Ellipsis

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May 19, 2012

Ellipsis #61

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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Pâfekuto Burû (1997) (Perfect Blue)
Satoshi Kon
Japanese

 
Perfect BlueSatoshi Kon’s remarkable debut feature Perfect Blue (1997) begins with an action scene from a television episode of Power Rangers, revealed only shortly later to be a live performance by the actors in a public auditorium. As the resoundingly unsuccessful show winds down, we hear some young audience members sourly point out that it was nothing like the television version. This idea of the virtual, the illusionary coming across as more real than the real drives the central conflict of Perfect Blue, in which an erstwhile pop idol, Mima, finds herself becoming the prisoner of her own fabricated personality. A good ten years ahead of its time, Satoshi Kon’s film frighteningly presages the progressive virtualization and publicization of our personalities. Mima loses out to one of her fans who does a better job of impersonating her than herself and develops a persona for Mima that’s truer than reality. Perfect Blue doesn’t merely subordinate reality to illusion and personality to identity, but thoroughly undermines the possibility of constructing such dichotomies, as reality and illusion bleed so thoroughly into each other that it is not just impossible, but also immaterial that they be separated. Even with its deceptively assuring closure, a la Shutter Island (2010), the film pulls the rug of reality from under our feet and leaves us hanging like Scottie Ferguson. Very much like Mima, the audience struggles with the instability of the movie’s construction and attempts (perhaps in vain) to hold on to a solid ground from which to view things, to secure its own sanity. Directed with an extremist’s taste for visceral shock and a modernist’s eye for reflective surfaces, Perfect Blue challenges the psychological seriousness of many similar live-action features, while benefiting from its choice of the medium.

 

April 15, 2012

Ellipsis #60

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: , |
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Bara No Sôretsu (1968) (Funeral Parade Of Roses)
Toshio Matsumoto
Japanese

 

Funeral Parade of RosesToshio Matsumoto’s flamboyant, shape shifting, subversive Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) is perhaps the ideal poster boy for what is known as the Japanese New Wave. If this loosely defined group associated with the cinema of filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura attacked the traditional notion of “the Japanese Identity”, exposing the blind spots in its attempts at constructing a seamless racial, political and cultural identity for the nation and upsetting any stable ground hitherto held on to, Matsumoto’s film questions the idea of identity itself. Centering on a group of transvestites working at a bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku District, Funeral Parade of Roses is a potpourri of fictional passages, interviews and found footage that weaves together various modes of representation/exposition and simulates the theme of amorphousness of identity that is at the heart of the film. This idea of identity-as-performance is set in motion by a tape recording that plays throughout the film and talks about humans wearing multiple masks one over the other and is fortified by the film’s perpetual self-reflexivity, which keeps revealing whatever we witness as staged. This reflexivity also keeps the film from being exploitative towards its transvestite subjects, who are instead made active participants in the creative process. Matsumoto does nothing that could undermine the dignity of his actor-characters and portrays them in all their richness: jealous, scheming, funny, carefree, tormented, self-deprecating and proud. (Not that the film takes all the right steps – it still seems to buy into the troubled childhood cliché)  Full of baffling shifts in tone, attitude, pace and narrative modes, Funeral Parade of Roses is the kind of film Almodóvar would really dig: perverse, intense, loving and dead serious.

 

April 9, 2012

Ellipsis #59

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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Kôshikei (1968) (Death By Hanging)
Nagisa Oshima
Japanese

 

Death By HangingTroublemaker extraordinaire Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) is a tar-black comedy in the vein of Dr. Strangelove (1964), straddling the polar realms of docu-drama and over-the-top absurdity, and begins with a documentary passage that tells us that about a recent survey which reveals that most Japanese are against the abolition of death penalty. Following this statistic, we are shown the process of execution of a prisoner step-by-step, with voiceover commentary that befits one of those state-sponsored awareness raisers, before being abruptly thrust into a world of Kafkaesque fiction. Authorities overlooking the execution discover that the hanged prisoner R (Do-yun Yu) is not dead yet and has lost his memory. Not having encountered this situation before, they scramble for law books and scriptures, before deciding that they would have to rekindle R’s memory and make him aware of his guilt so that he can be hanged again. What ensues is, as it were, a theatre of the absurd, with officials role-playing, reconstructing in great detail R’s past – right from his possibly troubled childhood – based on popular knowledge, their biases, neuroses and fantasies. “The Law is always prepared to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without remorse”, wrote Barthes. In Oshima’s film we witness that tendency in all its viciousness, as the officers channel their repressed racism and sexual frustration onto the ethnic outsider R, who becomes a Christ-like figure bearing the consequences of the prejudices of a whole nation. Oshima is unabashedly agenda-driven and uses a host of devices, that no doubt recall Godard, that distances the audience – who are explicitly implicated and grilled – from the central drama. With a moralist’s anger and a filmmaker’s flamboyance, he creates a cold, caustic work that presents a ruthless Japan that haunts its youth with the ghosts of an imperial, feudal, terrorizing past.

 

March 31, 2012

Ellipsis #58

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , |
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Tôkyô Orimpikku (1965) (Tokyo Olympiad)
Kon Ichikawa
Japanese

 

Tokyo OlympiadCommissioned by Japan’s national Olympic committee during the Summer Olympics of 1964, Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is a study in forms. Covering the event end-to-end – from the opening to the closing ceremony – Kon Ichikawa’s film is preoccupied with the filmic form as an end in itself, indifferent to if not independent of its ostensible subject. This stance is highly befitting of the project as well, for what are the Olympic Games if not the pure form of war, emptied of all its teleology and historico-political foundation? Each of the sport is filmed, edited and scored with a different style and rhythm, as though trying to develop an impressionistic portrait of the game. Ichikawa is excited by movement and by speed, by an athletic manoeuvre and by a show of sheer force, by the elegance of a gymnastic move and the animality of a shot put throw. His fascination is not with the perfection and beauty of the human body, as it might have been to Leni Riefenstahl, but with the grace of its movement and with the skill it’s capable of. Even when he is fixated on an isolated body part, as is the case with the oscillating derriere of an athlete in a walking event, the interest is less in the anatomical details than with the form of its motion through space and time. Ichikawa, as it were, is proposing why “Citius, Altius, Fortius” could well apply to the medium he is working with too. He also takes the spirit of the Olympics from the outside to the inside, from the frenzy of a mass sport to the simmering moods of an individual. He mystifies by distance, by covering the athletes from a distance and with a brooding voiceover which makes them come across like Zen monks (a stratagem that Chris Marker would employ in his film on Kurosawa). He captures their little quirks, their absurd superstitions and their emotional fragility in vivid detail which acts as the perfect foil to the extreme physicality of the rest of the film.

 

March 4, 2012

Ellipsis #57

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Bulgaria, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of Hungary, Cinema of the Czech Republic, Cinema of Yugoslavia, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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Podzemlje (1995) (Underground)
Emir Kusturica
Serbian/German/French/English/Russian

 

UndergroundEmir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) has been torn apart in certain sections as pro-Milosevic propaganda that brushes aside Serbia’s atrocities in the Balkan Wars. I think that’s not only being too harsh on a relatively benign satire but also that it ascribes way too much intention and focus to a film that’s riddled with ideological inconsistencies, like most films. True that it presents Yugoslavia under Tito as a Platonic cave whose residents mistake the shadows on the wall – sometimes literally, as when the inmates of an underground cell watch faked footage from WW2, which they think is still on – for truth and who are kept united under a phantom enemy while being blind to internal fault lines. But construing Kusturica’s generally sentimental lament about the breakup of a nation as brothers start killing brothers and friends turn on each other as a case for Serbia comes across as a pre-determined approach to the film which writes down the answers before the questions. What’s most inviting about Underground is how it keeps poking at the nexus between politics and cinema. Marko (Miki Manojlović), whose rise to power mirrors Tito’s, appears to us like a filmmaker figure, directing his historical actors in an underground set illuminated by high-key lighting and marked by a bizarre communal mise en scène. (And what of Tito himself, who could be the seen as the helmer of a chaotic crew made to act out a Communist metanarrative?) The deep hierarchy of performances that pervades the film aptly throws light on the loss of “reality” and the alienation from history that seems to have characterized Yugoslavia’s tumultuous half-century since the end of the Second World War.

 

January 22, 2012

Ellipsis #55

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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Mati Manas (1985) (The Mind Of Clay)
Mani Kaul
Hindi/Marathi/Tamil

 

Mati ManasCommissioned by NFDC and the handicrafts division of Ministry of Textiles, Mani Kaul’s Mati Manas centers on potters and terra cotta artisans located in and around Rajasthan and unfolds as a fictionalized version of Kaul’s journey into the region as an outsider and a documentary filmmaker. We have documentary passages that elaborately detail the art and business of terra cotta making and the way of life that revolves around it interspersed with sections where we see the in-movie documentary crew shuttling between museums showcasing earthenware from the Indus Valley civilization, excavation sites and various potter villages while narrating to us the various myths, legends and folk tales of the region that reveal how mud/earth has become, for these artisans, an element inextricable from imagination and practice and has gone on to develop maternal associations with its capacity to nurture, shelter and produce. Suffused with Cezanne-like still life and images of potters at work, especially the weary, skillful hands that lovingly, spontaneously shape raw earth into little, wondrous artifacts, Mati Manas comes across as a tribute to the dignity and grace of human labour. Perhaps more importantly, Kaul’s return-to-zero film unveils a society where people’s relationship to art is still habitual and tactile, a pre-reflective, non-reductive, phenomenological way of experiencing art that stands in opposition to modern, appropriative, optical approaches – a split that is reflected in the chasm between how ancient pottery is exhibited in museums and sketched in textbooks as icons of heritage and triumph of archaeology and how it might have been perceived by people of its time.

 

 [Capsule added to The Films of Mani Kaul]
 

January 15, 2012

Ellipsis #54

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: , |
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Serious Games (2009-10)
Harun Farocki
English

 

Serious GamesHarun Farocki’s four-part project Serious Games (2009-10) takes a look at the use of photorealistic computer-generated imagery in processes surrounding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see soldiers being trained before missions by demonstrative games that map out enemy terrain and climate in amazing detail – right down till the physical properties of the vegetation found in these geographies. We also see similar interactive programs that help PTSD-afflicted ex-servicemen revisit devastating moments and, in doing so, overcome their condition. There is an amalgamation of reality, fiction and simulation throughout the film. What appear to be documentary segments are revealed to be performances by amateur actor-salesmen demonstrating to soldiers the uses of their video games. In one segment, a mock Iraqi village is set up in Twentynine Palms, California with the help of local Iranian and Pakistani folk that seems directly modeled on a videogame. While not all of these games with reality and fiction pay off, it is intriguing to note how armies’ relationship to war has changed over the years. War appears to have ceased being a hard, irrational, unpredictable material reality and become a science that could be modeled, predicted and controlled. Farocki refers to this modern type of war as an asymmetric war, in which one side has a heavy advantage over the other and focuses on the biased representation and perceptual manipulation such simulations propagate. His fuzzy polemic, however, is not only compromised but also questionable because the kind of representation he is criticizing is, unlike the mass media, made specifically for the consumption of the army and is, itself, based on the army’s existing view of things. So not only does the commentary come across as self-evident, but also toothless because the position that the film locates itself in does not allow for insightful criticism in the first place.

 

January 8, 2012

Ellipsis #53

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Lithuania, Cinema of Russia, Ellipsis | Tags: , |
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Indigène d’Eurasie (2010) (Eastern Drift)
Sharunas Bartas
French/Lithuanian/Russian

 

Eastern DriftThe trajectory of Lithuanian helmer Sharunas Bartas’ filmography, in a sense, runs anti-parallel to that of Béla Tarr, with whom the former shares a number of artistic, political and philosophical inclinations, and has moved from extreme stylization to rough-hewn naturalism, from near-total narrative abstraction to flirtation with generic structures, from semi-autobiographical meditations set against the backdrop of Soviet collapse to highly materialist tales of marginal lives in the Eurozone. (In fact, one could say that the exact tipping point occurs at Freedom (2000).) Eastern Drift finds the filmmaker moving one step closer to conventional aesthetic as well as dramatic construction and follows Gena (Bartas himself), who is on the run after he knocks off his Russian boss after an altercation over a hefty sum of money. Even though the film has the appearance of a Euro-thriller, with the protagonist hopping from one major city of the continent to another, each of which regularly gets its token establishment shot (and all of which look very similar for the untrained eye), it actually moves against the grain of the sub-genre. Unlike the traditional European action picture, in Eastern Drift movement – the prime action over which the narrative is founded – itself is problematized. A large part of the proceedings is made up of Gena trying to sneak in and out of buildings as well as countries and finding himself thwarted at almost every move. An antithesis to the utopianism of Eurozone and its myth of intra-continental mobility, Eastern Drift crystallizes and futhers Bartas’ preoccupation with suffocating national borders, although the scenario over which he builds his argument remains moot.

 

[Capsule added to The Films of Sharunas Bartas]

 

December 25, 2011

Ellipsis #52

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the UK, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , |
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Project Nim (2011)
James Marsh
English

 
Project Nim

Project Nim (2011), directed by James Marsh of Man on Wire (2008) fame, gives to us the life of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee at Columbia University that was being trained to communicate in sign language, as narrated by Dr. Herbert Terrace (the head of the project) and his team of trainers. We see the animal being taken away from his mother by force, brought up along with human children at one of Terrace’s friends’ home, transferred back to the university, sold to a drug-testing facility and, finally, to a private ranch. We witness the devastating tragedy of Nim’s life, as he is deracinated, trained for years to become human-like only to be expected, subsequently, to behave like chimpanzee. Throughout, there is an ambivalence based on the nature versus nurture question that we experience: Is Nim’s rapid learning curve an indication of the dominance of social relations in shaping communication or is his random acts of violence a clinching proof for the presence of an innate animal essence? The interviewees describe their relationship to Nim in very human terms and one wonders if some of it is not the projection of their own anthropomorphic understanding of the animal’s behaviour. Consequently, Nim becomes something of a MacGuffin that everybody is talking about, but no one knows what it exactly is. The film’s sympathies clearly lie with the animal, to such an extent that it refuses to see the complexity of the situation. Abstracting scientific research as animal cruelty, the film fails to take into account the more pressing issues that are being addressed by such projects. To add to this gross simplification, Marsh’s questionable fictional restaging of facts and regular use of unrelated footage in order to prevent the film from becoming a talking-heads documentary betrays a lack of faith on the material and an unwarranted fear that a straightforward presentation would be ‘uncinematic’.

 

December 4, 2011

Ellipsis #51

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , |
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Jiabiangou (2010) (The Ditch)
Wang Bing
Mandarin

 

The DitchWang Bing’s The Ditch (2010), the filmmaker’s first full-length fictional feature, is a recreation of Jiabiangou Labour Camp located in the Gobi desert, where prisoners accused of belonging to the Right were sent in order to be “re-educated” through hard labour. We see prisoners being brutalized, living continuously in starvation and in pathetic trenches. We see them surviving on small critters, regurgitated food particles and even buried corpses. There are two kinds of landscapes that they inhabit – the seemingly-infinite plains of the desert where they toil during the day time and the cramped and under-lit trenches that they take refuge during the night – both of which Wang shoots characteristically in digital video on Steadicam and in long shots. The result has the hangover of Wang’s documentary features and each scene comes across less like illusionary fiction and more like the recording of a performance. The acting, likewise, is perched between the emotive and the expressionless. Consequently, Wang’s foray into the grammar of conventional fictional cinema – the occasional shot-reverse shot and close-ups – sticks out as high relief. No doubt, like Brutality Factory (2007), his first stab at fiction, he’s dealing with thin material here that concerns itself more with the need to remember than with the necessity of analytically dealing with history. This approach – the raison d’être of his best non-fiction works – reveals itself as a substitute for straightforward documentation and intentionally swaps prison dynamics for a survival sketch. However, there is one ironic detail that Wang seems to be arriving at here: that Mao’s re-education program at the camp for purported Rightist subversives only teaches them one thing: Every man for himself.

 

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