Cahiers du cinéma no. 99; September 1959.
If we are publishing this text that seems to have only a distant relation to film criticism, it’s because we think that good literature is worthier than bad cinema and that this article constitutes a good “short story” (Ed.).
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I’ll take the liberty of breaking with the tradition that requires you to present with great erudition the city where the festival you are invited to takes place. Getting down from the train, I looked around anxiously for any particularity that made San Sebastián (Spain) a Fullerian, Hawksian, Rossellinian or Cukorian city, in order to be able to better place it in the mind of Cahiers readers. To be sure, extremes rub shoulders this “Basque Nice” as we seamlessly glide from the rococo palaces of Rio Urumea to the wooden huts and scattered sheep of the harsh ridges surrounding the city. But to be fair, I think this allows me to clearly discern in San Sebastián the signs of an internal dialectic comparable to those in Eisenstein or Hitchcock.
Awareness of the social self
I’m looking at festival reports published by Cahiers. It’s expected that you give your opinion on the value of each festival. Which bores me a lot. To say that this festival is mediocre or that festival is excellent not only seems difficult to me, but I also believe it means nothing at all.
Reviewers generally start by criticizing bad organization or praising the efforts of the festival committee. If they are sincere, they redeem themselves by acknowledging the quality of the competition. The fact of the matter is that it’s rather impolite, and embarrassing to the person who does it, to demolish a festival that spent fifty thousand francs on your invitation—accommodation, food, screenings etc. Let’s confess frankly that we could have enjoyed the two screenings of North by Northwest, which essentially justified the existence of this festival, even in the small MGM theatre in Paris, since Paris already had a copy of the film ready before the festival. Of course, everyone knows that the festivals committee of San Sebastián doesn’t organize this festival to spread the knowledge of film art but to serve as local publicity, with all the concomitant effects on tourism, which will fill the cash registers of San Sebastián and Madrid more abundantly. But you don’t need to go far—five hundred metres in the city, fifteen kilometres in the countryside on bad or sometimes even forbidden roads, and when there are roads, it means that the communes are rich enough to pay for them—to note that gloomy misery prowls in the vicinity. Yes, let’s say it since it must be said even if the reader of Cahiers doesn’t give a damn, and he is absolutely right, we were well fed, well lodged, well served, and the organization was almost perfect. But it’s just this that I’d hold against the festival. We were too well fed, too well lodged and, to the direct detriment of the Spanish people, even if it was negligible, even if it was indirectly made up for by the money brought back by the event’s publicity power. The national government is more interested in ostentatious pomp than depth. And what shocked me definitively is not so much the fact that I stole something, at least virtually, from the Spanish people. After all, I was maybe the least guilty of my colleagues of this involuntary theft, in that I was perhaps the one critic of all who rated North by Northwest, the film that brought the most awareness of this festival, at the top. This awareness of the social self, as Domarchi would say, manifested itself through this comparison devoid of its serious character. No crises, except for a certain embarrassment, and an amused acceptance. It was enough for me to look up the list of French critics invited and find the name of Michel Capdenac of the Lettres françaises there. I don’t know Capdenac, but I am quite sure that he enjoyed the same privileges as me, that he didn’t turn down a drink, a meal or the cosy bed offered to him, and even that he didn’t bother himself with these questions like me, even though he is a practicing Marxist1. In short, just thinking of Capdenac made me chuckle and freed me of all social complex. Ah, here I must continue my sentence: as I was saying, what shocked me the most was that the Spanish people, a part of which was waiting applauding for two or three hours, sometimes under the rain, for the entry and the exit of festival-goers at each soirée, seemed to create this tragic and absurd farce at its own expense. I found this admiration of the working class for the rich and idle class, in which it likes to see itself mentally, identical to and brilliantly and cunningly portrayed in The Last Laugh, screened here in the retrospective section at twenty-four frames per second and without the last reel.
The anti-dialecticism of intellectualism
I’m still looking at festival reviews in Cahiers. Some find that the schedules are badly thought out and prevent them from seeing all films, others complain about the flowers that block the view from the front rows, or other trifles. So, I’d reproach the 12th San Sebastián Festival for not having anything to reproach it in the pages of Cahiers. On second thoughts, I have a whole lot to complain about. For instance, what’s terrible about the luxury hotels where we are put up is that everything runs smoothly, everything is done for the supposed comfort of the customer, and it’s this that is unpleasant. They take the suitcase from my hands, they bring the breakfast to my bed, I had the feeling of being good for nothing, of being treated with the respect usually reserved for Réné Clair, Marcel Camus or some other doddering geezer. They’ve just stopped short of bathing and grooming me. The most ordinary gestures of everyday life, which even the greatest geniuses can’t live happily without, are prohibited for us. No helping hand to lend, no shopping to do, no firewood to pick up, or dishes to wipe. Everyone is condemned to the anti-dialecticism of intellectualism. Write, write, write forever. I think, therefore I am… but no, I think therefore I don’t wipe, for there’s nothing to wipe. At the most, I open the tap of my washbasin, hoping deep within that it’ll burst and that I will have to repair it and stop a flooding. There is running water in my washbasin, and even hot water. But I’d have preferred to be in the mountains where a litre of cold-water costs a hundred francs, because it’s at least fun to calculate how much water I can waste at the most. There is a bed in my room, and even curtains, but I’d have preferred a sleeping bag and some hay, firstly because it feels better and also because it allows for some amusing, involuntary nocturnal slipping and bizarre awakenings. Where am I? Where is the north? Good God, where could this north be that I’ve lost? I want to take the stairs, but the overzealous lift boy drags me into the elevator: he doesn’t know that, as a fan of Touch of Evil, I never take elevators, in order to struggle with it by my own means.
Clerics, clerics, clerics
Let’s be serious. What’s the San Sebastián festival worth? I’ll tell you: it doesn’t matter. Besides, I don’t see why that would interest you since you don’t go to festivals often. What I say would only interest the director of the festival. I am a critic of films, and not of film festivals. And then, an organiser doesn’t merit praise for producing a good festival. There are no miracles in cinema, and if there are, nearly all of them are predictable. There are about twenty film auteurs in the world, those that are lauded in the Cahiers. After them, a void. That’s it. Respected organisers of big and especially small festivals, please invite their latest work and, if possible, the first films of promising directors whose names we have at Cahiers. If Cannes and Venice seize Bergman, Buñuel, Rossellini etc., catch hold of Cukor, Minnelli, Ray, Fuller, Hawks, Lang, Vidor, Cottafavi, Melville, Barnet, Losey, Godard, Kinoshita, the condemned of competitions. You’ll be right every time. Avoid at all cost directors who have more than two films to their credit and not a single success. Look down on national selections, they are the ones responsible for the sufferings of Saint Sebastian endured by critics. The selection committees tell themselves: San Sebastián is Spain, so we need clerics, we need moral, well-intentioned, children-oriented films. This is the reason there were thirteen bad films of the twenty-two in competition, most of them vile. This is not a criticism: Cannes prefers the average to the vile. But the average isn’t out of place in a festival any more than the vile. Let’s compare the two festivals: 1 point for great films, ½ for good films, half-price for out-of-competition premieres: The 400 Blows + Nazarin + Desire + India + Hiroshima + Anne Frank = 3 ¾ points for Cannes. The Hitchcock plus the Bulgarian film and the Indian film plus the Ford = 2 ¼ points. The difference isn’t great, Cannes wins it thanks to the value of its out-of-competition films, and it would’ve been enough for Verboten! and Rio Bravo to go to San Sebastián to reverse the trend. So, let’s not try to establish a list of best film festivals. San Sebastien 1958 with Vertigo, a Monicelli, a Sirk and a Guitry clearly had the upper hand over Cannes 1959. Let’s not attach too much importance to the prize list of festivals.
A gradation in sublimity
Cinema is not a sport or a beauty contest. The best remain the best for forty or fifty years. The spectacular and publicity interest of awards can endure only if it brings something new, something original, if it distinguishes itself from its precedents. Now, had the judges been fair, Hitchcock would’ve already won eight times at Cannes and Venice, Rossellini seven times, Welles five etc. It would’ve made no sense. It would’ve made sense if there were a festival of all the best films of the year. But these are scattered across six or seven competitions and win hands down over others, as expected all along. We understand hence that The Nun’s Story, a mediocre film by Zinnemann, but the third least bad film by little Fred, was crowned at the expense of the great Alfred’s admirable North by Northwest, which arrives only at the nineteenth position among the forty-six Hitchcocks. Only one awards roster this year will have some meaning because among the losers there will be virtual winners: Venice. We’ll give the winner the only campionissimo of Italian cinema, the leader Roberto getting ahead of Otto by a wheel, Claude by two laps, Ingmar bringing up the rear, Mario and Jerzy winning the peloton sprint, but it could be the other way. There, it would really be the films that triumph and not auteurs. We notice that the greats produce at most three or four works superior to their other films, and it’s these that a festival should award, thanks to a general confrontation without any exclusion. Orson, Roberto, Luis, Alfred, Ingmar, Charles, Jean, Fritz and some others would block the road forever and the best, even Murnau, wouldn’t be able to win more than four times. So, no academism. And we’ll gain in lucidity. For one must be strong to be able to prefer India to Nazarin or Hiroshima. To establish a gradation in sublimity, that’s the purpose of festivals. It’s the most difficult, the vainest perhaps, but also the most enriching of all intellectual exercises.
In short, here’s my award list at San Sebastián:
★★★—1. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (USA)
★★—2. Shakti Samanta’s Insaan Jaag Utha (India)
★★—3. Nicolai Korabov’s Malenkaia (Bulgaria)
★—4. Jerzy Passendorfer’s Answer to Violence (Poland)
★—5. Vladimir Pogačić’s Alone (Yugoslavia)
★—6. Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story (USA)
North by Northwest
(Silver Shell for the good quality of its creativity, its ingenuity, its subtlety) Admirable in itself, disappointing for a Hitchcock. Had I enjoyed Hitchcock’s artistic and commercial position, I wouldn’t have gambled on a subject that emphasizes so little on the nature of the characters, which are of an amazing richness in comparison to those of The Nun’s Story, but which suffer in comparison to those of Vertigo. It’s a more evidently commercial film with numerous holes in the course of its hundred-and-thirty-six-minute runtime, of a constant, rather surprising beauty and sparse sublimity, which owes a lot to the private joke (A.H. literally misses the bus), to the idea of pure mise en scène, harnessed here to the detriment of the script. It’s an art that places all its stakes on volumes, colours, duration, the concept of an already geometric and abstract figure, and Hitchcock wins every time thanks to the disconcerting neatness of an execution that’s as simple, as pared down as possible. There are here four or five greatest scenes that Hitch has ever shot, but we ask more of him. Eva Marie Saint makes a good screen debut. Mason is good. Grant excellent. Burks too. Saul Bass, brilliant, eclipses the windbag McLaren’s Serenal, which progresses at the rate of one idea every three minutes. But Serenal only lasts two minutes and fifty seconds. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
Two revelations
The only two other “cinematically thought” films crush the mass of films towards the direction of scholarly or aestheticizing actors. Uneven, of bad taste, botched up, they remain attractive thanks to the spontaneity and inventiveness of the acting, to effects that never borrow their power from morality or sentimentality. I don’t understand Hindi and I didn’t try to understand what happens in Insaan Jaag Utha. This film is good because the actors sing and dance here with talent, because the tics of the secondary characters are pushed beyond the grotesque, because there is action and plot twists. The best scene, the final fight in the quarry, is delirious: hanging on their respective ropes, midway between the summit and the depths of a quarry, which is going to explode, the two heroes try to knock each other off with kicks and blows. Good music. Margarita Ilieva, the Bugarian Malenkaia, isn’t very pretty, but she’s as lively as a Castellani heroine. Her partner is good, many little ideas in the intimist style. Good scenes in the streets of Sofia with well-directed extras. Colourful and exuberant formalism: a love scene seen through a distorting fishbowl. Gratuitous but funny. Critique of contemporary society that puts itself in an awkward position. Korabov (30 years) doesn’t care. Samanta neither. We neither. May they continue!
And the Polish?
Answer to Violence (critic’s prize and direct rival to The Nun’s Story), to which I preferred a new viewing of the Alfred, strikes us seemingly with the effectiveness of a raw document: the preparation and execution of an attack against an SS general, Warsaw, 1942. One point, that’s all. Out of competition: Farewells, Wojciech Has’s cerebral and baroque love story that I didn’t see; A short, talented Red Balloon called A Walk in the Old City of Warsaw, the latest Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds, cinematically average and impresses only with its baroque peaks, which are often unpleasant (emphasis on WCs). But the shirt that goes up in flames under the impact of bullets, the dying man who sweeps the ground with his feet to alleviate the pain, all these are not bad. Interesting script. The hero hesitates between homo and heterosexuality, but Wajda, the impulsive intellectual and aesthete, matches up poorly with his intentions (cf. Plazewski’s excellent article in our 96th issue). Documentary or baroque, Polish cinema occupies only an honorary place in world cinema. Nothing more.
L’il Fred won’t grow up
In The Nun’s Story (Golden Shell for the content inspired—for the contained inspiration, I’d say—by its theme, the purity of its direction on human and aesthetic levels), Audrey Hepburn, mediocre and out of place in the role, but Best Actress prize, tosses away her veil at the end of fifteen years and at the end of three hours and a half, which the Christian charity of Jack Warner cut down to two hours and a half. I had taken my precautions and napped before the screening; it was necessary, I wouldn’t have lasted otherwise. If Domarchi was at San Sebastián, we wouldn’t have known the end of Eisenstein’s secrets2, for this drudgery would have killed him for good. Zinnemann takes a stab at colour again like Huston, and it’s bad; he drones about metaphysics, it’s awful, he misses the mark completely. Let’s not be mean: the style comes across as simple, documentary, medical (it’s also about medicine, like the best Zinnemann, The Men; all the better, Zinnemann has everything it takes to be a doc). Not too many aesthetic experiments. The document is perhaps false, Aretino described the life of nuns differently, but the simplicity holds your attention, like in The Goddess. Even so, at the end, we have the desire, like Kyrou, to become a priest-basher. A film like this does considerable wrong to Christianity. I give it a rating of 53.
Miscellaneous, summer films
Since Zinnemann, whom I can’t be suspected of having a weakness for, comes sixth, only inanities must follow! Alone is a decent, suitably played, popular-democrat-style war film. Ragpicker’s Angel (the OCIC prize for showing a Japanese Christian) plays firstly on its baroque setting—not bad—and then collapses into pathos. I nodded off, I opened my right eye for a second, I closed it, I opened the left one: oh boy, what torture! I stayed because they told me Gosho was a good guy, but I’ll only trust myself from now on. The Rest is Silence (special prize), decently played, modernizes Hamlet with ridiculous results: expressionism, Claudius, head of a factory in the Ruhr, sells to SS his brother who, now a spectre, telephones Hamlet, who escapes from an airport… Marine expressionism in Wolf Hart’s Abseits, mediocre Golden Shell for Short Film. Among the Ruins started very well: the script is funny. The professor and his charming pupil fight in class, but fall in love with each other. After this, a horrible, melodramatic flashback for an hour and a half in order to remain faithful to the novel. In the first reel, Ezzel Dine Zulficar reveals himself to be as enjoyable as his relative Mahmoud Zulficar, but the rest of the film shows us that talent is not hereditary. The Light from the Top starts with beautiful landscapes, the actress is good, Portuguese is sweeter to hear than Spanish, but God, what melodrama, what sermonizing after that!
In two sequences of From the Apennines to the Andes, the actors eat naturally, and in the last, Rossi Drego undresses rather prettily behind a bedsheet put out to dry, which won it a joint Silver Shell with Hitchcock! Capdenac is completely crazy to see a masterpiece in For whom the Skylarks Sing, a dull peasant film. In Crime After School—jazz party—Vohrer, the German Molinaro makes the pretty Corny Collins ugly. G.B, N.T.R. Death in the Saddle, a parody Western, shows that the Czechs don’t yet know how to suitably use cinemascope. The films in Spanish are impossible: susceptible to pretension, theatrical actors, ugly language. Despite his Nobel prize, the savant in Leap to Fame (award for Best Hispanic Film and for Best Actor) doesn’t manage to interest us. I’ve not seen the Mexican film: they showed me some photograms earlier, that was enough; nor Everyone’s in Love: that gives me a good pretext to remain courteous to Jacqueline Sassard, which is very difficult after seeing her films. To be frank, let’s say that, not being a masochist, I stayed till the end of only about a dozen films. Life is short and spending more than ten minutes with a turkey is bad. If there’s nothing at the end of ten minutes, there’ll be nothing beyond. Which allows me to judge the value of films according to time: I stayed for 11 minutes, 23 seconds for Death in the Saddle against 8 minutes, 23 seconds for Convict no. 1040, 2 minutes, 47 seconds for Adolescence of Cain and 22 seconds for Leap to Fame. So, Death in the Saddle is superior to Cain by 8 minutes, 36 seconds.
India mon amour
Outside competition, The 400 Blows (France was not officially represented), not bad at all4, John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers and the sublime India, the most dizzyingly rapid and the most dizzyingly slow of all films, the most disconcerting, not the finest, but the newest of all, much newer than even Journey to Italy. Some yelled in rage in their seats, the others nodded off, exhausted by Rossellini’s incessant merry-go-round. I was speechless, completely astounded. And to think that certain critics at Cannes could see a good documentary without personality in this work next to which Ivan the Terrible comes across as an aborted bastard of the tradition of quality and which establishes itself as the firm favourite of the Moscow Festival. I hardly like unjustified hyperboles, but I think that, until we have the advantage of two or three screenings, for once, it’s there that the only reasonable and impartial criticism that one could make about the film lies.
A fine Ford
Over two hours and the American Civil War, a commando unit lead by Wayne and Holden advances into Pittsburgh. Mediocre photography by Clothier. But Ford is in full form. A curious thing: what irritates the most in Ford—a rather crude and embarrassing humour—is what explains his success and enables the fleshing out of subtle and endearing characters. More than a moving film—scenes of butchery and the advance of child-soldiers towards the Yankee army are nice, but nothing to cry about—it’s a sensitive film. Ford is uneven within his films, but there is a crowd of little details here that pack a punch. Walsh is clearly beaten by a long distance. Wayne has never been better than in this scene, full of invention, where he starts drinking his whisky, gets annoyed and ends up smashing everything.
1As his review shows.
2Domarchi had written a series on Eisenstein in Cahiers.
3The Catholic Central’s most negative rating.
4It’s a form of private joke.
[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]
At a time when Daesh funds itself by trafficking cultural artifacts and Europe announces asylum for threatened art works, Sokurov’s marvelous, piercing film offers nothing less than a revisionist historiography of art itself. For Francofonia, History is not the content of art but its very skin. Museums flatten time, and justifiably present their contents as the highest achievements of a culture, obfuscating, in effect, their history as objects involved in power brokerage, class conflict and market manipulation. Sokurov’s film flips this perspective inside out, identifying art as being frequently the currency of diplomatic power possessing the capacity to purchase peace and as being instruments in service of totalitarian collaboration. Napoleon, 
The jeu de mots in the title says it all. Not only is this deeply death-marked, Ozuvian film an unordinary home movie, but it is also a film about not having a home. Composed of footage shot in the filmmaker’s mother’s Brussels apartment and recorded video-conference sessions between the two, No Home Movie contrasts Akerman’s professional nomadism with the perennial confinedness of her mother Natalia. Between Chantal’s constant off-screen presence and Natalia’s self-imposed captivity (within the apartment as well as the computer screen), between Here and Elsewhere, lies the film’s true space – a part-real, part-virtual space of filial anxiety and affection. Akerman’s matrilineal counterpart to Porumboiu’s 
Taxi opens with a shot of downtown Tehran photographed from the dashboard of a car. Announcing Panahi’s first cinematic outdoor excursion since his house arrest in 2011, this shot sets up the dialectics that would define the film: home/world, individual/social and freedom/captivity. Through the course of Taxi, the spied-upon filmmaker drives around the city in the guise of a cabbie, chauffeuring clients-actors from various strata of the society, and realizing a pre-scripted scenario with them whose urgent, didactic purpose can’t be more obvious. The Iranian state has forged a private prison for Panahi from the public spaces of Tehran, allowing him a mobility and false freedom that’s regulated by its watchful eyes. Panahi turns this power dynamic upside down, transforming the private space of the vehicle into a public space for debate, discussion, instruction and critique. Watching the film, I was constantly reminded of that saying beloved of Wittgenstein: “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Panahi’s very presence in the film – his image, his voice – becomes an audacious act of political defiance, a gesture of tremendous existential courage that stares at the possibility of death floating in the air. Taxi makes cinema still matter.
A beautiful marine cousin to Guzman’s previous film, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button turns its attention from the arid stretches of the Atacama to the waterfront and ice field of Southern Patagonia. Threading metaphor over metaphor, the director fashions a typically associative, richly suggestive essay film that turns the nature documentary form on its head. Guzman’s film plumbs the depths of the ocean, trying to uncover traces of suppressed, unseen history embodied by countless “missing people” – a project that derives its impetus from the filmmaker’s bittersweet childhood experience of the sea. Despite Chile’s economic indifference to its 4000-kilometer-long coastline, he notes, the sea has been indispensable those in power, serving first as the entry point of the European invaders, who wiped out the Patagonian natives, and then as the dumping ground of political prisoners during the Pinochet regime. Guzman teases out the different values that the sea holds for him, the autochthons and the Chilean state, in effect politicizing and historicizing that which conventional wisdom takes to be apolitical and ahistorical: geography and the perception of it. The result is a film of immense poetry and horror – a horror that only poetry can convey.
The most impressive debut film of the year, Alexandra Gerbaulet’s ambitious, intoxicating Shift excavates the evolution of her hometown, Salzgitter, along with that of her family with archaeological care and scientific detachment. In Gerbaulet’s heady narration, anchored by a powerful, quasi-declamatory, rhythmic voiceover, Salzgitter’s transformation from a Nazi mining stronghold and concentration camp, through a waning industrial hub and to a nuclear waste dump parallels the gradual disintegration of the Gerbaulet family under the weight of unemployment, sickness and sexual repression. The filmmaker closely intercuts photographs and diary entries of her mother with impersonal material from popular and scientific culture, weaving in and out of both registers with ease. Gerbaulet’s film is literally an unearthing project, as the director scoops out the various historical, political and geographical layers of this war-weathered city whose tranquil current-day model housing sits atop a makeshift Jewish graveyard consisting of camp workers buried using industrial debris. “Man gets used to everything, even the scar”, declares the narrator bluntly. Shift unscrambles such a habituated view of things, observing the tragicomic tautologies in which history revisits the city. The more you dig, it would seem, the more of the same you get.
One of my favorite films of the year is a commercial for a major power corporation made by a 106-year-old artist. 
Thomas McCarthy’s dramatization of Boston Globe’s exposé of child abuse in the Church is a robust, smart procedural that is less about picking apart the Catholic establishment than about elucidating the epistemological processes of the Information Age. Set at the transitional period between print and online news media, the film underscores the soon-to-be-outmoded physical nature of journalistic investigation. There are no antagonists of the traditional kind in Spotlight. The only obstacles to the knowledge required to carry out the exposé are the numerous procedures and institutional protocols that have for objective the protection or publication of information. It is telling that the entire film is about a pack of newswriters seeking information that’s already out in the open. What’s more, the film recognizes that the Spotlight team’s attempts to mount an institutional critique is itself inscribed within kindred ideological biases, operational strategies and structural iniquities of Boston Globe as an institution and that the metaphysical crisis that their story can potentially wreak amidst readers is but similar to the disillusionment the newsmen experience vis-à-vis their Protestant weltanschauung. With relatively uncommon formal and ethical restraint, McCarthy crafts an arresting film about how a society’s narratives are made, predicated they are as much on the dissemination of information as on their marginalization.
ergei Loznitsa’s formidable follow-up to Maidan (2014) furthers the earlier film’s exploration of the aesthetics and mechanics of revolution, capturing a people coming together to make sense of a political limbo. Without context or a framing perspective, the film drops us straight into the streets of St. Petersburg just after the attempted reactionary coup d’état in Moscow in 1991. Confusion and mundanity – not heroics and determination – reign as we observe the formative process of a people’s movement and the imagined/imaginary social glue that causes individuals to cohere into a group. State apparatuses compete with each other for imposing a narrative onto the events, while the very toponymy of the city becomes an ideological battleground. Working off priceless archival footage, much of which is incredibly reminiscent of the filmmaker’s own cinematographic style, Loznitsa provides an invaluable glimpse into the unfurling of history, chronicling how numerous banal, unsure gestures and actions snowball into Historical Events. If Eisenstein’s better-than-the-original recreation of the October Revolution was the abstraction of materialist history into ideas, Loznitsa’s film, taking place at the same Palace Square 63 years later, rescues history from the reductions of ideology and brings it right back into the realm of the material.
A remarkable American counterpart to J. P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), In Transit unfolds predominantly as a series of interviews with a mixed bag of travellers on board The Empire Builder, a long-distance passenger train running over 3500 kilometers and spanning almost the entire width of the United States. The accounts of passengers seeking out professional and financial breakthroughs evoke the pioneer myth hinged on a “Go West” imperative while the stories of those aboard in search of their ‘calling’ demonstrate the essentially spiritual, even religious nature of their pilgrimage-like journey. The diversity and range of the interviewees and their interactions help the film depict the train as a miniature America, à la Stagecoach, and carve out a quasi-utopian space in which members across class, race and gender divides get an opportunity to converse with each other without personal baggage. Nonetheless, In Transit is less a cultural vision of a possible America than an existential meditation on what makes people embark on these journeys. One elderly war veteran remarks that he’ll never be able to see these plains again. To cite John Berger, “the desire to have seen has a deep ontological basis.”
One of a piece with Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010), Wake continues its precedent’s important investigation into the ecological consequences of the presence of America’s largest military bases in the Philippines during most of the 20th century. Like Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), Wake is guided by the spirit of Howard Zinn’s approach to history and sketches an economically-founded account of US-Philippines political and cultural relations – a history that seems to be have been lamentably wiped off from the Filipino national consciousness. Gianvito juxtaposes images from the Philippine-American war with current day images from the contaminated Subic naval base area, suggesting, in effect, the poisonous persistence of an agonizing, unacknowledged history. Wake is imperfect cinema – unwieldy and resourceful – and employs fly-on-the-wall records, talking heads, on-screen text, photographs and news clips to mount a potent critique of a historiography defined political amnesia and economic opportunism. More importantly, it is a necessary reminder that imperialism is not always about presence, action and exercise of power but sometimes also about the refusal of these very elements, that history is not only a matter of events but also processes and phenomena and that geography is always political.
“I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy, but in any case it’s a masterpiece”, says one of the characters, self-referentially, in Godard’s 
A sister film, in some ways, to Jonathan Demme’s brilliant Rachel Getting Married (2008), Sebastián Silva’s The Maid is nothing short of a spiritual revelation at the movies. What could have been an one-note leftist tirade about Chile’s class system is instead elevated into the realm of human where one facial twitch, one stretch of silence and one impulsive word can speak much more than any expository monologue or contrived subplot. There is no simplification of human behaviour here, no easily classifiable moral categories and no overarching statement to which truth is sacrificed. Nor does Silva suspend his study of the classes to observe his characters. He merely lets the obvious stay in the background. And just when you think that Silva’s vision of the world is getting all too romantic, he delivers a fatal blow to shatter your smugness – a single, deceptively simple shot during the final birthday party that masterfully sums up everything from the irreconcilable, repressed tension that exists between classes in capitalistic societies to our adaptability as humans to live peacefully with each other despite socio-economic disparities.
Rigorous but oh-so-tender, centenarian Manoel de Oliveira’s one-hour wonder Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl is a film in one and a half acts. Oliveira translates the work of Eça de Queiroz to the screen, running the 19th century tale of romance through the current economic landscape and harnessing the resultant anachronism to paint an achingly beautiful picture about the inability to transcend class, escape reality and lose oneself in art. Despite its decidedly Brechtian and ceaselessly self reflexive nature, Oliveira’s film is rife with moments of poignancy and touches of humour. Using double, triple and quadruple framing and achieving a mise-en-abyme of art and reality, Oliveira writes a ruminative essay on the impossibility of art and reality to merge, the confusion that exists between them and the classism that exists within and with respect to art. Flooded with references to art and art forms, Eccentricities is such a dense and intricate fabric of the arts that even the past is treated in a detached manner like a piece of art, where each image looks like a painting, each sound feels like a melody and each movement cries out: “cinema!”.
Of all the recent movies that have attempted to acknowledge dark chapters in national histories and advocated looking forward to the future instead of crying over what is lost, perhaps, none is as sober, ethical and uncompromising as Claudia Llosa’s Golden Bear winner. Llosa inherits her tale from the terrorist atrocities that plagued Peru two decades ago (Inheritance being the prime motif of the film) but, subsequently, discards every possible opportunity for sensationalism or propaganda. Tightly framing the lead character, Fausta (Magaly Solier), within and against claustrophobic structures, doorways, photographs, windows, paintings, mirrors and walls, gradually varying the depth of focus along the movie to detach the protagonist and integrate her with her surroundings and using extremely long shots to dwarf her in vast opens spaces of the tranquil town, Llosa concocts a film of utmost narrative austerity and aesthetic rigor. Punctuating and contrasting these downbeat images of Fausta’s life are slice-of-life sequences from the town depicting various wedding rituals and parties which tenderly highlight Peruvian people’s open-hearted embracing of capitalism and their resolve to come out of the trauma of the past and move on with life.
If Inglourious Basterds was a coup from within the system, Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control is an out-and-out war against the machine. The essential piece of cinema of resistance, The Limits of Control eschews simple genre classification and flips every ingredient of Hollywood’s conveyor belt products to surprise, appall, irritate and provoke us with each one of its moves. The complete absence of Jarmuschian brand of deadpan humour announces the film’s seriousness of intent. It is as if Jarmusch wants to establish once and for all that Hollywood does not equal American cinema and that the cinema that the former school marginalizes is truly alive and kicking. The Limits of Control is a film that can easily get on your nerves but, eventually, it succeeds in getting under your skin and evolving gradually to reveal how meticulously crafted it is. Using Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, production designer Eugenio Caballero and editor Jay Rabinowitz masterfully, Jarmusch creates a movie so meditative and relaxing that one feels exactly how William Blake (Johnny Depp) would have at the end of Dead Man (1995).
Porumboiu’s follow-up to one of the most hilarious comedies of the decade, 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), is a companion of sorts to Jarmusch’s film not only in the sense that both of them negate the function of the genre they are supposed to belong to, by completely de-dramatizing their narratives, but also because Porumboiu’s film, too, is a conflict between two types of cinema – the cinema of analytical contemplation represented by the detective-protagonist of the film (Dragos Bucur) and the cinema of thoughtless action represented by his ready-for-ambush boss (Vlad Ivanov). However, more concretely, Police, Adjective is an examination of how our own political and social systems, partly due to the rigidity of our written languages, end up dominating us and how individual conscience and social anomalies are effaced clinically in order to have the bureaucratic clockwork running smoothly. Like Bucharest, Porumboiu, often self-reflexively, sketches the portrait of a bland and pacific city that tries to ape the far west and project itself as more dynamic than it actually is. The film’s disparate themes crystallize deliciously in the final, side-splitting, Tarantino-esque set piece where we witness the police chief urging his subordinates to act by the book, literally.
Tetro is a beautiful film. Not just in the way it looks, but in the sheer romance it has for a lost world. The only worthy B&W film of this year out of the four I saw (the other three being Haneke’s 
Writer-director Marco Bellocchio’s ballad, based on a nebulous part of fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s life, can teach those so-called historical dramas a thing or two about locating personal ideologies within collective history without being exploitative or pandering to pop demands. Bellocchio’s film is far from a detailed recreation of Mussolini’s political life. It is, in fact, a commentary upon such “detailed recreations” of history based on documents written by winners. Bellocchio’s formidable script and mise en scène keep probing and remarking upon the tendency of fascist systems to suppress histories – personal and national – and exploit popular media, especially the relatively young and emotionally powerful cinema, to blind people of truth and forge a faux reality – a theme underscored in Tarantino’s film too. What more? Bellocchio constructs the film exactly like one of those Soviet agitprop films – not by easy spoofing, but by retaining their spirit and rhythm – using rapid montage, expressionistic performances and operatic sounds. Be it common folk fighting in a cinema hall over a news reel or a bereaved mother breaking down during the screening of The Kid (1921), cinema registers its omnipresence and omnipotence in Bellocchio’s film.
The perfect antidote to the summer blockbuster, Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah is an extremely assured and undeniably moving piece of cinema that arrives, appositely, as the golden jubilee reboot to Herzog’s thematically kindred movie, Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). Cleverly relegating specific issues such as the Australian government’s intervention and relocation policies for the Aborigines to the background, Thornton frees his films of broad, propagandist political agendas, without ever making the film lack social exploration. With an extraordinary sound design, Thornton keeps the word count in the film to an absolute minimum, letting the stretches of silence shared by his lead characters speak for themselves. The film’s observations about banality of racism in contemporary Australia, exploitation of tribal art and its consequences, the effect of colonialism, especially due to Christian missionaries, on the Aboriginal culture and the ever growing chasm between the tribal and white life styles themselves are fittingly subordinated to the beautiful, unspoken love story that, essentially, forms the heart of the film.
Let me dare to say this: Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is either the most profound or the most pretentious movie of the year. For now, I choose the former. Audiard’s decidedly unflinching feature breaks free from the limitations of a generic prison drama and takes on multiple dimensions as the apolitical and irreligious protagonist of the film, Malik (played by Tahar Rahim), finds himself irreversibly entangled in ethnic gang wars within and outside the prison. A trenchant examination of religion as both a tool of oppression and a vehicle for political escalation, A Prophet is an audacious exploration of Muslim identity in the western world post-9/11. Although the plot developments may leave the viewer dizzy, it is easy to acknowledge how Audiard confronts the issues instead of working his way around it or making cheeky and superficial political statements. Strikingly juxtaposing and counterpointing Sufism and Darwinism in Malik’s search for identity, Audiard creates an immensely confident and nonjudgmental film that trusts its audience to work with the rich ambiguity it offers.
Pedro Almodóvar is nothing short of an icon for feminist cinema. The way how he uses his female characters, their position and responsibility in society, their independence in making decisions – all indicate his support for the equality of the sexes. Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999) (as mentioned in the titles) is dedicated to all the women in the world and marks a very personal chapter in the canon of Almodóvar.
The Seventh Art 