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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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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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 75th 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 50th 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 4th 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

 

September 24, 2022

Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Switzerland, Filmmakers | Tags: |
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Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard chose to end his life on 13 September at the age of 91 in his home in Rolle, Switzerland. Many of the tributes from around the world have likened his passing to no less than the death of cinema itself. The comparison has to do as much with the outsized influence that Godard has in film history as with the filmmaker’s own melancholy pronouncements about the end of the medium that he had shaped in his image for almost six decades.

Born in 1930 to a French doctor father and a Franco-Swiss mother of high-bourgeois extraction, young Jean-Luc had a childhood split between Paris and Nyon. Summers were spent in Haute-Savoie at the estate of his maternal grandparents, the Monods, in a culture of literature, sport and religion. This protestant upbringing, notes biographer Antoine de Baecque, had a marked influence on “Godard’s relation to spirituality, but also to modesty, to money, to Switzerland, to nature, to isolation and withdrawal from the world and to irreverence and iconoclasm…”

Relationship between parents soured after the war, owing partly to class difference, and the resulting tensions bore down on Jean-Luc. The boy, in the meantime, turned out to be a kleptomaniac, and his increasingly serious exploits led the Monods to cut off ties with him. (He would later be behind bars in Zurich.) This disavowal evidently left a deep scar on the teenager, who composed a passionate screed against the family, portraying them as hypocritical snakes that can never get along. Much of Godard’s subsequent life comes into relief in light of this primal domestic rupture.

As an adolescent, Godard harboured ambitions of publishing a novel with Gallimard, born of a desire to emulate the poet Paul Valéry, a close friend of his maternal grandfather’s. Literature, however, came with centuries worth of history, not to mention the approbation of the clan that had disowned him. The young man thus abandoned the idea, frequenting instead the film clubs of post-war Paris, cinema offering an illicit passion and education disapproved by his family.

It is at these screenings that Godard struck up friendships with other young cinephiles who would constitute the posterchildren of the French New Wave: François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. Despite great difference in tastes and temperaments, the group was united in its impatience for literary-minded French cinema and a penchant for Hollywood films, which were being dumped en masse into Parisian theatres after years of wartime hiatus.

Godard and his cohort gorged on these transatlantic works, as well as on silent classics at the Cinémathèque française curated by Henri Langlois. At the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinema, where all of them soon found a place, they defended popular Hollywood movie directors as authors worthy of not just their literary counterparts, but the pantheon of Western literature. Indeed, Godard’s first review for Cahiers, on an American melodrama called No Sad Songs for Me (1950), invoked no less than Plato and Stendhal to make its case.

Unlike with literature, though, Godard found in cinema a young form of expression not yet ossified into Art, without the baggage of legacy or the anxiety of influence. “With writing,” the filmmaker would later remark, “I have a pointed sense of inferiority, which I don’t have at all with cinema.” Films spoke through and to reality; as a medium coming into being, cinema was the privileged witness to the century it was coterminous with. It could show, as Godard put it, “boys and girls as we see them in the real world.”

Boys and girls, not men and women. The importance of youth to Godard’s early work, and to the New Wave in general, cannot be overstated. Cinema was a young art, but it was also an art of the young. In Masculine Feminine (1966), Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is at a movie theatre with his girlfriend Madeline (Chantal Goya). As he sees an older couple on screen involved in miserable rituals of submission and domination, Paul muses: “At movies, the screen would light up, and we’d shiver. But more often, we’d be disappointed, Madeline and I. The images seemed old and flickery. Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. We were sad. This wasn’t the film we’d imagined, the perfect film each of us carried within, the film we would like to have made, or perhaps even to have lived.”

In contrast, Masculine Feminine, and Godard’s other features set in Paris, capture the precise textures and moods of being young in the City of Lights. Cafés, bars, dance halls, pool clubs, parking lots, publicity hoardings, laundries, photo booths and theatres dominate the imagery and the soundtrack, to the point that the films become documentaries about the city at a particular point in time. This tendency to be in unceasing communion with the world around him remained intact all through Godard’s professional life. “There is in him the constant, almost diehard and touching wish to be contemporary,” writes de Baecque, “He has a sometimes unhappy, but always sensitive relation to the present of his time.”

This wish is manifest most directly in the filmmaker’s turn to radical politics at the end of the sixties. With its ambivalent if sympathetic portrayal of the fledgling Maoist movement, La Chinoise (1967) captured the foreshock of the historical events of 1968. But the film was, excoriated by the far-left for its hesitations and Godard deemed “the stupidest of all the pro-Chinese Swiss.” The director recanted, pulled down the shutters on filmmaking and embarked on a process of re-education. He dissolved his individual identity in filmmaking collectives and let himself be guided by the voices of the next generation. For the second time in his life, he burnt all his bridges to begin anew. In her memoirs Un an après (2015), actress Anne Wiazemsky tenderly describes this acute spiritual crisis that drove her then husband onto the streets to jump barricades or exchange blows with the police.

The Maoist experiment, however, came undone along with the dreams of a generation. Following a near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971, Godard was forced to reassess his priorities. The time of collectives officially over, he moved from Paris to Grenoble with his third partner Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he lived in Rolle until his death. In the new city, Godard began again from zero, as he often did, finding new inspiration in video technology. The period also marked his ‘return’ to fiction filmmaking, resulting in a series of sumptuously photographed films that are nevertheless coloured with a bitterness about the end of utopian aspirations.

The crowning achievement of this period, though, was the eight-part video work, Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-98). Pillaging from hundreds of films, paintings and literary texts, and expanding on the lectures he had given in Montréal, Godard offers a dizzying personal meditation on the history of cinema and its relation to the world. While the global film fraternity was celebrating the centenary of the medium with consumerist cheeriness, Godard’s project mourned its death, its missed opportunities and its tortured relationship with the horrors of the twentieth century. In its philosophical scope, in the erudite, far-reaching associations it draws from its juxtaposition of image, text and sound, Histoire(s) remains unmatched in the annals of the seventh art.

Cinema, to be sure, hasn’t died with Godard, but it would be hard to deny that it has become significantly poorer. Not only did Godard’s work span the whole spectrum of filmmaking practice — commercial, experimental, documentary, amateur — but it also helped place cinema at the forefront of the story of art. Even in his final years, the filmmaker never ceased to interrogate the world through images. He was working on two new films when he decided to end his life by assisted suicide. “He was not ill,” reported someone close to him, “he was simply exhausted.”

The last minutes of his last feature film, The Image Book (2018), thus constitute a fitting coda. In the film’s final words, uttered over a black screen, Godard repeats to a coughing fit a quote from Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (2005): “Even if nothing turned out how we’d hoped, it would not have changed what we’d hoped for.” This is followed by a long, mute excerpt from Max Ophüls’ Le Plaisir (1952), which Godard once called the greatest post-war French film: a masked old man dances himself into exhaustion and collapses on the ballroom floor. Let us hope that the music goes on.

 

[First published in Frontline]

—

How does one begin to speak about Jean-Luc Godard, the Swiss filmmaker who chose to end his life on Wednesday at the age of 91? Or more precisely, which Godard does one speak of? The renegade critic at the iconic film magazine Cahiers du cinéma who championed directors working at the lower depths of the Hollywood studio system? The young independent filmmaker who inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of movie brats with an astounding series of insouciant, dynamic and self-aware works, starting with Breathless (1960)? The angry Maoist who quit filmmaking in the late sixties to work in anonymity within various political collectives, most notably the Dziga Vertov Group? The melancholy recluse who, alongside his partner and filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville, experimented with video and made one of the greatest cinematic works of all time, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998)? Or the Old Master who continued to shake up the film form in the first two decades of our century, with a series of mournful, caustic digital essays?

If Godard has taught us anything, it is that we can begin anywhere. Beginning anew, restarting at zero, is a theme that had characterized Godard’s entire professional life. His films from the 1990s onwards are shot through with a lamentation about the premature death of cinema, the snuffing out of its possibilities by commerce and art. Yet, Godard was never a purist and he embraced most every technological development — lightweight handheld cameras, television, analogue and digital videos, 3D stereoscopy, smartphones and even Instagram — at a time that these were seen as inimical to cinematic practice. Godard’s body of work is defined by such ruptures and recommencements, so much so that they become its defining elements.

It may be odd to talk about the body of work of a filmmaker who hated careerism and couldn’t perhaps be bothered less about his legacy; he was, after all, working on new films at the time of his death by assisted suicide. Yet as a colossus of twentieth-century art, he casts a tall shadow. Godard’s legacy would be secure even if he hadn’t made a single film; his passionate, typically epigrammatic film criticism, published in English as the book Godard on Godard (1986), has countless imitators, but few equals. Filmmaking, he famously remarked, was criticism by other means. His reflexive and densely allusive films are shining instances on the medium’s capacity to reflect not just on itself, but on its relation to history and the world. In Breathless, a celebrity writer is asked by the journalist-heroine what his ambition is. He replies, “To become immortal, and then to die.” Has Godard achieved that? As a lifelong contrarian and a master of cryptic aphorisms, Godard would have no doubt had a zinger in response.

 

[First published on Cinema Express]

 

July 4, 2022

Heights and Chances

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of France, Translations | Tags: , , , , |
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[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

In the introduction to the collection of your articles, Piges choisies (from Griffith to Ellroy), you state that your best critical texts are the most recent ones, but that for your films the evolution has not been the same: your best period would cover the years 1976-1989, from Anatomy of a Relationship to Les Sièges de l’Alcazar.

I don’t know. Whether my critical writing is good or not is not very important, at least not as important as it is for my films. The quality of my writing has undoubtedly improved over time; for films I don’t know. Those from 1976-1989 are generally held in higher esteem. And I don’t think there has been a step forward since those years. It’s rather up to you to tell me! I don’t care that much, but well… it’s a feeling. Filmmakers whose work extends over a long period of time often experience a setback at the end of their careers.

In a text from the special issue of Cahiers on John Ford, “The Slide of the Admiral,” you suggest on the contrary that the last shot of his last film, Seven Women, is his most beautiful.

Ford is atypical; Americans generally flag at the end: Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Griffith and many others. There is longevity, circumstances…

Piges choisies also reproduces your unorthodox answer to the Libération survey “Why do you film?”: “To make big bucks, to go on big trips and to meet pretty girls.”

If there is a questionnaire, there necessarily has to be a winner. I wanted to have the best answer. I received a lot of phone calls; my answer made a lot of readers laugh. I think I won. At the time—1987—I was an ascetic figure; I was almost seen as another Straub. I am still seen today as an unadulterated filmmaker who does not compromise. Jansenist, even.

It’s true that I don’t make many complacent films. In order to depress my interlocutors, I often have fun saying that I was forced to make a film to put food on the table. “Ah my poor fellow! What is it called? – Origins of a Meal.” So my reputation for integrity also has a playful side.

I think the answer would have been even funnier had it been given by Straub or Bresson. I had phoned Bresson to suggest it, but he took it badly.

My answer, moreover, corresponds to reality, or at least to certain aspects of reality. It was not for nothing, for example, that my first films always had two actresses in the lead roles. I was single, my chances were multiplied by two. I have to admit that it was a very bad calculation.

Did you put them in competition with each other?

I didn’t go that far, but two chances are better than one, or zero.

When you were writing at Cahiers, Rohmer once made this strange remark, which you also recall in Piges choisies: “Moullet, I know why you love Buñuel. It’s because you’re both slackers.”

This is the most beautiful compliment I have ever received. Rohmer put me in the same boat as Buñuel, without kissing up to him for all that, since he presented his comparison as a kind of insult. He didn’t realize the compliment he was paying me, I thought. I don’t know if he would repeat the compliment today, even if his appreciation of Buñuel has become more positive.

“Slacker” in what sense? The rejection of rhetoric, mannerism, everything that makes cinema?

A certain zero degree, once again. That’s what Rohmer meant, in a sense. Buñuel didn’t have a visual structure like Murnau or Eisenstein. He is therefore a slacker. And so am I…

Do you consider yourself a slacker?

Of course. That is, in any case, the evolution of cinema. In the silent era, everything was structured around the frame. With talkies, filmmaking became more subtle, more composite, less determined on the level of pictorial construction. The composition of a discreet whole, chiselled in the manner of Murnau’s genius, became outdated. Those who want to make films like Eisenstein today are, moreover, admen, or very retrograde directors.

(more…)

 

June 13, 2022

Every Law Must Be Bent (Vade Mecum)

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[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Brigitte and Brigitte (1966)

There are no hard-and-fast rules, only useful guidelines. Every law must be bent, that’s the only obligation—and that’s precisely what can be great in cinema. Nine times out of ten, what is taught in film schools today is in fact the opposite of what was taught sixty years ago.

Two illustrations as a preamble and a warning:

  • It was once forbidden to move directly from a wide shot to a close-up. This rule is palpable in a film I like very much, Children of Paradise: it systematically uses an annoying—and seemingly forced—gradation between the shot sizes. Today, however, the transition from the wide shot to the close-up works magnificently, provided it is well managed, even if some filmmakers abuse it, starting with Sergio Leone.
  • The 180-degree rule prohibits crossing the shot-reverse shot line so that the viewer isn’t disoriented. But the truth is that it all depends on the actor. With Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot or John Wayne, you can blithely cross the 180-degree line, because the actor is known and well placed, like a pillar: he or she serves as a visual reference. It is much more difficult with beginners whom no one knows, lack as they do a stable facial reference in the frame.

Like a majority of the technical rules in use, this is also a strictly western law. The Japanese constantly break the shot-reverse shot line; for them the problem does not arise. Imagine: had Japan won the war, that would have been the end of 180 degrees!

This is true of almost all laws: they are dependent on history or geography. None of them is indisputable or eternal. You just have to be aware of the risk you are taking when you decide to apply them. Or not apply them! Conscious of this risk, I have chosen to include in the vade mecum that follows the objections that have been made or that could be made to me. Also those that will be made, no doubt.

 

Production, Generalities

The plumber principle (choose a title starting with A or B)

Open the phone book, all plumbers have a shop name that starts with A. They all sit at the top of the directory. Being at the top of catalogues is important, because festival catalogues play a big role. All catalogues for that matter. You can’t always do it, but it is recommended, especially for short films. Maybe there will soon be a rush of short films starting with AAA, as with plumbers.

I can already hear the first objection. My first short, Un steack trop cuit (1960), is not exactly at the top of the alphabet: an error of youth, sorry. As for the following ones, Ma première brasse (1981), Essai d’ouverture (1988), Le Ventre de l’Amérique, Le Système Zsygmondy (2000) etc., they are a bit all over; that’s because, with time, I’ve become surer of myself.

(more…)

 

May 23, 2022

Maps and Habitats

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[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Just as tales—which we’ll come back to later, since the genre isn’t foreign to your cinema—begin in French with “Il était une fois…” (once upon a time…), we’d like to begin with “Il était un Foix…,” In 1994, you made a short film that bears this name, a small town in the Pyrenees. Foix is a film representative of your work; it is built on a geographical principle that you are fond of: to sketch a nearly exhaustive portrait of a place, to wander across it and survey it in all directions until its spatial, comic, dramatic and aesthetic possibilities are exhausted. But in general, you film familiar places, places that you have known and loved for a long time. In Foix, it is the opposite, and that is also why we wanted to start there: you present a completely ugly city, its ugliness accentuated by the laconic irony of a tourist-style voice-over. Foix is therefore a film against something, a negative portrait. It is the exception to one of the rules of your work, a contradiction within a work that has no shortage of them. How did the film come to be?

It must have been 17 September 1973, shortly after Allende’s fall. I was walking in the Pyrenees with my wife. When we stayed the night in Foix, we both had the feeling that we had discovered the most backward town in France. For the next twenty years, I travelled around the country to gather several proofs of this stellar backwardness. I didn’t do just that for twenty years, but I did that. I could see that, yes, this town was the champion in this regard. The script had time to mature: more than twenty years of work for a thirteen-minute short film.

Invited by Toulouse for a conference, I made a detour to see Foix again. It was a painful experience. From Toulouse, I wanted to go up to the Montagne Noire, where I hadn’t been before. I had to leave early, at seven o’clock. At the station, I stumbled on the new pavements, which are a bit slanted. I hurt my foot very badly. I travelled for 30 kilometres with a huge abscess on my toe. The right, I think. I delivered my lecture and then I went to the hospital the next morning to have the abscess removed. In the afternoon, I went to Foix. Because of my foot, I could scout it only slowly. The town was almost in the same state that I had left it twenty years earlier. It was really typical, very impressive. I don’t think it’s possible to go this far into degeneration. It’s quite a nice town in itself: there’s a chateau, it’s well situated. But you can sense that there has been no real town planning. It’s a complete mess.

Based on the photos that I had taken, I submitted a project to the CNC [National Centre for Cinema] for support with the short film. In photos with cars, I scratched out the two digits pertaining to Ariège region. Worried about a leak, I rechristened the project Vesoul. I added that the film would not be shot there, without specifying where. I thought that the people at the CNC would be keen to know where I would shoot, and that they would give me the money to find out. That’s what happened. We got the grant. We did a combined shoot, which is very cost-effective: I shot Toujours plus, which ended in Toulouse, and in the evening, we went to Foix to shoot Foix. The shoot went on for about three days. There was only one minor problem: Toujours plus being a TV film, we shot at twenty-five frames; but my sound engineer continued to record at twenty-five frames for Foix, instead of twenty-four, the normal frame rate for a cinema film.

Many people and institutions are thanked in the credits. Did the production actually involve them, or was it out of caution?

Not out of caution. It was to make the viewer laugh. I asked the town hall and the police for some little things so that I could put them in the credits. “I thank the town of Foix very much…” That’s funny.

Did the city respond?

Not directly, except on the day the film was shown on TV. The town hall phoned the production manager, who acted as a buffer. They couldn’t say anything, I hadn’t asked them for money. The town hall had done only one thing: turn on the little geysers on the ground—these “watering limbs” that make the water come out thirty centimetres from the ground—which only work in summer, whereas the shooting took place in winter.

Was the idea of the fake tourist documentary there from the outset?

The idea was inspired by Georges Franju’s Hôtel des Invalides, a film commissioned by the army that made everyone laugh. Well, almost everyone… As it was a short film, Foix was practically written down to the last detail. It’s tiring to draw up a complete découpage for a feature film. On the contrary, for a short documentary, it’s fun to do it, and it pleases the producer, who incidentally hadn’t invested a lot of money, since there was money from the Centre for Cinema. In these towns, everyone is happy when you come to shoot. No one comes to shoot in Foix. One day, I filmed in Toulouse, in the largest supermarket in the world. There were ninety-four counters. I was warmly received; at the end, we were even offered champagne. It’s rather in Paris that one can feel unwelcome. Everybody comes to shoot there; people are suspicious, they have had it up to here.

Did you go back to Foix?

I saw the city from the train. I’ve bought a Ray-Ban since then, so I might try to go back there. My face has changed a bit, I’ve lost hair. I should stop by the town someday.

(more…)

 

May 19, 2022

Notre Alpin Quotidien

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[The following is a translation of Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (“Our Daily Alpinist”, 2009, Capricci). The images are my addition; the original volume contains none.]

Maps and Habitats

Every Law Must Be Bent (Vade Mecum)

Heights and Chances

 

March 24, 2022

Migrant Labour at Cinéma du Réel 2022

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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]

 

February 22, 2022

Luis Buñuel

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of France, Cinema of Mexico, Cinema of Spain, Translations | Tags: , , , |
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[The following is a translation of Luc Moullet’s short monograph Luis Buñuel (1957), the fifth volume in the series Les Grands Créateurs du Cinéma, published bimonthly by the Club du Livre de Cinéma in Brussels. I’m extremely grateful to Samuel Bréan for finding me a copy of this rare volume.]

 

Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.

– Hegel

In our time, in our era of blockbusters and epic films, Luis Buñuel’s work and career stand out. While the vast majority of important filmmakers choose to marry art and commerce, with varying degrees of success, Buñuel confines himself to low-budget ventures, just like Roberto Rossellini. He thus enjoys a great deal of freedom: producers’ interference is limited to the choice of subject, which is generally very banal, and to the development of the script. The filmmaker imposes the expression of a highly distinct personality on such weak material. El río y la muerte (The River and the Death) was completed in fourteen days; technically it is superior to many French films, and in terms of quality, it has nothing to envy most of Buñuel’s great works. Like a novelist, the maker of L’Âge d’Or and El (This Strange Passion) works for his own pleasure; that is why the most mediocre of his offspring, the most industrial of his films, still bear his mark. This is a kind of miracle that cinema is not familiar with.

 

The Surrealist Experiment

One of the main constants in Buñuel’s work has often been explained using his Spanish origin. I’m referring to his taste for cruelty and violence, which also throw light on the inclinations of his personality. He was born at the dawn of this century, on 22 February 1900, in a small town in Aragon, Calanda, located on the edge of the famous Sierra de Teruel. After spending ten years at a Jesuit school, he left his provincial bourgeois parents for the University of Madrid, where he studied science, particularly neurology: physiological phenomena had always captivated him, as had the life of animals. But the Castilian capital attracted him towards less studious pursuits. He enjoyed idleness and led a merry and dissipated life. This is how he became friends with two of the greatest creators of twentieth-century Spain, Federico García Lorca, the poet, and Salvador Dali, the painter, who were then young unruly students. Buñuel’s films retain some of Lorca’s tragic lyricism and, above all, Dalí’s phantasmagoria.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Our young man was soon to be found in Paris, where he worked as a scientific attaché. But he was interested in many other things. Dali, who lived on the banks of the Seine, introduced him to the Surrealist Movement, in which Buñuel discovered an equivalent to his taste for the unusual. Cinema seemed to him to be the best means of expression, one that allows one to show the most amazing aspects of reality. After a first script, written from a surrealist perspective, which he could never shoot for lack of means, he took technical lessons, a trial run for Un Chien Andalou (1928). This small, fifteen-minute silent film made a great impression at the time and is still the biggest hit at film clubs today. The story, written by Dali and Buñuel, doesn’t follow any logical rule; underlying the main plot, a love story, are a series of extraordinary visuals of the purest surrealist tradition: the enormous living room piano stained with the blood of rotting donkeys, to which two seminarians are attached. The virtuosity, the unbridled inventiveness belonged as much to Buñuel as to Dali. And yet the director parted ways with his friend, whom he accused of seeking scandal for the sake of scandal. The next film, L’Âge d’Or (1930), which Buñuel made for a patron, continued the experiments of Un Chien Andalou while respecting factual logic more closely. This time, the scandal was huge: the precision and realism highlighted the filmmaker’s multiple attacks on society and religion, which he said impeded the power of love. Buñuel went from surrealism to documentary with Land Without Bread (1932), a poignant account of the region in Spain called Las Hurdes, one of the most backward and poorest parts of Europe after the Grésivaudan, Slovakia and Haute-Provence. Buñuel went ahead with the same talent, the same critical eye towards modern civilisation, whose most ignoble aspects he unveiled. At first sight, the rigour and honesty of the work contrasted with the fanatic Manichaeism of L’Âge d’Or: but in many beautiful visuals (the donkey devoured by flies, the portrait of idiots), there is that astonishing sensitivity partly inherited from his contact with surrealism.

But the time of patrons and small productions that one could finance oneself was soon over. For fifteen years, Luis Buñuel worked in cinema without making any films. This period of silence was important in its own right: faced with life and its difficulties, the maker of Land Without Bread evolved markedly; with maturity, he moved from revolt to reflection. That is how he was able to resume a body of work that was thought to be prematurely finished: recent films such as Los Olvidados or El are even considered to be of a much higher quality than those of the surrealist period. In charge of dubbing films in Paris, Madrid — where he moved on to production — and Hollywood, a bureaucrat, then a speaker in the United States, Buñuel finally left Los Angeles in 1947 for Mexico City with a very ambitious project in the bag: The House of Bernarda Alba, based on Lorca’s play, which he didn’t finally shoot.

 

(more…)

 

January 1, 2022

Favourite Films of 2021

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Denmark, Cinema of France, Cinema of Georgia, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of Latvia, Cinema of Mexico, Cinema of Spain, Cinema of Sweden, Cinema of the USA, Cinema of Ukraine, Hollywood, Lists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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I learnt a new term on social media this year (or maybe it was last year, who knows?): the Overton Window. Wikipedia defines it as “range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” By extension, it also designates the gamut of utterances that defines the limits of a discourse at a given point in time. As we sit aghast here in India watching this window slide to the right of the political spectrum—to a point that inclusion of conservative and extreme-right figures on televised debates constitutes diversity of opinion—the pandemic appears to have redrawn the old battle lines of film discourse. Forget the fight for celluloid over digital cinematography and projection. The old fogeys of today are those that think the theatrical experience means something, while the median of the Overton Window consists in debating what makes for good OTT content.

I don’t feel particularly compelled to take sides on this debate. As it happens, 2021 was the year that I did not go to the cinemas at all, and truth be told, it wasn’t entirely due to the health crisis. A number of other projects kept me busy in these twelve months, including the release of the hardcover version of my first book, and as it is, I find it increasingly hard to get excited about this or the other production. Except for the end-year binge that made this list possible, I must say I hardly saw films in 2021 and that includes older ones. I regret not being able to watch West Side Story, which had a run of less than a week in my city and was elbowed out by another Disney tentpole released on the same day. Who would have thought that the Overton Window now ranges from Spielberg to Spiderman? Anyway, here are my favourite films from this cursed year.

 

1. France (Bruno Dumont, France)

What comprises the blight of modern life? The reverse shot, answers Bruno Dumont in his scorching new dramedy about celebrity news reporter France, played by a dazzling Léa Seydoux, who cannot help but make it about herself in every story she does. Fresh off two films on Joan of Arc, Dumont gets his hands dirty with the profane world of modern media. And yet, it’s a spiritual tale that he tells. The filmmaker often quotes Péguy about the need to “stand up where one is.” That is what France does after she is subject to one moral crisis after another in her professional and personal life: rattled by a minor accident that she causes, France begins to see things “as they are”, subtracting herself from the reverse shot, but this grasping at saintliness doesn’t last long. She returns to her profession, not necessarily wiser but more authentic, and in doing so, reaches a state that may be seen as one of grace. It isn’t a media satire that France is after, but something all-pervasive, the simultaneous genuineness and falsity of our emotions faced with harrowing images of the world. Dumont’s film is daring, tasteless, compelling, overblown, contradictory and superbly stylized. Familiar but uncanny, it is everything you don’t want it to be.

 

2. Dear Chantal (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico)

An apartment evermore waiting to be occupied, letters responding to inquiries not heard, a voice never embodied in the image: Pereda’s five-minute short is a haunting, haunted tribute to the late Chantal Akerman that is structured around absence and substitution. We hear Pereda replying to fictitious queries by the Belgian filmmaker about renting out his sister’s apartment in Mexico City, and we see his sister readying the apartment, moving out paintings or clearing foliage from the skylight. In the film’s robust organization, Pereda, his sister and Akerman become mediums, connecting links in each other’s (after)lives: Pereda, unseen, serving as a middleman between the apartment owner and the impossible future tenant; his sister, unheard, taking the place of Akerman who will never feature in Pereda’s film; and Akerman herself, unseen and unheard, bringing the siblings together in a non-existent real estate deal. In an act of respect and love, Dear Chantal creates a physical space for Akerman to continue to exist, even if not in flesh and blood, just as No Home Movie, Akerman’s final work before her suicide in 2015, grappled with the physical absence of her recently deceased mother. The film imagines an alternate reality that brings Pereda and Akerman together not in artistic collaboration, but in the banal transactions of everyday living.

 

3. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Aleksandre Koberidze, Georgia)

How would Lubitsch do it? Well, if the old master were a contemporary filmmaker, ‘it’ would probably resemble Koberidze’s off-kilter, disarming romantic comedy about two lovers-to-be who work at a shop around the corner without recognizing each other all summer. What Do We See is obviously designed to please, but there is never a sense that it panders to its audience. Like the best storytellers, Koberidze knows that pleasure can be deepened by deferring gratification, and to this end, his film takes surprising excursions away from its central story, restarting at will and relegating its lead couple to the margin as though reposing faith in destiny to bring them together. This vast negative space of the narrative clarifies the larger objective of the film, which is to integrate its characters into the landscape of the ancient town of Kutuisi, whose faces and places, ebbs and flows, become the central subject. Pinning down the fable-like story on the voiceover allows the director to employ a complex, highly unusual visual syntax—that nevertheless derives from classical Hollywood cinema—without disorienting the viewer. The film involves magic, but Koberidze demonstrates that a towel flying through the frame can be as enrapturing as the most outlandish fairy tales.

 

4. Babi Yar. Context (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine)

The title says it all. Loznitsa’s new documentary represents a modulation of style for the filmmaker. Where his found footage work so far dropped the viewer into specific historical events in medias res, without much preparation, Babi Yar. Context offers a broader picture. With the help of archival material, but also uncharacteristic intertitles, the film details the events leading up to, and following, the Babi Yar Massacre of September 1941, where over 33,000 Jews were killed over two days in the eponymous ravine in Kiev. We see Ukrainian citizens welcoming the occupying Nazi forces with enthusiasm and collaborating in the persecution of their Jewish compatriots. In an illustration of the failure of archival, the massacre itself isn’t represented except in photographs of its aftermath. Loznitsa’s shocking film is a rousing J’accuse! directed at his nation, at the willingness of its citizens in enabling genocide, at the amnesia that allowed for the valley to be turned into an industrial dumping ground. Loznitsa’s newfound desire to contextualize his material should be construed less as a loss of faith in images to speak ‘for themselves’ than as a critical acknowledgement of their power to deceive. After all, the Red Army is welcomed with comparable pomp after they liberate Kiev, this formal continuity with the reception of the Nazis concealing a crisis of content.

 

5. Bellum – The Daemon of War (David Herdies, Georg Götmark, Sweden/Denmark)

The spectre of Harun Farocki hovers over Herdies and Götmark’s excellent documentary about war, technology and the production of images. A meditation on Western attitudes to armed conflict, Bellum unfolds as an anthology of three human interest stories: a Swedish engineer involved in designing an AI-powered military drone that will take autonomous decisions on bombing a perceived target, a war veteran in Nevada suffering from PTSD and having trouble reintegrating into civilian life, a photojournalist from the East Coast who covers the aftermath of the Afghan war. Well-meaning though these individuals might be, their lives and work are marked by a certain guilt surrounding the fact of war. This is evident in the case of the vet, but the photographer’s own activity may not be untouched by a liberal sense of culpability about her country’s interventions in Afghanistan. The engineer’s efforts to bypass the human factor of war, too, is an attempt to eradicate feelings of guilt about liquidating an enemy, which, the film’s narrator notes, is the only real restraining force in armed conflict. Bellum cogently points out the ways in which technology—of training, of intervention—increasingly eliminates human fallibility from the equation of war, for as Colonel Kurtz put it, “it’s judgment that defeats us.”

 

6. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, USA)

I don’t know if Bruno Dumont and Paul Schrader saw each other’s films this year, but I’m certain they would both have much to say to one another. If First Reformed (2017) was the subtext, The Card Counter is the text, a film that is all surface. Where the earlier work stood out in the authenticity of its character and milieu, the new film aspires to an artificiality worthy of the casinos and bars it mostly unfolds in. Schrader tells the same Catholic story he has always been telling, that of God’s Lonely Man who is mired in mud but has his eyes on the skies. Oscar Isaac portrays William Tell, convict turned cardsharp who tries to save a younger man from self-destruction, but faced with divine indifference, decides to play God himself. Formally, Schrader doesn’t deviate from the Bresson-Ozu-Dreyer axis of the previous film—what Schrader rightly or otherwise called the Transcendental Style—and this reserve produces a productive friction between the film’s style and noir setting of the story. In that, The Card Counter is highly reminiscent of American Gigolo (1980), which is to say that, despite the references to Abu Ghraib, it is a work completely out of joint with the present. It is incredible this film even exists.

 

7. The Year Before the War (Dāvis Sīmanis, Latvia)

Even if we are done with the 20th century, suggests Sīmanis’ singular, absurd period comedy, the 20th century isn’t yet done with us. When Hans, an opportunistic doorman at a Riga hotel, is falsely implicated in a bombing, he flees the Latvian capital to shuttle from one European city to another. The Europe of 1913 that Hans traverses is less a real geography than an abstract zone of competing political currents. War is around the corner, and there are several groups trying to influence the course of history. Zealous ideologues seek to entice and co-opt him, subjecting him to what Louis Althusser called “interpellation.” All through, Hans fights hard to follow his own moral compass, flee subjecthood and retain his individuality. A historical picaresque, Sīmanis’ film is interested in the singularity of this particular juncture in Western history—a point at which fin de siècle optimism about technology and human rationality came crashing against the reality of trench warfare—where countless isms sought to impose their own vision on the world. It would seem that Sīmanis views Latvia of the early 20th century as something of an ideological waystation, an unstable intellectual field where free radicals like Hans couldn’t help but be neutralized. And that vision isn’t without contemporary resonance.

 

8. Mr. Bachmann and His Class (Maria Speth, Germany)

Maria Speth’s expansive documentary about a batch of preteen students, mostly of an immigrant background, in a public school in Stadtallendorf, Hessen, is a classroom film that achieves something special. Remaining with the children for almost its entire four-hour runtime allows it to individuate them, to look at them as independent beings with their own skills, desires and prejudices, just as their charismatic teacher-guide-philosopher Dieter Bachmann adopts a different approach to each of his pupils. For Bachmann, it would seem, whatever the students accomplish academically during the year is of secondary importance. He knows that he is dealing with a group with an inchoate sense of self: first as pre-adolescents, then as new immigrants. Consequently, he spends a great deal of effort in giving them a sense of community, creating a space where they can be themselves. At the same time, the classroom is a social laboratory where new ideas are introduced and the children brought to interrogate received opinion, all under Bachmann’s paternal authority. Speth insists on the particularity of these individuals and there is no sense that our star teacher is indicative of the schooling system in Germany at large. Bachmann is an exception, and in his exceptionalism lies a promise, a glimpse of how things could be.

 

9. Out of Sync (Juanjo Giménez, Spain)

It’s an ingenious, wholly cinematic premise: estranged from family and friends, a sound engineer spends her nights at her film studio until she starts to experience a lag between what she sees and what she hears. Juanjo Giménez’s absorbing psychological thriller riffs on this setup, weaving its implications into a coherent character study of a young woman out of sync with her life. The result contains some very amusing set pieces constructed around the delay between sound and image, but also one of the most sublime romantic scenes of all time, one that begins with rude abandonment and ends at a silent movie show. Marta Nieto is brilliant as the unnamed protagonist who withdraws into a shell and then reconnects with herself and the world. She brings a fierce independence to the character that nuances its vulnerability. Its claustrophobic premise notwithstanding, Out of Sync feels like a very open work, integrated gracefully with the urban landscape of beautiful Barcelona. Watching the film in 2021, when so much of real-world interaction has been rendered into digital images and sounds, using Bluetooth speakers with their own latency to boot, is an uncanny experience.

 

10. Shared Resources (Jordan Lord, USA)

Ambitious to a fault, American artist Jordan Lord’s new work is nearly unwatchable. Yet it bends the documentary form like few films this year. Shared Resources is a home movie made over a considerable period of time, presented in scrambled chronology. We learn that Lord’s father was a debt collector fired by his bank, that his health is deteriorating due to diabetes, that the family lost most of its possessions in the Hurricane Katrina and that they had to declare bankruptcy shortly after Lord’s acceptance into Columbia University. All this material is, however, offered not directly but with a voiceover by Lord and his parents describing the footage we see, as though intended for the visually challenged, and two sets of subtitles, colour-coded for diegetic and non-diegetic speech, seemingly oriented towards the hearing disabled. In having his parents comment on images from rather difficult episodes in their lives, the filmmaker gives them a power over what is represented. Through all this, Lord initiates an exploration of debt in all its forms and shapes: paternal debt towards children, filial debt towards parents, the debt of a documentary filmmaker towards their subjects, one’s debt to their own body, the fuzzy line between love and indebtedness. This is an American film with an Asian sensibility.

 

Special Mention: From Where They Stood (Christophe Cognet, France/Germany)

Favourite Films of

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

 

December 17, 2021

René Vautier: Duties, Rights and Passion of Images

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Algeria, Cinema of France, Translations | Tags: , |
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[The following is a translation of an essay by Nicole Brenez titled ‘René Vautier: droits, devoirs et passion des images‘, originally published in Afrique 50 de René Vautier (2013, Les mutins de Pangée). The translation has been published as part of an anthology of Brenez’s writings assembled by Sabzian on the occasion of the film historian’s State of Cinema address, to be delivered on 23 December 2021.]

“…even when committed to a cause with all his heart and soul, René Vautier subordinates his images to nothing or no one, not in a proprietary sense (on the contrary, they are offered to anyone who needs them; we find them in numerous activist films and this sometimes results in the loss of precious copies too, as was the case with Algeria, a Nation), but in the name of an inalienable liberty. Emerging from the conception of cinema developed by René Vautier is the principle of an autonomy of images, whose existence, meaning and freedom, established in their own right, must be protected with the most vigilant intransigence: a symbolic and inalienable territory organized in time, from which history can be established. This autonomy (in the literal sense of a singular law) belongs to no one, not to filmmakers, not to cinema and not even to the people whose oppression and struggles these images document; everyone has the right to enjoy them and none the right to own them. This autonomy is in no way a counter-history, it establishes the possibility of an exact history.

[…]

One must point out that an autonomy of images has nothing to do with the fetishization of a shot, a motif or a medium (film, video, digital), so common among filmmakers. Rather, it has to do first and foremost with a symbolic operation, the responsibility of images in face of history, which subordinates and reconfigures other authorities: participants, author, signatories, context, intertext. René Vautier’s work deploys a precise and broad conception of the functions and uses of images: to document, to tell the truth, to do justice, to testify, to offer proof at a trial, to converse with other images, pieces of information, instructions and signals, to contradict, to counterattack, to convince… René Vautier explicitly invested images with all these duties: but in order for them to accomplish these, he had to also implicitly conceive of a right of images, which makes them irreducible to the host of uses and instrumentalizations they can be subjected to.”

 

[Full text here at Sabzian]

 

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