May 4, 2008

Embracing, 1992

Naomi Kawase's Embracing is both an evocation of, and disjunction from, Jonas Mekas's diaristic memory films, a journey in search of a lost past through the empty spaces and resigned silence of an unreconciled - and incomplete - present. This sense of absence and longing is revealed in the film's opening sequence: the sight of a traditional Japanese domestic setting (and reinforced by a shot montage of meal preparation), prefaced by a lighted sign for a restaurant called "Bar Happiness", that is juxtaposed against an audio recording of Kawase's unseen maternal relative who expresses her resistance at Naomi's intention to search for her biological father who had abandoned the family, briefly alluding to Naomi's separation from her mother following her parents' divorce and adoption by her great uncle and aunt, Kaneishi and Uno Kawase. By framing her well-intentioned aunt's argument for the integrity of the extended family support system that has nurtured Naomi throughout her entire life (and the potential fissures that may unwittingly be introduced into that fragile network by dredging up the past) through the image association (and dissociation) of happiness, home, and absence, Kawase metaphorically illustrates her essential disconnection with a lost, untold history. Incorporating alternating images of nature - flowers in bloom, insects in the field, and verdant landscapes - with contemporary images of her adoptive mother as the two look for information on her father's identity through family archives and photo albums, Kawase introduces the idea of nature as an eternal, but mutable representation of human cycles. This intersection is further reinforced in a picture of Kawase's biological parents, Kiyonobu Yamashiro and Emiko Takeda as a young couple that cuts to a shot of a flower in bright sunlight, that is subsequently contrasted to the image of a similar row of flowers against the darkness of forming rain clouds as her great aunt remembers the unpleasantness of her parents' break-up. Moreover, using high contrast to frame an episode featuring a little girl playing with a tadpole in a puddle of water, Kawase not only illustrates this symbiotic relationship between nature and human history, but also conveys the sense of rupture intrinsic in the idyllic image - the apparent absence of the child's mother. Revisiting her biological father's life by tracing his residential registration records over the past twenty years, Kawase places corresponding photographs from her own childhood, initially, as a figurative bridge between past and present within a depopulated landscape, then subsequently, as a reflection of the physical and emotional separation between father and daughter (a distance that is also symbolized by the recurring images of shadows against the landscape). Restless, curious, and impulsive in its fractured images, Embracing becomes an integral representation of Kawase's own search for identity: told, not through loosely interrelated pieces of an obscured personal history, but in the unarticulated silence of a brief, but transformative connection with the living present.

Posted by acquarello at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Naomi Kawase

2008 NY Human Rights Watch International Film Festival Line-up

The 2008 New York Human Rights Watch International Film Festival has now been posted, and unlike previous years, this year's selection is a combination of premiering films as well as highlights from previous HRWIFF selections such as Anthony Giacchino's The Camden 28, Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez's La Sierra, Rithy Pahn's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam's Dreaming Lhasa. Also, 2007 New York Film Festival Selection, Carmen Castillo's Calle Santa Fe is featured in the program.

Two films that I'm looking forward to this year are Maria Ramos's Behave and Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel's Project Kashmir. Ramos previously appeared in the HRWIFF program in 2005 with Justice, a sobering look at the Brazilian justice system in the style of Frederick Wiseman and Raymond Depardon. Kheshgi and Patel's film was featured as a work-in-progress screening at last year's festival, an insightful look at the Kashmir conflict from the disparate perspective of Southeast Asian-Americans, Muslim Kheshgi and Hindu Patel, whose lifelong friendship is gradually strained by their immersion into the heart of the regional conflict.

Posted by acquarello at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes

March 25, 2008

Springtime: Three Portraits, 1976

A muted, yet provocative composition on the changing face of the labor movement - or more appropriately, its immobility - in Western Europe in the 1970s, Johan van der Keuken's Springtime: Three Portraits articulates the struggle of the working class under the protracted climate of an austere, stagnant global economy (stemming in part from the OPEC oil crisis) and industrial recession through first person testimonies and quotidian observations of society's increasingly fragile and economically vulnerable middle class. This sense of work time as stasis is prefigured in the opening shot of an impressive wall clock in the suburban home of unemployed garment factory foreman, Joop Uchtman in Den Helder who, despite his productive working relationship with the factory seamstresses under his supervision, was laid off during company downsizing, as local industries sought to shrink their higher waged domestic workforce in favor of overseas outsourcing as a means of reducing operational costs and retaining global competitiveness. Threading through Uchtman's alternately expressed pride at his work (and implied humiliation at having to become dependent on the state and his wife) and anxiety over the repercussions of his inability to find a new job on his young family, with his all too familiar daily routine of reporting to the labor office in person to confirm that he has not secured a job and is eligible to receive unemployment benefits, and seeking advice from a friend on the merits - and illusion - of enrolling in state-sponsored vocational retraining, the recurring image of the clock becomes, not only a metaphor for the bureaucratic rituals of his vain search to find a job, but also reminder of his expiring state-assisted benefits, the dream of a comfortable middle class life being slowly swept away with the swinging of the pendulum.

In Frankfurt, the intersection between past and present, history and memory is embodied in the establishing shot of social activist and former teacher, Doris Schwert listening to a reel tape recording of her father's wartime testimony as a partisan rebel and political prisoner who fought against the Fascists in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and 40s. Instilled with her father's socialist ideals of solidarity and worker empowerment, Schwert's student radicalism and subsequent political engagement as a young teacher had drawn increasing concern from school administrators and West German officials who saw her ties to the communist party as tantamount to an act of ideological sabotage in the waging of the Cold War. Contrasting the images of protest graffiti demanding the reinstatement of the blacklisted, left-leaning teachers at her former school with recruitment posters tacked near empty classrooms that paradoxically tout equal opportunity to job seekers even with such insidious former affiliations as the Nazi party and wartime service in the SS, van der Keuken presents the idea of work time as historical recursion, where lessons from the past are whitewashed and reinvented to conform to the sociopolitical and economic expediencies of an amnesic present, a sobering reality that is punctuated by the chapter's concluding, intercutting shot of a confectionery store window display that is lined with premium chocolate Easter baskets and archival footage of a postwar Frankfurt street in ruins, the metaphoric resurrection of a national soul, fueled not by moral enlightenment, but exploitation and consumerism.

The near wordless Amsterdam closing chapter chronicles a day in the work life of metal worker, Jan Van Haagen, from his early morning suburban commute on his bicycle, to the bellowing of a factory horn that signals the official start of the work day (a sound akin to an air raid signal that also recalls the image of wartime Europe introduced in the Frankfurt chapter), to the union-synchronized meal break, to a passing anecdote of a senior co-worker's health problems that led to an early death after refusing to use an exhaust hood during welding operations (in favor of the company's earlier policy of instituting milk breaks as a means of bolstering employee health after working with hazardous materials), to the closing of the workshop in the afternoon. As in the Den Helder chapter, the clock becomes a recurring motif, marking through the workers' prescribed labor and break schedule with the monotonous ritual of fabrication and assembly. Framed against the image of a constantly turning exhaust vent on the facing wall of the building, the juxtaposition between the factory clock and the exhaust fan illustrates the idea of work time as a cultivated environment for social as well as technological progress, a humanization of industrial production.

Posted by acquarello at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Johan van der Keuken

March 17, 2008

The Power of Emotion, 1983

A subtly interconnecting mosaic of staged vignettes, non-fiction footage, archival prints, and found film excerpts, Alexander Kluge's The Power of Emotion is an organic, densely layered meditation on the intangible (and often irrational) essential mechanism of human emotion. At the core of Kluge's exposition is the interrelation between two disparate observations: 1) that objects, in their materiality, are the opposite of emotion; and 2) that emotions, by nature, search for a happy ending. The illogical nature of emotion is wryly illustrated in a chapter entitled The Shot in which a woman, Frau Bärlamm (Hannelore Hoger) testifying at an inquest over the apparent shooting of her husband, trivializes the gravity of her actions as an unmotivated compulsion, thereby frustrating the judges' attempts to find some psychologically motivated, extenuating circumstance that could help thread together the gaping holes in her story and resolve the case. Similarly, the disconnection between logic and emotion ironically plays out in In Her Final Hour..., when the victim, still harboring wounds from a badly ended love affair, refuses to condemn her attacker and unintentional rescuer following her opportunistic violation in the midst of suicide attempt, arguing that the emotional damage she suffered from her lover's rejection inured her from the trauma of the subsequent attack.

Motifs repeat in unexpected, yet coherent ways. The traditional construction of operatic tragedy inherent in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto and Aida causes Kluge to observe, "In all operas dealing with redemption, a woman is sacrificed in Act V". The tragic irrationality of human despair during a high-rise building fire evokes the confusion of languages (and consequently, the confusion of emotions) created by the Tower of Babel, and is subsequently revisited in the chapter, The Opera House Fire, where a fireman, fascinated since childhood by a stage prop, sneaks into the burning building to catch a glimpse of its contents, the Holy Grail embodying the elusive quest. A woman's (Hannelore Hoger) eccentric, Chaplinesque appearance during an undefined interview is similarly reflected in a prostitute, Betty's (Suzanne von Borsody) excessive makeup, each suggesting the commerce of created desire. A tradesman's detailed explanation on proper bolting technique (itself, a crude visual metaphor to a woman's expressed wish to be handled by her husband as if he were a "repairman") resurfaces in the unusual weapon used during a robbery, representing both an object of fetish and an entwined fate that binds Betty and Schleich - the professional burglar who buys her freedom - to each other.

In the chapter The Power Plant of Emotions, Kluge expounds on the early images of music as the crystallization of grief (in the actual footage of a memorial service attended by Helmut Kohl), examining the role of opera in nineteenth century society as a medium for harnessing emotion: a projected scale reduced to the level of the personal (most notably, in the tragedy of the century old war between the Egyptians and the Ethiopians that is distilled to the triangular conflict of Aida). Juxtaposed against the construction of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London as a showcase for the Great Exhibition of 1851 that will display a collection of valuable, cutting edge products from around the world, the correlation between the opera house and the Victorian-era Crystal Palace reflects their intrinsic connection between the physical and the ethereal within the mindset of colonial (and Industrial Revolution) era contemporary society - a corrupted convergence of dissimilar ideals that is embodied in the opera singer's alchemic quest for eternal life in Leoš Janáček's The Makropulos Case. In essence, the opera house and Crystal Palace have evolved into figurative temples that, like the Tower of Babel, reach towards the false idols of manufactured desire. Framed against the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace and short circuit fire of the opera house, their destruction becomes a metaphor for the redemption of emotion - disconnected from the material pursuit - a dismantling of the fifth act.

Posted by acquarello at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Alexander Kluge

March 8, 2008

2008 NY African Film Festival Line-up

The program for the 15th annual New York African Film Festival has been announced, and the opening night selection is the latest film from venerable independent filmmaker Charles Burnett entitled Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, a biography of Namibia's first president and South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) leader, Sam Nujoma. The program runs from April 9-15 at the Walter Reade Theater, and continues through May at the French Institute Alliance Française and BAMcinématek.

Film Society of Lincoln Center (Walter Reade Theater)

Africa Paradis (Sylvestre Amoussou, 2007) screening with 1961 UK archival footage, Sierra Leone Independence - Africa Paradis seems to be following in the same vein as Pierre Yameogo's Me and My White Pal (featured in the 2005 NYAFF) on the plight of illegal immigrants, from the upended perspective of Europeans as illegal immigrants in Africa.
Fri Apr 11: 7:30 p.m.; Tue Apr 15: 7:45 p.m.

Shoot the Messenger (Ngozi Onwurah, 2006)
Thu Apr 10: 7:45 p.m.; Sat Apr 12: 9:30 p.m.

Ezra (Newton I. Aduaka, 2007) - A fiction film on a young man coming to terms with his experience as a child soldier during the protracted civil war in the Sierra Leone.
Wed Apr 9: 5:15 p.m.

Goodbye Mothers (Mohamed Ismail, 2007) - An examination of the peaceful coexistence between Muslim and Jews during the "Black Years of Emigration" in 1960s Morocco.
Sat Apr 12: 1:15 p.m.; Tues Apr 15: 5:30 p.m.

Juju Factory (Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, 2006) - A film that explores the unreconciled history of Belgium's colonial past through the exoticization of contemporary Africa.
Thu Apr 10: 10:00 p.m.

Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (Charles Burnett, 2007)
Wed Apr 9: 7:30 p.m.

Brothers in Arms (Jack Lewis, 2007) - A portrait of South African activist, Ronald Herboldt, who became the only African to participate in the Cuban Revolution.
Sat Apr 12: 7:30 p.m.; Tue Apr 15: 9:30 p.m.

Black Business (Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, 2007) - Known for her human rights-themed documentaries, Lewat-Hallade's film focuses on Cameroonian families who are still searching for information on their missing loved ones who disappeared during a government campaign in the 1990s.
Thu Apr 10: 5:45 p.m.; Tue Apr 15: 3:30 p.m.

Iron Ladies of Liberia (Daniel Junge and Siatta Scott Johnson, 2007) - A chronicle of the first elected female president in Africa, Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's first year in office following a fourteen year civil war.
Thu Apr 10: 1:15 p.m.

Cuba: An African Odyssey (Jihan El Tahir, 2006-2007)
Sun Apr 13: 9:30 p.m.

The African Slave Trades: Across the Indian Ocean (Diane Seligsohn and Richard Rein, 2007-2008)
Sat Apr 12: 5:30 p.m.; Sun Apr 13: 1:30 p.m.

Meteni: The Lost One (Wondessen Deresse, 2002) screening with Awaiting for Men (Katy Lena Ndiaye, Belgium, 2007)
Sat Apr 12: 3:30 p.m.; Tue Apr 15: 1:30 p.m.

Baa Baa Black Girl (Gül Büyükbeşe Muyan, 2007) screening with Bushman’s Secret (Rehad Desai, 2006) - Muyan's film is an examination of the legacy of slavery in Muslim countries from the perspective of descendant Afro-Turks who continue to face discrimination and social stigma decades after the abolition of slavery in the Middle East.
Wed Apr 9: 1:30 p.m.; Sun Apr 13: 3:30 p.m.

Fantôme Afrique (Isaac Julien, 2005) screening with This is My Africa (Zina Saro-Wiwa, 2008)
Fri Apr 11: 5:45 p.m.; Sun Apr 13: 7:45 p.m.

Meokgo and the Stick Fighter (Teboho Malatshi, 2006) screening with Bunny Chow (John Barker, 2006) - Malatshi's New Crowed Hope entry, Meokgo and the Stick Fighter was featured in the 2007 NYAFF Young Rebels shorts program, a sensual, gorgeously shot tone piece where imagination, humanity, and desire intersect in the austere grace of an eternal, unforgiving landscape.

Russian archival footage: Independently Guinea, The President of Guinea in the USSR, and Hello Guinea
Wed Apr 9: 3:45 p.m.; Sun Apr 13: 5:45 p.m.

French Institute Alliance Française

Buud Yam (Gaston J-M Kabore, 1997)
Tue May 6: 12:30 p.m.; 7:00 p.m.

Sarraounia (Med Hondo, 1986)
Tue May 6: 4:00 p.m.; 9:00 p.m.

Muna Moto (Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa, 1974)
Tue May 13: 12:30 p.m.; 7:00 p.m.

Ali Zaoua (Nabil Ayouch, 2000)
Tue May 13: 4:00 p.m.; 9:00 p.m.

Barra (Souleymane Cisse, 1978)
Tue May 20: 12:30 p.m.; 7:00 p.m.

Drum (Zola Maseko, 2004)
Tue May 20: 4:00 p.m.; 9:00 p.m.

Homage to Ousmane Sembène - A tribute to the late filmmaker that includes a screening of Mamadou Niange's work in progress film, In Memory of Ousmane Sembène, Sembène's first film, Borom Sarret, and a panel conversation.
Tue May 27: 7:00 p.m.

Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAMcinématek)

African Shorts Program with Mama Put (Seke Somolu, 2006), Meokgo and the Stick Fighter (Teboho Malatshi, 2006) and Menged (Daniel Taye Workou, 2006)
Fri May 23: 6:50 p.m.; 9:15 p.m.

Les Saignantes (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005)
Sat May 24: 6:50 p.m., 9:15 p.m.

Juju Factory (Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, 2006)
Sun May 25: 2:00 p.m.; 6:50 p.m.

Growing Stronger (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 2005) screening with A Love During the War (Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, 2005) - Dangarembga's Growing Stronger was one of my favorites from last year's NYAFF (screened in the Women of Zimbabwe shorts program), a profile of two African women from opposite ends of the social spectrum living with HIV: a working class woman, Pamela Kanjenzana and former model and AIDS activist, Tendayi Westerhof.
Mon May 26: 6:50 p.m.; 9:15 p.m.

Clouds Over Conakry (Cheick F. Camara, 2007) - This was the opening film for the 2007 NYAFF, a nuanced look at how tradition and modernity often tenuously coexist in contemporary African society.
Sun May 25: 4:30 p.m.; 9:15 p.m.

Posted by acquarello at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes

February 11, 2008

Lost, Lost, Lost, 1976

In Reel 2 of Lost, Lost, Lost, the first volume of Jonas Mekas's diary film, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Mekas's commentary of his early life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as an immigrant and refugee drifting from factory to factory, accepting a series of temporary jobs as an assembly worker is presented against a typewritten letter that poses the instability of his employment history within the broader question of his true character: "Is it in my nature, or did the war do that to me? [A]m I a born D.P. (Displaced Person) or did war make me into a D.P.?" For Mekas, the rootlessness and transience not only expresses an immigrant's homesickness caused by his physical separation from his native country and family (for reasons that are broached in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania), but also a melancholy in realizing the impossibility of returning home again. A collage film in six reels shot between 1949 and 1963, of which the earliest footage was taken from a Bolex camera that Jonas and his brother Adolfas had purchased on loan a week after arriving to the United States under the immigration status of "Displaced Person" from Lithuania, Mekas's hesitant, measured commentary reveals a harbored sense of dislocation and estrangement that finds community in a shared, unarticulated longing and resignation to an innocence - and paradise - lost.

Not surprisingly, Mekas's earliest sequences are located within the (hollow) semblances of home itself, from portraits of fellow displaced persons who gather in silence at neighborhood parks and summer retreats in Stonybrook, Long Island, their wounded gazes betraying a despair over a distant homeland, to participating in cultural festivals that only serve to emphasize their dislocation, insularity, and quaint incongruity from cosmopolitan, modern-day New York City, to religious rites of passage that celebrate the continuity of family and ethnic traditions. In Reels 3 and 4, the refuge of sameness, commiseration, and impotent nostalgia that pervades the first two reels gives way to inspiration, liberation, and activism, evolving from the interiorization of grief (a loneliness that is reflected in Mekas's descriptions of his many long walks during his earliest days in New York) to the exteriorization of social commitment and action. Geographically, Mekas marks this transition through the brothers' relocation from Brooklyn to Manhattan, auspiciously on 13th Street in Greenwich Village, which also serves as an introduction to the creative community of artists such as poet Allen Ginsberg and filmmaker Ken Jacobs, and involvement in the nuclear disarmament campaign and the peace movement. Chronologically, this synthesis of creativity and politicization is reflected in the production of Mekas's experimental feature, Guns of the Trees (a time that also marks the filming of Adolfas's own feature, Hallelujah the Hills), as well as his assumed role as social documentarian, chronicling the zeitgeist of protest and unrest. In Reels 5 and 6, the development of Mekas's confidence as a filmmaker and integration into the New York art scene is reflected not only in his day-to-day experimentation (in particular, a playful, wandering camera self-portrait that suggests an embryonic version of Frans Zwartjes's Living) but in his equally comical attempts to be admitted to (or more appropriately, crash) the Robert Flaherty Seminar. In essence, Mekas's transformation becomes tied to his relationship with the creation (and resolution) of fixed images: first, in its frozen (and implicitly idealized) memories of a lost homeland, then subsequently, in the apparatus of capturing transience and passage within his own elusive (and often tangential) journey home. This idea of human experience coming, not to full circle, but to non-intersecting, collinear points within a spiral continuum is poetically encapsulated in the footage of Mekas filming his friends at a Long Island beach where, years earlier, he had visited with people from the Lithuanian expatriate community. Replacing black and white with color film, displaced persons with artists, Mekas captures the integral image of the artist as perpetual observer, outsider, and exile.

Posted by acquarello at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Jonas Mekas

February 5, 2008

2008 Rendez-vous with French Cinema Line-up

The line-up for the 2008 Rendez-vous with French Cinema has been announced and this year's selection looks very promising. I'm especially thrilled to see Nicolas Klotz's La Question Humaine, a film that re-teams Klotz with author Elisabeth Perceval (which incidentally, dovetails nicely with Klotz and Perceval's appearance at MoMA later in the evening for La Blessure). I'm also greatly looking forward to Noémie Lvovsky's Let's Dance (her earlier film Les Sentiments was a highlight of the 2004 Rendez-vous program), Christophe Honoré's Love Songs, and Cédric Klapisch's Paris, as well as the directorial debut of one of my favorite actresses, Sandrine Bonnaire with Her Name Is Sabine.

Roman de gare, Claude Lelouch, 2007 (Opening Night)
WRT: Fri Feb 29: 6:30 pm and 9:00 pm
IFC: Sat Mar 1: 7:00pm

Ain’t Scared / Regarde-moi, Audrey Estrougo, 2007
WRT: Sun Mar 2: 3:30; Wed Mar 5: 1:30pm
IFC: Tue Mar 4: 9:30pm

All Is Forgiven / Tout est pardonné, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2007
WRT: Fri Mar 7: 8:45pm; Sat Mar 8: 4:00pm
IFC: Thu Mar 6: 9:30pm

Fear(s) of the Dark / Peur(s) du noir, Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti & Richard McGuire, 2008
WRT: Sat Mar 8: 9:00pm; Sun Mar 9: 1:30pm
IFC: Sat Mar 1: 9:30pm

The Feelings Factory / La Fabrique des sentiments, Jean-Marc Moutout, 2008
WRT: Tue Mar 4: 8:45pm; Wed Mar 5: 4:00pm; Sun Mar 9: 6:15pm
IFC: Sun Mar 2: 8:45pm

The Grocer’s Son / Le Fils de l’épicier, Eric Guirado, 2007
WRT: Wed Mar 5: 6:30pm; Thu Mar 6: 3:15pm; Fri Mar 7: 6:30pm
IFC: Tue Mar 4: 7:00pm

Heartbeat Detector / La Question humaine, Nicolas Klotz, 2007
WRT: Fri Feb 29: 3:30pm; Sun Mar 2: 8:45pm
IFC: Sat Mar 1: 3:45pm

Her Name Is Sabine / Elle s’appelle Sabine, Sandrine Bonnaire, 2007
WRT: Sat Mar 1: 1:30pm; Wed Mar 5: 8:45pm
IFC: Sun Mar 2: 3:30pm

Let’s Dance! / Fait que ça danse!, Noémie Lvovsky, 2007
WRT: Fri Feb 29: 1:00pm; Sat Mar 1: 9:15pm
IFC: Sun Mar 2: 1:00pm

Love Songs / Les Chansons d’amour, Christophe Honoré, 2007
Sun Mar 2: 1:00pm; Tue Mar 4: 1:00pm and 6:15pm
IFC: Mon Mar 3: 7:30pm

Paris, Cédric Klapisch, 2008
WRT: Sat Mar 1: 6:15pm; Tue Mar 4: 3:15pm
IFC: Sun Mar 2: 5:45pm

A Secret / Un secret, Claude Miller, 2007
WRT: Sat Mar 1: 3:45pm; Sun Mar 2: 6:00pm
IFC: Fri Feb 29: 7:30pm

Shall We Kiss? / Un baiser s’il vous plaît, Emmanuel Mouret, 2007
WRT: Fri Mar 7: 4:00pm; Sat Mar 8: 1:30pm; Sun Mar 9: 8:45pm
IFC: Thu Mar 6: 7:00pm

Those Who Remain / Ceux qui restent, Anne Le Ny, 2007
WRT: Thu Mar 6: 1:00pm; Sat Mar 8: 6:30pm; Sun Mar 9: 3:45pm
IFC: Sat Mar 1: 1:45pm

Trivial / La Disparue de Deauville, Sophie Marceau, 2007
WRT: Thu Mar 6: 8:15pm; Fri Mar 7: 1:30pm
IFC: Wed Mar 5: 7:30pm

Posted by acquarello at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes

February 3, 2008

Kharij (The Case Is Closed), 1982

The second film in Mrinal Sen's thematically connected "absence trilogy" (along with Ek Din Pratidin and Ek Din Achanak) that examine the implications of a person's unexpected disappearance from a middle-class household on the family's moral consciousness, Kharij expounds on the trilogy's clinical and uncompromising social critique of entrenched, dysfunctional bourgeois values and materialistic privilege that have led to indifference, discrimination, insularity, and exploitation. This prevailing attitude of entitlement and commodification is foretold in the film's opening sequence: a conversation between an unseen couple from the back of a taxicab as the man offers to buy anything the woman desires after their marriage - a new apartment, car, wardrobe, or television set - only to be coddled with a declaration that all she needs in life to be happy is to be with him. The scene then cuts to the insightful image of the same man, Anjan (Anjan Dutt) a few years later, shaving in front of a mirror as he poses a nearly identical question to his wife, Mamata (Mamata Shankar) with the idea of using some of their disposable income from their successful careers to make their domestic lives easier. On a whim, Mamata proposes that they take in a houseboy who can help break coals for the stove, run errands, and be an attendant and playmate to their young son Pupai (Indranil Moitra) - a pragmatic request that, as Anjan subsequently rationalizes, would not only cost them little in terms of wages, but also in expenses, since he will invariably eat less than an adult house servant. Enlisting the aid of a neighbor's servant, Ganesh, the couple visits the home of a widowed father named Haran, who because of recent famine in their rural village, is forced to send his son Palan away to work in order to provide income for the family and ensure that he will, at least, have enough to eat. However, when Palan succumbs to carbon monoxide poisoning one December morning after having sought refuge from the cold weather in the relative warmth of an unventilated kitchen, and the police are called into the apartment building in order to investigate the circumstances surrounding the boy's death from apparently unnatural causes, Anjan and Mamata are forced to confront their own culpability in the senseless tragedy, even as they attempt to preserve their dignity, bristle at the inconvenience that Palan's death has caused them, and attempt to defuse a potential scandal in the face of prying eyes and opportunists in the neighborhood.

As in Ek Din Pratidin, the atmosphere of tension and menace in Kharij serves as a framework for subverted expectation. Structurally, Sen establishes this pervasive sense of uncertainty from the beginning of the film, in the unseen lovers' conversation that plays out against the image of the back of the taxi driver's head - a prefiguring metaphor for what would prove to be an exposition into the couple's subconscious that is also suggested in the image of Anjan in the mirror (in essence, his self-reflection), and is reinforced in the couple's repeated, amplified calls to wake Palan and subsequently, in the neighbors' attempt to break through the kitchen door when the boy fails to respond. Similarly, the protracted police inquest also reflects this anxiety by raising the specter of possible charges being brought as a result of the couple's negligence (and which, in turn, Anjan is quick to divert the blame on his landlord by seizing on a police officer's observation that a ventilator had not been installed in the kitchen), as well as the insinuation by a group of bystanders into the couple's home after surrounding Anjan on the street under the ruse of asking what happened. But beyond facile illustrations of deflected responsibility among inconsiderate employers and frugal landlords, Sen also exposes an endemic culture of collective accountability, where exploitation of the poor and the weak are rationalized not only by economic necessity, but also socially enabled by an impotent intellectualism that reinforces the status quo - an implied complicity that is articulated in a passing conversation between two university educated men who see the tragedy as a moral imperative and propose conducting a seminar on the subject of child labor as a means of taking up the cause. Moreover, by chronicling Anjan's desperate attempts to save face with the help of his influential neighbor (Bimal Chakraborty) by making accommodations for Palan's father to stay for the night (a courtesy that the couple never extended to his son, who slept behind the open stairwell, along with the landlords' houseboy, Hari (Dehapratim Das Gupta)), commenting to his consulting lawyer (Charuprakash Ghosh) that Palan was treated like a member of the family (a claim that the lawyer immediately refutes by citing his deplorable sleeping conditions, and Anjan's accusatory posture in his reference to Palan's earlier bout of illness as the boy having previously caused "trouble"), and attending Palan's funeral rites (albeit to verify that the mourners do not publicly denounce him in his absence), Sen illustrates a pattern of self-interest and denial that intrinsically reveals Anjan's struggle to confront his own guilt - an internal conflict that manifests itself in irrational fears that never materialize. It is the persistence of inerasable guilt that is evoked in the jarring soundtrack that accompanies Anjan's final encounter with Palan's father on the staircase leading to their apartment after performing their purification ritual, an invocation of unreconciled ghosts that reside, not in the realm between life and death, but in the recesses of a haunted conscience.

Posted by acquarello at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Mrinal Sen

January 27, 2008

O Sangue, 1989

Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing. The thematic convergence is insightfully revealed in an episode that occurs near the end of the film, when the older brother Vicente (Pedro Hestnes), having been held captive by his father's nefarious associates on New Year's Eve in a half-baked attempt to collect his father's unpaid debt from him, awakens in the darkness of an unfamiliar apartment to the sight of a restless silhouette on the balcony - the shadow cast by his father's mistress (Isabel de Castro) that has been made spectral and incandescent by the transient glow of exploding fireworks and the sweep of wind against translucent curtains (a sense of otherworldliness that also reinforces a captor's earlier idea of conducting a séance in order to contact Vincente's missing father (Canto e Castro)). Costa establishes this sinister atmosphere of sudden, erupted violence in the film's opening sequence: the prefiguring sound of a slammed door and scurrying feet that subsequently reveals a frontal shot of Vicente on a muddy road as he is suddenly slapped by his wayward father while intentionally blocking his path, trying to prevent him for leaving by imploring him to show consideration towards his younger brother Nino (Nuno Ferreira) who has been left home alone in the middle of night in pursuit of him. Cutting to the image of Vicente riding his scooter through the empty streets at twilight, and subsequently, the schoolteacher, Clara's (Inês de Medeiros) realization that a student, Rosa (Sara Breia) has run away from school with Nino, the image of dislocation and fugue also becomes a resurfacing idea, a reflection of the characters' own desire to reinvent and transform in the aftermath of loss that is reflected in Nino's impulsive attempt to rearrange the furniture, and his subsequent request to similarly dress Vicente in his clothing while accompanying him to school after their father's disappearance (a longing for change that is also implied in Clara's selection of a new haircut for Nino). However, when Vicente and Nino's skeptical uncle (Luís Miguel Cintra) pays a visit and finds the brothers home alone on Christmas Eve with Clara, his heavy-handed, if well-intentioned decision to take Nino away from home and form a new family with his fragile son Pedro (Miguel Fernandes) would lead the brothers into their own journeys of self-discovery in their isolated quest to return to their broken home.

It is interesting to note that in illustrating the brothers' (as well as Clara's) subverted attempts at escapism (and figurative erasure) - the persistence of a haunted past (an apparent allusion to Tourneur) that is ingeniously reinforced in the discovery of a body on the lake near the fairgrounds where Vicente and Clara go on a date - Costa introduces the idea of an irrepressible, hidden history that continues to haunt present-day consciousness. Costa expounds on this theme of place as the eternal witness to a deracinated history in evoking Cape Verde's tragic legacy (as leprosarium and slave port) in the moral contamination of the forgotten residents in Casa de Lava, as well as the concentration camps of Tarrafal (in Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters) that perpetuate a sense of moribund captivity to a contaminated, dying land. Similarly, the contrast between the abandoned, rural family home and the sterile, anonymous apartment buildings where the brothers are held against their will in O Sangue may be seen as a prefiguration of the Fonthainas diaspora itself, from the transitory sanctuary embodied by dilapidated, condemned spaces (In Vanda's Room), to the soullessness of uprooted communities represented by impersonal, high density, public housing (Colossal Youth). In this respect, Vicente and Nino's instinctual struggle to escape also represents a moral captivity to a traumatic history, an elusive homecoming that paradoxically embodies both liberation and surrender to the will of fate.

Posted by acquarello at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Pedro Costa

January 21, 2008

Umut, 1970

Part social realism in its searing depiction of the plight of the underprivileged against the transforming economy of an increasingly modernized Turkey, and part poetic essentialism in its psychological portrait of a desperate man succumbing to the mania of a delusive, blind faith, Yilmaz Güney and Serif Gören's Umut (Hope) captures the precarious atmosphere of a nation at a political and economic crossroads. The cultural climate of transformation and renewal is prefigured in the film's opening montage - an impromptu city symphony created by the early morning rituals of road washing trucks, sidewalk sweepers, street vendors, billboard gazers (not coincidentally, all advertising banking institutions), and waiting taxicabs that play out against a dozing Cabbar (Yilmaz Güney), an uneducated cart driver waiting in the wings of a station for commuters to arrive at the terminal. Immediately, the passengers' selected mode of transportation reveals an intrinsically bifurcated society, as people wearing modern, Western attire make their way towards a row of idling taxis, while people dressed in traditional clothing invariably board horse-drawn carriages lining the front of the station...that is, all except for Cabbar's shabby and woefully old-fashioned cart. Already leading a hardscrabble existence as the family's sole provider - one that includes five children whose financial demands for school expenses and playful whims are often weighed against the more fundamental needs of having enough food to eat and proper health care for an elderly parent - and plagued by compounding debts that have accumulated in the course of establishing (and maintaining) his out of fashion livelihood, his situation takes a further turn for the worse when a roadside accident delivers a tragic, final blow to his already struggling enterprise. Left without a means of earning a living, Cabbar follows the advice of his unemployed friend, Hasan (Tuncel Kurtiz) and seeks guidance from Hüseyin Hodja (Osman Alyanak), a mystical imam and village faith healer who would soon lead him away from his family in search of an elusive, ever-shifting panacea amidst the desolation and rubble of a parched, forgotten land.

In a way, Umut may be seen as an adumbration of Djibril Diop Mambéty's Le Franc in its cautionary tale of an insoluble debt that has metastasized into a vicious circle of delusion and gullibility, and the parasitic dependency created by institutionalized, arbitrary, windfall mechanisms that systematize poverty and disenfranchisement. This moral passivity (and consequently, victimization) is introduced in the establishing images of Cabbar: initially, through an incisive shot that frames a wash truck approaching his cart as he sleeps in the foreground, figuratively washing him away, in his oblivion, from the streets in the automated sweep of modernization; then subsequently, from his repeated requests to check his lottery ticket at a newsstand against the day's winning numbers, unable to read the posted numbers on the newspaper himself. At each instance, Cabbar's daily ritual is presented against undermining acts of intervention that render his apparent self-reliance an illusion. Visually, Güney and Gören reflect this rupture between perception and reality through the jarring juxtaposition of interstitial, highly formalized, chiaroscuro landscape shots (often resembling cutout animation) against rough hewn, neorealistic images of struggle and despair. Moreover, Cabbar's decision to follow Hodja's visions also represents a conscious, if unwitting, disempowerment in lieu of direct action and sociopolitical engagement: a rejection that is also suggested in his recusal from a planned cart driver strike, citing the confiscation of his vehicle. In essence, Cabbar's relegation of destiny into the hands of impotent fate reveals an underlying social schism - a division that is implied in the foreshadowing shot between modernity and tradition at the station - that, in turn, exposes the folly of inaction. Concluding with the image of a blindfolded Cabbar aimlessly turning in circles to divine his fortune, Umut illustrates that despair lies, not in the absence of hope, but in its hollow, inert persistence.

Posted by acquarello at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008

January 18, 2008

2008 Film Comment Selects Program Line-up

The 2008 Film Comment Selects program has just been announced. Highlights include the opening night screening of Jacques Rivette's latest film, The Duchess of Langeais, a late night screening of George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, the retrospective screenings of Philippe Garrel's J’entends plus la guitare and Trent Harris's Rubin and Ed, a spotlight on Richard Fleischer, and a sampling of Damon Packard's unclassifiable cinema. The closing night will feature Alex Cox's Walker and Searchers 2.0.

SPECIAL LATE NIGHT PREVIEW
George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero)
Thu Feb 14: 10:30pm

OPENING NIGHT
The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette)
Fri Feb 15: 6:00pm

The Banishment (Andrei Zvyagintsev)
Mon Feb 18: 6:00pm; Wed Feb 20: 3:00pm; Mon Feb 25: 2:00pm

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot)
Sun Feb 17: 6:45pm; Thu Feb 21: 3:15pm

Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas)
Fri Feb 15: 9:45pm

Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani)
Mon Feb 18: 9:00pm

Container (Lukas Moodysson)
Tue Feb 26: 2:15pm and 9:15pm

Dark Matter (Chen Shi-zheng)
Wed Feb 27: 8:15pm; Thu Feb 28: 1:00pm

Dust (Hartmut Bitomsky)
Wed Feb 20: 6:15pm

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)
Sat Feb 23: 4:30pm

Ex Drummer (Koen Mortier)
Sat Feb 16: 10:00pm; Tue Feb 19: 3:30pm

Flash Point (Wilson Yip)
Sun Feb 17: 9:00pm; Tue Feb 19: 1:30pm; Fri Feb 22: 4:00pm

Frontière(s) (Xavier Gens)
Fri Feb 22: 9:00pm; Wed Feb 27: 2:15pm

Import Export (Ulrich Seidl)
Sun Feb 17: 1:30pm; Wed Feb 20: 8:15pm

Inside (Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo)
Sun Feb 24: 9:00pm; Tue Feb 26: 4:00pm; Wed Feb 27: 6:30pm

Joy Division (Grant Gee)
Sat Feb 16: 7:30pm; Wed Feb 27: 4:30pm

Schindler’s Houses (Heinz Emigholz)
Sun Feb 24: 3:45pm

Wolfsbergen (Nanouk Leopold)
Sat Feb 16: 5:30pm; Mon Feb 18: 4:00pm; Wed Feb 20: 1:00pm

A Wonderful World (Luis Estrada)
Sun Feb 17: 4:15pm; Mon Feb 18: 1:30pm; Fri Feb 22: 1:30pm

RETROSPECTIVE
J’entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel)
Mon Feb. 25: 8:30pm

Rubin and Ed (Trent Harris)
Sat Feb 23: 7:00pm

SPOTLIGHT ON RICHARD FLEISCHER
Mandingo (Richard Fleischer)
Sat Feb 23: 2:00pm

10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer)
Thu Feb 21: 1:00pm; Sun Feb 24: 1:30pm

MONDO PACKARD
Reflections of Evil (Damon Packard)
Fri Feb 22: 6:15pm

Damon Packard’s Greatest Hits (Damon Packard)
Sun Feb 24: 6:00pm

CLOSING NIGHT
Walker (Alex Cox)
Thu Feb 28: 6:30pm

Searchers 2.0 (Alex Cox)
Thu Feb 28: 8:30pm

Posted by acquarello at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes

January 15, 2008

Screening Alert: Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure at MoMA

This is a quick note that Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure will be screening at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC as part of the Pierre Chevalier program, The Age of Chevalier. This was my favorite film from 2005, and is one that I continue think about, especially in light of incidents like the Amsterdam airport fire and the civil suit of a deported asylum seeker in 2005. I can't recommend it highly enough. Filmmaker Nicolas Klotz and screenwriter (and author) Elisabeth Perceval will introduce the film.

Screening on February 29, 2008 at 8:15 p.m at MoMA Titus 1.

P.S. Here's the link to the French trailer for the film that Harry Tuttle alerted me to. (Thanks again, HT!)

Posted by acquarello at 7:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Quick Notes