Ellipsis

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October 16, 2011

Ellipsis #49

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: , |
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Life In A Day (2011)
Various
Various

 

Life in a DayRidley and Tony Scott’s production house Scott Free, in association with LG and YouTube, invited users from around the world to submit footage of their lives shot on July 24, 2010 as a part of a socio-cinematic experiment. Out of the 4800 hours of video gathered, chief director Kevin Macdonald and co. wove this exhilarating 90-minute ride, Life in a Day, which, on its surface takes us through one day in the life of people from around the world. If Dziga Vertov attempted to sketch a portrait of a pulsating city as seen through the Kino-Eye over a day and Medvedkin had Soviet peasants shoot their own lives, edited the obtained footage in his Cine-Train and played it back to them, Life in a Day combines both these ideas and realizes them in a post-globalized cultural-economic climate – a time where the omnipresence of branded consumer products is matched by the ubiquity of low-cost image-making instruments. An endless play of presence and absence, lack and excess, similarity and difference, the homogenous and the un-normalizable and the empowered and the marginalized, Macdonald’s virtually inexhaustible film is a snapshot of planet earth in all its glory, stupidity and complexity. So much film theory has sprung up since Vertov et al made their films and what is of interest is not only the relationship between individual shots, but also the dense cultural content within each one of them that enriches our response manifold. Sporadically erratic and miscalculated, Life in a Day nevertheless achieves the remarkable feat of synthesizing a coherent, mesmerizing and, indeed, philosophically ambitious film from the very elements that have become the antithesis of these traits. What appears as a paean to narcissism to some commentators seems to me as a heightened awareness of one’s own existence. The act of photographing oneself – on a particular day and for a particular purpose – prompts one to be continuously conscious of the passing of time and the finitude of experience. One frustrated lady sums it up in the film’s final line: “Today, even though nothing great happened, tonight, I feel as if something great happened.”

 

October 3, 2011

Ellipsis #48

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the Philippines, Ellipsis
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Batang West Side (2001) (West Side Avenue)
Lav Diaz
Tagalog/English

 

West Side AvenueThanks to West Side Avenue (2001), clearly Lav Diaz’s first major work, we now know what will happen if the Filipino filmmaker takes to genre filmmaking. Diaz takes the standard policier, blows it to a size beyond what the text can handle and, in essence, brings to surface the mechanics of the genre. Constructed as a (seemingly endless) series of interrogations and recollections, a la Citizen Kane (1941), the film presents itself like a sphere without a centre. (Like Charles Kane, the relationship of all the characters to the dead boy at the centre of Diaz’s film – which is developed strikingly with a plethora of parallels – becomes the guiding device.) The procedure becomes so routine and schematic, aided to a large degree by the repetition of spaces and compositions, that the lead detective (Joel Torre) becomes something of a Melvillian zombie trudging through generic structures. But then, talking about Diaz’s film in terms of the genre is not half as justified as reading it from a national and auteurist perspective. Firmly planted in historical and geographical particulars – Filipino youth living in and around Jersey City during the turn of the century – the film takes up the issue of disappearing Filipinos – a sensitive idea that would be pursued further in other forms the later films – and examines the historical deracination and alienation that marks these young men and women. The relationship between the various characters with the killed teenager reflects their own conflicted relationship with their homeland. The film, itself, is somewhat (and slightly problematically) neo-nationalistic in flavour, gently appealing for cultural consciousness, integration and a “return to one’s roots”. The narrative mostly involves the investigation of the murder of one Manila teenager, If one moves beyond its precise sociological ambitions, one also discovers the flourishing of to-be-familiar stylistic (and narrative) devices: Scenes in master shots, montage of long takes, monochrome passages in. video and use of total amateurs. (Oddly enough, my favorite scene in the film is among the most uncharacteristic of Diaz’s cinema: a breakfast scene cut with verve comparable to Classical Hollywood). However, the most unmistakable authorial trademark of West Side Avenue is also the feature that attracts me most to Diaz’s work: the candidness and enthusiasm about his politics and political engagement, in general, as well as that rare faith in and love for cinema. That is why, towards the end of the film’s five hours, when the detective and the filmmaker – two professions seeking to discover truth – catch up with each other and restore the hitherto-absent heart of the film, you don’t if Diaz identifies with the detective or the filmmaker. He’s both.

 

[Capsule added to The Films of Lav Diaz]

 

September 24, 2011

Ellipsis #47

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of the UK, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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Pina (2011)
Wim Wenders
German/French/English/Spanish/Croatian/Italian/Portuguese/Russian/Korean

 

Maya Deren, committed perhaps more than anyone else to marrying choreography with film, once wrote: “There is a potential filmic dance form, in which the choreography and movement would be designed, precisely, for the mobility and other attributes of the camera, but this, too, requires an independence from theatrical dance conceptions.” This could well have been a mission statement for Wim Wenders’ Pina (2011), which attempts to re-imagine Bausch’s most famous works for a cinema audience and, specifically, for 3D technology. Consisting of an assortment of performances of Bausch’s famous pieces – performed on stage as well as outdoors in the choreographer’s home town – and interviews with her protégés, the film locates itself on this side of her passing and plays itself openly as a tribute rather than a cine-profile. Although it appears that art forms are being nested one inside another – Wenders’ film records Bausch’s choreography, which, in turn, is viewed as painting-on-stage – Pina comes across as collaboration between two art forms, as it is between two of its eminent practitioners – one feeding into another. Dance and cinema are presented as two universal forms bypassing verbal language, as is made explicit in the frequently interrupting (and consistently impoverishing) interviews in which we see Pina’s dancers – of different ethnicities, cultures and languages – sitting idly before the camera while their testimonies play as voiceovers, as though reducing both forms to their very basics – image and gesture. As for the dances themselves, we respond to the sheer physicality of them, more than their meaning, which is enhanced by Wenders’ restive, ever-tracking and craning camera that provides us the best of vantage points and brings us close to actually taking part in the performances.

 

September 17, 2011

Ellipsis #46

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Australia, Ellipsis | Tags: , , |
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One Way Street: Fragments For Walter Benjamin (1992)
John Hughes
English/German/Russian

 

One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin(The other) John Hughes’ One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992) seeks to present vignettes from the German philosopher’s life as well as his writing, predictably, in a form that reflects Benjamin’s own working method. As a result, fragmentation – pictorial and structural – becomes the (dis)organizing principle of the film. Multiple sub-frames (recalling Nick Ray’s cherished avant-garde film), graphic overlaps and abrupt colour shifts on the visual front are complemented by a thoroughly variegated set of exposition devices: hammy enactment of biographical minutiae, talking heads of authors who have written on Benjamin and other intellectuals of Weimar Germany, fictional interviews and an onslaught of quotes by Benjamin – onscreen as well as vocalized, reminiscent of Alexander Kluge’s attempts at adaptation of Marx, This ‘unclassifiability’ of the film finds an echo in the seeming malleability of Benjamin’s body of work – appropriated by a variety of disciplines and practitioners – which becomes one of its areas of investigation. Never dwelling on a particular strain in Benjamin’s thought (nor enriching our understanding of these dimensions), the film emphasizes the non-teleological nature of his work which resists ideological or philosophical reduction. At times, trying to emulate his subject, Hughes also takes to chains of free associations – toys/soldiers/toy soldiers etc. – that don’t necessarily take us deeper than the surface pleasures they offer. However, probably the most wanting quality of the film is that, situated on this side of the collapse of Berlin wall, the film doesn’t seem to want to open up Benjamin to the present, content in presenting a portrait of the writer locked in a time capsule – exactly the attitude towards past that Benjamin was operating against.

 

 

July 30, 2011

Ellipsis #45

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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Gandhi To Hitler (2011)
Rakesh Kumar Ranjan
Hindi

 

Gandhi to HitlerThere are three sets of letters written in Gandhi to Hitler (2011) – from Gandhi to Hitler just after the blitzkrieg, from Hitler to his people just before his death and between a jingoist Indian army officer (Aman Verma) wandering war-torn European countryside and his Gandhian wife back home – none of which are ever read. This is only one of the hundred methods by which the film engages in there-are-no-winners-in-war philosophizing and attempts to establish a ‘universality’ of grief and suffering. The picture is an amalgam of wish fulfillments: a chance for the writer-director to remake both Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Downfall (2004), for the home audience to see their own WW2 movie and for Raghuvir Yadav (Adolf Hitler) to be paired with Neha Dhupia (Eva Braun). Only Mohandas Gandhi gets a raw deal, existing solely as a mirror image of the German chancellor. (This vehement contrast informs the organization and stylistic of the first section of the movie: Hitler snaking through in his bunker cut to Gandhi walking through the corridors of his Ashram, the Furher belittling the officers around him with Gandhi preaching to his followers, the gradual disintegration of the Reich with the fortification of Gandhian movement). This split is also established within the third narrative track centering on the officer (and his Gandhian wife) leading group of Indian soldiers (under S.C.Bose, who sided with the German army), consisting of men of various religious persuasions. Not just the structure, but every shot in Gandhi to Hitler exists to present an idea, to illustrate a convenient thesis, while the direction, acting, editing and photography go into auto-pilot. But the film’s boldest move – which, I’m sure, reviewers would relish picking on – is to have an all-Indian cast, speaking Hindi throughout: a virtue born out of necessity that’s also a rebuttal of conventional wisdom about realistic storytelling, which is fixated on appearance, plausibility and imitation.

 

(Image Courtesy: GlamSham)

 

July 16, 2011

Ellipsis #44

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Ellipsis | Tags: , |
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We Can’t Go Home Again (1976)
Nicholas Ray
English

 

We Can't Go Home AgainNicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again, ostensibly the director’s most personal and complex film, was made by the director and his students during his stint as a film professor at State University of New York, Binghamton, under abysmal financial conditions (which is also what the film is about). Ray kept editing the film for almost a decade and the final version never saw the light of the day. The second cut, which dates to 1976, is as far from the studio pictures made by the filmmaker as it can be. We are far from the eye-popping days of ultra-widescreen, for one, with its 4:3 ratio. Instead of the frame becoming an infinite canvas in front of us, it keeps diminishing, sharing screen space with a bunch of similar frames. (The film was shot on a number of formats, projected on a single screen, which was then recorded on 35mm). This splintering of the visual field, the generally pathetic sound and the entire filming method highly befits both the ideological fragmentation of Ray’s radicalized students and the progressive mental and physical breakdown of Ray himself (who appears to play a slightly fictionalized version of himself). This sharing of screen space by multiple smaller frames, like a cubist painting, seems to suggest the amorphous worldview of the misguided youngsters – types from an era – who see the equally vacillating Ray as some sort of secondary father figure, one away from home. The one-eyed Ray, as if throwing light on the politics of his films, seemingly advises them, without condescension, that no ideological position must blind them of the human elements that make up the system, that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

 

July 2, 2011

Ellipsis #43

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Tarang (1984) (Wages and Profit)
Kumar Shahani
Hindi

 

Kumar Shahani’s Tarang (1984) is located startlingly far from the intense stylization and abstraction of his previous feature Maya Darpan (1972), with its conventional, accessible, (overly?) fleshed out and faithfully realized story, generous score (including songs!), impressive cast and naturalistic acting. Taking off from the template narrative of class struggle, Tarang tells the tale of an internally fragmented family of industrialists and the equally divided body of workers at his factory, the link between them being the upwardly mobile wife of a dead worker (Smita Patil) who begins an affair with the manager of the factory (Amol Palekar). A staunch Marxist, Shahani examines the class struggle on multiple fronts: in the writing that nearly recites the labour theory of value, in the densely layered soundtrack where various voices vie for power and the casting, where the star value of the actors is in conflict with the characters they play. In fact, Tarang is presented as a film within a film and we are regularly shown that Patil and Palekar are famous actors who are playing these characters. Shahani realizes that his film is born of the same system that it rails against (Reporter: What do you think of this? Policeman: The crime or the film? Reporter: What’s the difference anyway?) and foresees the impossibility of any satisfactory resolution to the conflict. Like the films of Eisenstein, who no doubt influenced Shahani as is evident crowd scenes at the factory, there is so much happening – much power struggle – in the frames of the film, as it is in the deeply metaphorical text.

 

(Image Courtesy: The Case for Global Film)

 

June 11, 2011

Ellipsis #42

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , , |
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Shaitan (2011) (Devil)
Bejoy Nambiar
Hindi

 

ShaitanBejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan (2011) deliberately starts off on the wrong foot, presenting a hackneyed bunch of carefree upper class youth inducting one more into the gang, with a scene that seems more like endorsement than condemnation. (This is the sole scene when the five leads are their most comfortable, with a slack, indulgent, food-in-the-mouth kind of acting epitomized by Brad Pitt). It is only when we follow them all over Mumbai as they indulge in all sorts of puckish activities including casual robbery and midnight races that we realize that our identification is being severed and a critical distance developed. And it is only when the pack rams into a scooter that it realizes that a whole world exists underneath its (literally: under their car’s tyres). Speaking in collective terms here is justified, since not one role in the film is a character; all are types, with minute variants at best. The film itself makes no claims otherwise. (In a way, it is a final girl flick, full of caricatures, without any external threat). Ostensibly a film wanting to examine mob mentality – the gang, bevies of reporters, religious masses – and tyrannical impulses within us – the leader of the gang, the various law enforcers and their activities – Shaitan finds its bunny-ear-donning child-adult protagonists, who are initially blind to notions of class and religion, gradually being pushed out of their comfort zones into a minority and attempting to blend into larger groups for survival. (You have kidnappers thrashing kidnapers, police chasing police and rich kids with a money crunch!) The film is defined by its major ellipses which swing between smart telescoping of action (e.g. the suspension of the officer) and incompetent shorthand (the news channels, which have usurped the role of the narrator in Hindi cinema off late). But it is the bravura action sequence at the lodge, with its off-kilter, everything-is-allowed, anything-goes, Hollywood movie brat-like aesthetic that takes the rest of the film’s banal TV and ad inspired stylistic to a whole new level. Nambiar, it seems to me, is a natural when directing music videos and this sublime, provocative, magical scene, which cross cuts between slo-mo bullet rains and the gang dropping from rooftops in fluttering black purdahs like fallen angels onto a truck full of feathers, alone is worth sitting till and beyond it. Also includes an in-joke among Kashyapians involving Rajat Barmecha and a wordless subplot (if not the ultimate ignoring of the gang’s original crime) dealing with a miffed couple that might impress Nambiar’s south side mentor.

(Image Courtesy: First Post)

 

June 4, 2011

Ellipsis #41

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Ellipsis, Hollywood | Tags: , , , , , |
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Unknown (2011) 
Jaume Collet-Serra
English

 

UnknownJaume Collet-Serra’s Unknown (2011) is the kind of movie that typifies straightforward PG-13 Hollywood thriller – star-driven, homogenized visuals with a strong primary color scheme (with a dominance of metallic blue, as usual), elaborate set pieces that could be moved around within the film, a pulsating score that vies with the boisterous sound design, with allegros of action separated by adagios of emotion, unapologetic about its generic nature with a plot detailed enough to claim seriousness and sketchy enough to avoid offending anyone and, of course, the solitary cuss word. Liam Neeson, who looks aptly like an ex-secret agent coming out of retirement, with his haggard appearance, wrinkled skin and receding hairline, is an American professor whose identity is stolen during his trip to a bio-conference in Berlin. With the rug of reality pulled off his feet, he must find a way to get back into the original social order with the help of a gorgeous working class sidekick (Diane Kruger), who knows all the seedy localities in the city, and an ex-Stasi officer (Bruno Ganz, also serving as the home star), who believes that Germans are very forgetful about history. Unknown channels wrong-man thrillers such as North by Northwest (1959), as well as Polanski’s Frantic (1988), but strips them of their psychosexual dimension, presenting a work that is solely concerned with mechanics of the genre and craft of the profession (the central car chase is sort of inspired, with its heady interleaving of vertical, horizontal and deep-space movements). The bunch of passages that pique your interest (the ostentatious scene at the museum, the confrontation between Langella and Ganz, both of whose best-known roles are infamous historical characters) are also the ones entirely superfluous.

 

May 7, 2011

Ellipsis #40

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under Cinema of France, Cinema of Portugal, Ellipsis | Tags: , , , , |
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Ne Change Rien (2009) (Change Nothing)
Pedro Costa
French/English

 

Change NothingPedro Costa’s latest film Change Nothing (2009), at a visceral level, rekindles the experience of watching that stunning cinephile bait of his, O Sangue (1989). Like his debut work, Change Nothing is presented in monochrome (although apparently not shot that way) with a contrast ratio to kill for, in which the white appears whiter and black appears blacker. Consequently, Costa, who shot the film himself in DV, achieves a flat field which results in a number of eye-teasing compositions, such as the one in which actress and singer Jeanne Balibar – the subject and star of the film – seems to have grown a pair of angel wings. More than ever, Costa works with light like a painter who’s been given only a limited quantity of colour would, meticulously sculpting Balibar’s distinct visage out of darkness. This exacting precision required for an artistic endeavour is what Change Nothing is ostensibly ‘about’, as it goes about recording Balibar and co. rehearsing, improvising, recording and live-performing a variety of vocal pieces. (There are also a couple of off-track sequences involving a live choir and a pair of Japanese in a bar). The reference here is, of course, Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968), which interpreted radical politics and art-creation as essentially incomplete ventures requiring audience participation. Costa’s film, however, seems more modest and self-sufficient, as it single-mindedly records Balibar’s relentless dedication to her work (and, implicitly, the director’s towards his as well). It undermines the illusion of a work of art being a smooth, finished product by situating it at the end of a long history of imperfections, goofs and possibilities. Ironically, Costa’s rigorous and ‘perfected’ film perpetuates this very illusion. In a way, then, the 100 minutes that we see is only a minor part of Costa’s project, the majority (the remaining 78 hours!) of which will, unfortunately, go unseen.

 

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