November 27, 2020

2020 Roundup #4

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of the Philippines, Cinema of the USA, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Autofiction (Laida Lertxundi)

Autofiction, the first of Basque-origin artist Lertxundi’s films I’ve seen, opens with an establishment shot of a city skyline. A while later, we are on the sunlit roads of the metropolis, where a cavalcade of police motorbikes prepares for a rally. Cut to bodies of various unconscious women being dragged on concrete and loaded on to a truck. Before we can figure out what’s happening, we are presented with short testimonies of women talking about motherhood, abortion and loneliness, testimonies that are cut with vignettes from the MLK day parade in the city. The bright pastel colours that compose the studio the women are photographed in, combined with the big, yellow typeface of the title and the sunny outdoors, suggest a pastiche of cheerful Reaganite suburbia. At one point, a woman crawls out of her living room couch into her large, suburban backyard to settle into a foetal position under the sun. But what’s the connection? I presume that the crimes taking place in broad daylight, whose perpetrators we don’t see, tie metaphorically with the women’s accounts, in which post-maternal deracination, post-abortive disorientation and post-separation depression are all conceived in terms of personal choices and experiences, independent of structural forces conditioning them. By intercutting these testimonies with a civil rights rally, Lertxundi is restoring the political character to these personal experiences. At the end, a rectangular opening on a card frames parts of women’s bodies separately, hinting at the unity behind these fragments, just as Lertxundi evokes the socio-political unity shaping individual experiences. The title, moreover, implies that Lertxundi might be articulating details of her own life through these accounts, thereby scattering her subjectivity and rendering it interchangeable with those of the women she films.

Orphea (Alexander Kluge, Khavn)

In Orphea, 88-year-old Kluge and 47-year-old Khavn revive the Orpheus-Euridice myth as an avant garde punk musical. In this version, Orpheus becomes a woman named Orphea (Lilith Stangenberg) while Euridice is a man called Euridiko (Ian Madrigal) and the underworld itself is Manila at night time. The filmmakers treat the myth rather loosely, converting it into a string of ‘set pieces’, in which Orphea is either navigating one lair of degenerates after another or reading out lines of Ovid from a teleprompter, or belting out arias and folk tunes in half a dozen languages in front of a matte screen. Unlike Straub’s inconsolable one, Orpheus here seems to get along just fine without Euridice. The result resembles a blithe experimental video game produced by Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Through Orphea’s valiance but also her ultimate impotence, the filmmakers mount something of an elegy for the revolutionary potential of art. One of the suppositions is this: what if, despite Orpheus’ desires, Euridice didn’t want to be rescued? Orphea is regularly transported to wartime USSR, and mourns its countless dead, seeking, like the Soviet ‘biocosmists’, justice for the dead. Towards the end, the present also makes its way into the film in the form of border surveillance footage and refugee camps. The connections are often only suggestive, such as Orphea’s descent in the Lethe river invoking the sea route of contemporary migrants. Strangenberg appears in most every frame and is a hypnotic presence, and there is never a dull moment in the film. Kluge’s heterogenous style—on-screen texts, multiple sub-frames, stop-motion animation, declamatory text readings, archival photos and found footage—goes really well with the atmosphere of pure play. But it is literally a mixed bag where anything goes, so your mileage may vary.

Movie That Invites Pausing (Ken Jacobs)

Ken Jacobs’ film is dedicated to his teacher and abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, whose legendary classes are part of almost every historical account of 20th century art. Hofmann’s painting and pedagogy emphasized the use of flat colour fields to generate the perception of depth, the impression of planes emerging or receding out of the canvas surface. Jacobs finds a filmic equivalent to this idea, producing the illusion of movement and dynamic colour without relying on pro-filmic reality. This is the setup: over the camera lens lies a fabric (or a translucent material) made of a hexagonal beehive pattern that gradually changes orientation over the course of the film. With what seems like a slightly mobile camera, Jacobs appears to photograph a liquid surface, first, and then some crystalline solids lit by stroboscopic light flashing at 120BPM (either that, or he has inserted these ‘black leaders’ artificially). At first, the result registers like the sight of a patterned gold foil slowly melting, but soon the hexagons vanish ‘underneath’ the liquid. Towards the end of the film, however, the fabric/material dominates the foreground, with the hexagons strongly asserting themselves with their dark borders. This receding and the emerging of the textured plane and the creation of new depths ties to what Hoffman called the ‘push and pull’ of the painting, the feeling of airiness that you get when you stare long enough at a Pollock, for instance. The strobing light also causes the hexagons to ripple like the liquid and ‘animates’ the surface into repetitive, gif-image like movements. More than pausing, which allows you to see various hues of gold and orange on the image, it’s speeding it up or slowing it down that the film tempts you to; playing it at 0.25x or 4x its speed illuminates its process better.

Inventing the Future (Isiah Medina)

Inventing the Future, Medina’s second feature, is adapted from a book of the same name by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. The text in question describes the limitations of the current ‘folk politics’ of the left and contrasts it with the long-term vision with which Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society conceived, disseminated and installed Neoliberalism into the ‘political common sense’ through universities and think tanks. An accelerationist outline for the future, it calls for a radical increase in automation that would result in fewer jobs, which, combined with a Universal Basic Income, could help reinvent newer forms of the self and the social. These rather weighty political ideas of the text are concentrated and tossed at us by the soundtrack—as read out by a girl who appears on screen from time to time—which Medina uses as a foundation for some extremely aggressive imagery. His blindingly rapid montage solders together what may be 25,000 shots in such a way that, in many stretches, we barely have time to register what we’re seeing. Even when a locus of anchoring images—crowds, people with phones, Lego blocks, the voiceover girl—constitute a set of identifiable visual motifs, the truculent editing forecloses any possible synthesis. Even the voiceover text, whose relative simplicity allows us to gather ourselves, is periodically chopped up and interrupted by an atonal piano melody or by another overlapping voiceover saying something else. Medina’s film appears to bear a mimetic relation to its source text in the sense that seeks cinematic correlatives to the ideas expressed. While the lightning-fast montage may be said to imitate the cognitive processes of the schizophrenic attention economy, the notion of UBI translates here to a universal access to image-making—thanks to ubiquitous cell phone cameras—which questions the need for new image production and shifts the burden of creative expression onto editing—a proto-Godardian idea. Conceptually strong though it may be, the punishing formal violence of Medina’s film makes it physically painful to watch.

IWOW: I Walk on Water (Khalik Allah)

While it continues and refines the street portraiture of Field Niggas (2015), Khalik “Danny” Allah’s IWOW also addresses the central moral-aesthetic issue weighing down on the earlier film, namely the filmmaker’s fraught relation to subjects whose consent in collaborating with him may not be wholly free and who, by dint of this power imbalance, run the risk of being commodified. As though in response to this problem posed by his obscured authorial position, Khalik places his self squarely at the centre of IWOW, where he claims to be nothing short of Jesus himself. This claim is, of course, tongue-in-cheek as Khalik confesses to having been inspired by the psychedelic mushrooms he keeps consuming. But it’s also a dramatic ruse that allows him to brashly interpret his work of ‘saving people’ in terms of Christian iconography and test it against the charity of his well-meaning family and friends, who are understandably concerned by his radical altruism. Khalik interrogates the limits of his own goodwill through his relation to Frenchie, an elderly Haitian street dweller with a speech impediment and a drug addiction, with whom he has worked over the past seven years. By his own admission, Khalik is a universalist who sees the same human essence binding everyone. To this end, his editing pattern disregards social hierarchies, cutting between extreme close-ups of outcasts and his friends and family in a manner that is often very provocative. Yet his focus is on the stories of those at the absolute bottom of the social ladder living on the streets of Harlem. The reason for this comes by way of an explosive monologue by one of his subjects, who describes the historical process behind the neighbourhood’s impoverishment and the real threat posed by gentrification; we then understand that the people Khalik films won’t be allowed to exist as they are once the district becomes ‘respectable’, i.e. the kind of place that will screen Khalik’s films and organize his exhibitions—a contradiction that the filmmaker reveals to be fully conscious of.

Sportin’ Life (Abel Ferrara)

Ferrara’s new documentary follows works by Daido Moriyama, Vanessa Beecroft, Bret Easton Ellis, Gaspar Noé and Wong Kar-wai as the sixth project commissioned by Saint Laurent as part of their project titled Self, which purportedly celebrates self-expression in the arts. Running for just over one hour, Sportin’ Life combines personal footage from Ferrara’s festival Q&As, media interviews, his concerts as a bass guitarist, television reports, internet videos, sessions from the US congress, Ferrara’s family photographs and clips from his own films. The interview excepts are quite direct and present Ferrara, invariably accompanied by his favourite lead man Willem Dafoe, talking about collaboration, making films with friends and family, and his approach to his craft. Interspersed with them are news reports about the Covid-19 crisis, Donald Trump’s feckless response to it and the mounting deaths in Italy and the US. It’s indeed striking how Ferrara is able to mould such pre-charged, disparate material into recognizable, personal imagery, with its references to Catholicism, its sense of being locked indoors, and the general end-of-days ambiance that pervades so much of his films. It’s as though the world has finally caught up with the dystopian fiction of 4:44 (2011), and so Dafoe gets to deliver his Dalai Lama-like monologue once again. On one level, Ferrara, holed up with his family in his apartment in Rome, is meditating on creation at the time of global destruction. The way he ironically superposes his concert music on low-fi footage of people dying drives home the idea of art’s impuissance in a more unequivocal manner than does Orphea. But the film is also Ferrara’s answer of sorts to public narratives about his oeuvre. In interviews and Q&As, we see journalists attach labels to his work—dark, radical, indie—that Ferrara doesn’t bother acknowledging. With this film, he appears to be simply ‘making his next move’ unmindful of the end game, i.e. responding to his immediate circumstances, remaining alert to the moment and, if we go by the equation ‘Pasolini=Dafoe=Ferrara’, making films as an existential coping mechanism. Towards the end of the film, however, Ferrara casts these sundry elements into a malevolent vision of the universe; the killing of George Floyd, the ensuing riots and violence are all stripped of their immediate, political meaning and shaped into a metaphysical picture of chaos. Maybe Ferrara is playing Nero more thoroughly than he imagines.

 

December 31, 2019

2019 Roundup #12

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Estonia, Cinema of Russia, Cinema of Syria, Cinema of the UK, Cinema of the USA, Hollywood, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Frances Ferguson (Bob Byington)

Was it Beauty that killed the beauty? Frances Ferguson (Kaley Wheless) is pretty, and that is her problem. Byington’s “story of a woman cast adrift in the Midwest” follows the sin, punishment and redemption of Fran, a substitute teacher in a high-school in North Platte, Nebraska. Twenty-five years of age, Fran is going through a failed marriage to a sleazy, loafing husband. Sexual frustration and a mistaken replacement lead to an infatuation with one of the students. In vein of pornographic tales, she arranges to meet the boy secretly, tries to seduce him at a laundromat with a pathetic cheerleader costume (for the “Cougars”) and hooks up with him at the motel. She is promptly arrested, tried for abuse of authority to sexually exploit minors and incarcerated. Frances Ferguson outlines her parole life in detail, structuring it through different penal procedures Fran has to follow: probation debriefing, compulsory group therapy, behavioural counselling, community service, supervised visitation of her daughter, probation exit interview and even voluntary group therapy sessions. Life outside the prison turns out to be even more distressing, uninvited attention for her looks now compounded with the notoriety of being a sex offender. All through the ordeal, the question that arises is whether Fran’s good looks are responsible for her trouble as for the townsfolk’s vivid memory and negative perception of her. Her warden wonders why female sex offenders are invariably pretty. When she tells her therapist that she hardly had authority at the school to abuse, he retorts that beauty is a kind of authority.

The story is recounted by a humorous, at times tendentious, male narrator (Nick Offerman), whose personality constantly comes in way of his objectivity. He contradicts Fran, who also gets to narrate the story from time to time (“joie de vivre”, he corrects Fran who is trying to fake her way through a French class). He inserts his own opinion on the proceedings and acts as a Greek chorus for Fran’s impending tragedy (“Was this breaking the law”? he asks at every turn of Fran’s). The narrator calls to mind Listen Up Philip, but one that’s less world-wise and serious about himself. Byington avoids traditional shot-reverse shot constructions, preferring to build conversations out of separate close ups; the scene of Fran’s interrogation by two police officers is particularly well-edited. He employs an 8-bit video game-like music cue, and a camera that goes out of focus to bid farewell to characters, to funny ends. The sound-bridges and the on-screen texts introducing characters and situations sometimes recall sitcoms, but the comic sense here is much more subtle. It’s still characteristic American sarcasm at work, but Byington pares down the exchanges, cutting away the excess fat that usually burdens American comedies with an insufferable smugness: when the prison cab driver asks Fran to use regular cabs as they are cheaper, she only asks him: “the next time I’m released from prison?”, dropping out the obligatory “sure” at the end. Wheless’ blank-stare performance, accompanied by internal screams, is the visual correlative of this muted comic strategy.

Immortal (Ksenia Okhapkina)

The only contextualizing text of Ksenia Okhapkina’s Immortal speaks of the gulags that were built to industrialize the arctic stretches of Russia. When the camps were opened after Stalin’s death, we’re told, the prisoners stayed back in the town. It’s a telling detail, whether you choose to see it a gesture of helplessness or the product of Pavlovian indoctrination. This three-line title card has more insight to offer than the film that follows. Okhapkina’s 60-minute film presents impressionistic vignettes from one of these erstwhile gulags, a mining town in the arctic still bearing the visual signatures of the Soviet era: image and quotes by Lenin plastered on walls, alongside posters of other Russian heroes. It would seem that it wasn’t just the people who stayed back, but the ideology too. Immortal examines this persistence of ideology in two spaces. In the first, a group of girls are being trained at a ballet school. The instructor asks them to exert themselves and fall in line with others. This exigence, as well as the ballet music, overflows into the second space: a military camp mostly for boys and young men. We see different groups of children and youth being trained for various competences: instruction in training assault rifles, mission simulations, marching drills, shooting practice, screening of nationalistic videos about Soviet kamikaze pilots with promises of concomitant greatness. The boys are insulted by the instructors over looks and behaviour, punished for minor mistakes and questioned over their origin.

The synchronization of military drill to ballet music and the marshalling of soldier bodies into harmonious movement, filmed here in disorienting closeups, brings to mind Beau Travail. Both the ballet (?) and the military camp, it’s revealed, are preparations for an enlistment ceremony on Russia’s Fatherland’s Heroes Day. The show, and the oath, anthem and photography session that follow, seem remnants of Soviet pageantry. Okhapkina pads these two narrative strands with repeated imagery from the town: the spectral to-and-fro of freight trains carrying mined material, hooded miners knocking about in the snow, buses that convey the youth from their house to the camp and back, the dingy corridors of the apartments where they live, a worker using a blowtorch to melt ice off a national monument, an empty factory and the barbed wire fence around it, and so on. The deserted public spaces seem to belong to a ghost town, or a place with no sense of freedom and life. A lone dog barks in the snow, until its fur is covered with frost, forcing it to find shelter. Faces of young men and women are intercut with drawings of heroes, which themselves are intercut with shots of tombstones and cradles, suggesting individualities hollowed out by state apparatuses. Immortal is unquestionably successful in evoking a despairing mood, but it also feels like an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel. Curiously, the film is at its weakest when dealing with concrete events such as the ballet class and the drill—who’d ever suspect a military camp to be a space of ideological indoctrination? I can imagine the material better suited for a book of photos or illustrated poems.

For Sama (Waad Al-Kateab, Edward Watts)

Whatever Russia Today or Al Jazeera will have you believe, whatever you think of American deep state’s collusion with Islamist fundamentalism, whatever objections are raised about the funding of “rebel” reporters, the brute facts regarding For Sama are there for everyone to see: Waad Al-Kateab stayed back with her doctor husband Hamza in rebel-controlled east Aleppo, delivered a baby and lived through the worst months of Putin-backed state bombing of her district. She kept filming, even when the bombings were at her doorstep, even when bodies piled up at the makeshift hospital that she had made home. Edited and telecast this year on British television, For Sama is a record of Al-Kateab’s life between the first student protests in 2012 to her eventual emigration in December 2016. It is presented as a filmed letter to her baby, Sama, to explain her parents’ decision to stay back in east Aleppo despite the impossible conditions of living, despite the inevitability of defeat. Filmmaking here becomes an existential cry against an order of things that would rather not hear these voices. The regime denied that the student protests were going on, says Al-Kateab, filming was the only way to show otherwise. For Al-Kateab, it becomes increasingly important to film as the military makes advances into east Aleppo, reducing the rebels to a few square kilometres. Filming, she says, gives her a reason to believe.

“Silence makes you feel that the city is dead”, notes the filmmaker when she finally leaves the city. Indeed, the incredible shock of For Sama stems from the extraordinary disconnect between image and sound, between the visual illusion of normalcy and the constant noise of shelling. So much so that even Sama doesn’t react to the explosions. The film is an inexhaustible series of harrowing sights—a mother carrying her dead son wrapped in plastic, a baby resuscitated from the clutches of stillbirth, a pan shot from a dead child to Sama in the operating room, Waad and Hamza singing to calm Sama down as they sneak back into their district, a young boy talking about his missing friends, two hospital attendants warming themselves over the shell that has pierced the building—whose horror is redoubled by the facts of normal life punctuating them: a wedding, Sama’s birth and antics, reunions with other families who are staying back, everyday school, painting sessions, a persimmon fruit as a gift, Waad’s repeated declarations of love to Hamza. To be sure, Al-Kateab makes only a passing mention of the extremists running her city, and we don’t get a clearer idea of what’s holding them back from leaving this nightmare, except their faith in revolution. In a sense, it is problematic that For Sama excises politics out of its narrative, rendering it an account of the extraordinary bravery of people fighting an abstract force of annihilation. On the other hand, it’s a deeply disturbing reminder that peace is not a stable condition interruptions to which are wars, but a fleeting, fragile state that can be swept away overnight.

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)

The story of Prometheus, with its democratic challenge to the keepers of the fire, represents a metatext of Western modernity, but its tragic vision also dovetails with the Christian worldview. Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse reinterprets this pagan myth, infusing it with a stark (anti-)Catholic flavour. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe play lighthouse keepers, Winslow and Wake respectively, posted on a remote, deserted island for a month. Wake the boss has Winslow do all the menial chores on the island, while he reserves the lofty task of maintaining the light on the tower. The bearded Wake, who is indeed a walking parody of a seaman, delivers long, literary monologues in sailorspeak, even when he’s only ordering Winslow to wipe the floor or cursing him for not liking his cooking. He pulls rank over Winslow every time he can, at times gaslighting his subordinate and weaponizing his original sin, which Winslow confesses during a night of drunken revelry. With mounting isolation, sexual frustration and a possibility that his stay on the island will be permanent, Winslow starts to lose it, abetted in no small part by alcohol. Soon, the pair bickers like the seagulls hovering above the island. The Lighthouse is set in no particular place or time, and it’s deliberately set at a register far above ordinary realism. This lack of particularity, combined with the simplicity of the outline, give the film a horror fable-like texture. This ethereal quality is countered by a grimy realism of mise en scène. Scenes of violence and physical degradation are visceral and the film features every bodily emanation possible.

There’s another reason that The Lighthouse floats unmoored to history. It’s evidently a very cinema-aware work, echoing if not quoting a range of films from the Expressionist classics to Ingmar Bergman and Bela Tarr. Its memorable monochrome cinematography, with geometric movements of the camera, looming shadows and an ominous atmosphere, its boxy aspect ratio, its actors staring back at the camera, and its use of medium and ‘American’ shots all make it feel familiar without locating it within a specific cinematic tradition or time period. That said, it is to Eggers’ credit that, despite the evocations, the film never feels like a pastiche. The Lighthouse employs horror movie tropes in its foreboding sound and visual design, but it doesn’t go where traditional horror films go. In fact, the stakes as well as the outcome of the premise, that the two men are going to go stir crazy, is clear right at the outset. The disintegration that does happen is played out with ample dose of comedy: Wake’s farts echoed with the sirens of the lighthouse, his towering self-seriousness that must inevitably mask a sense of uselessness, and Winslow’s eventual outburst when he blows his superior’s cover. Dafoe and Pattinson are fascinating to look at, especially in their very physical scenes with homoerotic undertones, but the film itself feels like a slight cinephilic sortie.