Film Fest Journal + Notes

Alain Resnais (French Film Directors) by Emma Wilson

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:29:27 -0500

In Alain Resnais, author Emma Wilson presents an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Resnais's recurring themes of memory, plasticity, construction, and fragmentation. By placing contemporary history within the broader context of capturing internal states and subjective reality, Wilson proposes a means of reconciling Resnais's more experimental, overtly political postwar films (through the 1960s) with his later, more hermetic and theatrical aesthetic, where the collective trauma and projected desire of his early films pave the way for the nostalgia and lyricality of his post Stavinsky work:

Resnais is fascinated by mental or subjective images, the virtual reality which makes up individual consciousness and is itself composed of both what we have known and what we have imagined. This interest in the finest workings of the mind - in the mind itself as an internal cinema where images both virtual and real coexist - calls for an extraordinary reshaping of cinema and rethinking of the capacity of film to show us reality as it is imagined, as well as lived.

Beginning with an analysis of Resnais's short film documentaries from 1948 to 1958 - which range from such seemingly diverse subjects as artist profile (Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) art (Guernica), culture (Les Statues meurent aussi), the Holocaust (Nuit et brouillard), the national library system (Toute la mémoire du monde), and polystyrene manufacturing (Le Chant du Styrène) - Wilson argues that the documentaries are integrally connected by the idea of (re)animation. In Guernica, the fragmentation of the painting reflects the inadequacy of representing collective trauma that foreshadows Hiroshima mon amour. In Nuit et brouillard, the juxtaposition of photographic stills with film footage creates ambiguity between life and death that, in turn, evokes the tragedy of the concentration camps. In Les Statues meurent aussi, the film is less a survey of African art than a reflection on cultural phantoms that have been lost in the face of colonialism and commercialization.

The death of statues is illustrated also in the opening images of the film where we see statues from western art, fragmented, the title seeming to refer to a Proustian sense of the friability of even hard matter, through time. In both motifs in the film, statues are rendered peculiarly animate (in particular, in Resnais’s moving shots which circle the material objects). Resnais introduces this uncanny theme of hesitation between life and death, flesh and stone, which will recur in his films as he shows ash-covered figures in Hiroshima, statues and shadows at Marienbad. In Les Statues meurent aussi, this material concern shadows the more trenchant awareness of the loss and embalming of a living civilization.

Moreover, in highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the living and inanimate in Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson introduces the idea of dislocating trauma from a specific, personal (and cultural) level towards a more amorphous, collective consciousness that runs through Resnais's films, a theme that is also captured in her analysis of Toute la mémoire du monde :

In Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais propagates a notion of collective memory, of a ‘mémoire universelle’. He shows, obliquely how the shots of his own films are always already familiar, part of this cultural meting-pot or memory bank. His films will recall torture scenes in Goya, the bodily horror of passages in Kafka. His will be a collaged art, glimpsed first by a wider public as he edits together Van Gogh, pursued in the editing of Guernica and Nuit et brouillard. Resnais's response to the traumas of the twentieth-century history is particular: he recognizes the fear of forgetting, the blow dealt to memory, yet retains and refuses to relinquish the resonances of art, literature and popular culture, the fabric from which cultural memory is continually re-shaped.

In the chapter on Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson insightfully argues that the dislocation is manifested in Resnais's films through cities that are as equally identifiable through images of iconic sites as they are interchangeable in their representations of urban spaces. In Hiroshima mon amour, the A-bomb dome is juxtaposed against the city's rebuilt commercial district, creating parallel strands of time that mirror the protagonist's unreconciled personal and collective memories of Nevers and Hiroshima.

Similarly, Boulogne and Algeria are also integrally connected in Muriel ou le temps d'un retour through suppressed personal and collective trauma, an intrinsic violence that Wilson proposes is revealed through Resnais's jarring editing and soundtrack that reinforce the atrocity of the Algerian War through the film's idiosyncratic aesthetic of "visual mutilation".

In her essay on L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Wilson provides an insightful analysis on the implication of Resnais's creative disagreement with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet over his decision not to film the climactic rape sequence and instead, culminate the scene with a repeating shot of A opening her arms to X. While on the surface, the substitution radically transforms A's station from victim to liberated woman, Wilson argues that the action is ambiguous and unsettling, implying a dark psychology more in-line with folie à deux than feminist icon:

For me, there is no liberation in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, thought here may be an act of transgression, and movement into the unknown. What is radical about the film is not the liberation of A, about which I am doubtful, but its gradual intimation that she, like the heroine of Hiroshima mon amour may seek a love which devours and deforms her, that she may be an actor and not an object in the relation that is generation by the dialogue between lovers. This is disturbing to X, disrupting his authorship, letting him be fantasized as rapist by his lover. Yet it is also, surely, disturbing to A - and to the viewers - who see her participation in a fantasy by which she is destroyed.

Favorite Films of 2009

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:34:51 -0500

After a semi-accidental unmasking at a NYFF panel in 2008, it seems natural that Benoît Jacquot's Villa Amalia would be the first film I had seen in 2009 that would resonate with me, a film as much about abandoning identity as it is about finding one’s place in the aftermath. In a sense, the films on this year's list also revolve around the theme of identity, whether reconstructed through the imperfect prism of personal and cultural history (The White Ribbon, Independencia, The Beaches of Agnès, and Broken Embraces), or constantly redefined by the roles and spaces (and junctures) that they inhabit (In Comparison, Ghost Town, Everyone Else, Sense of Architecture, and 35 Shots of Rum).

Favorite Films (in preferential order):

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki, 2009)
Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)
Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot, 2009)
Ghost Town (Zhao Dayong, 2009)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009
Sense of Architecture (Heinz Emigholz, 2005-2009)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)
The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order):

Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2009)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009)

Close Contenders:

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
Un Lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)
Sacred Places (Jean-Marie Téno, 2009)

New Discoveries:

Seventeen (Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, 1983)
Torero (Carlos Velo, 1956)
Death on a Full Moon Day (Prasanna Vithanage, 1997)
Paria (Nicolas Klotz, 2000)
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (Guy Debord, 1959)

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Part of Senses of Cinema 2009 World Poll.

Marguerite Duras (French Film Directors) by Renate Günther

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:35:45 -0500

In Marguerite Duras, author Renate Günther examines Marguerite Duras's films from the perspective of interweaving politics and memory that runs through her body of work. Born in Gia-Dinh in French Indochina (now Vietnam), the only daughter of emigrant teachers Emile and Marie Donnadieu who moved to the colonies in search of a better life, Duras's early life would be marked by the intersection of the personal and political - first, as a member of the working class who better identified with the indigenes than with other colonialists in their exclusion from bourgeois colonial society (especially after the family fell into poverty following her father's death), and subsequently as a young woman in occupied France who became involved with the resistance and the plight of Jewish people in World War II. Indeed, even her adopted pen name of Duras, assumed from a childhood village where the Donnadieu family had resettled after her father's illness, reveals an element of autobiographic fictionalization that characterizes her work:

Although Duras transformed her experience into art, she did not do so by simply telling the 'story of her life', as she did not believe that the chaos of memory could or should be subjugated to the contrived order of a linear and logically structured novelistic or filmic narrative. Instead she isolated significant moments in her life and condensed them, in fictionalized form, into the recurring scenarios that run through the texts of her films. This repetition with variations of the same core material is one of the hallmarks of Duras's work, as she creates clusters of references through which texts and films mirror and transform one another.

A familiar instance of this process of fictional condensation and repetition is embodied by the recurring iconic character, Anne-Marie Stretter who appears in Duras's novels La Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le Vice-consul, and L'Amant, and also in her film, India Song. Inspired by Elisabeth Streidter, the wealthy, strikingly beautiful Swiss wife of a provincial administrator whose daughters were close to Duras's age (as well as the unrequited object of desire of a young man who committed suicide), Stretter not only represented the socioeconomic ideal of the colonial bourgeoisie that the Donnadieus were excluded from, but also Duras's ambivalent relationship with her mother, whose attention and devotion were largely lavished on her eldest brother, Pierre, at the expense of the younger children.

However, rather than creating fictionalized versions of autobiographical episodes, Duras emphasizes the disjunction through dissociation, desynchronization, and non-linearity, creating the aesthetic of voix off in which off-screen voices are used in lieu of synchronized sound to accompany the visual track and maintain separation between image and sound:

Duras's filmic technique, then, illustrates her view that cinema is not a transparent reflection of the world, but a highly complex construct which should be presented as such. But the gap between voice and image does more than merely show the artificial nature of cinema. It also creates an unsettling feeling of dislocation within the spectator's own sense of identity which, for the duration of the film, loses its usual cohesion and unity. Duras's films demonstrate that the notion of a stable coherent self or 'subject' is, in fact, an illusion which, in Western patriarchal cultures at least, has been used by dominant social groups to reinforce their position of power over those who have been defined as 'the object', 'the other'.

As with the fictional incarnation of Stretter, the composite autobiographical episodes from Duras's childhood would similarly form the recurring image of the beggar woman whose fictionalized biography is recounted in India Song and Son nom de Venise dan Calcutta désert: a desperate Vietnamese woman, near death, who had handed her equally gravely ill child over to Duras's mother (Duras ended up caring for the child who died a few days later), and an emaciated, screaming beggar woman known as "la folle de Vinhlong" who, for Duras, symbolized the fear of mental illness (and implicitly, the sense of helplessness) that she harbored throughout her life. But more importantly, the beggar woman also represents a stateless and disenfranchisement that expound on Duras's recurring themes of class and division, as illustrated in her transposition as a drifter in Le Camion and more loosely, by the unseen, immigrant sanitation workers who sweep the pre-dawn streets of Paris in Les Mains négatives:

The theme of racist oppression and exclusion in Le Camion is also reflected in the film's location, since the lorry's journey takes us through a region inhabited entirely by immigrants, including a large Portuguese community. As Duras explained, the latter used to live in caravans near the railway station at Plaisir, but were evicted and rehoused in the grandes ensembles, the blocks of flats which we occasionally see in the film. Exiled from their native country and subsequently excluded from mainstream French society, the immigrants are condemned to live in this desolate landscape, evoked in the text by the woman's repeated vision of 'la fin du monde', 'the end of the world'.

Indeed, inasmuch as Duras's films all contain a political dimension, Le Camion is perhaps the most overtly personal response to a political autobiography - her own estrangement from the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) - featuring a truck driver whose hardline membership in the PCF unconsciously perpetuates the artificial divisions inherent in a monolithic identity:

This denunciation of political power in Le Camion begins with Duras's vehement criticism of the PCF which can be traced back to her resignation and subsequent expulsion from the party in 1950, after her seven-year experience as a fervent activist. The sense of loss she experienced following this episode was exacerbated by the fact that for her the PCF had become a substitute family, creating a strong personal identification in addition to her political commitment.

Similarly, Nathalie Granger also represents a personal and political convergence, this time, within the context of the post 1968 French feminist movement, the publishing of the solidarity petition in Le Nouvel observateur in 1971 to protest outdated abortion laws from the 1920s, and the 1972 mass demonstrations in Paris against the trivialization of rape in the French judicial system. Citing the duality intrinsic in the women's insular environment, suggesting both imprisonment and utopia, repression and violence (reinforced through the broadcast news of escaped convicts that accompany the extended shots of domestic chores), Günther provides an insightful and exhaustive deconstruction of the film's structure and its process of illustrating, diagnosing, and finally refiguring the mechanics of social class and gender roles.

The notion of gender as performance is clearly relevant to Nathalie Granger, as Depardieu's slightly exaggerated gestures and facial expressions constantly remind us not only that he is an actor, but also that the male figure he represents is acting out the role of the salesman as part of this gendered spectacle. The sharp contrast, furthermore, between the man's initially confident performance and his subsequent vulnerability in front of the women also foregrounds this discrepancy between his spurious masculinity and the fundamental humanity he shares with Isabelle and her friend. It is evident, then, that the women's implicit violence is not directed at the man personally, but rather at a society that imposes such a rigid prescription of gendered behavior on a multitude of different individuals.

...At the end of the film then, Duras transcends the barriers of both gender and class by creating a relationship of mutual understanding between a working-class man and two middle-class women. The oppositional categories of the Symbolic order become irrelevant, as the man reconnects with his 'femininity', just as the women's anger and violence are an expression of their 'masculinity'.

Los Condenados, 2009

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:18:26 -0500

The delineation between reality and mythology, ideal and application also provides the catalyst for Isaki Lacuesta's first fiction film, Los Condenados (The Condemned). The rupture is prefigured in the opening image of a gaunt, Argentinean expatriate, Martín (Daniel Fanego) undergoing a CT scan at a Spanish hospital, the implication of cancer suggesting a hidden, indefinable turmoil that continues to haunt the consciousness. For Martín, the sickness resurfaces in a message from longtime friend and former guerilla fighter, Raúl (Arturo Goetz), inviting him to an excavation of mass graves under the ruse of a university-sponsored archaeological dig in the remote countryside to search for the desaparecidos, in particular, a comrade named Ezequiel who went missing after being kidnapped by the state some thirty years earlier during the "dirty war". With Ezequiel's widow, Andrea (Leonor Manso) and mother, Luisa (Juana Hidalgo) in tow, Raúl has also enlisted the aid of Vicky (María Fiorentino), a dissident who, like Martín, had been held captive in a network of undisclosed jungle prisons. Idolized by the younger generation, especially Vicky's son Pablo (Nazareno Casero), Martín's complacency and distraction proves a stark contrast to his reputation as elusive rebel leader and ideological godfather - a friction that forces them to re-evaluate their own imperfect memories over their mutual, buried past. In its elliptical, organic structure and images of the jungle as a metaphor for interiority, Los Condenados suggests kinship with Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Moreover, inasmuch as Vargas's homecoming reframes the intrigue of his past into the banal in Los Muertos, Martín's journey also represents a demythification. Curiously, it is this dismantling of the heroic myth that also resolves the mystery of the disappearances, confronting the romanticism of failed revolution and, in the process, reconciling the hidden spaces between history and memory.

Torero, 1956

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:28:47 -0500

Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo's reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring after a prolonged absence caused by injury, as well as the unexpected death of cerebral, renowned Spanish bullfighter and admired contemporary, Manolete, the film seamlessly interweaves past and present, archival footage and re-enactment. Chronicling Procuna's rise from abject poverty (underscoring the correlation between bullfighting and escapism that also runs through Llorenç Soler's 52 Sundays), makeshift training, inauspicious debut, and personal and professional milestones, Velo incisively captures the ambivalent, often contradictory nature of the collective spectacle, where the relationship between the bullfighter and the audience proves to be as fickle and mercurial as the bulls themselves. Velo illustrates this ephemerality through two near real-time sequences that figuratively bookend Procuna's career - first, as a third-billed performer who emerges from the shadows after injuries cut short the main attraction, then subsequently, as a famous bullfighter nearing the end of his career who is goaded into returning to the ring, only to be jeered when his performance proves to be cautious. Juxtaposed against images of Procuna's humble aspirations - his childhood home, his mother's memorial, his loving family - Velo presents as thoughtful allegory for the fragile, often arbitrary delineation between humanity and mythology, where transcendence, like truth, lies in the inconstant eye of the beholder.

Almadrabas, 1934

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:53:51 -0500

Carlos Velo and Fernando G. Mantilla's quietly observed documentary, Almadrabas loosely prefigures Agnès Varda's La Pointe courte in capturing the rhythm and rituals of a small fishing village. Ostensibly titled after the Moorish word describing the structure of nets, the film follows the product cycle of canned tuna - from the fishermen who go out to sea to trawl the ocean, to the fishmongers who clean and dress the fish for curing and sale, to the cannery workers who cook, season, and package them in tins for export. As the title suggests, Almadrabas also illustrates the interconnectedness of the village, both as a close knit community and as workers contributing to the town's primary industry. In a way, Velo and Mantilla's idiosyncratic use of amplified ambient sounds, most notably in the cadence of water droplets and the undifferentiated white noise of machinery, anticipates Ritwik Ghatak's use of allusive sounds as a reflection of internal states. However, rather than imposing a psychological framework, Velo and Mantilla allude to an integrally sociopolitical context in their juxtaposition of village life and commerce, figuratively aligning the circumstances of the villagers with those of the hapless fish captured in their highly efficient nets, destined to feed the insatiable appetites of an anonymous, consumer-driven global economy.

Moroccan Romance, 1939

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:43:19 -0500

Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, Carlos Velo and Enrique Domínguez Rodiño's Moroccan Romance (Romancero marroquí) bears the imprint of Robert Flaherty's ethnographic documentaries in its distilled (if manipulated) images of a distant, exotic - and exoticized - culture. Part colonialist travelogue on aspects of life in contemporary Morocco (and implicitly, the benefits of imposed western culture on the native population in such areas as medicine and the local economy) and part recruitment propaganda extolling the virtues of a franquista revolution, the film reflects what author Marsha Kinder describes as the idiosyncrasies of Spanish documentary in its malleable fusion of real and constructed history. Composed of seemingly disparate segments - a panorama of Morrocan customs, a human interest story on a Moroccan farmer, Aalima, who volunteers to serve in Franco's army, a youth march in Spain - the film's fractured construction invariably reflects its complicated production history, specifically, Carlos Velo's precarious role as a leftist republican covertly working on a commissioned project that promotes a nationalist agenda. Forced to flee the protectorate before the editing of the film to avoid exposure (Velo would eventually live in exile in Mexico), Velo nevertheless asserts his unmistakable aesthetic in the spare compositions and textured landscapes that capture the quotidian, even as jingoistic sermons on colonialist unity, romanticized images of war, and a sobering epilogue depicting youth military exercises that trivialize warfare as a series of role-playing exercises undercut the film's essential, humanist tone.

The Overcoat, 1952

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:52:46 -0500

In an early sequence in Alberto Lattuada's The Overcoat, the mayor (Giulio Stival) relishes the idea of history having to be rewritten as a result of an archaeologist's discovery of ancient artifacts that had been unearthed during the groundbreaking of his commissioned, large-scale urbanization project. Designed to transform the landscape of the town's main square - one that strategically obstructs the view to the impoverished, outlying suburbs - in time for a dignitary's official visit, the project receives overwhelming support from the council despite its steep price tag in the belief that the investment would elevate the city's status on a national level. This idea of exploitive economics and window dressing as a means of gaining respect and dignity also foreshadows the plight of lowly office clerk, De Carmine (Renato Rascel whose reluctant purchase of a handsomely styled, fur-trimmed overcoat from the local tailor (having been unable to convince him to repair his well worn, but still functional overcoat) unexpectedly gains him entry into the rarefied world of high society. Retaining Nikolai Gogol's idiosyncratic fusion of social commentary, wry humor, and gothic tale, Lattuada, nevertheless, diverges from the dreamlike narrative of Gogol's short story, and instead, frames De Carmine's bumbling encounters as a realistic, if satirical, exposition on the arbitrary and superficial nature of privilege and exclusion. Transplanting Gogol's cautionary tale from nineteenth century St. Petersburg to contemporary Italy, Lattuada creates an incisive allegory for the underlying reality of postwar reconstruction and its inequitable human cost under the illusion of collective rebuilding, cultural development, and social progress.

A Lake, 2008

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:50:00 -0500

With a Russian cast, minimal French dialogue, and geographically ambiguous setting, Philippe Grandrieux's A Lake (Un Lac), like his multilingual preceding film, La Vie nouvelle, expounds on the notion of a borderless cinema - one that not only dismantles the man-made frontiers between nations and cultures, but also the boundaries between image and sound, material and light, logic and instinct. And like the indeterminate chronology of La Vie nouvelle, A Lake also takes place in a hermetic environment that seems equally primordial and post-apocalyptic, where human interaction is reduced to its essence: a knowing glance, a comforting touch, a frenzied exertion, an anguished cry.

In A Lake, the figurative Garden of Eden is a barren, winter forest shrouded in mist where a lumberjack, Alexi (Dmitry Kubasov) lives in a remote cabin near a lake. Prone to increasingly frequent bouts of epilepsy, Alexi's trips to the woods are as much a necessary ritual for survival as it is a rugged communion with nature, often ending up burrowed by convulsions into the snow until the seizure passes and he is able to walk home. There are other members in the household - a blind mother, Liv (Simona Huelsemann), a returning father, Christian (Vitaly Kishchenko), a younger brother, Johannes (Artur Semay) - but they all remain in the periphery, drifting in an out of his searching gaze, and only his sister and soul mate, Hege (Natalie Rehorova) can penetrate his frustration and despair over a body that continues to betray him. It is a lonely, if reassuring and predictable existence until a stranger, Jurgen (Alexei Solonchev) comes into their lives and, like the felled trees in the forest, momentarily, but irreparably, disturbs their fragile paradise.

Loosely reminiscent of Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son in its invocation of Caspar David Friedrich's gothic landscapes to convey a sense of profound isolation, intimacy, and longing, A Lake, nevertheless, remains very much a Grandrieux film, bearing his singular imagery of synaptic, perturbating camerawork, defocused framing, and liminal compositions that transform everyday movements and rhythms into a frisson of textured, abstract impulses that feed the senses. Eschewing the moral ambiguity and transgressive nature of his earlier films, A Lake also represents an aesthetic shift in Grandrieux's cinema towards the idea of nature as integral character: a transition that is implied in Alexi's recitation of a passage about the unity of the soul between man and beast, as well as his lack of dominion over the ephemeral forces of nature. It is this image of humanity receding into the environment that ultimately creates the visceral poetry of A Lake, capturing the body as landscape in all its gestures and paroxysms, contours and spaces, violence and ecstasy.
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First posted on AFI Fest Daily News, 10/01/09.

Broken Embraces, 2009

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:58:52 -0500

Ingeniously constructed as parallel metafilms - one, Ray X's (Rubén Ochandiano) behind the scenes documentary that illustrates the intersection (and disjunction) between reality and fiction; the other, Mateo's (Lluís Homar) reconstruction of a doomed film project made 14 years earlier that reflects the role of the filmmaker as archaeologist and conjurer - Pedro Almodóvar's wry, multivalent, and voluptuous Broken Embraces is also a poignant rumination on grief, guilt, and loss. The theme of duality is prefigured in Mateo's adoption of the name Harry Caine, his screenwriter alterego, after a tragic accident that left him blind, as well as office secretary, Lena's adoption of the pseudonym Severine (in a playful nod to Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour) when she moonlights as a call girl to help pay for the mounting expenses incurred by her father's terminal illness.

This assumption of persona is also implied in an early episode of Lena trying out assorted costumes that emulate iconic images of Hollywood actresses as part of her screen test for Mateo's film project, Girls and Suitcases (a reflexive reworking of Almodóvar's earlier film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), simultaneously evoking Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's in Lena's literal and figurative prostitution to her employer turned lover, Ernesto (José Luis Gómez) that is as motivated by financial necessity as it is by gratitude, as well as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in Mateo's attempt to conform Lena to the image of his creative vision and desire. It is interesting to note that the idea of projected desire is also revisited in the episodes of Ernesto spying on Lena through his son's unsynced documentary footage with the help of a neutral lip reader - an image that not only finds affinity with Chantal Akerman's recurring theme of "who speaks for the woman", but also converges into a sublime double projection when Lena enters the room and repeats her on-camera declaration in person, in essence, supplanting the image with the real. It is this transformation that perhaps best captures the haunting closing image of a reinvigorated Mateo against a magnified, recovered footage from the accident - revealing, not only a longing to suspend time and reconfigure the past, but also, in casting his own shadow against the projected image, an invocation.

Bluebeard, 2009

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:18:19 -0500

Ostensibly an adaptation of Charles Perrault's baroque fairytale, Bluebeard is also a distilled and densely layered exposition on Catherine Breillat's recurring preoccupation with socioeconomic and sexual politics. Structured as a tale within a tale, the film alternates between past and present, childhood and adolescence, fiction and reality. On one level is bright, cherubic Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) who sneaks away into the attic with her older, more gullible sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) to read Perrault's fairytale. On another level is the realization of the fairytale itself: the plight of dowry-less, virginal Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) who is compelled to marry the reclusive nobleman, Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) in order to lift her mother (Isabelle Lapouge) and older sister, Anne (Daphne Baïwir) from a life of poverty following the accidental death of her father. By interchanging Catherine and Marie-Catherine during a pivotal staircase shot, Breillat draws an implicit parallel between the real and fictional younger sisters. At the core of the intersected stories is the idea of role reversal: Catherine, who relishes her ability to terrify her older sister with her all-too-animated readings of Bluebeard; and Marie-Catherine, who not only brings financial security to her family, but also asserts influence over her world-weary, murderous husband with her disarming innocence. Combined with elements of reflexive construction - specifically, the mismatched cuts of Marie-Catherine ascending the tower staircase that emphasize a looped editing used to achieve the illusion of verticality - Breillat creates a droll and incisive metaphor for the nature of empowerment.

White Material, 2009

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:00:29 -0500

A textured panorama of modern day Africa's dynamic and volatile cross-cultural landscape, Claire Denis's White Material is an abstract and elemental, if oddly sterile rumination on colonial legacy and socioeconomic stagnation. Unfolding in episodic flashbacks as second-generation coffee plantation owner, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) scrambles to make her way back home after a forced evacuation of European settlers in light of an escalating civil war, the film structurally interweaves the parallel lives of the Vial family, a band of roving child soldiers scouring the countryside for "white material" trophies from fleeing settlers, and a charismatic military officer turned rebel leader known as the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) who has gone into hiding to recover from injuries sustained during a recent skirmish. With the family patriarch, Henri (Michel Subor) removed from day to day operations, her estranged husband, André (Christopher Lambert) seeking protection from the corrupt, warlord-like mayor (William Nadylam) by secretly agreeing to sign over the deed to the plantation, and her immature son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) unwilling to take on responsibility for the family business, Maria is left alone to manage the upcoming harvest, negotiating with former employees and impoverished villagers in an attempt to bring the coffee to market. But as agents of the civil war circle ever closer towards the near deserted plantation, Maria's illusive quest soon becomes a journey into the heart of darkness. By decentralizing the conflict to an indeterminate country even as she incorporates real-life elements from contemporary African history (most notably, in the Boxer character who is based on assassinated Burkina Faso president, Thomas Sankara, and the induction of child soldiers in the civil wars of Angola and Sierra Leone), Denis incisively dissociates the issue of African stagnation from reductive presumptions of long-standing tribal (and implicitly localized) conflict, reframing it instead within the broader context of racial, economic, educational, and class division. It is perhaps this sense of universality that ultimately defines the form of Denis's uncharacteristically raw and unfocused film, reflecting, like the unprocessed coffee beans, an immediacy that transcends simple economic reality and instead converges towards murkier implications of globalism and cultural survival.

Mother, 2009

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:54:00 -0500

Inasmuch as Life During Wartime explores the limits of forgiveness, Bong Joon-ho's Mother poses a sinister corollary in its tale of a parent's unwavering devotion to her child. The price exacted is prefigured in the opening shot of the impassive, titular mother (Kim Hye-Ja) wandering through the countryside with arms flailing to the rhythm of an imaginary dance. The sole provider and caretaker of Do-joon (Bin Won), her dimwitted, accident-prone adult son, she anxiously watches over him from across the window of her herb shop as he invariably gets himself into precarious situations. Sideswiped by a speeding car one day when he leans out into the street, Do-joon is goaded into chasing the occupants into a golf course to retaliate, even as he seems to have forgotten the reason for the pursuit. A trip to the police station leads to more confusion when the driver decides to file a complaint for vandalizing his car, and Do-joon is forced to pay for repairs when he is unable to remember who had caused the damage. Soon, Do-joon's pattern of short-term memory loss strikes a more somber tone when a schoolgirl is found murdered on the roof of a hillside building, and all clues seem to lead back to him. Suggesting a loose reconstitution of Bong's earlier film Memories of Murder in the pursuit of a handicapped suspect, Mother similarly subverts the crime fiction genre in its implication of national history in aberrant psychology. It is also in this context of repressed memories that Mother transcends the genre in its potent social commentary on the illusion of cultural amnesia as a way forward from traumatic, unreconciled history.

Around a Small Mountain (36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak), 2009

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:16:48 -0500

In a scene that occurs midway through Jacques Rivette's 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak, former circus performer turned textile designer, Kate (Jane Birkin) returns to Paris with a batch of fabrics that she has dyed during a visit to her family's provincial circus and tries to match the color of the swatches to a Pantone chart, discovering that the hues had turned out differently from how they appeared when she had inspected them under the circus lights. The idea of the circus as facilitating a different way of seeing is a theme that surfaces throughout the film, creating a broader analogy for the stage as an intersection between real life and performance. It is this sense of novelty that would also draw globe-trotting Italian businessman, Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto) into the world of a dying circus, prompted by Kate's invitation to see the show as a token of gratitude for fixing her stranded car. Returning after years of forced separation in order to mourn the loss of her father (who, in turn, was responsible for her exile) with her sister, Barbara (Vimala Pons) and niece, Clémence (Julie-Marie Parmentier), Kate is reluctant to step into the ring again, having once been involved in a tragic accident that would claim the life of her lover. But as Vittorio becomes as increasingly seduced by the elusive Kate as he is by resident clown, Marlo's (Jacques Bonnaffé) infinite variations on the opening skit for each show, he begins to immerse himself further into the everyday chaos of the circus in the belief that the ring represents the key to finding closure. Composed of self-contained episodes that underscore the construction and artifice implicit in a performance, 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak is a whimsical and bittersweet allegory for the stage as a place of adventure, mystery, and wonder. Alternating sequences between the performers and their performances that allude to their interchangeability, Rivette creates a poignant metaphor for life as human comedy and ever-changing spectacle.

Life During Wartime, 2009

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:38:48 -0500

During the Q&A, cinematographer Edward Lachman commented that the more aesthetic look to Life During Wartime with respect to Todd Solondz's earlier work was a result of Solondz's direction that the film convey a degree of unnaturalness and plasticity. On the surface, this image of conscious construction seems inconsistent with the sense of organic continuity achieved by revisiting characters (albeit transfigured) from Solondz's earlier film, Happiness: a narrative progression existing outside the frame that is suggested in the in medias res opening sequence with neurotic couple, Allen (Michael K. Williams) and Joy (Shirley Henderson) celebrating their anniversary at a restaurant before having their romantic dinner scuttled when the waitress recognizes Allen's voice as that of her obscene phone caller. As in Happiness, Life During Wartime is also interconnected by the three sisters' unrequited search for happiness: Trish (Allison Janney) the divorced mother just returning to the dating scene after her ex-husband, Bill (Ciarán Hinds) was imprisoned for pedophilia; writer Helen (Ally Sheedy) whose persona ever teeters between mercurial artist and narcissistic celebrity; and fragile Joy who, still haunted by her jilted lover, Andy's (Paul Reubens) suicide, decides to run away to Miami to re-evaluate her marriage. At the core of Solondz's perversely wry satire is the nature - and limits - of forgiveness in its various incarnations, from crime and punishment, to moral transgression, to weakness and despair. Framed against the image of pervasive artificiality, Solondz creates an eccentric metaphor for longing as a manifestation of impossible construction, where only the prospect of redemption, not happiness, lies within our grasp.

Film Comment Selects 2010 Partial Schedule

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:52:20 -0500

Thanks to FSLC's new bimonthly calendar format mailer, viewers now get a sneak peek at the Film Comment Selects schedule in February. FCS runs into March this year and according to the mailer, the tail end will also include Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, which is bound to be a highlight. The series is running from 2/19 to 3/4. Here's the list of screenings through 2/28:

Friday, 2/19
4:00 Nucingen House (Raúl Ruiz)
6:00 Accident (Soi Cheang)
8:00 Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan)

Saturday, 2/20
1:30 Accident
3:30 Godard Rarities (Jean-Luc Godard)
5:30 Perfect Life (Emily Tang)
7:30 Applause (Martin Zandvliet)
9:15 [Surprise Film]

Sunday, 2/21
1:00 Applause
3:00 The Revenge: A Visit from Fate (Kiroshi Kurosawa)
4:45 The Revenge: The Scar that Never Fades (Kiroshi Kurosawa)
6:30 Be Good (Sois Sage) (Juliette Garcias)
8:30 Nucingen House

Monday, 2/22
[No FCS Screenings]

Tuesday, 2/23
4:15 Be Good
6:15 Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
8:45 Be Good

Wednesday, 2/24
4:00 Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux)
6:30 La vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux)
9:00 Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux)

Thursday, 2/25
[No FCS Screenings]

Friday, 2/26
4:30 Persecution (Patrice Chéreau)
6:30 Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)
8:40 Persecution

Saturday, 2/27
1:30 Air Doll
4:00 The Land of Madness (Luc Moullet)
6:00 Persecution
8:00 Tales from the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, & Constantin Popescu)

Sunday, 2/28
1:30 A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang)
6:15 Be Good
8:15 Kinatay

Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), 1961

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:10:33 -0500

Composed of three stories based on Rabindranath Tagore's short fiction that span a range of ages, each shot in a different narrative genre - a social realist drama, a ghost story, and a romantic comedy - Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya (Three Daughters) is a lucid panorama on the lives of society's referential daughters and their relegated place in a deeply class-conscious and patriarchal culture. The first story, Postmaster, is equally a commentary on the cycle of poverty and social invisibility that relegate girls to subservient roles, and an indictment of the armchair liberalism that helps perpetuate these inequitable and disenfranchising institutions. Set in a rural outpost that is still plagued by malaria, the segment chronicles newly hired postmaster and urban transplant, Nandal's (Anil Chatterjee) struggle to adjust to provincial life, endeavoring to cultivate a sense of culture in the remote village by continuing his poetry studies and teaching an orphaned servant girl, Ratan (Chandana Banerjee) to read and write, until a crisis causes him to re-evaluate his circumstances. In capturing Nandal's superficial attempts at assimilation (in one scene, he humors a group of local musicians by finally attending a performance after sidestepping an earlier invitation) and charity towards the villagers, Ray explores the notion of enlightened goodwill as an assertion of superiority that reinforces social division.

Similar to Postmaster, the social imprinting of economics also provides the framework for the second story, Monihara, a gothic tale within a tale told by a village schoolmaster (Govinda Chakravarti) on the events that led to the haunting of a seemingly idyllic mansion across the river. Having inherited a country estate, successful businessman Phanibhushan (Kali Bannerjee) returns to his ancestral village with his attractive, commoner wife, Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar), where she is invariably visited by a desperate relative eager to exploit marginal family ties to curry favor from her husband. Manimalika's reluctant encounter with her long abandoned past provides a glimpse into her relationship with her husband as well. Childless and insecure over his wife's affection, Phanibhusan is quick to indulge her whims, lavishing her with jewelry from his many business trips over the years. It is a token affirmation that soon consumes Manimalika, a dislocated sense of adoration and loyalty that is strained when her husband is compelled to take an extended trip to stave off financial ruin, and she is faced with the possibility of losing her newfound privilege. In its critical examination of transaction as a surrogate for human connection, Monihara represents an intriguing corollary to the status of women in Postmaster. By presenting a paradigm in which social mobility is more fluid (albeit through marriage) and the balance of power is shifted, Ray illustrates the insidious - and intrinsically artificial - nature of class stratification, where the fear of erasure itself becomes a crippling, self-fulfilling prophesy.

As in Postmaster and Monihara, the final installment of Teen Kanya, entitled Samapti, also begins with a journey from the city to the province as a metaphor for reframing cultural norms from an outsider's perspective - and specifically, a modern point of view observing outmoded traditions - in this case, a recent university graduate, Amulya (Soumitra Chatterjee) who has returned home to visit his widowed mother, Jogmaya (Sita Mukherjee). From the comical opening image of Amulya falling into the mud while disembarking from a boat (after stubbornly refusing assistance from the locals) as a spirited Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen) amusedly looks on, Ray implicitly links the two characters in their strangerness - one, a transplanted native who is no longer accustomed to the village's quaint ways; the other, a poor, displaced young woman who is too old to lead the life of a carefree child, but has also cultivated few skills to cope in a world of adults. Rejecting his mother's notions of a suitable wife - one who invariably comes from an upstanding, middle class family and is equally adept around the kitchen as she is with embroidery hoops - Amulya instead has set his sights on the wild and unpredictable Mrinmoyee, a decision that brings the family much consternation when she decides to climb out of the window on their wedding night. In contrast to the dysfunctional relationships inherent in the previous stories, Samapti confronts the social paradigms that contribute to the inequality and polarization. Juxtaposed against a young couple's search for love and validation, the friction represents the difficult, but necessary process of cultural revolution in its painstaking negotiation of accepted roles and asserted individuality.

Liverpool, 2008

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:58:42 -0500

With its rockabilly-infused title sequence coda that segues to medium shots of industrial interiors and, later in the film, a desolate winter landscape (not to mention a running motif of Farrel [Juan Fernández] taking occasional swigs from a vodka bottle that he has stashed in his duffel bag), Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, on the surface, suggests a more straight-laced variation of Aki Kaurismäki's proletariat films (in particular, Ariel) than Alonso's recurring theme of internalized journey. From the opening image of an obscured Farrel looking on in the shadows of a dimly lit recreational lounge as a pair of gamers compete in the foreground, Alonso establishes a sense of distance and peripherality surrounding the film's reticent, inscrutable protagonist. Having spent much of his working life adrift at sea, traveling around the globe as a merchant sailor aboard commercial freighters, Farrel decides to seize the opportunity one day to request leave during a scheduled docking in Usuhuaia on the southern tip of Argentina in order to visit his hometown and check on his ailing mother. Having reached the figurative end of the world, Farrel's journey intriguingly represents both a fugue and a homecoming.

This oppositional image is subsequently reinforced in his disorienting return to his native village, whether trying to navigate the now unfamiliar geography of the town, peeking into the window of his home to see a young woman, Analía (Giselle Irrazabal) he has never met, or spending the night camped out at a neighbor's barn unable to go home, only to be dragged inside his parents' house to an anticlimactic reunion with his father (Nieves Cabrera) who is perplexed by his return and seems eager to see him leave. (Note an earlier juxtaposition of Farrel riding alongside harvested timber in the back of a logging truck - a shot that recalls the image of the impoverished woodcutter hitching a ride in La Libertad - that illustrates their mutual displacement and uprooting.) Curiously, Alonso introduces an ambiguity in his father's muted reaction to his homecoming that may not be the result of strained family relations, but rather, financial motivation, implied by Analía's nagging demands for money that reinforce his role as breadwinner for the family. It is this implicit connection between alienation and economics that incisively reframes the pathology of Liverpool in its distilled, allusive closing image, diverging from the notion of human idiosyncrasy towards a globalist indictment of its garish tokens of materialism and disposability.

History Repeating Now Posted at AFI Fest Daily News

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:55:56 -0500

Just a quick note to mention that the article, History Repeating, a theme piece on the use of refigured prewar history in Sabu's Kanikōsen, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, and Marco Bellocchio's Vincere has been posted at the AFI Fest Daily News.

Wife! Be Like a Rose!, 1935

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:27:35 -0500

In Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano cites the contradictory delineation between urban and provincial life in Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like a Rose! as an example of interwar Japan's amorphously defined domestic and social spaces that arose from society's ambivalence towards the rapid pace of modernization in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake. In Naruse's film, this nostalgia for a distant, idealized hometown is embodied by Hirao Village, where the estranged father, Shunsaku (Sadao Maruyama) has gone to prospect for gold in the mountains (a paradoxical emigration from Tokyo that is antithetical to the idea of moving to the city to seek one's fortune). Having settled into a new life with a former geisha named Oyuki (Yuriko Hanabusa) and their children, Shizuko (Setsuko Horikoshi) and Kenichi (Kaoru Ito), Shunsaku's new life reflects a return to a more traditional way of life even as it represents a rejection of another tradition - his marriage to Etsuko (Tomoko Ito) who, along with his now grown daughter, Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba), were left behind.

In turn, the seeming modernity of Tokyo with its Western-dressed workers and bustling streets (made all the more kinetic by the establishing shot of offices closing at the end of the work day) is contradicted by Etsuko's anxiety over being asked to act as a go-between for a former student in Shunsaku's absence. Channeling her loneliness and heartbreak through poetry, Etsuko ostensibly plays the role of the devoted, long suffering wife waiting for her husband to return - a reunion that seems at hand when Kimiko decides to go to Hirao village to fetch her father in order to attend to family obligations. However, inasmuch as Shunsaku's trips between Tokyo and Hirao Village reflects what Wada-Marciano describes as the cultural negotiation of space, the separation also reinforces Naruse's familiar themes of perpetual disappointment, stubbornness, and perseverance that would resurface throughout his body of work. For Etsuko, the poems express a romanticized longing for the absent Shunsaku, an image that evaporates when the idealization converges with the reality. For Oyuki, a life of sacrifice and shame are the price of her devotion to the feckless Shunsaku. For Kimiko, the desire to reunite her family is undermined by her parents' self-absorption. In this respect, Naruse's social observation transcends the contemporaneity of interwar society and converges towards a broader commentary on the human condition, where the quest is elusive and grace lies in the longing.

Paria, 2000

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:10:20 -0500

Paria opens to a Felliniesque shot of a man suspended between earth and sky: in this case, a vagrant - perhaps under the influence - swinging from pipes along the walls of a subway station tunnel. But rather than a metaphor for the struggle between the body and the soul, the suspended state in Paria is one of social uncertainty - a sense of limbo that is also reflected in the disembodied, back of the head shot of a state worker seemingly floating as he looks out from the windshield of a social services van, cruising the evening streets in search of homeless people to transport to the local shelter. The first installment in what would become Nicolas Klotz and screenwriter Elizabeth Perceval's provocative and impassioned trilogy of modern times (along with La Blessure and La Question humaine) - named in homage to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a satire on mass production (and by extension, the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s) - Paria also presents a collective portrait of lives that have been figuratively caught within the cogs of a monolithic, dehumanized system at the turn of the century. One such story is Victor (Cyril Troley), a farmer's son who moved to Paris in search of better job opportunities, only to end up living at a tenement (and makeshift hair salon) eking out an existence as a video store courier. Already behind on his rent, his circumstances become even more precarious when his motorcycle is stolen during a visit with friends. Another story is cocky, silver-tongued Momo (Gérald Thomassin), a homeless young man who spends his idle hours prowling commuter stations. Presented with an opportunity to earn some money by entering into a paper marriage, he begins to insinuate himself into his prospective bride's bemused family.

Proceeding in flashback, the interconnected plight of Momo and Victor (who is first seen struggling with him, resisting attempts to be loaded into the van) seems destined - a fatedness that is revealed in an earlier episode in which Momo steals Victor's shoes after he falls asleep on a train platform, in essence, demonstrating their physical - and socioeconomic - interchangeability. The shot of an African immigrant girl passing Victor in a hallway illustrates another point of intersection among the disenfranchised, alluding to a sense of shared station (note a similar passing encounter in La Question humaine in the interstitial image of immigrants - including Adama Doumbia from La Blessure - being targeted by police for a random identification check). Similarly, Momo and Victor's encounter with an ailing homeless man, Blaise (Didier Berestetsky) on New Year's Eve seems fated, bound by the community of resigned marginalization. Within this context, Victor's search for Annabelle (Morgane Hainaux) in a crowded café and Momo's celebration of his nuptials also represent a paradoxical juncture, converging towards a fleeting glimpse of respite and normalcy, even as they reinforce their increasing distance from them.

La Vie moderne, 2009

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 03:14:12 -0500

In an episode in Richard Copans's autobiographical essay, Racines, an elderly man provides Copans with a tour of his grandparents' house in Picardy, explaining that, like the expression "to put under glass" something that is cherished, he was inspired to convert the modest, turn of the (nineteenth) century home into a museum as a means of capturing the essence of a way of life that no longer exists. In a sense, La Vie moderne, the third chapter in Raymond Depardon's pastoral work in progress Profils paysans, expresses a similar sentiment of admiration and nostalgia. Returning to the farming village of Le Villaret in the mountainous region of Cévennes in the Massif Central, Depardon first visits the remote farm of cattle ranchers, brothers Marcel and Raymond Privat who, both already in their 80s, find the physical demands of their livelihood an increasing challenge, even with the begrudging addition of a family member, Cécile, the new wife of their middle-aged nephew Alain, who left the city life of Calais to live as a farmer after meeting her future husband through a personal ad in the newspaper. Struggling to adjust with unfamiliar household dynamics caused by Cécile and her teenaged daughter, Camille's introduction into what had been a bachelors' home for decades - and perhaps more subtly, their waning authority over family matters as a result of Cécile's influence on Alain - Marcel and Raymond bristle at the idea of a generation gap that has widened since Cécile's arrival, even as they complain of a general lack of deference to elders and the old ways.

Incorporating recurring, seasonal images of long, winding roads that weave the farms together into a collective portrait of isolation and obsolescence - a theme that is insightfully prefigured in the landing shot of Marcel grazing a flock of sheep with his Occitan-trained dog, Mirette - Depardon further juxtaposes images of death that implicitly correlate the fate of these ancestral farms: a visit to the reclusive Paul Argaud who is watching a televised broadcast of Abbé Pierre's funeral; the rapidly declining health of Raymond's prized cow; the news of Marcelle Brès's death, who had been the last inhabitant of the neighboring hamlet of Lhermet. However, the crisis of a disappearing way of life is not only relegated to an aging rural population, as a younger generation of farmers also echo similar tales of hardship and a limited future: Brès's former tenant farmers, Jean-François and Nathalie recount their struggle in the previous year with a virulent parasite that killed several cows, providing not so subtle encouragement to their son to study hard in order to have better opportunities and not follow in their footsteps; Germaine and Marcel Challaye, planning for their retirement, are resigned to selling the family farm after their children expressed a lack of interest in assuming control; Abel Jean and Gilberte Roy have entrusted the farm to their youngest son, Daniel who, in turn, resents being rooted to one place, and prefers the itinerant life of a seasonal worker; a young mother, Amandine Valla, eager to try her hand at farming, cannot afford the added maintenance of raising livestock and is forced to abandon her avocation. Closing with the shot of a sunlit narrow road that now leads away from familiar pastures, Depardon abstains from a direct commentary on cultural extinction and instead, captures the ephemeral moment under his own preservative glass, casting a lingering, reverent gaze over a gradually transforming landscape that is distant and sublime.

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:54:57 -0500

The panning shot of an anonymous city street establishes the tensile, yet integral relationship between citizen and environment in Guy Debord's dense and minimalist essay On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, describing the rows of generic apartment buildings as places of refuge from the constant social immersion imposed by the shared spaces of urban living. Like the market-based industries that propel the economy of these interchangeable cityscapes, social progress has also come to be measured by the mechanism of consumption, and by extension, leisure and recreation have also become commodities. In a sense, culture is not only a reflection of the present but an ingraining of the past, and as a consequence, cannot objectively reflect on the problems of the environment - the society - that cultivates it. This symbiotic relationship between culture and civilization is also contained in Debord's comment that one cannot challenge an organization without challenging its medium of exchange - its language. Visually, Debord reinforces this idea of language as currency through repeated use of interstitial blank screens that suggest both the hollowness of the mediated image and its implicated role as an instrument of social whitewashing. Perhaps the most telling of this compromise is the refiguring of the concept of social gathering from a forum of interaction to a marketing tool for selling beverages and reinforcing the notion of public (and often commercial) spaces as venues for exchanging ideas.

However, mediated images are not only relegated to the fiction of commercial advertisement, revealing itself in the realm of non-fiction in the way a filmmaker defines the scope of a documentary, where the subject is strategically (if arbitrarily) bounded into titrated, consummable sub-doses of a larger, unfilmable reality - a correlation that is reinforced through a similar suturing of a white screen with documentary footage of "real life". Within this paradigm, filmmaking - whether fiction or non-fiction - may also be seen as inherently a construction that, like the urban landscape, is created in the image of the society that consumes it, and therefore, is a tainted medium for creating social revolution. Rather than breaking away from the cinèma de papa that a liberation of cinema represents, the liberation of society requires the destruction of cinema itself as an enabling medium of social language, dismantling an apparatus of projected ideals in exchange for the tabula rasa of an amorphous and indefinable social ideal.

Racines, 2003

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:54:41 -0500

Similar to Boris Lehman's essay film, Searching for My Birthplace, Richard Copans's Racines (Roots) examines the nature of identity, migration, transplantation, and reconstructed history. A routine trip to the dentist provides the point of departure for the filmmaker, as they discuss implants as a way of recreating permanent teeth through artificial roots. For Copans, the analogy proves salient. The son of Simon Copans, an American expatriate and Voice of America jazz radio personality (as well as a communist sympathizer who emigrated to France during the Red Scare to avoid political persecution), his knowledge of his paternal family history had been limited to familiar stories of turn of the century immigrants from old Europe coming to America to avoid religious persecution. But retracing the past through the ravages of history soon proves to be a tangled and disconnected tale. Tracing the family surname to millers at a farm in Vilnius that had once been designated as a ghetto for the country's "stateless cultures" who migrated from other places such as Poland and Russia, Copans is faced with the reality that he may never be able to trace his roots beyond his ancestors' adopted Lithuanian homeland. Finding a kindred spirit in a Yiddish professor from Brooklyn, New York who relocated to Lithuania in order to study - and in some small way, reclaim - traces of his heritage, Copans hears first hand the indirect legacy of the diaspora: abandoned cemeteries now dependent on the charity of expatriates for their maintenance, younger generations who no longer carry on the traditions of their faith, and splintered families who have lost relatives in their search for a better life (in one episode, an octogenarian named Ziske idiosyncratically parallels his reluctance to leave Lithuania and resettle in Israel with his cousin's ill-fated passage on the Titanic in pursuit of a better life in America).

In an encounter with a Jewish family in Vilnius, a passing dinner conversation about traceable history as a kind of status symbol that is often denied ordinary people unexpectedly recalls an earlier conversation in Copans's maternal ancestral hometown of Picardy, where an enterprising man has decided to open his grandparents' home as a preservational museum, arguing that there is an audience interested in a glimpse of their forefathers' nineteenth century peasant life. In a wry coincidence, Copans's American cousin, a certified public accountant, keeps a framed picture of a fabricated family crest (claiming a Russian ancestry that the filmmaker was unable to decisively trace) and a collage of store fronts bearing the Copans name in order to impress clients with his many varied "business ventures" (in reality, the reference to Copans was from name of the street and not directly connected with the family). Perhaps the most illuminating point of convergence occurs in Copans's search through US census logs, assisted by a professional genealogist specializing in African American ancestry who explains that her focus stems from the absence of national archives available before the abolition of slavery in 1865, requiring additional research using ship manifests, plantation owner logs, and property tax assessments to trace distant ancestry. Reconnecting with long-time family friends who share their vivid memories of his grandparents as they immigrated to America to establish a new life, Copans's earlier reference to his father's jazz finds a paradoxical sense of arriving at a terminus in his grandparents' adopted home, where the exhilaration of new cultures transcends the particularity of the immigrant experience and converges towards a human one.

Death on a Full Moon Day, 1997

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:35:55 -0500

For the impoverished villagers of Prasanna Vithanage's Death on a Full Moon Day, the civil war is an abstraction, a distant reality removed from the struggles of everyday life. The idea of war as self-reinforcing, interwoven ritual is prefigured in the opening sound of a Buddhist chant (alluding to the solemn observance of the full moon) that is heard amid images of a rural landscape, creating a sense of disrupted nature in the subsequent shots of a lone automobile traversing a dirt road in the early hours of the morning, and a blind, elderly villager, Wannihami (Joe Abeywickrama) walking barefoot through a parched lakebed to fetch water. However, the advent of a full moon proves far from auspicious, the automobile seen earlier revealed to be a hearse transporting soldiers en route to Wannihami's house to escort the casket of his only son, Bandara back to the village for a proper burial. With the family unable to find closure after the soldiers refuse to allow the opening of the sealed casket for a viewing (presumably in deference to the condition of the remains after he was killed in a landmine explosion), Wannihami refuses to acknowledge that his son has been killed during a bloody skirmish, a skepticism that is seemingly reinforced when a letter from Bandara later arrives in anticipation of his impending homecoming for his younger sister, Sunanda's (Priyanka Samaraweera) wedding.

Vithanage incisively parallels religious themes of cycle, enlightenment, and renewal within the context of endemic poverty in order to expose the dysfunctional institutions that help perpetuate the inhumanity (and unnaturality) of the protracted civil war. In retrospect, Bandara's expressed hopes of providing a better life for his family by becoming a soldier reflects the villagers' sense of despair as well, where young men from the provinces (such as Sunanda's suitor, Somay), unable to eke out a decent living through farming, increasingly see the military as the only means to improve their circumstances which, in turn, indirectly serve to perpetuate a conflict that fosters destabilization (in one episode, the government authorizes the addition of a bus stop in the village in memory of Bandara, linking the seemingly noble pursuit of socioeconomic development with politically-motivated appeasement). This interrelation is further implied in the military's contingency death benefits that preclude independent investigation, where acceptance of payment represents a tacit compensation for silence and complicity. Framed against Wannihami's defiance, the breaking of the seal (and consequently, the metaphoric covenant with these exploitive institutions) is also a humble act of enlightenment - a search for truth in the face of isolation, adversity, and dispossession.

Dark Night of the Soul, 1996

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:30:42 -0500

A transplantation of Leo Tolstoy's turn of the century novel, Resurrection from Tsarist Russia to modern day Sri Lanka, Prasanna Vithanage's Dark Night of the Soul also finds kinship with Shyam Benegal's Ankur and Carl Theodor Dreyer's The President in its potent examination of class division, spiritual desolation, and moral anxiety. Alternating between past and present, objective and subjective points of view, Vithanage retains the epic scope of Tolstoy's novel to cast middle-aged businessman, Suwisal's (Ravindra Randeniya) crisis of conscience as a metaphor for the country's unresolved postcolonial history that continues to foment social unrest. Having once seduced - then promptly abandoned - a servant girl, Piyumi (Swarna Mallawarachchi) in his youth, Suwisal finds himself once again holding her fate in his hands when he is called to serve as a juror in her murder trial after she, now reduced to prostitution, is accused of killing a client in an attempt to commit robbery.

Vithanage poses this idea of personal history as collective consciousness in Suwisal and Piyumi's intersecting fates after a twenty year separation, integrally linking the leftist movements of the late 1960s embraced by student radicals with the ongoing civil war. The duality is illustrated in an episode in which Suwisal and a friend reminisce about their involvement in an organized protest in 1969 that initially seems to reinforce, then negate their commitment to social justice, rationalizing that the ideal outcome would be for Piyumi to be found guilty without ever recognizing her former employer, thus avoiding any potential scandal. Their conversation reframes an earlier flashback in which university student Suwisal returns to the country and decides to briefly join the farmers in their harvest in between studies (a naïve attempt at worker solidarity that is reinforced in a shot of him removing his sandals to walk barefoot behind cattle). But his egalitarian gesture proves to be hollow. In a subsequent encounter, Suwisal, having already taken advantage of the trusting Piyumi, offers her a handful of money in lieu of undying devotion, and later ignores her pleas for help after discovering that she is pregnant. This interconnection between past transgression and present unrest is similarly suggested in Suwisal's return trips to the family mansion after a long absence, initially in his visit home to work on a Marxist thesis away from the chaos of campus protests (and brief his disinterested aunt on how his activism intersects with a global social revolution), and subsequently, to recuperate from the emotional toll of the trial, and is once again confronted with his own impotence after a group of tenant farmers ask for his help in finding their missing sons who have been rounded and disappeared in the waging of the protracted conflict.

At each juncture, Suwisal's actions prove to be in opposition: retreating to privilege amid calls for solidarity, and conforming to majority opinion in order to bring swift, if unjust, closure to a tainted past. Visually, Vithanage illustrates the disjunction through narrative ellipses that not only interweave past and present, but also between indeterminate presents that reflect Suwisal - and by extension, the country's - unreconciled conscience. Similar to Ritwik Ghatak, Vithanage also integrates dissonant, yet naturalistic soundscapes to reinforce rupture and conflict, most notably in the prefiguring sound of a crying woman at the empty mansion that is repeated in a subsequent, similarly dissociated shot of Suwisal taking a shower, and in the amplified sound of dust sheets being removed from furniture that reflects the implicit violence of his deeply buried transgression and the turmoil caused by its revelation. Closing with the shot of Piyumi walking away into the horizon, her haunting image becomes - like Suwisal's (and a nation's) process of redemption - a reflection of a shared uncertainty and broken humanity.

The Pope's Toilet, 2007

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:20:14 -0500

In an episode near the denouement of César Charlone and Enrique Fernández's The Pope's Toilet, grocery runner Beto (César Troncoso), racing across the countryside on his rickety bicycle to install a public toilet in front of his home in time for the papal visit to his village - and more pressingly, the hordes of people expected to attend the holy mass and will invariably need restrooms - is overtaken by a bus filled with Brazilian pilgrims shouting words of encouragement to the hobbling cyclist on their way to the historic event. In a way, the momentary encounter between the struggling, desperate Beto and the pilgrims who express their support from the comfortable distance of a charter bus - but do not offer him a ride to town - reflects the dysfunctional relationship between hierarchical institutions and the people they are entrusted to guide. A historical fiction based on the real-life papal visit of John Paul II to the Uruguayan rural village of Melo during his 1988 Latin American apostolic tour, the film is a wry and trenchant satire on the abstract nature of mediated images, the cycle of poverty, and the exploitive mechanisms of powerful institutions.

Set during Uruguay's transition to democracy after years of military dictatorship, its repressive legacy is still evident in the arbitrary inspections by guards who patrol the porous border between Brazil and Uruguay - a constant, looming threat that is embodied by the intimidating, mobile customs agent Meleyo (Nelson Lence) who, near the beginning of the film, chases a group of returning cyclists from across the hills in his off-road truck before crushing the entire contents of a rider's parcel and confiscating a bottle of rum from Beto's friend, Valvulina (Mario Silva) in retaliation for attempting to running away. Already eking out a meager existence by running grocery orders from local shops to neighboring stores in Brazil, Beto's livelihood is further strained when he is blacklisted by shopkeepers after an afternoon of carousing (propelled, in part, by guards confiscating his groceries after discovering alkaline batteries that had been smuggled, without his knowledge, by a shopkeeper). But salvation seems at hand with the arrival of the pope along with the thousands of pilgrims expected to make the journey into town for the occasion, and villagers have already begun to stake their concessions spots along the route, where they hope to peddle their wares - assorted refreshments, balloons, and commemorative banners - before a generous (and hungry) crowd. Meanwhile, pope fever has also spread to Beto's household, with him eager to earn enough money for a motorcycle that can outrun the customs agents (and prevent further injury to his already hobbled knee), his wife, Carmen (Virginia Méndez) fretting over having enough money to send their teenaged daughter, Silvia (Virginia Ruiz) to a vocational school, and Sylvia, in turn, dreaming of a more glamorous career in journalism, perhaps inspired by the media frenzy surrounding the papal visit that have turned ordinary villagers into perennial television news fixtures.

Interweaving archival footage from street reports and excerpts from the papal visit within the fictional story of Beto's search for a better life, Charlone and Fernández create an ambiguity between truth and fiction that reflect the film's underlying social realism. By presenting the villagers' plight as a series of inequitable encounters - whether by corrupt border guards, shopkeepers (who deduct fees for confiscated items), the media (who sensationalize events in order to create news and boost viewership), and even the church (in an ironic episode, Valvulina's wife, Teresa [Rosario Dos Santos] buys a souvenir medallion from a member of the pope's entourage, even as her vended snacks remained unsold) - the filmmakers reinforce the idea that enabled institutions collectively lead to entrenched marginalization and poverty. It is this sense of collusive exploitation that is implied in Beto's impotent act of protest, implicating both the media and the church in their hollow calls for benediction, as well as the consumerist society (as symbolized by a television that was purchased on installment) that conceals its own degraded status under artificial tokens of privilege.

New York African Film Festival: 2009 Line-up

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:20:47 -0500

The line-up for the 2009 New York African Film Festival has been announced, and this year's selection once again proves why this festival continues to be an indispensable forum for engaging with other histories and cultures that too often remain at the distant periphery of Western consciousness. I'm especially looking forward to the new works by essayist Jean-Marie Téno (Sacred Places) and Sex, Okra and Salted Butter, the new feature from Daratt filmmaker, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, as well as Angèle Diabang Brener's portrait of Sérère poetry singer, Yandé Codou (Yandé Codou, The Griot of Senghor), Siki, Ring Wrestler on World War I hero and boxing legend, Battling Siki who was murdered on the streets of New York in 1925, and The Burning Man - Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave on the immolation murder of Mozambique guest worker, Nhamuave in South Africa. The festival runs from April 8-14, 2009.

Behind the Rainbow (Jihan El-Tahri, 2009)
Wed Apr 8: *8pm; Mon Apr 13: *2:50pm

The Fighting Spirit (George Amponsah, 2007) screening with
Siki, Ring Wrestler (Mamadou Niang, 1993)
Fri Apr 10: 1pm; Sun Apr 12: *5:15pm

Filmmakers Against Racism:
Congo My Foot (Okepne Ojang, 2008)
Martine and Thandeka (Xoliswa Sithole, 2008)
The Burning Man - Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave (Adze Ugah, 2008)
Baraka (Omelga Mthiyane and Riaan Hendricks, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *10pm; Sun Apr 12: *12:30pm

From A Whisper (Wanuri Kahiu, 2008)
Sat Apr 11: *3:00pm; Tue Apr 14: 7:00pm

The Importance of Being Elegant (George Amponsah, 2004)
Thu Apr 9: 2:15; Sat Apr 11: 10pm

In My Genes (Lupita Nyong’o, 2009)
Sun Apr 12: *9:15; Tues Apr 14: 5pm

Jerusalema (Ralph Ziman, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *7:15pm; Tues Apr 14: *9:00pm

Killer Necklace (Judy Kibinge, 2009) screening with
Area Boys (Omelihu Nwanguma, 2008)
Thu Apr 9:* 9pm; Mon Apr 13: *10:00pm

Kinshasa Palace (Jose Laplaine, 2006)
Wed Apr 8: 1:45pm; Mon Apr 13: 5:30pm

Paris or Nothing (Josephine Ndagnou, 2008)
Wed Apr 8: 3:30pm; Mon Apr 13: 7:30pm

The Prodigal Son (Kurt Orderson, 2008) screening with
Bronx Princess (Yoni Brook and Musa Syeed, 2008) and
African Booty Scratcher (Nikyatu Jusu, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: 3pm; Sun Apr 12: *2:40pm

Sacred Places (Jean-Marie Téno, 2009)
Wed Apr 8: *6:00pm; Sat Apr 11: *1pm

Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (Mahamat Saleh Haroun, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *5:10pm; Sun Apr 12: *7:20pm

Triomf (Michael Raeburn, 2008)
Thu Apr 9: *6:15pm; Mon Apr 13: 12:30pm

Wrestling Grounds (Cheick Ndiaye, 2006)
Thu Apr 9: 4pm; Sat Apr 11: *7:35pm

Yandé Codou, The Griot of Senghor (Angèle Diabang Brener, 2008) screening with
Nora (Alla Kovgan and David Hinton, 2008) and
Coming of Age (Judy Kibinge, 2008)
Sat Apr 11: *5:15pm; Tue Apr 14: 2:40pm

*African directors and guest speakers will be present during the festival.

Septiembres, 2007

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:02:29 -0500

At the end of an earlier Festival of Song contest, inmate and reigning singing champion, Norma García, a Mexican national serving a ten year sentence for unwittingly carrying contraband for a friend during a holiday trip to Spain, returns to her narrow cell after briefly basking in the limelight before a captive audience and bids farewell to the film crew with an affectionate request not to forget all the people they had been filming when they leave the prison and return to their daily routine. In hindsight, Norma's parting comment captures the sincere and impassioned social observation that lies at the core of Carles Bosch's incisive chronicle of the annual Festival of Song competition at the Soto del Real prison on the outskirts of Madrid. Similar to Maria Ramos's unmoderated documentaries on the Brazilian justice system (Justice and Behave), Septiembres frames the plight of the inmates as a procedural, chronicling moments in their everyday life as they prepare from one contest to the next.

Having won the cash prize of 290 euros for the past two contests (which promptly went to pay for tuition at a correspondence school and subsequently, dental treatment), Norma reveals that she is planning to buy her young daughter a Christmas present if she wins this year's contest, having continued to maintain the ruse (albeit tenuously) for the past three years that she has gone far away to work. The ruse of a pesky, overseas job also proves convenient for Argentinean national, Adalberto "Beto" Usoli, explaining to his beloved elderly grandmother that his extended absence and infrequent (and spotty reception) calls home are the result of working aboard a cruise ship. Accused of embezzling 3,000 euros from his employer, Beto moved to Spain in order to be closer to his Barcelonian lover, and is petitioning to resolve his case in the Spanish court system, fearing a lengthy separation from his partner if he is extradited back to Argentina. Following one's heart proves to be Lithuanian immigrant and counterfeiter, Rudolf Schlessinger's Achilles heel as well, having violated the terms of his weekend furlough in order to spend more time with an attractive young woman he had just met, and has been handed down an additional sentence for the impulsive act, delaying his upcoming parole. Beto's limbo within the Spanish court system is also echoed in the indefinite imprisonment of a young woman, Patricia Ávarez, the eldest of twelve children who is serving an open ended sentence for drug possession, and in the plight of Arturo Jiménez, a Madrileño of gypsy descent and devoted family man who has been detained for over two years at the Valdemoro Men's Prison awaiting a court date on drug trafficking charges.

The wide reach of the drug trade also casts its shadow on recovering addict and self-admitted black sheep of the family, Estefanía Maestre (who, like the young, unemployed couple in José Luis Guerín's En Construcción, hails from the working class port town of El Chino) who has found a measure of stability in her life with her fiancé Cristian (and who, in turn, is serving ten years for wounding his former girlfriend's lover in a jealous rage) and is eager to move on, but must wait until they both serve out their sentences. Another is José Antonio Gardoqui, the gravel-voiced, former drummer of a popular 80s band called "Burning" who once robbed banks to feed his habit, and his girlfriend and fellow inmate, Fortu, who tried to save her addicted children from the streets (ultimately, in vain) by buying drugs for them. In each story, Bosch illustrates an underlying pattern of marginalization and underprivilege - poverty, under-education, racism, alienation, and despair - that binds each contestant's search for happiness and normalcy. As in Ramos's films, the absence of an overarching commentary creates a sense of intimacy between subject and viewer. However, while Ramos reinforces the image of entrenched hierarchical structures in interactions with authorities, Bosch collapses these structures by filming solely from the perspective of the inmates, enabling their figurative self-expression through heartfelt song renditions and articulated personal aspirations that capture the humanity beneath their marginalized lives, and the quotidian moments of grace that reaffirm their dignity.

Rendez-vous With French Cinema: 2009 Line-up

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:00:33 -0500

The line-up for this year's Rendez-vous with French Cinema has been announced, and with the back to back programming with Film Comment Selects, it looks as though I'll have to make some tough planning choices on which films to catch on an extended weekend. Suffice it to say...help!

OPENING NIGHT

Paris 36 / Faubourg 36 (Christophe Barratier, 2008)
Alice Tully Hall: Thu Mar 5: 8:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE

35 Shots of Rum / 35 Rhums Claire Denis, 2008)
Film Society of Lincoln Center: Fri Mar 13: 1:30pm
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 6:15pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 8:00pm
IFC Center: Thu Mar 12: 7:00pm

Mesrine Part 1 / Mesrine, L’instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet, 2008)
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 6:15pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 1:30pm

Mesrine Part 2 / Mesrine, L’ennemi public n° 1 (Jean-François Richet, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 6:00pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 3:50pm

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

The Apprentice / L’apprenti (Samuel Collardey, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 3:45pm
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 8:45pm
IFC: Mon Mar 9: 7:00pm

Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 3:45pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 9:10pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 1:00pm
IFC: Fri Mar 6: 9:30pm

Change of Plans / Le code a changé (Danièle Thompson, 2009)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 6:20pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 8:45pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 3:30pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 7:00pm

Eden Is West / Eden à l’ouest (Costa-Gavras, 2009)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 9:00pm
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 1:30pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 4:00pm

The Joy of Singing / Le Plaisir de chanter (Ilan Duran Cohen, 2008)
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 3:30pm
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 1:00pm
IFC: Wed Mar 11: 7:00pm

The Other One / L’Autre (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 9:00pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 5:30pm
IFC: Tue Mar 10: 7:00pm

Stella (Sylvie Verheyde, 2008)
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 1:00pm
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 6:15pm
IFC: Wed Mar 11: 9:30pm

Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot, 2009)
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 8:45pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 6:45pm
IFC: Thu Mar 12: 9:30pm

NEW YORK PREMIERE
The Beaches of Agnès / Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 1:30pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 8:45pm

The Girl from Monaco / La Fille de Monaco (Anne Fontaine, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 1:00pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 6:35pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 1:30pm

Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 8:45pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 12:30pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 4:00pm

Versailles (Pierre Schoeller, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 3:30pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 6:00pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 1:30pm

With a Little Help from Myself / Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera (François Dupeyron, 2008)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 4:10pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 1:00pm
FLSC: Mon Mar 9: 6:15pm
IFC: Fri Mar 6: 7:00pm

WORLD PREMIERE
The Girl on the Train / La Fille du RER (André Téchiné, 2009)
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 3:30pm
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 9:10pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 6:45pm

TOUT COURT: NEW FRENCH SHORTS
France, 2008; 90m
Baby (Bébé, Clément Michel); New Skin (Peau neuve, Clara Elalouf); Good Night Malik (Bonne nuit Malik, Bruno Danan); The Fire, The Blood, The Stars (Le feu, le sang, les étoiles, Caroline Deruas); My Little Brother from the Moon (Mon petit frère est de la lune, Frédéric Philibert); and My Name Is Dominic (Tous les enfants s’appellent Dominique, Nicolas Silhol).
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 4:00pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 3:15pm