First of all, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes is a conceptual coup. It might be the best response to the Lumières’ earliest factory films this side of the 20th century, and a pertinent update to Harun Farocki’s work on the same subject. Unlike the Lumières’ films, there are not scores of workers pouring out of the factory at the end of day’s work. Nevertheless, the political, psychological and social transition that the exit from the work place represents – a transition that Farocki magnificently examines in his 1995 video project – persists in all its contrast. It’s well past the sunrise by the time the workers in Park Lanes leave the floor, and the blinding sunlight that awaits them at the gates directly impresses upon us the idea of a personal life beyond the threshold.
Having his film play out over a duration equal to the legislated eight-hour work day gives Everson a chance to establish a number of interesting parallels between industrial labour and filmmaking, an equivalence that avant-garde filmmakers have time and again emphasized. For one, shooting with the camera held in his hand, and not using a tripod, for almost the entire duration, Everson is, in fact, involved in manual labour. Secondly, Everson, like the workers, is handling raw material for his work whose final shape he will not be able to see right away, though he might have a general idea of it in mind.
Further, the film’s structure is defined by the structure of the work on the factory floor. We are taken through various sections of the factory dealing with bowling alley equipment. We do not see how each of the tasks segues into the next or how it fits into the overall final product – which I think is how the film is also organized. We synthetically piece together the work flow as much as the film and its spaces.
Everson avoids the usual pitfalls presented by such a subject – aesthetization, condescension and, especially, the idea of worker alienation. (The workers, I wager, know what they are working on and can well enjoy an evening bowling and appreciating in some basic form what they have done.) He pitches the film between humanist and post-humanist perspectives of industrial labour. But I get the feeling that, trying to avoid the pitfalls, he has boxed himself into some problematic false neutrality. I think the choice of not having a voice over or any explicit theoretical framework betrays a form of non-committal plurality inviting multiple interpretations. (Of course, I must admit that not having seen any other of Everson’s films perhaps deprives me of a pre-existing framework with which to approach Park Lanes.)
Moreover, I could sense a lack of transparency between Everson and the workers. Granted that the workers know and comment upon the director’s and the camera’s presence and Everson’s shooting at eye level intelligently preempts any similarity to surveillance aesthetic, but for long stretches of the film, the workers perform their everyday duty as if the camera’s presence didn’t matter, which I think is pretty impossible. I insist that there is nothing exploitative about this, at least not more than what is involved in the workers working in the factory in the first place, but the discrepancy between this obviously intrusive alien presence and the seeming normality of proceedings crops up to my mind as an unaccounted variable.
The film appears to have been shot with a relatively long lens, which results in a shallow field that helps Everson focus on either faces or hands or the objects and instruments of the factory. This, of course, has practical benefits of avoiding disturbances in the near field of the camera and being able to be at a distance from the work site and give the workers and the filmmaker some maneuvering space. And perhaps there is an ethical point to be made there.
I admit I found Park Lanes very difficult to watch, unlike similar films by Sharon Lockhart and Denis Côté. True that the smaller runtime is a factor, but I think that the ease of watching has more to do with the latter filmmakers’ direct and transparent aesthetic intervention into their material. Park Lanes is insistent upon not judging or even describing what it is showing. On one hand, this approach confronts us with the relentless, ritualistic, meditative and, at times, comforting simplicity of industrial labour today, allowing us heartwarming glimpses of multicultural utopianism and unfeigned proletariat camaraderie. At the same time, the multiple fields of inquiry that the film’s lack of commentary opens up appear to me to neutralize each other. We don’t know whether to read many of the passages from a political or a humanistic standpoint. Long stretches of the film depicting monotonous work in a space that employs safety measures and has advanced equipment go in internecine counterpoint with the recesses in which the workers are enjoying movies on tablets and smart phones. We don’t know what they earn. We don’t know if they are in a union and whether they want to be in one either. I must clarify that I am not arguing for pigeonholing the worker experience into an overarching Manichean thesis. I’m trying to say that I think the film conflates a kind of non-judgmental presentation of reality as it is with a nuanced irreducible perspective. The various elements of the film seemed to me to go off on tangents rather than dialectically conversing with each other. Perhaps an analogy from photography would help me articulate better. The opposite of capturing a scene in shallow focus and reducing it to a Grand Theory is not capturing everything in deep focus. It is to use the deep focus to relate the foreground to the background in ways that couldn’t be expressed by each of them individually. By subtracting personal subjectivity altogether, Everson renders the film subject-less.
Finally, I do think the film is not as rigorous as it should have been. Besides the demands placed by the framing concept, the length of many sequences – length of each one in itself but also in comparison to the others – does not seem to be justified, if I may be allowed to say so. There is a two-minute shot of a bunch of bowling pins towards the very end. Though that duration is next to nothing for an eight-hour movie, I can’t see the motivation for such a slack shot. Are we expected to ponder on the ontological nature of bowling pins? I know better than to try and hold a filmmaker intellectually responsible for all his decisions, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the freedom from considerations of resourcefulness, economy and preplanning that digital cinema offers has also started impacting directorial intuition for the worse.
Surely, it takes a bona fide auteur like David Cronenberg to locate his signature concerns in a text – such as Don Delillo’s – that deals with ideas hitherto unexplored by him and spin out the most exciting piece of cinema this year. Holed up in his stretch limo – an extension of his body, maneuvering through Manhattan inch by inch as though breathing – Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) comprehends the universe outside like cinema, through a series of moving images projected onto his car windows. Why not? This world, whose master he is, is experiencing the epistemological crisis of late capitalism: the increasing abstraction of tactile reality into digital commodities. Packer, like many Cronenberg characters, is more machine than man, attempts – against the suggestions of his asymmetrical prostate and of the protagonist of Cronenberg’s previous film – to construct a super-rational predictable model of world economy – a project whose failure prompts him to embark on an masochistic odyssey to reclaim the real, to experience physicality, to be vulnerable and to ultimately die. At the end of the film, one imagines Packer shouting: “Death to Cyber-capitalism! Long live the new flesh!”
Un chant d’amour for cinema, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is an ambitious speculation about the total transformation of life into cinema and cinema into life – the death of the actor, audience and the camera. The European cousin to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Carax’s return-to-zero work draws inspiration from the process of film itself – death, resurrection and persistence of vision – and takes cinema to its nascence – fairground attractions, popular theatre and zoopraxography – while opening up to its future possibilities. Uncle Oscar (Denis Lavant, the raison d’etre of Holy Motors), like Cronenberg’s Packer, cruises the streets of Paris in his limo in search of purely physical experiences – a series of performance pieces carried out solely for “the beauty of the act” – only to find that the city is a gigantic simulacrum in which everyone is a performer and a spectator (and thus no one is) and where the distinction between the real and the fictional becomes immaterial. At the very least, Holy Motors is a reflection on the passing of “things”, of physicality, of the beauty of real gesture, of the grace of movement of men and machines.
Nicolas Rey’s third feature, consisting of 9 short segments (reels, to be precise) projected in a random sequence, is a radical project that re-politicizes the cinematic image. Not only does the randomization of the order of projection of the reels circumvent the problem of the authoritarianism of a fixed narrative, it also exposes the seam between the semi-autonomous theses-like segments, thereby making the audience attentive to possible ideological aporias that are usually glossed over by the self-fashioned integrity of filmic texts. Furthermore, the existence of the film in the form separate reels is a breathing reminder of the material with which it was made: 16mm. The persistent dialectic between the visual – shots of highways, industries, farms and modernist suburban housing in the eponymous fictional city registering the sedate rhythm of everyday life – and the aural – snippets of conversations between two politicized industrial workers about the invisible tendons that enable a society to function smoothly – strongly drives home the chief, Althusserian concern of the film: the essential unity of the various, seemingly autonomous, strands of a state, contrary to claims of disjunction and autonomy.
A film that is reminiscent of Weerasethakul’s many bipartite films, Miguel Gomes’ singular Tabu, too, works on a range of binaries – past/present, youth/old age, city/countryside, abundance/scarcity, modern/primitive, colonizer/colonized – and sets up a conversation between the carefree, profligate days of the empire full of love, laughter and danger and Eurocrisis-inflected, modern day Portugal marked by alienation and loneliness. The opening few minutes – a melancholy mini-mockumentary of sorts chronicling the adventures of a European explorer in Africa with a native entourage –announces that the film will be balancing distancing irony and classicist emotionality, donning an attitude that is in equal measure critical and sympathetic towards the past. In Gomes’ sensitive film, the heavy hand of the past weighs down on the present both on aesthetic (silent cinema stylistics, film stock, academy ratio, the excitement of classical genres) and thematic (collective colonial guilt, residual racism, punishment for forbidden love) levels and this inescapability of the past is also functions as (sometimes dangerous) nostalgia for the simplicity and innocence of a cinema lost and an entreaty for the necessity of exploring and preserving film history.
What partially elevates the first film of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy from its rather undistinguished concerns about emotional alienation and old age loneliness is the nexus of intriguing cultural forces that it brings into the picture by having a relatively affluent, 50-year old Austrian single-mother (Margarete Tiesel, in a no-holds-barred performance) indulge in sex tourism in Kenya along with five other women friends. The result is a rich, provocative negotiation along class, gender, race and age divides that upsets conventional, convenient oppressor-oppressed relationships. In doing so, the film wrenches love from the realm of the universal and the ahistorical and demonstrates that between two people lies the entire universe. Seidl’s heightened, bright colour palette that provides a sharp chromatic contrast to the bodies of Kenyan natives and his confrontational, static, frontal compositions (Seidl’s nudes are antitheses to those of the Renaissance), which make indoor spaces appear like human aquariums, both invite the voyeuristic audience to take a peek into this world and place it on another axis of power – of the observer and the observed.
Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage’s exquisite, exceptional adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Meek One (1876) aptly locates the Russian tale of matrimonial discord between a bourgeois pawnbroker and the gentle creature he weds within the ethno-political conflict between nationalist and rebel factions of the country. Unlike humanist war dramas that, often naively, stress the underlying oneness among individuals on either side, Vithanage’s intelligent film underscores how the political haunts the personal and how the tragic weight of history impacts the compatibility between individuals here and now, while deftly retaining Dostoyevsky’s central theme of ownership of one human by another. Though liberal in narration and moderate in style compared to Mani Kaul’s and Robert Bresson’s adaptations of the short story, Vithanage, too, employs an attentive ambient soundtrack that counts down to an impending doom and numerous shots of hands to emphasize the centrality of transaction in interpersonal relationships. The metaphysical chasm between the possessor and the possessed finds seamless articulation in concrete sociopolitical relations between Sinhalese and Tamils, between the army and refugees, between the poor and the wealthy and between man and woman.
There has always been something intensely spiritual about Tsai’s films, even when they seem to wallow in post-apocalyptic cityscapes and defunct social constructions. In Tsai’s hands, it would seem, an empty subway corridor shot in cheap digital video becomes the holiest of spaces ever filmed. Walker, a high-def video short made as a part of the Beautiful 2012 project commissioned by Hong Kong International Film Festival, crystallizes this particular tendency in the director’s work and centers on a Buddhist monk played by Lee Kang-sheng (a muse like no other in 21st century cinema). As the monk walks the hyper-commercialized streets of Hong Kong at a phenomenally slow pace for two days and two nights, his red robe becomes a visual anchor in stark contrast to the greys of the urban jungle and the blacks of people’s winter clothing and his very being, his eternal presence, becomes a spiritual grounding point amidst the impersonal hustle-bustle of this super-capitalist Mecca. Part performance art with a gently cynical punch line, part an exploration of the limits of DV, Walker is a deeply soothing and often moving work from one of Asia’s finest.
Moving unsteadily with the help of a walking stick, the 79-year old founder of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), P. K. Nair, despite himself, becomes a metaphor for the state of film archiving in the country. It is of considerable irony that, in a nation that prides itself for its rich cultural heritage, film archiving is considered a useless exercise. During the three decades that Nair headed the NFAI, he was instrumental in discovering the silent works and early talkies of Bombay and south Indian cinema, including those of Dadasaheb Phalke, the “father of Indian cinema”. Celluloid Man, bookended by scenes from Citizen Kane (1941), draws inspiration from Welles’ film and sketches a fascinating if reverential portrait of Nair constructed from interviews with international filmmakers, scholars, historians and programmers and curiously hinged on the fact of Nair’s “Rosebud” – ticket stubs, promotional material and assorted film-related curios that the man collected during his childhood. Shivendra Singh’s film is a irresistible romp through early Indian cinema and an endlessly absorbing tribute to a man who is fittingly dubbed the “Henri Langlois of India”. To paraphrase one of the interviewees, Phalke gave Indian cinema a past, Nair gave it a history.
Although it might appear that it is perhaps the hollowness of Xavier Dolan’s previous feature that makes his latest, 160-minute music video look like a cinematic coup, Laurence Anyways really does succeed in accomplishing more than most of contemporary “LGBT-themed independent cinema”. While the latter – including this year’s Cahiers darling – almost invariably consists of realist, solidarity pictures that use social marginalization as shorthand for seriousness, Dolan’s emotionally charged film takes the game one step further and probes the inseparability of body and character, the effect of the physical transformation of a person on all his relationships – a transformation that is mirrored in the flamboyant, shape-shifting texture of the film – without sensationalizing the transformation itself. Rife, perhaps too much so, with unconventional aesthetic flourishes and personal scrapbook-ish inserts, the film rekindles and enriches the youthful verve of the Nouvelle Vague – a move that should only be welcome by film culture. If not anything more, Laurence Anyways establishes that critics need to stop using its author’s age as a cudgel and look at his cinema du look as something more than a compendium of adolescent affectations.
Let me confess upfront that putting Wes Anderson’s (surprise!) whimsy, twee and self-conscious Moonrise Kingdom in my year-end list is less a full-hearted appreciation of the film than a confession that I find Anderson to be an important voice that I’m genuinely keen about, but can’t entirely celebrate. I don’t think I’ve seen any film that employs so many elements of industrial cinema yet feels meticulously artisanal, a film that, on the surface, seems to (literally) play to the gallery yet is so full of personality and one that is oddly familiar yet thoroughly refuses instant gratification. Moonrise Kingdom appears to have every ingredient of an obnoxious family comedy, but the unironic, straight-faced attitude and the single-minded conviction with which it moulds the material into an anti-realist examination of the anxieties of growing up, alone, is something not to be found either in cynical mainstream cinema or in the overwrought indie scene of America. Anderson’s neo-sincere film is, as it were, a classicist text couched within a postmodern shell, an emotional film without affect. Paper blossoms, but blossoms nonetheless.
Hinged on the economic crisis of 2008, Lauren Greenfield’s cautious, measured The Queen of Versailles (2012) charts the riches-to-proverbial-rags trajectory of David A. Siegel, American real estate magnate, and his family as they plummet from being revoltingly rich to being nearly have-beens who are forced to relinquish the largest American home ever built. Greenfield’s film is full of improvisational metaphors, bitter little ironies and strokes of poetic justice, such as how the many employees whom Siegel laid off – not the big banks which refused to fund him – end up helping his family through thrift shopping. The most interesting aspect of the film, however, is how it throws light on how the familial fabric of the Siegel family, which no doubt is used to typify middle and upper American households, is dictated by factors outside their control and much larger than them, such as the global economic downturn – a direct demonstration of family being superstructural organization shaped by an economic base. These passages of the film play out like Metamorphosis as we witness the bourgeois family structure falling apart when the financial adhesive that held it together vanishes. Like Kafka’s novella, these scenes evoke a mix of revulsion and pathos: the repulsion one feels watching how thoroughly these relationships are founded on a bed of material transactions is counterbalanced by a pity for the children who seem to be oblivious to how tainted by excess wealth they are. If there is a lingering feeling, despite the film’s efforts to remain nonjudgmental and neutral about the events that transpire, that we feel pity for a group of people who are going from being extremely rich to merely rich, it is because the film rightly preserves the basic humanity of the Siegel family.
The Seventh Art 