filmjourney.org : Thierry's Cannes, Olivier's Quinzaine

Saturday, April 26, 2008

THIERRY'S CANNES, OLIVIER'S QUINZAINE
By ROBERT KOEHLER
If you happen to be at a film festival in March or April--as I was this year in Guadalajara (March) and Buenos Aires (April) (sorry, Film Journey readers, no BAFICI blog this year, but I promise a soon-to-come rehash/overview)--the conversation inevitably turns to what films can be expected to appear in Cannes (May). It's part of the seasonal spring chatter/gossip/speculation/informed insider talk, and it's partly generated by the fact that in pre-Cannes festivals, "The Cannes Effect" is fully felt. This is especially true in festivals in emerging market countries like Argentina and Mexico, but also the case in first-world economy zones like Hong Kong: Post-Berlin festivals from Mexico City's FICCO to Guadalajara to Hong Kong to BAFICI no longer can cherry-pick new work by filmmakers in their regions. During much of the Gilles Jacob era of Cannes, regions such as Latin America and Southeast Asia were usually ignored, allowing new films to premiere at festivals near where the filmmakers lived and worked, and if they sparked interest, would send out ripples to the rest of the world. In Gilles' Cannes, there was also no hard-and-fast rule that a Croisette screening had to be the world premiere.
Now, it's Thierry Fremaux's Cannes--the 2008 edition will be his first in which he has full rein over all aspects of the program--and, as we've seen during recent Cannes festivals, programming seeks to reflect the reality that filmmaking is exploding on every continent. (Whether the programming succeeds in this is another matter.) Bullish for Thierry's Cannes, but bearish for the BAFICIs of the world, now denied many of the very filmmakers they helped discover and foster. Call it being victimized by one's own success. Even more, as Rotterdam festival programmer Gerwin Tamsma has noted, filmmakers worldwide are now gearing their production and post-production schedules with an eye toward submitting to and competing in Cannes; festivals landing in March and April may lust for the new Johnny To or Amat Escalante or Lisandro Alonso film, but they just may not get them any more for the hard fact that they're not ready. (Even true for some select Americans, such as Steven Soderbergh, madly rushing as I write to finish his two-part Che in time to be shown together--as he demands it to be shown--in Cannes.) Just as Hollywood film production geared for awards-season films now targets Toronto as their fall deadline, Cannes is the spring deadline for the vast world beyond Hollywood.
So, what's the result, now that Olivier Pere yesterday (Friday) announced the full Quinzaine lineup? (It may be Thierry's Cannes, but it's Olivier's Quinzaine.)
First, as those of us huddled around breakfast and cafe tables in Guadalajara and Buenos Aires predicted, Olivier's Quinzaine, celebrating its fortieth year as the Croisette upstart, looks to be a whole lot more interesting than Gilles' Cannes. Just look at some of the filmmakers in the roster, and you're looking at a window on the future of cinema: Alonso and his Thierry del Fuego-set Liverpool, Albert Serra and his Three Wise Men odyssey El Cant dels ocells, Claire Simon's Les Bureaux de Dieu, Raya Martin and his five-hour Now Showing and the best Romanian you haven't heard of--Radu (The Paper Will Be Blue) Muntean and Boogie.
I'm suspending comment on Liverpool here until my Variety review appears, but I can already declare that few other films anywhere in the beach town will galvanize audiences and stir discussion more than the meaty round-the-horn combo of Alonso-to-Serra-to-Martin. Few younger filmmakers matter more than these three, and any program that contains all of them unveiling major new work is an event of the highest magnitude. Quinzaine goers will find that Alonso has built and expanded on La libertad and Los muertos but in unexpected directions; that Serra has found an even more exalted and stunning sky-and-earth atmosphere (the rocky, volcanic heights of the Canary Islands substituting for the Mid-East desert) than he did for Honor de cavalleria; that Martin--if his accompanying film to Now Showing titled Box Office: Next Attraction is any indicator--has expanded the syntax by which a film can be simultaneously a documentary and a narrative. Muntean made the kind of film with The Paper Will Be Blue that signals a world-class director--why has this, of all of the recent ballyhooed Romanian work, been by far the most ignored?--and that anything he makes is automatically essential viewing. And Simon--France's other fascinating Claire--should be expected to forge something new and unsettling, based on her previous film Ca brule.
Then there are the extra goodies, especially the extraordinary surprise of a new--brand-new!--Jerzy Skolimowski film (Four Nights With Anna), double-Straub (Straub's solo work, Le Genou d'Artemide and what is likely the final Straub-Huillet film, Itineraire de Jean Bricard), the unveiling of the restored print of Robert Kramer's legendary 1975 Milestones and an Olivier Jahan tribute film for the Quinzaine birthday, 40X15. Not bad.
The Quinzaine, as well, is littered with the unknowns, barely-knowns and sure-to-be-discovereds. (Who's Josh Safdie, and what's his new American film The Pleasure of Being Robbed?) I hear excellent things about Miguel Gomes' Portuguese film, Aquele querido mes de agosto/Beloved August), Federico Veiroj's Uruguayan Acne, and Lichuan Yin's Knitting from China. There will be more. Olivier appears to have out-done himself.
As for Thierry, it looked bad up until a week ago. His group, for example, had yet to see Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City, leading some of my colleagues like Variety critic Todd McCarthy to conclude that China may be a no-show this year. Turns out that didn't happen--Jia is back on the Croisette for the first time since his sublime Unknown Pleasures, and he has to automatically be considered a major Palme d'Or contender. Some may wrongly conclude that a fix may be in though, what with Sean Penn as prez and Clint Eastwood's period drama Changeling a headline-grabbing, stop-the-presses, hold-the-phone entry in the competition. (Think about it: How can Clint not win? Of course, it wasn't that long ago that he made Blood Work.) The aforementioned Mr. Soderbergh will be huffing and puffing to get from the Nice airport on time with his wetter-than-Wong Kar-wai-prints of Che Squared--and those, too, may in fact suck. (Wild Bunch has been happily leaking word out for months that it's genius, but take that with a grain of salt.) Expect horrors from some other Palm contenders like Atom Egoyan (Adoration) and Wim Wenders (the Euro-pudding sounding The Palermo Shooting), and--who knows?--probably Paolo Sorrentino with Il Divo.
Now, it's not all bad. Thierry did, in fact, nab the following. For starters, my favorite French director, Arnaud Desplechin, with Un Conte de noel/Christmas Story, his first biggie since Kings and Queen. Another Gaul great, Philippe Garrel and his La Frontiere de l'aube. (Garrel on the red carpet. Now, for that alone, the host country should be proud of itself.) He also has my favorite Belgians--the Dardennes--with The Silence of Lorna, instantly generating water-cooler talk of the outlandish possibility that Jean-Pierre and Luc could actually win a third Palm. There's, as well, my favorite Turk: the bountiful and masterly Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with Three Monkeys. Pablo Trapero has reportedly made an extremely fine film with Leonera, which programmers and others saw in Buenos Aires during the festival, and were quite buzzed about. Argentina should throw a party: Lucrecia Martel joins Trapero with La Mujer sin cabeza. (This is what I mean about the "Cannes Effect"---Alonso, Trapero and Martel, in the old days, would have been able to officially screen first in BAFICI, but not now.) Young Asia is nicely represented--well, younger than the early 40-ish Jia--with the terrific Eric Khoo (My Magic) and Brilliante Mendoza (Serbis, following his highly accomplished Slingshot). For many mainstream and middlebrow critics attending Palais press screenings, this will be their virgin viewings of filmmakers like Khoo and Mendoza. Good for Thierry.
Predictions? You'd have to be an idiot to bet much against Clint. The Palm is his to lose. But, like Hillary, nothing's for certain. A third win for the Dardenne brothers seems unlikely. Lefty Penn, who may or may not still buy into the ridiculous romanticization of Che Guevara (a Stalinist thug of the first order, which, hopefully, Soderbergh's film underlines), might push Che down the throats of his fellow jurors; if he does, don't expect such colleagues as Apitchatpong Weerasethakul and Sergio Castellito to swallow it. Garrel seems a tad outside, and younger directors like Martel, Khoo, Mendoza and Trapero are likely too young. (Youth hasn't stopped past juries, but again, unlikely.) Matteo Garrone's adaptation of the best-selling book on contemporary Mafia families, Gomorra, would probably have much more impact if Cannes were moved about 25 miles east of the Italian border.
That leaves, in no particular order, Desplechin, Jia and Ceylan. All are masters, inching toward mid-career, with past work that suggests a definite Palm-ish trajectory. Keep an eye on them. Sight unseen, their films could win the day.
Outside of the competition, indefatigable Cannes watchers might do well to attend the screenings of Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, if for no other reason than it is Davies' first film in nearly a decade. (Maybe Kim Jee-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which could be all three.) Lynchians may or may not have a treat with daughter Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance.
Un Certain Regard, as usual, looks blah, but don't forget Kelly Reichardt's post-Old Joy Wendy and Lucy, as well as Amat (Sangre) Escalante's Southern California-shot Los bastardos (early word is strong) and Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Tokyo Sonata. Another Tokyo movie, originally titled Tokyo!, might be a less essential item, since it's an omnibus film--a formula which rarely works--by Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry.
Finally, we'll leave you with a mystery: Although Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin was expanded into a feature based on the short he contributed to Cannes' Chacun son cinema and Kiarostami, is, well, Kiarostami, he's nowhere to be found in the lineup. Any lineup. Why isn't it in Cannes? What happened?
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

I've had Bazin on the brain lately, partly in conjunction with spending last week discussing the form and function of criticism as well as reading the Winter 2007 issue of Film International dedicated to Bazin. It's a provocative magazine (expect a blog on it soon), such as when guest editor Jeffrey Crouse highlights Bazin's "striking assertion, a dazzlement" traced through the work of Flaherty, Renoir, Vigo, Chaplin, and the neorealists: "In my opinion," Bazin wrote, "the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love." This wasn't rhetorical flare or mere sentiment, but a sustained argument about directorial style. For example: "Rossellini's love for his characters envelops them in a desperate awareness of man's inability to communicate," Bazin wrote. "De Sica's love, on the contrary, radiates from the people themselves. They are what they are, but lit from within by the tenderness he feels for them." Crouse writes, "I look forward to the day when film analysis is conducted from an emphasis on love arrangements as Bazin conceived, rather than largely power ones [favored in academia], with the latter being a subset of the former. Imagine the expanded vocabulary and range of concepts one might draw upon so as to delve more precisely into the significance of so many film masterworks."
I submit that the French film, The Secret of the Grain, which deservedly swept the Césars a couple months ago and screened at the Los Angeles COLCOA festival last weekend, is a prime candidate for this kind of analysis. Filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche (L'Esquive) has chosen to tell a story about a North African immigrant family living in the port town Sète in France, and although the narrative strands converge with considerable suspense in the final act, most of the film involves long, lively conversations filmed in close-up that thrust the viewer headlong into the characters' daily lives. This is a community dear to Kechiche's heart and he yearns to explore and reveal them in all their vitality. The 61-year-old patriarch is Slimane (Habib Boufares) and he has recently lost his job, which makes it difficult to provide for his two families, his ex-wife and daughters and his current girlfriend and her daughter; so he takes his severance pay and dreams of building a couscous restaurant inside a derelict boat.
This is not a "social issues" film, nor is it a feel-good rags-to-riches culinary fantasy. Some of the characters find themselves burdened with crushing defeats, but none of them are merely victims illustrating a cause or in need of a champion or a tidy plot resolution. Kechiche simply wants us to look and listen to his characters, to spend time in their homes, absorb their energy, mannerisms, and interpersonal exchanges, to recognize their lives.
Kechiche's technique, inspired by his background in theater acting, is to cast nonprofessional actors--but not for the reasons you might assume. Kechiche requires lengthy rehearsals and a long shoot (in the case of Secret of the Grain, a solid six months) to establish an on-set community that will allow the actors to slowly hone their performances and find their appropriate groove; nonprofessionals simply have more time to dedicate to this. In one sense, the immense work shows on screen, portraying characters and their dense, overlapping conversations with complex, evocative nuance, but it also achieves a naturalism that is so convincing, it seems spontaneously achieved.
It's no surprise that the intense immediacy of the camera's gaze is the source of complaints from mainstream reviewers--the Hollywood Reporter balked at the film's "suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long"--but the film's visual proximity and immersion is the whole point. One standout sequence takes place at the family's weekly Sunday dinner, and Kechiche captures a virtual symphony of spirited, candid conversation between the characters as they talk and joke, cajole and tease one another, eat voraciously, praise the food, and debate domestic concerns from modern diapers to language comprehension. At times, speaking with their mouths full and infusing their conversation with implications charged with subtext, the intimacy of the camera is aggressive, even troubling. But it expresses the family's everyday vitality; at once familiar and other, foreign but never exoticized, the film challenges the viewer to recognize and overcome resistance and share the table with others.
Kechiche has said he highlighted the mullet fish in the French title (literally "The Grain and the Mullet") because of its biological adaptability, a kind of symbol for Slimane's resourcefulness in coming to a new country and forging a new life. One can also read "grain" as the potential seed and opportunity enjoyed by his children, and in many ways the film is a comparison between first and second immigrant generations; the sacrifices of the first give way to the freedom and chances of the second, who respond in myriad ways, squandering, entrenching, or eagerly seizing the moment. Through his superlative cast of performers, Kechiche's family portrait is a doting record of the innate resiliency of this beloved community.

Friday, April 18, 2008

For decades, the great visionary of film preservation and exhibition, Henri Langlois, dreamed of building a museum of the cinema despite exorbitant costs and dwindling resources, so he obsessively collected scripts, props, costumes, models, art work, and defunct equipment in the hopes of providing a space to honor the hallowed detritus of film production. He'd be thrilled that many archives and museums exist today, including the Museum of the Moving Image (dedicated to film, TV, and digital media), which is currently doubling in size and set for a major reopening in 2009. The expanded museum will include a 242-monitor installation, a garden and cafe, a 264-seat theater with orchestra pit (for silent films), a screening room for educational programs, a video art ampitheater, and much more. (Click on the link for design renderings.)
The Museum was founded by Rochelle Slovin in 1981 and moved into its present location in 1988, fostering two different audiences for its many treasures: family and student visitors for its interactive exhibits and installations (like Gregory Barsamian's amazing "Feral Fount") and artifacts (including rare industrial age projectors that are still operational), and cinephiles seeking rare and groundbreaking retrospectives on figures such as Jerry Lewis ('88), Ken Jacobs ('89), David Cronenberg ('92), and modern horror (2007). The chief curator of the film programs is David Schwartz, who received a rare National Society of Film Critics award last year for organizing the first complete Jacques Rivette retrospective (including the 13-hour Out 1) in the US.
The Museum also has significant resources online, including its Pinewood Dialogues, which offers MP3 recordings and transcripts of 68 notable filmmakers, critics, and celebrities.
One of the Museum's most exciting projects, however, is set to launch June 3 (with a press conference in the lobby of the New York Times): The Moving Image Source, an intended hub for online cinephilia supervised by Dennis Lim, which will include coverage of worldwide retrospectives and archival screenings, publish original writing that coincides with exhibitions in the news, and much more. Lim says they've amassed 300-400 online resources for a research database that will be available to the site's visitors. Bookmark it now...
I can attest to the comprehensive nature and high quality of the Musuem's exhibitions, which are currently closed for the renovation, and to the knowledge and friendliness of the staff. The Moving Image Institute was a relaxed but fully engaged event that grappled with the rise of the Internet and the future direction of the film-critical industry, and it was a pleasure to attend.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Now that the Moving Image Institute is over, some lingering images and quotes:
• Indie publicists telling us they have no idea how three of their favorite films at Sundance--Sugar, Ballast, and Trouble the Water--could possibly be marketed to an ideal audience of young black viewers.
• Gratitude toward Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum for being the only print critics to offer enthusiastic words about online film culture in Gerald Peary's For the Love of Movies.
• Ace cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Swoon, Personal Velocity, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) telling us that the one thing she wished critics would do is become more versed in technical and formal issues, and consider the intent rather than judge films by convention alone.
• Kuras also suggesting Harris Savides' (Gerry, Birth, Zodiac) subtle craft represents the best and most overlooked work being done in cinematography today.
• Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker swooning over having watched Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala over the weekend; extolling the often overlooked longterm revenues of foreign films despite their reputation for initially poor box office performance; affirming his love of the Dardenne's L'Enfant; and generally shocking us with his genuine love of movies.
• Filmmaker Arthur Penn telling us that he was inspired by the French New Wave to make 1965's Mickey One and how he deliberately sought out Robert Bresson's cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, to shoot it. I haven't seen the movie, but I very much want to now. Notably MIA on DVD.
• Penn also telling us theater is a process of refinement, but film is a mystery.
• Dennis Lim recommending Carl Wilson's book on Celine Dion, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste as a model of critical writing.
• Heather Chaplin and Ed Halter championing video games as potentially new formal experiences with a unique need for serious critical analysis, citing examples such as World of Warcraft and indie games such as Everyday Shooter and flOw.

Monday, April 14, 2008

More than once this weekend at the Moving Image Institute, we've been told that filmmakers have an intense, almost irrational desire to have their work exhibited theatrically rather than on video, even if that means losing considerable sums of money. Distributors shake their heads while describing filmmakers turning down straight-to-video deals or spending virtually all of their cash earned from video sales to make prints, advertise, and book a screen or two here in New York City (a venture that can cost anywhere from $75,000-$100,000, three to four times what it costed fifteen years ago). No doubt this is largely a question of formal purity--filmmakers make, well, films, and want their work to be exhibited on celluloid rather than 525 lines of resolution on a video monitor. But it's also a question of prestige and public visibility. The question remains: how long can this continue?
Underlining virtually all of our discussions this weekend is the need to find or create an audience, a topic that goes far beyond commercial profits and into cultural transformation. Superficially, the more dependent on consumer markets filmmakers, distributors, and critics are, the more quickly artistic standards and the idea of specialty cinema evaporates from the agenda. But even academics talk of "smuggling" international or classic titles into film courses so as to not turn off prospective students. Everyone says it's the more challenging, progressive, adventurous films that inspire them to do what they do, but they continually offer reasons why such films cannot be emphasized in the public consciousness--particularly in uncertain times--often on the assumption that "the average person" inherently rejects them.
Setting aside the fact that I believe this fabled "average person" is more often than not a straw man for safety, fear, and convenience (is the "average person" really reading critics or enrolling in universities in the first place?), a primary question emerges: is the purpose of criticism to reflect the public's taste or to articulate and defend its own insights?
The journalists attending the Institute come from a wide variety of fields--magazines, radio, newspapers, blogs, academia--and one of the best aspects of this weekend has been hearing and resonating with their personal stories. But it's startling to hear how often their passions are seemingly at odds with their professions, not intrinsically but through a haggard, defeatist perspective, as if the demise of print criticism is the latest inevitability in a war that grows more labored and tenuous with each passing year. There is plenty of gallows humor--jokes about job opportunities in a field increasingly comprised of a handful of positions--but the mood is certifiably grim. The poets huddle together in an evacuated city as the barbarians storm the gates.
I believe one of the central purposes of criticism is to convince or convert, to educate and inspire. When critics decide their writing should be determined by others (implicitly or explicitly), they cease to matter. On the other hand, critics who refuse to compromise their passions, who figure out ways of sharing their observations with infectious conviction (in whatever form) become agents of cultural reflection and renewal. Criticism worth reading is always a form of activism, a resistance to conformity and a ringing call to arms. It attracts an audience and a culture; it is never passive. Whether in print or online, the critical vocation remains the same--explorers, interpreters, and ambassadors for a diverse and global art form.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

The last few days have been a true whirlwind at the Moving Image Institute in New York City, and I've only got a couple of hours before we'll be seeing Gerald Peary's new documentary on American film criticism. Rochelle Slovin, David Schwartz, Dennis Lim, and Livia Bloom (who just published an interview with Errol Morris in the latest issue of Cinema Scope) and the entire staff at MoMI have been impeccable hosts, and genuinely care about the dialogue we're generating about the divide between print critics and online critics, or the shrinking publicity market for smaller, more independent distributors.
Hailing from Los Angeles, it's hard not to feel like a real outsider in the intensely hermetic world of New York film culture, which increasingly revolves around a few major critics, newspapers, and theaters that will continue (for now) to promote and open films outside of major studio fare. Repeatedly we've been told that if the New York Times does not run a large, positive review of a film with a photo--capsule reviews do not count--the box office chances of independent or foreign film X in New York are virtually nill, and distributors like Donald Krim of Kino International have long depended on New York buzz to generate waves across the country.
Part of me feels like this trend has got to change, with the shrinking world of print criticism (not only in New York, but also secondary markets like Detroit, Atlanta, and San Diego) being the funnel that could force it; as information awareness--particularly among cinephiles and movie buffs who might be interested in films showing in repertory or art house theaters--shifts from a few print publications to a global network of online dialogue, the idea that a film's entire fate might be determined by two or three New York critics or editorial decisions seems absurd. (Consider the recent example of There Will Be Blood's premiere at a Harry Knowles event in Austin, Texas, an act that enraged New York film exhibitors.) Yet strong buzz online can be ethereal, and often doesn't translate to butts in seats when films are released on local screens. But this isn't necessarily any different from print criticism nowadays, either. Bingham Ray (a kind of American Pierre Rissient-type of movie hustler) waxed nostalgically for the days when Vincent Canby would write about one film several weeks in a row, thus getting behind it and helping to build momentum; isn't part of the problem the glut of films crowding the marketplace today?
The problem of transforming good reviews into ticket sales reminds me of a round table discussion we had at a Los Angeles film festival a couple years back, with exhibitors like the Laemmle theatre chain telling us that even a full-page rave from the LA Weekly wasn't enough to ensure a successful theatrical run. I've long recognized that Los Angeles has unique problems in this regard (many of which revolve around the serious traffic distances between various suburbs and theaters and the utter lack of widespread, efficient public transit) but it was still a shock to hear Ryan Werner of IFC Films and Krim both tell us yesterday that Los Angeles is by far their most difficult market for opening films. The only kind of film that does well in Los Angeles, Krim told us, is French comedies with big stars, a sobering assessment that left me speechless. Another startling factoid: Netflix alone--who purchased 8-10,000 copies of Old Joy--is at times solely responsible for keeping distributors like Kino afloat. No wonder indie distributors are increasingly looking into video on demand as a viable alternative to theatrical distribution.
But the highlight yesterday was meeting Andrew Sarris (who turns 80 this year) and Molly Haskell, two highly influential but shockingly modest and enthusiastic critics who proved to be a joy to interact with during our session as well as dinner afterward. Sarris envinced a particularly self-deprecating humor, referring to his "crazy arrogance and presumption" behind his desire to import French auterist ideas. Not only does he fully credit Jonas Mekas for establishing his career, but also suggests that he'd otherwise only be teaching English (or trying to teach English, he joked). "I'm truly the sum of all the conversations I've had about the movies," he told us. Sarris does teach at Columbia today, and he was quick to graciously assert that "kids today write much better about film then I did when I first started." At dinner, those of us sitting directly across from Sarris and Haskell couldn't have been more thoroughly charmed as we breathlessly discussed film (from Borzage to Juno, Billy Wilder to Sidney Lumet's resurgent career) and when Kevin Lee mentioned some interesting '90s films dealing with women characters, Haskell was quick to jot down the titles on a note pad. "All I've got to say," Haskell said, "is that if the critical baton must be passed, I'm glad it's going to such smart people." Yet their attention and encouragement never seemed like simple flattery; their earthy humor was always in full swing. "I'll say one nice thing about Pauline Kael," said Sarris--who still bangs away on a manual typewriter and couldn't quite fathom what all this talk of blogging was about. "She gave a licence to all critics, male and female, to say that something turned them on." Sarris and Haskell's endearing engagement was all the more encouraging given their delight at breaking the politeness barrier.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

In a couple of days, I'll be headed to New York City to attend this year's Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, who selected me as one of a dozen participating journalists, and they've just updated their website with the final schedule, list of participants, etc.
With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine film critical positions, and the continual growth of serious film writing and discussion on the Internet, this is an interesting time to be reviewing the state of the art, particularly at an event sponsored by the New York Times. I'm sure this widespread cultural transition will be a recurring subject of discussion this weekend.
I'm hoping to blog while attending, but it looks like a full schedule and I don't know how much free time I'll have. Either way, I'll be sure to offer a full account when I return.
Any recommendations while I'm there? My hotel is in Manhattan and the museum is in Queens; I expect I'll be commuting back and forth daily. I would be grateful for any ethnic food suggestions, bookstores, and of course cinephile-related opportunities in the area, plus anything else you might suggest. I haven't even planned my trip from JFK yet.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The industrious Adam Hyman of the Los Angeles Filmforum has organized an exciting collaborative event between various local film institutions (Filmforum, LACMA, REDCAT, UCLA) and the MAK Center: a week-long retrospective of German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz from April 6-13. Emigholz's Schindler's Houses was one of my highlights of last year's Toronto film festival, so I've been eager to explore previous entries in his thirty-film "Photography and Beyond" series (begun in 1983) showcasing architecture, sculpture, writing, and drawing. Unfortunately, however, I'll be in New York City next week, so I was delighted to discover that Facets Video has already released a couple Emigholz architecture films on DVD (Goff in the Desert and D'Annunzio's Cave) with more on the way (Sullivan's Banks, Maillart's Bridges, and Schindler's Houses). The discs are direct ports of fine German DVDs (chapter stops for each building, maps, informative extras) released by Filmgalerie 451.
Emigholz's architecture films are not the kind of historical/aesthetic information overviews one might expect; the best in that mode I've seen is Arte's excellent European Architectures series (also distributed by Facets) complete with its creative model photography, poetic insights, and wall-to-wall narration. By contrast, Emigholz presents "Architecture as Autobiography" by focusing on the work of a specific designer in its natural environment without any narration at all. (His dialogue-suffused D'Annunzio's Cave is an exception we'll get to shortly.) By shunning still photography and talking heads, Emigholz presents the spaces in a more ambiguous, less mediated fashion, allowing the viewer to construct a personal sense of the designer's creative voice (informed, of course, by the medium's inherent constraints, ellipses, and subjectivity). "Grasping, designing, and experiencing space is the starting point," Emigholz says in an interview printed in the Schindler's Houses sleeve. "I believe in first impressions and the analytical power of the first encounter."
Several formal qualities facilitate the viewer's experience through the twin media of 35mm and Dolby stereo: the setting of each building is emphasized visually (structures are often introduced in long shots where the subject isn't even entirely obvious at first; trees, signs, or cars often loom in the foreground) as well as sound (on-location recordings edited for smooth transitions and atmosphere, which also help convey the space). The almost always stationary frame is often slightly tilted to one side or the other, which breaks habitual ways of perceiving (or ignoring) horizontal and vertical lines. Emigholz knows the viewer will mentally construct the overall space given a succession of shots or related details, and his tilted compositions create an almost playful seesawing effect when the shots are edited together, continually adding one more element to kickstart fresh perceptions. All of these elements (including a reliance on natural lighting) offer ways of perceiving the buildings in ways different from architectural books. His films are meditative and revealing, offering a surprising range of emotions.
Here are some thoughts on the following films:

Sullivan's Bank's (2000)
Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) coined the phrase "form follows function" and is considered a father of modern architecture, but the eight midwestern banks he designed late in his life showcase his taste for decorative floral ornamentation. Often beautifully contrasting turquoise and red brick colors, the various textures in some shots are a marvel of diversity--graceful, arching curves against thin crossbeams bristling with intricate carvings. At times, Emigholz introduces his banks from outside the buildings; at times, he begins from the inside. Sullivan's spaces remain cavernous centers of modern commerce--one lengthy shot emphasizes the line before an ATM machine set within the brickwork--under grey, late-winter skies and the easygoing bustle of life in places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Lafayette, Indiana.
The DVD contains an onscreen biography of Sullivan (that can also be read here) as well as a challenging but fascinating one-hour bonus film by Emigholz entitled The Whitman Project (2007). It consists of a split screen featuring the work of two camera crews who follow (in uninterrupted tracking shots) a German-speaking actor and an English-speaking actor (both reciting texts--such as "A Sight in Camp" and "Manhattan Arming"--by Walt Whitman, who was an ideological influence on Sullivan) as they wander around the same space (a large rural enclosure filled with wounded Civil War soldiers) lamenting the human cost of war. Their voices overlap, but they recite the text asynchronously, and their differing interpretations, tone and levels of empathy create a double-pronged, stereoscopic portrait of Whitman's writing.

Maillart's Bridges (2001)
Robert Maillart (1872-1940) was a Swiss architect who revolutionized concrete designs; this film showcases 14 roof constructions and bridges built between 1910 and 1935. Of all the extant "Architecture as Autobiography" films, this may be the most pleasantly serene, often featuring remote or vacant structures spanning mountainous vistas and water streams; the sound of rushing water is almost ubiquitous throughout and creates a soothing, hypnotic feel, and the Swiss Alps often provide a stimulating compositional backdrop. But Emigholz isn't seeking postcard imagery; his compositions contrast the curve of rails over craggy terrain or emphasize the height and distance of each spanning design. One might even note (as I did) the relatively pristine state of the concrete until Emigholz provides a shock cut of a graffitied swastika on the footbridge over the River Toess in Winterthur.
The DVD includes two highly informative extras filmed in 2004, the 53-minute Buildings by Robert Maillart and the 36-minute The Art of Structure Engineering, both of which include casual but highly educated conversations between Emigholz and engineering professor David P. Billington, bridge designer Christian Menn, and structural engineer Jörg Schlaich.

Goff in the Desert (2003)
Like Whitman and Sullivan, Bruce Goff (1904-1982) was deeply inspired by nature, and was a major figure in organic architecture; he emphasized circular rooms and unusual materials, such as ashtrays or chunks of glass for windows. Emigholz's film begins with a brilliant pre-credit image of a flat freeway, with a no man's land of brown grass in mid-ground behind a wire fence, and assorted corporate signs rising in the background (McDonalds, gas stations, truck stop supermarkets) like industrial conquistadors towering over the landscape: an iconic image for anyone who has every driven through the midwest.
In this metaphorical "desert," Goff designed unconventional buildings in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma (where he taught at the state university), with a few more projects scattered between Texas and California, including the sensational Japanese pavilion at LACMA. At 110 minutes, this is Emigholz's longest film in his architecture series, and the most diverse in its content, tracing over 9,000 miles and 62 buildings, from gas stations to private homes to cathedrals. As with his previous films, so often telephone poles or stop lights obscure initial views of the buildings, creating a teasing ambiguity that emphasizes the designs within their natural locations and calls on the viewer to venture around, behind, closer. (A conical church in Edmond, Oklahoma is compositionally obfuscated by oil drills and road signage.) Writhing trees create a visual contrast to the stately edges of several constructions.
Goff's organic forms often reminded me of the sets of imaginative science fiction films; the metallic railing, circular design, and rustic, warm tones of the Ford House in Aurora, Illinois could have been an alternative set for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, while the endlessly curvaceous Gryder House in Ocean Springs, Missouri (precipitated in the film by a rare and beautiful pan across a pond) suggests a pavilion that could be (artfully) designed for a futuristic theme park.
Just as he begins Schindler's Houses with a bit of narration, Emigholz ends this film by describing the ruins of Shin'enKan in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, what many (including the filmmaker) once considered to be Goff's masterpiece. After a fire in 1998, all that remains now of the home are piles of rocks and glass, the residual testimony to an intensely creative vision.
Impressively, the DVD contains a German and an English audio commentary by Emigholz as well as a breezy "making of" feature shot by the filmmaker and his crew on their trek across the United States in 2002. The film (unsubtitled but featuring a mishmash of German and English) records the filmmakers visiting locations, planning and executing their shoots, interacting with residents--even getting pulled over by the highway patrol--while always remaining fascinated by passing examples of odd Americana.

D'Annunzio's Cave (2005)
Not all of Emigholz's films are about architects he admires--Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938) was a fascist writer who (along with his personal architect) designed his ultimate pleasure dome, the Villa Cargnacco on Lake Garda as a monument to his grotesque inner life. Stylistically, it diverges the most from Emigholz's previous architecture films; it' s entirely comprised of handheld, constantly moving camerawork twisting and turning--seemingly floating--through the fifteen shadowy, decadent, heavily cluttered rooms of the villa.
Moreover, the soundtrack is comprised of unnerving (and overlapping) computer voices intoning various texts by figures such as d'Annunzio, Mussolini, Joseph Conrad, a raging American film producer, tourist guides, and Emigholz himself, which are mixed with snippets of grating, pulsing electronic sound effects and bursts of atonal music. A subtle, raspy breathing seems to emanate throughout. The end result is one of the most disturbing films I've seen, an instant cinematic companion to the terrifying mansions in The Innocents or The Shining, but perhaps more accurately, the kind of claustrophobic, tyrannical worlds seen in Sokurov's trilogy, Moloch, Taurus, and The Sun. (Emigholz has written, "Considering this spectacle [of the villa], my hate began to recede, covered by my satisfaction at the dust that had settled like acid on everything...I felt as if I were on the inside of an embalmed corpse whose intestines and brain had been shunted away because they had begun to stink.")
In dark rooms with few windows, porcelain sculptures depict disembodied heads, naked bodies resembling prisoners rather than human ideals, and an unending series of lean, aggressive-looking animals that are interspersed among thousands of books and objects of every kind. Each room conveys a sense of suffocating, intricately arranged mania that overwhelms the viewer like an all-powerful, deranged consciousness. "I have wallpapered the area around my bed with red brocade," one inhuman voice recites from d'Annunzio's diaries, "and hid it behind dividers. I have created this alcove to sleep in purple, the beautiful color of blood."
About twenty minutes into the film, the atonal sounds are replaced by soaring Debussy, and Emigholz shifts the film into a different register, one that emphasizes the perfectionism and lure conveyed by the villa, thus giving the viewer a taste of its twisted, encompassing vision of power; it's one of the most challenging parts of the film, its flirtation with the villa's dark majesty is momentarily shocking in its clarity before it once again descends into its haunting phantasmagoria of sounds and images. Unlike Emigholz's previous films, the individual spaces are not set apart by blank screens and text, the voices merely call out room names from shot to shot, thrusting the viewer from one room to the next like a terrifying fun house.
The DVD includes a 60-minute compilation of the raw footage used by four different cinematographers to create the film, but interested viewers won't want to miss the film's excellent website, which includes all of the (sometimes unintelligable) text read in the film, with attributions.
"The stolen collection of every kind of art object, rearranged in layers, becomes an externalized 'brain' revealing [d'Annunzio's] thoughts and associations in the form of fetishes," the filmmakers says in the film's press notes. "Things are granted meanings like medals, sense becomes power, meaning becomes kitsch, dialogue a decree." For a filmmaker like Emigholz, who relishes the ability of art to invite exploration, contemplation, and discernment, d'Annunzio's aesthetic egoism is an aesthetic nightmare.

Friday, March 28, 2008

André Bazin once wrote, "Our melodrama in the last century has lost almost all its dramatic integrity and merely survives as a parody." If that was true in the 1950s (with Sirk and Ray at the height of their powers), it's definitely true today, when ironic detachment reigns supreme. Outside of contemporary Korean cinema, the best examples of melodrama still hail from classic Hollywood, and few of them shine more brightly than the work of Frank Borzage, whose scant representation on DVD leaves a gaping hole in the medium: Borzage's best films are full-blooded, convinced and convincing tributes to passionate devotion and transformative love.
Fittingly, a foreign distributor--the exemplary Edition Filmmuseum--is the first to release a Borzage touchstone on DVD: his once-lost masterpiece The River (1929), one of several artistically ambitious films that suffered with Hollywood's transition to sound (see also Borzage's Lucky Star and F.W. Murnau's 4 Devils and City Girl). The 2-disc set contains a dense 35-minute film essay by UCLA's Janet Bergstrom describing the era, Murnau and Borzage at Fox: The Expressionist Heritage, along with some Borzage shorts, and essays by The River's reconstructionist, Hervé Dumont. (Warner has also just released another notable Borzage title, 1940's Strange Cargo, packaged in a boxed tribute to its star, Joan Crawford; more on this in a bit.)
The River is still missing its beginning and ending, and two scenes in between, leaving a running time of 43 of its original 84 minutes, but with archival stills and explanatory intertitles, the entire reconstruction runs 55 minutes. Its setting is a dam construction site "somewhere in the Rocky Mountains" that is temporarily suspended. A young man named Allen John (Charles Farrell) wants to sail his barge down the river to the sea, but the dam has left treacherous, impassable rapids. One day while swimming nude, he narrowly avoids a deadly whirlpool and jumps out of the river, only to come face to face with Rosalee (Mary Duncan), the world weary girlfriend of a construction foreman convicted of murdering a rival. Allen John and Rosalee (whose only companion is a crow--more curse than comfort--given to her by her incarcerated lover) are both stranded, physically and emotionally, and begin a highly charged flirtation that pivots around his naiveté and her teasing sophistication. Eventually, as their relationship intensifies, all parties involved must dramatically come to terms.
Though it would doubtless be ideal to have the entire film as a piece, the negation of its first and last acts--by far its most melodramatic and plot-heavy--only emphasizes the middle act's exquisitely subtle, interpersonal maneuverings, its dance of attractions and sexual tensions between the protagonists in and around Rosalee's cabin in the woods. Thus it's ironic that in Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic Hervé Dumont writes, "Practically all the American press criticized Borzage for overdeveloping the intimate scenes to the detriment of the action...in reality, the strong sensuality of the love scenes shocked puritanical America, so much that The River was banned in several states and by tacit consensus its diffusion was limited."
The more intimate sections provide a vivid testament to Borzage's emotional brilliance--especially in his use of space and actor positions that express the characters' mixture of awkward but desirous feelings as they slowly, over the course of the film, physically unite. In their first encounter, Allen John hides his nakedness by jumping back into the river; later (after missing the train), Rosalee invites him to dinner and they stand nervously on her doorstep; Allen John constantly attempts to provide for her needs by chopping wood or bringing provisions, which she receives with indifference in the hopes of achieving deeper intimacy. Allen John is clearly attracted to Rosalee but appears to have no idea how to act upon it. (When she curiously asks him how many women he has known, he misunderstands and tells her none, given the fact that his mother died when he was a boy.) Rosalee's frustration builds to the moment when she lies in bed and Allen John tries to set up a checkers game between the; she furiously throws the pieces aside and breathes, "I'm thinking of you" while passionately stroking her breast. Allen John's inability to respond enflames Rosalle's aggression, but their relationship ultimately culminates in a tender, life giving embrace. As the critic-filmmaker Jean Mitry once put it: "The game of these two people who desire, seek out and refuse each other instead of acting like everyone else in the most banal melodramas.... Rarely has the psychology of love--sensual, erotic--been rendered so exactly in its troubling, simple, complexity."
Borzage and Murnau had more in common than industry woes; they also shared actors and personnel at Fox, including cinematographer Ernest Palmer, who at one point was filming The River during the day and Murnau's 4 Devils at night. Bergstrom contends that the studio head, William Fox, thought Murnau's The Last Laugh was the greatest film ever made and that Murnau was an artistic genius. The near carte-blanche Fox gave the production of Sunrise included a vision that spread throughout the studio. In her documentary, Bergstrom inserts an aerial photo of the studio backlot with its Rocky Mountain set from The River just around the bend from the city set in Sunrise--both incorporating forced perspective scaling and painted backdrops--a miniature Disneyland of innovative cinema.

Borzage's elaborate set is a major component of his emotional use of space. The construction camp is a quasi-expressionist string of huts emphasizing the community of workers and contrasting John Allen and Rosalee's initial isolation. (By way of character introduction, John Allen is standing in his stranded barge calling to the workers onshore, and Rosalee is loitering on the riverbank in frustrated contemplation as the workers stream past.) The huts connect with a rope bridge that spans the river and connects to a series of stairs that connects with the train platform, with more stairs that descend to Rosalee's cabin. Borzage emphasizes this elaborate network of paths each time characters cross the river, maintaining continuity and tracking their ascents and descents as if they're trapped in a necessary maze. At heart, the story is about lonely characters who seek release together, and the setting works like an extended metaphor--the river as obstructed destiny, the sea as ultimate freedom, and the deadly whirlpool as the ultimate trap that literally pulls victims into itself, sucking them into the earth, preventing escape and ensuring death.
A title card in Borzage's Street Angel proclaims its story is about "human souls made great by love and adversity," a phrase that has been used for at least one book-length study of the filmmaker, and it's an apt description of so many of his pinnacle achievements that I've had the pleasure of watching the past few years: Seventh Heaven, Lucky Star, History is Made at Night (which Andrew Sarris appropriately called "the most romantic title in the history of cinema"), Three Comrades, The Mortal Storm, and Moonrise--none of which have been released on DVD in the US yet. To this list I'd also add the recently released Strange Cargo (starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable), an oddly intense spiritual parable about a group of prisoners who attempt to escape Devil's Island through the jungle and surrounding ocean; the escapees include a bitter call girl (Crawford), an unrepentant thief (Gable), and various other hardened criminals; all of whom must bond with each other in friendship or in love in order to transcend the perils of nature, and Borzage underlines the spiritual and emotional projects of each character in ways that parallel their physical journeys. The film maintains a visual emphasis on actors' faces as if peering into their souls. While it's sometimes criticized for its heavy-handed religious metaphors (one mysterious character is overtly Christlike), it's a movie that consistently shuns dogmatism (a fundamentalist is just as spiritually lost as anyone else) and wholly embraces personal intuition and compassion. Highly recommended for those who enjoy their melodramas served with trenchant conviction.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Jose Avellar
MOMENTS OF GUADALAJARA
By Robert Koehler
Good stuff....Brian De Palma was here with Redacted, but unlike almost any director who ever attends a festival with his/her own film--exceptions include Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Jose Luis Guerin, the other "Joe," Lav Diaz, Raya Martin, Albert Serra, Monte Hellman and the late Curtis Harrington--he actually went to see movies....This whole film-viewing thing proved too much for De Palma at one point, when he had to leave a botched screening of the even more botched Cuban film Personal Belongings, since the Cuban print source forgot to send the festival an English-subtitled print (blame Cuba), and look for his driver. Walking out, he looked at me with his arm outstretched in total frustration and confusion: "What are we supposed to do now?" (Indeed--at least two juries, with non-Spanish-speaking members, were stuck in the screening.) "You escaped," I told him. He smiled, then wandered around the large Cinepolis multiplex looking for his driver, who had become lost. De Palma found him....
More great Argentine films than the mind could handle, with Tan de repente and Born and Bred and La cienega and Extrano and, our favorite, La libertad (and where oh where was Parapalos or Silvia Prieto?), all as they say back on the big screen where they belong. Even if the first reel of La libertad (so is this the print that Alonso keeps under his bed?) was out of sync....Lots of guys on screen, like Alonso's Misael, could be seen catching animals and cooking and eating them over open flames in the woods. This happened in more than one film (three, at least), and maybe it suggested the future of eating out.....Lots of films featuring refugees leaving their homeland and grinding poverty for opportunity, from Teo's Journey to 14 kms....
The lounge area of the Hotel Fiestamericana, the official festival hub, turned into a moveable feast and watering hole for festival guests, including AFI Fest director Rose Kuo and AFI programmer Shaz Bennett; Cinevegas' inimitable (and Sundance's go-to-guy for their best section, New Frontier) Mike Plante (get this dude going on James Benning, and forget whatever plans you might have for the evening); Fernando Eimbcke roaming about and looking understandably happy; Eimbcke's equally pleased sales agent, Peter Danner of Paris-based sales company Funny Balloons, which has quickly become an ace at handling many of the best Latin American films; PoChu AuYeung, program director of just about my favorite festival, Vancouver; Joseph Beyer, of Sundance Institute Online; the ever-friendly Raymond Phathanavirangoon of Fortissimo, who chatted about Fortissimo's fabulous pressbooks (if you get your hands on their book for Syndromes and a Century, never let it go!); Variety's Madrid (and now Paris) correspondent, John Hopewell; Variety's once and (maybe?) future Mexico City correspondent Michael O'Boyle and his Hollywood Reporter counterpart John Hecht, mensches both; IMCINE's new director Marina Stavenhagen; Huelva festival director Eduardo Trias; indefatigable producer Donald Ranvaud, whose Buena Onda Pictures is now re-settling in Los Angeles from Miami, where "things just didn't work well"; Juan Carlos Rulfo, he of the masterful doc Into the Pit, embarking on an ambitious project as a producer of films by new Mexican filmmakers; a glimpse of Argentina's grand old cineaste, Fernando "Pino" Solanas; Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival director Marlene Dermer (Los Angeles being all over Guadalajara); former Variety critic and current director of the Cineteca in Mexico City, Leonardo Garcia Tsao; and elsewhere--most memorably in the Guadalajara market area of the hotel, on Skype video with his wife in Rio--Jose Avellar, dean of Brazilian film critics and creator of his own wonderfully visual website, escrevercinema.com, that's a close cousin in some respects to David Bordwell's fine site; and Mad Filmes' sales person from Lisbon, Susana Rodrigues, who knows her cinema....
And nobody knows their cinema quite like Jean-Pierre Garcia, director of the Amiens film festival, who eat, drinks and sleeps cinema--particularly American and Latin American cinema, especially by filmmakers maudit (Cy Endfield is one of his latest projects)....When I happened to mention my love of Nikkatsu Studios, Garcia happened to have a copy of a book published by the Amiens festival (why don't American festivals do the same?) on Nikkatsu and its bevy of maverick directors. This is part of Amiens' longterm project to survey great non-Hollywood studios around the world, from Studio Babelsberg to Cinecitta....
Plus some thanks are more than due to festival programmer Lucy Virgen, who has as much as any one person provided Guadalajara with an injection of imagination and breadth, and to press director Paco Fernandez, who's a model of his kind....
A festival is about the films, first, and the people in the dark rooms, second, but I had some wonderful neighbors for the eight days of screenings, including Roger Alan Koza, the extremely enthusiastic programmer/critic/cinephile straight from La Cumbre, Argentina; Israeli critics Dan and Edna Fainaru (best known to English readers as Screen Daily's critics, and who also run Israel's only long-running film journal, Cinematheque), who also happen to be a terrific married couple; Mr. FIPRESCI himself Klaus Eder, desiring to get more American and Canadian film critics to festivals (always a good thought); Salon's film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who was the only other American critic besides myself in Guadalajara; and last but certainly not least Cristina Venegas, the mind behind Santa Barbara festival's terrific Cinemedia section of Ibero-American film, which contained about as many fine new films from Mexico as could be found in Guadalajara this year, which won't exactly be remembered (well, at least so far) as a banner year for Mexican film.....
Not-so-good stuff.....Almost nobody with the festival ever introducing a screening (what's up with that?)....Many significant films poorly attended, with some of those who did deploying their cell phones at all times during screenings....Talking, talking, and more talking....and more talking....Lots of flubs in the Cinepolis projection booths, including frame alignment, screen masking, sound control (as in no sound at times), improper aspect ratio, and my personal favorite, just letting the final reel run through the projector until there's nothing but the glaring projector light on screen....Those pesky projected English subtitles under the screen were almost always on cue, but damn, were they ever hard to read (making the experience of watching and reading the chatterbox The Elite Squad rather a strain)....great volunteers, but guys, let those of us waiting for the next screening know when it's starting, OK?.....
Above all, the Guadalajara festival should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that gifted group that imposes the Golden Globes on us every year (except this one, when they were blissfully reduced to a suitably numb press conference....Someone at the festival (who?) thinks it's a wonderful notion that the competition juries should suggest Mexican films to be considered for the foreign Globes nominations (this year, it was Lake Tahoe and The Desert Within)....Someone (the same person(s)?) thinks it's also a nifty idea to have a member of the HFPA on one of the juries....Any American reader with any awareness of the movies knows how fairly ludicrous this is, but the shame is that the joke that is the HFPA hasn't caught on in Mexico.....Well, let it start now: HFPA is a joke, and Guadalajara, if it's to become a festival ready to go to the next level, should stay clear of it....

Sunday, March 16, 2008

GUADALAJARA'S MEXICAN PROBLEM
By Robert Koehler
Sure enough, as Guadalajara wound down, Lake Tahoe was one Mexican film in the competition that mattered, and as the paltry and fairly pathetic lineup played out, proved its value as a way out of the dead-end of what often passes for "comedy" in Mexican film....even if, as I noted before, Eimbcke's film isn't properly a comedy. (His ability to shift from comedy to tragedy only demonstrates Eimbcke's confidence in his own comic abilities; oddly for a young man, like late Chaplin, he has the toolkit firmly in hand so that when drama and even tragedy is required, humor isn't forgotten.) But Lake Tahoe wasn't all by its lonesome. Rodrigo Pla's The Desert Within (which I've reviewed for Variety) proved to be another Mexican film that will travel, and actually was preferred in some circles to Eimbcke's. (A few festival goers even claimed that it was the best film they had seen so far this year, period.)
So, Mexican cinema wasn't a total loss at Guadalajara, but it wasn't a pretty picture either. This happens every year here, and it stuns visitors coming for the first time. Nobody warns them (OK, I will) that the Mexican sections here literally comprise what's available; that's to say that any new feature narrative or documentary that's done and uncommitted to premiering future festivals (think Cannes) is placed in the lineup, with the exception of the most nakedly commercial product, which is consigned to the hell that is "out of competition." (I've never met a soul who's gone to those screenings.) These aren't curated like the festival's Ibero-American sections, and it behooves the visitor to know this ahead of time. I'm still recovering from the shock in 2006 (when I was a GDL virgin) of plunking myself down in a seat on the festival's second day to see something called Los pajarracos, only to witness reels of garbage masquerading as a spoof of border culture and politics. Right then and there, I was disabused of the notion that what was premiered in Guadalajara was the best new Mexican cinema. It was ALL the new Mexican cinema, available in the spring each year, that could be run through a projector or played on a deck.
But here's a contradiction to chew on: It's actually not all of the new films. Guadalajara has done its part in putting Mexican film on the international map, but much like Fajr festival did for Iranian film (pre-Cannes), it has lost premieres to other places. Some docmakers now consider waiting to first show their work in Morelia, which has quickly caught on as one of the best doc festivals in captivity. Others have become attracted to FICCO (Mexico City, running just prior to Guadalajara), with its "Mexico Digital" section of new video-shot work. Others--like Amat Escalante, with his latest and highly anticipated Los bastardos--are waiting word from Cannes, and the siren call of "Palme d'Or/Certain Regard/Quinzaine/Semaine." (Mexico was all over Cannes last year, and there's every expectation that it will be again.) A victim of Mexican success, Guadalajara is being passed over by some--not by Pla, significantly, even though he's just off of a completely undeserving Venice prize for his lousy debut, La zona and, thus, presumably on the European festival fame train. The resulting basket of movies the festival has to work with doesn't mean a daily dosage of crap--well, some are, and just too sad and bad to even mention here--but it does mean that the result is an oddly skewed perspective on the Mexican film scene. This is especially the case since it's a program that continues to be dominated by films funded largely or in part by IMCINE, the government film funding body that casts a giant shadow over the country's cinema, even as it's never touched the likes of Reygadas, Escalante, Eugenio Polgovsky and several other independent filmmakers who've carved out alternative means of funding and promotion.
It's this independent sphere where Mexico's film-video future lies, not in the institutional brand of movie that sticks to conventional treatments and modes. (To get an idea, look no further here than so-called "popular" comedies like Know the Head of Juan Perez, also in competition right alongside a Lake Tahoe.) The institution-to-independence pattern has been breaking out across Mexico for the past decade-plus, ever since Mexico wisely ended its closed economy, signed up to NAFTA (a profound boon to the country's economy and vibrancy, regardless of whatever nonsense you may have heard lately) and freed itself from the political monopoly of the PRI party which governed Mexico for generations. Like the old politics, the old kind of movie--still loved by a good deal of filmgoers and movie renters here--is cracking up. If the visitor squints really hard, that nice bit of news is visible in Guadalajara. It would be even nicer if no squinting were required.

Friday, March 14, 2008

FROM BERLIN TO GUADALAJARA, CONT.
By Robert Koehler
By my count, although there are several films here direct from Berlin, only one is from Berlin's most interesting section, the Forum: Ishtar Yasin's astonishing debut, El Camino. This is the kind of film Forum was built for, and that Guadalajara would do well to show more of--intensely committed personal cinema that brooks no compromise, and expects an audience that demands no less. Yet El Camino is made of, and about, simple things. The opening sections seem to blow right out of the head of Lino Brocka, with warm images of Nicaraguan kids in an outdoor classroom asked to describe the making of Lake Managua contrasted with hellish, smoke-drenched images of a massive and thoroughly disturbing landfill, where young Saslaya (Sherlyn Paola Velasquez) and little brother Dario (Marcos Ulises Jimenez) live with their grandfather (Cornelio Flores Meza) in a shack at the landfill's edge. Dario, like the girl in La rabia, is mute, but has his big sister's hand to hold onto; Saslaya is viewed by Yasin as a watcher, trying to get a fresh view of her hell by looking at it through a shard of found glass, the first of several moments in the film where art is made out of bits and pieces, and in the moment.
Saslaya and Dario hit the road--el camino--after grandfather is seen by dim Vittorio Storaro candlelight trying to molest Saslaya in their hammock. The desire is to find their mother, working somewhere in Costa Rica, but the impulse is also to flee extreme physical and psychic danger. The road, and all of its dangers, is better than this, the film says wordlessly. (Yasin was born in Moscow of an Iraqi father and a Chilean-Costa Rican mother, and studied at Moscow's State Film Institute as part of the first post-Communist era batch of graduates, and she shows a deep regard and respect for Russian silent cinema and its love of the natural world.) Their adventure has been described as "picaresque," but this isn't actually the tone that Yasin takes. Instead, she's most interested in conveying the pure experience of willing oneself to leave home, walk (and boat) to a point unknown and know that somehow it's possible to get there. If there's belief behind this, it's the belief in being able to make the journey, a belief harbored internally and never expressed verbally, only sensed. Many scenes play out like documentary, or if they're pre-arranged, then all of the feeling of arrangement has been drained out of them, very much like Alonso. Only an episode with a urchin who badly needs playmates seems to literally salute neo-realism; otherwise, the film is directly, harshly, real.
Just days ago, British-born and Mexico-based documentary filmmaker John Dickie (El diablo y nota rota) was describing to me the terrifying and inhuman conditions of life in today's Central America, how "it gets worse the further south you go." Watching El Camino little more than 48 hours after our conversation rendered his disturbing word pictures rather mild, as the film emits the stench and torpor of existence there, so lived-in is every scene and sequence. Despite all of this, and quite counter-intuitively, Surrealist comedy floats through like thought bubbles: A pair of Roman Polanski-esque guys carry a table from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, trailing Saslaya and Dario beat by beat. After Brocka, Alonso and Pudovkin--and maybe, who knows, a touch of Apichatpong, when things move into the deep jungle during the final border crossing--who could've guessed that the film ends in a shadowy Costa Rican brothel setting that out-disturbs David Lynch? The ending is much like the way dreams end--abruptly, on a note of possibly impending doom (or at least change), on a detail that can barely be perceived (ceiling cornice, I believe), with thoughts drifting possibly toward oblivion, or to the light.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

FROM BERLIN TO GUADALAJARA
By Robert Koehler
The Guadalajara festival's position on the calendar--besides being at a blissfully moderate time of year for the weather--allows it to pluck Latin American films from the various sections of Berlin. Last year, that meant for instance that Chico Teixera's brilliant feature debut, Alice's House (which recently played at the Nuart and with the most exquisite lead female performance, by Carla Ribas, in any film I've seen in the past two years at least) could go straight from Berlin's Panorama to Guadalajara's Iberoamerican feature competition. Lucia Murat's newest, Mare, Our Love Story (or curiously titled in some quarters as Another Love Story), has taken an identical route this year. Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe, which I commented on in my previous post, hit Guadalajara immediately from Berlin's main competition, as did Jose Padilha's deeply flawed The Elite Squad, which my Variety colleague Jay Weissberg termed in his review as "a recruitment film for fascist thugs," with Albertina Carri's sinewy and brave La rabia, coming from Panorama and Ishtar Yasin's amazing post-neo-realist debut out of Costa Rica direct from the Forum. The effect of this Berliner wave washing up in Guadalajara is to underscore how effectively Latin America has been able to declare itself in major festivals--even ones, like this Berlin edition, which was by consensus a bust--and how Latin American filmmakers can be viewed as either keeping a healthy distance from Hollywood (Carri, Eimbcke, Yasin, even Murat, though her film contains some sweet nods to West Side Story) or not (Padilha).

This is why the churning, steaming sturm und drang generated by The Elite Squad in Berlin is much ado about very little. The film is minor through and through, but its Golden Bear win makes it a topic of conversation and essential viewing of a sort. Padilha's work here was little more than pulling and patching together remembered and revised scraps and bits from an endless list of American cop dramas and T.V. shows, from Dirty Harry to The Shield to S.W.A.T., with all of the standard tropes of the genre. A burnt-out case (Wagner Moura) is, as usual for this type of character, on the edge of sanity as he leads his unit of elite cops into Rio's drug-infested favela slums. The guy talks up a storm, at least on the soundtrack: In a nearly two-hour film, Moura must have at least 45 minutes' worth of cynical, irony-drenched voice-over narration (I estimate, though it seemed like five hours' worth to my ears), reportedly attached by Padilha to the soundtrack during the editing---a sure sign of creative panic. As usual, there are the younger pups of the squad, one trigger-happy (Caio Junqueira) and one studious and civilized (Andre Ramiro), including the de rigeur PC reversal of buried racial expectations--another standard T.V. cop touch. And like a paltry HBO show--no, The Elite Squad isn't really good enough for HBO, and will never remind anyone of The Wire, so think the Starz Network--there's the attempt at bringing in a social view through a group of liberal students who work in the favela. Matters hinge on how Ramiro's smart cop is a fellow student of the group by day, and a budding Elite Squad member by night, while Moura's commanding officer is barely keeping it together as his wife is pregnant at home.
And so on. And so what? Well, yes, the Elite Squad busts into corners of the favela to shoot first and ask questions later, and this is startling enough for a few minutes. And if there's a hell for cops who murder, then these guys are going there. But what Padilha, who's much better at this point at making docs (Bus 167) than dramas, never decides is where sympathies lie, and what point of view his film finally should have. He shows all the signs of liberal concern (the racial flip among the cops, the well-intentioned students), and he also shows all the signs of rooting on the Elite-ists when they charge down alleys offing bad dudes. The central problem with The Elite Squad isn't that it's fascist; it's that it hasn't decided what it is, torn between interests and characters, and grossly unable (unlike, say Fincher's Zodiac) of capturing a social panorama inside a genre structure, and allowing the wider world to inform the film. It's too confused to be a training manual for anything.

Albertina Carri isn't confused at all. Although her last feature pretty much stunk up the room--the let's-just-forget-about-it Geminis--she has a lasting place in young Argentine cinema with her landmark autobiographical document, Los rubios. With La rabia--which translates as "The Anger," though it should really retain it's Spanish title since it identifies the name of a cafe-bar in the small farming town where the film's set--she has raised her game to a new level. Everything in La rabia is pickled in emotional tension, impending violence, psychic dread and a poisonous stream of vengeance that's in the class of the best of Peckinpah. A long-running feud between ranchers reaches a tipping point when a weasel from one ranch gets away and attacks cattle in another. When farmer Poldo (Victor Hugo Carrizo) later discovers what his young mute daughter Nati (Nazarena Duarte) has known all along--that her mother Alejandra (Analia Couceyro) is having ultra-kinky sex with rival farmer Pichon (Javier Lorenzo)--it's enough for murder to happen. But La rabia is most inside Nati's head, who acts out by stripping off her clothes, releasing screams at a piercing high pitch and pencilling stark and even obscene pictures, which Carri lets flight in animation sequences that appear done by Ralph Steadman at full rage. Nati, in reality, is cinema: She observes life around her and makes images out of it with accompanying sounds, and like many tough, uncompromising films (like this one), they all combine to send her parents into a tizzy. Carri's is a horror film down on the farm, and it comes close to sui generis, capped by a recurring motif of the weasel, kept secure in a cage, but seen in close-up opening its toothy mouth, with jaw wide open, and emitting a hissing sound that can haunt nightmares. It's already done it for me, and I'm afraid it'll continue to do so for weeks to come.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Longtime readers of Filmjourney.org may have noticed a decisive lag in posts of late, and the reason is quite simple: my first child, Alexandra Anne Cummings, entered the world two weeks ago, and has been pretty greedy with my time. But we're settling into a life pattern and the blogging here should resume with more frequency shortly. (Expect a lot of DVD reviews for a few months!)
In the meantime, enjoy Robert Koehler's exciting posts (as time permits) from the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and feel free to check out a series of short posts on animation I'm publishing over at Beyond magazine this week, an Utne-nominated indie publication I'm very proud to be associated with. I'm looking forward to introducing Alex to as many of these films as possible over the ensuing years.
And as always, feel free to post any comments or questions on the discussion board...

Sunday, March 9, 2008

GUADALAJARA: SEARCHING FOR A FESTIVAL
By Robert Koehler
So.... the idea with attending the Guadalajara film festival is to survey what's popping up on the Mexican cinema horizon. The 23-year-old mission here has been to serve as a Mexico showcase, and it still is. Now, there are added layers, creating a slightly unwieldy superstructure of Latin American films--some of which are going places (or have already been) and some that will go nowhere.
Here's the catch: I can't blog about the films I'm reviewing here for Variety (and variety.com), so that means no Mexican films. Except Sergio Tovar Velarde's negligible Aurora Borealis, notable only since it was inventively shot in low-end digital video by the great Mexican director Ricardo (Noticias lejanas) Benet, and Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe, which just premiered in Berlin (and scored the Fipresci prize of international film critics).

Forget Aurora Borealis, but Lake Tahoe is something to hold onto, and keep close. Eimbcke, when we saw him last, made his sublime Duck Season, introducing the concept of deadpan comedy into the Mexican lexicon. (He told me at the time that he had to explain what "deadpan" was to the actors, the crew, everybody. He adores Aki Kaurismaki and Jim Jarmusch, so it couldn't be otherwise.) Jarmusch is all over Lake Tahoe's early sections, but that turns out to be a misdirection or a subtle trick, since the film isn't a Jarmuschian comedy. It's a tragedy that gradually shifts mood from deadpan/absurd to somber and a wee bit nostalgic.
What happens when Juan (Diego Catano) dashes out of his family's home and drives his Nissan into a light post, and then tries to find the right part to fix his engine? Well, for starters, Juan walks a lot, down empty streets in a sleepy coastal Yucatan town. (Eimbcke barely indicates it's the Yucatan--there's a distant sign, and there's a lot of sand around the sidewalks.) He walks, and he walks. And walks. In and out of one auto repair place after another, each one with giant painted signs that look like they've been there for eons. The first joke: Tons of auto shops, but no cars driving around. Second joke: A shop's door is open, but the unseen owner inside says he's closed. Eimbcke appears at first to resort to Jarmusch imitation. Head-on shots, minimalist compositions and blackouts abound, exquisitely paced and timed. But it's best to say that he's stealing, and stealing extremely well. (Steal only from the best.)
He's even better than Jarmusch at creating something from almost nothing. By the time Juan gets his part, and his repair, he has had to deal with a giant Mastiff, its fat auto shop owner whose business is so screwed up that he doesn't even realize that his phone is unplugged, a lazy girl behind the counter of another shop who has a slow-moving crush on Juan (and a baby) and a repair guy who likes to do martial arts moves when everyone else least expects it. But the growing annoyance with the car repair is just cover for a greater weight growing inside his home: Juan's mom won't come out of her bathtub and his little brother sits in a tent in their front yard. Something's going on. Eimbcke hangs out the mystery out, but he doesn't indulge it, as Juan is able to put the pieces together to realize that his father is dead. The title refers to a Lake Tahoe bumper sticker that Juan's aunt brought back from her trip there, which doesn't seem at first to have anything to do with anything in particular, except that his dad had placed it on the car, and had always wanted to take the family there. And now,in the final shot, as the boys have removed the sticker, we know he never will.
It may be early, but everyone watching the films here is convinced that there's no possible way that any film in the Mexican competition has a prayer against Lake Tahoe. I've heard this before, and then when least expected, something comes along. But this time, the guess may be right.

Guadalajara had become an old, doddering event that few outside of Mexico and Latin American film business reps paid much attention to; it just wasn't a destination. Now, it is, partly because Latin American cinema has expanded, diversified, and shown that it's sustainable, and partly because the festival has become more interesting. Cinephilia--which was more the kind of thing that FICCO, the Mexico City festival just ended, has cared about--has even appeared: A solid survey of recent Argentine films, which starts for me with Lisandro Alonso's La libertad, the film that actually launched a whole new way of making post-narrative films. My Cinema Scope colleague Mark Peranson (who wrote possibly the first English-language text on La libertad after it premiered at BAFICI in 2001--that magic, terrible year) has noted that La libertad was also one of the first films of its era to break down the division between documentary and fiction. This, more than any other single thing, is what distinguishes the new world cinema, whether it's by Raya Martin, Jim Finn, Pedro Costa or Albert Serra (and others). Alonso didn't start what gets commonly called "New Argentine Cinema" (there were at least two previous "new" periods), but he radicalized it, and offered a new way.
As far as I know--and I might be wrong, so anybody out there in the blogosphere, correct me if I am--La libertad has never screened in Los Angeles. Not a surprise perhaps (it took a while before Alonso's next, Los muertos, made it to Los Angeles). But this means that the most seminal film of the most important film movement of the past seven years hasn't played in the would-be film capital of the world. But its context in Guadalajara is even more important, since La libertad is placed alongside other key films like Martel's La cienaga and Carri's Los rubios as a way of defining what a national film movement actually looks like. The irony is that there's nothing absolutely Argentine about La libertad. Its freedom is a freedom from nationality, time-space, narrative laws, camera laws and the expectations that audiences instinctively impose on themselves. But pay attention to the actual translation of the Spanish title: "Liberty"--a harder, more profound word than "freedom," a word pointing to a greater leap, a commitment to an ideal, an identifier for an equation that even describes its opposition--oppression. Liberty is harder-won. Liberty is that thing that the films that really matter aspire to. This one just has the balls to take it as its own name.
A film about Misael, who cuts trees and shapes them into logs for sale. A film, really, about what Misael does--searching for his trees, wandering, taking a shit, finding, chopping, shaving, napping, stacking, moving them to a distribution point, returning to his base camp labeled "Los errantes," finding an armadillo for dinner, killing it, cutting it up, building a fire for the grill, grilling it, stacking the loose brush from his woodcutting, burning the brush, finishing the grilling, eating the armadillo (the hard shell forms a dish, as the dead tail wags back and forth), looking into the camera as lightning approaches. Active progressive verbs for an active progressive film that moves forward at every moment, considers every moment precious and immediate and the one thing right now--right. now.---that matters and nothing else. There are few films that encompass a world, a state of existence so purely and totally. Many have noted that Alonso's film is one of those ultimate affirmations of Andre Bazin's ideal cinema, the emphatic assertion of the real on screen. It allows the eye to pay absolute attention to what Misael is doing, because what he's doing not only is what counts, but what defines him. So in that sense, you have the essence of character. But there's the matching factor that almost nothing is even close to being "acted." Certainly not "written." La libertad is arranged and choreographed, an attentive contemplation on a human in nature. The big lie, by the way, is that this is ''minimalism." (The same way we hear Apichatpong Weerasethakul described as ''minimalist.") No--this is maximalism, a cinema containing everything needed for its own value and purpose, and that has the effect of growing in the mind, either as the viewer recalls it, or sees it again. (As you can on DVD, from the Collection Malba in Buenos Aires.)

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Garbage In Garbage Out, or Why the Foreign Oscars Need to be Blown Up

By ROBERT KOEHLER

Computer programmers have a term for the risk flawed data input poses to the goal of good data results: Garbage In, Garbage Out. No four words better sum up the profound problems that have turned the foreign-language Oscar category into a sad, pathetic joke. When the head of the executive committee overseeing the Oscar’s foreign category—that would be widely-respected producer Mark Johnson—looks at you directly, as he did to me while we rode a shuttle bus during this year’s Sundance, and tells you that it’s time to “blow up” the section, it’s a way of saying that the dilemmas hobbling the foreign film competition go far, far beyond the obvious issue that this year’s nomination list left off Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.

This corner of the Academy Awards is rife with garbage, and almost inevitably, the garbage out results in a quintet of mediocrities (and some baddies) like The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, Austria), Katyn (Andrzej Wajda, Poland), Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, Israel), Mongol (Sergei Bodrov, Kazakhstan) and 12 (Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia). The media’s dominant angle on the “missing” nominees (most oft-cited include various pet titles like Marjane Satrapi’s and Vincent Paronnaud’s wildly overrated Persepolis, Fatih Akin’s disastrous The Edge of Heaven, Lee Chang-dong’s should-have-won-the-Palme masterpiece Secret Sunshine, Carlos Reygadas’ astonishing Silent Light and, perhaps most indefensibly, J.A. Bayona’s less-than-scary The Orphanage) utterly misses the more serious issues confronting the Academy. This isn’t surprising: It’s easier stirring up froth about why the widely-liked The Band’s Visit was DQ’d (an excess of spoken English dialogue, a cardinal sin given the award’s name) than looking inside the very yucky interior of this category.

If they did, they’d find a bad, bad smell inside.

So where does the garbage start?

Governed by a United Nations-style philosophy of one-country-one-vote, or, if you will, “Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is every bit the equal of Nicolas Sarkozy’s France,” the Academy proudly allows any country to select and submit a film to the race, and do so in any manner that that country desires. No matter how profoundly corrupt or confused. The Russian group is notoriously sullied, with its dominance by a tiny mafia of producers and directors surrounding Mikhalkov, his big brother Andrei Konchalovsky and their circle. An unimpeachable source in the Russian film industry has described to me in blood-curdling detail—way, way off the record, for fear as they put it “of injury to my body and my loved ones”—of kickbacks, greenbacks and rampant cronyism for deals leading to their “selection.” (Notice Russia’s pick this year?) Italy, which regularly indulges in Donneybrooks and what one Variety reporter once described to me as a “comical simulation of the Italian parliament,” assembles a ridiculously huge group of disparate industry-ites and even some hangers-on to fight over the film to pick. (Their choice this time was a true doozy, the spectacularly dreadful Giuseppe Tornatore mess known as The Unknown.) Many countries, such as Mexico and France, have entrenched and relatively small committees composed of established industry pros who tend not to want to leave their cushy posts. Perhaps only India has a reasonable system, which involves a national runoff among films selected from the linguistically distinct provinces. At least in this case—India is, after all, home to the world’s biggest national film industry---there’s some consideration of a wider swathe of films across a range of interests. (Some, like Israel, automatically send their best picture “Oscar” winner, though this leaves aside the authenticity of particular national film academies—including our own.)
The process is so screwed up that when a country like Japan—which is usually expert in picking real dogs—selects a film as fine as Suo Masayuki’s procedural courtroom drama, I Just Didn’t Do It, or Hungary—whose own set of cronies aren’t known for their taste—picks something as daring and provocative as Gyorgy Palfi’s Taxidermia, it comes off as a stunning accident, a freakish event. Look at the lists of best 2007 films by Doug and myself on this site (way back in January) and note how few titles overlap at all with the list of 63 submissions for the current Oscar race: For every Secret Sunshine, there are dozens of pieces of junk like Satanas (Colombia) or The Russian Triangle (Georgia) or Shadows (Macedonia), stuff ratified by local bureaucrats, hacks and other nincompoops. It’s from such incoming garbage that outgoing garbage includes (from Spain) The Orphanage rather than the country’s greatest film of 2007, Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (Oh! We forgot! The Oscars would disqualify it as being too much in French, a language not frequently used in Spain, and therefore out!) or The Edge of Heaven (from Germany) rather than such stunning and accomplished works as Thomas Arslan’s Vacation or Maria Speth’s Madonnas that far better reflect the latest, and possibly most interesting, new German Wave. (And maybe Speth’s might not rate because it has too much English on the soundtrack. Who knows? Who, outside of a handful of Academy bureaucrats, cares?)
As for the one-film-one-country rule, Academy executive director Bruce Davis considers it Holy Writ, beyond debate, absolutely untouchable. I did get the distinct impression when asking him about this rule during an interview for Variety that wild horses and other four-leggeds would have to drag him out of his Beverly Hills office before he ever budged on his no-discussion position. “Besides,” he responded semi-rhetorically, “would you open it up to multiple films, with no limit to the number?” When one has a terrible idea, such as Davis’ Academy has with this rule, the best defense is suggesting chaos as the alternative. Even the abysmal Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that assembly of entertainment hack journos from around the world best known for rampantly corrupt junkets and the Golden Globes, were shrewd enough to not limit their field of foreign-language films to one per country. Only a supremely bureaucratic mindset would come up with such a ridiculous schema as the Academy, yet what goes little noticed is that the rule has been in place since nearly the inception of the category over fifty years ago. Put another way, the ancient and doddering Wajda wasn’t even a pup filmmaker when this lame-brained idea took hold, and for those interested in a reasonably relevant foreign film category, the bad news is that it ain’t going away anytime soon. No matter what kind of detonation plans Johnson has in store.
And it gets worse—oh yes, much worse. Sample this masterstroke of a rule, a model of what can only be termed as good intentions gone south: We paraphrase, but in essence, every print source supplying the Academy with a submitted film must deliver it in the form of a 35mm print. No digital allowed, either on tape or DVD. Moreover, that print will never, ever, be returned. It will stay in Academy vaults in perpetuity, throughout the known universe. The logic behind the latter requirement exists in some netherworld that’s too scary to contemplate. As for the former, the demand for a 35mm print may have made sense back in the day when film-to-video produced an unsightly image and damaged the filmmaker’s visual intentions. But now that we’re well into the age of digital cinema, when many of the most sublime new films on Earth are shot and presented digitally, when digital has been better absorbed into the film world’s circulation system than iPhones or WGA agreements, when even the high and still mighty Cannes film festival happily and frequently projects digitally-shot films on digital playback media---well, this is just about the stupidest requirement imaginable. (For all you techies out there who may wonder if the Academy demands this because its Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, where the foreign committee views the submissions, isn’t equipped for digital—be assured, it is.) It’s also a rule with hidden consequences. Poorer countries and producers, hard-pressed to afford even one video-to-film transfer print for certain festivals, and then faced with this onerous, idiotic and hopelessly outdated rule once their film is an official submission, might not be able to afford to deliver the print-into-the-Academy-black-hole given skyrocketing lab costs. A few films have fallen by the wayside because of this, and more will. How and why it’s even possible that a country with a bumper year of fine and even brilliant films like Malaysia (whose new wave of talent is going at full crest, and winning festival awards everywhere) didn’t submit is stunning on the face of it, but it’s reasonable to guess that that Academy bill was just too steep to make a submission even viable.
Please note that there’s been no mention here of the voters and their voting process, which after all would demand a Tolstoyan essay all by itself, and has been reported and described many times in the trades. The hue and cry about this group overlooking the 4 Months of the world simplifies the deeper matters eating away at the credibility of this Oscar category, many of which are too often ignored. Johnson has frankly and openly complained about the group’s heavy weighting toward retired members of the Academy branches (and don’t think he hasn’t received waves of internal flak for his comments), and while it may be true that younger members are under-represented, it hardly follows that a “younger” foreign Oscar committee would automatically pick better movies—a bias that’s commonly repeated in most news accounts of the group’s problems. It’s just as possible that their choices might even be worse; after all, the audience of 60 to 80-somethings may be a tad more comfortable with subtitles than the young’uns, who may have found Taxidermia just as revolting and intolerably radical as the crowd who reportedly streamed out of the official screening in abject horror. (Thus, getting Palfi’s point. Besides, 20 to 50-somethings streamed out of it in Cannes too.) Johnson’s belief that lowering the committee’s average age would ensure a more up-to-date result sounds plausible, but isn’t likely. Besides, the extraordinarily pockmarked process preceding his group watching and voting already makes the choices worse than suspect. If one wants up-to-dateness, yearns for hip and relevant, and gets all hot and bothered at the cutting edge—this is the Academy, so that can only go so far—then the issue is that the original countries and their bodies regularly fail to pick their own films that matter. The voting Filipino film industry vets, for one of many examples, won’t acknowledge the exciting and groundbreaking independent movement going on in the islands and aggressively throw blockades in the way of any of the movement’s young filmmakers from getting their work shown in commercial venues. These same vets, voting for a bit of travelogue-y drivel like Donsol, would never allow themselves to vote for a Khavn, or a John Torres, or a Lav Diaz. (His relatively shorter films, of course.) A body dominated by a hidebound elite in a country’s film culture, corrupt or not, will rarely if ever lean to the new. Particularly when they only need to pick one film per the Academy’s dictates. That’s why when cases come along like Mexico finally selecting Reygadas (after his years as a pariah), or a Hungary selecting their new and more daring artists like Palfi or Benedek Fliegauf, they have to be seen as exceptional, as bolts out of the blue. Look again at the best lists we assembled here at Filmjourney.org, and the message is that 2007 was a great year for world cinema. Yet the universe of cinema these lists acknowledge is often deliberately rejected and even despised by many of the members of the very committees determining a single “best” for the Oscar race. The entire system is rigged for mediocrity. The idea of blowing up such a system is just about the sanest new idea to hit the Oscar chat circuit in a long, long time.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

The estimable Animation World Magazine offers an excellent article on Persepolis' lack of exposure from Sony. The author doesn't make any points that a lot of us haven't been making for years, but it's great to see more articles like this in popular industry trades/sites. It's also well written, offering gems such as this:

"On the other hand, audiences are treated (on two screens at most multiplexes) to the lowest examples of swill dished out by Hollywood. While Persepolis struggles to be shown in the smallest of art film houses, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is smeared like celluloid scum across thousands of screens, insulting the intellect of millions. Oh, this film is good enough if one is willing to profess ignorance of American history and government, European history, Native American history, archeology, geology and geography. This is not to mention ignoring at least three major plot holes that could envelop Mount Rushmore, but why indeed go on? This misbegotten mishmash is presently sitting on a box office gross of $187,000,000, which should be enough to launch a third sequel (possibly subtitled Yankee Doodle Dimwits)."
And, yeah, I thought the whole point of the Oscars was repackaging films and boosting ad campaigns? Why doesn't Sony release Persepolis in the multiplexes with full-page ads that read "Oscar (TM) Nominated for Best Animated Feature of the Year"?
Yet I also appreciate the author's productive optimism:

"In the final reckoning, this column is not about Persepolis alone. My rant concerns countless instances of fine animated films, many of them good enough to contend for and win major awards, going unseen. It is impossible to ascertain who deserves the greater share of blame for this, but let's put that aspect aside for the moment and consider this instead: It really doesn't have to be that way. If we want change, we can work for it."
Working away...

Monday, January 28, 2008

Now that serial killer musicals are back in fashion, LACMA's screening last Friday of Michael Powell's rarely seen Bluebeard's Castle (1964)--with Powell's widow and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance--seems especially appropriate. Made for West German TV in the doldrums of Powell's post-Peeping Tom (1960) blacklisting, it's a startlingly expressionist, one-act, one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok's sole opera (with lyrics by film theorist Bela Balazs).
The producer/star Norman Foster (who should not be confused with the Hollywood actor/director of the same name, and whose widow recently approved distribution of the film with Powell's summary subtitles) plays the mythological duke; Bluebeard's new wife, Judith (Ana Raquel Satre), unveils his sordid past by unlocking a series of rooms that finally reveal the bodies of all his previous wives, whom he murdered. The opera (and the film) cast the story in tragic terms highlighting the inability of romantic commitment to withstand either the darkest corners of the psyche or the irrevocable forces of fate.
Schoonmaker affectionately quipped that the production cost "about twenty-five cents" and involved "a few students and a lot of polystyrene." But don't let that fool you--Bluebeard's Castle is an intense and visually dazzling film that recalls the most experimental moments of Powell's (and Pressburger's) The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). Bertrand Tavernier (last seen passionately promoting movies in Todd McCarthy's documentary on Pierre Rissient) and George Romero both count themselves among the film's ardent fans.
The sets, in fact, were envisioned by Hein Heckroth, the surrealist painter who designed those two previous movies, as well as Powell and Pressburger's third opera film, Oh... Rosalinda! (1955). While the decor may be of modest construction, it's highly effective: shadowy, abstract sculptures, vaguely evoking women's anguished faces and bodies, which suggest not only the walls of the castle but its very spirit of death. Splattered paint and menacing forms adorn layers of transparent fabrics that appear and disappear according to their illumination by vivid theatrical lighting.
Like a garishly-hued The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the abstract sets are not only striking in two-dimensional, pictorial terms, but also exhibit an immersive, three-dimensional depth by shifting within the film's space like a hellish phantasmagoria. Each door--resembling a monolithic gravestone--unveils its own degrees of beauty and horror; an armory, a treasury, a garden, even a distant mountain range are suggested through countless layers of complex, sculpted and painted forms, challenging the viewer to penetrate and decipher them like the turbulent emotions swarming within Bluebeard himself. One visual highlight is a pool of tears that Judith leans over, teardrops descending in the foreground painted on a transparent fabric. As she looks at her reflection, a fluid poured into the pool is scattered in jagged, concentric ripples, echoing the general set design before turning blood red. As a matter of fact, blood eventually finds its way behind each and every door Judith enters--and can even be seen in the surrounding clouds.
The opera was recorded for the film in Zagreb (Schoonmaker told us the conductor finished the recording and had to race to conduct a performance of Carmen later that evening) and Powell later shot the film to coincide with the pre-recorded music. (Schoonmaker also claimed Scorsese utilized the same technique for his Goodfellas montage set to Eric Clapton's "Lela.") Despite the potential danger of this approach, the camera and editing never seem constrained by it; though the film was obviously carefully planned out, it never feels schematic. In fact, Bluebeard's Castle is an shining example of how to make a great film out of virtually nothing, a film that reverberates in the consciousness like a haunting death cry, its images and emotions as worthy of scrutiny as the classics of German expressionism.
Incidentally, in surfing the web, I found a fascinating page at the University of Leeds that claims to offer video clips of an academic dialogue surrounding the film, including a lecture and discussion by Powell critic Ian Christie. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working for me--maybe you'll have better luck.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)
"Now that rampaging dinosaurs, epic catastrophes, and superheroes have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as news footage. But animation is as old photography itself; it predates 'motion pictures' through a variety of Victorian contraptions. And its practitioners were often the most solitary and obsessive filmmakers--visionaries who painstakingly granted the illusion of life to an astonishing array of materials, and devoted years of labor to producing a few moments of flickering movement. Animators are cinema’s original Frankensteins. . . ."
The new issue of the Utne-nominated ads-free indie magazine Beyond is flying off the printer now, and it's theme is "small." For my ongoing "Film Journey" column, I chose to discuss the works of animators whose obsession and genius have gifted us over the years: Ladisla