Romances de terre et d'eau, 2002
A 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 acquarello on Dec 10, 2007 | Permalink | Filed under 2007
On 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.
Named 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 
In 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 
In 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 
The 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. 
Something of a cross between the organic essentiality of Johan van der Keuken's ethnographic documentaries (most notably, in 
An 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.
Curiously 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:
Anticipating Nagisa Oshima's 
Composed 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 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.
Named 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, 
Set 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).
Inasmuch 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.
Something 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.
In 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.
Set 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 
Bouquets 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.
In 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:
In 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. 
In his early short essay film, Brutality in Stone, Alexander Kluge channels the contemplative spirit of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and Statues Also Die (co-authored by Chris Marker) to convey the idea of architectural memories, the traces of memory that subconsciously remain within the de-contextualized images of derelict structures and abandoned ruins, in this case, the decimated Nazi Party Rally Grounds in (then) present day Nuremberg. For Kluge, this evidence of a haunted, inerasable palimpsest of tragic, forgotten history is an unspoken reality that continues to shape Germany's unreconciled, postwar collective consciousness - a nation eager to put its turbulent and ignominious past behind and re-emerge internationally as an enlightened and formidable economic world power (enabled by an economic miracle that would lead to the implementation of a liberal guest worker program during the 1960-70s). It is within the resurfacing of these abandoned, yet apparent traces of a scarred history - this persistence of suppressed memory - that Kluge also frames his first feature film, Yesterday Girl, an acerbic, deliriously fractured, incisive, and darkly comic satire on a young German woman (and archetypal embodiment of the postwar generation), Anita G.'s (Alexandra Kluge) search for happiness, liberation, and independence in the illusive wake of a transformative national recovery (a parallel history of postwar reformation not unlike Japan's recovery). Indeed, the film's tersely written preface, "What separates us from yesterday is not a rift but a change in position" reinforces this sense of subconscious, recursive inevitability, as the heroine, the titular Anita G, is introduced through incisive, cross cut images: initially reading a piece of paper in subtly varying intonation, then subsequently, from a high angle-shot title sequence as she repeatedly assesses her vantage point before changing seats at a hotel bar lounge. From the juxtaposition of these fractured opening images, Kluge establishes the idea of postwar collective memory as an empty shell game that has been essentially formed from the simple, but implicitly deliberated modulation, displacement, and reconstitution of latent, prevailing cultural mores.
Converging towards Kobo Abe's experimental fiction in its fragmented examination of the strange phenomenon of johatsu - the unexplained (and presumably self-initiated) disappearances of otherwise seemingly responsible and professional salarymen in metropolitan Tokyo - as a broader social symptom of the anonymization and erasure of identity inherent in urbanization and rigid cultural conformity (most notably, in the novels Man Without a Map and The Face of Another that were later adapted to film by 
A connecting thread that invariably weaves throughout documentary filmmaker 
There is an understatedly crystalline moment in Le Lit de la vierge (The Virgin's Bed) when the scarlet woman, Marie Magdalène (Zouzou), having encountered the fragile and aimless Jesus (Pierre Clémenti) for the first time, cryptically explains that the men of the village pay for her company through the archaic currency of stones - and along the way, has amassed a collection that seemingly serves no other purpose than to have the potential having things to throw. The allusion to the casting of stones proves particularly incisive, not only within the loose, Biblical allegory of Philippe Garrel's reconfigured tale of a dislocated, modern-day prophet who crosses paths with (and shows compassion towards) an adulterous woman, but also within the contemporaneity of the widespread social unrest that had defined the political and moral climate of May 68 - a turbulent, yet profoundly transformative era when emboldened, young radicals like Garrel who saw film as an integral instrument of protest were galvanized into direct social action, hurling rocks (as well as more incendiary objects) at riot police during the infamous Night of the Barricades (a personal watershed that Garrel would also recreate in 
In its idiosyncratically alchemic fusion of bituminous humor, fractured narrative logic, bracing social interrogation, and sublimated depictions of perverted sexuality, The Ceremony is a provocative and excoriating satire on the amorphous nature of modern Japanese identity that could only have been forged in the wake of Nagisa Oshima's increasing disillusionment with the impotence of the left movement: a cultural inertia enabled by the fateful personal and historical intersection of the once radicalized postwar generation's inevitable maturation, indirection, and complacency - if not collective amnesia - over the nation's dramatic transformation, public rehabilitation, and international re-emergence as an economic (and consequently, political) world power. This sentiment of frustrated destiny and ambivalent sense of place in a rapidly altering, yet culturally entrenched social landscape is embodied in the somber, world-weary gaze of Masuo (Kenzo Kawarazaki), a Manchurian postwar repatriate (whose translated name, "Man from Manchuria", is a perpetual reminder of his alterity) and sole remaining legitimate heir to the powerful and highly influential Sakurada clan - a burden of responsibility that is reinforced in the family patriarch, Kazuomi's (Kei Sato) seemingly paradoxical advice to a young Masuo to lead two lives upon learning of his brother's death during the family's flight from the Russians in Manchuria. Unfolding as a series of flashbacks that trace the evolution of the family's dysfunctional relationships through the empty rituals of formal ceremonies - uncoincidentally, as Masuo and his beloved (if unrequited) "relative", Ritsuko (Atsuko Kaku) embark on another familial obligation that has been complicated by the arrival of a cryptic telegram from a mutual cousin and Masuo's romantic rival, Terumichi (Atsuo Nakamura) - the film is also a sobering allegory for the intrinsic corruption, social conformity, and incestuous politics that continue to exist beneath the country's seemingly profound transformation and inexhaustible economic miracle. 
Part elegy on the dying of a rural village, part exposition on mortality and obsolescence, and part exaltation of quotidian grace, Mercedes Álvarez's El cielo gira (The Turning Sky) is a serene, contemplative, and indelible rumination on the permanence of landscape, the transitory nature of existence, the imprint of history, and the eternal cycle of natural transformation. An introductory sequence juxtaposing the depopulation of Álvarez's ancestral village in the bucolic, agrarian community of Aldealseñor in the province of Soria with metaphoric images of local artist, Pello Azketo at work on his latest painting in his studio, sets the crepuscular tone for the film, as Azketo, visibly suffering from the effects of a degenerative eye condition, stands within a few inches of the canvas in order to study the texture of his painted, turning sky - an intimate, observant gaze of a recreated memory that is, all too palpably, receding and ephemeral. This theme of captured imprint and transfiguration is reinforced in the establishing sequence of an elderly villager following the curious trail of thee-toed fossilized footprints on a series of rocks that lead to a sedimentary clearing once used as a playing field in her youth - the lateral outline of a small dinosaur frame creating a figurative prehistoric trail towards its inexorable death. A subsequent conversation between cemetery caretakers evolving from their experiences with unexpectedly unearthing ancestral bones while preparing a plot for burial, to suggesting a pragmatic idea to dig larger and deeper graves in order to adequately plan for the inevitable deaths of the aging villagers, evokes the preceding palimpsestic image of the fossil turned playground, and intrinsically connects the two seemingly disparate sequences into a unifying metaphor for silent extinction. 
Composed of three self-encapsulated, cross-cultural, slice-of-life, quotidian portraits that are intrinsically connected by the pervasive sentiment of marginalization - economic, political, ethnic, racial - Javier Corcuera's The Back of the World is an understatedly observed, indelible, and provocative examination of the inextricable social cycle of poverty, exploitation, disenfranchisement, and disposability. The first chapter, entitled The Child, opens to a bookending sequence of a young boy named Guinder quietly rising - even before the first light of dawn - from a bed that he shares with several siblings in his parents' cramped, ramshackle home to gather his adult-sized tools and set out along with several of his similar-aged friends, not for school, but for the local quarry in the impoverished rural village of Carabayllo on the mountainous outskirts overlooking Lima: an early morning ritual that, as Guinder subsequently explains, affords him additional time to work on the rocks and perhaps earn additional money for his family. It is a life that his parents do not wish for any of their children, but one that, nevertheless, has become an inescapable reality in a village struggling with chronic unemployment and limited opportunity. Yet beyond the inhumanity and desensitization of a childhood spent more on breaking rocks at the quarry than studying in an elementary school, Corcuera's compassionate gaze captures graceful moments of a paradise not yet completely lost: a makeshift soccer game where the children momentarily act out the dreams of becoming professional athletes, a band of children working in the city as vendors, car washers, and market stall assistants who have found solidarity from the dangerous streets by organization into a union for protection, a group of village women who pool their meager resources to provide economically prepared meals for all the quarry workers at a community kitchen, a traveling circus that allows the children to indulge in all its silliness and over-the-top sight gags and briefly forget the austerity of their environment.
Ritwik Ghatak's films are deeply haunted by the specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947, and this sense of dislocation and self-inflicted human tragedy created by artificially imposed social division casts a pervasive sentiment of despair, instability, and perpetual exile through all the rended families and uprooted ancestral communities of Subarnarekha. Opening to the chaotic image of a pair of young, displaced teachers, Haraprasad (Bijon Bhattacharya) and Ishwar (Abhi Bhattacharya) inaugurating a makeshift village school at a refugee colony that has been established on the grounds of landowner's estate, while a low caste woman, seeking alms nearby, is forcibly separated from her son, Abhiram (Sriman Tarun) when she is rounded up into a truck and summarily ethnically cleansed from the colony by the landowner's hired thugs under the guise of religious orthodoxy enforcing caste segregation, the turbulent - and ultimately irrevocable - separation between mother and child serves as a potent metaphor for the trauma of the Partition itself, as Bengal is torn apart by religious and social sectarianism in the aftermath of the country's independence from the British. Ghatak illustrates the integrality of history to the interconnected destinies of Ishwar's communal family, initially, through the collapsed hope for reunification embodied in the idealistic Haraprasad's coincidental lament upon reading the news of Mahatma Gandhi's death - "Hey Ram!" (Oh, God!) - the exclamation commonly believed to be Gandhi's own last words upon his assassination, and subsequently, in Ishwar's conversation with his college friend, Rambilas (Pitambar), a wealthy businessman who inherited a foundry from his late father, as Ishwar comments on his dramatic change in fortunes from privileged student to orphan and caretaker of his younger sister Sita (Indrani Chakrabarty) after only six intervening years by reinforcing the contextual timeframe as 1942 through 1948, a profoundly critical period (with particularly great consequences for Bengal) that marked the birth of the 'Quit India' movement (1942), the Bengal Famine (1943) directly caused by the escalation of the Pacific War (a man-made catastrophe that is poignantly realized in Satyajit Ray's 
Evoking the films of Carlos Saura in its allegorical portraits of culturally entrenched social and psychological landscapes (most notably, in The Hunt) coupled with Luis Buñuel's wry excoriation of the bourgeoisie, Mario Camus' The Holy Innocents presents a caustic and potent indictment of the inhumanity (and corruption) of privilege, class stratification, and marginalization. Adapted from the novel by Spanish author Miguel Delibes, the film traces the interweaving personal stories of a peasant family working in the rural province of Extremadura at the feudal estate overseen by Doña Pura (Ágata Lys) during the early 1960s, as Franco solidified his stronghold (or rather, stranglehold) over the country with the support of powerful administrators like Doña Pura who represented the incestuous relationship between the upper class and the Catholic church. The film opens to image of a soldier, Quirce (Juan Sachez), recently discharged from the military, writing a letter to his sister at an empty café in what would prove to be a procrastinated homecoming. A series of extended flashbacks filmed from the perspective of several family members provides the framework for the young man's reluctant journey home as Quirce, then a teenager, and his family - headed by his father Paco (Alfredo Landa), a dutiful gamekeeper, and his mother, Régula (Terele Pávez) - are uprooted from their home at the instigation of Doña Pura's heir, Don Pedro (Agustín González), who has decided to relocate them in order to tend to his remote country estate. It is a move that the couple eagerly embraces in the belief that the geographic change will afford their older children, Nieves (Belén Ballesteros) and Quirce better opportunities for a proper education (and consequently, escape the cycle of poverty) beyond the self-instruction grammar drill kits that the government has disseminated to every peasant household in the country in order to promote (superficial) widespread literacy - a hope that is soon dissipated when, upon their arrival, Don Pedro appoints Nieves to be his wife's housemaid, and the family learns that the seeming unexpected visit by Régula's aging, simple-minded brother Azarías (Francisco Rabal) has become a more permanent arrangement, having been unceremoniously let go by his employer after spending a lifetime under his service for vague grievances regarding his boorish, unsanitary manners and impetuous behavior following the illness of his trained, homing pet owl, Kite. Left with few responsibilities except to occasionally watch over the couple's severely disabled young daughter (Susana Sánchez) (an affliction that perhaps also alludes to the family's insubstantive nutrition and inadequate access to health services caused by their poverty), Azarías seems content with living out his remaining years as an eccentric, if innocuous nuisance around the estate grounds and training Quirce's present, a new pet bird to replace his beloved Kite, to home. But as the family settles into a familiar routine of Don Pedro's perennially unfolding domestic dramas and Señorito Iván's (Agustín González) capricious (and often callous) demands to maintain his competitiveness during game hunting season, the couple's hopes for a better life for their own children begins to dissipate in the reality of their demoralizing, subhuman existence. This sense of pervasive dehumanization is perhaps best illustrated in Señorito Iván's seemingly genial, yet intrinsically contemptuous and exploitive interactions with the all too obliging Paco that would ultimately have profound repercussions for the entire family - initially, in his orders to track the scent of an errant, shot bird (an acquired skill that he backhandedly praises as being superior to that of a hunting dog), and subsequently, in extolling the government's literacy campaign, subverting his empty proclamations of the country's unprecedented social equality achieved under fascism by parading the servants as common spectacles before his dinner guests and instructing them to write out their names in order to prove their literacy. Inevitably, what emerges from Camus' understated, yet incisive gaze is a profoundly sobering portrait of a silent (and silenced), resigned servitude and institutionalized, moral enslavement enabled by insular - and essentially arbitrary - privilege and systematic exclusion.
Darezhan Omirbaev's penchant for spare, elliptical narrative, muted figures, and disembodied framing (most notably, of hands and feet) have often been (favorably) compared to the rigorous aesthetic of Robert Bresson. However, in imposing such a somber - and inescapably cerebral - analogy, there is also a propensity to overlook the wry, self-effacing humor and irony of situation that pervade his films: a lyricism that equally captures the human comedy in all its contradictions and nobility from the margins of Soviet society. This sense of the quotidian as a continuum of human experience, elegantly rendered in Omirbaev's recent film, 
In an early episode in Robert Guédiguian's The Last Mitterrand (Le Promeneur du champ de Mars), the ailing president (Michel Bouquet) visits the royal catacombs of Saint Denis Basilica with his personally selected ghostwriter for his memoirs, a young writer named Antoine Moreau (Jalil Lespert), and regards the extraordinary realism of a sculpture, glistening from condensation, depicting the anguish of Catherine de Medici's convulsed body at the moment of death - a testament, he explains, to the unflinching aesthetic of a time during the Middle Ages when artists strove to capture both the mystery and anxiety of the process of death, the crystallizing moment of transis. In a sense, this indelible image of the body in a state of mortal transfiguration also serves as an incisive reflection of the president's own personal and public life. Approaching the end of his presidency and battling an incurable, aggressive cancer that has already begun to ravage his aging body, the still sharp-witted, gregarious, and charismatic statesman approaches his mortality with a self-possession and unshakeable conviction of his secured place in history, as well the profound culture impact that his death would have, not only in national politics, but also in the symbolic embodiment of an increasingly extinct French identity with the assimilation of a free (old) Europe under a common market, and the advent of the multi-pronged approach to modern warfare that has rendered irrelevant the old world-styled "gentlemen agreements" of international diplomacy. But in a long and distinguished political career that has weathered the humiliation of occupation, the devastation of world war, and the chaotic struggle of decolonization, his public service legacy is still haunted by the shadow of his early - and irreconcilably obfuscated - tenure in the German-installed Vichy government and in particular, the level of his implication in the notorious René Bousquet affair, the Vichy chief of police who carried out an anti-Semitic campaign that led to the mass deportation of French Jews during the early 1940s. Within this context, even the chronology of a photograph taken with Marshal Philippe Pétain, a Great War hero turned wartime Vichy head of state, misdated (perhaps intentionally) by one year during a passing comment by the president to Moreau during a working meeting (a murky timeframe that, uncoincidentally, spans Pétain's public image transformation from savior of France to Nazi collaborator), reflects the malleability of history: an error that may either reveal the fog of memory eroded by the ravages of time and illness, or a subconscious attempt to reconcile with transgressions of the past by a man acutely aware of his own mortality and culpability. Guédiguian's remarkable depth of cultural (and geographic) texturality and penchant for complex characterizations prove ideally suited for the film's nuanced, but illuminating portrait, not only of a dying man and public figure, but of the very embodiment of a national soul in the throes of its own transis - often willful, suppressed, and contradictory in its attempts to come to terms with an unreconciled collective memory, and foundering under an encroaching, realized fear of obsolescence and cultural marginalization in the wake of globalization at twilight of the millennium. It is this uncharted journey through the existential threshold between life and death that is inevitably captured in the film's allusive reference to the "walker of Martian fields" in its original, eccentric title, a paradoxically somber, yet whimsical evocation of the profound desolation - and disorientation - of existential passage.
Perhaps what is most striking about Jia Zhang-ke's latest digital feature, Still Life, is its unexpected maturity, a marked evolution away from capturing the sad, eccentric tales of youthful indirection and cultural anachronism of contemporary Chinese life under an often contradictory, dual economy system that defined his earlier films towards a more somber - and classically humanist - portrait of anonymous, uprooted lives lived in the (un)certainty of state-sponsored phased extinction along the margins (and bowels) of China's profoundly transforming economic and physical landscape. Composed of two parallel stories of familial absence - a coal miner named Han San-ming searching for his estranged wife and teenage daughter (whom he has never seen) in a now submerged Sichuan village that had been demolished during the first phase of an ambitious, ongoing Three Gorges Dam project (envisioned by the late Chairman Mao Zedong), and a woman, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) seeking contact with her husband, a politically connected civil servant who has been sent to the village of Fengjie by the government to oversee the demolition project and has not returned home in two years - the film is a serene, breathtaking, and elegantly realized, if seemingly aesthetically depersonalized, panoramic tale of displacement, exclusion, and marginalization. That is not to say the Jia's recurring themes of the breakdown of family, the paradox of alienation in the most populous country in the world (a generational phenomenon that Jia allusively attributes to the government's instituted one child policy during the 1970s in his magnum opus 
On the surface, Jon Jost's austere, somber, and uncompromisingly caustic improvisational rumination on the pall cast by the aftermath of 9/11 on the European consciousness, La Lunga Ombra seems an uncharacteristic departure from the intractable consciousness of middle America that pervade his early films - a post tragedy portrait that converges more towards claustrophobic, Bergmanesque angst rather than the transformative, post-apocalyptic, loss of innocence grief that its conceptual framework would seem to suggest. Loosely structured around the lives and mundane gestures of a trio of close knit friends - a literary figure (Eliana Miglio) (whose agency appears to be in the process of publishing a photo-essay journal on the faces of colonial-era terrorism) and a television producer (Simonetta Gianfelici) who retreat to a remote, off-season seaside cabin in order to tend to a mutual friend, Anna's (Agnese Nano) emotional crisis and ensuing depression after being unexpectedly abandoned by her cruel (and perhaps abusive) husband - the film is also a provocative, broader exposition on the intangible, often corrosive collateral damage of psychological warfare and demoralization.
In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon's 
The first film of what would be loosely considered Theo Angelopoulos' Trilogy of Borders, The Suspended Step of the Stork opens to the tumultuous and disconnected stationary long shot of a helicopter hovering over an indistinguishable, formless, dark mass floating lifelessly in an undulating open sea that has been encircled by a small fleet of recovery boats. The voice of a journalist, Alexandre (Gregory Karr) provides a grim context to the disorienting sight, as a group of Asian stowaway asylum seekers, having been refused entry into the country by the government, chose instead to end their lives by jumping into the hostile, open waters rather than be returned to their native land. The provocative image of adriftness, alienation, and disposability, a recurring theme within Angelopoulos' cinema that is visually anticipated in two iconic sequences in his earlier films - the disembodied sculptural hand towed by helicopter from the sea in 
Recalling Robert Bresson (in particular, Une Femme deuce) in its muted gesturality and Manoel de Oliveira in its saturated formalism, and infused with a dose of Raoul Ruiz's puckish, tongue-in-cheek cerebral humor, the prevailing theme of Le Pont des Arts is perhaps best defined by a conversation that occurs early in the film between a computer scientist, Manuel (Alexis Loret) and his girlfriend, Sarah (Natacha Régnier) on defining baroque as the coexistence of two contradictory entities, both of which are simultaneously true. Manuel is quick to admit that the conceptual dichotomy evades him, a juxtaposition that implies the synthesis of bifurcated realities, even as he acknowledges a certain philosophical beauty behind the idea of it. But for the fragile and increasingly insecure Sarah, a talented, young classically trained mezzo-soprano studying the nuances of baroque performance under the tutelage of a cruel and vain, but highly influential impresario named Guigui (Denis Podalydès) (and whose own grotesque affectation and mercurial temperament have earned him the nickname "the unnamable" by his protégés), the silence of Manuel's incomprehension only reinforces the intranscendable distance that separates them. Elsewhere, a similar gulf continues to deepen for another couple, Pascal (Adrien Michaux) an undermotivated graduate student who has grown increasingly uncertain over the desire to finish his prescribed thesis, and his ambitious girlfriend, a philosophy student Christine (Camille Carraz). 
In 1937, when Spain was in the midst of a devastating civil war between the Nationalists (led by Franco) and the Republican loyalists, an unlikely sanctuary from the austerity and violence came in the form of Sant Julià de Vilatorta, a charity boarding school for orphaned boys established at the turn of the century by a wealthy family who had, presumably (as postulated by a family heir), undertaken such an ambitious project as a result of their perceived obligation to the church after their religious conversion to Catholicism. That year, a wealthy businessman, cinephile, and amateur magician and filmmaker named Felip Sagués, having retreated to the rural village with his family to seek refuge from the violence of war, decided to make his own fiction film after having previously entertained the schoolboys with an eclectic assortment of Chaplin comedies and German expressionist cinema. Casting several students from the school as well as local girls from the village, Sagués would create a whimsical, if unremarkable Arabian adventure "homegrown film" called Imitating the Faquir. Now, nearly 70 years since the shooting of the film, filmmakers Elizabet Cabeza (whose own late father appears in a supporting role as band leader in the Sagués film) and Esteve Riambau assemble several surviving members of the cast for a reunion screening and interview on the grounds of the boarding school. Ostensibly a documentary on the experience of making Imitating the Faquir as "disenfranchised", naïve children during the turmoil and economic severity of the civil war, the referential double life of the title alludes, not only to the rediscovery of Sagués' amateur film by a new generation of young viewers (whose abstract conceptions of war and death seem so disconnected from the everyday reality faced by the children in the film), but also a deeper examination into social implications of filmmaking itself, not only in its archival role as civil war-era escapist cinema, but more importantly, in its contemporary role as facilitators - if not, re-enactors - of an invariably altered national history. Evoking Miklòs Gimes' 
Part whimsical fable and part affectionate human comedy, José Luis Cuerda's The Education of Fairies is a slight and effervescent, but charming and thoughtful demythification of a "happily ever after" romantic ideal. The opening transition from a graphically illustrated title sequence to a live action shot of a father recounting a bedtime story on the magical powers and elusive nature of fairies to his young son (an abstraction that he would later explain as the result of a fairy's amnesia before coming into her powers) - sets the bifurcated, yet oddly cohesive tone for the film, as the seemingly idyllic, fairytale portrait of the family - the doting father, loving wife, precocious child - proves to be the result of a mundane fusion of divine chance and human intervention from the resourceful imagination of the endearing and good natured toy inventor, Nicolás (Ricardo Darín). Two years earlier, having spotted the attractive, young widow, an ornithologist named Ingrid (Irène Jacob) traveling with her son Raúl (Víctor Valdivia), Nicolás had appropriated a reserved, chauffeur-driven private car from the airport in order to ingratiate himself into their company, an audacious and impulsive act that would eventually succeed in winning the affections of both mother and son. Settling into an inherited country estate for a life of domestic bliss with his new family, Nicolás' life is turned to upheaval when one day, Ingrid enigmatically asks that he sleep in another room under the ruse of being kept awake by his distractive snoring, a request that soon becomes a palpable harbinger to his realized fear of her increasing estrangement from him. With his "natural" father and mother withdrawing further into the silent grief of their self-imposed separation, young Raúl decides to invoke his own fairy in the form of a troubled supermarket checkout clerk named Sezar (Bebe) in order to educate her into developing her powers and, consequently, reconcile his parents. Based on the contemporary novel by French author, Didier Van Cauwelaert, the film's pervasive eccentric humor and compassionate treatment of its characters provide an incisive framework for Cuerda's seamless exposition on the bounds of fairytale, enduring love, and the transformative power of the imagination.
One of the experimental works created from the cadre of radical, emerging artists financed under the rubric of Zanzibar films that captured the spirit of May 68 and the counter culture revolution, Philippe Garrel's silent film Le Révélateur is a fractured and elliptical, but instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of awakening, maturation, psychological trauma, and transformation of childhood memory. As the film begins, the révélateur - the processor of the images - is embodied through the isolated, spotlighted shot of a young boy (Stanislas Robiolles) in the corner of the frame, looking on as his father (Laurent Terzieff), apparently unaware of his presence in the room, struggles to connect with his abstracted mother (Bernadette Lafont) in an act of implied intimacy through the (iconic) sharing of a cigarette before fading into the proverbial background through a doorway suffused in a halo of light. But despite the physical act of transitory connection, what is ultimately retained in the child's camera/eye is not the residual image of tenderness and affection, but rather, a pattern of codependency, manipulation, madness, isolation, and perhaps even violence - an estrangement that is prefigured in the Freudian, reverse pietà image of the child emerging from a long, dark passageway towards his kneeling mother held in (apparently) resigned captivity tied to a cross at the end of the tunnel - a sense of pervasive emotional alienation and moral bondage that is further reinforced by the austerity and desolation of a seemingly godless, post-apocalyptic landscape. Pursued by an unseen, anonymous, but ubiquitous enemy (perhaps an allusion to the faceless nature of the embedded, guerrilla warfare tactics of the Vietnam War), the young family is compelled to leave the comfort of their dysfunctional home life and embark on an interminable journey to nowhere. Reduced to a life of perpetual exile and transience, the child begins to rebel, a defiance of parental control that is manifested in an act of literal repellance through his directed, repeated triggering of an aerosol can (in an elegantly composed, superimposed traveling shot) that further underscores his willful, symbolic act of distanciation from his parents. Reinforced by the subsequent shot of his parents posed as seeming trophy heads displayed on the corners of his headboard, the macabre image serves, not only to illustrate their role as trophic figures that he is weaning away from, but also represent their figurative impotence in his inevitable process of autonomy and independence. Concluding with the child donning his makeshift armor as he heads towards the sea, the image evokes a more primal Antoine Doinel (the adolescent alterego of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows) facing an alien and inalterable horizon - a silent and quixotic defiance against the oppressive and implacable forces of a cruel and inhuman human nature.