Composed of three aesthetically distinct, self-encapsulated, geographically-based chapters - assembled footage from Jonas Mekas' adoptive hometown of Brooklyn circa 1950 shortly after his arrival to America with his brother Adolfas, a series of short, herky-jerky vignettes recorded during the brothers' return to their place of birth in the rural, agrarian village of Semeniskiai, Lithuania in August, 1971 (25 years after their reluctant flight from home, having run afoul with pro-German authorities for publishing articles deemed sympathetic to the resistance), and finally, a visit to personal friend, Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka's hometown of Vienna - Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania traces a seemingly divergent, often contradictory, and inevitably irreconcilable personal odyssey that, nevertheless, instinctively converges towards the filmmaker's acute and inescapable awareness of his own spiritual displacement, sense of otherness, and perpetual exile. The film opens to a black and white montage shot from a Bolex camera of friends and family taking a recreational stroll through the woods in the Catskill Mountains as the accented Mekas speaks in slow, measured tone after an extended pause - a memory perhaps triggered by the sight of the woods again - of an occasion in the late 1950s during a hike through the mountains when he first became aware that, in the course of being completely occupied with the invigoration of the activity and camaraderie of friends, he had momentarily forgotten his longing for home. The realization of his unconscious, gradual cultural assimilation is a bittersweet one, an adaptive process of transformation that is tempered by a profound consciousness of loss and passage.

In Part One of the film, an observational survey of everyday life in the ethnically diverse, working class neighborhood of Williamsburg, Mekas juxtaposes dualistic images of lightheartedness and seeming leisure that also suggest an implicit sense of poverty: whether through the framing of neighborhood children playing against the cluttered array of assorted laundry hanging from clotheslines and people idly sitting on the sidewalks that reinforce the community's economic struggle and the pervasiveness of unemployment, or through recorded chronicles of his attendance in assorted social gatherings for immigrant "Displaced Persons" (comprised mostly of Eastern Europeans uprooted by the war) featuring traditional music and dance performances that reveal an underlying spiritual impoverishment, a longing to immerse in the reassuring familiarity of his native culture - a dichotomy that is reflected in Mekas' deliberative speech and incorporation of melancholic interludes monaurally recorded from scratchy, phonograph records that subvert the quick cut, animated imagery with a somber infusion of a distant, idealized, and dislocated nostalgia. As in the prefiguring, double entendred image of children playing with fallen autumn leaves in the Catskills that is presented against Mekas' account of his realization that he has supplanted his own memories of home with the new life he has established in America, the first chapter presents the idea of home as an elusive physical location - an evocative landscape of imperceptibly fading memories and transitory bliss.

Punctuated by a transition to color film, Part Two is composed of a "100 glimpses" of Lithuania, a series of short take, often destabilized and variably illuminated quotidian images (caused by his defective camera's inability to record at constant speed) of his small statured, but vital and indomitable mother (who was in her 80s at the time of the brothers' return), his visits with his multi-generational, extended family and childhood friends (including the well-intentioned uncle, a Reformed Protestant pastor, who had advised the young men to go west to Vienna in order to avoid capture), the family farm that has since been modernized and assimilated into a socialist farm collective that encompasses several villages. Kinetic, modulating, and irregular in form, the collage of unstable, fleeting images curiously impart, not only a sense of childlike exhilaration over recapturing the familiar sights of youth, but also an impressionistic fragility in their seeming volatility - the ephemerality of a mythical, "recovered" gaze that, in turn, reflects the intrinsic elusiveness of returning despite the act of homecoming, an impossibility that is reinforced by Mekas' own commentary of the transformed landscape and mode of life in the village after a 25 year absence (as reflected in the growth of planted trees and the obsolescence of manual farm tools that the brothers temporarily reclaim for visual demonstration).

The tongue in cheek reference to Kubelka as "Saint Peter" in the intertitles juxtaposed against images of the vivacious filmmaker feeding assorted animals in a public park (an allusion to St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and nature) provides the oddly fitting context for Mekas' trip to Vienna in Part Three that ironically represents the culmination of his earlier truncated journey to the indefinable "west", a destination that had eluded the brothers after their capture and relocation to work camps by the Germans during the war. Playing the role of resident host to a remarkable assembly of avant-garde personalities such as filmmaker Ken Jacobs, artist Hermann Nitsch, and writer and film theorist Annette Michelson (as well as Mekas himself), Kubelka also embodies an idealized representation - a concreteness of cultural and existential identity. In this respect, the gathering of avant-garde artists also becomes a manifestation of home - a sense of place borne, not of physical space (Brooklyn) or familial roots (Semeniskiai), but of the (geographically independent) communality of intellectual and ideological kinship. But in the end, even the surrogate idea of a spiritual home proves elusive for the pensive filmmaker. Concluding with the chaotic sight of Kubelka's favorite, open air, farmer's market burning in the distance, the turbulent image symbolizes the fleeting nature of their creative symbiosis that, in turn, serves as a broader reflection of the trajectory of all human relationships that define the ephemeral location of home as the metaphysical intersection of union, separation, longing, and transformation.

Posted by on Dec 09, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Jonas Mekas

On the surface, Time is perhaps Kim Ki-duk's most brash, confrontational, and bituminous film since The Isle, an admirably crafted - and unexpectedly refreshing - return to his more familiar gothic, cringingly blunt, provocateur form after immersing in such aesthetically impeccable, but slight romanticized allegories riddled with obtuse, pseudo Zen mysticism and disjointed orientalism. Ostensibly presented as a dark, cautionary tale of an insecure woman, Seh-hee's (Ji-Yeon Park) desperate attempt to stop the process of time and recreate the spark of a new romance with her committed, long-term lover, Ji-woo (Jung-woo Ha) (a filmmaker who appears to be in the process of editing scenes from 3-Iron) by undergoing drastic facial reconstructive surgery in order to reinvent herself and, in turn, their relationship, the film is also a brutal and scathing exposition into the psychology and morality of contemporary (and in particular, Korean) society's obsession with cosmetic surgery. Nevertheless, despite Kim's penetrating, articulate, and relevant social critique, I can't help but express a certain degree of skepticism towards the very elements that, paradoxically, I find most trenchant and provocative about the film: a resistance that is integrally rooted in the film's uncanny resonance - not only in a vague, overarching, existential thematic semblance with avant-garde novelist Kobo Abe's recurring preoccupations on identity, alienation, and emotional disconnection, but in particular, with Hiroshi Teshigahara's earlier cinematic adaptations of Abe's work - that seem too coincidental not to be, at best, a faithful homage, and at worst, a lazy derivation. Indeed, this apparent plane of aesthetic convergence between Teshigahara's cinema and Kim's aesthetic vision for the film culminates with a similar, progressive montage, stationary camera ending shot, as a face obscured, "transformed" heroine (Hyeon-a Seong) of Time leaves the cosmetic surgeon's office and has a seemingly fateful encounter before slipping away from view and fading into the anonymity of a bustling crowd on a metropolitan city street: an image that seems conceptually readapted from the mise-en-scène of the concluding sequence in Teshigahara's The Face of Another (in which Okuyama's fateful encounter is with the doctor himself), as well as in The Man Without a Map (in the detective's deliberate act of relinquishing traces of his former life by following in the footsteps - and therefore, indirectly assuming the figurative identity - of his missing subject), a reflection of the protagonist's psychological fugue that is manifested in the detective's evasion of the missing man's wife in Teshigahara's film, and in the shattered, unclaimed, pre-operative surgery souvenir portrait in Time. In essence, the film's conflation of past and present (as reflected through the bookending sequence of a recursive encounter) represents the metaphoric collapse, not only of time, but of humanity itself, where identity is reduced to the reinforcement of meaningless social rituals and interchangeable, cosmetic masks, and connection is similarly revealed through equally impulsive and transitory acts of delusive, surrogate intimacy. It is this bracing - and brazen - social criticism that inevitably defines Kim's flawed, but impassioned observation of contemporary society's inherent dysfunctionality in the wake of facile, economic privilege: a lost generation foundering in a youth-oriented culture of vanity, rootlessness, excess, and disposability.

Posted by on Nov 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2006, Kim Ki-duk

Incisively anticipating such sobering and indelible agricultural documentaries as Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare, Nick and Mark Francis' Black Gold, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread (as well as the dysfunctionality of big business economics as presented in Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot's The Corporation), and infused with Luc Moullet's irrepressibly droll, tongue-in-cheek humor that has been further crystallized within the filmmaker's socially critical, if not revolutionary, gaze, Genèse d'un repas (The Origins of a Meal) is a thoughtful, acerbic, contemporary, and profoundly relevant exposition on the indirect, wide-ranging repercussions of globalism on industrial food production, international commerce, and the local economy. Tracing the seemingly innocuous ingredients of a meal, the film soon becomes a broader roadmap illustrating the cycle of exploitation, xenophobia, and disenfranchisement engendered by a legacy of colonialism and entrenched social class: eggs originating from a partially automated, industrial poultry farm packing plant in Picardy (sold under the marketed brands of Coq'ami and Cokidat, perhaps, to create the illusion of competitive pricing) is contrasted against the primitive conditions at a Senegalese cannery where the tuna is still manually processed and hand packed into tins; a can of Pêcheurs de France tuna which bears the striking figure of a ruggedly handsome, pipe smoking, seemingly Breton fisherman despite the product's actual African origins in a Dakar seaport (a piece of information that has been surreptitiously indicated using obfuscated, tiny printing at the base of the label) underscores the implicit acknowledgment of racism that is mitigated by deceptive packaging; and a banana from an Ecuadorian plantation (interchangeably sold under the more familiar brands of Bajella, Chiquita, and Bonita) illustrates the inhumanity of working conditions, where children earning half wages as shipyard stevedores and poor migrant workers from the rural provinces increasingly constitute the industry's preferred labor pool in order to minimize operating expenses and reduce (or more appropriately, circumventing) worker-related expenses such as health care and pension funds.

Moullet's organic and sprawling, yet lucid and articulate essay film further broaches on such (still) contemporary issues as the disparity of wages between Senegalese workers and their Gallic counterparts (even those who work and reside in Africa), the culture of excess endemic in industrialized societies that have led to widespread obesity, the socio-political fragility intrinsic in a single-crop economy that enables the mechanism for catastrophic famine, the reality of a supplanted cultural imperialism in the wake of a delusive, post-colonial "liberation" (a shot of a supermarket aisle in France and Senegal become interchangeable as the French then export goods, such as re-branded canned tuna, back to the former colonies) that continues to foster economic dependency through infrastructural corporate alliances that perpetuate insoluble debt (a prevailing theme in Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako), the industrial practice of under-weighing produce to reduce payment to suppliers under the justification of product desiccation in transit, the ecological (and moral) waste of enforcing "excessive quality control" that relegates edible, but undersized food products (including fish) to be discarded rather than given away to the underpaid workers for their own consumption (note a shot of discarded bananas along the shipyard that is evoked in the fragrance of discarded oranges along the harbor in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Sicilia!), the endemic corruption caused by the forging of incestuous relationships between corporations and (often despotic) governments in order to ensure the continuity of their foreign operations despite political instability, and the impotence of organized unions in competitive and desperate labor markets. Tracing the often humorous, yet heartbreaking trajectory of the agricultural trade from the moment of harvest, to processing, to transportation (often through circuitous routes at intermediary, international ports in order to navigate through murky, protectionist tariff laws), and eventually, to local distribution centers (an equally muddled network of middlemen businesses that set an arbitrary overhead percentage for the domestic resale of goods), Genèse d'un repas serves as an ingeniously prescient social interrogation, not only of the thinly veiled exploitation of emerging nations as a result of the global economy, but also of the broader question of how the societies of developed nations define the very notion of civilization itself, where the insatiable, public-fueled consumption for cheaper (and more) goods, coupled by corporate profiteering, global competition, and exploitive outsourcing have engendered a dystopian economic reality of social polarization, cultural subjugation, and systematic poverty.

Posted by on Nov 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2006, Luc Moullet

I'm very excited to see the press release for this year's Spanish Cinema Now, which features a tantalizing and nicely balanced slate of debut films from several first-time filmmakers along with what is perhaps the first U.S. retrospective of Edgar Neville's work entitled City Streets and Secret Passages: The Films of Edgar Neville. The series runs from December 8-26, and seems ideally suited for a random stab at a pre-Christmas quick trip home for what promises to be a weekend of unexpected, accidental discoveries:

DarkBlueAlmostBlack (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo; 2006)
Crossing the Border (Carlos Iglesias; 2006; 105m)
Celia's Lives (Antonio Chavarrías; 2006)
Alatriste (Agustín Díaz Yanes; 2006)
Welcome Home (David Trueba; 2006)
The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville; 1944)
Life Hanging By a Thread (Edgar Neville; 1945)
The Night of the Sunflowers (Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo; 2006)
Lady Nitwit (Manuel Iborra; 2006)
Quixotic (Albert Serra; 2006)
The Education of Fairies (José Luis Cuerda; 2006)

SHORTMETRAJE
- Avatar (Lluís Quílez; 2005)
- The Fence (Ricardo Iscar, Nacho Martín; 2005)
- Maximum Penalty (Juanjo Giménez Spain, 2005)
- Hiyab (Xavi Sala; 2005)
- K (Juan Simons; 2005)
- Summer or the Flaws of Andrés (Jorge Torregrossa; 2006)
- Ponys (David Planell; 2005)

Carnival Sunday (Edgar Neville; 1945)
Round Two (Daniel Cebrián; 2005)
The Crime on Bordadores Street (Edgar Neville; 1946)
7 Virgins (Alberto Rodriguez; 2004)
Salvador (Puig Antich) (Manuel Huerga; 2006)
Out of Here (Víctor García León; 2006)
Lola (Javier Rebollo; 2006)
The Magicians (Esteban Riambau & Elisabet Cabeza; 2005)
Verbena (Edgar Neville; 1941) preceded by Flamenco (Edgar Neville; 1952)
The Last Horse (Edgar Neville; 1950)

Posted by on Nov 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Filed under 2006, Quick Notes

Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel's Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights... (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation - an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel's failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple - perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico - in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals. A seemingly isolated shot of another woman, an actress named Marie (Mireille Perrier) waiting in the office of the Ministry of Art subsequently connects the troubled couple through the sound of the rapid, half-whisper, off-screen script reading, first by the actor preparing for the role in the apartment, then subsequently by the voice of the filmmaker, Philippe (Philippe Garrel) as he casts her in his latest project - the seemingly disparate narrative arcs reconciled through the intersection of the autobiographical nature of Philippe's proposed project inspired by his own tumultuous relationship with model, singer, actress, and muse Nico (a transparency between art and life that is further compounded by the eventual appearance of Garrel as the director of the "film within a film" film). Another break in logic is created in the long shot of the actor, in the role of the film director, discarding a film reel from a bridge overlooking the river before meeting Marie, initially unfolding as the shooting of a film scene through the transformation of Marie's visage at the moment of performance, but subsequently subverted by the repeated episode of the couple - perhaps no longer acting in character - driving away, a romantic liaison that is reinforced by a subsequent, silent image of the couple engaged in an (apparently) intimate conversation.

Gradually, the bounds between reality and fiction begin to disintegrate in the interpenetration of dreams and memories, passions and anxieties, becoming increasingly fractured and irresolvable. Like his alter-ego character on the bridge, Philippe has grown apprehensive over the seeming irresolution of the film, and enlists the aid of friends: Chantal Akerman who is, uncoincidentally in the process of shooting The Eighties, a metafilm on the nature of repetition and performance); Christa, also played by Wiazemsky, and who, in turn, also evokes a self-reflexive, permeable reality through reconstructed, iconic poses that not only allude to Nico's early career as a fashion model, but also mimic the Bressonian model figuration of her character, Marie in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar); and actor Lou Castel, whose "new" character is introduced midway through the film shoot as Marie's new paramour (and indirectly, replacing Philippe - through his alter-ego - from her life). It is interesting to note that in introducing Castel into the film, Philippe not only enables a means of closure for his failed relationship with his former lover through their surrogate selves, but also illustrates the emotional process of transference, transition, and figurative rebirth. In essence, the transfiguration of death - subliminally illustrated, initially, through the liberating image of Marie riding carefree in an automobile to the music of Nico that serves as an evocative counterpoint to Jean Eustache's debilitation from a car accident, then subsequently, through the shot of a somber Garrel standing beside a collapsed noose that alludes to Eustache's suicide - inevitably paves the way for the film's second chapter (and metaphoric turning point), La Nativité. Inspired by the birth of his son, Louis (and who would later appear Emergency Kisses and Regular Lovers), the film dissolves into an instinctual collage of quotidian portraitures - of actors waiting, pacing, observing - of temps morts. Concluding with the elliptical, parting shot of Philippe standing by a window in visible discomfort as evening approaches, his suffering becomes as a double entendred, metaphoric representation: the physical withdrawal (whether through substance abuse or the separation of death) of profound loss, and the implacable - but necessary - ache of realized creation.

Posted by on Nov 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Philippe Garrel

My introduction to Robert Todd's cinema was through the experimental short, Our Former Glory, a film that juxtaposes clinical, often destabilized shots of urban architecture with footage from a makeshift missing persons posting center turned public memorial on a promenade overlooking a still smoldering World Trade Center site to create a powerful and provocative rumination on human commodification, transience, and symbolification in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. It is within this context that Todd's socially relevant, yet deeply personal essay film, In Loving Memory, proves especially suited as a logical progression in his continuing exposition on human fragility and consumability. Composed of a series of re-enacted character anecdotes and recorded telephone interviews with death row inmates set against depersonalized, institutional architectures and contrasting, idyllic images of verdant fields and voluptuous, highly textural natural landscapes, often paradoxically near prison grounds (an exquisite visual aesthetic that favorably recalls the austere, yet sublime rustic terrestriality of Jon Jost's cinema), the film confronts the myth of the prison correctional system as a punitive, but reformative agent for inmate rehabilitation and social reintegration. Indeed, what emerges from the film's illuminating conversations (or more appropriately, monologues, since Todd allows the prisoners to tell their stories in their own voice, seemingly without intrusive interjection) is not only a thoughtful, poignant, and wistful account of quotidian life that form the transcendent (and transitory) memory of indefinable happiness - youthful wonder, the birth of a child, the intoxication (and ache) of a romantic love realized too late, the humbling (and spiritually uplifting) act of selflessness - but also a profound awareness of moral culpability and inevitable mortality. Eschewing on camera interviews, photographs, or even establishing biographical information about the prisoners, the film renders a provocative and incisive re-assessment of the true meaning of blind justice, where expedient, yet prejudicial social stigmas of underprivilege, systematic abuse, limited education, and tragic lapses in judgment undercut - if not consciously obfuscate - any attempt at illustrating the humanization of the prisoners in the aftermath of their captivity, where a renewed sense of purpose, self-respect, integrity, and determination - in essence, the uncomfortable reality of confronting a condemned prisoner's actual enlightenment and transformation - is revealed through self-introspective (and implicitly, atoning) acts of spirituality, ministry, education, charity, and victim advocacy. Assembled during the filmmaker's recuperation from illness, In Loving Memory serves, not only as a social interrogation on the morality of capital punishment, but also as a broader commentary on human frailty, rehabilitation, and disposability.

Posted by on Nov 12, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Robert Todd

Connected by the recurring image of floating, disarticulated staircases, Patrick Bokanowski's equally transfixing, mysterious, and impenetrable magnum opus, L'Ange may be characterized as a synesthetic composition - a series of aesthetically distinctive, self-encapsulated chamber pieces, each revealing quotidian, if fantastic, acts of obsessive compulsion and moribund ritual. Converging towards the hybrid animation of his early short films, La Femme qui se poudre and Déjeuner du matin, Bokanowski's curious, often gothic figurations reveal an abstract logic of thematic suites that similarly reveal his penchant for juxtaposing optical experimentation with traditional fine arts, where rended objects (a doll used as a fencing target in L'Homme au sabre), accidental ruptures (a pitcher falls from the dinner table in L'Homme sans mains), and bursts of activity (a bather splashes animatedly in L'Homme au bain, and a group of identical librarians research, file, and reorganize a sprawling library in Les Bibliothécaires) reflect an overarching, universal law of entropy that, paradoxically, enables creation from the very act of friction, disorder, kinesis, and destruction.

Reflecting the seemingly hermetic nature of the individual vignettes through the characters' isolation (reinforced by the dimmed, directional lighting that suffuses the film), Bokanowski, nevertheless, integrally links each episode to the other through modulated visual semblances and recurring images of graduated steps and staircases that bind the assorted leitmotifs together towards an implied vertical movement. At the core of the film's arrangement is a Dante Alighieri-esque (upended) evolution from darkness to light, a conceptual progression that Bokanowski describes as a physical transition through interrelated spaces during his interview with Scott MacDonald for Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers:

"About the overall structure of The Angel, I can say that it is very traditional. You have a staircase, you go from the cellar to the attic. Scenes start falling into place during the dark, shapeless, not very precise starting phase; and then the more the film progresses, the more precise things become, and at the end, it reveals extremely luminous areas.

In one of the earliest stages, when I was doing the scenario, I thought that when one comes to the far top of this gigantic house, to an attic room, a last character would appear, some kind of a giant with barely discernible wings, some kind of angelic figure. He would lift the arm of the phonograph, the music would stop, and one would see all the film's scenes in still frames. Very quickly, I disliked the character. He was impossible to film! So, I did not keep this sequence, but that character did give the film its title."

It is interesting to note that despite Bokanowski's strategy to reject the inclusion of a unifying, iconic, titular image, the idea of an underlying celestial entity continues to pervade the film's visual composition through the application of point source lighting, the aforementioned luminosity, that, through light's integral optical properties of diffusion and diffraction, results in the formation of recursive, concentric rays that project a sunburst or halo effect throughout the film - at times, exaggerated and grotesque (as in the expressionistic, elongated, web-like abstract forms of the opening sequence), warm and pastoral (as in the image of a Flemish painting-styled milkmaid serving "the man without hands"), and saturated and disorienting (as in the frenetic, decontextualized, rapidly edited montage of the seemingly subterranean activities (or perhaps imprisonment) of La Femme qui coud).

Particularly illustrative of Bokanowski's aesthetic is the malleability and relativity of dimensional space: blocky, rough hewn lines that resemble woodcut prints are unsuspectingly animated by the initiation of transversal motion (in the sequence of a turbaned operator of a sextant-like instrument facing a seated, veiled figure), extreme long shots blur the delineation between live action and animation sequences (in the interstitial sequence of the liberated librarians encountering a woman in a boxed enclosure), and painterly images transformed into virtual tableaux vivants (in the Vermeer-inspired, L'Homme sans mains). Subverting the flatness of images in order to continually challenge the viewer's spatial and cognitive perception, L'Ange not only illustrates the intrinsic hybridity of film as a static and dynamic medium, but also reinforces the ambiguity and inconcreteness implicit in the aesthetic presentation of the very images themselves, where chaos transforms into order, frailty into perfection, and quotidian into grace.

Posted by on Nov 06, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Patrick Bokanowski

On the surface, Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa's gorgeous, provocative, and idiosyncratically rendered dark fable Madeinusa seems to have little in common with Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl beyond an artful eye towards creating a similarly foreboding atmosphere with which to present a dysfunctional, contemporary coming of age tale. While Martel uses loosely interwoven ellipses and (seemingly) abstract events to create an opaque, almost somnambulistic illustration of the liminal perturbations in young Amalia's daily routine following a catalytic - and violative - encounter in an anonymous and alienating city, Llosa's film converges on the slightest contours of the human face as a mirror to quotidian existence in a rural, remote cultural landscape, where the rituals of death and survival are as inextricably intertwined with the cycle of nature as they are with the inextinguishable, collective superstitions that enable human perseverance in the face of desolation and poverty. But beyond the transgressive nature of Martel and Llosa's tales of sexual awakening, the films also reflect a culture of disarticulated piety, one that is uncoincidentally bound together by the shared national histories of colonialism and mass-scale religious conversion that have resulted in a paradoxical - and often untenable - unholy union of illumination and ignorance, where the institutional expediency of disseminating the "Word of God" has supplanted even the most fundamental human endeavor of any civilized society to promote true enlightenment through literacy and education in order to cultivate a deeper comprehension of the very Word itself beyond its facile, rote regurgitation.

In Madeinusa, this grotesque reconstitution of the Word is founded on the culmination of Holy Week, where the solemn observation of Jesus Christ's death on the cross at 3:00 pm on (what has come to be known as) Good Friday carries through to the subsequent discovery of the resurrection after finding the tomb empty on the morning of Easter Sunday. For the isolated, fictional province of Manayaycuna, this sacred period between Christ's death and resurrection has come to be celebrated as el tiempo santo, a perverted "Holy Time" when God is dead and cannot see the transgressions of the world (and consequently, do not exist), and so people are free to act on their basest of impulses without guilt or consequence. However, for young Madeinusa (Magaly Solier), the upcoming festival is also a rite of passage where a ceremonial Virgin Mary is selected in a pageant competition from among the town's most beautiful, virginal young women to lead a procession and accompany the statue of a blindfolded Christ taken down from the cross to his place of burial, thus ushering the bacchanalia of "Holy Time". Abandoned by her mother for the lure of big city of Lima years earlier, Madeinusa has been living an increasingly intolerable life with her drunken, abusive father, the town's mayor Cayo (Juan Ubaldo Huamán) and callous sister Chale (Yiliana Chong), retaining only a vague attachment to her mother's legacy through a pair of ornate, brightly colored, beaded earrings that she has appropriated after her mother's departure, until the arrival of an affable stranger from Lima appropriately named Salvador (Carlos J. de la Torre), a geologist en route to an assignment at a mining outpost, provides her with a glimpse of a world outside the insular village.

Moreover, beyond Llosa's surreal and nightmarish vision of piety, ignorance, and collective hysteria, the genesis of the heroine's titular name itself - a name that, as Salvador argues, is a fabricated name, perhaps derived from encountered "Made in USA" product labels scattered throughout the country - also provides an implicit illustration of the broader human (and sociological) tendency towards cultural exoticism that exists in an environmental vacuum of ignorance, naiveté, and impoverishment. Like the absent mother's secretive (and seemingly, almost mythical) flight to Lima, the city represents an elusive promise land away from the stultifying oppressiveness of an insulated existence. It is this ephemeral destination that Salvador inevitably represents for Madeinusa - not a transitory, but fateful connection with a kindred spirit, but the instinctual location of an elusive, idealized elsewhere.

Posted by on Nov 01, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (13) | Filed under 2006

What I find most resonant and precious about nineteenth century French novelist Gustave Flaubert's literature is the preciseness of his aesthetic in juxtaposing realism with romanticism, retaining a certain adherence to the classical form even as it is applied to the exposition of more progressive ideals of social commentary. It is through this framework that, in hindsight, Eugène Green seems ideally suited to interpret Flaubert's La Première éducation sentimentale (the first version of L'Éducation sentimentale), re-adapting the themes of first love, the intoxication of desire, and failed ideological revolution (that culminated in the Revolution of 1848) to the May 68 generation through a chronicle of the parallel lives of a pair of childhood friends, the pragmatic Henri (Alexis Loret) and idealistic Jules (Adrien Michaux) as they leave their bucolic, rural hometown to separately pursue their baccalaureate - and real world - educations. Combining the baroque formalism and frontality often associated with Manoel de Oliveira's cinema (which the filmmaker subsequently subverts by breaking the fourth wall address, often through voiceover reading of letters) with the muted expression and disembodied framing of Robert Bresson (most notably, in recurring establishing shots of the character's feet) more commonly associated with modernist cinema, Green's cinema is also an idiosyncratic fusion of classicism with the immediacy of social critique, creating a sublime aesthetic that is equally atemporal and contemporary, archaic and modern.

An early episode chronicling Henri and Jules' ill-fated rendezvous with a beautiful, but hermetic bohemian "savage" (Anna Bielecka) who lives on the outskirts of town provides an insight into (and inevitably defines) the young men's integral characters, as the friends decide to seek out the woman with the intent of losing their virginities before embarking on their higher academic studies. Disappointed by their thwarted coupling, Henri sees the failed union as an uncompleted, requisite milestone in his process of maturation. In contrast, Jules savors the seeming poetry of the unrequited encounter as a wistful reminder of life's possibility, rationalizing that "maybe it's better that way, everything remains to be done." Sent off to the prestigious boarding school of August Renaud (Claude Merlin), an educator with exacting, and decidedly conservative, ideas for molding the future leaders of France, Henri is immediately attracted to Renaud's enigmatic, yet soulful younger wife, Émilie (Christelle Prot), a relationship that will also inevitably connect her to Jules through exchanged letters that the best friends would write to each other, often in lieu of meeting face to face on their brief holidays, leading to a profound - yet intranscendably distant - intimacy between Émilie and Jules that will forever bind the two strangers together.

Along with illustrating Green's affinity with the aesthetics of Bresson, it also interesting to note that a similar sense of abstract metaphysicality pervades the film, a dislocated spirituality that is revealed through Jules' explicative insistence on the necessity for an overarching, universal order in the creation - and appreciation - of art and beauty during a class recitation of Paul Verlaine's poetry, and subsequently, in his extended sojourn at a Greek monastery after completing his undergraduate studies, where writes to Henri that he can hear his own voice "and perhaps something else" (a contemplative image that is subsequently connected to a sparsely decorated nativity scene in Émilie's room at Christmas time); Henri's impulsive, nocturnal epiphany to travel to Rome with Jules on their summer vacation after seeing a sunlit church; and Émilie's fateful encounter with an escaped convict (perhaps also alluding to Bresson's A Man Escaped) with stigmata-like wounds in search of a sign that would help him "find the end of evil". In the characters' solitary quests to reconcile the corporeal with the spiritual - to define and give form to the inarticulable - Toutes le nuits thematically convergences to a seemingly mundane tutorial instruction once offered by Émilie to a young Henri that "the most important things we do, we do alone", a sentiment that Jules repeats during a conversation with a child near the end of the film - a poignant and enduring realization of the isolation of unrequited love, the ache of longing, and the impossibility of happiness.

Posted by on Oct 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2006, Eugène Green

Channeling a similar wavelength as Chantal Akerman's recurring themes of identity, parental silence, and haunted memory, compatriot filmmaker Boris Lehman creates an equally melancholic and autobiographical self-confessional essay film in À la recherche du lieu de ma naissance, a resonant and intimate exposition on the indelible legacy of Nazism, the diaspora, the Second World War, and the Holocaust on the psyche of the postwar generation of displaced European Jews. Opening to the image of Lehman's seemingly innocuous, off-camera request to an accommodating clerk at a Swiss registrar's office for proof of his birth, the film is a broader examination of the intersection between personal and cultural history, as the task of obtaining a reissued birth certificate itself sows the seed of creative inspiration: a point of departure towards the figurative reconstruction of one's unremembered moment of origin. Returning to Lausanne over forty years after his birth, Lehman's self-reflexive autobiographical reconstructions - depicted through re-enactments, archival footage, family photographs and correspondences, interviews with interned (and subsequently resettled) exiles, and surrogate representations of rites of passage - subvert the notion of personal history and instead, converges towards an examination of a suppressed collective consciousness.

From this perspective of estranged history and unwitting, self-inflicted cultural amnesia, Lehman's diaristic exposition transforms into an integral question of identity: what does a birthplace signify when the physical location has been disconnected from the emotional idea of one's home, when the destination is only a momentary passage, a transitory refuge from an obscured, forgotten (or suppressed) memory that reflects the trauma of exile...the very impossibility of home? At the heart of Lehman's elusive quest is the assembly of inherited artifacts, second-hand testimonies of survivors, and even the observation of religious rites into a reconstruction of personal memory that reveal an underlying sentiment of disconnected heritage. Deeply rooted in a sentiment of a silenced history - a metaphoric erasure of the past that has been engendered by his late parents' own reticence over the trauma of their displacement during the war years (and eventual permanent exile), first, during the Nazi incursion into Poland, then subsequently, from their adopted home in Belgium during the occupation - Lehman's journey become a search for the invisible, a struggle to assimilate and contextualize the unregistered memories of a suppressed past into the unreconciled reality of a present day consciousness:

"Painfully, I realize that my parents forgot me. They never talked to me, never told me about their lives because talking was not possible for them. In taking refuge in their silence, they walled me up in mine. I am a prisoner of my own memories. But the few that I have oblige me to invent rather than relate. All that's left of my parents, a few photos in an album that I can't or don't want to decipher. Do I recognize myself in these pictures?"

Challenging even the most seemingly trivial fundamental foundations of his identity based on materials and interviews he has gathered surrounding his parents' life during the war years - a letter of safe passage to a Lisbon port in Portugal in order to board a ship bound for Bolivia that his parents had never undertaken, perhaps, because of his imminent birth (and that, as Lehman would surmise, turned out to be a moment of serendipity in avoiding the inevitable encounters with the waves of Nazi war criminals fleeing to South America); a tongue-in-cheek survey of the common variations and "misspellings" of the surname Lehman that suggest (whether consciously or unintentionally) an obfuscation of culture and ethnicity; an interned prisoner and exile who has kept a suitcase of war "memorabilia" (false documentation, censored letters, photographs, testaments given by refugees who had been delivered into the hands of the Germans by "neutral" Swiss government officials) that prompts the filmmaker to question if his birthday is indeed even his own actual date of birth and not a product of the false paper trail created to evade Nazi persecution across Europe - Lehman returns full circle to the idyllic - and poetically homonymic - Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) that his mother once crossed in the days before his birth. Concluding with the recounted mythical tale of a wandering hermit who once traversed the entirety of the city in reverse, only to end his inscrutable venture by turning back at the shore of the ubiquitous lake, the enigmatic image also reflects the interconnectedness and self-reflexivity of Lehman's journey: a search, not only to understand the circumstances behind his parents' uncertain lives as refugees that led to his wartime birth in a foreign land in 1944, but also for the very nature of the process of memory and its sublimation into the human consciousness by which it shapes and defines our own identity, where the void of its absence becomes as formative as its haunted - and inescapable - persistence.

Posted by on Sep 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Boris Lehman

In hindsight, the expressionistic collaborative feature Seagulls Are Dying in the Harbor by Flemish filmmakers Roland Verhavert, Ivo Michiels, and Rik Kuypers proves especially suited as a milestone film for Belgian national cinema, carrying the international distinction as the country's first feature film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in postwar Antwerp, the film evokes the profound melancholy and bittersweet loss of innocence of René Clément's Forbidden Games in its depiction of the friendship between a pair of unlikely kindred spirits trying to make sense of their upended (and uprooted) lives in the forbidding, and increasingly alien urban landscape of postwar Belgium: a nameless, seemingly undocumented drifter (Julien Schoenaerts) and former German war camp prisoner desperately seeking passage out of the country, and a neglected, French-speaking orphaned girl named Gigi who has been adopted by an older, emotionally distant Flemish family (perhaps out of potential financial gain from an undisclosed inheritance) whose only glimpse of freedom comes from the stolen moments enabled by her adoptive older sister who exploits her afternoon playtime as a chaperoning ruse to rendezvous with her lover. Eschewing the inevitable sentimentality of the "little girl lost" premise of Forbidden Games, the film instead reflects the unsentimentality and cynicism of Europe's postwar lost generation, where the inhumanity of war and instinctuality for survival have metamorphosed into social indifference, cruelty, exploitation, hedonism, and self-absorption.

But beyond the film's noteworthiness as a trailblazer in the history of cinema (as well as its incisive, broader commentary on the human travails of war), the film is also a unique, intimate, and incisive window into the country's indigenous experience, not only with the isolative reality of cultural pluralism in contemporary Belgium, but also with the collective toll of occupation, displacement, and exile caused by the war. Intrinsic in this process of reconciliation with history is the legacy of occupation on the national psyche - first by Germany, and subsequently (albeit obliquely), by the Allied liberators stationed to secure the borders and assist in the country's reconstruction - a trauma that has further estranged an already culturally bifurcated country from its own sense of national identity. Within this framework of dispossession and figurative erasure, the characterization of the enigmatic, anonymous, multilingual everyman becomes an ideal representation on the country's struggle with its own sense of sovereignty and identity in light of an increasingly fractured and fragile national unity and economic decimation. Moreover, in capturing the pervasive national sentiment of profound disorientation through expressionistic imagery (most notably, in the atmospheric, noir-like texture of the opening sequence that establishes the film's sense of imbalance), stark and desolate, yet oppressively claustrophobic industrial landscapes (that prefigure Antonioni's psychological landscapes), and acute angle dolly crane shots (especially in the repeated image of the city street through the increasingly distant perspective of a moving structural elevator) that figuratively reflect the unnamed drifter's estrangement from his native community in the aftermath of war and occupation, the filmmakers transform the interiority of one person's struggle into a broader metaphor for a country's soul searching, implicitly correlating the drifter's moral dilemma with the societal estrangement of cultural division. In juxtaposing a sense of disorientation with the crisis of imposed (and suppressed) identity, the film articulates a compelling and impassioned cautionary tale for the preservation for the country's indigenous, plural identity through tolerance, self-respect, and the restoration of humanity.

Posted by on Sep 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006

Nearly twenty years after Harun Farocki paid homage to the profound influence of Straub/Huillet's cinema by filming their exhaustive rehearsal process during preparations for the shooting of their film Class Relations for the documentary Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work..., Pedro Costa captures their equally exacting process of editing their feature film, Sicilia! in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?. Indeed, as Farocki's film intrinsically captures the filmmakers' working methodology through the framework of his own recurring themes of automation and systemization of processes (even as they apply to the human process of creativity), so, too, does Costa's film illustrate the particularity of their methodology through his own characteristic preoccupation for capturing the allegorical in the quotidian. Curiously, inasmuch as both films capture the rigorous and deliberative nature of their creative process, it is only through the complementation of both films that the nature of the Straubs' collaborative process begins to truly emerge - a portrait, not of inequitable roles of visionary and confidante (as implicitly suggested in the Farocki film as Huillet's role during rehearsals is seemingly reduced to that of advisor and clap board simulator), nor implementer and consultant (as illustrated in the Costa film where Straub is shown to be the intrusive, occasionally tangential, gregarious observer - and comical counterfoil - to the more focused, serious-minded, and methodical Huillet who is editing the film), but rather, as equally creative contemporaries with instinctively defined, yet interactive roles throughout the filmmaking process: one, more conceptual and abstract, the other, more pragmatic and methodical. Ironically, this tumultuous, often colliding process of interactivity itself between theory and application, idea and implementation reflects the complex, yet delicate alchemy of the medium itself, a creative struggle that is articulated by the roguish Straub's impassioned commentary on the subordination of form over idea in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? that is integral to the realization of their aesthetic.

"The form of the body gives birth to the soul. I've said that a hundred times. ...When someone says, 'Yes, the form, it's the form, the form, never mind the idea', that is a sell-out. It's not true. You have to see things clearly: First, there is the idea, then there is the matter, and then the form. And there is nothing you can do about that. Nobody can change that! ...And through this work, the struggle between the idea and the matter, and the struggle with the matter, gives rise to the form. And the rest is just filling material. ...The same goes for the sculptor. He has his idea and gets a block of marble and he works the matter. He has to take into account the nervures in the marble, the cracks, all the geological layers in it. He just can't do whatever he wants."

This intrinsic "struggle with the material" that defines the process of creation also serves as an allusion to the hidden smile of the film's title. In an illuminating sequence during the editing of a train conversation scene in Sicilia!, Huillet attempts to convey an actor's unarticulated, knowing smile - an illustration of his realization that a passenger seated across from him lied about the nature of his employment - by finding an appropriate intercutting image from their brief exchange. But how can this uncaptured, hidden smile be revealed when the facial expression itself does not manifest in the any of the shot footage? Poring over each frame in search of the indefinable glint in the actor's eye in search of that fleeting image that betrays his disbelief to no avail, their strategy is then to abruptly truncate the shot at the final syllable of the passenger's staccatoed delivery such that the consequence of the lie does not dwell on the prevaricator's image - and implicitly suggest his deliberation over the ramifications of his own statement - but rather, on the delayed response of the listener to suggest his evaluation (and dismissive deduction) of the passenger's seemingly incongruous statement. It is this process systematic refinement - a struggle with the intrinsic properties (and inherent limitations) of the given matter to create implication through elision that is also reflected in Straub's subsequent exposition on the aesthetic evolution of their cinema.

"Most of us begin with a cliché - not always, but most of the time - and that's fine but you have to look at it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with the idea of a discovery, showing a mountain without the window, without anything. A torn curtain. Then you ask yourself, but why? It will inhibit the viewer's imagination instead of opening it up and you say to yourself: 'Yes, after having filmed Mount Thebes in Moses and Aaron, after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount Sainte-Victoire, why add another one?' And so you renounce slowly. Then one fine day, one fine day you realize that it's better to see as little as possible. You have a sort of reduction, only it's not a reduction - it's a concentration and it actually says more. But you don't do that immediately from one day to the next. You need time and patience."

As the filmmakers alternately engage in recounting personal anecdotes, gentle natured marital sparring, and professional ruminations over their collaborative cinema, what emerges in Costa's reverent and understated portrait is an affectionate, humorous, and indelible image of profound kinship and creative symbiosis - an idiosyncratic, modern-day love story that fuses passion with politics, creativity with conviction - told from the privileged intimacy of irascible, enduring romantics, intellectual peers, social activists, obsessed cinephiles, ageless idealists, and innovative, mutually-inspiring artists.

Posted by on Sep 03, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Pedro Costa

Perhaps it is postwar filmmaker's Keisuke Kinoshita's reputation as a director of old-fashioned, "women's pictures" coupled with his penchant for depicting simple, uncorrupted innocence that have rendered his work (particularly with the advent of the Japanese New Wave) vulnerable to criticisms of outmoded sentimentality. However, while these generalizations are rooted in the intrinsic elements of unabashed compassion and idealism that pervade his films, such cursory observations fail to adequately capture the irreverence, incisive social commentary, and profound humanity that also shape his work. This seemingly disparate fusion of effervescent comedy and subversive satire is particularly evident in Carmen Comes Home, the first all-color Japanese feature film (although an alternate, black and white version was simultaneously filmed). Made under nebulous instructions to shoot as many outdoor sequences as possible because of the then-unknown properties of the new medium, the film follows the misadventures of a dim-witted, self-described artist - and in reality, a burlesque dancer - from Tokyo named Okin (Hideko Takamine) who goes by the stage name Lily Carmen, and her equally oblivious colleague Maja Akemi (Toshiko Kobayashi) as they descend upon Okin's unsuspecting rural hometown on the foothills of Mount Asama for a self-instigated, attention-seeking homecoming celebration after achieving some measure of success in the big city with their popular striptease act.

Taking a cue from his mentor Yasujiro Shimazu, a master of the shomin-geki (for whom he served as cinematographer), Kinoshita introduces a finely rendered ensemble cast of characters to create a rich portrait of everyday life in the insular community: a blinded veteran and former music teacher Taguchi (Shuji Sano) who bides time in the school yard waiting for an opportunity to practice his elegiac compositions on the school's harmonium; Taguchi's self-sacrificing wife Mitsuko (Kuniko Ikawa) who ekes out a living as a hired cart driver to support her family; Okin's tormented father Shoichi (Takeshi Sakamoto) who struggles with contradicting feelings of love, responsibility, pity, and humiliation at his daughter's outrageous conduct and demeaning livelihood; Okin's sister Yuki (Yûko Mochizuki) who strives to bring about a reconciliation between estranged father and prodigal daughter (perhaps, in part, because of the financial support Okin's dubious career provides); the aging, well-intentioned schoolmaster (Chishu Ryu) who tries to bring progressive ideas to the isolated village even as he betrays a penchant for the nostalgia of fading, old world culture (and perhaps feels overwhelmed by the rapid transformation of his country); a moneylender and businessman named Maruju (Bontarô Miyake) who is quick to exploit the town's gullibility and the curious spectacle surrounding Okin's sensationalized homecoming. But beyond the seeming recipe for trite melodrama or facile "fish out of water" comedy as the flamboyant and interminably cheerful pair of transplanted city women attempt to assimilate into the bucolic, traditional life of the country, Carmen Comes Home is also a wry allegorical for the cost of Japan's postwar recovery.

Filmed in 1952 at the end of American occupation, Kinoshita presents a thoughtful, humorous, and (still) relevant commentary on the legacy of cultural imperialism enabled by the Occupation. Within this framework, the tongue-in-cheek characterization of a naïve, scatterbrained heroine (whose near death childhood injuries from a cow kick may have led to her simplemindedness) serves as an acerbic metaphor for the nation's collective amnesia in the aftermath of the Pacific War, where opportunism, exploitation, and suppression of indigenous identity represent the inevitable compromise and cultural toll of the country's movement toward national recovery, modernization, and international re-emergence. Moreover, it is through this cultural context that Okin's assumed foreign stage name of Lily Carmen may be seen, not as a naïve young woman's flighty notions of artistic exoticism to complement a "modern dance" act, but rather, as a subconscious erasure of identity - and implicitly, nationality - the denial of one's native roots from the rural province (from the country) in order to prosper in the modern (and increasingly vulgarized) world. (Note the especially subversive, tongue-in-cheek image of the children competing to break a plain white colored, piñata-like vessel that is filmed such that the foregrounded object visually recedes relative to the brightly colored international flags that line the playground, giving the appearance that the children are throwing play rocks at the flags themselves.) It is this conflicting, unreconciled sentiment of resentment and gratitude, affection and alienation that inevitably suffuses the seemingly lighthearted, whimsical tone of the film with a palpable, bittersweet melancholy: the critical portrait of a wounded nation at a crossroads, struggling to preserve its indigenous cultural identity even as it re-evaluates its isolated, self-destructive history in the wake of humiliation, gaudy imitation, and marginalization.

Posted by on Aug 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006

The program for the 44th New York Film Festival looks quite strong and nicely well rounded this year. Along with festival staples like Pedro Almodóvar, Alain Resnais, and Hong Sang-soo, there are also several off-the-beaten-path films that seem to have the potential to upstage the veterans, such as Our Daily Bread and Poison Friends from Emmanuel Bourdieu (co-screenwriter on How I Got Into an Argument... (My Sex Life), and re-discovery of classic gems, such as Reds, Mafioso, and Insiang.

Suffice it to say, my favorite Film Society of Lincoln Center membership perq is the advanced ticket sales for the NYFF, and this year, Christmas has come a week earlier than usual ...and these are the films in my fuzzy red and white stocking.

• • Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
• • Falling (Barbara Albert)
• • The Go Master (Tian Zhuangzhuang)
• • The Host (Bong Joon-ho)
• • Inland Empire (David Lynch)
• • Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)
• • Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada, 1962)
• • Marie Antoinette (Sophia Coppola)
• • Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)
• • Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro)
• • Paprika (Satoshi Kon)
• • Poison Friends (Emmanuel Bourdieu)
• • Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs) (Alain Resnais)
• • Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
• • These Girls (Tahani Rached)
• • Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)
• • Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)

Posted by on Aug 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2006, Quick Notes

Before Les Films du renard released its first installment of an anticipated three boxset Stephen Dwoskin anthology earlier this year, there seemed little room to reconcile Dwoskin's cinema between the transgressive, borderline pornographic gaze of Dyn Amo and the intimately melancholic Dad (an elegy to his late father Henry Dwoskin) - the only two films I had managed to see of Dwoskin's work until then. But somewhere between the interminable claustrophobia of the de-eroticized, writhing exotic dancers of Dyn Amo and the dramatic transformation of Dwoskin's father from virile, larger-than-life everyday hero to slender, bespectacled elderly man, is this intersection of awareness of the human body in all its evocations, sensations imperfections, limitations, and evolutions - its physicality and mortality - and it this underlying convergence that is revealed throughout Dwoskin's cinema. Indeed, inasmuch as Dwoskin's debilitating childhood infirmity and subsequent disability from polio provides, to some extent, a window into this acute awareness of the physical - and more specifically, a sensibility that has led to an aesthetic of awkwardness, imperfection, and stasis that Swiss film theorist and author François Albera would refer to as a cinema of "hinderedness" - there is also a deliberate nature to the transfixing slowness of his intimate gaze: not only towards an awareness of time and the toll of its inevitable passage, but also its reflection of the intrinsic discomfort of the extended gaze - the oppressiveness of "being looked at" that comes with the conscious regard of the other. In this respect, Dwoskin's cinema may be seen, not solely in terms of the convergence between the physical and the ephemeral, but rather, in a more thematically overarching aesthetic of temporal intersections and, in particular, those that occur within the human act of seeing - when the gaze transforms from curiosity to voyeurism, from information to imagination, from peripherality to fixation.

In Pain Is..., Dwoskin's thoughtful rumination on the nature of pain, this intersection occurs in the conceptual mechanism of pain itself, in the way it surfaces amorphously, imprecisely, throughout the process and conduct of life, as well as in its insidious ability to create a subconscious shift in (sensorial) awareness - in essence, to reconfigure (if not transform) one's immediate reality because of its existence. It is this untenable quality of pervasiveness and indefinability that Dwoskin articulates in an introductory analogy that sets the tone for the film's organic (and inherently circular) exposition:

"In the search, it became apparent that pain plays a part in all levels of life: in religion, in sports, in work, in sex, in politics. Not just pain itself, but all the things that pain produces: like pleasure, amnesia, complaint ...When you rub your finger on the wood, you feel the wood. If you get a splinter, you feel your finger. That's how pain works. It moves from outside to inside."

Punctuated by the decontextualized, low-grade video footage of a nude, face obscured, convulsing woman - an image that is repeated towards the end of the film - Dwoskin illustrates the intrinsic ambiguities of these amorphous intersections, as the same footage alternately evokes images of psychiatrically-induced spasm, involuntary seizure, hysteria, and rapture - a complexity of interpretation that has been enabled by the uncomfortable extendedness of the already transgressive image. (Note that the surveillance video also becomes implicitly voyeuristic in its prolonged clinical observation and reinforces the conceptual theme of the function of the extended gaze that runs throughout Dwoskin's oeuvre).

This cognitive extraction of the multiple meaning intrinsic within images through the conscious manipulation of time is also reflected in the parallel imagery that structures the film (a dualism that is encapsulated by the bookending shots from the corridor of a hospital): the image of a trapeze artist suspended by a series of ropes that is repeated in the image of a woman indulging in a bondage fetish, a man with impaired speech communicating through an interpreter that is mirrored in a patient who expresses his pain by playing the drums (note the image of surrogate instrument that is also represented by the interstitial sequence of a guitar ballad performance), a tattoo parlor patron wincing at the process of obtaining her body art that is contrasted against a tattooed performer unable to feel the pain of her self-inflicted piercings, an anatomic model used to illustrate abdominal organs that is evoked during a conversation with a middle-aged woman describing her desperation to alleviate the pain of her menopause-related symptoms, an implicitly contradictory exposition on the nature of pain: first, from a physician who acknowledges the inexactness of diagnostic descriptions used to help isolate the cause of the physical ailment, and subsequently, from a psychiatrist who explains the theoretical source of all pain through the commonality of stimulus-response. In this respect, Dwoskin's films can be seen, not only as an idiosyncratic realization of adaptive encumbrances, but also as a cinema of implication in which the uncomfortable, extended gaze facilitates, not only the complexity of inferences and re-assembly of interconnected associations behind the awkward images, but more importantly, the process of interactivity that is intrinsic in the act of seeing - the implication of the spectator as voyeur, complicitor, archaeologist, and self-author.

Posted by on Aug 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Stephen Dwoskin

In its metaphoric allusion to celestial descent, subconscious mysticism (or perhaps, lunacy), and alien terrestriality, Aleksandr Sokurov's Days of Eclipse recalls the opening sequences of Julio Medem's Tierra and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev as the camera follows the accelerated trajectory of an unseen projectile (the sound of an indecipherable voice perhaps suggests a conscious entity) hurtling towards the surface of the earth, aimed at the arid plains of a Turkmenistan rural village in central Asia, on the underdeveloped frontiers of a vast Soviet empire. In hindsight, the evocation to Tarkovsky seems particularly suited. Adapted from a science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the authors of Roadside Picnic on which Tarkovsky's film, Stalker was based, Days of Eclipse, as the title suggests, is also an exploration of creation and search for enlightenment in an age of pervasive darkness - at the figurative twilight of humanity. The prefiguring Icarian image of undefined journey and uprooted desolation (a theme that also pervades the establishing images of transplantation in Sharunas Bartas' Few of Us) would sublimate into unexpected, ephemeral forms throughout the film - surreal encounters, curious, somnambulistic rituals, otherworldly visions, crippling paranoia, and foreboding cosmic alignments - to create a perspective of the Soviet outpost, not as a landscape of untapped potential, but as an unassimilated culture foundering in the vacuum of an imposed, meaningless, ritualized order.

The reluctant witness to this soul-sapping, Dante-esque existential limbo is the young, idealistic physician Malyanov (Aleksei Ananishnov) who, at the instigation of the government in its push to modernize the rural Asiatic territories, relocated from Gorky in order to set up a clinic in the village. Ethnically and linguistically unassimilated into the local culture (and whose advice and medical practice are largely ignored by the impoverished villagers), his limited interaction with the outside world is relegated to the company of other kindred exiles: his suicidal neighbor, an underemployed engineer demoralized by the futility of his unrealized plans and who has been occupying his time by writing journals that no one else reads (a ritual that is paralleled in Malyanov's own perpetual typing of unsubmitted reports to pass the time); his estranged sister (Irina Sokolova) who questions his determination in continuing his practice in the village despite the profound isolation and disappointment of his empty, mind-numbing station; a cherubic, lost boy (who may have been abandoned or ran away from home out of hunger or abuse) who insinuates himself into Malyanov's care; his aimless and increasingly paranoid friend who continues to bear the residual psychological scars of generational trauma after his parents were driven from Russia during the Stalinist purges (note Sokurov's pointed reference to ethnic cleansing as part of the ideology behind the Great Purge, a silenced history that Kazakh filmmaker Ermek Shinarbaev also alludes to in his integration of the Korean-Kazakh experience in Revenge).

Little by little, as the village succumbs to the lethargy of the oppressive heat and the distractive mysticism of strange natural phenomena and arbitrary brushes with isolated resistance and nebulous authority, what emerges in Malyanov's encounters is the pervasive inertia and resignation of a society living under a crumbling totalitarian regime where the specter of fear and uncertainty has metastasized into empty rituals that have become disarticulated from their meaning (a decontextualization that is also illustrated through the uprooted exiles' alienation from their adoptive community). Within this context, Days of Eclipse aesthetically converges, not only with the elliptical mystery of Victor Erice's allegorical, Franco-era film, The Spirit of the Beehive, but also with the dark humor and environmental desolation of Béla Tarr's cinema (that coincided with the beginning of his fateful association with novelist László Krashnahorkai in Damnation), where human comedy is borne of a tedium and acute awareness of squandered time, and the strange, surreal, post-apocalyptic landscapes reflect the wasted potential of a myopic, destructive, self-eroding society. It is this metaphoric darkness of empty existence and directionless compass that is intrinsically captured in the extended closing shot of Malyanov's enigmatic gaze framed against the barren, eternal landscape - suspended in a netherworld between earth and sky like Dickensian tragic specters hovering over the earth, unable to break free from their moorings - a transitory passage into the void of a delusive (and inescapable) liberation.

Posted by on Aug 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Filed under 2006, Aleksandr Sokurov

In anticipation of both Paul Rachman's documentary American Hardcore and a weeklong break/sanity check from writing (as well as making good on an emailed jest to Girish regarding its TIFF screening), here are a few sentimental favorites to whet the appetite...or prod into running to the nearest exit. The quick disclaimers are that I've only managed to finish archiving about a tenth of the collection so far, so these selected tracks are in no way intended to encompass the history of hardcore, and that there are a few explicit lyrics on some of the tracks.

Adrenaline O.D. - My Father's Dreams
Bad Brains - Regulator
Beastie Boys - Ode to....
Fiends - Asian White
Minor Threat - Stumped
The Undead - Life of Our Own

[Note:Preview mp3s will only be available for a week.]

Posted by on Aug 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2006, Quick Notes

Adynata is a figure of speech, a form of hyperbole that has been exaggerated to the point of impossibility. Similarly, Leslie Thornton's seminal film, Adynata is also a densely assembled rhetoric: an exposition into the social representations of a perpetuated, exoticized otherness - an alien culture, an irretrievable past, an impenetrable psyche - a conjured idealization collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity and irreconcilable contradiction. A wispy, idyllic shot of a futuristic, opalescent, gently contoured botanical garden greenhouse in New York City sets the otherworldly tone for Thornton's exposition into the culturally amorphous forms of representation as the images of exotic flora (in its sumptuous foliage and forbidding thorns) are juxtaposed against a nineteenth century photograph of an upper class Asian couple formally posed in traditional costume, and set to the nostalgic sounds of scratchy, early twentieth century phonograph records. From this implicit evocation of an intangibly fragile, elusive, intranscendable alterity (an alienness that is reinforced by the idiosyncratic, animated sequence depicting an extraterrestrial view of a spinning Earth), Thornton begins to systematically dismantle the very mechanisms of this subconscious process of rarefaction and exoticism through the practical - and consequently, de-romanticized - recontextualization of the images themselves.

A western woman (Thornton), whose voice appropriately remains unheard, is seen in the process of donning the elaborate period clothing in the style of the woman in the photograph, and in the process, reveals the reductive, vulgar, and grotesque nature of ethnic sameness, caricature, and desexualization that underlies this act of superficial imitation. The shallowness of the masquerade is further underscored by the reconstructed opacity of Thornton's figuration mimicking the photographed woman's enigmatic expression, as any traces of her thoughts and motivations are obscured - and consequently, suppressed - beneath the heavy make-up and baroque ornamentation of the costume. Rather than presenting the seductive image of exotic fascination, what emerges in these self-contradicting images is a figurative masquerade: an erasure of identity enabled by the idealization of the subject behind the images, in the submissiveness and artifice of its projected illusion. This deconstruction of idealized images is also illustrated through the recurring shot of a pair of women's shoes, shaped in the impossibly narrow style of the period, as the footwear is whimsically integrated into images that reveal implicit domesticity (in the act of embroidered sewing) and objectification (in the collage of oriental paraphernalia). Initially juxtaposed against sumptuous, tropical images of bird of paradise flowers at the botanical garden, the footwear is then placed in the context of photographs and illustrative sketches from a scientific journal depicting the process of oriental foot binding to illustrate the implicit violence and inhumanity intrinsic in this cultivated ideal of exotic artificiality.

Moreover, innate in Thornton's investigation is the insidious nature of images, deployed equally as tools of information as they are of misinformation, illustration and deception, illumination and ignorance. In presenting the contradictions intrinsic in the perception of images, Adynata diverges from the immediate theme of orientalism and alterity towards a broader examination on the nature of human imagination, where the very process itself becomes an engaged, interpretive act of complicity towards the perpetuation of the perception of otherness. It is this multiplicity of meaning that is inevitably captured in the superimposed image of a two-headed earthenware jug that is set against the formal portrait of the Asian couple that concludes the film - an illustration, not only of the ephemeral irreconcilability of images, but also of the unresolved layers of significance that exist beneath the implicated act of seeing.

Posted by on Aug 08, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Leslie Thornton

"I thought I would at first offer you a simple lesson - sorry, you don't like being preached to - so let's say a little advice, which of course you are not obliged to follow, well, let's say a tip ...which calls upon us to first explore the steps that were cleared by our predecessors, since it was out of the question for me to remake the new geographical landscapes of the Romantics: Rousseau, Goethe, Chateaubriand or the Naturalist descriptions of places that were miserable or picturesque, of Eugène Sue or Victor Hugo, or Dada trips to regions without any particular interest, or also the random objective encounters of the Surrealists, and of course, the travels of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci ...I found accounts of travel that were extraordinary, imaginary, marvelous, utopian, exotic, fantastic explorations, etc."

Trying to encapsulate the texturally complex, amorphous, and indefinable essence of Maurice Lemaître's film Ganeden is a daunting task. On the surface, the film - evocatively named after the Hebrew word for the Garden of Eden - is a highly experimental, yet approachable anti-travelogue exposition on the imaginative adventure of mundane travel (or, in de-romanticized terms, the daily commute), an instinctively cohesive journey that strikes a sympathetic chord with Robert Breer's wordless, stream-of-consciousness animated work Fuji, and that appropriately opens with a similar illustrative image of a figurative point of departure - the train station - in this case, appearing in the form of a still (or more accurately, paused) image of a man frozen in mid step of boarding a train from a subway station platform. However, the film also represents the culmination of the iconic Lettrist novelist, poet, artist, and filmmaker's body of work: a creative philosophy that his groundbreaking film, Le film est déjà commencé? would prefigure in its tongue-in-cheek usurpation and cataclysmic (or at the very least, cacophonic) dismantling of the hallowed and rarefied experience of mid century cinema by upending such conventional notions of screen, projection, ambient sound, and artist performance. Intrinsic in this subversive aesthetic - and in particular, Lemaître's evocation of urban escapism - is its empirical evolution from the Lettrist concept of psychogeography, a consciousness of an environment's effects on an individual's psyche. It is within this philosophical imperative that the artistic struggle becomes a broader cultural revolution to transfigure the malleable landscape of the modern city into a more vital organism of inspiration and creation - to humanize it: the city re-imagined as an integrated artistic canvas of tangible, accessible art and uncharted wonderland of quixotic adventure (as Jacques Rivette would whimsically capture the Situationist concept of dérive - a Lettrist splinter faction - in such films as Le Pont du Nord or Celine and Julie Go Boating), moving away from the automated machinery of dehumanized production and towards a state of perpetual metamorphosis and source of creative reinvigoration.

In this respect, the Lettrist ideal of re-asserting the human element into the industrial landscape - and consequently, propelling the creative stimulus of the individual - by reinventing the familiar into novel forms - a detournement - converges with the artistic philosophy of seminal Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka, not only in his practical reconstitution of found film, but also in the discretization of sound from images in order to reconstruct new layers of meaning and signification. However, while Kubelka's aesthetic is integrally rooted in the unique properties and physical materiality of celluloid - and in particular, its projected speed - Lemaître's aesthetic is rooted in a more atemporal mixed media of traditional and contemporary visual art forms: film and video, photography and sketch drawing, digital post-production effects and hand painting, live footage and animation. In essence, while the principle of reductive, self-imprint governs both filmmakers' body of work, Lemaître's aesthetic is revealed through the multilayered juxtaposition of compositions - a creative methodology that is not propelled by the compact delivery of information dynamically presented at 24 frames per second (as is the case with Kubelka's cinema, where images are often presented liminally at the threshold of registered visibility), but rather, by the conflation of discrete layers of information revealed through the density of images, in their resulting hypergraphy.

In Ganeden, this hypergraphy is manifested though the juxtaposition of iconic, if quotidian images - building and infrastructural architecture, train car views, cityscapes, harbors, identification markings, and informational signage - that define the urban landscape. But beyond the transfiguration of mundane images into works of art, Lemaître's inspired act of self-imprint - his humanization of the "dehumanized city" - is ingeniously manifested through his incorporation of an inconstant, mutable artistic style throughout the film that, when superimposed against the sequence of manipulated urban images, becomes a contextual survey of several key art movements: from Primitivism (the linear figures riding the train), to Pointillism (the speckled opening sequence), to Impressionism (the lateral shot of a modern bridge painted wispily in a color palette that evokes Claude Monet's Japanese Bridge at Giverny), to Post-Impressionism (the garishly fluorescent, Van Gogh styled re-coloration of the Eiffel Tower), to Dada (the overlaid chiseling on the iconic image of Mount Fuji), to Abstract (the compositions of saturated color blocks and instinctual geometries), and Pop Art (the alternating negative and positive photographic image of an Asian woman). Ironically, in contrast to the alienating, subversive chaos of Le film est déjà commencé?, what emerges in Lemaître's personal and cultural journey through the evolution of art history is an assimilative aesthetic that remains reverent towards its foundational roots even as it seeks, not to push the bounds of the disparate art forms, but rather, to collapse the imaginary frontiers that separate them - to return to a unitary ideal - a Garden of Eden.
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This entry is part of the Avant-Garde blog-a-thon. Other participants include (updated throughout the day as entries are posted):

          » Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura.
          » Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan.
          » Chris Cagle at Category D.
          » Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity.
          » Matt Clayfield at Esoteric Rabbit Blog.
          » Culture Snob.
          » Brian Darr at Hell on Frisco Bay.
          » Jim Flannery at A Placid Island of Ignorance.
          » Filmbrain.
          » Flickhead.
          » Richard Gibson.
          » Ed Gonzalez at Slant.
          » Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.
          » David Hudson at Greencine Daily.
          » Tom Hall at The Back Row Manifesto.
          » Ian W. Hill at Collisionwork.
          » Andy Horbal at No More Marriages!.
          » Darren Hughes at Long Pauses.
          » Jennifer MacMillan at Invisible Cinema.
          » Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee.
          » David Pratt-Robson at Videoarcadia.
          » Seadot at An Astronomer in Hollywood.
          » Girish Shambu.
          » Michael Sicinski at The Academic Hack.
          » Michael S. Smith at Culturespace.
          » Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.
          » Squish at The Film Vituperatum.
          » That Little Round-Headed Boy.
          » Thom at Film of the Year.
          » Chuck Tryon at The Chutry Experiment.
          » Harry Tuttle at Screenville.
          » Walter at The Quiet Bubble.

Posted by on Aug 02, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (20) | Filed under 2006, Maurice Lemaître

Something of an irreverent collision between the offbeat, carnivalesque formalism of Lina Wertmüller or Ulrike Ottinger, and the somber, often sardonic view of despiritualized, post-communist societies from contemporary, ex-Soviet bloc filmmakers such as Darezhan Omirbaev (in particular, Killer), Béla Tarr, and Cristi Puiu, Kira Muratova's The Tuner is a wry, infectiously offbeat, penetrating, and relevant portrait of the inescapable greed and exploitation that have come to define the cultural landscape of modern day Eastern Europe in the inherently dysfunctional mechanisms of its nascent, capitalism-based, free market economies. A series of parallel, early encounters establishes the prescient tone for the film’s recurring themes of subverted expectation and complicit deception. The film opens to the image of an apprehensive, privileged, lovelorn woman named Lyuba (Nina Ruslanova) curiously wearing an incongruously out of fashion, beaded headdress as she initiates a conversation with a dashing, middle-aged man reading a newspaper at a public park with whom she has arranged a rendezvous after exchanging correspondences through a personal advertisement in a local newspaper (and whom, she subsequently realizes, she had mistakenly approached in her eagerness to find a potential suitor, having arrived a half hour earlier than the proposed meeting time) - an introductory meeting that invariably turns into a subtly goading, hard luck story that culminates with an indirect overture to solicit a loan in order to move forward with a lucrative, short window of opportunity deal despite personal, short-term cash flow problems. The image of Lyuba's fruitless rendezvous is immediately reinforced by a shot of petty thief and conman, Andrei (Georgi Deliyev) borrowing money from a local loan shark (a shot ingeniously - and symbolically - taken from below the sight line of the table), before heading off to the supermarket to buy groceries (as well as opening bottles of expensive liquor to sneak ample swigs while feigning outrage that the store has been selling opened merchandise). The two sequences, connected by the act of implicit, underhanded, financial solicitation, presage the interconnected fates of Lyuba and Andrei, a seeming predestiny that is concocted by Andrei after he overhears a wealthy widow, Anna Sergeyevna (Alla Demidova) ask for personal recommendations for a piano tuner at the supermarket. Under the spell (or at least, the thumb) of his beautiful, capricious, and extravagant lover, Lina (Renata Litvinova), Andrei sets out to ingratiate himself into the company of Anna Sergeyevna and her friend Lyuba by responding to the classified advertisement for a piano tuner in an attempt to win over their trust, and access to their dwindling fortunes.

It is interesting to note that Muratova operates within the framework of her idiosyncratically familiar absurdist stylizations and visual elements that are visible throughout her body of work in order to illustrate the film's own themes of opportunism, amorality, and obsolescence. The recurring red herring encounters - Lyuba's mistaken identity rendezvous, Andrei's groping by a man in the supermarket who may or (more likely) may not have been a store employee frisking him for shoplifted items, Lina's invitation of a scatterbrained, homeless person to her table after ordering everything on the menu, Lyuba's impulsive marriage to an opportunistic projectionist - serve to reinforce the atmosphere of pervasive deception that has defined the young couple's existence (an early shot of Andrei returning home by sneaking into the attic of a residential complex alludes to their existence as scam artists living in the margins of society). Similarly, Anna Sergeyevna and Lyuba's repeated encounters with twins at the Central Bank - another recurring visual element within Muratova's cinema - proves especially appropriate within the context of an interconnected (and ever escalating) pattern of double crosses that binds the characters together in their dysfunctional mutualism - Anna Sergeyevna and Lyuba in their archaic rituals and old-world insularity who are literally (through the malfunctioning piano) and metaphorically out of tune with the world around them (an image that is comically reinforced by Lyuba's disco-era ornamental headdress as well as the gated entrance to Anna Sergeyevna's house), and Andrei and Lina in their aimless and futureless hedonism and sense of self-entitlement (a rootlessness and disconnection that is also reflected in Andrei's penchant for using cell phones and in Lina's ambiguous declaration of commitment). It is the end, it is this representation of Andrei as a modern-day, morally ambiguous everyman that is captured in Anna Sergeyevna and Lyuba's vague, often contradictory descriptions of the perpetrator at the denouement of the young couple's elaborate scheme - the faceless anonymity and amorphous indefinability of impoverishment, desolation, and moral bankruptcy endemic within the corrupted ideals of self-motivated enterprise emerging from the ashes of a post-Soviet brave new world.

Posted by on Jul 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2006, Kira Muratova

Five years before Abbas Kiarostami would blur the delineation between documentary and fiction in Close-Up by casting underemployed laborer and accused Mohsen Makhmalbaf impersonator, Sabzian to participate in a re-enactment of his fateful encounter with Mrs. Mahrokh Ahankhah and his subsequent deception of the Ahankhah family by ingratiating himself into their company, Françoise Romand would channel the spirit of dramatist Luigi Pirandello's recurring preoccupation with the interpenetration between art and reality in the thoughtful and poignant, yet fascinating, idiosyncratically offbeat, and whimsical first feature, Mix-Up to explore similar Pirandellian themes of identity, destiny, and absurdity. The maternity ward of a small, Nottingham hospital in 1936 serves as the literal and metaphoric stage for the story, as Blanche Rylatt, one of the two mothers involved in the "baby mix-up affair", recounts her admission into the delivery room to fill out the necessary documentation in preparation for the birth of her first child, only to be asked if she would voluntarily vacate the room (leaving all of her paperwork on the table in the hastily arranged move) in order to accommodate another patient, Margaret Wheeler, who was already in a more advanced stage of delivery. Ingeniously shot from the waiting room of a hospital nursery, the now elderly women take turns in front of the viewing window to recount their birth stories, punctuated by the appearance of their respective daughters beside them ...or so it seems, as a disembodied hand reaches over to tap the arm of Blanche's biological daughter, Valery in a pre-arranged cue to stand beside her foster mother, Margaret, while Margaret's biological daughter, Peggy, in turn, once again returns to the foreground, this time, standing beside her foster mother, Blanche.

Already discomfited by the hospital staff's frequent misdirection of flowers and correspondences between the two mothers, Margaret becomes immediately convinced that the daughter given to her was not the baby shown to her during the delivery, a misgiving dismissed by the hospital staff as a common uncertainty expressed by many mothers overwhelmed by the birth of a new child. Without conclusive proof, Margaret sought to insinuate herself into the Rylatt family's life by any means necessary in order to maintain contact with the family (and above all, Peggy), asking Blanche's husband, Fred to become Valery's godfather, paying occasional visits to the family (as well as surreptitiously sending family and friends to view baby Peggy in the hopes of gleaning conclusive information from a third-person opinion), and even sending several photographs of Valery over the years as a courtesy to the family. In contrast, Blanche, placated by their family doctor's reassurances that Peggy was the child whom he had helped deliver, and frequent comments from family and friends on Peggy's resemblance to other members of their extended family (as well as Fred's own conscious attempts to insulate her from Margaret's skeptical instigations), never truly doubted that Peggy was her biological child and showered her with the a kind of over-attentive, doting affection parents often have for their f