Film Fest Journal + Notes

Nelson Pereira dos Santos by Darlene J. Sadlier

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:20:18 -0500

With Nelson Pereira dos Santos's body of work deeply rooted in an aesthetic as well as political and social consciousness, it is not surprising that Darlene J. Sadlier analyzes the trajectory of dos Santos's cinema through a similar paradigmatic approach of integrating film form with historical context. Brought up in a middle-class, cinephile household in a rapidly modernizing (and consequently, culturally vibrant) postwar São Paolo, dos Santos's involvement with the left movement in the 1940s was incited more by humanism - particularly, with respect to the socioeconomic disparity and underdevelopment of the sertão (northeast) region - than opposition to the authoritarian government of Getúlio Vargas. Despite working towards a law degree, dos Santos had spent his academic career pursuing filmmaking, traveling to Paris to embark on a makeshift film studies crash course (after a failed attempt to enroll at the renowned IDHEC [Institut des hautes études cinématographiques]), and taking on documentary projects commissioned by the Communist party. It was during these lean years working in cash-strapped productions that dos Santos, now living with his young family in a Rio suburb near the city's largest favela, conceived the idea for Rio, 100 Degrees - a film that confronted the unvarnished reality of life in the slums that, until then, had remained below the periphery of social discourse on everyday life in the city (even as the favela maintained a visible presence atop a hill):

In contrast to the aerial shots of the tourist sites, the camera takes a position low to the ground to photograph the favela from the base of the hill to the top. This angle enables dos Santos to give audiences a better sense of the size and steepness of the hill as well as the closeness and poverty of the wooden shacks, which lack even running water. We see a boy walking up the hill with a can of water on his head and several others making their way down narrow paths and onto the paved streets filled with marketplaces, cafés, and palm trees. These few shots make clear that the favela is quite close to the city; but life in the metropole is so much richer that it seems like another planet.

In the essay, Rio, Zona Norte, Mandacaru Vermelho, Boca de Ouro, and the beginning of the Cinema Novo Movement, Sadlier examines dos Santos's early, transitional films that, while entirely different in their scope (and levels of critical and commercial success), reveal recurring themes and methodologies that would resurface throughout his body of work: race and indigenous identity versus assimilated Western culture (Rio, Zona Norte), landlessness and migrant workers (Mandacaru Vermelho), and a translational approach to literary adaptation (Boca de Ouro). Also, by locating these films within the chronology of Cinema Novo, Sadlier makes a salient point on dos Santos's precedence with respect to the birth of the movement, correcting the common misconception that aligns his cinema squarely with the emergence of Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, and Arnold Jabor under the rubric of Cinema Novo.

Sadlier expounds on Dos Santos's translational approach to adapting literature in her detailed analysis of Vidas secas. Based on the novel by Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos (whose autobiographical novel, Memories of Prison, would later be adapted by dos Santos in 1984), dos Santos not only took advantage of the novel's cyclical structure to rearrange the self-contained stories for dramatic effect, but also dispensed with much of the characters' philosophical inner monologues in order to retain a more visceral connection with the nature of poverty.

Between and within sections, characters' thoughts and moods often undergo swift, radical changes, revealing their curiosity about language and undermining certain stereotypical notions about "primitives" derived from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. In fact, Ramos's novel is as much or more concerned with the "human and contradictory" language and consciousness of the retirante (peasant migrant) as it is with the brutal landowning system of the Northeast.

...Dos Santos's film dramatizes this scene in its entirety [an episode in which the oldest son struggles with his mother's explanation of the concept of inferno], but it somewhat downplays the boy's curiosity about the words and his desire to understand what he does not know, giving greater emphasis to the ironic relationship between the word 'hell' and the boy's immediate surroundings.

In Culture and Cannibalism: Como era gostoso o meu francês, Sadlier frames How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman within the context of cultural extermination as a result of the military government's attempts to bring "civilization" to the indigenous people as part of its national development campaign. By drawing on colonial history, the cannibalism serves as an allegory for the consumption of one culture by another - a phenomenon that speaks directly to Brazilian society's continued emulation of European culture long after the country's independence. (Note: The equation of cannibalism with cultural consumption also appears in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma).

Sadlier further proposes an intriguing corollary that by filming from the perspective of the indigenous tribe, dos Santos is recreating a historical record that had been erased from "official" history through a process of what critic Raymond Williams describes as "selective tradition" in which culture is redefined by the prevailing attitudes of contemporary society (and that, by nature, reinforces these biases and aspirations).

Viewed in these terms, dos Santos's film is less interested in distorting a canonical text than in revealing what that text omits. Its documentary-like or "anthropological" style directly participates in an effort of reinterpretation by providing the viewer with a simulation of what has been lost, not just in time but also through the selective cultural process. Dos Santos's solidarity with the Tupinambá can therefore be described as an ideological position in powerful contrast with the interests and values of the dominant class in Brazil, which has always identified with Europeans, especially the French.

The collapse of populism in the 1960s also coincided with dos Santos's divergence from a purely leftist agenda towards a more humanist cinema, a transition that is reflected in the fabular dimension to Ogum's Amulet:

Although dos Santos had long been aware of religious practices in the favela, his approach in his earliest films was strictly Marxist, focusing on social class and race while implicitly dismissing religion as an opiate of the masses. O amuleto de Ogum makes clear not only the centrality of religion in the lives of the poor but also the ways in which umbanda reinforces class solidarity and gives a kind of power to individuals who are caught in a violent and corrupt world.

Stadlier also illustrates this ideological shift in her analysis of Memories of Prison and Cinema of Tears. In Memories of Prison, dos Santos creates early ambiguity on the identity of the author and main character, Graciliano Ramos, by placing him in the milieu of the general prison population, in essence, democratizing the attribution of "hero" to all the prisoners. In Cinema of Tears, dos Santos's Latin American contribution to the BFI's Century of Cinema project (on filmmaker searching for a lost film that connects him to a tragic episode from his past), he embraces the escapism of popular studio-produced films and their ability to connect with the audience.

The actor's search through the archive is also, of course, a fictional device that allows dos Santos to show brief clips, most of them in pristine condition, of wonderfully evocative black-and-white films of the studio era. By this means he pays tribute to a generation of directors, cinematographers, and stars who became internationally famous largely because of their work in melodramas. Although the content of these films had little to do with the social reality of the moviegoing public, the Mexican melodramas were among the highest-quality films made in Latin America. In effect, dos Santos who began his career as a neorealist and a symbol of the Latin American New Wave, takes a revisionary approach to a genre that, like the chanchada [musical comedies], was often criticized by the Left because of its association with Hollywood.

Short Notes from The Calm After the Storm: Making Sense of Lebanon's Civil War

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:24:16 -0500

Ready To Wear Imm Ali (Dima El-Horr) is a delightful, understated comedy that like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention and Randa Chahal Sabag's The Kite, finds brittle humor in the absurdities of everyday life under a protracted occupation. Ostensibly chronicling an enterprising woman's efforts to launch a fashion boutique in a bucolic farming village and her malfunctioning neon sign, the film effectively conveys the climate of secrecy and distrust as ordinary people struggle to find some semblance of independence and self-determination in the face of uncertainty, transforming her confusion into a potent commentary on empowerment and solidarity.

While Falling from Earth (Chadi Zeneddine) suggests affinity with the films of Theo Angelopoulos in its intersection of personal and national history, the film finds greater kinship with Hector Faver's Memory of Water in its interweaving elements of documentary, fiction, and imagination. As in Faver's film, Falling from Earth is equally poetic and frustratingly heavy-handed in its elliptical and allusive tale of an aging, disconnected exile who parses through the rubble of his tormented past in an attempt to come to terms with his mortality and legacy.

Of the three short video works in the Akram Zaatari program, All Is Well at the Border proves to be the strongest entry, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Ici et ailleurs in its tale of two cities and the alienating, fragile peace of a status quo struggle for power and control. By presenting modern-day Lebanon as a collage of scarred streets, demolition, and reconstruction accompanied by the testimonies of former political prisoners during the occupation, Zaatari creates a potent allegory for the Palestinian conflict and a haunting survey of war's subtle, yet indelible imprint on physical and human landscapes.

The second offering in the Zaatari program, Red Chewing Gum is more experimental and abstract in its execution than the quasi-documentary, All Is Well at the Border, a spoken word rendering of two estranged childhood friends and the memory of an encounter with a chewing gum peddler. Punctuated by the repeated refrain, "no sugar left" as the peddler discards his used gum into a cardboard box, the film serves as a metaphor for the fracture and irreparable damage of the Lebanese civil war.

The least effective entry in the Zaatari program is Crazy for You, a survey of the mating ritual told from the perspective of working class men in modern day Lebanon. Colorful and forthright in its stories of romantic conquests, Zaatari treads a culturally taboo-breaking, if banal road in examining the country's decidedly mixed message towards modernity and socially progressive attitudes - a dichotomy that Zaatari wryly reinforces in a bawdy drinking song of machismo strength - one that can withstand the weight of a collapsing wall - shot against the rubble of a dilapidated house.

Part autobiography and part refiguration of turbulent history, Randa Chahal Sabag's Our Imprudent Wars, like Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost, is a clear-eyed and probing assessment of the personal toll of a family's lifelong activism and resistance. Born to intellectual, globe-trotting parents, Sabag would bear witness to the tumult resulting from her family's commitment to social engagement - first, in her parents' militant, left-leaning politics, then subsequently, in her older siblings' involvement with the militia during the Lebanese civil war. Struggling to reconstruct her family's ambiguous and ever-shifting circumstances during the war, Sabag presents an incisive analogy to the murky politics, inflexible ideology, and dubious alliances that led the protracted civil war itself.

The militancy of ordinary people during the civil war and occupation of southern Lebanon also provides the framework for Sabag's Souha Randa, a fascinating portrait of (then) recently liberated radicalized student turned communist revolutionary, Souha Bechara who, at the age of 21, was arrested after her failed assassination of provisional officer, General Antoine Lahad. Following Bechara as she readjusts to her former life - albeit this time, as a national hero - in a newly liberated southern Lebanon, the film interweaves historical footage with Souha's emotional visit to Khiam prison where she once languished and was repeatedly tortured. With the prison now transformed into a teaching museum commemorating the struggle, the contrasting images of Khiam (made all the more visceral by Bechara's account of her ordeal) creates an insightful juxtaposition - facilitating a constructive dialogue to a new generation in its acknowledgement of turbulent history and celebration of renewal.

Last Train Home, 2009

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:42:19 -0500

From the seemingly mundane (if logistically nightmarish) objective of documenting the annual mass exodus of migrant workers from industrial cities as they return home to their rural villages in time for the Chinese New Year, Lixin Fan poignantly captures the dissolution of family in the face of globalism, poverty, and disenfranchisement in Last Train Home. Shot from the perspective of factory workers Changhua and Sugin Zhang over the course of three years as they travel for their only trip home to Guangzhou in the Sichuan province for the year, the film understatedly reveals the toll that their absence has taken on the children they have left behind. For their adolescent son, the separation has led to a need for affirmation, trying to win his parents' approval by repeatedly rehashing his accomplishments in school (feeding off their constant nagging on the importance of a good education). For Qin, their strong willed teenaged daughter, her grandparents - now only her grandmother - are her true parents and are entitled to her deference, rejecting their attempts at discipline and authority. With Qin eager to assert her independence and leave the village to try her hand at factory work, the Zhangs' relatively benign drama of getting home each New Year holiday becomes a potent commentary on the broader cultural significance of rapid industrialization on traditional values of family, caring for elders, and providing a better life for the next generation. Rather than auguring the promise of a new year, the holiday becomes a paradoxical signpost for what has been irreparably lost in the pursuit of progress and economic relief. As Fan poetically remarks during the Q&A on the parents' enduring sacrifices and hardship for their family, "they burn their candles out so that their children's light could shine brightly."

I Am Love, 2009

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:54:37 -0500

With its baroque interiors and saturated compositions, Luca Guadagnino's sprawling I Am Love recalls the melodramas of Luchino Visconti in its lush and operatic, if oddly clinical and overwrought treatise on passion, identity, and destiny. And like Visconti's The Leopard, a majestic dinner party also foretells the end of a way of life: the retirement of Milanese textile magnate, Edoardo Recchi (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his decision to cede the reins of the family business to his son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) as well as Tancredi's oldest son, Edo (Flavio Parenti). With her husband and son now immersed in the day-to-day operations of the company and her only daughter, Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) studying abroad, Tancredi's Russian-born wife, Emma (Tilda Swinton) is confronted with the isolation and boredom of her increasingly empty, well-appointed household (in one episode, Emma tries to engage her attendant, Ida [Maria Paiato] in a conversation, but is respectfully cut short, mindful of their class difference). Embarking on an extended holiday through the Italian countryside en route to Betta's photography exhibition, Emma's senses are soon re-awakened by the change of scenery, and with it, a newfound liberation and resurfaced identity away from the Recchi clan. Guadagnino deploys an arsenal of familiar, allusive, piecemeal plots in lieu of a tightly woven narrative to convey Emma's rekindled passion and reconnection to her past (including the use of an intrusive, swollen musical soundtrack): the equation of food with the senses (Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate), the coupling in the wilderness as a reflection of essential human desire (Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus), the tragedy of discovery and rejection (Louis Malle's Damage). Rather than a modern day take on the classical melodrama by interweaving storytelling and evocative imagery, I Am Love proves to be as fragile and diffused as the façade of its hermetic, carefully constructed beautiful world.

Dogtooth, 2009

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:40:19 -0500

In Yorgos Lanthimos's previous film, Kinetta, an amateur film crew converges at a resort hotel in the off season to reenact accident and crime scenes, blurring the bounds between reality and staging in their obsessive attention to detail and complete immersion in their inscrutable project. In a sense, Dogtooth proves to be an extension of these themes of isolation, psychological ambiguity, and constructed reality. Each day, after their father (Christos Stergioglou) drives away from the gates of their secluded house in the suburbs, the older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), younger daughter (Anna Kalaitzidou), and son (Hristos Passalis) follow a strict regimen of tape-recorded (creative) vocabulary lessons (one that oddly assigns new definitions to everyday words), prescribed meals, and physical activities under the watchful eye of their mother (Michelle Valley). As in Kinetta, their motives remain unclear, and only the performance of the absurd ritual betrays their anxiety and longing. During the Q&A for the film, Lanthimos indicated that his initial idea was a science fiction in which families were being outlawed, and the lengths that people would go to in order to keep their own family intact. Intriguingly, the temporally indeterminate setting - represented by rotary dial telephones, cassette recorders, and VCRs - not only alludes to the film's conceptual origin, but also reinforces the children's hermetic existence that, like the obsolete household gadgets, is equally carefully preserving and repressively stunting.

Sound and Fury, 1988

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:22:51 -0500

While the highly stylized, oneiric sequences in Sound and Fury portend Jean-Claude Brisseau's preoccupation with erotic imagery, his visceral, unsentimental portrait of childhood alienation nevertheless aligns closer to the naturalism of Ken Loach's Kes and Jean Eustache's Mes petites amoureuses than the surrealism of his later films. Indeed, Bruno's (Vincent Gasperitsch) initiation into his new life in the suburbs proves to be as mythological as the shrouded women that occupy his waking dreams, greeted by a real-life trial by fire as he runs a gauntlet of burning doormats that have been set ablaze by his reckless neighbor, Jean-Roger (François Négret). Arriving at an empty apartment with a bird in tow following the death of his guardian, Bruno's aimlessness is further compounded by his mother's frequent absences from home (communicating with him only through assorted notes that she leaves behind), a sense of isolation that further draws him to Bruno and his equally dysfunctional, yet fiercely devoted family. Another surrogate also surfaces in Bruno's life. Struggling to keep up with his grade level, Bruno's idealistic teacher (Fabienne Babe) offers to tutor him after school and becomes a neutralizing influence to Jean-Roger's increasingly destructive antics. But when Jean-Roger's household is upended by the news of his older brother's (Thierry Helene) decision to move out, Bruno once again finds himself caught up in the entropy of his friend's unraveling life, torn between a need to belong and to be loved. By relegating his now familiar (and arguably indulgent) images of ecstatic angels into the periphery, Sound and Fury is perhaps Brisseau's most accessible and honest film, retaining the intriguing, provocative nature of his body of work without the distraction of overripe sexuality that has diluted his later films (most notably Secret Things and Exterminating Angels).

Victor... Before It's Too Late, 1998

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:50:24 -0500

In Sandrine Veysset's Victor... Before It's Too Late, social observation and whimsicality oddly - but seamlessly - converge into a bracing exploration of family, connection, and healing. From the opening sequence of an anxious Victor (Jérémy Chaix) staring out at mobile airplanes with both wistfulness and fear that segues into a shot of him running away in the dark of night after a seemingly surreal act of violence, Veyssett creates something of a eccentric realist fable. Rescued by carnival attendant Mick (Mathieu Lané) who promptly deposits him at the door of a prostitute, Triche (Lydia Andrei), Victor soon finds a kindred spirit in the troubled young woman, bound together by a mutual history of parental abuse and sublimated dysfunction. Veysett ingeniously captures the ambiguity between reality and imagination to reflect Victor's confusion and uncertainty over the adult world around him (a sense of dread that is also reinforced by him wearing a red coat that evokes images of Red Riding Hood traversing the forest), striking a delicate balance between gritty realism and fractured fairytale that, like Mick's traveling carnival, offers respite in its fleeting moments of mundane grace.

Morphia, 2008

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:02:48 -0500

Adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov's collection of autofictional stories, A Country Doctor's Notebook, Aleksei Balabanov's Morphia is an unvarnished portrait of rural Russia at the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution. Told from the perspective of an idealistic young doctor, Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin), Morphia retains the humor and texturality of Bulgakov's prose to underscore Polyakov's difficult and overwhelming adjustment to the isolation of life in the country where he has moved to serve as the region's only physician. Still uncertain over his medical skills (often running back from the clinic to his nearby study in order to review textbooks on the medical procedures that he is about to perform) and struggling to cope with the backwardness of the community that often endanger his patients (in one episode, the parents of a girl suffering from acute asphyxia refuse to consent to an emergency tracheotomy, arguing that such a procedure would cause certain death), Polyakov finds unexpected respite in a morphine injection that had been administered by head nurse, Anna Nicolaevna (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) to treat an allergic reaction. However, as the demands of his job continue to mount, Polyakov's dependence soon turns into full-blown addiction, leading him to increasingly desperate and reckless acts when a war-driven medical rationing threatens to cut off his supply. By emphasizing the intersection of personal and national history, Balabanov not only captures the social conditions that enabled the revolution, but also establishes Polyakov's obsession and paranoia within the context of his seemingly more altruistic efforts to educate the rural community, not unlike the agitprop trains that toured the countryside to spread the gospel of the revolution (note that Polyakov is first seen arriving by train). In essence, by correlating Polyakov's self-destruction with his idealism, Morphia also serves as a pointed allegory for the dysfunction that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union - a tragicomic denouement to a noble social experiment that, like the film's flawed, well-intentioned hero, had lost its way.

Air Doll, 2009

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:27:12 -0500

During a poignant encounter in Hirokazu Kore-eda's idiosyncratic, yet droll and resonant contemporary fable, Air Doll, a reclusive doll maker, Sonoda (Jô Odagiri) tells a troubled inflatable doll turned video store clerk, Nozomi (Du-na Bae) that the main difference between her and a human being is biodegradability. In a way, Sonoda's simplified differentiation between burnable and nonburnable trash captures the essence of Air Doll as well, exploring not only socially reductive gender roles, but also the meaning of being human in a culture of technology, mass production, and consumption that substitutes connection for instant gratification. At its most basic is Nozomi's role as a sexual surrogate for her owner, Hideo (Itsuji Itao) who, despite naming her after a former girlfriend, prefers to avoid the emotional entanglements of a real-life relationship. Another is her misdirected attempt at goodwill towards an insecure receptionist that alludes to the problems of aging in a youth-obsessed society, having been increasingly marginalized at work, replaced by her younger coworker. Another is her friendship with an elderly man who relies on a portable breathing apparatus for survival, recasting the notion of the human body as a network of biological functions within the modern reality of artificial life support systems. Another surrogacy emerges in the brooding Junichi's (Arata) fetishistic attraction towards her, implied in his continued obsession (and perhaps guilt) over a lost love. It is this recurring convergence of organic and synthetic, structure and plasticity throughout the film that is also reflected in the bookending image of a young woman awakening to find beauty in the mundane, a transitory affirmation of humanity in the face of obsolescence and disposability.

Land of Madness, 2009

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:12:03 -0500

In its idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary, self-confessional, and deconstruction, Land of Madness is a droll and refreshing throwback to Luc Moullet's early essay films like Anatomy of a Relationship and Origins of a Meal. Returning to his bucolic, ancestral hometown in the Southern Alps, Moullet embarks on a whimsical, homegrown investigation of the region's disproportionally high rate of mental illness. Proposing that this geographical hotbed forms a pentagonal "land of madness" - one that, for some unknown reason, has an inactive center that, like the eye of a hurricane, defies the phenomenon - Moullet suggests some suspect pathologies, perhaps mutations caused by a Chernobyl-styled irradiation, or behavioral adaptation to a medical affliction, such as a prevalence of goiter that would have invariably led to a culture of "slowness". Moullet then expounds on his theory by presenting a string of bizarre crimes that have occurred over the past century at the vertex towns - some motivated by passion, theft, or revenge, others remaining unsolved mysteries. As in his earlier essays, Moullet concludes with an intersection of personal experience and social observation that recontextualizes the basis of the argument and leads to further debate (with his wife, Antonietta Pizzorno) - in this case, a harbored family grief over a relative who had committed a senseless murder.

Kinatay, 2009

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:44:59 -0500

The opening sequence of Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay provides an intriguing foil in its organic, intersecting stories that mirror the chaos of the city, as a young working class couple (and new parents) Cecille (Mercedes Cabral) and Peping (Coco Martin) make their way to city hall to get married and, along the way, encounter a news crew reporting on a potential suicide jumper. With a year left to his police academy training, Peping is eager to make a good impression on his superior officers, even helping out in their daily routine of intimidating street vendors to extort money. However, when an officer recruits him for an unspecified operation involving an exotic dancer, Peping is soon initiated into a darker world of drug dealing, prostitution, and violence, and is forced to confront his complicity in the systematic corruption. Similar to Mendoza's previous film Serbis, Kinatay provides an illuminating, if truncated regional panorama of a contemporary Filipino city - in this case, the industrial city of Mandaluyong. Interweaving cultural landscape and moral ambiguity, the film finds kinship with Orso Miret's Le Silence in its well-intentioned, but ultimately impotent social critique. Indeed, by abruptly shifting from the organic approach of the opening sequence to a distilled, linear (if not myopic) perspective that dominates the rest of the film (except for a tire changing scene near the conclusion), Mendoza oddly supplants his fascinating and detailed cultural observation with a far more conventional psychological portrait of guilt, and in the process, creates a sense of indirection not unlike the dilemma faced by his indecisive protagonist.

Persecution, 2009

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:02:16 -0500

The themes explored in Patrice Chéreau's probing, tightly constructed Persecution are prefigured in the film’s disorienting (and quintessentially Chéreau) opening sequence. Scanning from one anonymous commuter to another, a panhandler makes her way through a crowded train before someone makes inopportune eye contact, and she responds by slapping her face. The episode intrigues a bystander, Daniel (Romain Duris) and impulsively follows the shaken victim to the nearest exit, eager to uncover the non-verbal cues that had been exchanged in the moments before the heated encounter. In hindsight, this convergence of fixation, contact, rejection, and violence also consumes Daniel in his personal life. Hopping from one construction site to another working as a home remodeling contractor (which serves as his temporary residence as well), Daniel is searching for some permanence and constancy in his relationship with his distant, jet-setting girlfriend, Sonia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but their interaction is often reduced to voice messages and chance meetings with mutual friends. Ironically, ever searching for ways to hold his Sonia’s attention, Daniel has only succeeded in capturing the interest of a lonely, middle-aged man (Jean-Hugues Anglade) who has begun to stalk him at his latest job site. Stitching together pieces of a seemingly rootless and unremarkable life as itinerant worker, nursing home volunteer, and insecure lover, Chéreau creates a lucid and provocative exposition on the ephemeral - and searing - nature of the search for human connection.

Applause, 2009

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:46:48 -0500

From the first images of Applause, Martin Zandvliet seeks to capture a rawness and immediacy in his complex, if familiar portrait of a recovering alcoholic. Shot in grainy, desaturated medium and close-ups with a handheld camera, a middle-aged woman (Paprika Steen), seemingly under the influence, makes a candid assessment of her relationship with her husband. A reference to their Anglicized names, George and Martha, presents an initial disconnect, and subsequent confrontations with her unseen husband recontextualizes her drunken tirade as scenes from Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The interconnection - and dissociation - between reality and drama also provides the framework for the respected actress, Thea's volatile personality. Unable to maintain a relationship since her divorce from Christian (Michael Falch), and having relinquished custody of her children to him after an alcohol-fueled act of negligence, Thea is eager to turn over a new leaf. But soon, the delineation between real-life and performance collapses for her, measuring her struggle to reconnect within the emotional arcs of a staged drama, and in the process, drifts even further away from finding some semblance of a normal life that continues to elude her. In its grittiness and intimacy, Applause recalls the spirit of John Cassavetes's cinema, most notably, Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence. However, it is also this association that ultimately undermines the film's potency by framing its provocative character study of self-destruction and recovery in a generic looseleaf of conventional tropes and allusive homages.

Perfect Life, 2008

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:16:16 -0500

Composed as parallel narratives on the status of women in the capitalist-fueled, rapidly expanding economy of contemporary China - one, a fictional account of Li Yueying (Yao Qianyu), a working class young woman and her search for a better life; the other, a documentary on Jenny, a middle-class housewife and mother undergoing a divorce - Emily Tang's A Perfect Life follows in the vein of Wang Bing and Jia Zhangke in presenting a cultural portrait of the "other" China. Estranged from her parents, disconnected from her coddled, slacker brother, and drifting from one low paying job to another as she chases after job opportunities, Yueying's story is, in a way, a metaphor for China itself in her rootlessness, ambition, and facility for constant reinvention (During the course of the film, Li appears as an aspiring performer, prosthetic factory worker, hotel maid, flight attendant impostor, bride, shopkeeper, and lover). Similarly, Jenny's story embodies the insecurity and disempowerment that comes with profound cultural transformation. Compelled to re-enter the workplace after her increasingly messy divorce, her gradual slide into poverty is implied in her constant job hunting and in the milieu of her interviews that shift from a comfortable Hong Kong apartment to a rented dormitory bunk bed near a dance hall. By capturing a seemingly mundane encounter between the two women at Yueying's shop (Tang ingeniously keeps Yueying out of frame until Jenny leaves the store to maintain the narrative distinction), Tang insightfully reflects on their interconnected destinies - a dissolution of the bounds between reality and fiction that culminates in the image of Yueying posing with her wedding picture, figuratively rejecting and reinforcing her created image.

Nucingen House, 2008

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:57:28 -0500

Structured as a tale within a tale, Raoul Ruiz's fractured, defiantly illogical Nucingen House returns to the territory of On Top of the Whale and its otherworldly, tongue in cheek sense of foreboding in its hermetic construction of polyglot characters, suspended time, and inescapable limbo. Unfolding as a reconstructed memory told by an American gambler, Will James (Jean-Marc Barr) upon overhearing a nearby dinner conversation discussing - rather imprecisely - a third hand account of the strange events that James and his fragile wife, Anne Marie (Elsa Zylberstein) had encountered years earlier during their stay at a remote estate called Nucingen House, the film incorporates familiar Ruizian elements of mnemonic devices, dark humor, and repetition in its loopy tale of haunting and possession. Having arrived at Patagonia to claim property that he had won in a bet and facilitate Anne Marie's recuperation, the unwitting couple is soon introduced to the household's idiosyncratic rules (one that relegates certain languages and religion to peripheral areas of the house) and equally eccentric family - an insomniac housemaid (Miriam Heard) who seems to exist in a perpetual state of waking dream, an indifferent patriarch (Laurent Malet) who refuses to leave but cannot pay rent, a young man who seems constantly pressed for time (Thomas Durand), a flirtatious young woman (Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre) who continues to mourn the loss of her best friend, Léonore (Audrey Marnay), and a perennial houseguest [and family physician (Luis Mora)] prone to taking cat naps at the dinner table. Ever straddling the line between highbrow and camp, Nucingen House ultimately suffers from a broader schism, where atmosphere is counteracted by the starkness of video, and any cultural allegory on modern day Chile is tempered by a reinforcing self-awareness of its construction.

Film Comment's Best of the Decade Avant Garde Poll/21st Century Limited Program

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:19:00 -0500

I was asked to participate in Film Comment's recently published A Decade in the Dark: Avant-Garde Film and Video 2000-2009 poll, and I'm happy to see that in addition to the poll, the FSLC is also curating a series of avant-garde programs based on the results of the poll over the course of three Sundays in July, which includes several films that were on my submitted list. Here are the programs on tap. My list is appended at the end:

July 11

Program 1: Pictures of Quiet Light
Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky)
The Great Art of Knowing (David Gatten)
Pitcher of Colored Light (Robert Beavers)

Program 2: Breaking the Waves
Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta)
At Sea (Peter Hutton)
The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (Stan Brakhage)

July 18

Program 3: I'll Keep It With Mine
She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh)
Nest of Tens (Miranda July)
Poetry and Truth (Peter Kubelka)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky)
The General Returns from One Place to Another (Michael Robinson)
Rehearsals for Retirement (Phil Solomon)

Program 4: Some Velvet Morning
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (Daishi Saito)
Easter Morning (Bruce Conner)
False Aging (Lewis Klahr)
Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell)
Light Work (Jennifer Reeves)
Lumphini 2552 (Tomonari Nishikawa)
Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O'Neill)

July 25

Program 5: Liberty or Death
Ah Liberty! (Ben Rivers)
Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs)
Footnotes to a House of Love (Laida Lertxundi)
The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser)
An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson)

Program 6: Confidential
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Werasethakul)
Tabula Rasa (Vincent Grenier)
Dwarfs the Sea (Stephanie Barber)
Let Me Count the Ways 10...9...8...7...6... (Leslie Thornton)
Great Man and Cinema (Jim Finn)
Second and Lee (Kevin Everson)
Something Else (Kevin Everson)
Memory of It - Three Related Documents (The Speculative Archive)

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Best of the Decade Avant-Garde Poll Submittal

Eniaios IV "Nefeli Photos" reel 2 Gregory Markopoulous – Robert Beavers, Greece, 2004
Respite – Harun Farocki, Germany/South Korea, 2007
13 Lakes – James Benning, U.S., 2005
A Trip to the Louvre (Une Visite au Louvre x 2) - Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, France, 2004
When It Was Blue– Jennifer Reeves, U.S., 2008
At Sea – Peter Hutton, U.S., 2007
War at a Distance – Harun Farocki, Germany, 2003
Song and Solitude – Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2006
Kolkata – Mark LaPore, U.S./India 2005
Michelangelo Eye to Eye – Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 2004
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine – Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2005
Poetry and Truth – Peter Kubelka, Austria, 2003
Star Spangled To Death – Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2003
Sense of Architecture – Heinz Emigholz, Austria, 2005-2009
Hide – Matthius Müller and Christoph Girardet, U.S., 2007
Letter to Uncle Boonmee – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/Germany, 2009
RR – James Benning, U.S., 2008
Schindler’s Houses (Photography and Beyond Part 12) – Heinz Emigholz, Austria, 2007
Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7… – Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004
Capitalism: Slavery – Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2006

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.