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The 1949 The Small Back Room may be Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's best film (the competition is Black Narcissus, I'd say), but it lacks the exotic or fantastic subject matter with which the filmmakers are associated, and in fact makes a concerted effort to hunker down in the midst of everyday, tedious life. It's fun to describe it as a film about an alcoholic bomb defuser, but that logline misses the mood altogether.
The title points the way: the protagonists work in a tiny, barely furnished, anonymous office in 1943 London, for a government entity that exerts influence on the 1943 British war effort but escapes scrutiny. Explosives specialist Sammy Rice (David Farrar), still not adjusted to the loss of a leg and the relentless pain of wearing a prosthesis, is hiding in back-room life, hesitant to emerge from the shadow of his bosses, battling alcoholism, and unable to accept fully the love of his girlfriend and coworker Susan (Kathleen Byron).
The mundane world envelopes and practically mocks Sammy; and yet P&P characteristically give it a stylized appeal. Sammy is introduced sitting at a very crowded pub, appearing at the end of a low-angle tracking shot that follows a jostled bartender delivering a message. When Susan and an Army captain (a young Michael Gough) arrive at the bar to find Sammy, an overhead shot shows them taking the wrong path in the labyrinth of pubgoers before the bartender points Sammy out. There is no narrative reason for the wrong turn, but the mood of good-natured, oblivious, encompassing quotidian life will be developed, in restaurants where functionaries seek Sammy out for tidbits of information, or in clubs attended routinely by the lovers on Wednesday nights. One of the most striking scenes takes place in a lurching underground train where Sammy and Susan huddle in their seats, Sammy trying to ignore the pain in his leg. The camera surprises us by tracking in and out on the couple in the confined space, as hordes of Londoners evacuate the foreground of the shot at stops, then fill it again. Eventually the couple stand up, and the scene ends with the train light momentarily blinking out, casting Sammy and Susan into semi-darkness as the camera withdraws and the car hurtles on. This visual drama is expended on a rather simple and unassuming scene. In a way, P&P are playing at expressionism, externalizing the suffering of the fellow in the corner seat. But the routine of rush hour underground travel is unthreatening and depicted with amusing human detail. The mundane environment is not just a backdrop or a metaphor: it's part of the film's subject.
The Small Back Room is probably P&P's most intimate and human-scaled film, attentive to the ebb and flow of Sammy and Susan's struggle for survival as a couple: the small humiliations of office life; the uneasy symbolism of the man and woman's adjacent, connected apartments; the way pain is banked and nurtured when breakup becomes a possibility. But the profusion of scaled-down observation is the cover for a capital-R Romantic battle for Sammy's soul, rendered by Farrar and Byron with full-bodied emotionality. Farrar, an actor who naturally projects force and virility, alternates here between bitterness and a childlike vulnerability: Sammy clenches Susan's hand to ward off pain, or crumples on her breast with a barely audible sigh.
Just when alcohol and self-destructiveness are about to claim the love relationship, a slow-building suspense story emerges from among the subplots, announcing its primacy with a beautiful, unreal image: a lonely moonlit beach, with an unexploded German bomb protruding from the sand, marked with a flag and guarded by a soldier. The image speaks of paradise, of the bomb waiting for Sammy at the edge of the known world, far from the torture of his daily life. Beneath the beauty, there is a threat - the bombs have taken several lives already, and we have witnessed the last agonies of their most recent victim - but beneath the threat there is more beauty, as Sammy is plainly receiving his final wake-up call. The climax of the film, played out with the sound of the ocean and seagulls for counterpoint, manipulates point of view to place us, with Sammy and the bomb, on a peaceful metaphysical plain where all mundane concerns drop away. And if this intense transformation of the film's form should make us feel that Sammy's personal transformation might be possible as well, then so much the better for the drama.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Lech Majewski's beautiful 2004 feature-length video The Garden of Earthly Delights is at the same time a clear piece of storytelling, albeit in a modernist mode, and a remarkably free exercise in the association of images and sounds. The film's beauty is the result of these two layers being carefully and continually linked.
The gimmick (not too strong a word, because it requires sleight of hand to pass it off as plausible; the work occasionally shows) is that a couple videotapes themselves almost continuously, partly because they are creating an experimental video piece based on the eponymous Bosch painting, partly because of the man's habits, and partly because of a dire medical problem which the video helps them come to terms with. We are introduced to the complexities of the situation gradually, with information doled out as it enters the visual field of the camera.
But the film's appeal is not conceptual: it grows from the power and density of Majewski's audiovisual images. One sees the actors handling the camera in a number of scenes, but Majewski gets the cinematographer's credit, and the seemingly casual video work is tunneled through with labyrinthine depth compositions and striking color and texture juxtapositions. Complicated pan-and-zoom movements are bracketed with simple home-movie visual language. The accumulated effect of the subtly larger-than-life imagery is to impart a sense of grandeur to the travails of the game but afflicted couple.
The premise of amateur self-documentation justifies a great deal of randomness and even confusion in what images are presented. It's fascinating that the tiniest dose of narrative is enough to alter our relationship (mine, anyway) to the torrent of sights and sounds. At any rate, by allowing us to piece together a story, Majewski lifts from the imagery the burden of providing unity to the movie, and assigns to it the role of providing entropy.
Enjoying the discipline of providing linkage between form and fiction, Majewski marks each evolution of the story with a small style shift, starting with the surprising pan that reveals the video camera in a mirror. Playing off the essentially exhibitionistic nature of the couple's project, Majewski chooses to reveal the illness story through the surprising mise-en-scene of the woman trying for once to avoid her lover's camera.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is, among other things, a strikingly physical rendering of a heterosexual relationship. The man (Chris Nightingale) and the woman (Claudine Spiteri) disrobe and couple frequently in the course of their Bosch-based charades, and the remote, unattended camera both justifies their shyness and heightens the tactility of the sexual imagery. In addition, the contemplation of death in this movie is expressed in bodily, even chemical terms. The nonprofessional actors are chosen to some extent because their physiques lend themselves to a pictorial allegory of classical male and female beauty. And yet Majewski manages to give the characters psychology, albeit in large strokes that do not compromise their symbolic status. Though the woman is both the visual and narrative center of the film, the man is the more mysterious and ultimately the more poignant character: while the woman confronts death with a philosophical quest, the man reacts with mute pain and withdrawal, and with a desire to cross the gender barrier and merge with the beloved object. That Majewski is as engaged with people as he is confident about form marks him as a major filmmaker and not just a talented one.
I do not believe in a sharp division between film and video: if Bazin could find identity between cinema and the process of making death masks, I think we should be able to appreciate the common ground between emulsion and pixels. But it was my pleasure to see two films last month in quick succession - the Majewski, and Jun Ichikawa's 2008 short feature Buy a Suit - where unpolished video images take on a beauty that is partly due to the narrative utility of the video, to the appropriateness of using an inconspicuous, consumer-affordable recording device for these particular stories. Of course, the beauty is partly due as well to a spatial and compositional authority that crosses media.
The gimmick (not too strong a word, because it requires sleight of hand to pass it off as plausible; the work occasionally shows) is that a couple videotapes themselves almost continuously, partly because they are creating an experimental video piece based on the eponymous Bosch painting, partly because of the man's habits, and partly because of a dire medical problem which the video helps them come to terms with. We are introduced to the complexities of the situation gradually, with information doled out as it enters the visual field of the camera.
But the film's appeal is not conceptual: it grows from the power and density of Majewski's audiovisual images. One sees the actors handling the camera in a number of scenes, but Majewski gets the cinematographer's credit, and the seemingly casual video work is tunneled through with labyrinthine depth compositions and striking color and texture juxtapositions. Complicated pan-and-zoom movements are bracketed with simple home-movie visual language. The accumulated effect of the subtly larger-than-life imagery is to impart a sense of grandeur to the travails of the game but afflicted couple.
The premise of amateur self-documentation justifies a great deal of randomness and even confusion in what images are presented. It's fascinating that the tiniest dose of narrative is enough to alter our relationship (mine, anyway) to the torrent of sights and sounds. At any rate, by allowing us to piece together a story, Majewski lifts from the imagery the burden of providing unity to the movie, and assigns to it the role of providing entropy.
Enjoying the discipline of providing linkage between form and fiction, Majewski marks each evolution of the story with a small style shift, starting with the surprising pan that reveals the video camera in a mirror. Playing off the essentially exhibitionistic nature of the couple's project, Majewski chooses to reveal the illness story through the surprising mise-en-scene of the woman trying for once to avoid her lover's camera.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is, among other things, a strikingly physical rendering of a heterosexual relationship. The man (Chris Nightingale) and the woman (Claudine Spiteri) disrobe and couple frequently in the course of their Bosch-based charades, and the remote, unattended camera both justifies their shyness and heightens the tactility of the sexual imagery. In addition, the contemplation of death in this movie is expressed in bodily, even chemical terms. The nonprofessional actors are chosen to some extent because their physiques lend themselves to a pictorial allegory of classical male and female beauty. And yet Majewski manages to give the characters psychology, albeit in large strokes that do not compromise their symbolic status. Though the woman is both the visual and narrative center of the film, the man is the more mysterious and ultimately the more poignant character: while the woman confronts death with a philosophical quest, the man reacts with mute pain and withdrawal, and with a desire to cross the gender barrier and merge with the beloved object. That Majewski is as engaged with people as he is confident about form marks him as a major filmmaker and not just a talented one.
I do not believe in a sharp division between film and video: if Bazin could find identity between cinema and the process of making death masks, I think we should be able to appreciate the common ground between emulsion and pixels. But it was my pleasure to see two films last month in quick succession - the Majewski, and Jun Ichikawa's 2008 short feature Buy a Suit - where unpolished video images take on a beauty that is partly due to the narrative utility of the video, to the appropriateness of using an inconspicuous, consumer-affordable recording device for these particular stories. Of course, the beauty is partly due as well to a spatial and compositional authority that crosses media.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Jules et Jim
There's not much new left to say about this magnificent, well-appreciated film after all these years. Still, Truffaut doesn't get enough credit for finding the passageway to a form of cinematic expression that puts narrative and the artist's commentary on a fluid continuum. As a punishment for making postmodernism look easy, Truffaut is too often pegged as the McCartney/Donovan to Godard's Lennon/Dylan, where it might be more accurate to regard him as a Joyce or Proust to Godard's Brecht.
Truffaut's way of making experimentalism commercial was to create a brazenly impressionistic cinema of the mind, and then to include, as casually as an afterthought, the cinema's traditional role - the documentation of reality - as one component of mental life. So the representational is present in Truffaut, but encapsulated, so to speak, in a container of shifting subjectivity.
In this light, we can understand why Truffaut does not have and does not need a strong sense of space, why his compositions need not come together, why the sequencing of shots in his films can be quite arbitrary. Truffaut merely alludes to external reality. He sacrifices the camera's authoritative rendering of the world in favor of a more abstract description of mental states. The elongation of time via overlapping cuts (i.e., Catherine jumping into the Seine - a common figure of style in Truffaut) and the intensification of the camera's gaze via a barrage of unexpected, jaggedly edited closeups (i.e., the depiction of the Adriatic statue, or the later comparison of Catherine's smile to the statue's) are blatant declarations that the film's form is refracted through and scattered by memory and emotions.
Truffaut's expression of subjectivity is strongly linked in Jules et Jim and other films to his bold enlistment of literature on the cinema's behalf. Putting the words of the novelist on the soundtrack in abundance is a way of telling the audience that the fascination of storytelling, which induces a present-tense state of mind, has already been accomplished in another medium. Whereas Truffaut's filming is anything but novelistic, and suggests rather the phantasmagoria of experience that swirls around our orderly narrative-making impulse.
The film's script (here's an online transcription of the dialogue in English), by Truffaut and Jean Gruault from Roché's novel, is a startling and brilliant amalgam of literary description and highly abstract passages of poeticized dialogue. (Read the "Catch me!" scene, where Catherine begins her colonization of Jim, to see how purely stylized and absurdist Truffaut and Gruault's dialogue can be - and then recall that it precedes and follows scenes that devote many minutes to establishing the line of the narrative.) When Jules recites the entirety of the Marseillaise over the phone to demonstrate that he has lost his Austrian accent, or when he describes Catherine's background to Jim ("Her father's a noble, her mother's a commoner. He's from an old Burgundy family. Mama was English. So she's not average. And she teaches." "What?" "Shakespeare!"), actor and director are united in a playful acknowledgment of their desire to inflect the story with the grandeur of private mythology. Truffaut happily intensifies such dialogue with music or closeups, creating Welles-like coups de théâtre that he uses as scene transitions. As often as Truffaut has been compared to Renoir, and as often as he invoked Hitchcock, he is probably closest to Welles in the way that his films are marked continuously and openly with the amplifications of memory.
If some programmer would screen Jules et Jim annually on the anniversary of Truffaut's birth or death, I'd try to clear my schedule in perpetuity.
Truffaut's way of making experimentalism commercial was to create a brazenly impressionistic cinema of the mind, and then to include, as casually as an afterthought, the cinema's traditional role - the documentation of reality - as one component of mental life. So the representational is present in Truffaut, but encapsulated, so to speak, in a container of shifting subjectivity.
In this light, we can understand why Truffaut does not have and does not need a strong sense of space, why his compositions need not come together, why the sequencing of shots in his films can be quite arbitrary. Truffaut merely alludes to external reality. He sacrifices the camera's authoritative rendering of the world in favor of a more abstract description of mental states. The elongation of time via overlapping cuts (i.e., Catherine jumping into the Seine - a common figure of style in Truffaut) and the intensification of the camera's gaze via a barrage of unexpected, jaggedly edited closeups (i.e., the depiction of the Adriatic statue, or the later comparison of Catherine's smile to the statue's) are blatant declarations that the film's form is refracted through and scattered by memory and emotions.
Truffaut's expression of subjectivity is strongly linked in Jules et Jim and other films to his bold enlistment of literature on the cinema's behalf. Putting the words of the novelist on the soundtrack in abundance is a way of telling the audience that the fascination of storytelling, which induces a present-tense state of mind, has already been accomplished in another medium. Whereas Truffaut's filming is anything but novelistic, and suggests rather the phantasmagoria of experience that swirls around our orderly narrative-making impulse.
The film's script (here's an online transcription of the dialogue in English), by Truffaut and Jean Gruault from Roché's novel, is a startling and brilliant amalgam of literary description and highly abstract passages of poeticized dialogue. (Read the "Catch me!" scene, where Catherine begins her colonization of Jim, to see how purely stylized and absurdist Truffaut and Gruault's dialogue can be - and then recall that it precedes and follows scenes that devote many minutes to establishing the line of the narrative.) When Jules recites the entirety of the Marseillaise over the phone to demonstrate that he has lost his Austrian accent, or when he describes Catherine's background to Jim ("Her father's a noble, her mother's a commoner. He's from an old Burgundy family. Mama was English. So she's not average. And she teaches." "What?" "Shakespeare!"), actor and director are united in a playful acknowledgment of their desire to inflect the story with the grandeur of private mythology. Truffaut happily intensifies such dialogue with music or closeups, creating Welles-like coups de théâtre that he uses as scene transitions. As often as Truffaut has been compared to Renoir, and as often as he invoked Hitchcock, he is probably closest to Welles in the way that his films are marked continuously and openly with the amplifications of memory.
If some programmer would screen Jules et Jim annually on the anniversary of Truffaut's birth or death, I'd try to clear my schedule in perpetuity.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Cheri, and the Curious Case of Stephen Frears
Following Stephen Frears' career has not been much fun for me for the last twenty years or so, but I feel as if I owe that much to the director of One Fine Day (1979), Bloody Kids (1979), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Song of Experience (1986). For a few years back then, I considered Frears one of the world's greatest filmmakers.
If there was a shift in Frears' sensibility after the success of Laundrette and his graduation from British TV to international theatrical releases, it's not that easy to detect. He always considered himself an interpretive artist, subordinate to the writer's vision. Around the time of Afternoon Off (1979) or One Fine Day, he began to enjoy master shots, started moving his camera more deliberately, and seemed struck by a new awareness of the space around people. Technique is merely the handmaiden of artistic sensibility, of course, and the fact that Frears' films no longer look the same is not an indictment. But, in his best films, Frears' technique took him to an interesting, contemplative place. He intuitively grasped that his camera style lent itself to a demonstration of the psychological inaccessibility of characters, and found angles on his scripts that allowed him to emphasize the unknowable aspects of people.
This directorial attitude pretty much evaporated upon contact with the world of theatrical distribution and international acclaim. In retrospect, I suppose that Frears never wanted to brandish such an attitude, and remained true to his conception of the director's role. But there's a practical problem with a director subordinating himself or herself to the writer. A script is a solid thing that can be passed around, an object that every producer and investor can and does scrutinize and try to modify. By committing himself to an interpretive role in an industrial context, Frears risks becoming the servant of a larger, more commercial agenda. And that's exactly what the trajectory of Frears' career suggests to me. It's not as if his recent films lack judgment or taste, but he's no longer negotiating a settlement between what a comfort-loving audience wants and what the filmmakers choose to give. The inscrutability and visual recessiveness that gave such power to his late-television period would not necessarily poison the commercial prospects of the films that Frears now supervises. But someone would need to make the decision not to take the safest possible route.
Cheri, Frears' new movie of Christopher Hampton's adaptation of two Colette stories, offers the audience a number of genre pleasures: lavish décor and costumes, the pleasure of bitchiness as a recreational sport, a self-confident grande-dame protagonist who strikes poses and gets a lot of conspicuously witty dialogue. While I was watching the film, I mostly registered Frears' cooperative attitude toward these tropes. The project certainly has points of interest, most notably the elusive character of Cheri, quite well played by Rupert Friend: unaware of what he wants or even feels, and yet possessing an assertion and vigor that is wholly ineffective in the absence of self-knowledge. In fact, Cheri is exactly the kind of randomly bouncing pachinko ball that Frears might have enjoyed setting free in the shifting visual field of his earlier style. If Cheri feels relatively shallow, it's because the filmmakers want the audience to receive familiar genre pleasures, not because the material doesn't contain depths. The raptures of love are dilated upon with large acting and music cues; likewise the self-aggrandizing sorrow of renunciation. The ambiguity of response and the irresolution that lies between these poles, the only emotional terrain in the film that might really repay exploration, could only be probed at the risk of throwing the audience off its comfort.
If there was a shift in Frears' sensibility after the success of Laundrette and his graduation from British TV to international theatrical releases, it's not that easy to detect. He always considered himself an interpretive artist, subordinate to the writer's vision. Around the time of Afternoon Off (1979) or One Fine Day, he began to enjoy master shots, started moving his camera more deliberately, and seemed struck by a new awareness of the space around people. Technique is merely the handmaiden of artistic sensibility, of course, and the fact that Frears' films no longer look the same is not an indictment. But, in his best films, Frears' technique took him to an interesting, contemplative place. He intuitively grasped that his camera style lent itself to a demonstration of the psychological inaccessibility of characters, and found angles on his scripts that allowed him to emphasize the unknowable aspects of people.
This directorial attitude pretty much evaporated upon contact with the world of theatrical distribution and international acclaim. In retrospect, I suppose that Frears never wanted to brandish such an attitude, and remained true to his conception of the director's role. But there's a practical problem with a director subordinating himself or herself to the writer. A script is a solid thing that can be passed around, an object that every producer and investor can and does scrutinize and try to modify. By committing himself to an interpretive role in an industrial context, Frears risks becoming the servant of a larger, more commercial agenda. And that's exactly what the trajectory of Frears' career suggests to me. It's not as if his recent films lack judgment or taste, but he's no longer negotiating a settlement between what a comfort-loving audience wants and what the filmmakers choose to give. The inscrutability and visual recessiveness that gave such power to his late-television period would not necessarily poison the commercial prospects of the films that Frears now supervises. But someone would need to make the decision not to take the safest possible route.
Cheri, Frears' new movie of Christopher Hampton's adaptation of two Colette stories, offers the audience a number of genre pleasures: lavish décor and costumes, the pleasure of bitchiness as a recreational sport, a self-confident grande-dame protagonist who strikes poses and gets a lot of conspicuously witty dialogue. While I was watching the film, I mostly registered Frears' cooperative attitude toward these tropes. The project certainly has points of interest, most notably the elusive character of Cheri, quite well played by Rupert Friend: unaware of what he wants or even feels, and yet possessing an assertion and vigor that is wholly ineffective in the absence of self-knowledge. In fact, Cheri is exactly the kind of randomly bouncing pachinko ball that Frears might have enjoyed setting free in the shifting visual field of his earlier style. If Cheri feels relatively shallow, it's because the filmmakers want the audience to receive familiar genre pleasures, not because the material doesn't contain depths. The raptures of love are dilated upon with large acting and music cues; likewise the self-aggrandizing sorrow of renunciation. The ambiguity of response and the irresolution that lies between these poles, the only emotional terrain in the film that might really repay exploration, could only be probed at the risk of throwing the audience off its comfort.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Assorted Screenings in NYC: June-July 2009
Less and less sure that anyone is reading this blog, I think I'll recommend a few films I haven't even seen.
- The Hola Mexico Film Festival, at the Quad through Sunday, June 28, isn't exactly suffering from media overexposure. On top of that, the festival buried its most remarkable screening in the fine print of its Special Events pages: Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's first feature, 1972's La verdadera vocación de Magdalena (The True Calling of Magdalena), on Friday, June 26 at 5 pm. Hermosillo, probably best known in the US for 1985's Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Dona Herlinda and Her Son), has gone through a lot of changes in his long career, and I can't say that I've been wild about his recent work, which tends toward camp-tinged fairy tale. But in the 70s he took melodrama and genre more seriously, creating tension between the extremism of his stories and the blank solemnity of the camera's stare. I've never seen Magdalena, but at least two of Hermosillo's 70s films - 1976's La pasión según Berenice (The Passion According to Berenice) and 1977's Matinée - are among my all-time favorites.
- Japan Society's annual Japan Cuts series, rather uncomfortably affiliated with the earthier New York Asian Film Festival, contains a few titles I've been waiting for. Ryosuke Hashiguchi's 2008 Gururi no koto (All Around Us), screening at Japan Society on Thursday, July 2 at 8:45 pm and Sunday, July 5 at 2:45 pm, is getting more attention than the director is accustomed to, taking the #2 slot in the Kinema Jumpo awards and performing well at the Japanese box office. Hashiguchi received a little international attention in the 90s, but has made only two films in the last 14 years. After seeing his intelligent 2001 comedy Hush!, I'm eager to track down the rest of his work. In addition, the late Jun Ichikawa's last movie, the short feature Sûtsu wo kau (Buy a Suit), screens in Japan Cuts on Sunday, July 12 at noon. Ichikawa made an impression on me with 2004's atmospheric, visually stylized Tony Takatani. Before that, he kept a low international profile; but he'd been making features since 1987, and some devotees of Japanese film (Michael Kerpan, for instance) regard his work highly.
- Moving on to a few films I've actually seen: Marie Losier continues her wonderful programming at French Institute/Alliance Française with the currently running Michel Piccoli retrospective, the highlight of which is Michel Deville's 1973 La femme en bleu (The Woman in Blue), screening at Florence Gould Hall on Tuesday, July 21 at 12:30, 4 and 7:30 pm. The first film that Deville made after the end of his long collaboration with Nina Companéez, La femme en bleu allayed the reasonable fear that Companéez would take the “Deville touch" with her: the film is breezy yet full of cruelty, experimental without effort, light about dark things. Unlike many Deville films, La femme was available in the US on a subtitled DVD, from Pathfinder, that unfortunately compressed the image horizontally - I'm looking forward to a projection in the proper ratio.
- Anthology Film Archives has scheduled a week run for Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's latest provocation, 2007's Import/Export, on July 31-August 6, and will precede it with a retrospective of Seidl's earlier work on July 24-30. Seidl is just the sort of filmmaker from whom I usually recoil, with a harsh vision of humanity that is right next door to condescension. And yet I generally end by admiring the directness of Seidl's gaze, and taking it as a needed challenge to the barriers that we erect between ourselves and others for our own comfort. (Import/Export seemed to me rather too energized by the cruelty that it depicts…but I owe it another chance.) My favorite of Seidl's films is the 2003 documentary Jesus, Du weisst (Jesus, You Know) (Saturday, July 25 at 9:15 pm; Monday, July 27 at 7:15 pm; Thursday, July 30 at 9:15 pm), an experiment in tonal juxtaposition that starts out like Jerry Springer and ends up like Carl Dreyer. But I'm also impressed by 2001's Hundstage (Dog Days) (Friday, July 24 at 6:45 pm; Sunday, July 26 at 8:30 pm; Tuesday, July 28 at 6:45 pm) - a fiction film, but the difference between fiction and documentary isn't so significant in Seidl's universe - and 1992's Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (Loss Is to Be Expected) (Saturday, July 25 at 4:15 pm; Tuesday, July 28 at 9:15 pm).
Friday, May 29, 2009
L'Enfant: Walter Reade, Saturday, May 30, 2009
When I first saw Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's L'Enfant (The Child) at the 2005 New York Film Festival, I didn't completely grasp what it was trying to do. I wrote in my journal at the time, "Beautifully executed, with a powerful story hook, as usual for the Dardennes - but I feel less inevitability in the second half, and the ending seemed a bit obligatory." The principal reason that I was looking for inevitability is that the Dardennes' previous films, and especially 2002's Le Fils (The Son), which immediately preceded L'Enfant, develop their stories with an almost syllogistic rigor. Whereas L'Enfant ejects its ne'er-do-well protagonist Bruno (the superb Jérémie Renier) at the film's midpoint onto the unwelcoming streets of Seraing, Belgium, where he plies his unwholesome trade without noticeably advancing the plot.
On my second viewing, at last year's Dardenne retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, it was suddenly easy for me to accept the structure of L'Enfant on its own terms. My guess is that the Dardennes were thinking of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, where the first part of the novel places the character of Raskolnikov in a psychological or spiritual force field, after which change is effected in him in a subterranean way while he goes about the business of life. Dostoyevsky understood that real change in people is ineffable, and that using drama to express a character's change runs the risk of exposing the change as mere fiction-based wish-fulfillment. In L'Enfant, the Dardennes likewise avoid crystalizing Bruno's moral crisis by giving it dramatic shape, but instead contrive a dramatic pseudo-climax within a secondary story: the alarming scene in which a botched purse-snatching nearly leads to an icy death for Bruno's 14-year-old accomplice Steve (Jérémie Segard, in another standout performance). According to the practices of fiction, our intense response to drama creates within us a small-scale simulacrum of the character's upheaval, and helps make plausible to us the character's subsequent change. That the drama here does not relate directly to the change that Bruno must make points up that the flow of fictional pleasure can only simulate an explanation of change.
L'Enfant certainly does not try to recreate the vivid subjectivity of Dostoyevsky's style, and in fact the Dardennes would be the last filmmakers whom I would nominate for such a task. The cinema lends itself readily to impurity and to the importation of effects from other art forms, but, among great directors, the Dardennes have perhaps the purest conception of cinema. All effects in the Dardennes' films are pegged to the phenomenology of photography, to the exterior viewpoint that the photograph enforces on the most interior events. Even the performance style in the Dardennes' movies (and they are underrated as directors of actors) is calibrated to the limitations of the image in revealing inner life. (Bresson often comes to mind when one contemplates the Dardennes - there's some similarity in the way both oeuvres combine subjective, abstract subject matter with filmic styles that deny us the signifiers of psychological or spiritual revelation. But comparison with the Dardennes highlights how much less pure Bresson's style is, how his direction of actors and his decoupage are conceived in opposition to theatrical or dramatic values and therefore depend upon them.)
The Dardennes' effects are incremental, and the beauty of L'Enfant is in the way that these effects evolve out of a descriptive style. The brothers' remarkably expressive camera work starts from the limitation of a cinéma-vérité handheld viewpoint, and then exploits that limitation to create sudden, surprising compositional shifts. Time and again the camera doggedly tracks a character in closeup, only to pan a few degrees in response to a voice or an event and capture an extreme foreground-background opposition. Just as the camera style conceals its remarkable variety behind its documentary origins, so Renier's performance conceals the character's gradual transformation behind his propensity for dogged forward motion, which takes on only a hint of weariness as Bruno's ebullient street hustle carries him into a long, dark night of the soul.
I saw L'Enfant for a third time on Wednesday on the opening night of the Walter Reade's currently-running Dardenne series (which includes a number of early features, shorts and documentaries never before shown in NYC), and I now think it is the most mature and most perfect of the brothers' films, the one that moves most splashlessly beneath the surfaces of quotidian life. Repeat viewings only enhance the amazing scene of Bruno commencing the business of selling his child: as carefully as we gather clues, watch the elements of the situation fall into place, home in on the exact moment of decision, we remain stymied by the inability of the camera to give us an exploded view of Bruno's thought process, and by Renier's and the Dardennes' unwillingness to playact at rendering the unrenderable.
Is it possible that the Dardennes' aura is too 1990s to capture the imagination of today's art-film buffs? I strongly recommend that all of you camp out at the Walter Reade for the next few days. L'Enfant screens once more there, on Saturday, May 30 at 8:30 pm.
On my second viewing, at last year's Dardenne retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, it was suddenly easy for me to accept the structure of L'Enfant on its own terms. My guess is that the Dardennes were thinking of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, where the first part of the novel places the character of Raskolnikov in a psychological or spiritual force field, after which change is effected in him in a subterranean way while he goes about the business of life. Dostoyevsky understood that real change in people is ineffable, and that using drama to express a character's change runs the risk of exposing the change as mere fiction-based wish-fulfillment. In L'Enfant, the Dardennes likewise avoid crystalizing Bruno's moral crisis by giving it dramatic shape, but instead contrive a dramatic pseudo-climax within a secondary story: the alarming scene in which a botched purse-snatching nearly leads to an icy death for Bruno's 14-year-old accomplice Steve (Jérémie Segard, in another standout performance). According to the practices of fiction, our intense response to drama creates within us a small-scale simulacrum of the character's upheaval, and helps make plausible to us the character's subsequent change. That the drama here does not relate directly to the change that Bruno must make points up that the flow of fictional pleasure can only simulate an explanation of change.
L'Enfant certainly does not try to recreate the vivid subjectivity of Dostoyevsky's style, and in fact the Dardennes would be the last filmmakers whom I would nominate for such a task. The cinema lends itself readily to impurity and to the importation of effects from other art forms, but, among great directors, the Dardennes have perhaps the purest conception of cinema. All effects in the Dardennes' films are pegged to the phenomenology of photography, to the exterior viewpoint that the photograph enforces on the most interior events. Even the performance style in the Dardennes' movies (and they are underrated as directors of actors) is calibrated to the limitations of the image in revealing inner life. (Bresson often comes to mind when one contemplates the Dardennes - there's some similarity in the way both oeuvres combine subjective, abstract subject matter with filmic styles that deny us the signifiers of psychological or spiritual revelation. But comparison with the Dardennes highlights how much less pure Bresson's style is, how his direction of actors and his decoupage are conceived in opposition to theatrical or dramatic values and therefore depend upon them.)
The Dardennes' effects are incremental, and the beauty of L'Enfant is in the way that these effects evolve out of a descriptive style. The brothers' remarkably expressive camera work starts from the limitation of a cinéma-vérité handheld viewpoint, and then exploits that limitation to create sudden, surprising compositional shifts. Time and again the camera doggedly tracks a character in closeup, only to pan a few degrees in response to a voice or an event and capture an extreme foreground-background opposition. Just as the camera style conceals its remarkable variety behind its documentary origins, so Renier's performance conceals the character's gradual transformation behind his propensity for dogged forward motion, which takes on only a hint of weariness as Bruno's ebullient street hustle carries him into a long, dark night of the soul.
I saw L'Enfant for a third time on Wednesday on the opening night of the Walter Reade's currently-running Dardenne series (which includes a number of early features, shorts and documentaries never before shown in NYC), and I now think it is the most mature and most perfect of the brothers' films, the one that moves most splashlessly beneath the surfaces of quotidian life. Repeat viewings only enhance the amazing scene of Bruno commencing the business of selling his child: as carefully as we gather clues, watch the elements of the situation fall into place, home in on the exact moment of decision, we remain stymied by the inability of the camera to give us an exploded view of Bruno's thought process, and by Renier's and the Dardennes' unwillingness to playact at rendering the unrenderable.
Is it possible that the Dardennes' aura is too 1990s to capture the imagination of today's art-film buffs? I strongly recommend that all of you camp out at the Walter Reade for the next few days. L'Enfant screens once more there, on Saturday, May 30 at 8:30 pm.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Fort Apache and the Fordian Container
The FIPRESCI web site Undercurrent, edited by Chris Fujiwara, has just published a new issue that includes a special section on John Ford, with 18 Ford films discussed by different writers. The issue includes my piece, "Fort Apache and the Fordian Container."
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