September 21, 2008
Bucharest, Memory Lost, 2008
Like Boris Lehman's autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity - the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence. For Solé, the ambiguity of his nationality as a young boy - his parents having alternately referred to Paris, Budapest, and finally Bucharest as his birthplace - foregrounds a childhood lived in clandestiny as an unwitting participant within the Spanish resistance movement. The son of Jordi Solé Tura, an intellectual and partisan from Cal Pinyonaire who was radicalized by his first-hand experience with the intimidation and forced assimilation of Catalonians by Francoists, and Anny Bruset, the politically committed, French-born daughter of Communist party loyalists who fled Spain after the defeat of the Second Republic in 1939, Solé's childhood would be spent infiltrating porous borders between Eastern and Western Europe using a trail of disposable aliases, disguises, and false documentation in order to broadcast information critical of the repressive Franco regime (often exposing abuses documented from notes smuggled in false bottom canisters passed by political prisoners), as well as organize national strikes from an underground, independent Spanish radio station in Bucharest known as La Pirenaica (intentionally misnamed to give a false impression that the station was located in the Pyrenees). Calling attention to the capture and subsequent execution of Communist party leader, Julián Grimau despite pleas for leniency from the international community, Solé's father, Jordi would emerge as an important figure in the resistance in his role as La Pirenaica newscaster, Josep Oriol, before fleeing Bucharest after the death of Soviet aligned Gheorghiu-Dej and the emergence of the Securitate. Returning in exile to Paris, Solé's family would continue to work in the resistance until an internal rift over policy between those aligned with party leaders, Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (known as "La Pasionaria") and Santiago Carrillo, and the party's leading intellectuals, Jorge Semprún and Fernando Claudín (caused, in part, by their reservations over the party's alignment with the increasingly repressive government of the Soviet Union) would lead to Jordi's expulsion from the party - consequently bringing an end to the family's life in clandestiny - and pave the way for their relocation to Spain, and a renewed struggle for true democracy and representation.
But beyond an intimate account of Jordi Solé's remarkable evolution from impoverished baker's son, to revolutionary, to one of the key architects of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, to distinguished parliamentarian and cultural minister, the film also examines the disjunction between national history and personal memory. Paralleling his own faint memories of childhood with his father's struggle against the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease and his mother's subsequent hospitalization from a cerebral embolism, Solé frames his experience within the broader context of a cultural amnesia, where truth becomes increasingly relegated to the realm of myth, and the history of the resistance has been equally romanticized by revisionists (in one scene, the old site of La Pirenaica, having been converted to a Securitate office after the disbanding of the radio station, is now marketed as a neo-socialism historical site after the fall of Ceaucescu), exploited for political means (most notably, in politicians claiming the distinction as one of the "Fathers of the Constitution" even though only a handful of the convened group actually participated in its drafting), and taken for granted by a post Franco-era generation. Visually, Solé reflects this disjunction by incorporating secondary images into the personal interviews - archival newsreels, family photographs, footage from Alain Resnais's La Guerre est finie (from a script by Semprún), iconic paintings (in particular, Pablo Picasso's Guernica which provided an implicit expression of solidarity among members of the resistance), and graphics from comic book superhero, Captain Thunder (penned by popular comics writer and secret Communist party member, Victór Mora) - that figuratively fill the void of incomplete, fragmented memories. Juxtaposed against a neurologist's diagnosis that Jordi's illness has entered a depersonalization phase where he has difficulty recognizing himself and the stories of his life, Solé reflects on his father's condition as a both a personal and cultural tragedy - a memory gradually being erased by the ravages of time, and within it, the dilution of a nation's collective consciousness.
Posted at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008
September 13, 2008
No, or the Vain Glory of Command, 1990
Inasmuch as Manoel de Oliveira's films convey what Randal Johnson describes as a
Composed as a series of conversations between drafted history scholar, Lieutenant Cabrita (Luís Miguel Cintra) and members of his brigade, Manuel (Diogo Dória), Salvador (Miguel Guilherme), and Brito (Luís Lucas), and interwoven with re-enactments from watershed events, from the assassination of the great Lusitanian warrior, Viriato (also played by Cintra) that would alter the dynamics of the battle between the Lusitanians and the Romans for the domination of the Iberian peninsula, to the defeat in the Battle of Toro (and subsequent accidental death of Prince Afonso from a horse riding accident that would end the dream of a unified Iberian Empire under one crown, to the disastrous Battle of Alcácer-Kebir that would result in King Sebastian's (Mateus Lorena) disappearance in northern Africa that would setback Portuguese exploration (and consequently, its empire building). It is interesting to note that by juxtaposing history-based fiction with historical non-fiction, Oliveira illustrates the process of mythologization, where history becomes refracted and idealized in times of crisis and upheaval. However, rather than engendering a romanticism for the past glory, Oliveira dismantles the myth of conquest, reframing history as an elusive (and delusive) quest for fleeting victories and unsustainable empires. This mythologization is prefigured in the idiosyncratic inclusion of sea-faring explorers arriving at a Garden of Eden-like paradise populated by nymphs and cherubs, suggesting the intersection between history and myth, and culminates in the symbolic image of King Sebastian emerging from the fog clutching the blade of his sword - a figment of Cabrita's subconscious - that reinforces the human cost of war in the vain pursuit of empires. It is this image of bloodied hands - a symbolism that is also implied in the legend of the Mangled Man who, despite severed hands, continued to hold the kingdom's flag during the Battle of Toro - that is evoked in a physician's dated entry of April 25, 1974 that concludes the film: the implication of the Salazar regime as the end of another failed empire within the sweep of history, bound together by collective sacrifice, inhumanity, delusion, and tragedy.
Posted at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2008
September 5, 2008
Hear My Cry, 1991
Filmed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, Hear My Cry captures the essence of Maciej Drygas's articulate and insightful film essays on the rupture between official record and human history, the impossibility of absolute truth, and the malleable nature of collective memory. The theme of revisionist history is prefigured in the film's opening shot, a wordless sequence of uniformed officers taking turns in confiscating documents from a private residence to be destroyed at a makeshift bonfire that had been set in the courtyard. Cutting to an image of a records clerk unlocking a series of doors leading to a remote storage room in order to retrieve what would prove to be woefully incomplete archived reports on the investigation surrounding a middle-aged accountant, Ryszard Siwiec's self-immolation on September 8, 1968 during a harvest festival at Warsaw Stadium - the dossier containing only a related citation for distributing flyers containing "false information" at the public event - the juxtaposition between the labyrinthine odyssey through locked vaults and the retrieval of Siwiec's sanitized files becomes a metaphor for an altered history (implicitly linked by the idea of destruction by fire) that had been suppressed during the Cold War. A subsequent review of church records by a parish priest similarly provides an intentionally ambiguous account of Siwiec's death (albeit for compassionate reasons), listing the cause of death as an accident, perhaps in order to be allowed proper burial in a Catholic cemetery (a sanctification that is also reflected in a priest's description of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation as a spiritual act of self-destruction and creation). In both cases, the incompleteness of information creates secondary - and equally inexact - layers of truth. Protesting against Władysław Gomułka's increasing alignment with the Soviet Union that contributed to the Warsaw Pact's intervention in Czechoslovakia after a series of liberalization reforms, Siwiec had sought to expose the party's betrayal of socialist ideals under Gomułka's leadership and the folly of subjugating a nation.
But beyond a chronicle of Soviet-era whitewashing, Drygas examines the plasticity of memory in the way time deforms and sets - however imperfectly - during moments of crisis and tragedy. This idea is illustrated in the reading of Siwiec's will, as photographs of his wife and children from 1968 are intercut with present-day interviews of the children, now middle-aged, who share memories of their father and comment on the legacy of a heroism that had only been realized in the hindsight of cultural rehabilitation - his death, figuratively suspended in time, even as history has transformed to reframe his protest as an act of patriotic resistance. The refiguration of memory is also reflected in Siwiec's wife, Maria's recollections of their last Easter together, observing a distance and melancholy that may or may not have actually existed (a daughter earlier recalls Siwiec's animation especially when discussing politics with family), and in the accounts of witnesses who remember the incident only within the context of a momentary disruption from the pageantry by a mentally unstable spectator. In this respect, Hear My Cry converges towards Harun Farocki's expositions on the interrelation between cognition and recognition in Images of the World and the Inscription of War, exploring the disjunction between the captured image (seeing) and its registration (memory). Concluding with a slow motion, magnified shot of Siwiec's self-immolation captured by Kronika Filmowa camera operator, Zbigniew Skoczek, the manipulated footage itself becomes a protraction of time and signification of the image - an act of imprinting memory.
Posted at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Maciej Drygas
August 31, 2008
The Forsaken Land, 2005
The opening sequence of Vimukthi Jayasundara's The Forsaken Land suggests a metaphoric, alien landscape - a land transfigured by the buried scars of a decades-long civil war and the ominous disquiet of a fragile, uncertain peace. A lone militia guard, Anura (Mahendra Perera) patrolling the main road to a remote village, passes his idle hours inspecting the contours of an open field, looking for irregular patches in the topography (perhaps indicating the presence of unmarked, makeshift graves). A disembodied arm juts out from the undulating water, articulated in rigor resembling a prehistoric sea monster surfacing from the lake. The harsh white light from a fluorescent bulb illuminates a dark room, its intensity reflected in the crosscut to a shot of the human eye. A restless woman, Anura's unmarried sister Soma (Kaushalaya Fernando) rises at dawn to bathe using water ported into a barrel in the absence of indoor plumbing, and hears the sound of a tank rolling into a nearby open field to conduct military exercises. In a way, the images capture the desolation of a people existing in a state of suspended animation, harboring the persistent memory of a violent, unreconciled past, and relegated to a life as impotent spectators to the meaningless rituals of everyday life in the isolated village. On the surface, The Forsaken Land suggests Shohei Imamura's Ballad of Narayama in its stark and austere portrait of an inhuman, godless society, where the tainted landscape reflects the nihilism and moral vacuum of disintegrated lives lived in perpetual stasis (as suggested in an episode involving a pregnant villager's apparent suicide by poison ingestion). However, in its abstract naturalism and implicit allusion to the social repercussions of ethnic marginalization, the film also converges towards Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours, where the forest represents a place of menace (the schoolgirl, Batti's [Pumudika Sapurni Peiris] encounter with the night guard, Piyasiri [Hemasiri Liyanage]) and transitory escape (Anura and a soldier's retreat into a trench to smoke). It is within this context of protracted ethnic conflict and disenfranchisement that Piyasiri's recounted children's tale - about an impoverished woman called "Little Bird" who once set out with a cup of rice as dowry to faraway lands in order to find a husband, only to be killed by her prospective husband after a perceived slight and humiliation - may be seen as an allegory for the civil war itself: a marginalized people who has razed its own home in order to assuage its guilt and insecurity, eternally condemned to a karmic cycle of self-inflicted retaliation as victim and transgressor.
Posted at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2008
August 17, 2008
Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971
Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, White Nights, Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer may also be seen as a paradigm for José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia, capturing the romanticism of longing, the voyeurism inherent in an artist's gaze, and the creation of idealized memory. Like the dreamer in Guerín's film, Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is a restless artist searching anonymous, city streets in pursuit of an elusive, ideal woman (the dreamer's journey in In the City of Sylvia is similarly chronicled through enumerated nights spent in his hotel room). For Jacques, the quixotic quest would lead him one night to the Pont Neuf, where a despondent Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) has stepped out onto the ledge to end her life by jumping into the river. Convincing her to climb back just as a patrol car stops to intervene, Jacques takes her hand and walks her home with the promise that he would appear at the same time at the bridge on the following evening. The encounter would mark the first of the dreamer's four nights with the fragile Marthe, bound together by their fateful connection and the melancholy of elusive love - Jacques, in the fleeting pursuit of unattainable women with whom he has fallen in love from a distance (and whose embodied idea becomes the inspiration for his fanciful, tape recorded messages and a series of faceless, work-in-progress portraits scattered in his studio), and Marthe, in the apparent rejection by a lover (Maurice Monnoyer) who did not return to her after studying abroad. Offering to act as an intermediary and deliver a letter to the wayward lover's friends in an attempt to reconcile the couple, Jacques becomes increasingly drawn to Marthe and, in the process, finds his new, unrequited object of desire.
Perhaps the lightest and most idiosyncratic film in Bresson's body of work, Four Nights of a Dreamer nevertheless broaches his recurring themes on the division between the physical and the ephemeral. Within this framework, the film serves as a deconstruction of the romantic myth in all its manifestations and illusions. This idea of artificiality is first explored during Marthe's recounted story of receiving tickets from her then presumptive lover to attend the premiere of a trite potboiler entitled The Bonds of Love that ran the gamut of popular film conventions from extended shoot-outs to the clutching of a beloved's photograph - accompanied by swelling music - in the moments before death. But Jacques coming to Marthe's aid at a bridge is also a familiar scenario - the proverbial rescue of the damsel in distress - a romantic sentiment that is further reinforced by his continued arrangements to meet her on the same bridge as their relationship develops (the bridge itself suggesting a metaphoric point of convergence between these two drifting souls). This sense of contrived romantic destiny is also reflected in Jacques's recorded messages describing his beloved's separation from him for six months that alludes to Persephone's descent into Hades (further elevating the idea of love into the realm of mythology), as well as the musical interludes that seem to coincidentally insert themselves during key moments throughout their brief encounters. In this respect, Bresson reflects on the role of the artist as a creator of images, where the ideal lies in the pursuit of the elusive - in the empty spaces that reveal the essential "gesture which lifts its presence from the object" - the illusion of transcended love.
Posted at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Filed under 2008
August 13, 2008
New York Film Festival 2008 Line-up
Just a quick note to say that the main program for the 46th New York Film Festival has been announced, and the slate looks quite strong this year. Along with the usual suspects - Jia Zhangke, Hong Sang-soo, Jerzy Skolimowski, Arnaud Desplechin, Steven Soderbergh, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Olivier Assayas, and Wong Kar-wai - I'm also excited to see Darezhan Omirbaev (wow, two Kazakh films!), Brillante Mendoza, and Kelly Reichardt make the line-up. The NYFF runs from Sept. 26 through Oct. 12.
Opening Night
The Class / Entre les murs
Laurent Cantet, France, 2008; 128m
Centerpiece
Changeling
Clint Eastwood, USA, 2008; 140m
Closing Night
The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008; 109m
Retrospective
Lola Montès
Max Ophuls, France/West Germany, 1955; 115m
24 City / Er shi si cheng ji
Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong/Japan, 2008; 112m
Afterschool
Antonio Campos, USA, 2008; 122m
Ashes of Time Redux
Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 2008; 93m
Bullet in the Head / Trio en la cabeza
Jaime Rosales, Spain/France, 2008; 85m
Che
Steven Soderbergh, France/Spain, 2008; 268m
Chouga / Shuga
Darezhan Omirbaev, France/Kazakhstan, 2007; 91m
A Christmas Tale / Un conte de Noël
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008; 150m
Four Nights with Anna / Cztery noce z Anna
Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland/France, 2008; 87m
Gomorrah / Gomorra
Matteo Garrone, Italy, 2008; 137m
Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh, UK, 2008; 118m
The Headless Woman / La mujer sin cabeza
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain, 2008; 87m
Hunger
Steve McQueen, UK, 2008; 96m
I'm Going to Explode / Voy a explotar
Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2008; 103m
Let It Rain / Parlez-moi de la pluie
Agnès Jaoui, France, 2008; 110m
Night and Day / Bam guan nat
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2008; 144m
The Northern Land / A Corte do Norte
João Botelho, Portugal, 2008; 101m
Serbis
Brillante Mendoza, Philippines/France, 2008; 90m
Summer Hours / L’heure d’eté
Olivier Assayas, France, 2008; 103m
Tokyo Sonata
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/Netherlands, 2008; 85m
Tony Manero
Pablo Larrain, Chile/Brazil, 2008; 98m
Tulpan
Sergey Dvortsevoy, Germany/Kazakhstan/Poland/Russia/Switzerland, 2008; 100m
Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/France, 2008; 90m
Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008; 80m
The Windmill Movie
Alexander Olch, USA, 2008; 80m
Posted at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes
July 31, 2008
Calcutta 71, 1972
In the book The Essential Mystery: The Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema, John W. Hood proposes that the Bengali famine in 1943 was a watershed event that would deeply mark then 20 year old Mrinal Sen and lead to his politicization and involvement with the left-leaning Indian People's Theatre Association. In hindsight, this convergence between personal and cultural history also seems to provide the underlying link between the overarching portrait of contemporary life in 1971 Kolkata with its prevailing images of the Naxalite insurgency, and the three self-contained, period stories presented in the film, each a crystallization of the spirit of the times and a harbinger of things to come. Framed through the perspective of a doomed, anonymous 20 year old militant student whose restless spirit hovers over the city to confront its legacy of poverty, underprivilege, and cruelty, each story exposes society's complicity in the unraveling of a natural crisis into human catastrophe.
The first installment, 1933, based on Manik Bandyopadhyay's The Right to Suicide, underscores the everyday realities of life in the flood-prone city, where life remains in a state of transience, caught in a perpetual cycle of construction and destruction, transformation and decay. Capturing an impoverished family's futile attempts to weather the monsoon rains from their dilapidated home, as the head of the family (Satya Bannerjee) increasingly shows his frustration and helplessness by lashing out at his adolescent daughter and a stray dog, 1933 illustrates the inhumanity imposed by an entrenched caste system that continues to reinforce arbitrary power structures even within the inescapable reality of impotence and destitution, a corrosive cycle that perpetuates a sense of entitlement (that, in turn, leads to complacency in its illusion of expected privilege) and oppression of the weak.
Adapted from Prabodh Sanyal's The Disgraced, the second episode, 1943 examines the wide-reaching toll of the famine, from an early montage of desperate villagers converging in the already overcrowded city to beg for food, to a day in the life portrait within the relative comfort of a middle class family, where a young widow, Shobhona (Madhabi Mukherjee) struggles to support her mother and younger siblings. Relocating to Kolkata after giving up custody of her son (having moved into an apartment building under murky arrangements with the owner), the family is compelled to face their degraded circumstances when a cousin, on his way to a new civil service job in Delhi, pays an unexpected visit. Contrasting fond memories of their idyllic lives in the village against the austerity of their new life in Kolkata, Sen reinforces the idea of the famine as a juncture of paradise lost, a complete rupture from the past. Moreover, in confronting the mother's instigations to solicit money from her neighbor (by sending her teenaged daughter to run errands for him), and her son (by goading him to exploit his employment at a tea shop), Sen parallels the family's decline in status with their moral prostitution (a theme that also surfaces in Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder, where the erosion of social class is created by the commonality of despair.
The intersection between (artificially created) class disparity and food shortage also provides the framework for 1953 in its tale of two cities - one, propelled by urban development and agricultural reforms stemming from Jawaharlal Nehru's five-year plan, the other, relegated to the sidelines of economic transformation. Based on Samaresh Basu's The Smuggler, the film challenges the notion of national unity that the consolidation of the railways symbolizes in its segregation of passengers between the working class and the poor, uneducated backwards classes who stow away on trains to panhandle, or smuggle food through the porous borders of (then) East Pakistan for sale in the drought affected villages. Devolving into a symbolic class war between the privileged passengers (as embodied by a health conscious traveler who epitomizes the Darwinian capitalist model: survival of the fittest) and the young, impoverished smugglers, Sen alludes to the perils of complacency and displaced retaliation (a theme that also recalls the father's impotent rage in 1933) that also underlies the anonymous stranger's social indictment. Revisiting the transgressions of the past, the disembodied stranger becomes the nation's figurative collective consciousness, confronting society's tendency to reconstitute human suffering as distant histories removed from everyday reality. Culminating with the portrait of contemporary Kolkata in which a politician (Ajitesh Bannerjee) hypocritically expresses his concern during a lavish dinner party over the flood of refugees arriving into the city from Bangladesh as a result of the war for independence, the image of famine victims repurposed as wall art encapsulates the aestheticization of tragedy as abstract spectacle, and humanity's moral imperative to reclaim art from its bastardized role as status symbol to its ideological origins as an instrument of social revolution.
Posted at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Mrinal Sen
July 17, 2008
The Little White Girl Had to Bow Her Head for Emperor Hirohito, 2003
Based on author, choreographer, activist, and filmmaker Lydia Chagoll's autobiography A Childhood in the Japanese Camps and historical essay Hirohito: Emperor of Japan, The Little White Girl Had to Bow Her Head for Emperor Hirohito is a lucid and impassioned examination of the postwar geopolitics that have led to the cultural amnesia and historical whitewashing (enabled by western governments) of Hirohito's role in the commission of atrocities during Japan's expansionist campaign that culminated in the tragedy of the Pacific War. The daughter of an outspoken, anti-fascist journalist of Jewish ancestry, Chagoll fled her adopted home of Belgium with her family as a young girl in 1940 during the Nazi invasion, making their way south through the continent as refugees seeking asylum before being deported by South Africa - because of their Dutch-issued passports - to the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1942. Detained and interrogated by authorities upon arrival to Batavia (now Jakarta) in an attempt to root out agitators seeking to undermine colonial authority, their belated freedom in the increasingly volatile region would prove to be short lived when Japan expanded their military campaign and began occupying the islands. Separated from their father and imprisoned in a series of progressively worsening conditions and inhumane treatment at concentration camps over the course of the next three years, Chagoll's family would face even further humiliation when, at the end of the Pacific War, Indonesia declared its independence and Europeans were forced to remain in the camps for their own safety, still guarded by the same Japanese soldiers now tasked by General Douglas MacArthur to protect them as they await their delayed repatriation. Returning to Europe only to discover that their relatives had been killed at Auschwitz and Sobibor, the family's harrowing ordeal in Java would be supplanted by their own guilt of survival and an immediate need to rebuild their interrupted lives, leading to a shared silence of history that would continue for decades until Frans Buyens convinced Chagoll to write about her experience as a means of exorcising her haunted past.
Structured as a talking head news panel with Chagoll, moderator Anne Blanpain, and actress and friend, Michèle Simonet reading passages from Chagoll's memoir (the author, still reluctant to talk about her personal experience in the camps), the stark, brightly lit, minimalist sound stage reinforces the autobiographical and editorial dual nature of the film, serving as a platform for Chagoll's recounted trauma that alludes to the austere circumstances of her captivity (where prisoners suffered from malnutrition and systematic abuse), and the idea that tragedy is inherently unfilmable (a theme that also finds kinship with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog). Placing their discussions within the context of Chagoll's public protests, first, during Emperor Hirohito's state visit with King Baudouin in 1971, and subsequently, in the royal couple's decision to attend his funeral in a sovereign capacity in 1989, Buyens and Chagoll frame Hirohito's transformation from untried war criminal to venerated dignitary (presumably duped by a military clique into embracing expansionist policies) as the result of politically expedient revisionism, where the act of waging war (even a cold one) "has become so banal that it has given killers human faces." In essence, Japan's wartime amnesia is symptomatic of an absence of closure, a U.S.-orchestrated wholesale absolution designed to preserve the country's hierarchical structure as a means of ensuring national stability and, consequently, a strategic foothold against an expanding communist threat. It is a negation of history that continues to shape the murky contours of contemporary Japanese society, most notably, in (then) Prime Minister Yasujiro Nakasone and his cabinet's official visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, a socially ingrained evasion of moral accountability and reckoning that once again comes full circle to its origins in Hirohito's impunity from past transgressions that Chagoll challenges with the question: "Who is a war criminal: the one who kills, the one who gives the order to kill, the one in whose name the killing is done?"
Posted at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Frans Buyens & Lydia Chagoll
July 10, 2008
Tren de sombras, 1997
Ostensibly framed as a restoration of a degraded found film recovered some 70 years after the sudden and unexplained death of its creator, a Parisian attorney and amateur filmmaker named Gérard Fleury at a lake in the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, Tren de sombras (Train of Shadows) is a dense, sensual, and richly textured exposition of José Luis Guerín's recurring preoccupations: the nature and subjectivity of the image-gaze, the permeable borders between truth and fiction, the role of architecture (and landscape) as palimpsest of hidden histories. By placing the discovery of Fleury's last shot footage of his home and family within the context of the ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of his death after a seemingly innocuous scouting trip early one morning to find suitable lighting conditions to incorporate into his home movie, the found film becomes both a curious artifact of the early days of cinema in its informally staged performances that suggest the whimsical, created illusions of Georges Méliès (in a performance of dancing ties and magic tricks), and also a non-fiction, historical record that can be deconstructed, reconstituted, and re-analyzed to glean further information into the real-life mystery.
The dual nature of film is similarly suggested in the multilayered transitional shot between Fleury's footage from 1930 and modern day Le Thuit - the image of a caretaker sweeping leaves at a sidewalk corner overlooking a cemetery as schoolchildren cross at the intersection, a folding billboard advertising a cinémathèque program featuring pioneering filmmakers propped against a lamppost on the edge of the frame - visually repeating interchangeable themes of decay (fallen leaves, graveyard, film nitrate) and renewal (children, film revival, the act of sweeping). Interweaving depopulated, still-life compositions that alternately show ethereal images (casted shadows, lake mist, clouds, rays of light poking through occlusions, reflections on mirrors and windows) and physical objects (landscape, architecture, framed photographs, clocks, period furniture, camera equipment), Guerín further expounds on the idea of film as a medium of materiality and immateriality, where filmmaking itself becomes an act of creation (in capturing images that do not physically exist), destruction (in the chemical degradation of the medium), and transformation (in the projection of material into light). Moreover, by introducing sequences that overtly demonstrate the image manipulation of Fleury's unfinished film (with the apparent motive of finding hidden clues to the mysterious death) - splicing damaged footage, matching cuts that illustrate parallel gestures and expressions, freeze frames and zooms that provide detailed observation - Guerín not only reflects on filmmaking as a godlike process of suspension and reanimation, but also on the inherent responsibilities (and limitations) that it enables in creating permutations of the story, where truth is arbitrarily defined by editing, and the idea of closure to a story is negated by the competing idea that the same film can be rewound, reconfigured, and re-edited into a plurality of equally valid, alternate endings. It is this open-endedness that is reflected in the film's long take, closing shot of a dead-end street intersection in Fleury (a recurring aesthetic that also surfaces in Guerín's En Construcción and In the City of Sylvia), where people momentarily pass into and out of frame - each passerby representing another open story, each passage, a corridor leading to new, alternate angles of perspective and (re)discovery.
Posted at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2008, José Luis Guerín
July 2, 2008
Less Dead Than the Others, 1992
Composed as a fiction film based on Buyens's autobiographical novel, re-enacted with the intimacy of a documentary, but framed from the observational distance of an essay, Frans Buyens and Lydia Chagoll's Less Dead Than the Others resists facile categorization - alternating between poignant crystallization of living memory in the aftermath of his younger brother's accidental death and his parents' struggle with terminal illness, and an impassioned polemic on a person's right to die with dignity. This idea of inhabited contradiction is established in the opening sequence, crosscutting between the somber procession of mourners lined up for a casket viewing (presumably, of Buyens's mother) and the animated, candid shots of his mother (Dora van der Groen) pulling together an important occasion outfit from her wardrobe (which she is shown wearing later in the film while packing for her hospital admission) and performing calisthenics in the kitchen. In hindsight, the juxtaposition of these contradictory images - life and death, stasis and activity, reality and dramatization - reflects his mother and father Jozef's (Senne Rouffaer) daily routine following the death of his brother, Armand (Koen De Bouw) from severe burns, having worn a gorilla suit for a costume ball that was accidentally set on fire by a pair of half-drunken revelers throwing lit matches at a crowd (and who, rather than help douse the flames, instead went to get a last drink before leaving).
For his parents, Armand's death also relegates the present to a constantly rewinding past, where the ritual of grief metamorphoses into a mythology of the dead (a sentiment that is also implied in his mother's observation that Armand, like Jesus, died at the age of 33): re-reading newspaper obituary clippings that described the funeral (which his mother was too inconsolable to attend), revisiting commemorations given in his brother's honor by friends and colleagues, looking through old photographs of family vacations and happier times, re-evaluating decisions made throughout their lives that aligned to meet his tragic fate. Languishing in a hospital for ten days before dying alone at night - the less familiar, off-shift nurses failing to realize that his repeated calls for "François" were for his brother - the experience would also mark his parents in another way, as they faced their own mortality.
Confined to a hospice after being diagnosed with incurable cancer, his once physically fit father - an avid dancer and tireless labor activist - would endure the emotional roller coaster of several false alarms over his imminent passing, isolated from his family, slowly wasting away, but resigned to a lingering death by an exceptionally strong heart. The specter of Armand's unanswered calls for his brother also hovers over Jozef's death, in Buyens's admission that he ignored his father's pleas to help him end his life. Alternating between antiseptic images of his ailing father confined to his hospital bed, and color-saturated shots of him dancing and casually dispensing advice from his favorite chair, the stark juxtaposition not only illustrates the disconnection between Jozef's mind and body towards the end, but also reinforces the image of his coexistence between life and death, both as a grieving parent who never recovered from his son's death, and as a patient struggling with terminal illness. In contrast, the image of his mother's subsequent return home after an unproductive extended hospital stay is warm and bathed in light. Reconciled with her fate, the stillness of her death seems paradoxically ecstatic - a peaceful deliverance from a body wracked with constant pain. In a way, by passing unnoticed between life and death, she liberates her son from the guilt of survival that had once consumed them and, in sharing the intimacy of her final moments, enables his own lonely transition to a life without her: "I don't know when she died. I didn't see it. I didn't feel it. I didn't hear it. Her life passed into mine. She is less dead than the others."
Posted at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Frans Buyens & Lydia Chagoll
June 18, 2008
The Way South, 1980-81
The coronation of Queen Beatrix on the eve of May Day in 1980 provides a salient point of departure for Johan van der Keuken's The Way South, a cultural interrogation into the intertwined sociopolitical landscape of immigration, dislocation, underprivilege, and class division. Continuing on the prevailing theme of economic disparity between the continental north and south (in such essay films as Diary, The White Castle, and the The New Ice Age), van der Keuken encounters his first destination within a short distance from his home in Amsterdam, where a unused office building on Kinker Street has been converted to a communal squat by activists (who see their action as a pragmatic solution to the affordable housing shortage by making use of existing real estate that would otherwise remain unoccupied). Facing an imminent siege by riot police to force their eviction, the squatters discuss the logistics of their staged resistance, from rounding up volunteers for round the clock sentry duty to guard the main entrance, to installing reinforcing screens in order to thwart a surprise intrusion from unsecured windows. Intercutting a shot of the activists protesting in the street with footage of a public rally celebrating the country's liberation in 1945, van der Keuken presents the activists' defiant expression of freedom within the irony of self-imprisonment that reveals their idealistic act of resistance.
Van der Keuken captures a similar image of imposed occupation at a nearby church, where a group of Moroccan migrant workers have assembled to seek refuge while awaiting their deportation, having lost their jobs as a result of stricter guidelines governing immigrant labor (one that also levies the restrictive requirement of having continuous employment under a single employer as a means of providing a loophole to deny access to social services). Spending a final night at the church before their expulsion, the immigrants sleep in communal beds under panels depicting the Stations of the Cross, implicitly linking the sorrow, isolation, and sacrifice that also mark their uncertain plight.
The problem of assimilation is also implied in the profile of Goutte d'or in Paris, the oldest immigrant community in Europe, where the idea of impermanence and transition embodied in the names of boarding houses such as Hotel du Progrés collides with the reality of a fourth and fifth generation ethnic African population continuing to reside within the same community (a social immobility that is also reinforced in the portrait of a construction worker and his wife who, despite having lived in France for over 45 years, are still considered immigrants). Focusing on the everyday routine of Ali, a disabled former car factory worker who has been taking clerical correspondence courses in order to find a new way to make a living after his accident, van der Keuken reveals the intrinsic racism that continues to exist behind the ideal of social inclusion, where a constant police presence can be seen from his apartment window, and he is compelled to carry his disability and residency papers at all times in case of "random" identity checks.
The myth of post-colonial integration revealed by the experiences of Goutte d'or's residents also resurfaces in Rome, where an octogenarian widow, Nonna Rosa - the daughter of an Italian father and Eritrean mother - talks about her transient life between Eritrea, her homeland, and Italy, her country of citizenship. Displaced by fascism, racism, British territorial expulsion, apartheid, decolonization, and finally, Ethiopia's annexation of Eritrea in 1962, Nonna Rosa's life has been marked by perpetual exile, struggling to bridge the two cultures of her identity only to belong to neither.
In the village of Calabria in Locri, a Catholic priest, Father Natale, exposes a different kind of institutionalized oppression, defying the thinly veiled threats of a mafia don who lords over the small town with the silent complicity of the local church. Establishing a clothing factory cooperative to provide jobs for the poor (and stave off the lure of organized crime), Father Natale sees a correlation between the church's increasing inability to attract young men into the priesthood and its perceived culture of corruption. Concluding the chapter with a montage of gravestones from villagers who were killed by the mafia, van der Keuken wryly reinforces the macabre connection between the church and organized crime through the mutual commerce of death, and the tragic dignity of ennobled resistance.
The moral cost of the illusive pursuit of wealth is similarly reflected during the observance of the Feast of Sacrifice in Cairo, where a family's financial ability to provide sacrificial food itself becomes a status symbol. Offering alms to the poor - who are often found living inside family vaults (connected the parallel image of the Kinker Street squatters) - in exchange for prayers for the souls of lost loved ones, van der Keuken illustrates the conflation of economy and spirituality in the meaning of sacrifice. Framed against the television broadcast of an imam preaching against the perils of following "desires" that is ironically being shown simultaneously over multiple televisions at a shop window display, the imam's call for solidarity paradoxically reflects the self-inflicted fragmentation of society as well (a man-made division that is also symbolized by a prefiguring shot of pedestrians cutting through un-reinforced sidewalk barricades in lieu of crossing at street corners). Concluding with an incisive, tongue-in-cheek montage of a manually operated waterwheel (that evokes a recurring image of Sisyphean ritual), peanut farmers (harvesting to the radio broadcast news of the U.S. presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan), brick loaders (a metaphor for Cairo's economic transformation literally being carried on the backs of workers), and repeated shots of graffiti that alternately read "No Future" and "Carry On", van der Keuken's expressed desire to touch reality also suggests a quixotic quest to transcend the bounds between the figurative north and south, to dismantle the artificial notions of privilege and exclusion, and consequently, find the root of our common humanity.
Posted at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Johan van der Keuken
June 12, 2008
H story, 2001
Inasmuch as Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour examines the impossibility of translation in articulating the weight of tragedy, Nobuhiro Suwa's H story also aligns with Arnaud Desplechin's Playing 'In the Company of Men' in illustrating the inherent limitations of adapting source material to convey the essential story. The ambiguity of language is foretold in the film's silent, establishing shot of Suwa and lead actress Béatrice Dalle discussing the staging of a hotel room scene - an image capturing the (apparent) mutual understanding between actress and director that is subverted with the introduction of sound, revealing the voice of an off-screen translator mediating their conversation and the presence of a second actor, Hiroaki Umano, waiting for direction nearby. Structured as a day in the life chronicle of the filmmaking process as Suwa and cinematographer Caroline Champetier attempt to shoot a faithful adaptation of Marguerite Duras's screenplay in a way that consciously rejects the facile restaging of sequences from Resnais's iconic postwar film, H story is also a layered reflection of a younger generation's sense of incomplete and disconnected history. This estrangement is captured during a conversation between Hiroshima native Suwa and writer Machida Kuo who is visiting the city to research the life of a hibakusha artist for possible inclusion as a character in his latest novel. For both Suwa and Machida, the bombing represents a distant, intangible history, dislocated from a geographic and moral sense of place.
Interweaving episodes of the difficult film shoot with Dalle's increasing sense of disconnection in the unfamiliar city, the language barrier is shown not only as a symptom of transplantation and distance, but also as a byproduct of its construction, a problem of textuality that is reflected in her continued struggle with the unnatural patois of Duras's precisely crafted, poetic screenplay. In a sense, Dalle's gravitation towards singular images of the bombing rather than large-scale panoramas during a recounted trip to a war museum alludes to her difficulties with the script, where the attention to the form of the language supersedes the content - a rift between reality and its representation. This rupture is also mirrored in Dalle's restlessness during a trip to a Hiroshima bombing memorial-themed art museum with Machida, where personal expressions of tragedy have been sublimated (or more appropriately, buried) within the public exhibition of commissioned works. Moreover, with the idea of transforming untranslatable tragedy into free-form sculptures and pop art, Suwa revisits an earlier theme in an episode between Dalle and Umano at a riverbank where the two pass the time during make-up by sharing an anecdote about the nearby river as the site where the bombing victims, suffering from thirst and the heat, had once sought relief by drinking the water that had been poisoned by nuclear fallout. Framed within the context of the tragedy-inspired art objects at the museum, the incongruity of their casual conversation serves as an incisive interrogation of society's tendency towards the aesthetization of horror, where suffering is lost in the abstraction of the spectacle.
Posted at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008
