The Seventh Art

February 23, 2011

Short Films #11

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Iran, Short Films | Tags: Ali Akbar Sadeghi, Chess and Cinema, Chess Fever, Iranian Animation, Kanun, The Rook |
[9] Comments

The Rook (1974)
Ali Akbar Sadeghi
Iran
10 Min.

Renowned painter and filmmaker Ali Akbar Sadeghi’s The Rook (1974) is a hilarious short animation based on a quick little game of chess. The idea of bringing the game to life, in itself, isn’t a terribly novel thing. Many people, like me, would have wondered how a film based on chess would pan out, given the inherent capacity for not only sadism and spectacle, but even analysis of class, war and bipolar politics. (Kubrick’s chess movie is probably the closest one comes to witnessing such a treatment). Sadeghi, given that he was working for the Kanun, undermines the scope for gratuitous violence throughout, instead opting for a Lego-like version of the war. The result is nearly as hysterical as Pudovkin’s and Shpikovsky’s brilliant comedy based on the game Chess Fever (1925). Sadeghi’s style of animation (that seems to have died out now and which one used to see so often in government sponsored animation programmes in India) generally consists of two planes of action, which appear as if they are sliding one beneath the other, and involves hand-drawn sketches animated to puppet-like gestures marked by repetition and rigidity. And the director uses this rigidity to great effect in The Rook. The kamikaze match (which actually sticks religiously to the rules of the game), right till its recursive, anti-climactic showdown is full of absurdities, not only in the way each move is presented, but also in the playing strategy itself. I don’t know if I should understand it as a remark on the absurdity of war or on the absurdity of the game, but Sadeghi sure harnesses the absurdity of the medium to its fullest here.

(Posted as part of the ongoing Iranian Film Blogathon at Sheila O’Malley‘s. Do check out the rich collection there)

February 22, 2011

Ellipsis #32

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Iran, Ellipsis | Tags: Abbas Kiarostami, Gozaresh, Kurosh Afsharpanah, marital dramas, marriage-in-crisis films, Shohreh Aghdashloo, The Report |
1 Comment

Gozaresh (1977) (The Report)
Abbas Kiarostami
Farsi

The Report is a typical example of the marriage-in-crisis film that many great filmmakers seem to have made during the early part of their careers. Such a gesture is usually channeled as critical reassessment, a personal confession, wish-fulfillment or even self-justification. But, for Kiarostami here, it becomes an opportunity to telescope the social situation of the country into a deceptively simple marital drama. In many ways, The Report reminds us of the remarkable vérité films of early Tarr, especially in its preoccupation with diminishing and often suffocating urban spaces. Kiarostami’s film is not about stasis, as many films of the subgenre are, but about disintegration. It situates itself at a narrative and historic point where institutions can no longer hold together. Corruption reigns supreme in the public sphere and money becomes the focal point of almost all discussions. The stuffy, noisy streets of Tehran seem as though they are already in a state of decay. It appears as if there can be no way out but downward – for the society and the family. Kiarostami rarely films his couple (Kurosh Afsharpanah and Shohreh Aghdashloo) together in the frame. Like Certified Copy (2010), which is the closest film to this one in terms of scenario, the director severs the protagonists from each other with his shot patterns and blocking, with the only holding force being their little girl child. Kiarostami also employs a large number of static, fixed compositions with judicious use of walls and doors so as to allow long chunks of action unfold within the same shot. This sense of mundanity is compounded by a soundtrack without any music and consisting of only direct sound, which would later become the director’s forte in the 90s.

(This is a small contribution to Sheila O’Malley’s Iranian Film Blogathon (Feb 21-27), which has already received a number of terrific entries)

February 21, 2011

Short Films #10

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Iran, Short Films | Tags: Abbas Kiarostami, Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Colours, Kanun, Rangha |
[3] Comments

Rangha (1976) (aka Colours)
Abbas Kiarostami
Iran
15 Min.

I’m usually wary of tracing auteurist strains in a filmmaker’s very early works since this retrospective ‘curve fitting’ not only turns out contrived but imposes an unwarranted burden on the filmmaker by not allowing him to change with time. One of Abbas Kiarostami’s earliest short films, Colours (1976), both reveals traces of his subsequent preoccupations and stands antithetical to many facets that would become his trademark. Made for the film division of Kanun (Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults established by the Shah’s wife in the 60s), Colours is a educational documentary, possible targeted at the very young, which urges the children to discover various colours in natural and manmade objects around them. Like Satyajit Ray, Kiarostami started out as a graphic artist and Colours appears closer to that vocation than filmmaking. Presenting various items head on, more often than not amidst a white background, with a narrator describing what is shown, the short is completely preoccupied with objects and surfaces (like his very latest, can we say?). The soundtrack, with its redundant voiceover and a corny, loopy soundtrack is in direct contrast to Kiarostami’s later, minimalist ventures. But Colours is also one of the very few completely non-narrative films by the director, who seems to be more at ease here working with still life than live action. Kiarostami’s still on experimental grounds here and the Centre seems to have provided ample opportunities for that, even (especially?) after the revolution. The film ends with shots of drawings on a blackboard, which has quite easily become emblematic of Kiarostami’s early works at the Centre, the works of the Kanun, in general, and even Iranian cinema, in a way.

P.S: There’s an extended scene with toy racecars tracing curves on plastic tracks – so redolent and so-not-redolent of the director’s later works.

(This is a token contribution to Sheila O’Malley‘s Iranian Film Blogathon, which I’m eagerly looking forward to. Get over there pronto!)

February 20, 2011

Ellipsis #31

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Ellipsis | Tags: 7 Khoon Maaf, 7 Murders Forgiven, Irrfan Khan, John Abraham, Naseeruddeen Shah, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Priyanka Chopra, Ruskin Bond, Usha Uthup, Vishal Bhardwaj |
[2] Comments

7 Khoon Maaf (2011) (7 Murders Forgiven)
Vishal Bhardwaj
Hindi

So we have two high-profile filmmakers releasing two remarkably symmetric films this weekend which wear their inspirations on their sleeves. Both these similarly structured films give us serial killers traumatized by childhood events. But, while Menon’s movie is like gazing into a fish bowl, Bhardwaj’s is akin to peeping through the door lens. It is not the protagonist, Susanna (who befittingly misses an emotional arc, played by Priyanka Chopra) but the world around her that is distorted in 7 Khoon Maaf. Right from the beginning, we are told, she is in search of father figures (through her six husbands) to replace her deceased biological father (which, of course, culminates with her marriage to the Son, her ordinance, which wittily distorts her line about drinking her husband’s blood). Along the way, she seems to see herself as a feminist twist on Christ (which goes well with Bhardwaj’s not-so-singular brand of militant feminism) who suffers for the sake of those who follow. She seeks forgiveness for her seven sins, her seventh sin being exactly this misinterpretation of Christ’s mission, to militarize Jesus, to bring him to earth, to replace forgiveness with retribution, to ‘kill’ him. However, where Bhardwaj’s film trumps Menon’s is that, although it lends itself to easy Lacanian reading like Naaygal, 7 Khoon never attempts to reduce characters to psychoanalytical toolboxes. Spanning several decades (Bhardwaj clumsily attempts to contextualize the narrative, using political events while, given the themes, he should have done precisely the opposite: collapse history and let anachronism reign), 7 Khoon hops across film subgenres of the west (costume drama, period film, concert picture etc.) all the while having a very ‘Indian’ heart (The commentary on Indian patriarchy almost swaps targets in the Russian segment), as if remarking upon Bollywood’s skin deep aping of Hollywood cinema. This masking of ‘Indian-ness’ by ‘European-ness’ and of (regressive) actualities by (progressive) surfaces and of the present seemingly repeating itself to eternity is, ultimately, is what 7 Khoon deals with. And it deals with pretty well, even if one gets the feeling that a rewrite would have done more good.

(Image Courtesy: Fun Cracker)

February 19, 2011

Ellipsis #30

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Ellipsis, Kollywood | Tags: Gowtham Vasudev Menon, Midnight Dogs, Nadunisi Naaygal, Sameera Reddy, Veera |
1 Comment

Nadunisi Naaygal (2011)
Gowtham Vasudev Menon
Tamil

Part rip-off, part tribute to Psycho (1960) – right from the plot to the up-down movements of objects and the camera – Gowtham Vasudev Menon’s Nadunisi Naaygal (“Midnight Dogs”) charts the activities of a soft-speaking serial killer, Veera, who lives with his (surrogate) surrogate mother in a mansion consisting of, well, three floors. Menon’s film is nearly as much about transgression – of mores, of geographical boundaries, of industry idioms – as Hitchcock’s picture was about deviation – of the narrative, of normalcy, of sexuality. Menon has said elsewhere that this is a film based on a true story, while it’s actually a pseudo-horror based on the superficies of a pseudo-science (spare me the Oedipii and the Electras), where, unlike the finale of Psycho, it is the director who plays the shrink all along, deeming deviance as just a product of other deviant practices. (Naaygal has one of the ugliest directorial schemes of recent times, with subjective and objective reality clearly delineated by awkward POV patterns). Menon has also proclaimed that Nadunisi Naaygal is his middle-finger-to-all film. True. It is, in fact, the film in which he actually wants his audience to hate him, to consider him as an outlaw. (He succeeds by leaps and bounds: He’s written a character that invites unanimous derision). Evidently, the director recognizes himself in the central character – a psychotic woman-slayer – which is only partly acknowledged by the employment of POV shots for both the filmmaker-killer and the audience-victims. (Tarantino nods abound, starting with the title). This is a refreshingly skewed perspective from and of a director who has been routinely killing off his lead women in his films. With Naaygal, like Veera, he almost denies that he had anything to do with his previous blockbusters at all. May be he’ll deny later that he had nothing to do with Naaygal as well. May be this is a turning point in his career. May be it’s the end of it. May be he hears those dogs howl at midnight.

(Image Courtesy: Chennai 365)

February 12, 2011

Capturing The Spangles

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA | Tags: American Underground, Anarchist films, Flash texts in Star Spangled to Death, Jack is the Spirit Not of Life But of Living, Jack Smith, Jerry Is Suffering, Jerry Sims, Ken Jacobs, Star Spangled to Death, syndicalism on film, The Height of Folly |
[10] Comments

“A film adrift in the cosmos… A film found on a dump.” – Week End (1967, JLG)

Whatever one attempts to say about Ken Jacobs’ sprawling, pointed, majestic, self-deprecating, playful, serious, enrapturing, frustrating underground work Star Spangled to Death (1957-2004), apart from becoming contradictory, only turns out reductive, for it is an unwieldy beast of a film. A relentlessly fragmented and remarkably sustained reflection on war, xenophobia, imperialism, religion, ideology, racism, resistance, justice and truth – although always in the American context – Jacobs’ film is simultaneously an anarchist critique of the USA and a celebration of its (possible) glories. Constructed using a dizzying amount of news reels, second rate TV specials, Disney cartoons, excerpts from early Hollywood productions, political speeches and amateur footage, among others, Star Spangled to Death is both a history of America constructed using its mass media and a deconstruction of historiography based on mass media. Rather than trying to write an inevitably insufficient review of this massive film, I chose to embark on a much more mechanical, much more pointless, much more painstaking, much more fascinating and, really, much more rewarding exercise.

For the uninitiated, Jacobs plants hundreds of single frame flash texts – besides equally elusive shards of images and sounds – throughout the seven hour film, each of which lingers for about one twenty-fifth of a second on the screen, into the film. These texts perform the paradoxical function of aggravating the slippery nature of the film and presenting its ideas cut and dried. Of course, this hit-and-run approach is anything but subtle. It’s more like Freudian seepage from the film’s unconscious to its surface. Much like how Jacobs counterpoints narratives of the establishment with the film’s overall structure and trajectory, these texts prove to be the perfect foil to whatever assertions these dominating materials make. There’s another paradox at work here. One one hand, Jacobs’ film – specifically these flash texts – is one that’s uniquely encoded in the film format. These frames – with fixed position in time and space – are much easier to zero in on a reel of film than on an intangible stream of binary numbers. One the other, it’s only a home video that provides one the luxury to navigate the film with ease in order to grab these frames. If cinephilia, in a sense, is defined as an odyssey to capture for life that elusive frame, Star Spangled To Death literalizes the notion and takes it to its extreme.

There is probably no point to this undertaking at all, but I do think it will be useful for viewers like me who actually feel the itch to read all those transitory intertitles without choking the remote buttons. Of course, I must add that I might have missed a number of frames here. Please feel free to point them out to me or, if possible, provide the missing screenshots. (One of the ones here, thanks to the copy of the film I have, is smudged as well. I’d be grateful if anyone could provide a replacement). Without further ado, I present you those notorious twelve and a half seconds of Star Spangled to Death which, I’m guessing, only a few might have seen in its fragmented entirely. Or whatever.

[Readers who are already cursing me (and will be cursing, until this post ages off the main page) for the increased load times, here (6.7Mb) is the collection in a downloadable pdf format]

Chapter 1: Jack Is The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living

Chapter 2: Jerry Is Suffering

Chapter 3: The Height Of Folly

February 8, 2011

Ellipsis #29

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Ellipsis | Tags: aamir khan, Dhobi Ghat, films based on Mumbai, Kiran Rao, Kriti Malhotra, Monica Dogra, Mumbai Diaries, Prateik Babbar |
[15] Comments

Dhobi Ghat (2010) (Mumbai Diaries)
Kiran Rao
Hindi/English

Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat (2010) is a film about Mumbai (duh!). More precisely, it’s a film about the impossibility of making a film about Mumbai, an impressionistic look at the city which argues that it is the only possible way to look at the city at all. Everyone in Rao’s film is an artist. No, not just the four lead characters but everyone – even the myriad Jia-esque immigrant workers who literally build the city’s canvas – is an artist here, albeit removed from reality to varying degrees. If Rao’s Mumbai is the film crew, the sea at its end is the cinema screen, before whose stoic permanence social divisions vanish. (One character notes that the sea air smells of people’s desires). Everyone, and specifically the quartet at the centre, seems to attempt to find in art a subliminal hope of transcending class, of being on a level ground. Arun (Aamir Khan) – the film critic figure – can relate to the city space only through the arts. Shai (Monica Dogra) desires to level all spaces through her photography. Munna (Prateik Babbar) – ever at right angles to life – dreams of hitching to the mainstream through cinema. Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra) seeks to rationalize her condition through her art and hopes it will outlive her. Alas, right from the first scene, reality seeps in to foil such utopian plans. Rao, likewise, has a keen eye for urban and screen spaces, dividing and subletting the frame to emphasize the fragmentation that exists on multiple levels. This fragmentation is integral to Dhobi Ghat, for it is terrified of a complete view of the city, suggesting that a total understanding of the city – with its frightening disparities, unspoken calamities and tragicomic ironies – can only result in deep silence – of acknowledgement, of paralysis and of powerlessness. Like Arun’s last painting, like the old woman next door, like the sea.

February 5, 2011

Ellipsis #28

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Ellipsis, Kollywood | Tags: Cheran, Myskkin, Yuddham Sei |
[4] Comments

Yuddham Sei (2011)
Myshkin
Tamil

Myshkin’s fourth feature, Yuddham Sei (“Make War”), is a film in reverse. The Jake Gittes-like protagonist of the film JK (a tribute to philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthy, from whose idea of the individual as the means of social change the film seems to take off from) maneuvers through an inverted world, as is literalized in the numerous garish-yet-impressive upside-down compositions. This is a place where everything revolves around missing persons (rather, missing parts of body), where deaths are the most commonplace of events and where people are more living than dead. JK is played by director Cheran – a casting choice that might be the wisest by Myshkin so far – whose very countenance points to a man whose eyes have been plucked out and soul sucked off through the sockets. An undead hero – not a cold professional as other movies of the genre might indicate – like Melville’s last lead character, he sleepwalks through the narrative space, witnessing physical fragility with utmost equanimity, until his lost past resurrects him back to life, with all its emotional vulnerability and subjectivity. By presenting grotesque instances of violence before revealing them to be calculated acts of revenge against a much more diabolical scheme of things (the sort of emotional swing that Mani Ratnam’s latest failed to achieve), Myshkin indulges in much what-is-justice kind of philosophizing – a la Irreversible (2002) without the flashy puckishness – calling into question the ways of the law (although he cops out by revealing the unjust elements to be merely aberrations in an otherwise healthy establishment). As if providing a corrective note to Anjathey (2008), which might have seemed like valorizing the police force – Myshkin keeps alienating his lead man from institutional justice, seemingly arguing for some abstract notion of individualized justice, even at the risk of glorifying violence. And yes, the legs are all there.

(Image Courtesy: The Cinema News)

January 29, 2011

2010: At A Glance

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Super Scenes
[16] Comments

January 23, 2011

Ellipsis #27

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of China, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: Japanese documentary, Kaminoyama, Manzan Benigaki, Nagisa Oshima, Red Persimmons, Shinsuke Ogawa, Xiaolian Peng |
[2] Comments

Manzan Benigaki (2001) (Red Persimmons)
Shinsuke Ogawa, Xiaolian Peng
Japanese

Red Persimmons (2001) begins with a movie crew watching the fascinating A Visit To Ogawa Productions (1981), in which the late Shinsuke Ogawa, that Japanese filmmaker who pushed the limits of documentary filmmaking like no other, talks to Nagisa Oshima about his then current project A Japanese Village (1982), a work that is so oppressively modest that it turns out avant-garde. This absence of Ogawa haunts Red Persimmons, which Chinese filmmaker Xiaolian Peng helped complete, especially when it uses on-screen text instead of Ogawa’s usual, casual voiceover. Less digressive than the typical Ogawa picture but as sensitive and attentive to the rhythms of the countryside as any of his works, Red Persimmons attempts to trace the history of Kaminoyama with the science and commerce of persimmon farming, which forms the lifeline of the village, at its focal point. We see how personal and collective histories are tied to the production of this fruit, how persimmons have use, exchange and even symbolic value for the villagers and how the technology that develops alongside evolves primarily to address necessities and reduce effort than for expansion or multiplication of revenue. We observe, through the course of the film, that the persimmon itself becomes representative of ‘the Japanese village’ in the way it goes from being an organic part of a lifestyle, through being a commodity under simple capitalism and then a fiercely competitive economy, to gradually losing its ritualistic qualities and finally ending up as a low-demand produce. Beautiful, like a Dovzhenko film, humble, essential.