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May 6, 2026

Visions du Réel 2026

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Argentina, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of Cuba, Cinema of France, Cinema of Spain, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the UK | Tags: Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room I Like It as It Is., Graeme Arnfield, Ignacio Ceroi, Laura Cazador, Lauren Dällenbach, Nicole Nicole, Oliver Laxe, Peter Mettler, Sirāt, The Case Against Space, Tricontinental Letter to Open in Case Of, Uberto Rapisardi, Vacío Luminoso, Visions du Réel, While the Green Grass Grows |
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Visions du Réel, Nyon, continues to grow in stature and size into one of the most significant documentary festivals in the world; its recently concluded 57^th edition featured a whopping 164 films from 75 countries. With a strong industry segment, co-production market and curation of special programmes, it is veritably an institution for contemporary documentary practice.

Which means it also flirts with the risk of institutionalization. I haven’t watched enough titles from the festival’s main section — International Feature Film Competition — to make a qualified judgement. But at a cursory glance, the section seems populated by commercially viable titles that embody a dominant tendency in documentary cinema today: human-interest stories featuring common people playing themselves, enacting fictionalized exchanges against the abstract backdrop of hot-button crises such as climate change, neoliberal plunder or geopolitical upheavals.

Like with all big festivals, the juicy, challenging and most rewarding films seem to be found in the sidebars, such as the experimentally oriented Burning Lights Competition. Here are a few of the titles from across the festival’s sidebars that I found most interesting.

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In the winter of 1973, a team of astronauts embarked on an 84-day-long stay aboard Skylab, NASA’s first space station. Not only was this the longest manned spaceflight thus far, the crew was also made of first-time astronauts. Assigned an unprecedented volume of tasks and experiments, they fell behind their schedule. Mission control, with whom they had brief contact over every orbit, urged them to catch up without paying heed to their deteriorating mental and physical conditions. Overworked and cooped up in a poorly designed environment unfit for long-term dwelling, the crew went quiet just before Christmas.

Accounts of what happened during this communications blackout differ significantly. The Case Against Space pursues the theory that the crew went on an organized strike, with the unstated demand that the working hours that apply on earth be applicable in space too. An extremely reduced kammerspiel, Graeme Arnfield’s film largely consists of performers talking to a frontal camera that simulates the radio equipment. These actors re-enact the crew’s experience in the days preceding the strike, their monologues based on transcripts of real communications with mission control, but complemented by creative speculation about what must have likely happened onboard. They describe their absurdly overstuffed to-do lists, their frustrations with faulty equipment and their dwindling faith in the top brass back home.

As the recent euphoria around Artemis II reminds us, space missions have historically been viewed in supra-political terms, as collective human accomplishments. At best, they have been proxies for national and ideological conflicts. The Case Against Space reframes the matter in starkly materialist terms. In Arnfield’s film, the work of astronauts isn’t the expression of human enterprise or techno-nationalist superiority, but concrete labour carried out for demanding bosses on earth. There’s no velocity high enough to escape the class struggle.

In 2019, Argentinian filmmaker Ignacio Ceroi bought a used camcorder on eBay and found that it was full of fascinating home and travel movies. Wishing to make a film from this material, Ceroi reached out to the camera’s old owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and an insistent moustache who figures regularly in the videos. This man, named Charles, gave the filmmaker the go-ahead and even shared personal stories that will help explain the footage. Ceroi went to work with this information and produced a film titled What Will Summer Bring (2021), a documentary about a man who went to Cameroon on an accidental adventure, fell in love with a woman there and ended up in the jungles in search of her renegade son. Since the film is entirely narrated by Ceroi on behalf of Charles, it is hard to know how much of all this is fabricated.

As it turns out, all of it was. While the footage and the camcorder were real, Ceroi never really found its owner. The entire story was made up, and there was no person named Charles. Those appalled by this impish piece of media-hacking wouldn’t probably care for Ceroi’s follow-up film titled Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room, I Like It as It Is. Here, Ceroi admits to being anxious all these years about the real owner getting a whiff of his heist. To find closure, he sets out in search of the owner — this time for real — with the help of a professor from Paris and contextual clues from the footage.

It would be revealing too much to say what happens next. But I found the film strangely touching. Whether intended in apology, curiosity or respect, Ceroi’s journey in search of the camera’s owner is a pilgrimage, a reparative attempt to wrest truth from fiction and return it to reality. His first film was the fruit of pure coincidence — the resale of an old camera — but the sequel suggests that even anonymous, arbitrary images can be the catalyst for meaningful relationships. While the former was based on a fake correspondence, the second one strives to create a real one. Through this striving, Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room honours the memory of “Charles”, whose afterlife in recorded images comes to hold personal significance for those who have encountered them.

At first sight, Uberto Rapisardi’s Vacío Luminoso is a straightforward making-of documentary about Oliver Laxe’s arthouse hit Sirāt (2025). It details the filmmaker’s intentions, the casting and shooting process, the contribution of actors and technicians, and the craft behind the film’s most memorable — and shocking — scenes. But Rapisardi’s account does something more: it shows how the film was almost not made. Rapisardi intercuts footage from the sets of Sirāt with an interview with Laxe recorded at a moment of crisis during the last days of the shoot. Laxe is evidently dejected by something he doesn’t fully name and has retreated from the sets in frustration. Shot in extreme closeup, Laxe outlines the influence of Sufi thought and practice on his work. He also expresses horror at the flagrant incongruity between the spiritual origin of Sirāt — which is, among other things, a religious parable about ego loss — and the megalomaniacal behaviour that mounting such an international, quasi-super-production instils in him. Rapisardi also interviews actors who express their misgivings about the mismatch between the stated intentions and the methods of the film. In prying open the contradictions at the heart of Sirāt, Vacío Luminoso points to the resistances that lie at the heart of all creative endeavour.

What Lauren Dällenbach’s debut feature Nicole Nicole pries open are the contradictions of Western family relations. Winner of the National Competition section, Dällenbach’s endearing domestic documentary centres on the filmmaker’s grandmother, Alberte, and her maternal aunt, Nicole, who live together in mutual dependence – the former afraid of being alone, the latter neurodivergent and seemingly incapable of striking out on her own. This dependency, although functional, is a ticking bomb since Nicole cannot live forever with her ageing mother. What’s more, Nicole, we learn, has a secret lover, whom she sneaks out to meet without ever being able to bring him home.

To address this, Nicole’s wider family, primarily her elder sister (the filmmaker’s mother), hatches a plan to help her move out. Working with public institutions, they find a way for Nicole to find a job, a new apartment and, most importantly, the courage to tell Alberte that she will be leaving. Part of the challenge for them is in defining Nicole’s unique mental condition: her intellectual metrics are too low for a completely independent life, but too high to be considered autistic so that the state’s disability support system can come into effect.

As a maker of exterior images, however, the filmmaker has no need to label Nicole. With great affection and care, she spends time with her aunt, probing with hopeful thrill into her secret romance and even conspiring to turn her life into one of those softcore photo-comics that she loves reading. At one point, when Nicole breaks down at the thought of her mother’s eventual death, Dällenbach puts her camera down to go embrace her aunt — an acknowledgement of the filmmaker as a human that I have rarely seen in documentaries.

“Dear comrades, do not allow them to make me anything other than what I am, and what I wish to be: a revolutionary fighter.” These are some of the last words of a letter that Michèle Firk left to her friends-in-arms, titled “to be opened in case of”. What this unmentioned case might be was perhaps clear to Firk’s comrades engaged in militant struggles against imperialism in various corners of Latin America. Born in Paris in 1937, Firk began as a film critic at the magazine Positif (a role later memorialized in Luc Moullet’s Les Sièges de l’Alcazar), but her real calling was politics. At 24, as part of the Jeanson network, Firk was a voice for Algerian independence, and her interest would soon expand to international Third World movements.

Firk was acutely aware of the hypocrisies of armchair intellectualism and, unlike many of her peers in France, sought to refashion her life in line with her beliefs. “What is shameful is speaking casually of Vietnam without changing one’s life, being objectively informed from afar without getting involved,” she wrote in her final letter. In the early sixties, she moved to Cuba, where in addition to working the fields and meeting Che Guevara, she was an interpreter at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966. After years of pseudonymously moving across countries in service of the cause, she found herself involved in armed struggle in Guatemala. Implicated in the kidnapping of an US ambassador, Firk allegedly shot herself in her hotel room when the police came knocking.

Swiss helmer Laura Cazador’s rousing cine-portrait of Firk, Tricontinental, Letter to Open in Case Of, takes the words of the letter to heart, presenting the subject on her own terms, without distance, condescension or historical relativization. It helps that Cazador is committed to the same causes as Firk and has a shared affinity for Havana where she works at the EICTV film school. Cazador structures her film wittily, borrowing chapter titles and clips from anti-imperialist Third Cinema works. This is supported by a dense and propulsive voiceover composed of a mix of Firk’s own words and the filmmaker’s second-person account of Firk, creating a sense of complicity between the two across time. Cazador’s Firk is not a girl lost to history, but a model to be emulated, a guiding light shining on the horizon.

Cuba, specifically the EICTV, also features prominently in another title I was very taken by: Peter Mettler’s While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (which premiered in Toronto in 2025). Mettler’s seven-part, seven-hour-long diary film is an utterly unique object — part home movie, part travelogue, part visual experiment, part philosophical essay. But this colossal documentary is foremost a record of Mettler’s life over three years, which includes the passing of his aged parents as well as a major health scare for himself. Alternating between time spent with parents and encounters with people during professional trips, the filmmaker weaves a sprawling meditation on human striving, material and spiritual. Weighty considerations on what lies beyond immediate human experience rub shoulders with life as it is lived one day at a time.

Mettler incorporates vast amounts of natural vistas, especially water bodies, while the soundtrack carries his monologues and conversations. This oblique arrangement prompts us into reveries and reflections of our own, but integral to the subject at hand. Internal rhymes and echoes abound — remarks, themes and images from one section are reprised in others in subtle and surprising ways. At once ambitious and unassuming, Mettler’s film doesn’t shy away from overt philosophizing, but also lets the beauty, banality, frailty and absurdity of life trickle through in its quieter passages. I can’t recall a recent film in which every moment, every element becomes such a thorough expression of the filmmaker’s state of mind and life situation. Possibly one of the most vital documentaries of the decade.

April 2, 2026

Cinéma du Réel 2026

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of France, Cinema of Italy, Cinema of the USA | Tags: Another Earth, Barefoot Maria, Ben Russell, Cinéma du Réel, Juliette Achard, Labore Nobile, Matter of Britain, Peter Treherne, Rebecca Digne, Sharon Lockhart, Windward |
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There’s little doubt that Cinéma du réel, Paris, continues to offer an expansive, challenging programme (and definition) of documentary cinema, one that is as formally adventurous as it is alert to the iniquities and bloody upheavals of our world. Working through this year’s competition lineup, I was, however, struck by the considerable amount of space the festival has secured for works of an opposite kind, films that seem to take deliberate flight from the tumult of the times and find refuge in a serene, rarefied realm beyond politics and history.

To be sure, the festival is still dominated by urgent, pointedly political work, with special sections dedicated to Palestine, Eco-feminism and “Artists and the peoples’ struggle”. Even within the competition, titles such as With Love and Rage (which revisits a feminist organization’s picketing of the Pentagon in 1980), El León (an elliptical commemoration of those killed by the military in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s) and Narrative (centring on a workshop regrouping the family members of those killed in the pro-democracy protests in Thailand in 2010) grapple directly with specific political moments.

Yet, for all the confrontation Cinéma du réel enables with the sordid state of things, this year’s competition section also opens up a vast space for calm and contemplation, for beauty beyond all the bloodshed.

Perhaps no other work embodies this transition better than Ben Russell’s Another Earth. This 13-minute film begins in a kind of tautology: a closeup of a mouth uttering a short text about humanity’s long history of living underground, an experience forever lost after the industrial age. As the actor repeats the text with minor hiccups, the film incrementally layers new visual information over her face — colour-saturated shots of caves, a child playing by the lake, fingers doomscrolling through harrowing war news and, finally, glimpses of protests — suggesting that, underneath layers of civilizational debris, may lurk primal instincts of the Platonic cave. “Time is not what it is, but how it is felt”, go the final words of the looping text. The idyll of the child by the lake indeed evokes a sense of time starkly different from the accelerated sensorial assault that the omniscience of contemporary life enables. Is it possible, desirable to return to subterranean bliss?

A response may be suggested by some of the other titles in competition: meditative landscape films, pastoral portraits, vehemently non-didactic essays and durational experiments that have the salutary effect of calming the viewer’s nerves.

Among the more rewarding entries is Sharon Lockhart’s Windward, set on the scarcely populated Fogo Island, located near the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The film is something of an extension, a chromatic inversion of Lockhart’s mid-length Eventide (2022). Where that single-shot featurette took place under the twilight skies, its actor-participants piercing the dark frame with their torchlights, this new work unfolds entirely in daylight. Comprising twelve static shots of about five minutes each, the film also echoes Pine Flat (2006) in that it centres on children or young adults engaged in leisurely, summertime activities outdoors.

In extremely long, wide shots that turns them into little more than mobile pixels, we watch the youngers take a swim, chase each other, fly kites, walk on stilts or just sit quietly on the rocky coasts of the island. The landscape is breathtaking, particularly in Lockhart’s painterly composition of them, but it’s the human elements that invigorate it. Our gaze is locked on the children’s activity, which is both a vehicle of chaos within a stately pictorial order and a dynamic formal element that activates the frame. This is most spectacularly felt in a shot where a girl feeds a flock of seagulls on a rock. The birds lunge at the fish that the young woman tosses one by one, and their moving mass keeps shifting the visual centre of the shot to thrilling effect.

But the children in the film are, above all, a source of emotional warmth. Very simply, the sight of boys and girls, frequently dressed in white, enjoying themselves in sunny nature is deeply gratifying. As they say, not a phone in sight, just people living in the moment… As always with this filmmaker, there is a touch of theatre beneath the apparent spontaneity of action. Lockhart often captures the children’s actions midway, but ends the shots just after they have exited the frame — in a manner that recalls the trains in James Benning’s RR (2007). Despite the overwhelming presence of nature, man, quite literally, becomes the measure of things in Windward.

Rebecca Digne’s Barefoot Maria operates in an adjacent thematic territory, but limits its scope to one young girl. Eight-year-old Maria leads an enchanted childhood in the Tuscan countryside, with cats, dogs, geese and horses for playmates, in a lovely country house that is marked for eviction by its new owners. Digne pays remarkable attention to Maria’s leisure-time behaviour (and leisure is all that she seems to have), shaping the material to give us the impression that she lives alone in this heavenly demesne. She also lends Maria a Super-8 camera, and the girl regularly sends back tapes that she has filmed of her own life. What emerges from this intergenerational correspondence is a charming, almost timeless picture of a childhood at once insular and privileged, untouched by the anxieties and demands of modern life. Maria grapples with boredom, invents ingenious ways to pass time and manages to achieve perfect harmony with her environment just as it is taken away from her.

The horrors of the world are scarcely to be seen in Matter of Britain too. Peter Treherne’s enigmatic, rapturously shot debut feature unfolds in an unnamed, lushly wooded village in the south of England. Vignettes from everyday life in the village – farming, deer hunting, sheep rearing, churchgoing, cattle trading — are interspersed with fictional passages in which the villagers enact episodes from Arthurian legend, particularly the Knights’ quest for the Holy Grail, in full costume. Realized in a high-theatrical style, and bathed in Caravaggian darkness, these passages monumentalize ordinary lives in a manner that recalls Roberto Minervini’s use of rural Southerners in The Damned (2024). Treherne’s film doesn’t expound on this strange mix of fantasy and ethnographic document, although an early radio soundbite about climate change-induced agrarian crisis hints at a possible connection to the Holy Grail’s capacity to restore barren lands. Does the Quest represent a living myth for the villagers, a collective, subconscious yearning? Are they looking for some kind of deliverance? Matter of Britain doesn’t explain.

Several titles in the competition take this refusal of discursivity to its furthest limits, almost to the point of unintelligibility — a tendency that has become increasingly common in experimental documentary, both in the fly-on-the-wall and the essay traditions. Presented without context or comment, large parts of these ‘slow’, solemn films come across like unprocessed inventories of found images that ask the viewers to make what they will of them.

That’s perhaps why I found Juliette Achard’s Labore Nobile appealing in its openness, sincerity and capacity for commitment. The film is a fairly dense, focused treatise on the evolution of labour and industry as seen through the changing fortunes of Saint-Nazaire, a port town in Northern France. The film’s lucid voiceover is conceived as a sort of letter to a future where work has ceased to have the meaning it has always had in human history, and the narrative is completed by interviews with people working in different sectors of Saint-Nazaire.

While the filmmaker takes us through the economic history of the town — dominated by heavy industries such as ship building and aircraft assembly that have proven to be increasingly indifferent to worker rights and public health — she also weaves in short, poetic monologues performed by its blue-collar residents. Labore Nobile (which translates to “Ennobling through work”, not free of the ominous echoes of Arbeit macht frei) makes many small inventions within the framework of a classic essay film. Despite specific subject matter and a limited geography of focus, Achard manages to undertake considerable formal and thematic digressions, pushing a traditional form from within in the vein of Harun Farocki. Her film amply demonstrates Luc Moullet’s maxim that “thirty square kilometres or a little more is enough to know the whole world, to have all its keys.”

January 1, 2023

Favourite Films of 2022

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Australia, Cinema of Austria, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of India, Cinema of Iran, Cinema of Russia, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Lists | Tags: A German Party, Alexander Markov, Chavittu, Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg, David Easteal, Footnote, Jan Baumgartner, Maryam Tafakory, Matter Out of Place, Maxime Martinot, Nazarbazi, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Olho Animal, Red Africa, Sajas Rahman, Shinos Rahman, Simon Brückner, Stomp, The DNA of Dignity, The Plains, Zhengfan Yang |
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2022 witnessed the demise of several towering figures of cinematic modernism, none more iconic than Jean-Luc Godard. With their passing, it really feels like the end of a chapter in the story of film, one in which cinema was the privileged artform to interrogate history and the world. But their death also registers as strangely liberating in a way, like a clearing in the woods produced by fallen trees that allows us a new, privileged view. Let us hope that the work of these giants will continue to guide filmmakers and critics in their thought and practice.

In August this year, I was lucky to attend the 75^th Locarno Film Festival, my first fest outside India. Basking in the gorgeous summertime scenery of Ticino and soaking up the equally sumptuous Douglas Sirk retrospective was an experience to remember, but I’m most grateful for the chance to get to know some terrific people from around the globe, among them cinephiles, curators and critics I’d known online for years but had never met. I’m truly grateful for their insight and company. Mistake: not reaching out to Luc Moullet when I was in Paris after the festival.

In a year that saw the world return to some semblance of normalcy,^{[citation needed]}my own moviegoing habits seemed to have changed for good. The Locarno festival notwithstanding, I went to the theatres, I think, no more than four times this year (Vikram, Ponniyin Selvan: I, Kantara (all 2022) and the 50^th anniversary re-release of The Godfather (1972)), which is four more than the last year. Ominous signs. That said, I was fortunate to watch three silent films on 35mm with mesmerizing live piano accompaniment at a King Vidor retrospective at the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation in Paris in September: The Sky Pilot (1921), Wine of Youth (1924) and The Crowd (1928), the latter screening a highlight of my cinephile life.

Although I saw more films this year than any other in my memory, I didn’t watch as many new productions as I normally would, especially from India. Despite the absurd overvaluation it has been subject to in the West, I haven’t see a finer action movie in the recent past than RRR, which felt like a masterclass on how to imbue action with emotional-moral stakes, the missing soul of so many contemporary blockbusters. For all its saturated spectacle, RRR is a minimal film in the way it weaves the fewest of narrative elements in different combinations to emphatic, expressive ends. Gehraaiyaan was a compelling piece of slick, professional filmmaking, as was Jalsa. I’ve always admired the streak of self-sabotage in the career of Gautam Menon, and his superb gangster epic Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu harnesses that impulse productively, channelling it through screenwriter Jeyamohan’s touching, tragic vision.

A good part of my viewing this year consisted of a dive into Iranian cinema, which, I can say for certain now, is my single favourite national cinema. Among the 200-odd auteur and genre films (from native as well as expatriate Iranian directors) that I watched, there was very little that I disliked, scores of great works and at least two dozen masterpieces. I hope to publish a list soon. In the meantime, check out Another Screen‘s formidable programme dedicated to Iranian/Iranian-origin women filmmakers, which ends on the 4^th of January.

Other personal discoveries this year were the films of Costa-Gavras (Picks: Family Business (1986) and Music Box (1989)), the mid-tier features of Boris Barnet (on whose Lyana (1955) I wrote a text for the amazing Outskirts magazine) and the astounding, hyper-caffeinated anime of Masaaki Yuasa (essay coming up). Without further ado, my favourite films of 2022:

1. Matter Out of Place (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria)

If researchers a few hundred years from now were to try and understand how humankind lived in the year 2022 AD, they would do well to turn to Geyrhalter’s spellbinding Matter Out of Place, an expansive survey of foreign objects littering the remotest nooks of the earth. Filmed in a dozen locations on different continents, the film traces the planetary movement of human-generated waste, the great paradoxes shaping its production and the massive efforts needed to manage its proliferation. Garbage doesn’t just cover the landscape in Geyrhalter’s film, it becomes the landscape. With cheeky visual rhymes, astute sound design, proto-Lubitschian humour and a subtly psychoanalytic approach to the physical world, Matter unearths the repressed material unconscious underlying the enticements of consumer society and international tourism. But the film offers no easy answers, presenting instead a universe whose horrors and beauties are inextricably linked, one which evokes awe and terror at humanity’s godlike capacity to create and destroy. In its firm belief that the secrets of the world reveal themselves to the questioning camera eye, Geyrhalter’s work possesses a spiritual dimension directly sdescending from the writings of André Bazin, and his new film elevates the sight of rubbish into a religious epiphany.

2. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, Canada)

Somewhere in the dematerialized wastelands of Cosmopolis (2012), overrun now by the vacuous celebrity culture of Maps to the Stars (2014), lives Saul Tenser, an “artist of the inner landscape” who grows new organs that are surgically removed by his partner Caprice during their feted public performances. Saul is a conservative in denial of the rapid transformation the human body is undergoing—a Clint Eastwood of the New Flesh—who would rather excise his new organs than embrace his true, deviant self. As governments and corporates look to quell the insurrection triggered by a cult of anti-Luddite ecoterrorists who sabotage not technology but the human body, Saul must decide whether to remain at the mercy of the algorithms or take the evolutionary leap. The most rewarding way to approach Cronenberg’s stellar, career-capping new work is to take it not as an allegory of current political debates, but literally. In Crimes of the Future, the body is indeed the final frontier, the last repository of all meaning, the sole means to spiritual edification or revolutionary change—a truism already in our Age of the Body. Filled wall-to-wall with dad jokes and dumb exposition, Cronenberg’s silly, sublime, supremely stylish treatise on corporeal capitalism is the most thought-provoking film since Pain and Gain (2013).

3. A German Party (Simon Brückner, Germany)

Politics is dirty, and electoral politics doubly so. Few filmmakers possess the curiosity, intellectual mettle and good faith—leave alone the necessary access—to examine the unglamorous negotiations and compromises that are fundamental to the democratic process. Made over three years, Simon Brückner’s magnificent fly-on-the-wall documentary about the workings of the far-right German outfit Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) immerses us into the party’s operations, ranging from cool deliberations of executive meetings to high-temperature grassroots confrontations. The result is a markedly composite picture that offers a sense of the heterogeneity of an organization popularly considered an ideological monolith. Over six illuminating chapters, A German Party presents a political body fully caught up in the dialectical process of self-definition, an organization trying to identify itself through differentiation. The need for the AfD to go mainstream, to form alliances and influence policy runs up against the image that it has built for itself, namely that it represents a force outside the establishment. The most intriguing suggestion of Brückner’s film may be that rightward shift of the party, far from signalling the formation of a coherent ideology, may actually be the fruit of a lack of clear identity. Whether the AfD is the elephant in the room or a paper tiger, A German Party leaves it to the viewer to judge.

4. Stomp (Sajas & Shinos Rahman, India)

The Rahman brothers’ boundary-smashing formalist work is nominally a documentary about a theatre group named the Little Earth School of Theatre. For the most part, the film showcases the troupe’s preparations for an upcoming performance at the annual function of a middle-class housing association in Kerala. We see the company’s rehearsal in considerable detail, their work on gesture, movement, voice and cadence, but the nature of their play is sketchy and elusive, like pieces of a puzzle that never fit. Rejecting literary and psychological explanations, Chavittu subverts the conventional artist profile, supplying no commentary on the meaning or significance of the rehearsal and complicating it with absurd interludes. What the filmmakers offer instead is a bracing procedural work intently focused on the physicality of its subjects, emptied of emotional life and operating together as a consummate professional unit. The sensuality that the film radiates comes not through dramatic or formal devices, but from the raw presence of young, athletic bodies populating the frame. Even when it places this performance within a satirical, self-reflexive social context, the film remains gentle, focused on the troupe’s single-minded artistry in the face of indifference and marginalization. Chavittu is all grace.

5. Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory, Iran-UK)

The problem with film censorship, as Judith Williamson pointed out, isn’t that it rids movies of objectionable matter, but that it makes everything else seem dirty. Drawing images and sounds from almost a hundred Iranian films made since the 1979 revolution, overlaying them with evocative fragments of citations and original text, Maryam Tafakory’s ambitious, enrapturing video collage Nazarbazi illuminates how the Islamic regime’s censorship codes, specifically its restriction on showing men and women touching each other on screen, displaced this repressed sexuality onto other sensations, objects and aesthetic elements. An astonishing example of film criticism as an artwork in itself, Tafakory’s exhilarating, tactile montage locates the erotics of cinematic art in fluttering fabric, clinking bangles, slashed wrists, breaking glass, aromatic food, sweeping camera movements and, of course, the play of glances. Supressed desire finds a way to manifest not just in filmmakers’ cunning paraphrase of taboo actions, but simply in the ontology of the medium; sensuality in cinema is revealed not just as what artists express, but as what they can’t help but express, thanks to the inherent voluptuousness of moving bodies, caressing textures and resonating sounds. Watching Iranian films after Nazarbazi, you might find yourself asking the same question as Diane Keaton in Love and Death (1975): can we not talk about sex so much?

6. Footnote (Zhengfan Yang, USA-China)

Terror floats in the air in Footnote, not just due to the pandemic, but also because the film’s soundtrack consists entirely of police radio communication from Chicago city. The incoming complaints are by turns petty and serious, ranging from minor disagreements with neighbours to drive-by shootings, and officers are tasked with everything from delivering a lost pet home to checking on isolated senior citizens. Seemingly gathered over a year, these excerpts reveal an extremely busy, probably understaffed police force grappling with the tensions of a diverse, multicultural city. The image, meanwhile, comprises wide-angle shots of open spaces filmed from a higher vantage point— intersections, highways, beaches, parking lots, rooftops—almost always featuring ant-like, solitary human figures animating the frame. Thanks to the thrillingly dialectical relation that Footnote sets up between sound and image, these calming panoramas become vehicles of anxiety, with human bodies turning into agents of both biological and criminal threat. Widening the chasm between the home and the world, the radio chatter colours the images with a feeling of alienation and paranoia. In the way the airwaves convert ordinary window views into something akin to CCTV footage, pregnant with dramatic incident, Footnote might be tapping into a fundamental psychological condition of life in America. Also, the finest Hitchcock remake in ages?

7. The Plains (David Easteal, Australia)

The Plains channels the spirit of Jeanne Dielman into Andrew Rakowski, a middle-aged lawyer who leaves office every evening just past 5 P.M. to drive home to suburban Melbourne. Easteal’s cyclical road movie formalizes this routine, filming Andrew’s commute over eleven different days of the year with a fixed camera from the back seat of his car. On some days, Andrew offers a lift to his colleague David (Easteal himself), probing the reticent young man on his private life while also generously talking about his own: relatives, career, romance, wealth, mental health. Literally compartmentalizing work and life, the commute creates a transitional zone where Andrew can view each as an escape from the grind of the other. It provides a moment of unwinding, freedom from roleplay that both life and work demand. Yet, for all the me-time the drive home affords, there is an eerie silence whenever Andrew isn’t chatting away or the radio isn’t on, as though this non-place, non-time were forcing him to reflect on Important Things. Despite the apparent sameness, every day brings small deviations that threaten Andrew’s reassuring routine, all accumulating into a powerful meditation on aging and the passing of time, a view of life’s parade from the wheel of his car.

8. Red Africa (Alexander Markov, Russia)

Rivalling the best work of Sergei Loznitsa, Alexander Markov’s resplendent found-footage project samples propaganda and reportage films that the USSR made during the Cold War to strengthen its ties with newly liberated African states. In this gorgeous Sovcolor assemblage, we see Soviet Premiers and African heads of state visit each other amidst ceremony and pomp, exhibitions showcase the latest in Soviet culture and technology to the African public and students use the knowledge they have gained in Moscow for the betterment of their countries, whose exported resources return as value-added products from behind the Iron Curtain. It’s a poignant glimpse into a nascent utopia, a world that could have been, which hides as much as it reveals. With cunning visual associations, Red Africa recasts decolonisation as a formal process that concealed fundamental continuities between the departing Western powers and the Eastern hegemon. Uplifting notions of bilateral ties between Africa and the USSR are belied by the strictly unilateral flow of influence and ideology. In its attempts at creating a new world order, Markov’s sharp film demonstrates, the Soviet Union espoused anti-colonial struggles in fraught areas of the globe even as it held sway over its diverse republics—a tragic irony made apparent when the chickens came home to roost in 1991.

9. The DNA of Dignity (Jan Baumgartner, Switzerland)

Jan Baumgartner’s moving, loosely fictionalized documentary The DNA of Dignity follows the patient, heroic work of individuals and organizations involved in identifying victims buried in mass graves during the Yugoslav wars. Along with bones, volunteers retrieve articles of clothing, toiletries and other knickknacks, all hinting at stories to be told of those they have outlived. With witnesses passing away each year and new structures waiting to be erected over these burial sites, the excavations are truly a race against time, fighting both political amnesia and nature’s complicity in the oblivion. In their quest to rescue war victims from anonymity, forensic scientists assemble excavated bones into skeletons, carry out DNA tests to ascertain identities and hand over the remains to grieving families, who haven’t had closure despite the end of the war and who confess to no longer being able to enjoy landscape without being reminded of what it hides. Baumgartner’s film obscures political and institutional details to focus on the scientific process, offering a fascinating, inspiring picture of the how the abstractions of science eventually coalesce into human stories. Its success lies in finding the right tone and distance necessary for a subject as grave and delicate.

10. Animal Eye (Maxime Martinot, France-Portugal)

Martinot’s funny, free-spirited, quietly radical Animal Eye features a 30-year-old Breton filmmaker discussing his next project with his producer in Lisbon. He isn’t very articulate, but knows that the film will be an “autobiographic animal diary” about his dog Boy. “Films are filled with humans,” he says, “all liars.” Animals, in contrast, are not aware of the camera—or don’t care about it—and as chaotic beings of “pure present,” they evade the signifying operations of the image, emptying it of meaning and intention. As the muddled filmmaker slowly “hands over” the project to his smart, wry producer, the film’s central theme crystallizes: in neither owing anything to imagemakers nor expecting anything from them, the filmed animal offers a way out of the crippling egocentrism of artistic creation. In being just an image, the filmed animal becomes a just image. Animal Eye takes the first tentative steps towards the faint understanding that a “cinema of animals” shouldn’t consist of simply filming the world from their eyes, but filming as them, whatever that might entail. Chaining together clips of dogs from across movie history—subject to sadistic torture, sentimentalism and signification, locked out of the human realm—Martinot’s film embodies a rousing rallying cry on behalf of a “deanthropocentrized” cinema. In its own modest way, Animal Eye marks a milestone in anti-speciesist filmmaking.

Special Mention: Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, France)

Favourite Films of

2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

March 28, 2022

Oscars Shorts 2022: Documentary

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Afghanistan, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of the USA, Roundup | Tags: Audible, Ben Proudfoot, Elizabeth Mirzaei, Gulistan Mirzaei, Jay Rosenblatt, Jon Shenk, Lead Me Home, Matt Ogens, Pedro Kos, The Queen of Basketball, Three Songs for Benazir, When We Were Bullies |
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Disability in sport, homelessness, school bullying and war-induced displacement are some of the themes of the films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) this year. All five works showcase the capacity of individuals to overcome adverse circumstances.

More importantly, these films attest to an increasing willingness on the part of documentary filmmakers to incorporate fictional methods, to dramatize their material in collaboration with their subjects. Whether this impulse stems from a concern to compete with fiction films for the viewer’s attention or from a confidence in the authenticity of their narratives remains to be seen. But on the evidence of some of these shorts, we may be witnessing the evolution of a Netflix documentary aesthetic.

The Queen of Basketball (2021) is a relatively conventional biographical sketch about Lusia Harris, an icon of women’s basketball in the US and the only woman to be drafted by the men’s NBA. Harris, who passed away in January, was the tenth of eleven children in a family of sharecroppers in the state of Mississippi. Towering at 6’3”, she was part of the college team at Delta State University that won three consecutive national championships.

As a poor Black woman in the Deep South, and one who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder later in life, Harris has evidently had to overcome several disadvantages. Where a feature length documentary would have furnished more context, The Queen of Basketball touches upon these aspects of her identity only in passing. Interspersing interviews with Harris with archival clips of her games, director Ben Proudfoot focuses instead on her individual accomplishment.

Some of the sports footage is rousingly scored to Vivaldi, but Proudfoot multiplies the cuts for no apparent reason other than to impart some pace to the film. That Harris’ statements are constantly interrupted by edits may owe to issues of articulation, but when key passages of play are also broken into multiple shots, it takes something away from their power.

Basketball is often promoted as a way out of poverty for Black children, but Harris’ case illustrates a telling counter-example: as there was no women’s NBA at the time, Harris struggled to make a living, had to give up playing in order to raise a family. The film ends on the note that all her children are highly educated today, two of them holding doctorates. Does she have regrets about her shortened career? “Maybe the world would have known my name had I continued playing. But I didn’t, so I don’t speculate,” she smiles.

Audible (2021), in contrast, is a sports biography in the present. At its centre Amaree, a football player representing the Maryland School for the Deaf. Directed by Matt Ogens, the film follows Amaree through his senior year, his relationship with his family and friends and the intense training that he and his teammates undergo after a scarring defeat. As a hearing-impaired team, Amaree and co. are certainly disadvantaged in the field in some ways, but as their coach says, it also helps them cut out the noise from outside.

An undiscerning viewer could mistake Audible for an underdog sports drama, thanks to its slick finish with stroboscopic lighting effects, slow-motion sequences and impressive sports photography. There is a pointed fictional quality to the scenes featuring Amaree’s conversations with his girlfriend and his estranged father. Interviews with Amaree and his friends are interestingly presented in sign language, without voiceover and with subtitles, which makes the film’s sound design choices more transparent. On the other hand, Amaree’s father’s speeches at the church aren’t accompanied by any on-screen sign language, prompting the question of whether the film was conceived only for the hearing.

There is lingering doubt as to what future awaits Amaree and his mates after school, when they have to go out into the world without the protection of their community. Sensitive to discrimination, however, the youngsters seem more accepting of racial and sexual differences, more determined to prove themselves equal. From the looks of it, the kids are alright.

The future is also in contention in Three Songs for Benazir (2021), the only nominee not set in the US. The film is a human-interest story that follows Shaista and his wife Benazir, a young couple internally displaced by the war in Afghanistan and interned in a refugee camp in Kabul. Shaista is faced with the option of either joining the national army or going to work in the poppy fields. The former would earn him a respectable living, but at the risk of antagonizing the Taliban, who still seem to hold sway over the refugees’ lives. Harvesting opium, on the other hand, would pose the risk of addiction and of coming under the influence of the Taliban.

Members of Shaista’s family refuse to sign his enlistment form, and his conversations with them comprise the most absorbing moments of the film. Shaista’s father tells him that, because he doesn’t have an education, someone would steal his “machine gun and satellite.” Shaista’s brothers are a little more convincing, pointing to his pregnant wife who might be widowed. Hovering over these exchanges is the US presence in the form of a surveillance balloon, an eye just as omniscient as the Taliban with their ears to the ground.

On the margins of it all is Benazir herself, a silent witness but also a moving force. Over the course of the film, shot over many years, we see her transform from a giggly girl slapping her husband’s arm to a taciturn woman covering her face in front of the camera. In the end, when she comes with her two boys to a rehab centre that Shaista has been admitted to, we perceive the toll of time on her face just as much as on her husband’s emaciated body.

Like Shaista and Benazir, some of the participants of Lead Me Home (2021) are hopeful despite their bleak circumstances. Shot in the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle between 2017 and 2020, the film explores the problem of homelessness in the West Coast. Directors Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk offer a composite if clouded picture of the phenomenon, juxtaposing everyday scenes from the lives of homeless individuals with soundbites from NGOs, policy makers and citizens. Filmed seductively in tracking or drone shots, the cities themselves become a character, their streets and parks dotted with rows and rows of shanty settlements.

The list of interviewees spans genders, age groups, ethnicities, sexual orientations and marital status, and each one comes to the welfare services with a different set of expectations and problems. The most harrowing account is that of a single mother who, pregnant again by rape, tries to keep her children away from the streets. For someone not familiar with the relevant public policy, it is not always clear why certain participants come back to the streets after getting an apartment or why they can’t find jobs. More than any of the other nominees, this is the film that needed an elaborate, Frederick Wiseman treatment.

Unlike the other four works, When We Were Bullies (2021) is structured around an absence. When filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt contacted Richard Silberg for some voiceover work, he realized that they were both perpetrators in the same bullying incident at elementary school. Amazed at the coincidence, but also ashamed at his participation in the event, Rosenblatt set out on an investigation. He reached out to all his classmates in grade five involved in the act, asking them what they remember of the victim. With Silberg, he revisited the primal scene at his school after fifty years, trying to make sense of both the event and his response to it.

It’s a remarkably powerful idea, but also an extremely challenging one, poised on the fine line between introspection and self-absorption, where the search for justice and reconciliation can easily collapse into an exercise of guilt. Written like a New York Times feature article, Bullies is unfortunately far too focused on its own process to be able to see a way out of the dilemma.

But the film’s bigger problem is formal. To illustrate his lines, Rosenblatt repeatedly employs clips from old educational documentaries such that there is a short circuit between the individuals he speaks about and the figures on the screen. The long middle section of the film consists of a series of telephone recordings whose content is visualized by extended stop-motion animation of photo cut-outs. The filmmaker generously includes his primary school teacher’s prediction about his film-in-progress: “possibly very tedious to watch.”

[First published in News9]

March 26, 2022

Oscars Shorts 2022: Animated

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of Chile, Cinema of Russia, Cinema of Spain, Cinema of the UK, Roundup | Tags: Affairs of the Art, Alberto Mielgo, Anton Dyakov, Bestia, Boxballet, Dan Ojari, Hugo Covarrubias, Joanna Quinn, Les Mills, Michael Please, Robin Robin, The Windshield Wiper |
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The list of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film this year presents an eclectic slate. Spanning different genres, subject matters and styles, these works demonstrate that animation can sometimes deepen ideas and feelings in a way that live-action filmmaking cannot.

The Windshield Wiper (2021) is perhaps the most striking of the nominees in terms of animation technique, which here consists of 3D modelling over painted backgrounds. The gestures of the central character — a middle-aged man smoking in a corner of a café, lost in thoughts — are so precise and expressive that it is hard to believe that the film wasn’t rotoscoped out of a live-action film played by real actors. The impression of realism is accentuated by the ambient sound mix, which captures stray conversations in the café, as well as mock-cinematic devices like out-of-focus shots and cloud effects.

A painter by training, director Alberto Mielgo is nevertheless careful not to imitate photographic reality closely. To this end, he only picks out the salient features of his human characters and renders the play of light on their bodies in thick painterly strokes. There also appears to be some frame dropping, which takes the film further away from realism.

As the man in the café muses on what love is, Mielgo cuts to vignettes of unfulfilled romance: a young pair at a sunny beach staring at the sea in silence, a homeless man talking with a mannequin as though she were his old flame, a Japanese schoolgirl jumping off a high-rise in Tokyo, a man with a bouquet of roses in Berlin rushing for a planned date, two tattooed Tinder hopefuls in a supermarket who don’t realize that their match is standing next to them. At first, these scenes feel like the man’s reminiscences, but it turns out that they are just unconnected scenes connected by the theme of love and given the music video treatment.

Romance is also at the centre of the Anton Dyakov’s Boxballet (2020), in which a fading heavyweight boxer in Soviet Russia falls in love with a ballerina. Over their courtship, the two exchange personalities: visiting museums and dance halls, the pugilist discovers the softer side in him; the dancer, in turn, develops the inner strength to defy her sleazy trainer who offers her the lead role in his next production in exchange for sexual favours. It’s an unlikely romance between two characters whose careers are on the wane. Also on the wane is the USSR, whose history has a complex relationship with ballet. The film thus has an unusual political resonance: it is conceivable that the couple might not have existed in a different era.

While its setup recalls American film noir, Boxballet opts for an exaggerated cartoony style with caricatured characters, aquarelle colours, visible contours, charcoal-like shading and rapid cuts. Figures in the ballerina’s scenes are elongated to underscore her long legs and her flexibility, but also her frailty. The environment of the boxer, on the other hand, is characterized by an accent on volumes and solidity. He is a sack of potatoes compared to the ballerina’s carrot. This simple duality makes for some effective contrast and formal rhyming. His bulk attaches him to the ground while her litheness draws her towards the skies. Raising her hand to slap her trainer, the ballerina instead curls it to punch him on the nose.

Hugo Covarrubias’s Bestia (2021) is also a period narrative, one set in Chile during the Pinochet regime in which political dissidents were tortured and killed, often with the cooperation of private companies. The film is based on the ghastly life of Íngrid Olderöck, an executive in Pinochet’s intelligence agency, who allegedly used her dog to rape her detainees. Bestia begins by emphasizing Íngrid’s everyday life, her culinary habits, her relationship with her German shepherd and her commute to ‘work’. This quotidian reality becomes progressively unsettling as Íngrid murders abducted prisoners to upbeat music or has her pet perform sexual acts on her.

The corpulent Íngrid is modelled like a cracked china doll, with light bouncing off its glazed surface, to reflect the hollow, broken woman that she is, but also to underline her porcelain coldness. Her tiny, painted mouth hardly moves, but the film puts this impassivity to good effect. The lovingly designed décor, made of everyday material such as cardboard, wool or fur, aptly echoes the film’s central theme of the banality of evil.

Much more children friendly is Robin Robin (2021), an old-style Christmas movie about a bird that grows up among a family of mice, ill-suited to the business of stealing food from humans. It’s the only nominee that has the glossy finish of a Pixar production, with its dynamic ‘camera’ movements, hyper-sensitive character features and extremely detailed object textures. The voluptuousness of nature on display harks all the way back to Bambi (1942). The animals all have a fur that resembled pilled wool, conveying a feeling of warm domesticity.

With a runtime of just over thirty minutes, Robin Robin is also twice as long as the other nominees. The length helps the film pack four musical numbers penned by directors Dan Ojari and Michael Please. The best of these is a Tim Burton-esque sequence set in a tool shed and features a villainous cat taunting our hapless robin. As the cat bandies his victim across the shed, mechanical tools come to life in coordinated motion, turning into instruments of torture, just as the cat’s apparently consoling verses become threatening: “A robin or a mouse? After all, under the skin, you’re all the same.”

A cat is at the receiving end of violence in the fifth and the funniest nominee, Affairs of the Art (2021), made by British animators Joanna Quinn and Les Mills, who have been developing the lead character, Beryl, for over three decades now. A middle-aged housewife in a family of obsessives, Beryl recalls how monomania runs in her family. Her sister Beverly, a natural-born sadist and a precocious taxidermist, tortures small animals and is haunted by Lenin’s preserved body. Beverly’s obsession with death and decay perhaps comes from their grandmother, who would pickle any living thing that came her way. Beryl’s son Colin speaks only in Dutch and is possessed by railway signals. Beryl, for her part, is into art now, “drinking from the cup of creativity.” She makes her husband repeatedly come down the stairs naked in order to capture “the movement in between the moment of change.”

It’s the kind of neurotic bunch that you might find in films by Woody Allen or Wes Anderson. And the animation is appropriately nervous: the hand-drawn lines pile on top of one another, the colour fields exceed the lines, corrections are left visible, figures quiver with repressed energy. The writing and the voice acting are superb, and the animation matches it in its suppleness and expressivity. Motifs of aging, beauty, violence and death recur in different forms. But it is the manner in which Affairs of the Art treats patently morbid subjects with irreverent humour that stands out. It could be the winning film.

[First published at News9]

March 24, 2022

Migrant Labour at Cinéma du Réel 2022

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of France | Tags: Anyox, Bouba Touré, Caught in the Rain, Cinéma du Réel, Crossing Voices, Elie Maissin, Jessica Johnson, Mieriën Coppens, Navigators, Noah Teichner, Raphaël Grisey, Somankidi Koura |
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The last week of March 2022 marks the second anniversary of India’s first covid-enforced lockdown. Out of work and anxious about the immediate future, migrant workers from every part of the country decided to go back to their homelands by whatever means was available to them. The harrowing, mediatized tracking shots of men and women trudging along highways with their belongings are now a veritable part of the visual history of independent India.

Migrant labour also happens to be one of the most prominent themes of the recently concluded Cinéma du Réel documentary festival. While several films that premiered at this year’s edition explore the intersections of technology, nature, politics and work, four projects train their attention on the experiences of the expatriate working-class.

We barely see workers in Noah Teichner’s Navigators; even so, the film centres on an important chapter in the history of migrant labour in America. Following the October Revolution in Russia, the United States drafted the Immigration Act of 1918 to deport anarchists and communists living in the country. In November 1919, the US Department of Justice raided the premises of the Union of Russian Workers, an anarchist organization comprised of Russian immigrants. 249 of the arrested radicals were put aboard the USAT Buford on December 21 and sent away to the new-born Soviet Union.

Among the deportees were the anarchist intellectuals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, whose diary entries and letters on the voyage serve as textual material for the film. But the protagonist of Navigators is the USAT Buford itself. Commissioned in 1890, the ship was put to varied use during its forty-year lifetime. At one point, it even served as the set for Buster Keaton’s classic comedy The Navigator (1924).

Presented entirely in split screen, Teichner’s film employs three distinct formal elements. Its visual component is made largely of newsreels and scenes from silent comedies, particularly The Navigator. Clips of Buster Keaton wandering on a ghost ship are juxtaposed with excerpts from writings by Berkman describing the harsh conditions aboard the overloaded Buford over its 28-day journey. The comic images and radical text are scored to a selection of humorous anti-communist music, sometimes slowed down to the point of being unrecognizable.

In Buford, Navigators discovers an instance of history appearing first as tragedy, then as farce. But history resurfaces in other bitter ways as well. If America’s deportation of anarchists recalls the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, Lenin’s persecution of the same anarchists in the 1920s strikes a note of sad irony. Comedy and history come across as conjoint twins in the disorienting crosstalk between text and image, fiction and reality, that Navigators puts in place. Cinephiles will no doubt notice that the three-way clash of cinema, radical politics and red scare that informs the film’s formal scheme would emerge again in the Hollywood blacklist of the late forties.

Migrant workers are also deported in Jessica Johnson’s Anyox, which mixes current-day footage of a former mining town in British Columbia, Canada, with archival material from the twenties and the thirties, when the site was owned and administered by the Granby Consolidated Mining corporation. During its heyday, about half of the company’s workforce was made of immigrants from Central Europe who mostly worked at the mines, while labourers from English-speaking countries were deployed at the smelting facility. The workers all appear to have been sensitized to their rights by political newspapers available in a host of languages.

Compelling the viewer to read forbiddingly long reports and newspaper clippings, director Johnson provides a detailed account of the agitation that gripped the town in the thirties. Since the company owned all the businesses in Anyox, the worker’s sustenance-level salaries came back to the firm in the form of shopping receipts and dorm rents. When the demand for copper plummeted during the Great Depression, the company further cut down wages. The employees struck, demanding better living and working conditions. The police intervened, hundreds of strikers were put on barges and expelled from the town.

The immigrant workers of Crossing Voices, on the other hand, returned to Africa of their own volition. In 1977, fourteen migrant labourers working in France travelled to Kayes, Mali, to establish a farming cooperative named Somankidi Koura. The group had first met in Paris as members of the Cultural Association of African Workers in France (ACTAF), which fought for the rights of migrant workers, but also supported the liberation struggles of Portuguese colonies in Africa. ACTAF members protested the lamentable living conditions for African labourers, housed in terribly equipped, undersized dormitories in suburban Paris.

Following the liberation of the Portuguese colonies in 1974, however, the group turned its attention to the droughts that were gripping the Sahel region. They came to the realization that the very phenomenon of African immigration to Europe has its roots in the exploitative practices of colonial agriculture: the colonisers’ insistence on cash crops such as peanuts had eroded the quality of the soil in rural Sahel, producing the drought and the subsequent exodus of rural workers to cities, including in Europe. In order to address the problems of urban immigrant life in France, one then had to address the state of rural agriculture in Africa.

To this end, the group undertook underpaid internships with French farmers. They carried this knowledge back to Africa, their reverse journey from Europe a symbolic undoing of the effects of colonial economics. “To fight the sun and the famine, our weapon is the daba (pickaxe),” became their motto in establishing the Somankidi Koura cooperative.

Using material from public archives and the personal collection of filmmaker Bouba Touré, one of the co-founders of the cooperative, Crossing Voices illustrates the continued struggles of immigrant and illegal workers in France and contrasts it with the everyday operations of the cooperative. Spanning decades, continents and economic activities, the film offers a cogent historical analysis of blue-collar emigration from Africa.

The politics of migratory labour takes a backseat in Caught in the Rain, which instead adopts an oblique, lyrical approach to representing migrant life. The setting is a nondescript residence in Belgium. Two African men are engaged in what appears to be fragments of renovation work, peeling old wallpapers, clearing scrap materials or doing the laundry. But there are interruptions: responding to offscreen signals, one of the men abandons his task and rushes outside. It rains a while later, and the man lets half-a-dozen other immigrants inside. They wait until the rain stops and then make their way out as quietly as they came in.

We learn shortly that the two workers were picked up by the police five months ago on a raid. The men, it appears, are illegal immigrants squatting in this abandoned house; far from distraction, their alertness to off-camera stimuli is indicative of their uncertain situation, a compulsion to be ready to flee anytime. But this scenario isn’t treated for dramatic effect.

Rather, the film unfolds like a haiku; instead of putting their actors through a narrative, directors Mieriën Coppens and Elie Maissin photograph them in partially-lit profiles, lending them a monumental presence that underscores their silent dignity. There are precedents to this approach in the work of Pedro Costa or even John Ford. But the film’s rarefied portrait of immigrant labour and community life is moving in its own right. In their apparent precarity, their quiet desperation, the workers here call to mind India’s nameless, numberless migrant labourers who, too, were forced to run for shelter, caught in the metaphorical rain.

[First published at News9]

December 9, 2020

2020 Roundup #5

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Argentina, Cinema of Brazil, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of the USA, Hollywood, Roundup | Tags: Anika Kash, Carlos Segundo, Christopher Nolan, Clive Oppenheimer, Corporate Accountability, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, From Time to Time I Burn, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, John David Washington, Jonathan Perel, Judy Rebick, Judy Versus Capitalism, Marriage Story, Mike Hoolboom, Robert Pattinson, Tenet, Werner Herzog |
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Judy Versus Capitalism (Mike Hoolboom)

Hoolboom’s hourlong documentary is a biography of Canadian feminist and activist Judy Rebick presented in the voice of the subject herself. Divided arbitrarily into six chapters—titled ‘weight’, ‘abortion’, ‘others’ etc.—it traces Rebick’s childhood, the influence of her father on her romantic life, her first activist interventions, her conscious decision to gain weight as a defence mechanism, her involvement in the pro-choice movement leading up the legalization of abortion in Canada, her mental disorder and its roots, and her continuing struggle for the cause of social justice. As the years progress, we see Rebick’s concern grow beyond feminism, gradually encompassing questions of mental health and Israel-Palestine, and we end up with a picture of resistance and activism as a way of life. The account is chronological, and Hoolboom lets Rebick’s words drive the narrative. He illustrates her words with photos and videos from her personal album or associated archival footage from the corresponding time periods. The film is at its most inspired when Rebick opens up about her dissociative identity disorder, about the way it serves as a protective shield against the trauma of childhood abuse. As she talks about her various alters, Hoolboom, whose Scrapbook (2015) constitutes one of the most resonating cinematic explorations of selfhood and the ego, cuts to a series of faces of different ethnicities, genders and ages—a witty, sideways association with Rebick’s activism that’s constantly bound up with the question of ‘others’ outside herself. But for the most part, Judy Versus Capitalism falls short of its inventive title and remains a conventional portrait. Because Rebick’s testimony is powerful and stands on its own, Hoolboom is (rightfully) obliged to respect it and let it take centre stage. As a result, there’s little here that couldn’t have been accomplished by a more academic documentary.

From Time to Time, I Burn (Carlos Segundo)

With his dazzling debut Slits (2019), Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Segundo initiated a meditation on the nature of the digital image, and its relation to reality, memory, loss and mourning, against a backdrop of flagrant social inequality. In From Time to Time, I Burn, he continues this interrogation into the ontology of images and the way they fundamentally alter reality. But this time, he approaches them from the other end of photographic history. The quantum physicist of Slits studying high-definition digital images makes way for an experimental photographer, Louise (Rubia Bernasci), who works with the most rudimentary of photographic devices: a pinhole camera that she exposes to orchestrated movement of human bodies for several minutes. Standing naked before the device, she enacts a pseudo-ritual of seduction with another model. With its aperture always open, the camera ‘combines’ these bodies in a process of chemical communion into an organic composite in which racial and gender distinctions don’t hold anymore. Louise, an Afro-Brazilian who takes care of her pious, ailing mother, experiences a kind of religious epiphany when one of her models whispers something into her ear. Like Slits, From Time to Time is an enigmatic film about a subjective experience with images, and its narrative feels like an abstracted version of a longer treatment. In a short introduction, in which he also expresses solidarity with artists resisting the current “political virus” in Brazil, Segundo cites the Holy Trinity as an inspiration for both works. The claim is as baffling as the new film, but one gets the sense that, for Segundo, there’s something fundamentally religious about image-making, particularly in the kind of transubstantiation it effects between reality and representation. It may be that Segundo is shrouding very concrete political ideas in quasi-religious mystery, which seems to be a foundational value in his films. His subsequent work will, no doubt, throw more light.

Marriage Story (Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli)

In its pared-down quality, Marriage Story seems to take off from the audiovisual abstraction that So Pretty (2019) ended with. This new short film does away with many of the narrative layers of the latter feature—community life, literary adaptation, political action. Even the carefully panning camera and exceptionally dense sound design of So Pretty give way to simpler formal elements. In fact, there are only three shots in the film, which may narratively be described as a rudimentary sketch of an afternoon session of sex between Rovinelli and her girlfriend Anika Kash. In the first, the filmmaker prepares coffee on a stove. In the second, she and Kash make love on the living room couch while, in the third, Kash sits on a chair reading out a text detailing a passionate sexual encounter with another woman. Bright red frames punctuate the film, and they constitute the entry and exit images as well. In every shot, a quotidian middle-class décor is subverted with elements that don’t typically belong there. The kitchen of the first scene is a picture of conventional piety and domesticity, complete with a religious painting on the wall. But Rovinelli has a slow stream of red light wash over the muted colours of the kitchen as though from a discotheque or a police siren. Combined with the sight of Rovinelli’s unconventional, naked body with its tattoos, breasts and dense armpit hair, the setting becomes something else. Similarly, in the third shot, we only see Kash’s ‘topless’, bare body on a chair, while a television set next to it projects the image of her head speaking the lines. Drawn from disparate sources, including the Song of Songs and writings by St. Theresa of Avila, the text conflates sacred and profane ecstasy in a manner that recalls Bernini’s St. Theresa. With all this, Rovinelli appears to be reintegrating what bourgeois religiosity keeps apart, i.e. the experiences of the spirit and the flesh.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog, Clive Oppenheimer)

Thank heavens for Werner Herzog, for he is one of the few remaining auteurs who still believe in the capacity of film for cosmic reflection, in whose work man is more than a moral-political creature. The visitors in Fireball are meteorites, i.e. rocks and dust formed millions of years ago in the far reaches of the universe that grace the earth. Herzog and British geologist Clive Oppenheimer go across the world in search of stories about these interstellar travellers—myths, legends, rituals, scientific accounts—even accompanying an Antarctic expedition for space rocks. They position these meteorites as objects alternatively of scientific research and around which the film’s human subjects create meaning: the rocks are rare minerals, but also existential tokens, like cave paintings, whose transhistorical origin relativizes our own lives. This bivalence could produce two different responses to the film. A viewer looking for a scientific investigation could be frustrated by the mystification Herzog’s methods bring, just as a viewer seeking philosophical edification could find the geological explanations wanting. While the film’s scientific orientation could arguably be ascribed to the influence of Oppenheimer, the manner in which it juxtaposes the absurd and the sublime is vintage Herzog. It’s the mark of the filmmaker’s strength and sophistication that he is able to identify both these potentials in his material without undercutting the value of either. Under his camera, the eccentric takes on a heroic aura just as the erudite acquires a touch of the ridiculous. Herzog shies away neither from Malick-like preciousness nor from Hollywood cynicism; he can break a solemn philosophical mood by joking that Bavarians like him are not made of stardust, but he can also provoke a tear or two with a cut from an aboriginal painting to a telescopic view of a meteorite crater. A borrowed shot of an explorer breaking down at a momentous discovery while the rear end of a busy team member occupies the background of the frame sums up the film’s all-accommodating generosity. Apt, considering the film’s theme is the twin role of meteorites as a destructive as well as a life-creating force.

Tenet (Christopher Nolan)

Christopher Nolan is a fanatic who has been increasingly willing to throw himself under the bus for the sake of his truth. Interstellar (2014) left behind his fanboys, Dunkirk (2017) thumbed its nose at sacred filmmaking tenets, while this new film ventures into even more untested terrains. That he has gaged a $250 million project for his personal desire to revive cinemagoing in the middle of a pandemic, moreover, cannot be ignored while evaluating the film. The world’s most popular poet of time has, once again, conceived of an ingenious, impenetrable syuzhet in which narratives in forward and reverse chronology are woven together within the framework of a spectacular if old-fashioned Euro-thriller: a CIA operative (John David Washington) must thwart the efforts of a future generation that seeks to annihilate all past in order to preserve itself. This chronological mesh makes for some unwittingly funny, but eye-popping reverse motion sequences that descend directly from the Lumières’ self-constructing wall. What’s impressive about Tenet, and its predecessor, is the filmmaker’s unapologetic privileging of an abstract figure of style over grammatic or affective considerations: the ‘trans-temporal’ crosscutting in Dunkirk, reverse motion here. In a way, these are bold, formal experiments that, in their failure, throw light on the mechanisms of classical storytelling. Nolan, who has always taken care to place his characters’ emotional or moral predicament at the centre of his narrative contraptions, does away with it in Tenet, Washington’s unflappable protagonist being little more than a sexless, humourless cipher. Despite the overwhelming intensity of the exposition scenes, he has also seemingly let go of the need to tie up the logical loose ends of his hypothesis, letting the contradictions and loopholes remain as they are. While a more thoughtful story could’ve drawn out all the themes of the intriguing premise, it is notable that Nolan, who has been crusading to preserve and employ celluloid from within a media climate hostile to such backward-looking attitudes, chose to make Tenet the tale of a man who fights to preserve the past at the expense of the future.

Corporate Accountability (Jonathan Perel)

In Toponymy (2015), Perel pursued the traces of Argentina’s military dictatorship on its landscape, examining in essence the way governments inscribe preferred narratives onto geography. In the new film, he continues this exploration by looking at the role of large private corporations in enabling and carrying out state-sponsored pogroms against political dissidents of the junta. The structure is simple: in static shots from the dashboard of his car, Perel photographs the company facilities as they are today while a brisk voiceover lists out how each firm helped military and security forces detain, torture and get rid of problematic workers in exchange for financial perks. The text, read out from an official 2015 report, is numbingly repetitious, and drives home the pervasiveness of these military-industrial operations. Perel’s decision to frame the sites through his car’s windshield creates a sense of illicit access, even though there is visibly little stopping him from going nearer the facilities. Some of the companies continue to operate under their own name, while some others have changed, with at least one site carrying a memorial sign for the injustice perpetrated there. Perel is, in effect, photographing the ur-filmic image of factory entrances, but all we see is a handful of vehicles leaving the gates. This eerie absence of human figures evokes the disappeared workers who, at some companies, were picked up at the entrance, a site, as Farocki has demonstrated, of class dialectics. But Corporate Accountability also exhibits kinship to landscape films such as Too Early, Too Late (1981), Landscape Suicide (1986), and to the more recent Did Wolff von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offenses? (2004) and Status and Terrain (2019). The question that Perel raises is this: how do you film criminal responsibility when you are removed in time and space from these acts, and when you can’t put a face on to the perpetrators? After all, corporations aren’t people and you can’t indict a logo. The filmmaker foregrounds this crisis of representation by emphasizing the primacy of the source report, which carries the burden not just of describing the crimes but of differentiating criminal accountability from mere complicity. Perel’s reading out of the report’s copyright page is thus bitterly ironic since adapting it is precisely what he cannot do.

November 27, 2020

2020 Roundup #4

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of the Philippines, Cinema of the USA, Roundup | Tags: Abel Ferrara, Alexander Kluge, Autofiction, I Walk on Water, Ian Madrigal, Inventing the Future, Isiah Medina, Ken Jacobs, Khalik Allah, Khavn, Laida Lertxundi, Lilith Stangenberg, Movie That Invites Pausing, Orphea, Sportin‘ Life, Willem Dafoe |
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Autofiction (Laida Lertxundi)

Autofiction, the first of Basque-origin artist Lertxundi’s films I’ve seen, opens with an establishment shot of a city skyline. A while later, we are on the sunlit roads of the metropolis, where a cavalcade of police motorbikes prepares for a rally. Cut to bodies of various unconscious women being dragged on concrete and loaded on to a truck. Before we can figure out what’s happening, we are presented with short testimonies of women talking about motherhood, abortion and loneliness, testimonies that are cut with vignettes from the MLK day parade in the city. The bright pastel colours that compose the studio the women are photographed in, combined with the big, yellow typeface of the title and the sunny outdoors, suggest a pastiche of cheerful Reaganite suburbia. At one point, a woman crawls out of her living room couch into her large, suburban backyard to settle into a foetal position under the sun. But what’s the connection? I presume that the crimes taking place in broad daylight, whose perpetrators we don’t see, tie metaphorically with the women’s accounts, in which post-maternal deracination, post-abortive disorientation and post-separation depression are all conceived in terms of personal choices and experiences, independent of structural forces conditioning them. By intercutting these testimonies with a civil rights rally, Lertxundi is restoring the political character to these personal experiences. At the end, a rectangular opening on a card frames parts of women’s bodies separately, hinting at the unity behind these fragments, just as Lertxundi evokes the socio-political unity shaping individual experiences. The title, moreover, implies that Lertxundi might be articulating details of her own life through these accounts, thereby scattering her subjectivity and rendering it interchangeable with those of the women she films.

Orphea (Alexander Kluge, Khavn)

In Orphea, 88-year-old Kluge and 47-year-old Khavn revive the Orpheus-Euridice myth as an avant garde punk musical. In this version, Orpheus becomes a woman named Orphea (Lilith Stangenberg) while Euridice is a man called Euridiko (Ian Madrigal) and the underworld itself is Manila at night time. The filmmakers treat the myth rather loosely, converting it into a string of ‘set pieces’, in which Orphea is either navigating one lair of degenerates after another or reading out lines of Ovid from a teleprompter, or belting out arias and folk tunes in half a dozen languages in front of a matte screen. Unlike Straub’s inconsolable one, Orpheus here seems to get along just fine without Euridice. The result resembles a blithe experimental video game produced by Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Through Orphea’s valiance but also her ultimate impotence, the filmmakers mount something of an elegy for the revolutionary potential of art. One of the suppositions is this: what if, despite Orpheus’ desires, Euridice didn’t want to be rescued? Orphea is regularly transported to wartime USSR, and mourns its countless dead, seeking, like the Soviet ‘biocosmists’, justice for the dead. Towards the end, the present also makes its way into the film in the form of border surveillance footage and refugee camps. The connections are often only suggestive, such as Orphea’s descent in the Lethe river invoking the sea route of contemporary migrants. Strangenberg appears in most every frame and is a hypnotic presence, and there is never a dull moment in the film. Kluge’s heterogenous style—on-screen texts, multiple sub-frames, stop-motion animation, declamatory text readings, archival photos and found footage—goes really well with the atmosphere of pure play. But it is literally a mixed bag where anything goes, so your mileage may vary.

Movie That Invites Pausing (Ken Jacobs)

Ken Jacobs’ film is dedicated to his teacher and abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, whose legendary classes are part of almost every historical account of 20^th century art. Hofmann’s painting and pedagogy emphasized the use of flat colour fields to generate the perception of depth, the impression of planes emerging or receding out of the canvas surface. Jacobs finds a filmic equivalent to this idea, producing the illusion of movement and dynamic colour without relying on pro-filmic reality. This is the setup: over the camera lens lies a fabric (or a translucent material) made of a hexagonal beehive pattern that gradually changes orientation over the course of the film. With what seems like a slightly mobile camera, Jacobs appears to photograph a liquid surface, first, and then some crystalline solids lit by stroboscopic light flashing at 120BPM (either that, or he has inserted these ‘black leaders’ artificially). At first, the result registers like the sight of a patterned gold foil slowly melting, but soon the hexagons vanish ‘underneath’ the liquid. Towards the end of the film, however, the fabric/material dominates the foreground, with the hexagons strongly asserting themselves with their dark borders. This receding and the emerging of the textured plane and the creation of new depths ties to what Hoffman called the ‘push and pull’ of the painting, the feeling of airiness that you get when you stare long enough at a Pollock, for instance. The strobing light also causes the hexagons to ripple like the liquid and ‘animates’ the surface into repetitive, gif-image like movements. More than pausing, which allows you to see various hues of gold and orange on the image, it’s speeding it up or slowing it down that the film tempts you to; playing it at 0.25x or 4x its speed illuminates its process better.

Inventing the Future (Isiah Medina)

Inventing the Future, Medina’s second feature, is adapted from a book of the same name by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. The text in question describes the limitations of the current ‘folk politics’ of the left and contrasts it with the long-term vision with which Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society conceived, disseminated and installed Neoliberalism into the ‘political common sense’ through universities and think tanks. An accelerationist outline for the future, it calls for a radical increase in automation that would result in fewer jobs, which, combined with a Universal Basic Income, could help reinvent newer forms of the self and the social. These rather weighty political ideas of the text are concentrated and tossed at us by the soundtrack—as read out by a girl who appears on screen from time to time—which Medina uses as a foundation for some extremely aggressive imagery. His blindingly rapid montage solders together what may be 25,000 shots in such a way that, in many stretches, we barely have time to register what we’re seeing. Even when a locus of anchoring images—crowds, people with phones, Lego blocks, the voiceover girl—constitute a set of identifiable visual motifs, the truculent editing forecloses any possible synthesis. Even the voiceover text, whose relative simplicity allows us to gather ourselves, is periodically chopped up and interrupted by an atonal piano melody or by another overlapping voiceover saying something else. Medina’s film appears to bear a mimetic relation to its source text in the sense that seeks cinematic correlatives to the ideas expressed. While the lightning-fast montage may be said to imitate the cognitive processes of the schizophrenic attention economy, the notion of UBI translates here to a universal access to image-making—thanks to ubiquitous cell phone cameras—which questions the need for new image production and shifts the burden of creative expression onto editing—a proto-Godardian idea. Conceptually strong though it may be, the punishing formal violence of Medina’s film makes it physically painful to watch.

IWOW: I Walk on Water (Khalik Allah)

While it continues and refines the street portraiture of Field Niggas (2015), Khalik “Danny” Allah’s IWOW also addresses the central moral-aesthetic issue weighing down on the earlier film, namely the filmmaker’s fraught relation to subjects whose consent in collaborating with him may not be wholly free and who, by dint of this power imbalance, run the risk of being commodified. As though in response to this problem posed by his obscured authorial position, Khalik places his self squarely at the centre of IWOW, where he claims to be nothing short of Jesus himself. This claim is, of course, tongue-in-cheek as Khalik confesses to having been inspired by the psychedelic mushrooms he keeps consuming. But it’s also a dramatic ruse that allows him to brashly interpret his work of ‘saving people’ in terms of Christian iconography and test it against the charity of his well-meaning family and friends, who are understandably concerned by his radical altruism. Khalik interrogates the limits of his own goodwill through his relation to Frenchie, an elderly Haitian street dweller with a speech impediment and a drug addiction, with whom he has worked over the past seven years. By his own admission, Khalik is a universalist who sees the same human essence binding everyone. To this end, his editing pattern disregards social hierarchies, cutting between extreme close-ups of outcasts and his friends and family in a manner that is often very provocative. Yet his focus is on the stories of those at the absolute bottom of the social ladder living on the streets of Harlem. The reason for this comes by way of an explosive monologue by one of his subjects, who describes the historical process behind the neighbourhood’s impoverishment and the real threat posed by gentrification; we then understand that the people Khalik films won’t be allowed to exist as they are once the district becomes ‘respectable’, i.e. the kind of place that will screen Khalik’s films and organize his exhibitions—a contradiction that the filmmaker reveals to be fully conscious of.

Sportin’ Life (Abel Ferrara)

Ferrara’s new documentary follows works by Daido Moriyama, Vanessa Beecroft, Bret Easton Ellis, Gaspar Noé and Wong Kar-wai as the sixth project commissioned by Saint Laurent as part of their project titled Self, which purportedly celebrates self-expression in the arts. Running for just over one hour, Sportin’ Life combines personal footage from Ferrara’s festival Q&As, media interviews, his concerts as a bass guitarist, television reports, internet videos, sessions from the US congress, Ferrara’s family photographs and clips from his own films. The interview excepts are quite direct and present Ferrara, invariably accompanied by his favourite lead man Willem Dafoe, talking about collaboration, making films with friends and family, and his approach to his craft. Interspersed with them are news reports about the Covid-19 crisis, Donald Trump’s feckless response to it and the mounting deaths in Italy and the US. It’s indeed striking how Ferrara is able to mould such pre-charged, disparate material into recognizable, personal imagery, with its references to Catholicism, its sense of being locked indoors, and the general end-of-days ambiance that pervades so much of his films. It’s as though the world has finally caught up with the dystopian fiction of 4:44 (2011), and so Dafoe gets to deliver his Dalai Lama-like monologue once again. On one level, Ferrara, holed up with his family in his apartment in Rome, is meditating on creation at the time of global destruction. The way he ironically superposes his concert music on low-fi footage of people dying drives home the idea of art’s impuissance in a more unequivocal manner than does Orphea. But the film is also Ferrara’s answer of sorts to public narratives about his oeuvre. In interviews and Q&As, we see journalists attach labels to his work—dark, radical, indie—that Ferrara doesn’t bother acknowledging. With this film, he appears to be simply ‘making his next move’ unmindful of the end game, i.e. responding to his immediate circumstances, remaining alert to the moment and, if we go by the equation ‘Pasolini=Dafoe=Ferrara’, making films as an existential coping mechanism. Towards the end of the film, however, Ferrara casts these sundry elements into a malevolent vision of the universe; the killing of George Floyd, the ensuing riots and violence are all stripped of their immediate, political meaning and shaped into a metaphysical picture of chaos. Maybe Ferrara is playing Nero more thoroughly than he imagines.

November 19, 2019

2019 Roundup #4

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of France, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of the USA, Roundup | Tags: Cristian Popa, Dan Sallitt, Denis Côté, Fourteen, Frank Beauvais, Guillaume Tremblay, Judith State, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, Marius Olteanu, Monsters., Norma Kuhling, Tallie Medel, Wilcox |
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Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)

To lead a more affordable life, filmmaker Frank Beauvais moved away from Paris and settled down in a remote village in the Alsace region with his then partner. In the seven years that followed, he lost his father, who had lived with him during his final days, broke up and went into a period of intense isolation and anxiety, watching over 400 films between April and October 2016. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is a record of these seven months constructed solely through images from these 400 films strung together with Beauvais fast-paced voiceover. With detachment, but not without stretches of indulgent melancholia, Beauvais talks about this life of poverty, his relation to his mother living in the region, his panic attacks, his political indecisiveness caught between a feeling for revolution and a renunciation of all action. It’s an agonising life, the straightforward dramatization of which would’ve resulted in a significantly lesser film. The stasis and claustrophobia of the existence described is given a vital momentum by the lively images, rife with movement and action, and the snappy narration. The relation between word and image is literal times, and only intuitive at others. But the surfeit of images sweeps you along, not just in its volume but also in the striking detail Beauvais picks out: predominantly close up of actions, almost no faces and a generous amount of violence and decay.

In this, Just Don’t Think is the preeminent film about cinephilia, the life in films that Truffaut called a disease and which Beauvais christens “cinéfolie”. Early on, he tells us that films are not a window to the world but mirrors, that is to say a way of life that encourages self-absorption and isolation from others, which the filmmaker is happy to do, surrounded as he is by the village’s infuriating conservatism and national pride. Hearing about the attack in Nice, he unfeelingly goes back to sleep with a cynical reasoning. Like all cinephiles—in fact, like all monomanes—Beauvais absolves this unhealthy cultural consumption by turning it into a talking point, a means to a so-called higher end. He is fully aware of this self-deception and he calls out his “Machiavellian construction” to justify this “bulimia”. He muses about the vanity of a narrative in first person, the potential collapsing of a distance from the subject that the project needs. (He can’t, of course, entirely get rid of the disingenuousness of the undertaking because, for all the talk about the malaise of cinephilia, it’s clear that he’s been using it to plan this film along the way.) Despite its contradictions and predetermined construction, Just Don’t Think is an accomplishment in the way it transforms a subject of low artistic value—one man’s emergence from a rut—into a lively, fruitful meditation on a subculture.

Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)

Fourteen traces the friendship between two young women, Mara and Jo, living in New York. They seem to naturally complement each other. The round-faced Mara (Tallie Medel) is petite, introspective and stands cross-legged. In a long shot midway, we see that she is among the last people exiting a train station upstate. Jo (Norma Kuhling) is lanky, slack-armed, constantly eating or smoking, and doesn’t think twice before correcting her friend on a turn of phrase. Jo calls Mara every time she’s in panic mode, Mara cancels her plans only to find Jo indifferent to her arrival. It’s clearly a parasitic relationship, but Mara feels compelled to fend for Jo for a reason that harks back to when they were fourteen. Both Mara and Jo hold temporary jobs and write on the side. Most of their interaction is about work; Mara fills application forms for the social worker Jo, while her own search for a permanent teaching position is a struggle. Fourteen contains some of the most realistic shop talk I’ve seen in films. It makes interesting what sounds unbearable in real life. The dialogue, in line with the Mumblecore tradition, seems improvised, which makes for some refreshing expressions (“stressball”, “cutting”, “eyeteeth”).

At several points, Fourteen jumps forward in time without warning and these blunt ellipses register the harsh blows of passing time even more strongly. The women change jobs, apartments and boyfriends. Mara’s fortunes improve, but Jo seems to be stagnant. Jealousy, resentment and guilt are hinted at but kept in check by the admirable performances. After a tense night of confrontation—the only tense passage in a film that’s otherwise entirely on a soft scale—the friendship gives in. Sallitt’s film is clear-eyed about the bounded nature of friendships and there’s only so much space individuals can dedicate for non-romantic relationships. It understands the way friendships wither and ossify irrevocably into a distant admiration. The understated quality of this almost Ozuvian look at non-blood ties is perhaps the reason I found the multi-tonal final sequence superfluous, ties as it does the difficult loose ends that all finished friendships invariably leave behind. Sallitt employs an unusual grammar to compose his scenes. Conversations don’t always unfold in shot-reverse shot patterns and the camera lingers long on faces, while voices emanate from off-screen. Like Bresson, Sallitt begins a shot before characters enter the field and cuts away after they’ve left. The film contains hardly any outdoor shots in its first half and opens up as it proceeds, the passage from claustrophobic NYC interiors to more open spaces paralleling the relationship between the women.

Wilcox (Denis Côté)

Denis Côté’s Wilcox begins and ends with a brief summary of individuals who moved away from civilization into the wilderness, sometimes undertaking odyssey-like journeys across vast and unforgiving landscapes: Everett Ruess, Carl McCunn, Dae Aabye, Christopher McCandless, Christopher Knight, Lilian Alling. Never mind that the lives of these figures only have a tenuous connection with each other, they nevertheless form a mythical backdrop to Côté’s film, which depicts the journey of Wilcox (Guillaume Tremblay) across the Canadian countryside. When we first see him, Wilcox is literally at the margins of a community paddling event. Lugging his large backpack, he wanders from one unnamed small town to another, taking shelter in deserted houses or buses, but never staying for more than one night anywhere. He meets and spends time with various old men living alone, but never forges friendships. He helps stuck dirt bikers, gives water to a dying mouse and survives on packaged supermarket food heated over a portable flame. The world seems welcoming and wholly accessible to him: he picks vegetables from fields, rides away on a borrowed bicycle and sleeps in the cellar of some unlocked house. There’s also a scene of an old man making potato wedges and tea.

Wilcox charts the same trajectory as Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, from the protagonist’s episodic encounters with people on his way out from civilization to his final spiritual revelation. But Côté abstracts out the McCandless story and empties it of its philosophical and emotional content. Most of the film has no real sound, which is replaced by a muffled, drone-heavy sound palette resembling a high-altitude ear block. We don’t know why Wilcox is on this quest, or why he attracts the hospitality and affection of the people he meets. The film assumes this is understood. Like in Ghost Town Anthology, Côté’s other film this year, there’s no sense of progress to the narrative, which could theoretically go on forever. As a result, Wilcox’s journey—distilled into a metanarrative of all those who leave society behind—becomes a means for the filmmaker to describe specific areas of Canadian landscape and culture. So we have generous views of the wooden strip houses so characteristic of Côté’s films, Wilcox pensively posing in and moving through springtime woods. Several passages are shot through a prism, making the periphery of the frame fuzzy. Equally mystifying is the choice to insert archival clips from the early part of last century—a surgeon trying prosthetic parts for WWI soldiers who have been disfigured and a series of shots of animals and birds forced together as though for a kiss—which are probably oblique references to the problems of modernity.

Monsters. (Marius Olteanu)

The most assured debut feature of the year, Romania’s Monsters is a three-part examination of a marriage in crisis. In the first section, Dana (Judith State), a thirty-something HR employee, skips her work trip and hires a taxi for the entire night. The taxi driver, whom she insistently picked, has had a terrible day, but he recognizes that the moody Dana suspects her husband of having an affair. In the second section, we see her husband Andrei (Cristian Popa) lying lonely and desolate in his swanky apartment, reaching out to Dana over phone. While Dana forges a fleeting emotional connection with the taxi driver, Andrei has a tryst ‘upwards’, unsatisfactorily hooking up with an upper-class businessman. The third part of the film presents them as a couple interacting with various members of their social circle. Monsters offers no easy answers: Andrei is gay, but is emotionally dependent on Dana, who can’t find intimacy outside their necessarily unsatisfactory marriage either. They playact happy coupledom for the world, but are also putting up a front to each other. Olteanu’s film forces us to constantly rework our perception of the characters, of them second-guessing each other and behaving the way they think the other would like them to behave, only to cause more misery.

Monsters models itself loosely after Godard’s Contempt, in its languid camera movement connecting people in different rooms, in its blue-red colour scheme, in its longueurs and in the centrality of jealousy in a relationship. At the backdrop of the marriage is a portrait of contemporary Romanian mores, its cultural conservatism, the nosiness of acquaintances, the hatred of the elites for their country, the pan-social anti-Roma prejudice, income inequality and housing problem. The success of the film is that these varied ideas only enrich the central story without ever overwhelming it. Olteanu demonstrates an ability to craft evocative atmosphere. Several passages unfold in real time and offscreen, the rhythm is consistently measured and the emotional beats genuine. The long scene of Andrei’s hook-up mixes the banal and the unusual to great effect. A large part of the film is in 1:1 ratio, which opens up to widescreen when the couple comes together in the third section, before closing in again. Despite being an unsubtle, theoretical choice, the device doesn’t come across as all that brash. The box produces exquisite closeups, helps Olteanu separate characters across shots and registers the cramped nature of the relationship. Monsters is a complex portrait of a marriage that can’t hold not just because of societal pressures, but because of the fundamental incompleteness of individuals.

August 21, 2019

Staying Vertical (2016) + Wonderstruck (2017)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of France, Hollywood | Tags: Alain Guiraudie, American Museum of Natural History, Basile Meilleurat, Christian Bouillette, Damien Bonnard, India Hair, Julianne Moore, Millicent Simmonds, Raphaël Thiéry, Rester Vertical, Staying Vertical, Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck |
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Staying Vertical

With Staying Vertical, Alain Guiraudie sustains his standing as the maker of enigmatic, beguiling films. The mystery here doesn’t stem from concealed character motivations or narrative convolutions, but by the creation of a world where familiar social rules don’t apply. The film opens with shots from the dashboard of a car moving through the countryside. The driver is Leo (Damien Bonnard, a potentially-great comedian) and, given it’s a Guiraudie film, he’s likely cruising. He solicits a young man with an instantly-suspicious body language and is turned down. The boy is Yoan (Basile Meilleurat) and lives with old man Marcel (Christian Bouillette) whose waking time is accompanied by booming metal music. Though in rase campagne, neither of them is scandalised by Leo’s solicitation – a behavioural detail symptomatic of the universe Guiraudie constructs here.

Leo continues and arrives in the prairies in the south of France, where he hooks up with Marie (India Hair), a shepherdess living with her farmer father Jean-Louis (Raphaël Thiéry) and two sons. Leo frequently escapes to the city: he’s a screenwriter short-changing his producer with a non-existent script. In an abrupt time-leap, we see Marie giving birth to Leo’s baby. Depressed and anxious about Leo’s regular absences, Marie departs for the city with her two sons, leaving Leo and her father with the newborn. Leo wanders with the baby, sometimes consulting a therapist living in the woods, always keeping an eye on Yoan and Marcel. Jean-Louis discovers him, takes him to Marie by force and, given Marie doesn’t want to return from the city, keeps Leo with him. Leo escapes the farm after Jean-Louis makes sexual advances and uses his baby as bait for wolf-hunting. At the end of another series of encounters with all these characters, Leo ends up with the lonely, suffering Marcel. He helps the old man alleviate his pain by screwing him to death. He’s arrested and his baby handed over to Marie by the child services.

Staying Vertical spans the entire breath of France, but we don’t really get a sense of the scale of geography the characters traverse—perhaps a product of the film’s piecewise funding. Guiraudie’s film is a series of a journeys into and out of the heartland of the country: young people like Leo, Marie and Yoan are able to get out and return at will to the backwoods, but old men like Jean-Louis and especially Marcel have to resign themselves to this life of isolation. So, in a way, Guiraudie is mapping out the tragedy of queer aging onto the landscape, the city offering more chances of at least passing connections than the endless prairies. Leo loses his car, becomes penniless and makes it on foot across the country dodging the police. The film contains several wide-angle shots of him walking across a seemingly infinite geography. This isn’t an existential image as in Ceylan’s films, but a metaphor for gay loneliness that Staying Vertical is about.

Guiraudie’s film develops what might be called a non-normative—or even homonormative—world. Characters recognize desire in each other’s eyes instantly, their changing sexual affinities being a surprise to no one within this world. Guiraudie cycles through various permutations of his five central characters, just as he cycles through the same spaces and same framing of these spaces, to create several fleeting family-like units. Leo’s desire to retain his baby parallels Marcel’s wish to hold Yoan and Jean-Louis’ to keep Leo with him. Within these two-member units, characters are bound to each other by traditional, heterosexual familial relations as well as by their own romantic coupling. The nature of relationships between people in this world oscillates constantly between sexual and platonic. Guiraudie refuses to make a distinction since, for these gay men of vastly different ages, the same relationships must fulfil multiple needs.

Staying Vertical does have elements of melodrama in that it follows the romantic quest, fulfilment and disillusionment of a sympathetic central character. When Leo returns to the same locations, he’s always worse-off than before: all his objects of interest vanish from his ambit, he and his baby are held hostages by Jean-Louis, he loses his car, goes broke, is attacked by a group of clochards, gets implicated in assisted suicide, loses his son to child services. Without his baby by his side, he sleeps in Jean-Louis’s barn maternally clutching a lamb. This appropriation of ingredients from the woman’s weepie for queer ends finds its summit in the symbolism of the prairie wolves. Threats to the sheep and general life in the region, the wolves reside in the outer margins of the grasslands and come to represent the external world in face of which Leo must stand tall and fearless. It’s a blunt symbol that’s somewhat softened by Guiraudie’s matter-of-fact treatment.

Wonderstruck

Is Todd Haynes an auteur? Sure, he exclusively makes period films that deal with the question of personal identity within a society in flux. But Haynes’ works are so different from each other in terms of subject matter and style that they seem to be a product of many subjectivities and no subjectivity at once. If there’s any doubt as to whether this is intentional, look no further than his masterpiece I’m Not There (a title that should be read as “there is no such thing as I”). Bob Dylan stopped singing protest songs as a protest against an establishment that was expecting protest songs from him, just as Haynes frustrated the expectation from him to keep up the melodramatic high of Far from Heaven. Todd Haynes is an auteur whose preoccupation is a denial of that label. He’s done the flip again with Wonderstruck, following up a heartbreaking film about the assertion of queer identity in a conservative milieu with an equally-felt straight up children’s picture on the value of traditions.

Adapted from Brian Selznick graphic novel of the same name, Wonderstruck weaves together two stories set fifty years apart. The first unfolds in New Jersey in 1927 and follows a deaf-mute girl Rose (Millicent Simmonds) who runs away from her authoritarian father to her mother, a famous silent film star (Julianne Moore) in Hollywood. The premise and the timeframe allow Haynes to realize this section like a silent film—soon to make way for the talkies—without necessarily imitating its aesthetics. He pays tribute to Gish, Chaplin, Griffith, Murnau, and Vidor, but also shoots in widescreen monochrome, with a modern camera choreography and a conventional-sounding musical score by Carter Burwell. Information is revealed visually through texts that Rose writes and shows to others, producing plot surprises that wouldn’t have been possible with sound.

The second story takes place in 1977 in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota. Having recently lost his mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) also loses his hearing in a lightning strike. Ben is a curator of sorts, he collects various models in his house, one of which is an old illustrated book published by the American Museum of Natural History. He sets out to New York city in search of his father, the only trace of whom is a scrap of letter addressed to his mother tucked in the book. As expected, the two stories come together in the third act in a predictable but meaningful way. But Haynes intercuts them right from the beginning in a thematic manner that allows each story to take turns in anticipating each other. This editing pattern, perhaps a little too neat, underscores the living weight of history and helps each narrative thread furnish information missing in the other. There are also a handful of psychedelic montage sequences recalling Guy Maddin where the past is evoked in the present.

Haynes’ film is most of all a tribute to museums as institutionalized memory creating and outlasting personal memories. The plot revolves around two people who manage to find their roots in a particular room of the American Museum of Natural History. The film’s key moments involve the act of touching—a proscribed yet instinctive gesture for first-time museum visitors the film understands well. Rose and Ben connect to each other in their coming in physical contact with the meteorite at the museum. The shooting stars they see in the sky, themselves, are emissaries from the past. The two stories come together in a voiceover that is cut to a miniature NYC panorama at the Queens museum, a double metaphor of museums as living histories that provide narratives and whittle down time and place to human scale. Haynes’ film is a kind of museum too, depicting the changing face of New York over a long period. Like those institutions, it aims to connect people across ages through a shared geography.

Wonderstruck is untainted in its innocence. To be sure, there are several failed parental figures and Ben has all his money stolen in the city, but the children in the film aren’t subjected to any real loss of innocence. Rose and Ben leave for New York on pure faith—a faith that is returned by its residents and institutions. In doing so, I think Haynes divests himself of his camp, ironic sensibility and pays a more profound, close-grained tribute to the silent movies. Julianne Moore is incredible, but it’s the sublime Millicent Simmonds, deaf-mute in real life, who is the very face of the film. With her cropped hair and deep, sparkling eyes, she recalls the great waifs of silent cinema. I hope we see more of her. The wolves are symbols.

The Seventh Art