La Lunga Ombra, 2006
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.
Intercutting the quotidian rituals of women in the stasis of their isolation (as they alternately attempt to console Anna by lending a sympathetic ear as she struggles to articulate her sense of loss, distracting her thoughts with idle conversation and whimsical parlor games, and encouraging her to reclaim her identity by returning to youthful pursuits) with textural and increasingly abstract archival footage from acts of terrorism, Jost reinforces an atmosphere of disjunction between characters and context that, in retrospect, perhaps reveals the underlying separation between action and consequence that pervades the film. A videotaped interview with a businessman recounting his experience while working in postwar Afghanistan alludes to this bifurcation when he describes his observation of the absence of everyday interaction between men and women in contemporary, post-Taliban Afghan society, a culturally enabled separation that leads to a certain level displaced intimacy not usually found in patriarchal cultures.
Conversely, the friends' hermetic retreat also becomes a form of artificial segregation - this time, from the community of men - where their interaction is relegated to the margins (represented only as distant photographs hanging from walls or leafed through in books (uncoincidentally, as symbols of warfare or violence), or existing in the periphery as fire wood vendors, technicians, or photographers). However, inasmuch as instinctual regression serves as a defense mechanism against inflicted wounds, it also exposes the myopia of victimization. In a sense, this defensive retreat towards isolation - and in particular, a self-imposed isolation in order to reinforce a sense of solidarity and foster moral support - not only illustrates the core of human nature's response to trauma, but also introduces the idea of the women's private turmoil as a microcosm of post 9/11 consciousness where grief, loss, fear, and confusion have invariably given way, not only to isolationism, self-righteousness, and intransigence, but more importantly, to a self-perpetuating moral contamination and spiritual inertia that continues to fester long after the crisis has subsided. Moreover, by incorporating granular and pixellated images from the World Trade Center attack that appear increasingly impressionistic and decontextualized (paradoxically creating an inverse proportionality between the distance to the image and its resolution), the juxtaposition becomes a potent metaphor for the abstraction inherent in the psychology of terrorism, where effectiveness is measured, not in conveying graphic realism or maximized casualty, but in the manipulation of public sentiment through the global domination of media images. It is this quest for sensationalism and media occupation that is ultimately encapsulated by the controversial inclusion of a gruesome and desensitizing ritual execution footage taken in postwar Iraq that concludes the film - a grim and sobering reminder of society's own implication in the creation of the spectacle, in the systematic corruption of its own soul.
Posted by acquarello on Jan 30, 2007 | Permalink | Filed under 2007, Jon Jost
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.