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2007


December 10, 2007

Romances de terre et d'eau, 2002

romances.gifA reverent, humbling, and impassioned observation of life among the landless, peasant farmers of the semi-arid Carriri region of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana's poetic ethnographic documentary Romances de terre et d'eau bears the deep humanism and trenchant, sociopolitical commitment of its venerable producers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Insightfully filmed near the commencement of the town's nine day, Feast of St. Anne - the patron saint of mothers and childless women (and in a broader sense, fertility) - the film opens to the shot of potters forming and hand painting an assortment of decorative, pastoral clay figures on the dirt floor of a modest, unlit house. In a subsequent establishing sequence, a sprightly octogenarian and water diviner standing at a grazing pasture, Miguel Rodrigues de Barros (affectionately known in the village as Seu Tetel), tells the story of his birth in the context of a terrible drought that had devastated the region in the same year. In a way, the juxtaposition of artisanal clay people and the personal testimony of real-life farmer Seu Tetel, whose identity is similarly rooted in the bounty of the earth, embodies the harsh reality of everyday life among the dispossessed and profoundly marginalized Sertão farming communities - an existence that has been shaped and worn down by a profound connection with a generous, but unforgiving land that has led to a life of nourishment and deprivation, joy and hardship - a way of life, already imperiled by the unpredictability of seasonal harvest, that is further being eroded by increasingly hostile enforcement of land rights, privatization, and commercial development. This sense of silent resilience is similarly reflected in the words of peasant farmer Thiago Pinheiro Gomes who recounts his own haunted childhood, having witnessed the prolonged illnesses and eventual deaths of his two young sisters as a result of their family's abject poverty following the abandonment of their father (that prevented them from receiving timely, proper medical care), as well as his mother's implacable guilt (even now some 35 years later) over having been unable to accommodate what would prove to be their deathbed requests for a meager meal of eggs and cassava. Now a father of six children, he supplements his seasonal employment as a day laborer in a sugar cane plantation by working as a sharecropper, reasoning that while the plantation provides him with the occasional means of buying his children clothing and school supplies, farming ensures that his conscience will not be burdened by the guilt that his mother continues to harbor, and that his children, even in their poverty, will not go hungry as his sisters had. For Thiago, a peasant farmer's integral connection to the land is an unbreakable bond that is both essential and cathartic, a sentiment that is similarly echoed by displaced elderly farmer, João Bosco Ferreira Paz and his Josefa Amara da Silva who, having left the village as an act of impotent protest for an even more uncertain life in a shantytown after a rancher spitefully asserted his land rights by grazing his cattle on João's planted vegetable garden, wistfully recall their well-worn lives on the fields of the Sertão. But perhaps the most emblematic of the farmers' complex relationship with a borrowed land that engenders poverty is illustrated by a group of itinerant amateur actors who stage their rustic pageant before appreciative local villagers. Performing in full costume, an actor proudly reflects on the continuity of a cherished cultural legacy instilled by these outmoded staged spectacles, even as he expresses his relief in retaining his anonymity by donning a mask and avoiding the stigma that the troupe is ultimately soliciting charity. It is this paradoxical coexistence of cultural heritage and obsolescence, community and marginalization, impotence and fertility, that is poignantly encapsulated in the film's closing montage - an attribution of individual names that accompanies the stationary shots of the posed subjects - a captured, privileged moment of intimacy that reflects both the bittersweet validation of a faceless, ennobled people and a fragmentary record of an indigenous culture on the twilight of man-made extinction.

Posted by on Dec 10, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007


December 4, 2007

Fantômes, 2001

fantomes.gifOn the surface, Jean-Paul Civeyrac's Fantômes unfolds with a sense of haunted, supernatural disequilibrium that similarly infuses Kiyoshi Kurosawa's atmospheric, tonal cinema. In the film's opening sequence, a young acting student, Mouche (Dina Ferreira) stares out the window of an empty room and wistfully implores her absent lover, Bruno (Olivier Boreel) to return. Alone with her grief, she retreats into the silence of her intimate memories, briefly interrupted by what appears to be an anonymously placed, prank telephone call (in a premise that coincidentally evokes Kurosawa's Pulse, made in the same year), before being brought back to the mundane reality of rehearsing text in Russian for an upcoming drama class during a subsequent telephone conversation with her professor, Andreï (Jean-Claude Montheil). However, Mouche's desolation does not lie in the vestiges of a failed love affair, but rather, in the tragic loss of a new lover from a motorcycle accident. The image of the sad-eyed Mouche invoking the name of her dead lover is reflected in the dorsal shot of another distracted acting student, Antoine (Guillaume Verdier) as he stares out the window of a country house while rehearsing his lines, avoiding the gaze of his first love (Emilie Lelouch) before finally resolving to break up with her. Emboldened by his newfound emotional liberation, Antoine turns away from the quiet familiarity of his pastoral life and hitchhikes his way to Paris to visit his cousin Mathieu (Serge Bozon) where, on the eve of his arrival, he witnesses the curious disappearance of his traveling companion (Guillaume Junot) on the side of a hill overlooking the city - an unemployed motorist attempting to reconcile with his estranged wife with empty promises of finding a new job - after he pulls his car over to the side of the road in order to get better reception on his cell phone, and simply vanishes into the darkness. Arriving disoriented at Mathieu's apartment on the following day, a flophouse shared by a curious assortment of interchangeable, self-involved roommates who lead their separate lives oblivious of each others' presence, Antoine's strange encounter is validated by Mathieu who recounts the apparently rampant urban legend of unexplained disappearances that have recently plagued the city. Soon, as Antoine strives to forge a new life in Paris as a drama student and a part-time accountant, he, too, finds himself surrounded by the strange presence of aimless, disconnected lost souls who hover over the empty spaces of their resigned lives pining over lost - and perhaps imaginary - loves. At the core of Civeyrac's allusive and resonant, if opaque, subverted ghost story is the integral anxiety of illusive love, the regret of missed opportunity, and the fear of being ordinary and anonymous. Civeyrac expounds on the visual continuum developed in his earlier film, Les Solitaires where past and present, the living the dead coexist within a character's interpenetrating perceptual reality (a seamless transition through obscuring shadows and underlit, interstitial spaces that is also incorporated in the aesthetic movement of All the Fine Promises and À travers la forêt) to explore what would become his recurring orphic themes of corporeal love, longing, existential passage, and redemption. Framed against Antoine's diverted journey towards self-discovery near the sea - an image that is underscored by his encounter with an alluring, siren-like woman in the water - Fantômes presents a reconstituted contemporary mythology of human desire and frailty, where limbo is the banal reality of unreconciled memories, and immortal love exists only in the illusion of an irretrievable, transitory bliss.

Posted by on Dec 04, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Jean-Paul Civeyrac


November 27, 2007

The Legend of Time, 2006

legend_timeNamed after legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla's groundbreaking record album (which, in turn, was inspired by the works of Andalusian poet, Federico García Lorca), Isaki Lacuesta's The Legend of Time melds the improvised encounters of Johan van der Keuken's ethnographic documentaries with the quotidian intimacy of Mercedes Álvarez's El cielo gira to create a understated, yet meticulously observed meditation on grief, identity, and self-expression. Composed of two, self-contained chapters capture the disparate lives of figurative outsiders from Camarón's ancestral hometown of San Fernando, Cádiz - a gypsy boy, Isra who decides to honor his father's memory by refraining from singing during the family's self-imposed period of mourning, and a young Japanese woman, Makiko who leaves her ailing father behind in order to follow in the footsteps of Camarón and learn cante by immersing herself in the culture - the film is also a lucid and thoughtful essay into the inalterable nature of change, resonance, and connectedness.

In The Voice of Isra, a boy who bears a vague resemblance to a young Camarón with his long, curly hair and charming smile, struggles to come to terms with the subtle, yet profound shifts in his personal life, both as a younger brother who sees his relationship with his elder brother transform from that of playmate to surrogate father figure, man of the house, and, more importantly, disciplinarian (a change in the family dynamic following their father's death that is suggested in the film's poetic introductory sequence, when Isra plays with his brother Cheíto by pretending to bury him in a mound of fake snow), and as a maturing adolescent trying to win the affection of his brother's pretty friend, Saray. Chronicling Isra's maturation through seemingly mundane, yet insightful episodes of sibling rivalry (tersely encapsulated through Cheíto and Isra's arm wrestling contests), self-proving acts (initially, in Cheíto's goading of Isra to spray paint graffiti bearing Saray's name on the side of a tower, then subsequently, in the Japanese expatriate, Joji's feigned rite of passage with a sharp knife), and illustrations of time's passage (the advent of Mardi Gras, Isra's breaking voice, and Saray and Isra carving their measured heights onto a tree), Lacuesta uses the trauma of Isra's deliberately silent, then "lost" voice as a metaphor for the gradual formation of his own identity.

Similarly, Makiko's immigration to Spain in The Voice of Makiko is also one of self-discovery. In an early episode, Makiko, inquiring about referrals for cante instructors at a flamenco dance class that caters to a predominantly Japanese clientele, instead receives a tip from a student for a possible waitressing job at a local Chinese restaurant. This idiosyncratic image of interchangeable, borrowed identities becomes a reflection of Makiko's search for her own identity as well, a quest that is implied in the image of Makiko lip synching to Camarón's performance that opens the film. For Makiko, singing cante becomes inextricably bound to the exhilaration and adventure of immersing in a new culture as it is to a profound sense of guilt, grief, and dislocation (in an unexpectedly intimate scene, Makiko talks to her father from a public phone about her nursing schools studies as she speaks in voiceover of how her father taught her to suppress her display of emotion, a haunting image of imposed distance that grows more poignant during a subsequent, routine telephone call to her father). As in Isra's story, Makiko's identity and transformation emerge from the trauma of (paternal) loss and separation. Framed against the characters' personal stories as cross-cultural reflections of Camarón's inextinguishable spirit, Lacuesta creates an eloquent allegory for the cante itself as the embodiment of an eternal collective consciousness in its weathered, intertwined expression of joy and sadness, beauty and banality.

Posted by on Nov 27, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Isaki Lacuesta


November 3, 2007

Tarrafal, 2007

tarrafal.gifIn an episode that occurs halfway through Tarrafal, Cape Verdean immigrant José Alberto, having just received his expulsion notice, encounters the elderly, displaced Fonthainas resident Ventura waiting on the side of a dirt road as his friend, Alfredo tries in vain to catch rabbits by thrashing random bushes with a wooden club. In a way, the idea of silent, enduring landscapes as figurative intersections for other unfolding - and often converging - human stories (a recurring theme in José Luis Guerín's cinema as well) may be seen as a metaphor for Pedro Costa's densely layered themes of dislocation and statelessness. As subsequently revealed in The Rabbit Hunters, Alfredo, too, is homeless, resorting to a life in the streets after having been thrown out of the apartment by his wife. In Tarrafal, this converging image of forced - and implicitly traumatic - displacement and exile is established in the opening images of José Alberto's ironic inquiries to his mother over the derelict conditions of their ancestral houses in Cape Verde from his own ramshackle home in the slums. As the conversation morphs from the neglect and inhabitability of their beloved, deserted homes that recalls the reclamation of abandoned ghost houses in In Vanda's Room, to the strange tales of a blood-sucking phantasm who foretells a person's hour of death by surreptitiously leaving letters in the most mundane of hiding places to be subsequently retrieved at the time of their immutable appointment - an impersonal, life-altering communication that alludes to the state's arbitrary dispensation of deportation and eviction notices in modern day Portugal - Costa illustrates a sense of anonymous interchangeability among the transitory, drifting souls of Tarrafal. Visually, this sense of surrogacy and transplantation is reflected in the repeating angular doorway view of José Alberto's house: first, in the solitary image of José Alberto facing away from the camera as he sits on a wooden plank to smoke, then subsequently, in a reframed shot of Ventura and Alfredo seated on the same plank looking out into the neighboring town, commenting on the profound transformation of the once desolate landscape (note Alfredo's humorous misidentification of stray cats as rabbits that further reinforces their seeming interchangeability). Moreover, intrinsic in José Alberto's sad tale of requesting a work release to single-handedly bury his estranged father, and the rabbit hunters' conversation over their mistreatment and death at the hands of authorities is the specter of Tarrafal's unreconciled history as a prison camp where inmates were tortured and relegated to die a slow death. Composed as skewed, frame within frame stationary shots that evoke the acute angles and distanced address of Straub/Huillet, these parallel testimonies of dislocation, separation, entrapment, and fatedness unfold through supplanted images of interchangeable, moribund, drifting ghosts that integrally reflect their own erasure and social invisibility.

Posted by on Nov 03, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Pedro Costa


October 29, 2007

Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, 1985

nakedspaces.gifIn Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha expounds on the themes of postcolonial identification and the geopolitical (and social) apparatus of disempowerment in Reassemblage to create dense, thoughtful, and articulate ethnographic essay film on indigenous identity, the impossibility of translation, and architecture as cultural representation. The prefacing image provides a terse, yet incisive encapsulation of Trinh's recurring preoccupations. Opening to a fragmentary, red filter shot of a Senegalese village celebration against the unsynchronized sound of tribal rhythms, the film then abruptly cuts to an extended black screen as the drums continue to beat in the background, before returning to the same idiosyncratic footage of unnaturally reddened villagers in the midst of their animated performance. In a way, Trinh's odd presentation of images serves as a metaphor for the abstract, often exotic representation of African culture in Western society - the reframing of images through the figurative filter of a usurped, privileged gaze - dissociated from its cultural rooting, repackaged, and systematically reinforced as quaint entertainment or exploited by the international community as justification for continued sovereign meddling (and consequently, domination) in the absence of a colonial-era "enlightened" mandate. Indeed, Trinh's symbolic crossing out of the word directed from the film's title sequence reflects her deliberate strategy to withhold preformed context to the presented images, not as a means of mystifying (nor exoticizing) African life, but as an act of resistance towards a filmmaker's unconscious process of interpretation as explanation in composing these ethnographic images - a defiance against reinforcing prescribed assumptions and perpetuating stereotypes that is announced in the film's tongue-in-cheek, pre-emptive opening statement, "Not descriptive, not informative, not interesting."

Implied in the opening tribal dance in Joola, Senegal is a sense of mutual causation - a body responding to the percussive rhythms through movement, that, in turn, drives the beating of the drums in a sympathetic resonance that the narrator (one of three accented female voices in the film) describes as the interactive process of mediated involvement. The theme of mediated ritual processes is subsequently revisited in the portrayal of native divinities, not as all-powerful gods who control the forces of nature and create mankind in their own image, but rather, as enlightened guides who initiate humanity into the "nature of death". Presented against images of house building and domestic rituals, Trinh introduces the idea of architecture as a fundamental life cycle - an initiation into the indigenous living culture. This essentiality between the organic and the inorganic is further reinforced in the subsequent chapter in Serer, Senegal where African folklore describes the creation of men and women as the elemental chemistry of air, water, earth, and light (a humbled sense of place that is also connected to the images of Bisa, Burkina Faso, where earth is symbolically collected from the center of a calabash during funeral rites). Juxtaposed against images that reinforce the idea of natural geometries found in everyday village life as rooted in the recurring pattern of circles - houses, granaries, calabash pots, the formation of harvest and ceremonial rituals, and even the shape of tombs - Trinh further expounds on the theme of native architecture as both a representation of cyclical life processes and its cultural function in forming an integral consciousness, a metaphysical convergence that is subsequently reflected in the description of the circle as a "spirit in eternal motion" in Peul, Senegal.

The idea of architecture as living testament of a collective consciousness surfaces throughout the film in unique and unexpected ways. In Jaxanke, Senegal, the tribal paintings depict, not a primitive mythology, but a mundane connection to the earth and its cycles of growth and harvest. In Birifor, Burkina Faso, the Western aesthetic of open floor plans is upended in the indigenous construction of dark passageways and secluded areas that prevent the layout of the house from being seen in totality, and whose spaces only reveal themselves in fragments through rays of directed, natural light - in essence, unfolding in levels of domestic intimacy. The stilt houses in Fon, Benin conflate the Western concepts of (demarcated) private and public spaces (a sentiment that is also inherent in the shared landscape of Peul, Senegal) as villagers row their boats from house to house exchanging essential provisions in the isolation of their floating community (a communal gesture that ironically plays out as a narrator comments on the nebulous distinction between external charity and conditioned dependency). In the traditionally conservative, deeply patriarchal society of Oualata, Mauritania, the austere, minimal exterior spaces open to ornately decorated interiors. Framed against the images of women instinctively withdrawing behind their veils in the presence of strangers, their domestic spaces, handed down from generation to generation, become the surrogate, silent guide to ingrained, unarticulated personal and cultural histories. In Moba, Togo, the metaphoric representation of the house as being is connected to the theme of natural communication in the description of doorways as mouths to the vault of heaven, a reflection of humanity's interdependency between the earth and sky for survival that is also reflected in the characterization of granaries as "celestial wombs" in Kabye, Togo that alludes to ecological and human cycles of fertility. This metaphor for living architecture is further illustrated in Soninke, Mauritania, where the breathing of houses - enabled by the incorporated structural design of open-air vents - becomes an overall reflection of a household's health and well-being. It is interesting to note that by using recurring images shot through vents and doorways, Trinh creates a sense of separated connectedness that supplants the filtered gaze of the opening images with one of obstructed transparency - a visual reinforcement of otherness that defines Trinh's (as well as the spectator's) mediated point of view that is also inherent in the inquisitive, stolen glances of the village women in Oualata. Concluding with the bookending shot of the Senegalese village ceremony - this time, without the distortion of red tinting - as a narrator comments on the mechanics of dance as a body's continuity to the gaps in the rhythm, the image becomes a dual-natured one: a reassertion of indigenous expression in the absence of imposed filters, and an invocation of ancestral spirits within the sacred circle of a shared cultural intimacy.

Posted by on Oct 29, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Trinh T. Minh-ha


October 23, 2007

In Vanda's Room, 2000

vanda.gifThe first image of Vanda's childhood friend, Nhurro is an insightfully intimate one. On the morning of the scheduled demolition of his home - an abandoned house in the slums of Fonthainas that he had taken over and settled into as his own - Nhurro takes a final, almost ceremonial, thorough scrub down bath in near total darkness in the midst of pounding sledgehammers and approaching heavy machinery, using buckets of ported hot water to rinse off the soap suds in the absence of running water and electricity. Emerging in the shadows from his bath with the steam evaporating from the surface of his skin, Nhurro's obscured silhouette momentarily appears phantasmagoric and evanescent against the stray rays of light poking through the crumbling walls and covered windows of the barren house, transforming him into an almost spectral, otherworldly figure that is subsequently reframed against a more mundane reality when he awkwardly stumbles from the wet floor while trying to retrieve his clothes from a nearby chair. This metaphysical image proves to be Pedro Costa's most direct illustration of the marginalized, discarded Fonthainas residents as displaced ghosts in In Vanda's Room - a theme that would again surface in Colossal Youth and especially Tarrafal) - a manifestation of figurative lost souls drifting from one derelict landscape to another in the wake of the shantytown's looming, phased demolition, systematic depopulation, and involuntary exile. In an encounter with Vanda that occurs near the end of the film, Nhurro, once again forcibly displaced by advancing bulldozers from his newly claimed "home" (a house that he continues to fastidiously clean until the very end of his brief "tenancy", perhaps as a symbolic gesture of his human dignity), secretly takes refuge in Vanda's room for a few days while searching for other intact, abandoned houses to move into, and resignedly tells her of his life in perpetual transience, "living in ghost houses other people left empty." In a sense, the sad, adrift characters wandering into and out of Vanda's room are also leading impermanent, yet paradoxically static and inescapable lives in the doomed ghost town.

In Vanda's Room also anticipates José Luis Guerín's En Construcción in its untold stories of disposable lives and buried cultures that continue to surface and reassert their inerasable identities from the rubble of area revitalization. Composed of long take, stationary shots, often of cramped interior spaces or narrow alleys framed against neglected building façades, doorways, and even gouged walls that reflect the characters' economic bondage and spiritual captivity, the film's oppressive moral landscape and interminable stasis are also revealed through repeating episodes of inarticulate, idle conversations, hardscrabble drug use, door to door peddling, acts of petty theft, and habitual rummaging (most notably, in Vanda finding an antique model ship that had been inadvertently left outside that alludes to the country's own historical change in fortune from colonial empire to increasingly marginalized country within the economic homogenization of a borderless European Union). But there is also a specter of inevitable change in these uncomfortably intimate moments of destructive (and often self-inflicted) limbo as the remaining residents, too impoverished to move away, await their fate. (In one ironic juxtaposition, the extended image of Vanda resting in an alley with a crate of unsold vegetables is framed against a doorway as the song The Power by Snap! plays in the background.) The news of Nhurro's newfound residence that is mentioned during Vanda and her sister, Zita's opening conversation is supplanted by his subsequent eviction from his latest home during the course of the film. In another conversation, the state-enabled, mass eviction of Fonthainas is reflected in the inequitable dispensation of institutional justice over the apparent theft of Knorr soup cubes, where punishment is exacted against the arbitrary measure of human disposability. Perhaps the most emblematic of its systematic cultural extinction lies in the fate of a middle-aged woman named Geny who, early in the film, anxiously stands near the door of her home, having been evicted on the same morning as Nhurro. Raising a faint smile when a neighbor tries to cheer her up with a tongue in cheek offer of cohabitation, the fleeing moment of lightness becomes even more poignant within the context of a passing visitor's subsequent indirect account of her misfortune. This sobering convergence in Vanda's room - the evocation of Geny's faint smile, told by an emphysemic friend who trades a bouquet of flowers for a supply of respiratory medicine, in the room where Vanda and Zita get their heroin fix - powerfully encapsulates the film's haunted, indelible, and unflinching intimacy: an image of tragic souls hovering aimlessly over their physical captivity, pursuing distractive quests for transitory relief.

Posted by on Oct 23, 2007 | | Comments (3) | Filed under 2007, Pedro Costa


September 5, 2007

En Construcción (Work in Progress), 2001

construccion.gifSomething of a cross between the organic essentiality of Johan van der Keuken's ethnographic documentaries (most notably, in I Love Dollar) and the disenfranchised cinema of Pedro Costa, José Luis Guerín's En Construcción anticipates Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life in its understated, yet bracing portrait of economically imposed dislocation, class stratification, and cultural erasure. Ostensibly a chronicle of the construction of a condominium as part of a multi-phased, residential development project intended to revitalize the working class Barcelonan port town of El Chino (whose name had been derived from its once bustling commerce as a trade port to Asia), the film is also a provocative and poetic document of marginalized, discarded lives lived within the constant flux of demolition and construction, urbanization and depopulation in the pursuit of an economic renaissance that comes with the process of gentrification - the people on the figurative other side who are slowly being pushed away from these transforming communities: the migrant, day laborers (usually foreigners or people from rural provinces) who work on the construction site without the security of continued employment after the project is completed, and impoverished townspeople who look on at the construction activity from the windows and rooftops of their own worn down tenements (often scheduled for future demolitions themselves), unable to afford the price of an apartment unit in the new building. This underlying dichotomy is tersely encapsulated by the plight of a young couple, Juani and Iván who, as the film begins, have been given a notice of eviction by the landlord after falling behind on their rent (as well as receiving underhanded threats to implicate Juani's mother in a lawsuit if they refuse to comply). Juxtaposing their impending homelessness against a shot of a wrecking crew throwing out the contents from a room of a gutted apartment building with a graffiti bearing Juani's name (while passersby rummage through the contents of the dumpster and retrieve a painting that had once been hanging on the couple's wall) in preparation for clearing the site for new construction, Guerín subverts the notion that area redevelopment creates a new economy, but rather, merely supplants the old one.

In documenting the discovery of ancient relics from a suspected Roman-era catacomb at a demolished building site (a theory that is acerbically rebutted by an elderly bystander who is convinced that the corpses had instead been buried there during the dark days of the Civil War), Guerín not only expounds on the film's prefiguring images of cultural disposability and substitution, but also underscores the theme of inorganic structure as testaments of "living history", a preoccupation that resonates with Alain Resnais's early cinema in his recurring expositions on architectural memory. This idea of human imprint as encapsulated (and inerasable) records of history is visually reflected, initially, in the establishing shot of a large, four panel graffiti mural of eternal eyes that is mirrored in the children's chalk drawings at the construction site, then subsequently, in the foreman, Juan López's correlation of a building's structural framework to an inanimate soul - the hidden substance that defines an object's underlying integrity. Within this metaphysical analogy, the indelible images of deformed silhouettes as passersby invariably peek through the canvas enclosure along the perimeter of the construction site to watch the activity that is also evoked in the exaggerated shadows cast on adjacent walls as laborers work through the evening may also be seen as metaphoric figurations of transcended bodies. It is in this aesthetic representation of spaces as interchangeable, transitory containers for human existence that Guerín's haunting exposition ultimately converges towards the displaced spirit of Chantal Akerman's cinema, where concreteness of place is an untenable illusion, and the idea of home proves to be arbitrary and elusive.

Posted by on Sep 05, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, José Luis Guerín


September 1, 2007

Washed Ashore, 1994

washed_ashore.gifAn elderly cemetery caretaker, Josef Fuchs, impassively looks out into the Danube River before turning to face the camera and reciting Count Albrecht Graf Wickenburg's requiem for the namenlos - the unidentified dead, often people who committed suicide or lost their lives in boating accidents, whose bodies have washed up along the riverbank over the years and were buried at the Cemetery of the Nameless in lower Austria near the city limits of Vienna. In another area along the Danube River, a military guard stands atop an outpost scanning the landscape amidst the rumble of a hydroelectric plant overlooking a pedestrian bridge as vehicles speed past across a road on the opposite side of the river. In still other images of the Danube itself, a floating, ceremonial casket covered with flowers drifts aimlessly with the current towards its indeterminate place of rest, and a lone angler watches the tranquil waters for signs of activity as he rows his boat along the river in search of an ideal fishing spot. These introductory parallel images of disparate, yet intrinsically connected river sentinels along the Danube provides the framework for Nikolaus Geyrhalter's evocative and understated stream of consciousness rumination, Washed Ashore, an interweaving elegy on ritual and obsolescence set against the eternal, yet indelibly transforming modern day, socioeconomic landscape of the river in the face of encroaching urbanization, a collapsed Soviet bloc economy, and globalization.

This paradoxical coexistence of construction and erosion, activity and decline that characterizes contemporary life along the Danube is initially reflected through Fuchs's own testimony of his evolving role in the cemetery since the site's incorporation into the city of Vienna during the early half of the twentieth century. Decades earlier, during the final years of regional autonomy from Viennese jurisdiction when the laws still permitted people to trawl bodies found floating on the river, he had retrieved as many as fifty unclaimed corpses for burial. Now prohibited by the district charter from recovering the dead from the river (a phenomenon that would also be mitigated by the implemented diversion of the river, perhaps to feed the hydroelectric plant and prevent soil erosion that will accommodate new construction along the riverbank), the aging Fuchs now single-handedly tends to the care and maintenance of the existing (and now largely representational) anonymous graves, often faced with exhausting responsibilities of controlling overgrown foliage, grounds keeping, and even repairing markers and placards that have been defaced by thrill-seeking vandals and souvenir hunters from the gravesites. A similar sentiment of a dying way of life is intimated in the fisherman's explanation of the local community's opposition to the assimilation of the area's natural attractions into a proposed national park, arguing that such a project would not only open the floodgates to large-scale tourism that will adversely affect the area's already fragile ecological balance, but also, as a consequence, lead to the imposition of even more stringent regulations that will threaten their very livelihood.

However, the vulnerability of integral economies enabled by the river cannot be not solely attributed to the problems of (over) development, as illustrated by the middle-aged husband and wife team of barge operators from Romania, Aurel and Helene Rotaru, who live modestly aboard their company-supplied boat transporting industrial goods and raw materials bound for harbors along the Danube throughout Europe. Nearing retirement, the couple sees their lifelong career as a dying vocation, as younger generations, raised in an age of modern conveniences and discotheques, are unable to adapt to the more old fashioned (and decidedly low tech) lifestyle demanded by their nomadic occupation. This sense of self-imposed simplicity and asceticism is perhaps best illustrated by Gyosei Masunaga, a Buddhist monk who, years earlier, heeded the teachings of his mentor and left Japan to establish a peace pagoda and temple in Vienna in order to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now leads a humble life of devotion and subsistence near the riverbank. Closing with the rhapsodic performance of an untranslated traditional folksong by a traveling musician (Polina Schestova), her soulful performance serves as an idiosyncratically fitting coda to Geyrhalter's organic symphony on the enduring mutability of life along the margins of the Danube itself - at once, exotic and familiar, somber and rapturous, distant and transcendable.

Posted by on Sep 01, 2007 | | Comments (2) | Filed under 2007, Nikolaus Geyrhalter


August 29, 2007

2007 NYFF Sidebar: Views from the Avant Garde Program

The NYFF Views from the Avant Garde sidebar program has been announced. Aside from a jaw-dropping program entitled Memories featuring short films by Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, and Eugène Green from the Jeonju International Film Festival Digital Project (by far, my most anticipated program of the entire festival!) and the 35 mm restoration of Robert Breer's Recreation and Eyewash, I'm also especially looking forward to the Robert Beavers program, which includes Grogory Markopoulos' Reel from The Eniaos (Bliss). Views screened Helga Fanderl's Bulrushes in last year's program, and is dedicating an entire program of her work this year. Also worth noting is that Matthius Müller and Christophe Giradet, Jeanne Liotta, Paolo Gioli, Jacqueline Goss, Robert Todd, Jim Jennings, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and David Gatten have films among the compilation programs.

Saturday, Oct. 6

12:15 pm - From the Canyons to the Stars, 84m
    - All that Rises, Daichi Saito, with Malcolm Goldstein on violin, US, 2007; 7m
    - The Coming Race, Ben Rivers, UK, 2005; 5m
    - Surging Sea of Humanity, Ken Jacobs, US, 2006; 10m
    - Black and White Trypps #3 Providence, Ben Russell, US, 2007; 11m
    - Energie! , Thorsten Fleisch, Germany, 2007; 5m
    - North Shore, Fred Worden, US, 2007; 11m
    - Armoire, Vincent Grenier, US, 2007; 3m
    - Finestra D’Avanti Ad Un Alberto (a Fox Talbot), Paolo Gioli, Italy, 1989; 13m
    - Transit of Venus, Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2006; 2m
    - Observando el Cielo, Jeanne Liotta, US, 2007; 17m

3:00 pm - At Sea, Peter Hutton, 60m

5:00 pm - Unending, 94m
    - The Hyrcinium Wood, Ben Rivers, UK, 2007; 3m
    - Nymph, Ken Jacobs, US, 2007; 2m
    - Anonimatografo, Paolo Gioli, Italy, 1972; 26m
    - What the Water Said 4-6, David Gatten, US, 2006-07; 17m
    - How to Conduct A Love Affair, David Gatten, US, 2007; 8m
    - Tziporah, Abraham Ravett, US, 2007; 7m
    - Phantom, Luke Sizceck, US, 2007; 6m
    - In Memoriam Mark LaPore, Phil Solomon, US, 2005-07; 25m

7:30 pm - Ken Jacobs and Rick Reed, approx. 60m
    - Dreams That Money Can’t Buy, a live Nervous Magic Lantern performance.
    - Capitalism: Child Labor, Ken Jacobs, 2006; 14m

9:15 pm - Stranger Than a Strange Land, 112m
    - Untitled, Peggy Ahwesh, US, 2007; 3m
    - Notes from A Bastard Child, Fern Silva, US/Portugal, 2007; 6m
    - The Mongrel Sister, Luther Price, US, 2007; 7m
    - Victory Over the Sun, Michael Robinson, US, 2007; 12m
    - Stranger Comes to Town, Jacqueline Goss, US, 2007; 28m
    - Light is Waiting, Michael Robinson, US, 2007; 11m
    - SpaceDisco One, Damon Packard, US, 2007; 45m


Sunday, Oct. 7

12:30 pm - House Next Door, 111m
    - Old Dark House, Ben Rivers, UK; 4m
    - We the People, Ben Rivers, UK; 1m
    - Detroit Block, Julie Murray, US; 7m
    - Frontier Step, Gretchen Skogersen, US; 8m
    - Dedication, Peggy Ahwesh, US; 4m
    - House (single screen version) , Ben Rivers, UK; 6m
    - Footnotes to a House of Love, Laida Lertxundi, US; 13m
    - Office Suite, Robert Todd, US; 14m
    - Prague Winter, Jim Jennings, US; 7m
    - Electricity, Henry Hills, US/Czech Republic; 7m
    - Recordando El Ayer, Alexandra Cuestra, US/Ecuador; 9m
    - Tahousse, Olivier Fouchard & Mahine Rohue, France; 31m

2:30 pm - Helga Fanderl, 43m
    - Glaciers, 2006; 3m
    - Drawing Cobblestones, 2006; 3m
    - Gulf House, 2006; 3m
    - Leaden Waves, 2006; 1m
    - Shadows on a Red Wall, 2006; 2m
    - Tents on a Canal, 2006; 3m
    - Warrior’s Market, 2007; 2m
    - Louie, 2007; 1m
    - Tombs, 2004; 3m
    - Broadway, 2006; 3m
    - Reflections, 2006; 3m
    - Courtyard, 2006; 2m
    - Gray Heron, 2006; 3m
    - Three Midtown Sketches, 2006; 2m
    - Pond in the Berry, 2004; 3m
    - Green Balloon, 2007; 1m
    - Carousel, 2006; 1m
    - Swinging Zora, 2007; 2m
    - Throwing the Net, 2006; 1m
    - Under the Water Lilies, 2005; 3m

4:00 pm - Ernie Gehr, 79m
    - Untitled, 9m
    - Cinematic Fertilizer 1, 5m
    - Cinematic Fertilizer 2, 8m
    - 10th Avenue, 57m

6:15 pm - Bits and Pieces (Make Up To Break Up), 80m
    - Antigenic Drift, Lewis Klahr, US, 2007; 7m
    - Hide, Matthius Müller & Christophe Giradet, US, 2007; 5m
    - The Counter Girl Trilogy, Courtney Hoskins, US, 2006; 6m
    - Volto Sorpresso al buio (Face Caught in the Dark) , Paolo Gioli, Italy, 1965; 6m
    - Beirut Outtakes, Peggy Ahwesh, US, 2007; 7m
    - For Them, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - For A Winter, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - Sunbeam Hunter, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - A Logic Sore, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - The Wedding Present, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - 40 Years, Jonathan Schwartz, US, 2007; 3m
    - The Film of A Thousand and One Nights and A Night (Volume 1) , Scott Puccio,
      US, 2007; 26m
    - Hanky Panky, Ken Jacobs, US, 2007; 1m
    - Eyewash, Robert Breer, US, 1959; 3m (35mm restoration)
    - Recreation, Robert Breer, US, 1956, 1m (35mm restoration)

8:15pm - Robert Beavers, 53m
    - Pitcher of Colored Light, US/Switz., 2007; 23m
    - Reel from The Eniaos (Bliss), Gregory Markopoulos, US, 2004; 30m

9:30 pm - Memories, 102m
    - Respite, Harun Farocki; 40m
    - The Rabbit Hunters, Pedro Costa; 23m
    - Correspondences, Eugène Green; 39m

Posted by on Aug 29, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Quick Notes


August 21, 2007

The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (The Blind Director), 1985

blind_director.gifCuriously opening near the end of the second act of Tosca as the heroine (Maria Slatinaru) fends off the advances of Scarpia (Günther Reich), the corrupt police commissioner, the unexpectedly abrupt, in medias res performance of the Puccini opera provides an incisive prelude to the elliptical structure of Alexander Kluge's "anonymous city" symphony, The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, an organic and fractured, yet humorous, intuitive, and poetic rumination on the integral - and correlative - nature of technology and (urban) identity, the intersection of film and new media in the creation of art, and the delusive quest to manipulate time. A rearticulated theory by Professor von Gerlach (Hans-Michael Rehberg) presented during a radio interview discussing the seemingly patternistic evolution of history - remapping the twentieth century as a cumulative progression of compartmentalized, four-year plans that, when stitched together, reveal a tabula rasa, generational life cycle of social change and political reinvention - serves as an introductory paradigm for Kluge's multi-faceted approach to the film. Observing that the year 1984 intriguingly represents exactly sixteen years since the height of the May 68 revolution, as well as sixteen years from the end of the twentieth century, the recursive, yet arbitrary reduction of human history as binary multiples of repeating intervals reflects the perpetuated myth of time as a conceptual, yet quantifiable point of convergence - a precise demarcation of an idealized, indefinable present that exists only in relation to another. It is this illusive idea of time as absolute and infinite that the narrator (Kluge) reinforces in an abstract composition that occurs midway through the film:

"Time is what you can measure with a clock. A child, a city, a love, death...these are clocks. One cannot measure that which we consider past, present, future. People, being at fate's mercy, interpret the period of time in which they decide as 'the present'. They want this period to be long. This is the source of illusion."

In a chapter entitled The Superfluous Woman, Kluge dispels the argument of time as an interminable entity through the case study of a well-respected doctor (Rosel Zech) who goes away on an extended vacation to Africa and returns to find that her superior has recruited an additional physician to the medical practice (enticed, in part, by the ambitious doctor's offer to finance the purchase of expensive diagnostic equipment for the clinic) and has demoted her to the basement office. In a subsequent chapter, The Hasty Ones, the idea of manipulating time through arbitrary parameters of (apparent) activity, preoccupation, and speed is subverted by the randomness of fate as a business executive's "saved time" proves meaningless against the inevitability of death - an egalitarian destiny that also recalls a researcher's (Alfred Edel) earlier conversation on the transitory nature of time as kairos, an intense, but fleeting consciousness of experience (a conversation that is wryly prefigured by the interstitial, keyhole shot of a fluffer at work in an anonymous, high-rise building). Contrasted with an earlier vignette of a young Polish woman who reluctantly entertains the romantic overtures of a German soldier during the war in the hopes that his infatuation will aid in delaying the confiscation of her parents' film collection, Kluge illustrates the paradox of time as both malleable and inalterable - a tradable commodity and an irreplaceable endowment - an interplay between the ephemerality of kairos and the eternity of chronos (whose essential Truth resides in its enduring quality).

In The Handover of the Child, the idea of time as a surrogate for desire is illustrated through a lonely single woman, Gertrud Meinecke (Jutta Hoffmann) who decides to become a foster parent to an orphaned child (primarily out of financial incentive), only to face losing her when the girl's wealthy relative is found years later. The theme of surrogacy similarly infuses the final chapter, The Blind Director, in which a veteran filmmaker (Armin Mueller-Stahl), struggles to complete his latest film despite his increasingly failing eyesight. Enlisting the aid of assistant directors to describe the shot footage, Kluge captures the underlying dichotomy between rote image and vision. In both episodes, time exists, not in the present, but in the acute awareness of its eroding passage - its finiteness. Moreover, Kluge's fragmented, idiosyncratically assembled sequences of narrative vignettes, time lapse sequences, found film, and rough hewn, artisanal compositions also reinforce an integral aspect of the discourse that culminates in The Blind Director (a theme that is also broached in a segment chronicling the captive life of a computer-addicted family): the illusion of technology as a surrogate for human imprint. Juxtaposed against images of steel recycling that allude to the obsolescence of traditional production (the materials having been reclaimed from an automobile salvage yard), Kluge's intriguingly dense exposition transcends the simple novelty of creating thematic variations on the dual nature of time, and instead becomes a stage for articulating its repercussions. Concluding with the extended shot of the blind director alone on the ledge of a fire escape as a montage of heavily matted, vintage film stills supplants the frame, Kluge presents an indelible metaphor for the enduring role of film in an age of immateriality, the relativity of images, and the isolation of creative vision.

Posted by on Aug 21, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Alexander Kluge


August 16, 2007

Intentions of Murder, 1964

intentions_murder.gifAnticipating Nagisa Oshima's Ceremony in its metaphoric representation of the dying of the samurai class through contaminated bloodlines, mystical connections, incestuous relationships, frailty, and impotence, Intentions of Murder bears the characteristic imprint of Shohei Imamura's recurring preoccupations: the sensuality and resilience of women, the manifestation of individualism in a codified society, the idiosyncrasies and primitive instinctuality that define human behavior. Opening to an establishing montage of a working class suburb that overlooks commuter railroad tracks, the double entendred image of a train rushing headlong into the foreground is reinforced in the subsequent image of a gaunt salaryman, Riichi Takahashi (Kô Nishimura), his elderly mother Tadae (Ranko Akagi) and his young son, Masaru, restlessly waiting at a train station - as a seemingly random bystander inconspicuously hovers nearby - for the arrival of his earthy, common law wife, Sadako (Masumi Harukawa) who is bringing a change of clothes for his business trip, only to discover that she has misunderstood his instructions and has only brought along a change of underwear. In hindsight, the introductory milieu proves to be a terse encapsulation of the strange dynamics at work in the Takahashi household - a purported "curse" (as alluded to by the servants in the Takahashis' ancestral home) that had been sown generations earlier by the family patriarch's abandonment of his mistress, Sadako's grandmother, following the birth (and appropriation) of their child who, in her profound despair, had taken her own life. Reluctant to register the lower classed Sadako, who once served as the family housemaid, as his legal wife, Riichi's parents had instead registered Masaru as their own child in an attempt to mask the boy's illegitimacy and ensure the succession of the Takahashi bloodline, leaving Sadako without a legal claim to her own son (but with all the domestic responsibilities for his upbringing). Returning home alone after Tadae takes custody of Masaru in Riichi's absence, Sadako is followed by the enigmatic bystander, a poor, washed up musician named Hiraoko (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi) whose nebulous intentions turn from robbing the simple-minded housewife to committing rape, seemingly driven by the mere sight of Sadako's bound, voluptuous form struggling to break free in the shadows. Consumed by thoughts of suicide as an honorable gesture to escape the moral stain of her violation, Sadako's morbid preoccupation soon gives way to a return to normalcy, as Masaru and Riichi return home, and Sadako begins to busy herself with repairing items that were broken during the struggle (and consequently, concealing the evidence of the committed crime). However, when Hiraoko unexpectedly returns declaring his undying love for Sadako, her desperation to maintain at all costs her unhappy marriage and menial status within the Takahashi clan propel her to concoct an ill conceived plan to permanently rid herself of her troublesome suitor.

Returning to animal imagery as a surrogate for human behavior that Imamura would incorporate in Pigs and Battleships and The Insect Woman, the recurring images of captive mice and silkworms in Intentions of Murder, nevertheless, prove to be more malleable. Ostensibly a representation of the robust Sadako's figurative social captivity as an undereducated, peasant woman in a male-dominated society (albeit one of sickly and financially insolvent men), the plight of Masaru's pet mice - the smaller one having apparently killed and consumed the larger one - may also be seen as a reflection of her overturned role in her relationships with the (Implicitly more powerful) people around her. Similarly, the re-appearance of a lone silkworm in the final sequence that recalls an earlier memory of a silkworm being crushed during an act of punishment illustrates both the realization of a stunted, childhood fixation, as well as Sadako's dramatic transformation in her return, full circle, to Riichi's ancestral home. In essence, even as Riichi and Hiraoko alternately use (violent) sexuality as a means of exerting control and domination over Sadako, it becomes an even more powerful weapon in the hands of the exploited heroine - a poetic role reversal that is incisively marked by chance events that would derail her own "intentions of murder", initially, in her fateful encounter with Hiraoko in a tunnel after their Tokyo-bound train is delayed by a snowstorm, and subsequently, in her indirect implication in a traffic accident that would bring an unexpected end to Riichi's infidelity. Framed against Sadako's continued efforts to correct the official family registry that would identify her as Masaru's biological mother, her struggle becomes a metaphor, not only to find a place within the margins of a patriarchal - and vestigially class-entrenched - society, but also for the validation of her own identity.

Posted by on Aug 16, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Shohei Imamura


August 15, 2007

New York Film Festival 2007 Lineup

The press release for the NYFF line-up has been released. I'm a little disappointed that Nicolas Klotz's La Question humaine didn't make the cut, but I'm thrilled to see the new Jia on the slate (I didn't know there was one), along with Guerin, Reygadas, Rohmer, Lee, Saura, Ford, Tarr...

Opening Night:
The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson, US, 2007; 91m, screening with Hotel Chevalier, Wes Anderson, US, 2007; 12m

Closing Night:
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, France, 2007; 95m

Centerpiece:
No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, US, 2007; 122m

Retrospective:
Blade Runner: The Definitive Cut, Ridley Scott, US, 1982/2007; 118m
Hamlet, Sven Gade & Heinz Schall, Germany, 1920-21; 110m (Piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin)
The Iron Horse, John Ford, US, 1924; 132m
Leave Her to Heaven, John M. Stahl, US, 1945; 110m
Underworld, Josef von Sternberg, US, 1927; 80m (Accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra)

Special Event:
Fados, Carlos Saura, Spain/Portugal, 2007; 92m
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965, Murray Lerner, US, 2007; 80m
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich, US, 2007; 238m

Sidebar:
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade Retrospective

Feature Films:

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Christian Mungiu, Romania, 2007; 113m
Actresses, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, France, 2007; 110m
Alexandra, Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 92m
The Axe in the Attic, Ed Pincus & Lucia Small, US, 2007; 110m
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Sidney Lumet, USA, 117m
Calle Santa Fe, Carmen Castillo, France, 2007; 163m
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, France/U.S., 2007; 112m
The Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007; 113m
A Girl Cut In Two, Claude Chabrol, France, 2007; 115m
Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara, Italy/US, 2007; 96m
I Just Didn’t Do It, Masayuki Suo, Japan, 2007; 143m
I’m Not There, Todd Haynes, US, 2007; 136m
In the City of Sylvia, José Luis Guerín, Spain/France, 2007; 90m
The Last Mistress, Catherine Breillat, France, 2007; 114m
The Man From London, Béla Tarr, Hungary/France/Germany, 2007; 132m
Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach, US, 2007; 93m
Married Life, Ira Sachs, USA, 2007; 90m
Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project, John Landis, US, 2007; 90m
The Orphanage, Juan Antonio Bayona, Spain, 100m
Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant, US, 2007; 85m
Redacted, Brian DePalma, US, 2007; 90m
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, Eric Rohmer, France, 2007; 109m
Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong, Korea, 2007; 142m
Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007; 142m
Useless, Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Kong, 2007; 80m

Posted by on Aug 15, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Quick Notes


August 8, 2007

Sink or Swim, 1990

sink_swim.gifComposed of twenty-six distinctive chapters, each thematic, one word title representing a letter of the alphabet in reverse order, Sink or Swim is, in some ways, an autobiographical corollary to Su Friedrich's The Ties That Bind, a series of allusive, poetic, and insightful third person anecdotes that deconstruct the complicated relationship between a girl - now a young woman - and her estranged, emotionally distant father. Appropriately opening with the moment of creation in a chapter entitled Zygote, as archival laboratory film footage illustrating the fertilization of an ovum traces embryonic development (a scientific approach to physiological and biological phenomena that evoke the films of Jean Painlevé and Barbara Hammer), the image of growth and cultivation is replaced in the succeeding chapter, Y-Chromosome, by the seemingly abstract composition of disembodied hands setting free a dense clump of milkweed spores into the wind. In hindsight, this odd act of metaphoric emancipation serves as a reflection of the filmmaker's father, Paul Friedrich's disconnection and absence from her life as well - a double-edged gesture that represents, not a custodian placing faith in a child's journey towards maturity, independence, and sexual awakening, but a willful dissociation from the "ties that bind" a parent to his child.

By chronicling tell-tale incidents from their strained relationship through recurring, often complementary patterns that provide the abstract fragments of a candid and intensely honest autoportrait, Friedrich introduces the idea of human behavior as inherently hereditarian - a self-perpetuating cycle of trauma and dysfunction that has not only been instilled since birth, but also passed on from generation to generation through the emotional baggage of a tenacious collective consciousness (a persistence of long memory that is alluded in the early shot of a grazing elephant). Perhaps the most emblematic of this transference is the discovery of the father's commemorative poem that he had written on the occasion of the birth of his first-born daughter, a celebration of a new life that he would weigh against the loss of his younger sister from a childhood drowning - in essence, offering his newborn child at a figurative altar of memory to atone for his guilt over his sister's accidental death. (Note the father's self-absorption between lamentation and culpability that is also reflected in a subsequent poem that paradoxically expresses his grief in watching his daughter's growing distance from him, even as he single-handedly bears the responsibility for sending her packing for a premature return trip home during a Mexican vacation.) A similar duality of celebration and mourning is also revealed in the girl's eventual victory in a game of chess against her father - a triumph that would prove to be bittersweet when he decides to stop playing against her. Still another is suggested in the long-awaited introduction of a television set into the household after her parents' acrimonious divorce - an object that he had refused to purchase during their marriage (and who would, instead, send the children to a neighbor's house to watch such spectacles as Don Ameche's Flying Circus Show) - the images of intact, nuclear families represented by The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best serving as an ironic surrogate for their own rended family. But far from merely reflecting a child's rebellion over her absent father, the oppositional elements in Sink or Swim also reflect the institutionalization of this dichotomy within the complexities of a contemporary family structure (one that, in Friedrich's case, entails a succession of three wives and the addition of half-siblings) - a perpetuated conflict posed by the coexistence of bifurcated, unrealistic ideals that is mirrored in her father's kinship studies at the time of the divorce, as well as his research on Aphrodite (the goddess of love) and Demeter (the goddess of grain and fertility). Juxtaposed against alternating images of women as both mother and whore (as depicted through assorted ecclesiastic art and Ukiyo-e prints of the pleasure quarters), Friedrich exposes the inherent irreconcilability of these ideals - a mythologization that is reinforced in the film's final (and only multi-titled) chapter, Athena, Atalanta, Aphrodite - a reflection, not of god-like invincibility, but a father's inflicted destiny.

Posted by on Aug 08, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Su Friedrich


August 4, 2007

Nordrand, 1999

nordrand.gifThe advent of the Balkan Wars following the collapse of the Soviet Union (and leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia) - and in particular, the engagement of NATO peacekeeping forces in Kosovo - forms the destabilized, uncertain backdrop for Barbara Albert's politically loaded Nordrand, a zeitgeist film on the changing face of Austrian society at the end of the twentieth century framed from the perspective of a pair of working class young women living on the outskirts of Vienna. Opening to the interweaving voices of children in prayer, among them, a girl named Tamara who wants to be a nurse when she grows up and Jasmin who wants to have a large family, the universality of their humble dreams is subverted by an early awkward encounter between Tamara, a shy, Serbian immigrant girl being humiliated, then summarily left out by the other children during play time, after passing a friendship note to Jasmin, the most popular girl in class. Their inability to come together as friends - an imposed distance that is implicitly reflected in Jasmin's seemingly privileged status as a cherubic, Germanic child - establishes the sense of alterity and exclusion that runs throughout the film, an image that is subsequently reflected in an ideologically divided family's argument over a loved one's involvement in the Kosovo War at a hospital where Tamara (Edita Malovcic), now a grown woman, works as a part-time nurse's aide. But even away from the sensationalism and scarred images of the local news, the corrosive effects of the war on Austrian society prove to be inescapable, as refugees and migrant workers from Eastern Europe converge on Vienna either in search of opportunity or as a gateway to other countries, and soldiers are called into service to reinforce border patrols and stem the influx of illegal immigrants fleeing the neighboring war torn region. Meanwhile, Jasmin's (Nina Proll) reputation for popularity has taken on a more insidious connotation, embarking on a series of reckless affairs (perhaps a promiscuity brought on by incest) with all too familiar endings of abuse and rejection. Rebuffed by her lovers after discovering that she is pregnant, Jasmin, still living at home, is left with few alternatives but to undergo an abortion, a decision that would unexpectedly reunite her with Tamara who, too, has arrived at the clinic to terminate a pregnancy against the wishes of her boyfriend, a border soldier on weekend leave named Roman (Michael Tanczos). Brought together by the unspoken trauma of their own hidden scars, the two women embark on a long overdue friendship that had eluded them in childhood.

Structured through intersecting episodes of chance encounters and parallel experiences (visually reinforced through recurring shots from a bustling train station and extended, interstitial musical seques), Nordrand provides the blueprint for Albert's subsequent (albeit, less cohesive) film, Free Radicals on coincidental interconnectedness. However, while the peripheral associations in Albert's latter film occasionally prove to be abstract, they serve as an integral representation of Austrian society's state of flux in Nordrand - an uncertainty that has been imposed both externally by the trauma of a virulent, neighboring war, and internally by the challenges of large scale assimilation. Juxtaposing images of a military (and implicitly nationalistic) parade with a targeted police identity check of a group of Eastern European workers waiting at a train station, the film poses the integral question on the essence of Austrian cultural identity at a time when an unprecedented influx of foreigners have raised the specter of Anschluss on a nation's moral character. Indeed, inasmuch as political pressure towards enacting tighter borders and stricter immigration policies reflected the public's growing anxiety with an interminable war, it is also a reflection of society's endemic xenophobia and propensity towards ethnic scapegoating - a bias that is revealed in Jasmin's flippant dismissal of Serbs during a radio news report on the war while hitching a ride with Roman and Tamara from the abortion clinic (in a seemingly dour episode that is hilariously turned on its ear when Roman changes the station and the trio begins to listen to Ace of Base's All That She Wants (Is Another Baby)). Far from portraying the seasonal "sameness" of human behavior, the film's elegance lies in Jasmin's subtle, yet profound transformation after Tamara (re)enters her life - a metamorphosis that illustrates the human capacity to retain one's identity even as it learns to accept (and even embrace) change. Concluding with a parallel montage that begins with an emotionally liberated Jasmin crossing a pedestrian overpass (in a shot that uncannily prefigures Hou Hsiao Hsien's bookend shots of the heroine, Vicky (Shu Qi) in Millennium Mambo), the images of people in transit becomes a metaphor, not of flight, but a redefined homecoming.

Posted by on Aug 04, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007


July 25, 2007

Night and Fog in Japan, 1960

nightfog_japan.gifNamed after Alain Resnais' essay film on the abandoned landscapes of postwar Auschwitz that bear silent witness to the tragedy of the Holocaust, Night and Fog in Japan, Nagisa Oshima's fictional deconstruction of the left movement in the aftermath of the ratification of the second U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960 is also a caustic and pointed cultural interrogation into personal and collective accountability that, as implied by Resnais' film, have been (consciously) obscured by the fog of guilt and memory. The marriage of two Zengakuren members sets the symbolic stage for Oshima's critical inquiry into the collective failure of the Japanese Left: former activist turned field reporter, Nozawa (Kenzo Kawarazaki), a member of the student movement during the collapsed opposition to the first Anpo treaty in 1950 who now covers the continued political struggle of a new generation of young radicals for the local newspaper (a gesture that he believes demonstrates his continued solidarity with the movement), and the younger Reiko (Miyuki Kuwano), a student protestor who had been injured during recent demonstrations opposing the treaty's extension. As in Oshima's subsequent film, The Ceremony, the empty performance of the traditional wedding ceremony becomes a reflection of dysfunctional, antiquated social rituals, cultural displacement, and impotence.

Implicit in Oshima's indictment is the entrenchment of American imperialism into contemporary Japanese culture - an inculcation that had been fostered during postwar occupation and continued to shape the country's process of political self-determination on its road towards international re-emergence - and with its exerted influence, the formation of a key ideological alliance, not only against socialism, but also towards enabling the U.S. government's policy of containment (particularly in Asia) during the early stages of the Cold War. Structured in a series of flashbacks as a pair of wedding crashers (and fellow Zengakuren members hiding from the police) confront the guests, some now prominent members of the Communist party, on their culpability over the nebulous circumstances surrounding the fates of two fellow activists - Nozawa's comrade, Takao (Sakonji Hiroshi), and Reiko's friend, Kitami (Ajioka Toru) - the film is also an examination into the factionalism, internal power struggles, and petty self-interests that sabotaged the left movement. Revisiting the botched imprisonment of a presumed spy from the group's student headquarters a decade earlier (an unproven allegation perpetuated by the group's authoritarian leader, Nakayama (Yoshizawa Takao) despite the membership's increasing, though unarticulated, skepticism) that lead to Takao's scapegoating, Oshima not only illustrates the personal (and implicitly selfish) issues that undermined the movement's effectiveness in promoting a collective agenda (most notably, in Nozawa and Nakayama's ongoing rivalry for the affections of fellow student activist Misako (Akiko Koyama)), but also exposes its underlying repressive, totalitarian culture that mirrored the heavy-handed government of Stalinist-era communism in the Soviet Union - a tendency towards paranoid suspicions and intolerance for dissent that contributed to its self-inflicted public disfavor and political marginalization. Similarly, the subsequent disappearance of Kitami from a hospital during a violent government crackdown on demonstrators protesting the 1960 Anpo treaty extension (a watershed incident for the radical left that also fatefully brought Nozawa and Reiko together) reveals the younger generation's increasing disenchantment with the inflexible, out-of-touch Zengakuren leadership that had resulted in the group's disorganization and irrelevance at a critical stage when the credibility (and sustainability) of the left movement in the shaping of the Japanese political landscape was at stake. By framing the group's moral dissolution within the context of embittered, unrequited love and consuming self-distractions, Oshima creates an incisive metaphor for the failure of the left movement as an ill-fated love affair - a displacement of unrealized desire and resigned acceptance of convenient, if compromised, ideals.

Posted by on Jul 25, 2007 | | Comments (3) | Filed under 2007, Nagisa Oshima


July 11, 2007

Tales of Little People, 1994-1999

The unreconciled ghosts of colonialism and its legacy of economic stagnation, currency devaluation, and underdevelopment among emerging contemporary African nations lies at the core of Djibril Diop Mambéty's whimsical, yet incisive (and sadly, unfinished) series of envisioned fables, Tales of Little People, that sought to illustrate - through accessible, culturally familiar folkloric imagery and traditional, tale-teller narrative - the endemic socioeconomic malaise that continues to plague the continent as it collectively struggles to emerge from its exploited history and remain viable in an age of effacing globalism. But far from the resigned lamentations of systematic exclusion and seemingly arbitrary, externally inflicted injustice at the hands of myopic, international economic superpowers, Mambéty sought to expose the underlying dysfunctional culture as a means of confronting - and inevitably breaking - the self-destructive behavior that enables (and continues to fuel) these entrenched mechanisms of corruption, exploitation, and crippling dependency. In the two completed tales, Le Franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun (1999), Mambéty introduces the trenchant idea that the power of the imagination to raise post-colonial African consciousness does not exist in fanciful, but ultimately empty, idle dreams or wistfully dwelling over a lost - and stolen - noble past (a theme that is also articulated in Jean-Marie Téno's films, as well as Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret), but in a certain wide-eyed innocence and naïve determination that recovery and advancement are still possible with dedicated effort. It is within this contrasting framework of marginalization and perseverance that the protagonists of Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun may be seen as both symptomatic representations and character foils towards this overarching theme of indigenous self-empowerment: Marigo, the perennially daydreaming, able-bodied, bumbling loafer and sidelined street musician of Le Franc and Sili, the determined, young, disabled newspaper seller of The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun.


Le Franc, 1994

franc.gifSet against the French government's economically catastrophic devaluation of the CFA franc exchange rate in 1994 (from 0.02 to 0.01 French francs), Le Franc chronicles an impoverished, ne'er-do-well musician, Marigo's (Dieye Ma Dieye) impossible path towards financial recovery and independence. Unable to go out into the city and earn a meager income as a street performer when his landlady (Aminata Fall) impounds his beloved congoma after failing to pay his back rent (and who then proceeds to taunt him by playing the instrument in front of his house), Marigo resorts to spending his idle time watching life go by from a city sidewalk until he spots a fallen bank note near the lottery ticket stand of a mystical, dwarf peddler named Kus (Demba Bâ). Following Kus' advice to play his envisioned lucky numbers on the national lottery (whose theme is pointedly titled Devaluation), Marigo fastens the ticket behind a poster of his Robin Hood-styled folk hero, Yaadikoone for good luck - an impulsive act that soon threatens to invalidate his ticket when he is unable to hand over the item for verification at the lottery office. Concluding with the double-entendred image of a lone, raving, ecstatic Marigo on an isolated rock formation hovering between uninhibited euphoria and seeming madness, the film is as a wry and sardonic fairytale that implicitly reveals the entrenched cycle of self-defeating poverty, where the popular gravitation towards quick fix, delusive panaceas of instant wealth and easy money reflects both the inertia of a resigned acceptance to second-class status, and an endemic culture of victimization and sense of helplessness, where the very notion of economic (and moral) recovery rests in illusive - and implicitly external - ideals of reparation, charity, and arbitrary dispensation of divine justice (a wishful thinking that is embodied by Marigo's idolization of thief/benefactor, Yaadikoone).


The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun, 1999

vendeuse.gifInasmuch as Le Franc serves as a parable for a pervasive moral climate of disempowerment, Mambéty's subsequent installment for Tales of Little People, The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun is its poignant and sublime antithesis. The film centers on a young, illiterate, crippled girl named Sili (Lissa Balera) from a shantytown on the outskirts of Dakar who decides one day to abandon her blind grandmother's vocation of begging in the street and take up the physically demanding job of selling newspapers - a task usually undertaken by boys who can aggressively peddle them at busy intersections throughout the city (an early image of a dead kitten lying on the side of a road alludes to the harshness of life for these impoverished street children). Given an initial allotment of thirteen copies of the less popular, government newspaper, Le Soleil (a symbolic quantity and representation that alludes to the continent's struggle to emerge from a position of disadvantaged history), Sili's first day on the job proves to be auspicious when a well-to-do businessman, encouraged by her initiative and self-reliance, offers to buy out all her remaining copies, leaving her free to share her unexpected good fortune with her grandmother and a few neighboring friends for the afternoon, and even pleading for the case of a wrongfully accused woman who has been imprisoned without charges at a local police station. In time, Sili forges a thriving business with her refreshingly low-key sales approach, cultivating a growing clientele of customers who go out of their way to buy her newspaper. But as the competition becomes increasingly desperate and cutthroat, Sili's popularity soon places her in the crosshairs of rival peddlers who see her presence as a turf invasion and resolve to thwart her profitable enterprise by any means necessary. In juxtaposing Sili's well-earned success against her rivals' increasingly underhanded - and implicitly thuggish - territoriality, Mambéty presents an incisive metaphor for the cultural institution of lawlessness and corruption, enabling a tragic legacy of factionalism, civil wars, and government coups that have contributed to a climate of chronic destabilization. However, as the government's announcement of its decision to dissociate its currency from the French franc in Le Soleil suggests, the travails of post-colonial Africa are not solely rooted in cultural dysfunction, but are also an insidious (and perhaps inevitable) consequence of imperialism. It is through this seemingly anecdotal convergence with the government's symbolic declaration of independence that Sili's quest for financial independence becomes an integral metaphor for the plight of contemporary African nations in their own struggle for economic survival. Concluding with the parting image of a mistreated, but unbowed Sili emerging into the light, her defiant gesture not only represents an ennobled act of perseverance, but also offers a way forward from the chaos, despair, and sense of helplessness of inflicted marginalization.

Posted by on Jul 11, 2007 | | Comments (4) | Filed under 2007, Djibril Diop Mambéty


July 6, 2007

Strongman Ferdinand, 1976

strongman_ferdinand.gifSomething of a wry spiritual ancestor to Harun Farocki's 1990 found film montage, How to Live in the German Federal Republic on the pervasiveness of efficiency training and preparedness exercises in German society and their intrinsic reflection of a people's stunted growth, repressed conformity, and evasion of human experience in a climate of increasing economic competition and ever-refining (and consequently, more dehumanized) industrial production, Alexander Kluge's Strongman Ferdinand is a bracingly prescient, humorous, astute, and understated satire on the obsessive culture of rote rehearsals, role-playing, and fear-mongering as delusive reinforcement towards an (otherwise) insupportable effectiveness and self-justification under an ambiguous, and largely untenable, responsibility of upholding security. An early argument between the stocky, middle-aged detective (and quintessential Napoleonic figure) Ferdinand Rieche (Heinz Schubert) and a superior officer following the botched police pursuit of a burglary suspect reveals Rieche's underlying ideology in his obsessively inhabited role as security expert, insisting that the escaped suspect should have been apprehended prior to breaking into the house when the crime had not yet been committed - a pre-emptive that would have ensured, not only a successful arrest, but also the safety of the pursuing officers who, with their lax training and marginal shooting accuracy, were destined to miss their fleeing target. Falling out of favor with his superior officers for his constant insubordination, Rieche is relegated to a dead end desk job until an opportunity for a position as security expert opens up following the sacking of a security chief for an industrial corporation auspiciously called Deutsche Neuropa (an allusion to the emergence of a new Europe under Nazi-era Germany) in the aftermath of a worsening scandal involving his controversial deployment of snipers to subdue protestors, and his subsequent cavalier statements to the press on his instituted policies that has brought even more unwanted attention to the image-conscious multinational company. Having assumed the responsibility of chief security officer under a six month conditional employment, Rieche is eager to make a strong impression over his irreplaceable (and more importantly, immeasurable) value to his new employers - in particular, a skeptical executive, Wilutzki (Gert Günther Hoffmann) who was not consulted during the board's decision to recruit him - by seeking to dramatically (or at least palpably) transform the security operations of the industrial complex while restoring the legality of their enforcement and mitigating any potential scandal that could fall into the hands of the press (in one comical encounter, Rieche rejects an informant's complaint of sexual indiscretion between amorous co-workers by countering that his corroborating proof was verbal and not visual). Nevertheless, despite implementing a series of security and detection measures (including a lockdown of offline areas during non-working hours that traps a bemused cleaning lady in the utility room), reinforcing classroom theory (a return to the discipline of intelligence gathering that Rieche believes will prove useful during indeterminate interrogations), and conducting elaborate field maneuvers that begin to resemble battlefield combat and guerilla warfare, the industrial complex soon falls prey to a targeted, coordinated night-time bombing in an apparent - and ultimately unsolved - act of sabotage. Emboldened by his new corporate mandate to secure the plant and handle the media in such a way that the public does not begin to question the integrity of their products, Rieche embarks on an increasingly maniacal quest to ensure the security of the industrial complex by attempting to inhabit the mindset of the agitators whom he believes to be behind the attack (a predisposition towards blaming the left movement that is suggested in his earlier purchase of Marxist literature at a bookstore for research purposes), inevitably resorting to his own perpetrated acts of theft, intimidation, and sabotage under the expedient justification of enforcing security. At the heart of Kluge's penetrating and profoundly relevant exposition is Rieche's assumed - and largely inflated - role as the guardian (or more appropriately, exterminating angel) of Security, a self-anointed posture that conceals his incompetence, systematic abuse of power, and arrogant excesses under an inherently corrupt policy of strong-armed tactics, unchecked authority, and willful disregard of legal consequences. Framing Rieche's paradoxical, self-perpetuating act of terrorism as a sensationalist, cautionary statement on the perils of terrorism itself, Kluge presents a potent metaphor for the vicious circle of violence and exploitation, where the idealistic goal of a noble end no longer justifies the draconian means, but metastasizes into a grotesque inhumanity and corrupted, if amnesic consciousness.

Posted by on Jul 06, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Alexander Kluge


July 2, 2007

Rose Lowder: Short Films (1982-1995)

Les Tournesols, 1982

tournesols.gifIn some ways, Rose Lowder's Les Tournesols, a kinetic, color-saturated, Vincent Van Gogh-esque structural film could just as easily have fit Jean-Luc Godard's description of "blind, trembling pans" as interior representations of the artist's psychological state (as Godard once described Alain Resnais' Van Gogh). Composed of frame by frame stationary shots of a lush field of sunflowers in full bloom near Bédarrides, Vaucluse where the focus of each successive image varies according to prescribed subject patterns - the fluttering of petals, the (sideways) bending of the wind, the cross-pollination of bees, the casting shadows by passing clouds - the apparent movement in the film results from the individual frame changes in the depth of field. Rather than simply capturing the diurnal, two-dimensional, to and fro motion of sunflowers swaying in the breeze, the focal modulation results in a momentary (single frame) displacement perpendicular to the plane of the film frame, causing the resulting image to appear to pulse. Expounding on the ideas presented in her first film, Roulement, Rouerie, Aubage, Lowder's trompe l'oeil "still life" composition is similarly rooted in the mechanism of the mind-eye's registration of images, where the placement of the frames of an image within the continuity of a film strip itself alters its apparent behavior. Creating an increasingly animated portrait of the verdant sunflower field as the natural movement of the sunflowers seemingly triggers a corresponding, proportional change in the camera's alternating focal length, the resulting image becomes a dynamic reflection of the subject itself in its rustic beauty and irresistible vibrancy.


Quiproquo, 1992

quiproquo.gifSet against the sound of an aggressive drumbeat, Quiproquo opens to the successive images of an errant, bobbing, plastic bottle floating towards the foreground, a man seemingly walking on water towards the left of the frame, and a duck floating backwards to the right of the frame against the powerful current of a body of water. The opening montage serves as a distilled metaphor for the divergence of nature, humanity, and technology in contemporary society. Incorporating structural techniques from her earlier films - most notably, in the repeated, subtly modulated landscape shot of a nuclear power plant that is bisected by a train (that recalls the shifting aesthetic imagery of Roulement, Rouerie, Aubage) and a cherry blossom-laden tree that, in its shimmering whiteness, appears incandescent (a visual created by the asequential, odd-even frames that Lowder studies in Impromptu) - Quiproquo is an abstract and freeform, yet cohesive rumination on the fragile intersection of industrialization and environment, where the coexistence of development and natural preservation create an essentially bifurcated landscape (note Lowder's bisection of the horizon that anticipates James Benning's Thirteen Lakes). Using stationary images that are subsequently animated through alternating shot frames, the manic collage of disparate ecological images and ever-shifting soundscapes becomes an integral representation of our own irreconcilable relationship with the environment.


Bouquets 1-10, 1994-1995

bouquets.gifBouquets 1-10 is Lowder's first collection in an ongoing series of one minute episodes, each composed of footage shot around a general geographic location that has been alternately woven, frame by frame, into a single film reel and connected through the interstitial still life image of a flower that cues the beginning of each integrated film Bouquet. In Bouquet 1, a day of leisure at Mount Ventoux, Vaucluse juxtaposes the vibrant image of indigenous flowers with the equally colorful bins of candy. In Bouquet 2 a seemingly uninterrupted study of flowers near the village of Brantes is eventually disrupted by the passing of cyclists in the last few moments of the film. Perhaps the most memorable is Bouquet 3, set in the village of Roquevaire, Var on the banks of the Huveaune River featuring a nondescript, old-fashioned pedestrian bridge that, interwoven with images of colorful wildflowers, optically transforms into impressionistic, Claude Monet-like compositions. In Bouquet 4 wildflowers and weather worn local handicrafts represent the slowly disappearing, rustic panorama of Beauduc, Camargue, Bouches-du-Rhône. Bouquet 5 illustrates the inevitable intersection between environment and technology as commuters figuratively share the same space as a field of poppies near the Marseille-Paris railway line. Work and leisure intersect in Bouquet 6 at a fishing harbor in Vesse, Bouches-du-Rhône, as boats are summarily abandoned in favor of a recreational swim in the idyllic blue waters. The image of water carries though to the therapeutic springs of Fosse Dionne in the medieval town of Tonnerre in Bouquet 7, where the wildflowers emerge from the interstices and abandoned ruins. In Bouquet 8 the absence of flowers on the beach at Beauduc, Bouches-du-Rhône is replaced by brightly colored sailboards that dart in and out of the horizon. The uneasy intersection between humanity and environment resurfaces in Bouquet 9 on the open fields near Signes, Var as assorted, discarded junk litter a field of buttercups. In Bouquet 10, the swarm of pollinating insects near the conclusion of the episode serves as a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the influx of vacationing tourists on Lake Serre-Ponçon, Hautes-Alpes near a pastoral town on the mountain ranges of St. Apollinaire.

Posted by on Jul 02, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Rose Lowder


June 27, 2007

Pedro Costa at the Smithsonian (Freer Gallery) in D.C.

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the Portuguese Cinema program at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery concludes this weekend with A Weekend with Pedro Costa, which includes the screening of O Sangue and Colossal Youth, both followed by discussions with Costa and Cinema Scope editor, Mark Peranson. Admission is free.

Posted by on Jun 27, 2007 | | Comments (2) | Filed under 2007, Quick Notes


June 25, 2007

The Ties That Bind, 1985

ties_bind.gifIn an interview with Scott MacDonald for A Critical Cinema 2, Su Friedrich comments that the inspiration for her first feature film arose from the idea of her mother's seeming uprootedness despite having settled in the United States since after the war. This sentiment of an elusive home suffuses her mother, Lore Bucher Friedrich's candid, heartfelt, and thoughtful account on her early life in 1930s Germany as well - a traumatic experience that, in its fateful intersection with the collective shame of a terrible national history, could only be relegated to the silence of personal memory - as a young woman orphaned in part by the cumulative toll of persecution on her defiantly anti-Nazi family, as a civilian driven out of her late parents' house by insensitive American soldiers during the occupation, as a postwar immigrant starting over a new life in the United States, and as a wife and mother whose husband left the family after fifteen years of marriage:

"Before I made The Ties That Bind I had such bad feelings of being German; and my father is half-German too. I don't think I really trusted the material I had. When I was working on the film, I told myself to stop worrying, to stop thinking I shouldn't be doing it, to stop disbelieving her, to trust her. I figured if the film was a failure in the long run I wouldn't show it. At some point I just stopped carrying on about it. It was strange to suddenly be thinking of my mother in this respectful way, to really be admiring her for what she did, for surviving. I had never thought of her."

Introducing her mother through an idiosyncratic montage of arms, elbows, hands, and feet, the fragmented images serve as an oblique reflection of Friedrich's own process of re-framing her mother's life within the context of personal testimony rather than a representative collective history. As the youngest daughter of a German Catholic family in the town of Ulm whose family patriarch, from the onset, had distrusted the lofty promises of Adolf Hitler and refused to join the wave of popular support despite social (and financial) pressure, Lore recounts her ostracism from school as being only one of the three girls who was not a member of the BDM (League of German Girls branch of the Hitler Youth movement), her family's unexpected disinheritance from their father's will at the hands of a suspicious executor that prevented her from pursuing her university studies, her forced draft into a Dornstadt air facility at the age of 19 at a time when her mother was dying from incurable cancer (an involuntary service that she suspects was instigated by a former piano teacher's denunciation of her), her increasing awareness of resistance groups, such as the White Rose Group formed by siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl who were also from Ulm, her traumatic memory of the bombing of Stuttgart that killed 3/4 of the local population and left her shell-shocked and wandering aimlessly through the streets, her fateful encounter with American soldier Paul Friedrich who was working on the de-nazification program, and finally, her emigration and less than fairytale marriage that would end in divorce .

Eschewing the interview format by replacing oral questions and observations with scratch film, the prominence of her mother's lone voice ironically reflects Friedrich's own process of personalization, introducing a physical self-imprint - the figurative ties that bind - that connects her mother's life experience with the formation of her own identity. This imprinting of collective consciousness is suggested in an early intertitle commenting on her mother's odd aversion to fireworks that is subsequently reinforced, not only in Lore's recollection of the bombing of Stuttgart, but also the continuous bombardment that would mark the last day of the war. Juxtaposed against images of the filmmaker's own acts of protest and resistance against the military and nuclear proliferation, and in particular, the implementation of Ronald Reagan's capstone Star Wars program, Friedrich subverts the notion of a silenced history, and instead presents a multifaceted collage of a remarkable, humble life lived within the eternal recursions of an all too human history, where a return to the simple pleasures of swimming in the sea and playing the piano serve, not only as implicit acts of defiance, but also as a re-assertion of suppressed identity.

Posted by on Jun 25, 2007 | | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Su Friedrich


June 13, 2007

Elsewhere, 2001

elsewhere.gifIn 2000, the final year of the twentieth century, Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his crew set out with a digital video camera to film twelve, self-contained ethnographic episodes, each encapsulating a month-long document of the lives of people who perform their quotidian rituals in a figurative "elsewhere" - distant cultures and remote geographies seemingly left untouched - or perhaps, more appropriately, left behind - by a ubiquitous, untenable West, unaffected by the media-cultivated sensationalism (and crass commercialism) surrounding the advent of the new millennium. Opening to Ekeschi, Ayr at the heart of the Sahara desert in Niger in January, the image of the parched, sun bathed landscape on what is traditionally winter season in the West incisively underscores this sense of alterity and exoticism that the film subsequently subverts in its quiet observation, absence of mediating narration, stationary frame, long take sequences, and first person direct address. Chronicling life among the nomadic Tuareg as a woman and her child retrieve water from a deeply dug well (with the aid of a donkey that must travel a span of nearly 300 meters before the pail of water surfaces from the opposite end of the rope), men herd their camels through the barren landscape, and a tribesman comments on the lure of the cities for the younger generation and his concerns over the ability of the land to continue to support their ancestral way of life under a climate of overpopulation and land development. But perhaps the most insightful portrait of the Tuareg is revealed in the mundane gesture of a traditional, extended handshake that contradicts the notion of a casual greeting implied by its Western counterpart, emphasizing the act of the tactile, interactive human contact that reinforces a sense of communal intimacy and solidarity.

The repercussions of overpopulation and uncontrolled growth subsequently resurfaces in the portrait of the Moso tribe, a matriarchal, ethnic minority community of farmers and ranchers living in the Yunnan province in China, as an extended family tends to their farm. Addressing a recurring comment by the Han Chinese (the majority tribe) towards the Moso tribe's resistance to marrying as a means of leaving the ancestral home and establishing a new household (and familial independence), a woman argues that the family's (and by extension, the tribe's) longevity is enabled by their clan's collective work ethic, a mutual consideration that regards the land as an ancestral stewardship to be passed on to future generations, and not as personal property to be divided (and subsequently, further subdivided) among heirs and future generations as inheritance (a process that inevitably leads to the fragmentation of the land into unusable plots for farming). The idiosyncrasies of tribal notions of inheritance and (dis)possession also unexpectedly surfaces during a discussion of polygamy by Himba tribespeople in Kaokoland, Namibia as the co-wives of a village elder (and regional administrative judge) recount their own stories of courtship and inclusion into the family (even as they express disapproval over the idea of their husband marrying a third co-wife), and the elder explains th