even entertain the idea of her playing the part of the wayward girl), she promptly responded that she was not, which, although she realized immediately that they did not believe her, she self-effacingly jests that that they must have been swayed by her acting. Ullmann shares another anecdote in her character's befriending of a sheep in the film that, as she recalls, died in real-life (as it does in the film). Looking to economize, the Carlmars then served the sheep as part of the wrap-up party. As Ullmann would eloquently conclude, her acting may not have been the most polished (a remark that says more about her own exacting nature when it comes to her craft than in the detection of any perceptible weakness in her characterization of Gerd), but it remains, for her, certainly the most honest of her performances that she would ever commit to film, made by a young artist who wanted to prove her skill, mettle, and passion for the craft, both to the world and to herself.

As it turns out, The Wayward Girl is something of a minor gem - a film that, not only pushes the artistic bounds of filming sexual liberation given the morality of the times, but also captures the dichotomy of the exuberance and freedom of youth and the subconscious realization of the eventual need to conform to societal expectations that comes with growing up. At the heart of the film is a pair of runaway young lovers, Gerd (Ullmann), the illegitimate child of a perennially absent, self-absorbed mother, and Anders, a university student from an upstanding middle-class family, who sneak away into an abandoned cabin in the woods to lead a Garden of Eden existence of love, complete abandon, and self-reliance. Rather than rendering a simple cautionary tale of reckless young love, Carlmar creates a thoughtful and provocative portrait on the process of maturation and awakening to social constraints and moral responsibility that ultimately serve to extinguish the light of youth.

Posted by on Nov 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

In the review for Sara Johnsen's understated and intelligently realized debut feature Kissed by Winter, Mode Steinkjer writes, "The last part of the film's key moments are accompanied by Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley in his version that is both beautiful and atmospheric. For me the song works to elevate the drama because the connection is unconsciously linked to Buckey's own fate". This insightful association does, indeed, reside at the core of the film, as the emotional trajectories of three families converge within the arc of an unexpected - though perhaps, not entirely unforeseen - tragedy and its ensuing repercussions in a small, provincial town in Norway: a country doctor, Victoria (Anika Hallin), who recently separated from her husband (Göran Ragnerstam) and the painful memories of her life in Oslo in order to start over, a snow plough driver, Kaj (Kristoffer Joner) who painstakingly built a dream home for his wife only to be abandoned by her, and a stern and devout Iranian immigrant couple, (Michalis Koutsogiannakis and Mina Azarian) whose troubled, missing son Darjosh (Jade Francis Haj) was found dead on the side of a snow embankment without shoes and curiously marked by a series of puncture wounds on the soles of his feet. Unfolding as a seeming whodunit mystery, the film is, instead, a muted, yet incisive portrait of the underlying grief, guilt, pain, and internalized, misdirected trauma felt by the characters as they struggle to come to terms with their own insensitivity (or more appropriately, obliviousness) and sense of moral culpability in the tragedy of a young man's death. Filmmaker Johnsen demonstrates a natural ability to convey the gentle humor of, and quiet affection for, her endearing, but emotionally isolated characters, a compassion that is exquisitely captured in the remarkably rendered performance by Swedish actress Anika Hallin (who remarked during the Q&A that her acting career had, up to this point, been mostly playing the role of law enforcement officials in crime dramas).

Posted by on Nov 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

Norwegian cinema is integrally rooted in the presentation of landscape as character, and this integration is particularly evident in Arne Skouen's Nine Lives. Told in extended flashback, the story is based on the real-life experience of resistance fighter Jan Baalsrud who became the sole survivor of a sabotage mission to blow up a German war boat anchored in then-occupied Norwegian territory, only to be betrayed at their reconnaissance point when their contact, a shoemaker named Hansen, is replaced by another shoemaker named Hansen who is sympathetic to the Fascist government of Vidkun Quisling. Forced to navigate his way through the mountains alone in order to cross the border into Sweden for safety and medical treatment for his injured leg (after sustaining a gunshot wound in the foot), Baalsrud inevitably stumbled into the kindness of strangers and other pockets of resistance fighters and sympathetic villagers willing to help him despite personal risk to ensure his safe crossing. Skouen's combination of spare dialogue with extended shots of Baalsrud and his guides navigating through the dangerous and inhospitable terrain (and unpredictable weather) of the mountains creates a taut and dramatic portrait of one person's perseverance and enduring spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity and seemingly inescapable death, a juxtaposition of man and unconquerable nature that also characterizes the atmosphere of the nation's wartime occupation.

Posted by on Nov 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

The first film on tap for A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema was Rune Denstag and Sivge Endresen's Too Much Norway, a film that, as a Norwegian American audience member appropriately pointed out, was a film "made for Norwegians, not for export." Indeed, there are no indications of a National Geographic travelogue at work in Denstag and Endresen's humorous and meditative essay: no picture postcard shots of the tundra, Lapps in costume, or national landmarks, but rather, (literally) launches from a certain familiarity and insight into the national history into a tongue-in-cheek reflection of the country's nascent history since the dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1905. Told from the fictional perspective of an aging astronaut (played by artist and writer Odd Borretzen) who has lived throughout much of the country's independent history, the film is an alternately self-effacing, whimsical, cheerful, and thoughtful portrait of a small, but wealthy and well-educated European country striving to make its mark on the world stage (through pioneering expeditions into - and subsequent annexations of territory within - the South Pole and excellence in Olympic games) while still struggling to define what it means to be Norwegian (an opening collage of multi-ethnic Norwegians dispels the myth of the country as a monoethnic society). In essence, it is this pervading spirit of self-reliance that would seem to define Norway's history through its first century as an independent nation, not only from its separation from Sweden, but also recently, in its rejection of joining the European common market: a determination to retain its own sense of culture and national identity in an age of increasing globalization and interchangeable economic unions.

Posted by on Nov 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Norwegian Cinema

Michael Haneke's latest offering, Caché brilliantly converges towards early Harun Farocki themes of surveillance and terrorism though images while retaining his own recurring themes on the abstraction of videoimage representation (as in The Seventh Continent), the desensitization of images (as in Benny’s Video), and the breakdown of (social) order as a consequence of failed communication (as in Code Inconnu) to create a challenging and provocative examination of guilt, complacency, and reckoning. From the opening stationary image of a quiet suburban neighborhood that begins to display video tracking marks, revealing the surveillance nature of the recorded image (as Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) study the anonymously recorded tape of the front of their house for clues on its origin), Haneke presents a literal self-projection of the characters' actions (and implicitly, our own) that serves as a mirror to examine human conscience and collective responsibility. Moreover, as the frequency and unsettling specificity of the mysterious video correspondence escalates to include child-like, crudely drawn images of seemingly intimate knowledge from incidents from Georges' childhood - in particular, his one-sided rivalry with his Algerian "almost" brother, Majid (Maurice Benichou) for his parents' attention - the tone soberingly shifts from sinister mystery and critical self-assessment (and national, as in the case of the massacre of Algerian residents by French authorities in 1961) to one of exposing the baseness of instinctual human behavior that manifests in destructive, inhuman acts of crippling paranoia, racism, misdirected blind aggression (as in the case of the couple's near collision with a cyclist on a one-way road, an episode that hauntingly recalls the catalytic encounter of Code Inconnu), and self-righteous retaliation. The film's penultimate sequence of Georges' surveillance-like, regressive dream into the pivotal episode that lies at the core of his childhood guilt, captured from a stationary, medium shot camera recalls the framing of the opening sequence (as well as prefigures the concluding sequence), establishing a connection between the two visually innocuous - but implicitly traumatic images: an omniscient view, not from a distant, God's eye perspective, but from an equally inescapable perspective of personal conscience.

Posted by on Oct 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

Aleksandr Sokurov has always seemed to be particularly in his element with his dense and amorphous expositions of integrated, Eastern spirituality (A Humble Life, Dolce) and the commutation of collective history (Oriental Elegy, Russian Ark, so it comes as no suprise that the third installment of his historical tetralogy, The Sun - a film that incorporates both aspects of these recurring themes - is his most accomplished (to date) of the series. Rendering a painstainkingly detailed portrait, not of the biographical life of Hirohito (Issei Ogata), the (hu)man, but rather, of the culturally unquestioned institution of the divine Emperor of Japan, Sokurov’s vision eschews the conventional framework of illustrating the turmoil and decimation of the waning days of war in order to present a more challenging and illuminating portrait of a physically slight, pensive, and perhaps reluctant national ruler trapped in the eternal performance of traditional rituals and bound to the rigid social codes of his inherited role. From the opening sequence of the emperor impassively listening to his itinerary for the day over a private breakfast - including his exact hour for catching an afternoon nap - the film provides an image of the imprisoning rituals - and consuming weight - of assumed power. The selection of Richard Wagner's elegiac compositions (Wagner also composd the magnum opus operatic tetralogy, the Ring Cycle) seems especially suited to this twentieth century portait of götterdämmerung, chronicling the literal twilight of the sun god, as the defeated Japanese emperor transforms from deity to mere mortal after his official surrender to General Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson) and the American occupiers. However, even more than the actions of Hirohito himself, the film's incisive study of the cultural framework that underpins the source of the emperor's absolute power provides a particularly relevant context to Sokurov's expositions on the dynamics of power and (false) idolatry, most notably in the filmmaker's treatment of the mythification of a political leader that seems eerily resonant of contemporary American politics in which a destructive culture of unquestioned faith, intractable policies, isolationism, and evocation of divine rule serves to unwittingly precipitate the nation's own predestined failure and international marginalization.

Posted by on Oct 09, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

After two films that admittedly left me uncertain over the direction of Hou Hsiao Hsien's cinema, it was particularly satisfying to see Hou incorporate his earlier (and specifically, more overtly political) films with his recent expositions into more distilled and highly elliptical mood pieces. Evoking Chantal Akerman's Toute une nuit in its essential distillation of singular, transformative episodes that define the formative substance of all romantic relationships, Three Times presents a series of vignettes, each chronicling a series of understated encounters between two lovers played by same actors Chang Chen and Shu Qi, as their destinies weave through the complex socio-political terrain throughout the last century of Taiwanese history. Set in a 1966 rural province, the first chapter A Time of Love recalls the nostalgic innocence of young love of Hou's earlier film Dust in the Wind as a young man spends the few remaining days of his civilian life at a billiard parlor before reporting for compulsory military service and falls for the parlor's attractive, new employee. Infused with a tonal romanticism of unarticulated longing that rivals the atmospheric texturality of a Wong kar-wai retro period piece, Hou's melodic rendition is imbued with a poetry of sensually charged gestures and understated intimacy.

The second chapter A Time for Freedom unfolds as a silent film variation of Flowers of Shanghai. Set at a brothel in 1911 during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the film follows the evolving relationship between a highly influential newspaper editor (and political activist) and a courtesan approaching the age of marriage who is prompted to re-evaluate her own future when her patron decides to intervene in the fate of one of the junior courtesans. Retaining the atmosphere of insularity that pervades Hou's earlier film, the episode similarly reflects Taiwan's increasing estrangement from mainland China at the turn of the century while presenting a social critique on the consuming national and sexual politics of the times.

The third chapter, a contemporary piece set in Taipei entitled A Time for Youth recreates the modern-day rootlessness of Goodbye South Goodbye (sans implicit humor) and Millennium Mambo as a young couple lead an aimless existence of club hopping, wordless intimacy, and escapist motorcycle rides through town. Replacing the stylized, melancholic romanticism of the earlier chapters with a dedramatized, alienated realism, Hou illustrates a sense of estrangement borne, not of external circumstances, but of a pervasive spiritual inertia. Expounding on similar themes of absent parents, broken communication, and missed connection that Hou explores in his previous film, Café Lumière, the film becomes an elegy, not for the nostalgia of a bygone era, but of lost opportunity in an age of liberation.

Posted by on Oct 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

David Gatten's largely text-based impressionist work-in-progress omnibus, Secret History of the Dividing Line: A True Account in Nine Parts is, at once, a mind-numbing, transfixing, frustrating, poignant, and narcoleptic grand unified theory into the figurative separation between word and image, film and narrative, presence and absence, empire and colony, mortality and legacy. Weaving inexorably throughout Gatten's ambitiously conceived magnum opus are the themes of information tranference beyond a physical medium, the art of penmanship and mechanical printing, and the materiality of written language.

In the first installment, Secret History of the Dividing Line, the visibility of the physical line (as image) initially appears ordered: demarcating the on-screen textual chronology between year and cited history, as biographical text is presented on the life of William Byrd II of Westover, an eighteenth century colonist, author of the survey literature The History of the Dividing Line, A Journey to the Land of Eden that defined the border between North Carolina and Virginia (as well as a second publication that detailed the "secret history" of this demarcation), and one of the founding fathers of the state of Virginia who amassed one of the largest libraries - and perhaps the largest collection in the South - in the new land. The text is then abruptly truncated: the line between narrative and (film) image made palpably visible as magnified images of cement film splices create an equally alien, secondary landscape - like the constantly transforming text in the first half of the film - of pure abstraction.

In the second installment, The Great Art of Knowing, taken from the title of Athanasius Kircher's seventeenth century encyclopedia, the line becomes increasingly disrupted and fragmented, as biographical excerpts appear on Byrd's daughter, Evelyn, a pensive and beautiful socialite who was once presented before the king of England, reflecting the emotional violence of her separation from her one true love, a Catholic English gentleman named Charles Mordaunt at the hands of her overprotective, devoutly Protestant father, who forcibly sent her back to Virginia. This sense of turbulent rupture is also reflected in the "separation" of the collected books of the vast Byrd library through an auction that is undertaken by heirs of the Byrd estate in order to settle a family debt. As in the first installment, Gatten explores the interrelationship of text as conveyer of ideas and image object through connotative, visual manipulations of text, presenting the ill-fated affair between Evelyn and Mordaunt as a series of increasingly disordered, decontextualized, and fractured textual images that begin to lose coherence and approach the point of information saturation.

The third installment, Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, represents a conceptual shift from the visibly defined demarcation between text and film image (through the anatomy of cement splices) to a more integrated abstraction between words and images, emptiness and physical spaces. Linked together by the texturality of forgotten objects and frayed (or physically manipulated) imprinted text images, the film represents a thematic collapsing of distinct objects that further erases the bounds between image (and text) from meaning, where recursive shifting of once seemingly separate entities become alternate presentations of a visible (and invisible) continuum - a decontextualized mood piece where absence and emptiness become increasingly tactile - an impression.

The fourth installment The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found, is an even more dissociated film from the previous installment that further shifts the thematic focus of the abstract narrative from William Byrd II to his daughter, Evelyn, as entries from her personal diary and passages from her favorite books are projected onto the screen, reflecting her thoughtfulness, romanticism, fragility, profound longing, and ultimately despair for her lost love: the tragic resolution of her star-crossed affair often romanticized in the annals of history as a death from a broken heart. Innate in the fragmented passages is a sense of solitude and a poetic heart - exhausted and adrift - a wandering soul trapped within the walls of a stately, but oppressive man-made sanctuary. It is within this image of torment that color appears for the first time in the series - perhaps a metaphoric respite from the monochromatic ache of despair that suffuses the film - a visual (and spiritual) transcendence through the act of reading.

Posted by on Oct 04, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Filed under 2005, Views from the Avant-Garde

Resonating in a similar vein as the organically meditative - though less ethereal - cultural elegies of Aleksandr Sokurov (specifically, Elegy of a Voyage and Russian Ark or a stylistically flattened early Alain Resnais art documentary (most notably, Van Gogh and Guernica), A Trip to the Louvre seems on the surface to be devoid of elements that bear the signature of a Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet film: the emotive (if not histrionic) voice-over of an off-screen narrator replaces the tempered, atonal, alienated speech of a Straub/Huillet protagonist; the baroque images of European classical art replace the spare mise-en-scène; the absence of implicit social radicalization in the context of the film. Nevertheless, upon closer inspection (and aided by visual repetition since the film is presented in two near identical parts, with modulations on the opening and concluding sequences - the latter, repurposed from their earlier film Ouvriers, paysan), the film inevitably resolves into more familiar Straub/Huillet terrain of converging sensual, emotional, and cerebral engagement and challenging the aesthetic notions (and interrelations) of beauty, truth, and realism.

Adapted from the biography of Paul Cézanne by Aix-en-Provence poet and admirer Joachim Gasquet, the film presents a series of paintings from the Louvre shot in long takes from a stationary camera as an off-screen female narrator (Julia Kolta) assumes an impassioned first-person observation and criticism of the artworks in a distancing (gender inconguent) voice performance as Cézanne. A painting is shown in its tableaux-like physical tactileness, but appears before the viewer as an image reproduction: the mutation from object (and inorganic performer) to image occurring between the apparatus of the camera and the human eye. A highlighted detail, often a seemingly trivial subscene from a richly detailed and complex work such as Veronese's The Marriage at Cana, is shot through the proportionality of the overarching image such that the contextual aspect is preserved within the totality of the visible camera - and canvas - frame, but appears microcosmically autonomous from it. Eschewing works that seek the idealization - and therefore, negation of the human essence - of the physical body through formalized gestures, embellishment, and impossible symmetry, Cézanne delights in the realism of voluptuous forms, textures, and incidental serendipity that elevate the quotidian to the sublime, the transfiguration of image reproduction to humanist work of art, the perfection of the imperfect.

Posted by on Oct 03, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2005, Views from the Avant-Garde

Filmed during American postwar occupation, The Ball at Anjo House is a curiously atypical Japanese film that hews eerily closer to the privileged, dysfunctional families and moral abandon of The Magnificent Ambersons or a Douglas Sirk melodrama than a Shochiku middle-class shomin-geki: the proud family patriarch, Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) who continues to harbor the illusion that his name will be sufficient to secure credit and save the family mansion from foreclosure; the aimless, playboy son, Masahiko (Masayuki Mori) who seduces a maid with empty promises of marriage and instead, latches on to Yoko (Keiko Tsushima), the daughter of the blackmarketeer, Shinkawa (Masao Shimizu) to whom his father is financially indebted; the prudish daughter Akiko (Yumeko Aizome) who once spurned the affections of the handsome family chauffeur for an ultimately (and scandalously) failed marriage to a socially prominent man; the pragmatic, devoted daughter (Setsuko Hara) who accepts the family's change in fortune and is inspired by the idea of forging a new beginning (and, perhaps, away from the intractable social codes that bind their class). Filmmaker Kozaburo Yoshimura's portrait of the privileged class, scripted by Kaneto Shindo, is highly formalized and stilted, but nevertheless, presents a provocative portrait of the inevitable democratization of class structure - and, more importantly, the chaotic upending of social order - in postwar Japan (as symbolically encapsulated in the physical toppling of the ancestral samurai family armour that is prominently displayed in the main entrance of the estate). Perhaps the most incisive sequence in the film is revealed in the sublime father and daughter tango that concludes the film - a change in sentiment (and literal pace) that hints at an image of struggling to keep in-step with the uncertain, disorienting, and foundation-less realities of contemporary, postwar society.

Posted by on Oct 02, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Filed under 2005, Shochiku at 110

Keisuke Kinoshita's wartime film, Army is anything but the rousing call to arms and reinforcement of patriotism that the authorities had envisioned the film would be. Known for his Ofuna-flavored shomin-geki "women's pictures", Kinoshita subverts the official themes of duty, allegiance to the emperor, and national glory. Contrasting the emotional (and philosophical) rigidity of the family patriarchs through several generations as they try to instill the virtues of service and duty as career officers against the exquisitely haunting final sequence of an extended tracking shot of the mother, played by the great actress and frequent Mizoguchi heroine (and erstwhile muse) Kinuyo Tanaka, running alongside her son as the new military recruits march through the streets in a send-off parade before being deployed to the battlefront, the lingering image of the price of war becomes imprinted, not in the father's stern and uncompromising life lessons but in the complexity of emotions revealed through a mother's anxious, tearful farewell.

Posted by on Oct 02, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Filed under 2005, Shochiku at 110

One of my favorite sequences in any film is the remarkably fluid lateral dolly shot through the financially ruined Furusawa household that opens Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion, so it is particularly satisfying to see Hiroshi Shimizu further refining this technique in the seemingly effortless, long take, outdoor tracking shot of a pair of weekend vacationers from Tokyo (a conversation about the pleasure of having the powder removed from their faces suggest that they are geisha) descending onto a hot spring resort that cuts into a lateral dolly shot through the rooms occupied by the longer-term residents of a resort inn. This visual convergence in Ornamental Hairpin serves as an impeccable foreshadowing of the narrative intersection between the two groups as one of the young women from the weekend revelers, Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka) inadvertently loses her ornamental hairpin in the spring waters and is "found" by a soldier in recuperation from a war injury (Chishu Ryu) who cuts his foot on the object. Attempting to downplay the incident, the soldier calls the episode as almost "poetic", a sentiment that the professor (Tatsuo Saito) then misconstrues as the soldier's implicit romanticism for the owner of the hairpin - "a poetic illusion" that now seems within grasp when Emi decides to come in person in order to retrieve her property and personally apologize for the mishap. Filmed during the uncertainty of the Pacific War, Shimizu's seemingly escapist, insular tale, based on a Masuji Ibuse short story, nevertheless reveals a crepuscular, allegorical meaning in the juxtaposition of the residents' romanticism towards the owner of the ornamental hairpin, and the final shot of Emi in mid-step ascending the staircase - a state of limbo, isolation, and fugue - a reluctant return to reality and dissipation of the poetic illusion.

Posted by on Oct 02, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Filed under 2005, Hiroshi Shimizu, Shochiku at 110

Near the halfway mark of the first week at the festival, Bohdan Slama's exquisitely rendered Something Like Happiness provides a good-natured, refreshing, leisurely paced, and satisfying palate cleanser: a slice-of-life serio-comedy on devotion, friendship, family, and missed connection. At the heart of the film is the scruffy bohemian, a perennial "sweet guy" named Tonik (Pavel Liska) who lives with his aunt in a derelict house on a scrap of land overlooking a sprawling industrial complex in which they are two of the few remaining holdouts in a proposed factory expansion project (long after other residents, including his own parents, have moved into residential apartments with all modern conveniences). Secretly carrying a torch for his childhood best friend, a beautiful store clerk named Monika (Tatiana Vilhelmová), his prospects for winning her heart prove ever fading when, at the start of the film, her dashing and affable boyfriend immigrates to America and subsequently sends her a ticket to join him after he secures a steady job for both of them. However, when the Tonik and Monika become unexpected custodians to a pair of young boys after their mother is institutionalized, her decision to defer her trip until her release from the hospital provides the shy Tonik with a glimmer of hope for their long awaited romantic union. Like the character Tonik, the film is also gentle and unassuming, but ultimately haunting and endearing portrait of compassion, unrequited longing, and human dignity.

Posted by on Sep 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

During the Q&A for the film, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman commented that the inspiration behind his remarkable transformation into the character of novelist Truman Capote came from the idea of someone who needed the other person much more than the other needed him, but concealed this lopsided dependence in such a manner that the other believes the reverse. This posture provides an insightful glimpse, not only into the controversial relationship between Truman and Perry (Clifton Collins, Jr.) one of the killers of the Clutter family whose senseless murder served as the basis for his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, but also in his self-consumption and eccentricity. From the opening sequence recreating the discovery of the bodies in the Klutter family in their Kansas farmhouse that cuts into the image of Capote transfixedly reading the article on the murder from his New York City apartment (figuratively holding the open ended resolution of their deaths in his hands), filmmaker Bennett Miller creates a sense of interconnected fatedness in this chance "encounter", a compulsion that would propel him to visit Kansas with his childhood friend (and implicit beard) Nell Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). While I disagree with Bennett's characterization of Truman as a narcissist but rather, as an insecure outsider whose abandonment as a child led him to perpetually seek attention, the film achieves resonance into Capote's true character (and ties into the theme of fate) in a scene in which Truman describes Perry as coming from the same house, an image of himself who left through the back door, while he left through the front.

Posted by on Sep 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

A well-crafted riff on Yasujiro Shimazu's familiar shomin-geki films, this time transplanted to a group of Western opera stage actors working in the bustling theater and entertainment district of Asakusa in old downtown Tokyo, The Lights of Asakusa is a charming and elegantly realized ensemble slice-of-life serio-comedy. Centering on the acting troupe's attempts to harbor a virginal young chorus girl from the lecherous advances of one of the theater's most powerful patrons - and abetted in no small part by the troupe director's wife and principal actress Marie (played by the legendary screen and stage performer, and frequent Ozu and Naruse actress, Haruko Sugimura) - the plot provides a simple backdrop for the ecletic personalities of the film's cast of characters: a struggling painter who derives inspiration from European art, a veteran actor who contemplates retirement after being jeered onstage, a lonely arcade worker who longs to escape the tawdry lights of the district, a well-intentioned actor (Ken Uehara) whose off-stage samaritan deeds and insistence on fairness and righteousness rival the heroics of his on-stage persona, an older, world wise chorus girl who takes it upon herself to protect her young co-worker's honor. Eschewing plot in favor of richly textured characters, the film is a thoughtful and affectionate portrait of camaraderie, pragmatism, and human decency.

Posted by on Sep 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Shochiku at 110, Yasujiro Shimazu

Hiroshi Shimizu's government-pressured, militarism-era film A Star Athlete is a breezy, refreshingly lighthearted, and subtly subversive slice-of-life comedy that centers on an all-day student march in formation and armed combat drills through the rural countryside for military training exercises. Shimizu demonstrates his deceptively facile adeptness and virtuoso camerawork through a series of extraordinarily choreographed plan sequence shots: a track-and-field race around the campus track between the school's start athlete Seki (Shuji Sano) and his constantly spurring - and sparring - team mate (Chishu Ryu); an extended dolly sequence of the students' march as bemused villagers and flirtatious, love-struck young women alternately respectfully step aside, playfully trail, obliviously obstruct, and amorously chase the dashing students in uniform; a mock battlefield charge assault through muddy fields as a guilt-ridden motley crew of travelers on the road scramble to flee from the students in a mistaken belief of being chased in retribution for their petty transgressions during their brief stay in the village.

Posted by on Sep 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2005, Hiroshi Shimizu, Shochiku at 110

Dorota Kedzierzawska continues to demonstrate her strength in directing young actors (particularly evident in the performance of the lead actor, Piotr Jagielski) that she had earlier illustrated in The Crows with her latest film I Am. Recalling Ken Loach's Kes or Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows in its modern day, pseudo-Dickensian tale of instinctual survival shot from a child's perspective, the film is a familiar story of a neglected, troubled child's fugue, retreat into a makeshift world of his own imagined creation, and inevitable return to the "outside" world, I Am renders a less metaphoric journey for parental connection in a similarly suffused and foreboding vein of Andrei Zvyagintsev's Return). However, while Kedzierzawska's execution is impeccable and remarkably adept, the film, nevertheless, retains an oddly sterile conventionality to its manner of storytelling, an impression that is further reinforced by composer Michael Nyman's swelling and overwrought (if not patently manipulative) soundtrack that suffuses each dramatic scene with an inconguent, near-mythic sense of tragedy.

Posted by on Sep 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

Mikio Naruse's elegantly distilled early silent film Every Night's Dreams provides an archetype for the filmmaker's recurring themes: pragmatic, determined women who tenaciously hold onto their failing relationships, weak men who lead a life of increasing dependence on the women they mistreat, life stations that grow baser as characters paradoxically strive to improve their situation. Structured in the framework of a melodrama, the story chronicles the life of a popular bar hostess and single mother named Omitsu (Sumiko Kurishima) as she struggles to rebuild her fractured family after her chronically unemployed husband (Tatsuo Saito) unexpectedly returns. Stylistically, Naruse incorporates a series of innovative camerawork: temporal cross-cutting, elliptical montage, and recurring shots of disembodied framing (most notably, in a night time sequence of running legs) the serve, not only to provide a compact precision - and therefore, emotional tension - to the film's pervasive atmosphere of entrapment and existential stasis, but also to reflect the characters' sense of disorientation and economic instability.

Posted by on Sep 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Filed under 2005, Shochiku at 110

In the essay Woman of the Mist and Gosho and the 1930s from the book Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Arthur Nolletti examines the complex narrative and visual strategies employed by Gosho that culminate in what would become one of his most accomplished works. Perhaps the most indicative of this style is his use of irony and subverted expectation. As the film begins, Bunkichi (Takeshi Sakamoto), an affable ne'er-do-well who married late (after sowing quite a few wild oats in his own youth) is approached by members of the community to head a collection drive for a commemorative lantern, a level of responsibility for which his wife Okiyo teasingly calls into question his suitability. Bunkichi further proves his irresponsibility when his widowed sister Otoku asks him to speak her son Seiichi in order to advise him to concentrate on his studies (instead of frittering his time reading novels) and instead, takes the young man out for a night of drinking. However, when Seiichi becomes involved in an even more serious - and potentially life-altering - predicament, Bunkichi takes him under his wing and assumes responsibility to mitigate the consequences of the young man's indiscretion. Gosho's richly textured home drama is a refined and seemingly effortless examination of duty, sacrifice, and maturity. The film's curious title, a reference to the out-of-favor geisha turned Ginza bar hostess Terue, provides an evocative and haunting metaphor for human transience.

Posted by on Sep 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Filed under 2005, Heinosuke Gosho, Shochiku at 110

From the seemingly effortless opening tracking shot through a middle-class neighborhood that terminates to a shot of two young men practicing baseball pitches in the backyard of their suburban home (and accidentally breaking the window of a neighbor's home), Yasujiro Shimazu illustrates his remarkable agility with the medium in the sublime shomin-geki (home drama), Our Neighbor Miss Yae. Ostensibly chronicling the story of a budding affection for the girl next door, Yaeko (Yumeko Aizome), the film is also a complexly (but gracefully) choreographed portrait of contemporary 1930s Japan, as the two households broach an array of traditional and modern social realities from divorce and extramarital affairs, to a young woman's sexual forthrightness, independence, and virginity. Shimazu's elegant command of narrative and camera is bolstered by the equally strong, natural performances of the actors (most notably, the great character actress, Chouko Iida), resulting in a remarkably fluid and delightfully satisfying slice-of-life portrait of prewar Japan.

Posted by on Sep 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Shochiku at 110, Yasujiro Shimazu

Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine is a breezy and efferverscent slice-of-life comedy on a harried - and easily distracted - freelance writer (Atsushi Watanabe) whose deadline for a commission work to write a play for a theater company in Tokyo is quickly approaching. Scouting for a suitable retreat where he can complete his draft, the playwright comes upon a house for rent in a quiet, rural enclave and decides to move in with his young family. However, the seemingly idyllic town soon proves to be a source of its own distractions, from mice scrurrying in the attic, to stray cats foraging in the garden, to the children waking in the middle of the night to demand their parents' attention. The final straw comes when a jazz band begins to rehearse at a neighboring house, prompting the playwright to pay a visit to the lady of the household, a Western-dressed moga (modern girl) who invites him to their jam session. The first all-talkie motion picture made in Japan, the film effectively showcases the strength of the technology, from evocative sound effects, to subtle inflections in dialogue, to the fully formed presentation of unconventional, cutting-edge music: a fitting and ebullient celebration and warm embrance of modern ways, creativity, and an open mind.

Posted by on Sep 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Filed under 2005, Heinosuke Gosho, Shochiku at 110

The title of the film provides a glimpse into the fragility of the hollow, empty life led by the main character: a middle-aged airbrush operator at an Ohio doll factory named Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) who takes cares for her invalid father, shuttles her car-less, twentysomething best friend and fellow factory worker Kyle (Dustin James Ashley) to his second job in neighboring West Virginia, and spends her evenings sewing doll clothes. It is a predictable routine that is soon perturbated when the company foreman hires a second airbrush operator named Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) to ramp-up production for a large order, a nebulous, young single mother with a penchant for stealing. Shot with a cast of non-professional actors, Steven Soderbergh's low budget indie film Bubble has the signature look - and rides the familiar clichés - of an independent film set in rural America: pot-smoking, high school drop-out blue collar workers, dysfunctional family lives (burdensome and unemployed parents, volatile ex-boyfriends, a steady diet of fast food), and distended sequences of dead time. Skirting the narrative and muted emotional arc of monotonic ritual, betrayal, and senseless violence, the characters' lives - like the film itself - are reflected in the dolls of their creation: fractured, colorless, inanimate, and underformed.

Posted by on Sep 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

Films about the effects of Israeli occupation on the Palestianian population are always bound to be inflammatory and subject to often unfair, prejudicial criticism of justifying terrorism, and this ugliness unfortunately surfaced from a particularly hostile member of the audience at the Q&A with filmmaker Avi Mograbi for his penetrating documentary Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. At the heart of Mograbi's organic essay is the juxtaposition of two events. The first is the ancient history of the mass suicide of the zealots at Masada during the Jewish Revolt as a final act of defiance against an inevitable Roman capture. The second is the Biblical text of the emasculated, blinded, and captured Nazirite Samson standing between the main pillars of the temple who implored God to find the strength to "avenge but one of my two eyes" (a phrase that, coincidentally, is also used in a rallying song by the minority militant, right-wing settlers), collapsing the temple - which brought his own death - in such a way that he killed more Philistines with his final act of suicidal retribution than during his lifetime. While the film does not inherently correlate the defiant act of the Masada with the modern-day act of suicide bombing, it was the juxtaposition of these two ideas that clearly vexed a few people. However, rather than directly commenting on the suicide bombing as a consequence of the occupation, the film instead explores the psychology behind the egregious act, laying bare the underlying callous indifference, insensitivity, racism, and uncertainty that the occupation has caused in the conduct of everyday life for the Palestinians: an ambulance carrying a seriously ill woman is physically blockaded by two armor tanks and repeatedly ordered to go home, refusing any pleas from the anxious husband and her family with the terse response "I don’t care. Go home!" broadcasted through a megaphone; a group of farmers who must cross a checkpoint in order to harvest their olives are refused permission to enter because of military exercises and denied information for a set time that they can return in order to be admitted entry; a group of young schoolchildren returning from school are refused passage through the checkpoint gates under "military orders" that the soldiers refuse to present. Mograbi’s vérité-styled filmmaking effectively captures the turbulence, humiliation, and uncertainty of occupation, presenting a thoughtful and incisive call to action for the return of humanity in increasingly entrenched and inhuman times.

Posted by on Sep 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

There is a palpable spirit of Robert Bresson (most notably Pickpocket and L'Argent) and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment at work in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L'Enfant, so it comes as no surprise that during the subsequent Q&A, the brothers remarked that one of the images that they had wanted to capture in the film was how the fallen hero, a petty thief and new father Bruno (Jérémie Régnier), learns to "see the woman facing him". This woman (Déborah François), appropriately named Sonia, is a Dostoevsky archetypal chracter: devoted, suffering, taken for granted. As in the Dardenne's earlier film, The Son, the "child" of the film is also a figurative embodiment of redemption that is defined by more than one character: the newborn son Jimmy who is sold by his father on a whim, the immature Bruno, a flightly and rootless young man who sees his son as a disposable accessory, the band of young boys recruited by Bruno to perpetrate the petty crimes for a share of the profits. In this respect, the repeated shots of Bruno aggressively pushing the pram through the streets (and subsequently, in a situational permutation of him pushing a scooter) becomes a refiguration of Raskolnikov's dream: an image of burden, reluctant responsibility, and duty.

Posted by on Sep 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy as Moussa Bathily's Le Certificat d'indigence that serve to impede the proper dispensation of proper medical care (and, more importantly, lose sight of the face of humanity behind human suffering), the film unfolds as an absurd subversion of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych in which the isolative process of dying becomes occluded in the pettiness, moralizing, helplessness, and coincidental distractions that invariably occupy everyday life as the lonely widower and retired engineer, Larazescu, is scuttled from one hospital to another throughout the evening after suffering from a bout of migraine and nausea. As in Tolstoy's novella, the process of death does not alter the process of living, but rather, becomes only a momentary distraction in an eternal - and seemingly interminable - human comedy.

Posted by on Sep 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

Regular Lovers is a quintessential Philippe Garrel film. Part self-exorcism of the failed idealism of the May 68 counter-culture revolution that inevitably burned out in a haze of recreational drug use, sexual liberation, and the inertia of bohemianism, and part elegy on love found in the wreckage of a heartbreaking aftermath that, too, becomes inevitably lost, the film follows the plight of a young poet and draft dodger, François, as he devolves from impassioned idealist and revolutionary, to hopeless romantic (who once - perhaps, half-heartedly - offered to put aside his art and find a wage-earning vocation in order to provide a more stable life for his new lover, Lilie), and eventually, to adrift bohemian and parasitic houseguest. The film's final sequence - an evocation of the romanticism of revolution - is a fitting double entendre that recalls an earlier extended dream sequence of the French Revolution, as the latent potency of the dross opium becomes a metaphor, not only for the crystalized potential for upheaval and (self)destruction that continues to sublimate within the souls of a consumed and demoralized May 68 generation, but also, in its stabilized, incombustible form, represents the consumed residue of a transitory and ephemeral moment of bliss and paradise lost.

Posted by on Sep 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (16) | Filed under 2005, New York Film Festival

In the book Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen, author John W. Hood provides an insightful examination of the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that have shaped filmmaker Mrinal Sen's personal and creative ideology. Born into a middle-class Bengali family in Faridpur in 1923, Hood provides a contextual frame of reference to the independence movement in this rural area as a "hotbed of the stream of the Independence Movement that was non-Gandhian in that it was characteristically violent." Sen's father, a nationalist and politically active lawyer, had the reputation throughout his career of defending fellow nationalists whose allegiance to insurgent organizations made it impossible for them to receive a fair trial under the very colonial government that they had sought to overthrow. It is, therefore, not surprising that Sen's politicization not only came at an early age, but would also deeply define his character (and that of his cinema) as well: a lifelong commitment to social causes that would be further galvanized with his involvement in the activism of the political left during his university days at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta. As Hood would later comment:

Mrinal Sen will always be regarded as a champion of lame ducks and underdogs. The Bengali poor - that vast majority of anonymity - perform a major role in many of his films, but never as heroes, only as victims. It will be remembered, of course, that Sen regards the notion of 'the noble poor' to be a perverse rationalization in favor of the status quo, and so in none of his films does he seek to idealize the masses in any way, portraying them rather in their material poverty, their ignorance, and most significantly, their powerlessness.

Hood also suggests that Sen's films are integrally rooted in the culture of Calcutta, citing that the city - often associated with nefarious Western connotations of decay, chaos, and misery (in particular, through the conjured images of the Black Hole of Calcutta in which British soldiers were imprisoned in a dungeon in 1756, Winston Churchill's missive during his stay in the region in which he comments "I shall always be glad to have seen it - namely that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again", and in the works of Mother Theresa in which the city has become inextricably associated with images of abject poverty) - instead provides a constant source of intellectual, philosophical, political, and social stimulation for the filmmaker through its natural state of constant flux and re-invention.

Sen's screen essay [Calcutta: My El Dorado] is sufficient to regard Calcutta itself as harbouring contradiction: wealth and poverty, splendour and squalor, pre-industrial and post-industrial economy, artistry and scholarship and disorder and ignorance, vibrant optimism and morbid pessimism. The really significant paradox is Calcutta's constant decay and its constant regeneration. The flood comes, the city survives, the floodwaters recede, the city, rejuvenated, springs back to life. No sooner to the police scatter the huts of the pavement dwellers than they are built again...For Chaitanya to cherish the man who dies every day, he must also be born every day.

It is this awareness of perpetual transformation that not only provides the creative stimulus for Sen's filmmaking, but also becomes an integral part of his narrative philosophy:

'Death' might seem surprising as a metaphor for the constant flow of the stream of history, being so obviously a mark of finality. In Indian thinking, however, death is one side of a coin in which birth is the other...While Mrinal Sen is a rationalist and by no means a religious Hindu, he does belong to a culture which readily accepts the notion of time as cyclic. An end of something is always the beginning of something else; hence, 'death', can be a useful metaphor for change and movement in the ebb and flow of history.

In essence, this cycle of renewal has also contributed to a characteristic, thematic open-endedness in Sen's films, from the literal and metaphoric dawning of a new day after the family experiences an economic and interpersonal crisis following the disappearance of their sole wage-earner, their unmarried (and callously exploited) daughter Chinu in Ek Din Pratidin, to the unreconciled departure of the photographer from the decaying mansion in Khandahar after a brief connection with the beautiful Jamini whose devotion to her ailing mother has bound her to a life of isolation and enabling illusion, and also the existential crossroads between civilization and autonomous existence of Genesis as a figurative Garden of Eden is destroyed by jealousy, rivalry, and greed.

Posted by on Aug 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (24) | Filed under 2005, Film Related Reading

On a typical summer night in inner city Baltimore, a children's game of cops and robbers shootout plays against the morbid backdrop - undoubtedly in familiar imitation - of a real-life police arrest of a teenager on a neighborhood street. A single statistic posted on black screen provides a sobering context to the children's "art imitating life", role-playing games: that 76% of all African American males in Baltimore city schools do not graduate from high school. A dedicated middle-school school counselor and program recruiter named Mavis Jackson seeks to remedy this grim statistic by assembling some of the city's greatest "at risk" boys into a school auditorium in order to confront the reality of their situation, explaining that that by the age of 18, as an African American young man in Baltimore, their futures can take on three paths: an orange jumpsuit and a pair of Department of Corrections "bracelets", a black suit and a brown wooden box, or a black cap and gown and a diploma that can also serve to open up opportunities for them. Handing out an information package and application form for a two-year boarding school in Laikipia, Kenya called The Baraka School, Jackson encourages the children to give serious consideration to the educational opportunity, citing that graduation in The Baraka School offers them entry into the city's most competitive schools where most then go on to graduate high school. An introverted, musically inclined (and emotionally closed) boy named Devon who lives with his doting grandmother (and away from his financially unstable, drug-addicted mother) dreams of becoming a preacher. An argumentative boy with a natural aptitude for mathematics named Montrey aspires for a career in science. An academically struggling student named Richard and his thoughtful younger brother Romesh are encouraged by their supportive, strong-willed mother to undertake the journey, realizing that it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to change the direction of their future (Asked what would happen if only one of her sons had been accepted into the program, she immediately answers that one would become a king, the other, a killer). Far from the distraction of their desperate surroundings and impersonal institution of the public school system, the boys begin to academically (and emotionally) thrive in the challenges of their new environment, returning home for summer vacation with a newfound sense of maturity, deliberativeness, and character. However, when heightened terrorist concerns and global politics intervene and threaten the future of The Baraka School program at a critical stage in the boys' development, their learned life lessons are soon put to the test. Following the real-time progress of the Baraka boys throughout their formative years (since their recruitment to the school in 2002), filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady capture the depth of intimacy, conflict, poverty, and desolation experienced, not only by the children, but also by their well-intentioned families and guardians who realize the weight of their children's demoralizing environment but feel powerless and financially unable to easily change their circumstances - a sentiment articulated by a concerned father who debates the issue of safety to a program official after hearing the heightened security warnings for the school by commenting that his son has a greater chance of being killed on his own neighborhood street in Baltimore than he does by becoming a victim of a terrorist attack in Africa. In presenting an equally bittersweet, tragic, and affirming portrait of the boys' bifurcated trajectories since their Baraka School experience, the film presents a haunting and complex portrait of poverty, marginalization, and disenfranchisement that defies socially expedient trivializations of human worth, ability, perseverance, and destiny.

*Screened at AFI Silverdocs 2005. The film will premiere in NYC at the HRWIFF on June 23, 2005.

Posted by on Jun 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (13) | Filed under 2005, Human Rights Watch

In an incisive encounter in The Education of Shelby Knox, (then) high-school student Shelby from Lubbock - a devout, abstinent, southern Baptist, child of conservative Republicans, and fierce advocate for comprehensive sex education in the classroom as a means of curtailing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, stemming off widespread health misinformation, and promoting important life (and life-saving) skills - turns to her charismatic, spiky-haired youth pastor, Ed Ainsworth for advice in a moment of spiritual crisis. Recognizing the inherent failure of the George W. Bush-backed, faith-based initiative, "abstinence only" program that teaches only marital relations and fails to address the concerns of - and effectively excludes - the gay population who cannot marry, young Shelby (an amusingly typical, hyper-romantic teenager who still envisions the man of her dreams in grandiose, operatic gestures as someone who could play the role of the Phantom to her Christine in The Phantom of the Opera) has become an unlikely ally in the school's gay student movement towards equal rights and representation. Struggling to reconcile her religious beliefs with social reality and her innate compassion for the marginalized, she muses that "God could not have made all these people just so He could send them to Hell." Nodding with the (apparent) gesture of an understanding heart, Ainsworth then embarks on a bafflingly open-ended (if not condescending), veiled allusion to Shelby's "questionable" faith by remarking that Christians have had a traditionally long history of intolerance and that, when he listens to her articulate her inner turmoil, what he is hearing from her is "tolerance" (and yes, the audience let out a collective sigh upon hearing this comment). Remarkably capturing Shelby's infectious effervescence, fearlessness, sense of egalitarian justice, and unwavering integrity of faith, filmmakers Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt have created a whimsical, yet potent, inspiring, and affirming portrait of the true meaning of moral activism and spiritual service.

The film will premiere on PBS' P.O.V. series on June 21, 2005.

Posted by on Jun 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Human Rights Watch

One of the festival highpoints (and certainly one of my personal favorites) from this year's slate of films from the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is filmmakers Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy's exhaustive (and inspired) documentary, State of Fear: a sobering, trenchant, and disturbingly relevant dissection of Peru's contemporary history through the socio-political framework of a protracted (and seemingly interminable) decades-long war on terror that had contributed to a demoralized culture of tolerated erosion of human rights, systematic military abuse, mass killings, torture, and fear-mongering political opportunism. The film traces the rise and fall of an underground, insurgent Maoist organization known as Shining Path that, under the direction of radical intellectual, Abimael Guzmán, seized on the desperate poverty and marginalization of the Andean indigenous people (living predominantly in rural areas) as an ideological rallying cry for social revolution and began to mobilize the peasants into a terror campaign with a strategy of violent revolution and scorched earth policy in order to (coercively) convert the rural countryside to their cause towards the greater path of encircling - and eventually capturing - the city of Lima. Unable to effectively identify Shining Path operatives - the faceless, anonymous enemy embedded from within the grassroots level - and weed out the real terrorists from ordinary civilians, the government empowered the military with broad, unchallenged authority to take any necessary action (at the expense of civil liberties) in order to stem the tide of domestic terrorism. In an incisive (and deeply unsettling) interview, a tribal elder recalls the incalculable devastation inflicted by the crisis on her people as Shining Path radicals first attempted to forcibly conscript some of the villagers, including children, to their bloody cause (and execute those who opposed them) then, after the group's departure, were visited by the military who subsequently armed and recruited them into forming a civilian militia empowered to gather intelligence, torture, and execute terrorists, resulting in a gruesome and devastating (and unreined) tribal infighting that would nearly exterminate the entire village. Nevertheless, despite suffering through years of rural atrocities, domestic terrorism continued relatively unabated until Guzmán decided to accelerate the revolution and bring the war to Lima by initiating a campaign of random bombings throughout the city. It is within this atmosphere of desperation and chaos - a constant "state of fear" - that political outsider Alberto Fujimori ran a successful presidential campaign under the platform of waging a strong-armed war against terrorism. To this end, Fujimori suspended the national congress under a heightened - and indeterminate - state of emergency and concentrated power to the presidency. A Truth Commission member appropriately comments, "We traded our liberty for security." Perhaps the most incisive and insidious aspect of Peru's recent history lies in Fujimori's calculated ability to maintain his continued grip on the centralized and corrupted power of the presidency even after Guzmán's arrest by continuing to raise the specter of an unspecific terrorist threat despite the effective decapitation - and subsequent disintegration - of the Shining Path movement. Alternately harrowing, engaging, illuminating, and inciting, State of Fear is not only remarkable account of opportunism, inhumanity, and corruption, but also a cathartic, hopeful tale of humility and enlightened transformation (as in the case of privileged, upper middle-class Lima-based lawyer and Truth Commission member, Beatriz Alva-Hart who emotionally breaks down upon the conclusion of the testimony hearings and expresses her profound apologies to all the victims for not realizing earlier the extent of the atrocities occurring within her own country).

Posted by on Jun 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2005, Human Rights Watch

During the spring of 2004, as the Iraqi city of Falluja slowly metamorphosed from secondary, wartime infrastructure target to the emerging epicenter of an escalating (and increasingly emboldened) Iraqi insurgency, soldiers from a squadron of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division stationed in the volatile city struggle to adjust to their amorphous, undefined, and intrinsically irreconcilable roles as law enforcers, occupiers, and goodwill ambassadors in a foreign land. For a few hours each week, the young soldiers are directed by their superior officers to go out into the streets in full body armor for mandatory, pre-scheduled "public relations" where they canvas as many streets as possible in order to psychologically reinforce their presence and visibility in the city, initiate contact with the townspeople (usually through an interpreter) in an often fruitless attempt to gain their trust and gather information, and, with alarming frequency, play reflexive games of survival as militants seize the opportunity to take pot shots and launch last-minute offensives in their direction. The dangerous, frustrating, and often surreal encounters experienced by the soldiers underscore the seeming futility of their reluctant role as a peacekeeping (rather than combat) force in the openly hostile, war-ravaged town. Unfamiliar with the language and local customs, the soldiers' relationship with the town has become palpably acrimonious (especially following the death of a fellow soldier from their squadron): distrustful glances from the Iraqis are often retaliated with verbal hostility and profanity (in English) by th