Bruno Dumont | The Seventh Art

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: Aleksandre Koberidze, Babi Yar. Context, Bellum the Daemon of War, Bruno Dumont, David Herdies, Dear Chantal, Dieter Bachmann, Dāvis Sīmanis, france, Georg Götmark, Jordan Lord, Juanjo Giménez, Léa Seydoux, Maria Speth, Marta Nieto, Mr. Bachmann and His Class, Nicolás Pereda, Oscar Isaac, Out of Sync, Paul Schrader, Sergei Loznitsa, Shared Resources, The Card Counter, The Year Before the War, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? |
Leave a Comment

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 20^th century, suggests Sīmanis’ singular, absurd period comedy, the 20^th 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 20^th 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

August 23, 2019

Climax (2018) + Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of France, Review | Tags: Bruno Dumont, Charles Peguy, Climax, Gaspar Noé, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, Lise Leplat Prudhomme |
Leave a Comment

Climax

So Love was a one-off misfire where Gaspar Noé’s singular style came undone under the banality of the material. That’s partly because tracing the journey of a romantic relationship from inception to breakup requires an engagement with character psychology over a longer period of narrative time—something at odds with Noé’s cinematic temperament, primarily geared to short-term subjective phenomena. With Climax, flamboyant and stylish to the hilt, the filmmaker comes back to a narrative of a limited timeframe, in which character development and emotional maturity play little part. Unfolding almost in real time, the film centres on a dance troupe’s final rehearsal the evening before they leave on a US tour and the pre-departure party that follows.

Climax opens with a tracking shot of a woman crawling in the snow. The camera is drone-mounted and photographs the woman from overhead, producing a flat visual field. It circles the woman as she crawls and cries, circle being the chief visual motif of the film. The end credits roll, making it the second film at the 2018 Cannes festival to force the viewer to sit through the générique de fin. There’s an expectation that the story will unfurl backwards from this point as in Irreversible. Instead, Noé cuts to a series of talking heads taped on VHS. It’s a recording of the film’s actors talking about dance, drugs and sex. The footage plays on a CRT television surrounded by movie DVDs and books on cinema, art and philosophy. We aren’t sure who the viewer is, just as we aren’t sure whether there’s an orchestrating hand behind the spiking of the sangria at the party. Climax doesn’t have a single reverse shot; its participants are like fish in a tank observed by an omniscient eye, itself invisible. The filmmaker plays god, introducing an element of chaos into this world and studying its repercussions.

The dance sequence that follows the interviews—part of a longer, unbroken, 12-minute shot—is brilliant in the way individual performances find their place in the larger piece. Outside of a few coordinated passages, they are all freestyle, drawing from different genres, the only commonality between them being the audio beat. The performers react to the music instinctively and improvise, demonstrating that dancing is writing with the body just as filmmaking is writing with the camera. The number is choreographed for the camera which shifts axes as the piece proceeds. The rehearsal ends five minutes in, but Noé’s camera keeps going, following specific characters as they move around the floor to talk to others. This continuously shifting perspective parallels the dance number we’ve just seen and sets up the notion of Climax as one long dance sequence.

Throughout, the film emphasizes the similarity between dance choreography and filmmaking. The viewer of TV interviews in the beginning could be either the choreographer of Noé himself. Like choreography, filmmaking is collective writing that involves the manipulation of performer’s bodies in space according to a set of ideas. Noé’s film unfolds as a chain of pronounced gestures essentially without any meaning. Like the dance, it’s an instance of abstract writing that only intermittently has a signifying function. The dancers’ various moves, though referring to sexual and violent acts at times, are purely automatic, subconscious interventions that are performed, filmed and assembled together on instinct. The film is heavily improvised, made up as it proceeds (it was shot in sequence), and is one long tapestry of gestural work only symbolically liked to real-world phenomena.

The dance floor is a space where desire is fluid and, while participants have personal preferences, there’s a sense that any person in this twenty-odd group of young men, women and non-binary people could end up with anyone else. Noé chains together several bits of conversations—all filmed in two-shots—where characters talk about those off-screen. These dialogues enter increasingly sticky territory, until we discover that the sangria was laced with LSD. The dancers go unhinged after this point, as does the camera, and we follow their self-destruction in a virtuoso, 42-minute-long shot. It’s an impressive piece of conceptual art, with an impeccable sense of space delineation, whose force derives from the tension between the unseen, internal struggle of the characters and its external manifestation. That said, this is not In Vanda’s Room and Noé is moreover not interested in documentary. His camera choreography imitates the loss of direction the actors might be experiencing and unwittingly turns Climax into a cautionary film about drugs.

But the more crucial idea Noé seems to be working towards is the importance of discipline to artmaking. When the dancers go off the rails under the influence, and their worst instincts surface, we are surprised that it’s the same people who created the beautiful opening dance sequence of the film. The rehearsal’s rigour, singular determination and sense of communion with others gives way to survivalist violence and rapaciousness. Instinct gives birth to art, but when left undisciplined by craft and intellect, it enables the most repulsive human tendencies to flourish. Climax is Noé’s stab at the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic. It’s also him assuring the viewer he’s not simply screwing around.

Jeanette

There are several contradictions in the TV version of Jeanette, Bruno Dumont’s reimagining of Charles Peguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc as a neorealist musical. Firstly, there’s the protagonist herself: Jeanette (Lise Leplat Prudhomme) is only eight years old—not yet Jean d’Arc—but is torn apart by the poverty and suffering of the peasants around her. She sees that their souls are damned, and is disappointed by their apathy towards the English siege of France. She sings out her torment, addressing them to God, who sends forth the saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret to inform her of her mission. She keeps this annunciation from everyone else and it’s only three years later, when the English have besieged Orléans, that she assumes the responsibility. With the help of her uncle, she leaves home to meet the Dauphin of France and convince him about taking on the English.

The incongruence created by a child uttering Peguy’s complex, incantatory verse as though in a school recitation is amplified by Dumont’s stylistic choices. Jeanette is broadly naturalist in that it is made with amateur actors, real locations and direct sound. The story is mostly Jeanette conversing with her friend Hauviette (Lucile Gauthier) and madame Gervaise (one character played by two actors, Aline and Élise Charles, à la Buñuel). Like Pasolini before him, Dumont clothes his actors in plain outfits, there’s very little psychology in line delivery of his amateur actors and the landscape is elemental. The compositions are simple, even rudimentary, and veer on the painterly when the actors are filmed against the sky. As much as Straub, Pasolini or Oliveira, Jeanette recalls the theatre with its single perspective, single décor, improvised performances, and marked-out character entries and exits.

This visual asceticism, however, is tipped over by Dumont’s use of heavy metal music to which his actors sing, not always in pitch, beat or meter. The filmmaker has stated that this lack of finesse is the point, music and dance manifesting in bodies unprepared for them being the essence of Jeanette’s preordination. Characters bang their heads to bass guitar riffs, leap around to perform flips and splits. Dumont finds an intersection between the highs offered by metal music and Jeanette’s religious transports; cutting off the score, it would appear that her ecstasy is authentic. There is also a magical excursion in the appearance of the levitating saints, and absurd turns such as Hauviette walking bent over like a crab. Jeanette’s speech is all about the damnation of the soul, but Dumont’s camera is firmly fixed on Jeanette’s physicality: the way she clutches her garb, her bare feet hopping in sand and her unruly hair. Her perennial doubt and turmoil are in contrast with the constant sun illuminating the countryside—Dumont transposes Jean’s historical birth region of Lorraine onto his own native Nord and the film is shot at a point from which England is visible.

Jeanette provides specific pleasures through its many aesthetic tensions. Peguy’s text, even when presented as a rock musical, can be challenging to penetrate. The film’s sincere intention and anachronistic method situate it somewhere between satire and solemn drama, and I’m not so sure that Dumont really succeeds on either front. The result is merely quaint. Devoid of the socially-conscious edge of Lil’ Quinquin and Slack Bay, Jeanette feels frozen as a concept. Dumont’s intention is perhaps to rescue Joan of Arc from the National Front’s appropriation of the figure. His film teases out the human aspect of Jeanette. Her lies to her friends and parents in the quest for her personal truth register like but one instance of an eternal teenage condition. But neither making her a universal icon nor asserting her Christian piety is going to override the fact that she’s associated with the French national identity – a topic that I hope Dumont tackles in the second part.

January 1, 2015

Favorite Films Of 2014

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Bulgaria, Cinema of France, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Hollywood, Lists | Tags: Adieu Au Langage, Al doilea joc, Bronx Obama, Bruno Dumont, Corneliu Porumboiu, Eric Baudelaire, False Harmonies, Faux Accords, Goodbye To Language, Jean Luc Godard, Kevin Lee, Kristina Grozeva, Letters To Max, Li'l Quinquin, Maxim Gvindjia, Melbourne, Nima Javidi, P'tit Quinquin, Paul Vecchiali, Petar Valchanov, Peyman Maadi, Ryan Murdock, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Lesson, The Second Game, Transformers 4, Transformers: The Premake, Urok, Wes Anderson |
[20] Comments

While my writing on this blog came to a grinding halt in 2014, watching and reading hit an all-time high, with the year practically spent in the eight feet between my bookshelf and computer screen. The films that I really liked last year consisted of some boldly adventurous mainstream Indian features (Haider, Dedh Ishqiya, Pisaasu, Jigarthanda), strong arthouse dramas (Waste Land, Two Days, One Night, Clouds Of Sils Maria, A Midsummer’s Fantasia), experiments in participative ethnography charting newer territories (Episode Of The Sea, Joy Of Man’s Desiring, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long), intelligent and reflexive modernist works (Actress, The Salt Of The Earth), classic fly-on-the-wall documentaries (National Gallery, Of Men And War, Maidan), purely formalist delights (Journey To The West, Panchromes I, II, III, Khan Khanne) and nearly unclassifiable mysteries without mysteries (Jauja, For The Plasma, Mercuriales). But (nearly) no film of the year, I thought, compared to the best offerings of the previous few years. Here’s hoping for a much richer 2015. As always, only the films that had their world premiere in 2014 are considered for this list. Happy New Year and good luck at the movies.

1. Goodbye To Language (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)

There is a reason why Godard’s explosive ‘second final’ film is called Adieu au langage and not Adieu à la langue: what it seeks to bid farewell to is not any particular language, but the system of language itself – not surprising for a film that attempts to wrestle with half a millennium’s worth of Western perceptual history. In 3D, which he employs like Cézanne employed watercolours, Godard finds a tool that can demolish the Albertian perspective of 2D images, decenter the human spectator and ultimately dethrone anthropocentric perception as the preeminent way of observing the world. The result is a torrent of phenomenological incidents in which stereoscopic images reinforce and undermine one another, stereophonic monologues diffuse into dialogue and ‘stereotemporal’ narrative shards respond to each other tangentially. Goodbye to Language is a investigation into the 3^rd dimension in every sense of the word and sets up a plethora of sonic, visual, narrative and conceptual dialectics to see what the synthesis does to its two constituents. It is an attempt to find a perspective outside language – one of a dog, perhaps. No other film this year animated me and annoyed me as much. More importantly, it snapped me out of a cinephilia-induced intellectual stupor.

2. The Second Game (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)

The simple and cozily domestic setup of Porumboiu’s pseudo-single shot movie – the director and his father bond over a recorded game of televised football, in which the latter was a referee – belies the complex chain of implications that this physically hermetic film sets in motion. Running for exactly the length of one football match (played between two governmental bodies in 1988 on a spectacular snow covered ground), The Second Game is part-filial wish fulfillment of watching his father at work, part-review of sports aesthetics under communism and part-remembrance of an outmoded video technology, all filtered through a present day perspective. Striking an equivalence between his profession and his father’s, in both of which players have to be directed and decisions have to be made on the spot, the film is likely a reflection on whether or not the filmmaker has temperamentally inherited anything from dad, whose view of sports as perishable commodity is antithetical to his son’s view of it as art. It is more importantly one of the most intelligent and productive instances of appropriation art, with Porumboiu refashioning out of obscure sports footage a trademark film that is “long”, where “nothing happens” and which is nonetheless highly suspenseful.

3. Transformers: The Premake (Kevin Lee, USA)

If what Porumboiu accomplishes sitting in front of a TV screen was amazing, what Chicago-based Kevin Lee does sitting in front of a computer is downright revelatory. Weaving together hundreds of internet videos about the making of Paramount Pictures’ Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), uploaded by common folk in America and Hong Kong and official news agencies in mainland China, Lee develops a brilliant and scary picture of corporate cultural hegemony in which seemingly the entire world bends over backwards to affiliate itself, consciously or otherwise, with the American conglomerate. Imbibing the spirit of Harun Farocki and Theodor Adorno (who, not coincidentally, lend their names to Lee’s HDDs) respectively in its tracing of modern forms of labour and commodity production and its critique of the darker side of popular entertainment, Premake reveals a post-globalized, post-nationalist Hollywood whose financial motor is now set to ensure China-friendly films to capitalize a booming market – a pertinent reminder that the influence of patronage on aesthetics is strongest in cinema of all arts. It is a short, sharp alarm call about the all-pervasive nature of Big Money, which can forge adherents out of the very people it has run over.

4. Bronx Obama (Ryan Murdock, USA)

Ryan Murdock’s bountiful Kickstarter-funded documentary about Bronx-based Puerto Rican single father and Obama-impersonator Louis Ortiz is an oblique tale of possession and haunting. For the recession-hit Ortiz, Obama’s ascension to power is not only a story of national hope, but also a personal one that rides the coattails of Project Merchandise Obama. Murdock’s richly thematic film ties his fate to that of the POTUS in heady ways that demonstrate the double-edged nature of power: while his daughter can’t take for granted the privileges that the president’s can, Ortiz, unlike Obama, has infinitely more power in being able to stop playing the president any time he wants. It is also a snapshot of a common man struggling to maintain his dignity and identity under the weight of celebrity, for Ortiz has to not only become a receptacle of repressed racial hatred towards the president, but actively undercut his beliefs and parody his idol for one-percenter entertainment. When Ortiz looks at his hero speaking on television, he is at the same time looking at a mirror, continuously calibrating his speech, gesture and gait to match those of his doppelgänger. A Kagemusha for the 21^st century.

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, USA)

It seems to me that, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson set himself his biggest challenge to date. If making films with genuine affect wasn’t tough enough in a postmodern art climate where unironic approach to material is generally considered reactionary, his new movie assigns him the task of conveying nostalgia for a world doubly lost to our post-ideological age, in which the only valid nostalgia is the nostalgia for a time when nostalgia was even possible. The Matrioshka doll-like construction of the film aptly serves this objective by employing nested frameworks, each set in crucial periods of 20^th century Western history, that bring this lost world closer to us instead of distancing it. The result is a deeply felt work about the enduring value of categories such as truth, beauty and basic human decency, really, which sets Anderson apart from most of his equally flamboyant peers, whose malevolent or agnostic universes seem to reject the spiritually uplifting side of art. If ever Renoir’s faith in Human Goodness in The Grand Illusion (1937) felt as being trapped in a time capsule beyond contemporary access, Anderson’s film releases it back into our epoch.

6. Letters To Max (Eric Baudelaire, France)

“Dear Max, Are you there?” asks Baudelaire in the first of his 74 “impossible letters” to his Abkhazian friend and ex-diplomat, Maxim Gvindjia, addressing, in effect, both his interlocutor and his country. This existential question haunts the entirety of the film, which investigates what it is that really makes a nation. Is it the spectacular rituals and glorious anthems reinforcing nationhood? The time-worn buildings and landscape that give it a unity of character? The dubious accreditation of superpowers? Or is it indeed an imagined community forming an identity in opposition to ‘the other’? Such a dialogue between the material and the abstract is woven right into the structure of Letters to Max, where the very possibility of the physical letters that Baudelaire dispatches from France reaching Abkhazia gestures towards a recognition of its existence. Baudelaire’s film is partly an amicable correspondence between amis sans frontières and partly an interview between a bureaucrat and a political critic in which Eric’s broaching uncomfortable questions thwart Max’s desire to paint a unblemished picture of Abkhazia, putting him in a double bind paralleling that of his country: a nation torn apart as much historically between change and preservation as it is geographically.

7. False Harmonies (Paul Vecchiali, France)

Veteran French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali made not one but two sublime films in 2014, the other being the Dostoyevsky adaptation, White Nights on the Pier. In False Harmonies, Vecchiali plays a man who is grieving the death of his long time partner. He chances upon email exchanges that the latter had had with an anonymous user on an online gay dating website and imagines the texts being read out to him by this unknown young man, who is played by two different actors depending on the tone and content of the messages. On one level, False Harmonies is an intelligent modernist exercise that charts its own making, wherein the script of the film is its very subject and the elaborate central scene of letter-reading is, in effect, the audition for the actors playing that role. But, like White Nights, it is also a work of soaring honesty about the essentially limited nature of romantic relationships. It suggests the frightful probability that the person you have spent half your life with might be the one you know the least; that we play roles in a relationship, sure, but we also seek out other roles to complement it; that getting out of character might be as important as getting in.

8. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)

In its conception, Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin, made as a four-part television miniseries, recalls the slyly subversive films of Robert Altman in his heyday. Picture this: 1.4 million French folks tune in to Arte TV expecting a comic broth of northern hicks, bumbling detectives and enfants terribles. What they get instead is a progressively morbid feuilleton about an ersatz Old Testament God meting out gory punishment for vaguely defined transgressions and a community with a twisted idea of moral propriety willing to shield this vigilante who seems to give potent form to their own thwarted drives. This is fine, topical screenwriting that responds to the rapid rise of the far-right in France, portraying a nation whose barely-repressed xenophobic streak during and before WW2 rears its ugly head in the present as Islamophobia. (Quinquin seems so tailor-made for India, where similar political upheavals have taken place and where a psychopath with a perverted sense of bovine justice is very much in the realm of possibilities,) It’s a world where pre-adolescents inherit, internalize and put into practice adult beliefs and rituals without reflection. Despite its humour and frivolity, darkness looms in the future that Dumont’s film lurches into.

9. The Lesson (Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, Bulgaria)

The debut feature by Grozeva and Valchanov, like Two Days, One Night, works within the melodramatic form, moving its protagonist from point A to B through a series of progressively challenging obstacles. But while I found the Dardennes’ formidable and formally astute picture nonetheless a tad too ‘clean’, in the way it deliberately takes an irresolvable ethical quandary as a starting point and keeps underscoring a globalized Europe, The Lesson seems to me to retain the messiness of some of their earlier great films. On one level, it is a simple parable about the fallibility of authority, but it is also an uncompromising portrait of the tyrannical nature of all forms of social organizations, be they human systems with conscientious individuals at the helm or faceless bureaucratic ones with no vested interests. Slowly shifting its narrative space from the classroom to the metropolis with an enviable economy of exposition, The Lesson facilitates a double-edged critique that argues that the values taught in the class are but modeled on the values the state imposes on us and that what the state demands of us is to be ideal pupils in a classroom that is less than ideal.

10. Melbourne (Nima Javidi, Iran)

This remarkable debut feature by Nima Javidi naturally reminds one of Asghar Farhadi’s films, with its strong sense of drama, tremendous actor interpretations and mature writing that does not compromise the integrity of any of the characters. But there is also something particularly “new generational” about it in the way it harnesses the choice in front of affluent young Tehranians: to stay in Iran and own up its problems or to leave the country to start life anew. The inciting event in the film that dramatizes this choice stops the train of life dead in its tracks, exposing its protagonists to the unbearable “nowness” of the present. It is a terribly universal predicament in which time freezes around the material reality before you and all plans for the future and memories of the past seem like a remote, inaccessible country, a crisis that makes you want to either regress in time (“wish mother were here”) or to jump to a future day when the clouds have cleared, a moment where husband and wife see each other’s innermost character in all its stark nakedness. Though the couple might physically arrive at the eponymous neverland, the utopia it once represented is irrevocably lost.

The Seventh Art