2011 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
All films from U.S.A. unless otherwise specified.
([v] video piece; [s] short, under 30 minutes; [m] medium length, 30-69 min; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)
COVERAGE CENTRAL!! 1) Wavelengths for Mubi Notebook 2) Capsules for Cinema Scope, from me and the gang 3) tiff Blogging for Cargo
NOTE: Bypass the super-tedious preview essay and scoot down to the reviews by clicking here. And you can get right down to Wavelengths previews, if that's your wont, by clicking here.
A Supposedly Fun Thing . . .
I originally had a mindblowingly tedious (even for me) three-paragrapher about how I was working too hard to even enjoy TIFF anymore. (I even went so far as to attempt to locate some sort of childhood etiology for my 'anhedonia'. Rough month!) And while it's true that I'll be doing more TIFF-related critic work before, during (oh, yes, during...), and after the festival than ever before, this is merely the cost of, you know, being a critic. Nobody ever said that actually occupying this longed-for professional legitimacy ("Make me a real boy, Blue Fairy!") would result in peaceful naked traipses through Elysian Fields. (Ew, gross.) No bitching. It's good to have a job, or two or three.
What got me going down this ranty road (as well as the one not taken, or taken and then wisely deleted) was the uncharacteristic ennui surrounding TIFF for me this year, despite a plethora of fine films worth seeing. Time was, when the Press & Industry Schedule went online, I'd then stay up all night hammering out my tentative screening plans for festival week, giddy with the thought of the film-orgy just around the corner. This year, the schedule was out three and a half days before I got the chance to sit down with it. And whereas I used to genuinely agonize about films I'd have to "sacrifice" to see other films (due to simultaneous screenings or other TIFF chicanery), I feel eerily sanguine about it all this time around. Sure, there are movies I very much want to see that I won't be able to, owing to scheduling conflicts. (Tarr's The Turin Horse is a big one. The Dardennes' The Kid With the Bike, Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, and Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin are others. Luckily they all have U.S. distribution in place.) But I figure I'll see everything I need to, by the by.
Shouldn't I be more, I dunno, pumped? Or frazzled? I have every confidence that once I'm heading up or down that comically long escalator at the ScotiaBank Theatre (or whatever the venue will be called once we arrive -- I'm pulling for Tim Horton's Timbit™ Movie Palace), the fun will kick in. But for now, it all feels like one part of the overall fabric of nonstop busyness, the large agenda item that I'm moving my smaller ones around. It feels strangely natural. I guess I've become a real boy. It's just what I've always wanted . . .
seen prior to the festival
Ars colonia (Raya Martin, The Philippines / The Netherlands) [s] [7]
February 2011. See review here.
Slow Action (Ben Rivers, U.K.) [m] [7]
March 2011. See review here.
Space is the Place (Eriko Sonoda, Japan) [v/s]
May 2011. See review here.
preview / pre-fest screening
Las acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, Argentina / Spain) [4]
This is a perfectly "respectable" Camera d'Or winner, in the sense that more than anything Las acacias gestures toward a concentrated nugget of inchoate talent and a high degree of promise -- that is, what is to be, not necessarily what is right now. The opening reel of Giorgelli's film is a bit deceptive. Before it begins in earnest (and I do mean "earnest"), Las acacias displays a sharp and considerably abstract formal rigor that provides a sense of startling open-endedness. We begin in medium long-shot watching men at work in a forest felling trees (not unlike a collectivist riff on Alonso's La libertad). Then, as Giorgelli isolates and introduces his protagonist, truck driver Rubén, Sr. (Germán de Silva), the tight,fixed-frame lateral framing from the passenger side, with the reverse landscape rolling back through the side mirror, evoked a slightly more humane version of Gallo's Brown Bunny. Even when Rubén parks his truck at a weight station, Giorgelli almost effortlessly erects geometrical compositions with buildings and shadows. As it happens, all of this flies out the window when Rubén, through paid arrangement with his boss, picks up Jacinta (Hebe Duarte), a young unwed mother planning to emigrate from Paraguay to Argentina to find work. Much to the chagrin of the curmudgeonly Rubén, she's got her infant daughter Anahí (Nayra Calle Mamani) in tow. From this point on, apart from some road-movie longeurs, Las acacias begins heading down the Humanist Pap Highway and never veers off the main line. Immigration issues are nominally addressed, but mostly the film serves as a slow-thaw character study for the wounded Rubén. Really, apart from Giorgelli's shrewd use of a very charismatic baby, this is pure formula that should have both Sony Classics and Similac pulling out their wallets.
Arirang (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea) [v] [3]
[BIG SPOILERS] How KKD Got His Groove Back This semi-essay film is Kim's solution of sorts to a three-year dry spell following his 2008 film Dream. (I should note that I am one of the millions who did not see Dream. After the risible right-wing dances-with-wallpaper kitschfest that was 2007's Breath, I wasn't going back to the well.) Apparently there was a guillotine accident on the set of Dream which almost killed the lead actress, and this trauma sent Kim spiraling into depression and "director's block." Arirang is Kim's bizarre and mostly unwatchable testament, a rambling, unstructured confession / rant that begins promisingly enough but rapidly devolves into cringeworthy solipsism, a cinematic drunk-dial from a depressive acquaintance you don't even know well enough to screen on caller ID. We see Kim in his Fortress of Solitude, a hilltop cabin in which, strangely enough, he must take a pot and collect snow for water, and sleep in an indoor tent for warmth (the Sports Authority version of the Brakhage "mountain man"), but then has a full editing deck inside the tent (electricity!), a sweet homemade espresso machine, and other random mod-cons. Don't get me wrong; the place is a dump, and KKD is seriously unkempt. But the discrepancies make it hard to know what's a put-on and what's indicative of a man coming unglued. Still, it's hard to work up a lot of sincere interest, since the main body of Arirang (named for a mournful classic Korean folksong, which Kim croak-warbles three times) consists of the man using direct address and various self-interview manipulations (light Kim vs. dark Kim; Kim vs. his silhouette) to give himself pep talks, designed to insist to Kim-1 that he owes it to himself and the world to return to making movies. ("They're waiting for your films, buster!" is my single favorite exhortation.) What does this mean for us? Kim giving "himself" (i.e., us) list after list, litany after litany, of his awards, his festival screenings, his 13-strong filmography, his honors from the South Korean government, and his status as a director of international stature. (As if seeing the "trophy room" weren't enough, near the end of Arirang we get slow superimposed stills of every Kim movie poster in sequence.) He's making his own tedious documentary, but it's also a deeply personal rant, with crying, recriminations over perceived slights, preparation of nasty looking ramen, incoherent aesthetic theory that makes Kiarostami's 10 on Ten sound like The Eisenstein & Bazin Variety Hour, and a lot of drunken camera confessions. It's tough to select a lowlight from this fiasco, but a leading candidate would certainly have to be the extended sequence near the conclusion when Kim, in his videotheque cocoon, watches the millstone-mountaincliming scene from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and, identifying with his protagonist's travails, blubbers like an infant. By the very end of Arirang, Kim is shown applying his machinist's know-how to build a handgun. Having accomplished this task, he is able to leave his hovel and face the world in a manner very much in keeping with the worst excesses of his filmography. ("Don't get Zoloft, get even!") Ladies and gentlemen, your Un Certain Regard winner, ready to kick some petty-grievance ass.
Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia) [8]
[MILD SPOILERS] Although I have been consistently impressed with Zvyagintsev's films, I haven't exactly been immune to the claims of his detractors that his work exhibits some of the worst traits endemic to the post-Tarkovskian Russian art film. By this I refer to a turgid, humorless transposition of the grim fatalism associated with the national literature into plodding images and doomed, nonverbal masculinity. I greatly admired Zvyagintsev's debut feature The Return, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, in spite of a tendency toward glowering wordlessness and dank, rain-soaked landscapes, largely because the director's preternatural ability with editing and rhythm produced a formalist electricity that belied any potential self-parody within the subject matter. The way in which Zvyagintsev orchestrated this story -- the tale of an absent, possible-gangster father infiltrating the lives of his estranged sons with renewed prerogative -- is precisely what made it matter. To many observers, Zvyagintsev moved even further in the direction of pseudo-mystical Russo-blather with his follow-up, The Banishment. Ostensibly a contemporary story of a family torn asunder by suspicion of adultery and a subsequent pregnancy, the film is meticulously organized around Christian symbols and the royal blue of the Virgin Mary, as well as exquisitely composed shots of the family home within a sun-dappled landscape, images designed to explicitly recall moments from the history of Western painting. The Banishment is a film that I appreciated in its deliberateness, especially since I, for one, found it an implicit critique of outdated Russian narratives of patriarchal right. In time, Zvyagintsev opens the frame and lets the contemporary world flood into his film, once it's too late. I found The Banishment sumptuous and stifling in equal measure, a complex film in need of reevaluation given that it was quickly dismissed as a failure within the hothouse environment of Cannes.
Elena, it must be stated right off the bat, represents something radically different. There is no hint of mysticism or allegory in this film. In fact, while Zvyagintsev presents a complex web of characters, most of whom have as many virtues as foibles, Elena is a bracingly clear-eyed, materialist film, in which everything is exactly what it is, and can hardly be said to represent much else. As with The Return and The Banishment, Zvyagintsev makes masterful use of slow, creeping camerawork and especially an extremely subtle rack focus technique. That is, things don't leave the field of vision most of the time; we shift our perspective around them. (The device, as Zvyagintsev uses it, is not as abstract as Hou Hsiao-hsien; Tarkovsky and to some extent Sokurov are relevant touchstones.) The very first shot begins outside of the broad picture window of the spacious modernist apartment that Elena (Nadezhda Markina) shares with her husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov). We are focused on winter branches of a tree outside the second-story window, a tangle of bare wood. Slowly, the lens refocuses, taking us through the branches and into the shadow-box world inside the apartment. It's dark; Elena is just waking up and before this we see the cool lines and sleek Mies / Corbusier style wealth the space and its furnishings represent. Zvyagintsev is masterful in slowly doling out narrative information about Elena and Vladimir through small but pregnant observational details. They are an elderly couple, probably in their sixties. They sleep in separate bedrooms, which implies estrangement but in time is revealed as a concession to elder creature comforts, like Vladimir's preference for blackout curtains and his tendency to fall asleep watching soccer whereas Elena prefers lifestyle programs. Although the two of them have conflicts in the relationship, such as their treatment of their respective adult children, they share an easy rapport, all the more notable because (another major difference for Zvyagintsev, and for much contemporary Russian cinema) Vladimir expresses genuine friendship with his wife. "The porridge is perfect," he remarks at breakfast; later he inquires, "what have you got going on today," with honest interest.
Eventually, we learn more about these two and their respective families, and this becomes the crux of the conflict at the heart of Elena. Vladimir and Elena have only been married a few years; he is the one with the money, and she draws a pension from her previous job as a nurse. Elena's adult son Sergey (Aleksey Rozin) is an unemployed ne'er-do-well living in a shitty public housing block next door to a massive nuclear reactor with his layabout wife, flunky son and their new baby. Essentially, Elena is supporting this family of losers, who smoke around the baby, play XBOX all day and never want for liquor even as the fridge is completely empty. They need even more money, since the grandson has grades too awful to attend university and is therefore facing induction into the army (which apparently means heading straight to the Chechen front). With a big wad of Vladimir's cash, Sergey can bribe the kid's way into college. Understandably, Vladimir doesn't see this as his problem. Elena counters with the fact that he has willingly subsidized his own daughter's life of partying, alcoholism and drug abuse. At this point, Elena is nearing what could be called the film's major decision point, and one of only two elements in the entire film that would register as conventional "drama." What makes Elena remarkable is the manner in which Zvyagintsev operates in dual registers as a filmmaker of the mundane. On the one hand, a key plot point such as Vladimir's heart attack at the gym could be understood, through conventional narrative grammar, to be telegraphed in advance. However, Zvyagintsev so underplays the event, through averted looks and finally a matter-of-fact floating shot of Vlad in the pool, followed by an extended interaction between himself and Elena in the recovery room (the real action). Elena's choices are made out of duty, and while we are given the space to question her view of things, we are never asked to judge her, an attitude which extends to Vladimir, his daughter Katya (Yelena Lyadova), and to some extend even Sergey's low-class family, who are as enabled in their poverty-culture mindset by Elena's indulgence as they are hamstrung by the post-Putin economic cesspool. Zvyagintsev's camera examines Elena's universe with a clinical eye, seeing it as a function of buildings, landscapes and vehicles (shades of "Berlin School" cinema), but also allows for a casual, unaffected compassion, befitting people jostling within economic and emotional entanglements in which so much is at stake. Yes, there is a crime, but Zvyagintsev considers that the least of his worries. No one is reducible to their class position, but no one can escape it either. Everyone has his reasons. It's "Renoir noir."
Free Men (Ismaël Ferroukhi, Algeria / France) [W/O] (0:33)
Anyone who complains about Rachid Bouchareb's "dull," straight-ahead studio pictures about the Algerians' difficult 20th century are advised to have a brief look at Free Men. You'll thank your lucky stars for Bouchareb's basic skills as a filmmaker. Days of Glory and even Outside the Law have a certain old-school verve, despite their foursquare earnestness. Ferroukhi's film, by contrast, is an exercise in cine-edification so starched by duty and rectitude that it never even threatens to entertain or surprise. The topic of today's white paper: Algerians fought in the French Resistance. Despite the presence of Michael Lonsdale and Tahar Rahim, the thing just kind of sits there on the screen. (I bailed when it was revealed that a key Resistance figure, probably the greatest singer of sacred Islamic songs in all of France, was . . . [wait for the shocking revelation] Jewish.) Rahim, by the way, plays a petty crook who becomes radicalized by witnessing the violence around him, and being inducted into Freedom Fighting by a learned elder and a devoted peer. The fact that Free Men's plot explicitly evokes The Battle of Algiers is almost comical, considering just how much more Pontecorvo accomplished than Ferroukhi, with so much less.
Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran) [7]
Ever since Iron Island, Rasoulof's work has been characterized by an incisive visual style, modulated acting in the realist mode (but well outside the usual non-professional confines of so much Iranian cinema), and deep political conviction that has tended to remain on the level of allegory, although is none the more unmistakable for that. Rasoulof's methods have remain consistent, even as his films have been rather different. Iron Island is a largely about containment. Head Wind is guerrilla documentary. And his most ambitious film, The White Meadow, is magic realism saturated with barely suppressed rage against the abuses of the Islamic regime. Considering what has happened to Rasoulof -- arrested along with Jafar Panahi, interrogated, potentially banned from working legally in Iran, his entire future a looming question mark -- we'd expect that his latest film, Good Bye, to be quite unlike anything else he's made up to this point. In fact, we'd probably have trouble even imagining what it might look like, given the sheer miracle of its even having been made. Remarkably, Good Bye is another exquisite turn in Rasoulof's still-evolving career where we might've expected a mere stopgap. Claustrophobic and shadow-laden where The White Meadow was expansive and grayish-white, Good Bye plays out almost entirely within middle-class interiors, private spaces that are nevertheless crisscrossed with the ever-present paranoia of Islamic totalitarianism. It's a virtually first-person story of Noora (Leyla Zareh), a disbarred lawyer living alone in Tehran while her husband is working on a pipeline far from the city center. We see her in her sparsely furnished apartment, dark and painted in deep midnight blues. (Eventually her mother comes to visit unexpectedly, because she hasn't been able to reach Noora on the phone.) Noora is perpetually nervous and quiet, and leaves the apartment only for very secretive errands whose mystery Rasoulof maintains for a few moments even as we view them. In time, we learn that Noora and her husband were left-wing (or perhaps just anti-Ahmadinejad) activists, and her husband is in hiding due to articles he published. Noora is pregnant, and trying to wheedle her way out of Iran by gaining permission to present at an academic conference, and going into labor while abroad. Where The White Meadow and even aspects of Iron Island displayed the fantastical visual imagination (within an oppressive overall social landscape) that we might associate with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Good Bye is very much of a piece with Darioush Mehrjui's middle-class kammerspiels. (The achingly apposite final shot shows the State thundering down into private life, in no uncertain terms.) Nevertheless, the complete desperation, the poly-tendrilled reach of the regime -- which would be absurd were it not potentially life-ending -- is very much an expression of Rasoulof's own view of contemporary Iran, up and down the social strata. That the director, who may have narrowly escaped a sentence as harsh as Panahi's, would turn around and make Good Bye with his tenuous freedom takes some serious guts.
Gypsy (Martin Sulík, Slovakia / Czech Republic) [6]
Gypsy is a film characterized by a certain predictability, even a patient rolling out of foregone inevitability. Although such a statement risks being mistaken for faint praise, it really does take nothing at all away from Sulík’s meticulous film to note that any attentive viewer understands where it is going almost instantly. Essentially a retelling of Hamlet set within an impoverished, highly insular Romani community on the outskirts of a Slovakian village, Gypsy is upper-middlebrow cinema at its most skillful and high-toned, consistently managing to negotiate between its genre operations and its narrative particulars. Adam (Jan Mizigar) is a quiet, thoughtful “gypsy” in a scrappy, extroverted community. His father is killed and his mother soon remarries his brother Ziga (Miroslav Gulyas), the local loan shark. Repeatedly visited by his father’s ghost, and drawn to various non-criminal options – the local (white) priest (Attila Mokos) tries to teach Adam to box; condescending liberal anthropologists offer to help him get into college – the conflict between Adam and Ziga is inevitably mapped onto the meaning and maintenance of Romani identity vs. selling out to the white (Slovakian) world. And, lest Ziga’s pride in Roma self-sufficiency and/or theft seem misplaced, Sulík is careful to display the array of racist indignities to which the Roms are subjected, from tragicomically banalities (a city bus blatantly bypasses Adam and his friend) to systematic oppression (a police interrogation scene). Performances and direction are exceptional, indeed reinvesting one of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits with surprising freshness. Sulík’s visual approach, in particular, is unusual for such a character-driven film. Adam’s dislocation is reflected in desolate yet subtly evolving landscapes; scenes abruptly fade to black, like clipped punctuation; and Sulík provides jarring chapter-heading shots that feature Adam in medium-close-up, staring directly into the camera, daring us to disengage.
Michael (Markus Schleinzer, Austria) [4]
Here comes a little bit of possible hypocrisy. Earlier, I bailed on the limp but clearly well-meaning Spanish incest drama Don't Be Afraid, primarily because it had nothing to offer but its therapeutic rectitude. Now, on the flipside (and I do mean 'flip'), we have a debut feature by casting-director / supporting actor Schleinzer. (He's worked with Haneke, and was the parole officer in Heisenberg's The Robber.) Despite its highly formalized, rectilinear abstraction -- two dinner table place settings framed at precisely opposing diagonals; stock-still long takes depicting the antiseptic suburban interior as mechanized metal window shades slowly descend -- Michael lays its cards on the table in the first ten minutes. It's a sensationally anti-sensationalized, day-to-day procedural about a nebbish insurance agent (Michael Fuith) who has a boy of about 8 or 9 years old (David Rauchenberger) locked in his basement. The credits list his name as Wolfgang, although I'm not certain he is ever called by name in the film. Michael has held him prisoner for many years, for the purposes of regular molestation. This, too, is presented in a matter-of-fact way, although not directly. (Just before the title card, we see Michael washing his penis in the sink, post-"sex." Later, after Michael gives Wolfgang an Ikea bunk bed and they put it together, Michael lies lasciviously on the mattress, pats his groin and beckons the child to come hither.) In between scenes at home with the child, Schleinzer shows us the deeply awkward but functional Michael out in the world, at his job, with his older sister, at the supermarket, etc.
Michael is a difficult film to dislike, since doing so threatens to mark you out as a prude or a moralist. There are many legitimate ways to examine the topic of molestation through representation. It is not "hot material" that absolutely demands a social-realist treatment. As I mention above, when I call Schleinzer's style "sensationally anti-sensationalized," there is a patent self-congratulation, bordering on smugness, that permeates Michael, in terms of its formalist approach and its attitude (or lack thereof) toward its theme of child abuse. Part of this is just the result of Schleinzer's second-hand, festival-ready "Austrian" cinematics. Clean, linear, blanched of warm color values, limited camera movement, one can see traces of Haneke, Seidl, Spielmann, Albert, Heisenberg, and other recent auteurs from Schleinzer's country of origin. But even apart from direct family resemblance, the point stands, there is nothing in Michael's construction that will be jarring to anyone who has seen, say, 25 art films in the last decade. What Schleinzer does "add," or at least emphasize to the point of utter perplexity, is rampant tonal confusion bordering on black comedy. Much of this has to do with the fact that keeping a missing child in your basement entails a maniacal degree of precision that, by and large, Michael lacks. He keeps fucking up, to increasingly jarring degrees. Schleinzer seems to understand that we instinctively hate this man, but the extent to which we watch him suffer and fail veers somewhere between Buster Keaton and the Grand Guignol. Is Michael a child molestation "comedy," in stolid art-film clothing? Are we looking at a stealth version of something we might expect from, say, a less humanist version of the Farrelly brothers? (Mark my words: Michael will be one of John Waters' top ten films for 2011 in Artforum.) By the time Michael is nearing its (cruelly protracted) conclusion, there is no sense of what sort of response the film ever hoped to elicit from us, what it meant to show us, or even why it existed. Even taken as a first film, Michael is a failed stunt.
Mushrooms (Vimukthi Jayasundara, India / France) [6]
My take on Jayasundara's impressive debut The Forsaken Land was essentially that it came out of the gate as a full-on avant-garde effort and eventually domesticated itself into a well-appointed if somewhat generic international art film. I have yet to catch up with his sophomore effort, but on the basis of film #3, I can't say I'm in that great of a hurry. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Chatrak. It's a solid family drama in the muted, unspecific manner of so much Southeast Asian auteur cinema, wherein the combination of close attention to a select few members of a clan with an odd lack of deep psychological characterization produce the spectral sense that a myth or an allegory may be hovering just beyond comprehension's grasp, even though there are no actual clues to indicate its presence. In this case, Jayasundara turns his attention to an architect named Rahul (Sudip Mukherjee) who has just returned to Kolkata from Dubai. This reunites him with his younger girlfriend Paoli (Paoli Dam), but also produces strife. He finally decides that he must locate his brother (Sumeet Thakur), who went insane years ago and has been missing ever since. He lives in a forest, playing naked in the trees. We see him tormenting / seducing a European border guard (Tomás Lemarquis) in the opening moments of the film. (The soldier seems equally unbalanced, haunted by the one hundred men he has killed.) So Jayasundara has the basic thematic elements in place -- modernity vs. the primitive, borders and their breakdown, the eruption and suppression of the past as a nation's untidy unconscious. (Mushrooms, which don't factor into the film at all, could be said to be metaphorical I suppose. They spring up unbidden in the shit. Some are yummy, but some are poisonous. There! An allegory!)
Nevertheless, there's an unnerving feeling that Jayasundara works his way through all of this with minimal fuss, as though there were "stakes" in inverted commas, but not really. Part of this is formal. The aforementioned opening sequence, with two historically-burdened lunatics frolicking in the forest, owes virtually everything to Apichatpong -- the stilted homoeroticism, the play of light through foliage, the movement of the camera through a thicket whose verdant expanse is sliced by the tonal incongruity of human flesh. In the first twenty to thirty minutes, VJ also throws in some nods to his betters -- some Claire Denis here (isolated military man clinging to a faded regime), some Jia Zhangke there (imposing, late-capitalist building sites intercut with the exploited workers who erect them), but mostly it's a Joefest until, like The Forsaken Land, Chatrak starts playing it all too clean. But this film becomes even more normal, almost obsessively constricted, not unlike its protagonist. Chatrak is the sort of film I feel like I'm overrating at a [6], but it's never less than "compelling," in a by-the-numbers way. (Sony Classics or the Weinsteins could pick this up. Really.) More than anything, it's as though Jayasundara set out to make the world's politest Ritwik Ghatak film. Whether the tenor of the film is shaded by the fact that he made Chatrak as a Sri Lankan in India, invited by Indian producers, I cannot honestly say, but it's certainly worth considering.
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France) [7]
I'm starting to think that Dumont is the unholy arthouse cross between Robert Bresson and M. Night Shyamalan. How many times have I been completely on Dumont's wavelength, prepared to defend his ideas and artistry against all gainsayers, only to have him pull some ridiculous last-minute "twist" that not only recodes all that came before it, but practically defies you to organize it into any meaningful interpretation? Granted, I have quite a bit more faith in Bruno Dumont than I do in latter-day M. Night, and I am being (somewhat) tongue in cheek. Dumont's films, of course, bear certain ineluctable commonalities of style and worldview, but I don't think for a minute that the man has self-consciously turned himself into a "brand." If anything, I believe Dumont's philosophy relies too heavily on a kind of sudden jolt of nihilism as a way to shake loose of an otherwise deterministic universe, one forever buoyed by our animalistic drives and the pull of gravity on our flesh. But, as it plays out in the actual dramaturgy -- see Twentynine Palms and Flandres, and to a lesser extent Hadewijch -- these reversals come to feel like deus ex machina devices for a thoughtful director who has effectively painted himself into a corner. (L'humanité remains Dumont's masterpiece in part because its finale is both conclusive and utterly open-ended, an image-event that can only be read on the symbolic plane.) And so it was with Outside Satan, a film nearly as brutal, graceful and uncompromising in its rendering of the tie between the spirit and the earth as L'humanité, and even more aggressive in its unwillingness to assign firm identities among its main characters. This was essentially the case, anyway, until the final ten or so minutes of the film, when [SPOILER] a fairly straightforward Christian miracle confirms that we have been in the presence of someone or something, if not Divine, then at least sent from Somewhere Else, all along.
David Dewaele plays an unnamed, unkempt outsider who lives on the periphery of the local village. He seems to have some kind of connection to the land, as he encamps behind a particular rock as though it were his home. Similarly, he frequently goes down on his knees in prayer before various natural features and vistas, not in an obviously pagan manner but more along the lines of an ascetic St. Francis, witnessing God's glory in His creations. The man, who resembles Vincent Cassel if his features were elongated like pulled taffy, has a young companion / acolyte in the similarly unnamed "Elle" (Alexandra Lematre). She has short black hair, pale skin, and a vaguely Goth aspect, marking her out as both visually and socially at odds with her rural surroundings. Early on in Outside Satan, the self-styled mystic helps this girl in trouble (although Dumont has not yet revealed anything by this point) by taking a rifle and murdering her stepfather. The mystic is a sniper. He is also flatly uninterested in pursuing sexual relations with his young charge, despite her occasional come-ons. By contrast, a local boy pursues her quite aggressively, with disastrous results. Up through the vast majority of Outside Satan, I found myself rather more entranced with Dumont's formal approach -- his patience, his post-Bressonian hypnosis mode, his brute physicality -- than I had with anything he'd done in years. Given the fact that Satan was, for most of its running time, not clearly "about" any particular moral framework or firmly identifiable social structure (e.g., the fog of war, or the existential drive of fervent belief, or even, as in the case of Twentynine Palms, the world-canceling power of raw lust), I found Dumont able to let us think. Should this charismatic drifter be understood as a holy man, or a psychopath, or is there a meaningful difference therein? Presuming the absence of feminist empowerment, does a young girl's sexual awakening necessarily entail an index of possible repressions, from which she must select the most benevolent, or the most seductive, or the one which holds out the most hope for the subversive exercise of will? And what of the sheer materiality of bodies, the pull that earth and sky exert upon our physical selves, or the way we cup our hands and "collect" the rays of the sun as we sit and pray, knowing that we are more than just our thoughts alone? The girl's repetitive gesture of sticking her hand out of her door and presenting the older man with a daily sandwich is a perfectly Dumontian emblem: cyclical, humorously mundane, concentrated on minimal action as a synecdoche for broader social interaction.
So, when all of this philosophical "white space," this nearly plotless meditation on companionship (as opposed to "sociality," and its implied scripts and constraints), becomes, finally, a sort of Evil-Angel-Teorema-Ordet affair, I sort of want to slap Bruno upside the head. But I'm pretty sure that's the point. So there you go. Consider me properly punk'd.
Page Eight (David Hare, U.K.) [4]
Here we have the rare film that manages to evoke tedium through much of its running time, only to evoke genuine interest at the home stretch in direct proportion with an increasing level of ire and disbelief. What putters along as an overwritten, tight-assed BBC teleplay about the twilight of Cold War relics serving Her Majesty at the MI5 eventually mutates into a crass apologia for the New Geopolitics, wherein any attempt at maintaining ethical consistency, much less a global vision, is hopelessly passé. Bill Nighy, for my pounds sterling one of the most overrated thespians on the contemporary scene, is Johnny Worricker, an old spy so wrongheadedly devoted to The Company that he neglected his wife (Alice Krige), who then married his ostensibly more humane desk-jockey supervisor, Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon). Trouble begins when Baron comes into possession of an intelligence file relating to American “black sites” for extraordinary rendition. According to the titular p. 8, the Prime Minister, one Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes, channeling Tony Blair as a Hugo Boss model), knew about it, but kept it from his Home Secretary (Saskia Reeves), MI5, and the entire British intelligence community. At this point, Page Eight is pitched between an unfunny In the Loop and a junior-grade Ghost Writer. It seems that Blair’s bum-licking of the U.S. is a trauma the U.K. is still working through, many of its liberal artists apparently every bit as obsessed with sovereignty loss as Nick Griffin. But, as various characters, including rival Jill Tankard (Judy Davis) keep informing Worricker, “It’s the 21st century,” and rational-actor flexibility is where it’s at. So by the end, he sacrifices all his grand ideals for a kiss from the young woman across the way (Rachel Weisz). Alas, the end is Nighy.
Smuggler (Katsuhito Ishii, Japan) [7]
Those of us who thoroughly enjoyed Takashi Miike's recent 13 Assassins but were a bit nonplussed by its overall normalcy may well consider Smuggler something of a transmission from an alternate universe, a place where the basic ingredients of a solid-state studio picture can exist side by side with bugfuck lunacy. (For the record, I haven't seen Miike's Hara-kiri remake, but by all accounts it's played even straighter, despite the 3D.) Ishii has been just on the verge of becoming a major Japanese filmmaker for the last several years. His talent has been unmistakable from the start, but his idiosyncrasies have thus far displayed a certain difficulty coalescing into a clearly defined auteurial stamp. His debut feature, 1998's Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, was quite well-received, and another successful Tadanobu Asano star vehicle. It seemed to hit all the right violent-hipster notes to make it click with the Extreme Asian contingent. But 2000's Party 7 was widely lambasted as a total failure, a semi-Lynchian / Japanese gameshow inflected quirkfest besotted with its own oddities. (I liked it.) Ishii's goofy sense of humor ("I am Captain Banana!") ran at odds with the cool posturing Shark Skin Man had promised its fanbase. Then, to further complicate matters, Ishii delivered what many consider to be his masterwork, The Taste of Tea, a gently paced rural shomin-geki with semi-mystical, somewhat outsized fantasy elements woven into the fabric of the everyday. It's a film that surprised everyone when it premiered at Cannes in 2004, and seemed to mark Ishii's arrival in the big leagues of Japanese auteurs. Alas, another curveball: Funky Forest: The First Contact, a 150-minute no-holds-barred sketch comedy movie that by all accounts (I haven't seen it myself) conforms to and exceeds every Western idea about bugfuck-crazy Japanese TV. Of course, a hypothetical "Tim & Eric Awesome Show" movie would be just as psychotic . . . Anyway, point is, Ishii has been all over the map, but he's never been dull. (As far as his profile in North America, Ishii's fortunes weren't helped by the fact that Shark Skin Man, Taste of Tea,and Funky Forest all received commercial releases some three to four years after their initial debut.)
With Smuggler, all the pieces are in place for a complete breakthrough, and one can only hope that the stars will align for Ishii this time. It's a film characterized by extreme violence, but placed in the context of a genuine story arc -- fierce and unremitting, but never gratuitous, never an obvious sop to fanboy sensibilities. Based on a manga series by Shohei Manabe, the story concerns ne'er-do-well Kinuta (Satoshi Tsumabuki), a self-professed slacker, deaf in one ear, a guy who wanted to be an actor but just gave up. After racking up massive gambling debts, he's forced by mob enforcers to work for a ruthless banker (Yasuko Matsuyuki) as a part of a smuggling team. Basically a group of no-questions-asked long-haul truckers, the smugglers typically move dead human freight for whichever yakuza or triad is paying top dollar that day. This scenario allows Ishii to set up two basic tonal poles for Smuggler, ones which he keeps in near-perfect balance throughout. There's a sort of cowboy-inflected bildungsroman centered on Kinuta's mentorship from long-term smuggler Jo (Masatoshi Nagase). The older man initially finds Kinuta worthless but, over the course of several unexpected events, comes to see himself as a kind of sensei to the lost young man. This thread, not without its dark humor, is played relatively straight, as a kind of Kurosawa / Leone inculcation into self-sufficient, existential masculinity. Against this aspect, and fully complementary to it, Ishii introduces a yakuza world as outsized and hyperviolent as anything found in comparable manga-derived cinema. The main perpetrators of the mayhem are a pair of indestructible assassins (and maybe lovers -- it's left ambiguous) called Vertebrae (Masanobu Ando) and Viscera (Ryushin Tei). Much of the "secondary" plot hinges on possible betrayal of Vertebrae at the hands of Viscera; an up-and-comer (Tsuoshi Abe) wants to break up the team and make an opening for himself. But eventually Vertebrae, due to earlier transgressions against the yakuza hierarchy, becomes the smugglers's "cargo," resulting in a fateful meeting between himself and Kinuta, two types of men who should probably never have even known the other existed, but discover surprising common ground.
Yes, there is torture and spatter. Park Chan-wook would be more than satisfied, although Eli Roth would probably find it all far too . . . intellectual. (Ishii does organize Smuggler with chapter headings, though, much like Roth's benefactor, QT.) But what makes Smuggler such an impressive piece of work is the fact that Ishii manages to convincingly articulate the style and form of Asian "extremity" with certain sturdy, classical cinematic values, without ever making this articulation seem calculated. There's no condescension here, no tsking tone that would indicate, as would some "humanist" tastemakers, that violence (like sex, or cigarette smoking) must "earn" its place in the cinema by some diegetic necessity. Ishii isn't taming anything, or cleaning up the underworld for festival bourgeoisification. (Although I must admit, I wonder how Toronto's midnight crowd will react to this film. It's really more of a Vanguard selection.) Instead, Ishii has found a way to bring all of his strange and disparate interests to bear within an odd but fully convincing universe, one characterized by both ugliness and compassion. As a result, Ishii's vision will reach a wider audience. And we can just call that smuggling.
Wavelengths previews / pre-fest screening
Loutra / Baths (Nick Collins, U.K.) [s]
This brief and deceptively breezy-looking landscape study by Collins (a filmmaker which whom I was not previously familiar) is an exceptionally intricate mosaic whose construction largely hinges on the interplay of what we might call “subjectless reverse shots.” Or, if you prefer, the camera itself is the subject, and since Collins refrains from assigning that point of view, seemingly even to himself, it becomes an experience of pure natural vision. An ancient Roman bath, and all the natural overgrowth around it, is spatially delineated through interiors and exteriors, light and dark passages, as well as rhyming negative spaces in the foliage and decaying architecture. When Collins shows us a view toward a cave, he then takes us inside, giving us the parallel view right back out, and this symmetry, in addition to describing this chosen space with an ideal cinematic cognition, also places us, Collins’s viewers, in a kind of dialectic between the present of the film image, and the movement through time and history that the semi-preserved space itself represents.
Edwin Parker (Tacita Dean, U.S. / U.K.) [s]
Of the films I was able to preview, I can say without hesitation that British artist / filmmaker Dean’s film portrait of the late American painter Cy Twombly is far and away the standout in this year’s Wavelengths program. If you’ve seen other work by Dean (for example, her 2002 portrait Mario Merz), you may have some clue as to what to expect. But even still, the quiet, tremulous audacity with which Dean hovers (like a mad-scientist’s cross between a housefly and Mark Lee Ping-bin) around Twombly’s office / studio in Lexington, Virginia, slowly pulling focus across thick vertical blinds, observing the midday Southern sun through the front window as cars whizz by, and using extreme close-up and hazy shifting lensing to observe the aged hands of Twombly, fumbling through his beige slacks pocket for his glasses. The scene is hushed and banal, Twombly resembling nothing so much as an elderly insurance agent in a neighborhood firm about to close up shop. Were it not for the presence of a few of the man’s inimitable plaster sculptures standing about on the desks, there would be little to distinguish Edwin Parker from a scene in an early effort by a regionalist like Ira Sachs or Kelly Reichardt.
And this is precisely the point. Dean very pointedly titled her film “Edwin Parker,” Twombly’s given name rather than his nom de peinture. It’s not just that we’re being given access to one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century, at the dawn of the 21st and the twilight of his years, in a purposely demystified manner, although it’s true that watching Twombly and his assistant take an Italian curator to lunch in a workaday Virginia diner makes for a scene of pure joy. (Some of those sloppy, “food fight” canvases take on a new meaning after watching Twombly lustily tuck into a bowl of applesauce.) What Dean demonstrates with Edwin Parker, and what this time with Twombly demonstrates as well, is in perfect concert with the Twombly we’ve been “reading” right off the paintings and drawings for fifty-plus years. As the ultimate “my kid could do that” artist, Twombly’s grand gesture has always been the active normalization of the erudite, bringing the Gods down to Earth with the dead seriousness of child’s play. When, near the end of Edwin Parker, Twombly picks up a Keats book and briefly talks poetry, it’s both a surprise and an inevitability. Twombly, the great palimpsestic artist, allowed Tacita Dean to uncover a few more layers, just before the last great erasure. We’re all the richer.
99 Clerkenwell Road (Sophie Michael, U.K.) [s]
A purely formal film that does manage to evoke a significant sense of play (you’ll think you’re seeing planetary movement and other symbolic, not-just-spherical things, and you’ll be right), Michael’s experiment harks back to the 1920s and 30s work of the geometrical abstractionists and “visual musicians” – Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Hans Richter, Mary Ellen Bute – but with a harder, 21st century edge. This isn’t to suggest any computer-generated malfeasance; by all appearances Michael is generating her images with old-fashioned tools, and in fact the title refers to a defunct toyshop where she located the basic materials for the film, it seems. (Can’t say I’m entirely clear on how that works. It Clerkenwell partly a ray-o-gram?) More than other purely geometrical films, Clerkenwell exhibits a palpable manipulation of space; the solid-colored round “discs” that swirl into the foreground pop out into sphericality quite often, enacting a groovy, almost Sesame Streetish tension between polka-dot action and planetary orbit. Dark field, saturated hues, all in your face like it’s neo-geo party time.
Empire (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / Austria) [s]
Unlike the other festival trailer on this program (see Ars colonia, above), Apichatpong’s submission for the 2010 Viennale is a lovely but surprisingly slight entry, especially considering the fact that Joe is the rare feature filmmaker who can produce work of equal strength in the short form. Empire is a brief, slowly unfolding exploration of an undersea grotto, its bulbous stalactite formations hanging down like udders or vampire bats. (I was reminded more than once, actually, of the Mugwumps from Cronenberg’s film version of Naked Lunch.)The organic forms are no doubt beautiful, made all the more so by Apichatpong’s spotlit underwater cinematography, which excises these hidden objects from the darkness quite casually, with none of the portent you might expect from, say, an accompanying Werner Herzog narration. The seeming appearance of great mystery (a long root or tail) is rapidly replaced by the banality of the human form, a hand examining snail shells. But why the title? If every shell is a home, is the explorer no better than a conqueror, annexing the sea in scuba-assisted Anschluss? Hard to say, and hard not to feel like I’m over-interpreting a probable Uncle Boonmee outtake.
Sack Barrow (Ben Rivers, U.K.) [s]
The recent shift in Rivers’s work has been quite fascinating indeed. The artist has expanded beyond the poetic crypto-ethnographies that justifiably made his reputation and is now exploring multiple genres and modes of address, without entirely leaving behind the creative nonfiction procedures that instantly set his work apart. His film Slow Action, in the Future Projections section, resituates Rivers’s frequent concern with geological time within a quasi-fictional context. On the other hand, Sack Barrow is a spectral, multi-part tour of a plating factory in its final days of production. That is, rather than considering the temporality of sediment layers in the earth, divorced from their direct interaction with human beings, Rivers’s latest film revels in a material process that can only transpire when skilled humans engage with metals, salts, the thick bubbles, smoke and residue of production. Many of the shots in Sack Barrow display the shop floor as an empty relic, with its impasto of hardened metallic froth over the edge of basins, or lingering pin-up girl postcards about three decades out of date. But Rivers also shows us women and men at work, stationed independently, not on an assembly line. This is clearly high-quality, inefficient labor that maximizes time over both productivity and managerial oversight, the buzzwords that drive contemporary manufacturing (and drive it right on over to China). Rivers, it should be noted, maintains medium to medium-long shots of the workers, never showing exactly what they do. Like the smelting smoke, they’re more like an organic part of a fully functioning entity, not “at” or “inside” it. And now that organism is gone.
Found Cuban Mounts (Adriana Salazar Arroyo, Costa Rica / Germany) [s]
Another highlight of the series, Salazar’s film nestles in at a perfect conjuncture of formalism and political history, neither one ever gaining the upper hand. Found Cuban Mounts is a slightly rough, seemingly in-camera graphing of various revolutionary monuments and civic squares throughout Havana and environs. We see, for example, bas-reliefs of Guevara and Marx, broken into single-image segments, presented one after the other in a makeshift grid pattern that Salazar imposes through her segmented cinematic looking. At times, as with a monument featuring the words of Castro, this patterning results in an implicit request that we read the text, broken up across a series of mini-“plaques” of fixed frame imagery. Salazar’s method is polyvalent. It prevents touristic gawking at her subject. It emphasizes both positive and negative attributes (both internally and externally defined) regarding the Socialist state – seeing becomes labor, but it is also subject to management and restriction – such that neither attitude becomes “right.” Like many structural films, Found Cuban Mounts has a back-story (or a back-formula) that explains how and why it’s built (Salazar’s rhythm corresponds to cadences in Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech), but as is usually the case, knowing or not knowing this fact makes little difference in the appreciation of the film itself.
I Will Forget This Day (Alina Rudniskaya, Russia) [s]
One of the few outright duds of this year’s series, Rudniskaya’s quasi-narrative short employs half-hearted serial technique to drive home a message of de-individuation of young women in contemporary Russia, but I Will Forget This Day is so stranded in equivocation that it almost refuses to make a mark. In hazy black-and-white 35mm (so washed out it resembles video, not unlike a distaff Sokurov in its own way), woman after woman dons a hospital gown and goes behind the double doors of the clinic’s private area. Then, woman after woman is wheeled out on a gurney. Are they having plastic surgery? Abortions? Lobotomies? Turns out the answer is (B), and we hear a craggy counselor harangue the women who are in late-term. The only shots outside the hospital are repeated long shots of a bridge in the snow, presumably taking woman after woman from the miserable hospital back to their miserable lives. Rudniskaya’s method never allows any woman’s plight, or the Plight of Woman, to have much impact. Everything remains a gauzy, half-considered veil of general woe. I will forget this film.
Sea Series #10 (John Price, Canada) [s]
One of the consistent pleasures of the Wavelengths programs under Andréa Picard’s leadership has been her championing of John Price, a really fine Canadian filmmaker whose work doesn’t get shown in the States nearly as much as it ought to. His films tend to straddle a line between diaristic, private affairs and something bigger, gesturing outward from the very personal. Unlike others who work in this vein – the small-scale, almost notepad approach to filming daily life – Price’s films never feel precious or even geared to elicit what we typically think of as empathy. Instead, they isolate within the everyday a kernel of formal or intellectual distance, which is then subsequently reflooded with the rush of the quotidian.
The latest film in Price’s Sea Series is, on its face, a three-part “trick film” about visiting the lakeside beach. The first part finds Price’s camera trained out on the water as sailboats come in and out of view. Oddly, the boats just seem to appear on the screen, without entering from the side of the frame. Price must be exploiting a low cloud cover. Next, we see the water again, then pan ¼ turn and see what the frame had been concealing: Toronto’s Pickering nuclear power plant. It dominates the background of the “beach,” and produces anomalies in the sky (“funny clouds”). In part three, Price uses black and white to gaze down the beach at the activity (and inactivity) on this stretch of coast. What this home movie is looking for, however, is more complex. The title card gives the date (May 21, 2011) and Pickering’s distance from Fukushima, Japan. Price and his family are spending the day out by a nuclear reactor, thinking about those less fortunate living near the Daiichi plant, its core in meltdown following March’s deadly tsunami. But why May 21st? As Price reminds us (and sadly, even I’d forgotten), this was the day so many American Evangelicals told us the Rapture was coming. (Here in Houston, a non-evangelical religious group posted billboards on the 22nd which read, “That was awkward.”) So Sea Series #10 uses the vast waters to display connection, rather than the usual sense of separation, and to remind the more impressionable among us that, as time and history move us along, the world “ends” a bit every day.
Sailboat (Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1967) [s]
This year’s lone catalogue classic in the Wavelengths line-up, and it’s a fine if ineluctably odd film from one of experimental cinema’s underappreciated greats. Like her from 1933 from the same year, Sailboat is a kind of cognitive game in which the pure sensual information of the image is pitted against the honking semiotic stamp of language. For just under three minutes, we see a blueprint-blue whirl of grain, an ocean expanse on the screen with small sailboats drifting placidly across in the diegetic time of their own travel. Along the top of this image, dominating its top third, is the word “sailboat” in white serif font. A cinematic cousin to the paintings and sculptures of Joseph Kosuth, Wieland’s film is wry conceptualism that also remembers to address the eye.
A Preface to Red (Jonathan Schwartz, U.S. / Turkey) [s]
There is an openness and curiosity about the world that characterizes the films of Jonathan Schwartz. It is often the case, when describing a filmmaker, that too much emphasis can be placed on where they studied and with whom. It’s the kind of background information that easily mutates into a lazy shorthand or empty factoid. But in applying one’s eyes and ears to Schwartz’s unusual films, it’s hard not to consider (if only as a starting place) that he worked with both Saul Levine and the late Mark LaPore while at MassArt. Most of Schwartz’s films are relatively short but dense, sometimes edited in-camera, and almost always organized more according to associations of color and shape than any obvious argumentative rhetoric. And many of the films document Schwartz’s international excursions, particularly to the Middle East. We can see throughout Schwartz’s work the tension between the two approaches to the world exemplified by his masters -- Levine’s exuberance and LaPore’s caution reticence.
As a result, Schwartz’s work exists as a dialectic all its own, with a kind of wry fascination with things and a tinkerer’s yearning to take them apart and put them back together again. A Preface to Red exhibits this attitude, while at the same time displaying a rather unexpected level of formal aggression from the usually sedate Schwartz. Beginning with the nighttime taillights of a traffic jam, Red soon enters daylight with a series of bright forms in the titular hue. Many are composed against the hot color temperature of the Turkish sun, and before long, the Constructivist beauty of Schwartz’s semi-ethnographic fragments (not dissimilar to Warren Sonbert in their brevity and aesthetic exactitude) is being overpowered by a violent, ear-damning sound design wavering somewhere between white noise, stadium cheering, and the cyclical whinny of an unseen factory machine. (According to Schwartz, it’s a field recording from inside a tunnel near a harbor.) Schwartz is to be commended for having the chutzpah (so rare today) to generate pointed, rigorous discomfort, and as Red progresses and concludes, the purpose becomes clear. In the final shots, we see people filing onto a bus, and a close-up of a loudspeaker (perhaps indicating that this otherwise everyday occurrence has become “news”). Some lives, some places, exist under the squall of permanent pressure. And sometimes, the perspectives we try our best to bracket out just hang with us, like a ringing in our ears.
Resonance (Karen Johannesen, U.S.) [s]
Blown up from Super 8, the gauge in which Johannesen customarily works, Resonance is a lovely, amber-toned abstraction that initiates a set of essentially painterly values and then sets to work pumping, popping and thrusting them about in a shadowbox of deep, miniaturized space. Taken as purely optical information, Resonance consists of vertical black bands interrupted by shifting golden stripes, which themselves are traversed by thinner horizontal black stripes. The golden stripes move forward and back, and sometimes seem to whirl around each other as different frame-by-frame “sets” blend in the eye. The more you look at it, the more you see “what it is.” (The yellowish forms are parts of a brick wall; the black stripes are negative space possibly produced in the processing, or maybe actually by some actual object like vertical blinds.) But space and motion overtake any sturdy resolution into “thingness.” Johannesen’s film is there strictly to vibrate, to open up a gap in vision – a literal hole in the wall.
Optra Fields VI-IX (T. Marie, U.S.) [v/s]
Late last year I had the pleasure of presenting a selection of works by video artist T. Marie in a festival program entitled “Pixel Painting,” alongside works by Phil Solomon and others. Sadly, it was to an assembled audience of five. But nevertheless, we repaired to a coffee shop and had a wonderful discussion about the screening, particularly Marie’s pieces, which fascinated by their unique application of painterly principles (particularly color mixing and the organization of the frame) to the video raster. Likewise, the pieces in question – 010101 (2009) and Slave Ship (2010) – represent a complex intersection between two distinct temporalities, which we might call “screen time” and “painting time.” We know that screen time is a duration determined by the maker of a work. But the beholder typically controls “painting time”, even though he or she may not consciously comprehend how a (still) picture unfolds before him or her in the looking mind. T. Marie’s practice, in addition to pushing individual pixel work to a highly defined level of aesthetic control, is also a deeply original and challenging investigation into this problem. And having said all this, I hope I can be understood when I explain that Marie’s latest works, Optra Fields VI-IX, strike me as rather disappointing. Although these three “canvases” are clearly as meticulous as Marie’s earlier efforts, the decision to explore the black and white lines and forms of Op Art seems redundant, if not wrongheaded. Op Art, with its almost neurological play on the standard sensorium, is already functioning “in time.” Setting forth an electronic Op field and then gradually shifting it is, in some sense, gilding the perceptual lily. In fact, this activation, together with the light quality and pixel shifting of video (as opposed to the latex matte of actual Op Art painting), threatens to place the spectator in a position so passive as to cancel “painting time” altogether. I deeply admire Marie as an artist and as a pioneer, but I simply feel that she’s barking up the wrong neurons this time around.
Chevelle (Kevin Jerome Everson, U.S. / Canada) [s]
No Really, Get Out of the Car – One of the simplest and most elegant films in this year’s program, Everson’s short, structural mini-documentary has bounce, crunch, and . . . well, I was going to say “a chassis that just won’t quit,” but as a matter of fact, Chevelle is a fixed-frame, real-time observation of the flattening of two junkers in a junkyard in Cookstown, ON. (The first is a green Grand Am, the second the Chevelle of the title, in Mary Kay pink.) Everson takes his distance from the rectilinear, ground-level smasher, giving his composition the distinct feel of a proscenium (In fact, it strongly resembles one of Robert Wilson’s postmodern opera sets – the CIVIL warS as populated by the John Chamberlain sculptures of the future.) Coming in from frame right, like an open-armed Shiva, is the forklift, sliding the cars onto the smasher like Pietàs. The plate comes down; the whole apparatus bounces. Pressure increases. Glass flies out midway to flatness. And there you have it: metal on metal, that’s what we crave. Program it alongside Thom Andersen’s latest. Yeah, we bust the windows out your car.
349 (for Sol LeWitt) (Chris Kennedy, Canada) [v/s]
Kennedy is one of a number of filmmakers who, to my mind, have returned to the lessons of structural film in recent decades, but with a difference. Whereas that tendency (don’t call it a “movement”!) eventually became anathema due to perceptions of academicism and an anti-humanist bent, this newer generation of film- and videomakers (including Scott Stark, Lynn Marie Kirby, Tomonari Nishikawa, Daïchi Saïto, and folks on this year’s program, like Recoder / Gibson and Blake Williams) understand “formalism” as a toolbox rather than a crusade. Having moved through that history, and others as well, it can serve as an opportunity not only for playfulness but even sly self-expression. 349, like Kennedy’s Tamalpais from two years ago, takes an external set of terms and organizes them according to a sequential grid. But unlike the earlier film, which segmented a landscape into a syntagmatic chain, 349 takes the elements of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing (one of the artist’s conceptual works, created as a series of directions for gallery employees to “perform”) and runs through them in such rapid succession as to practically layer them into one animated semi-solid. The primary structures of minimalism, when combined with the accelerated time element of digital video, results in a comical new form of “primary,” a bright, electric play-object that would not look out of place in between more conventional segments of Sesame Street or Yo Gabba Gabba! (And in this regard, Kennedy’s piece offers a hat-tip of sorts to the late avant-animator Robert Breer, whose films did in fact end up in children’s television.)
Black Mirror in the National Gallery (Mark Lewis, U.K. / Canada) [s]
In its single, semi-remote-controlled shot, Mark Lewis’s Black Mirror manages not only to raise certain questions about the nature of art spectatorship. (To call them “probing questions” would be to pun too hard to request clemency.) The film also accomplishes the noteworthy secondary goal – intended or not, I can’t say – of being frightening as hell, easily the scariest film in Wavelengths (not hard to do, typically) and a likely candidate for Horror Film of TIFF 2011. With a nod or more to Michael Snow’s classic La Région central, Lewis has outfitted a tall black mechanized arm (although I think we may catch a glimpse of human control – not certain) with a flat reflective disc. This robotic mirror-man is on dolly tracks moving straight ahead toward the camera, and it moves ever so slowly through two rooms of paintings in the National Gallery. On its central axis, the mirror dislocates the wainscoting, playing angles off each other to realign the gallery space, bringing some paintings closer, sending others further away. Views from the far room are enfolded into the nearer chamber. But this creepy giant eye isn’t just for spatial games. It really is an artificial “looker,” a kind of A.I. art-thinking machine. It pointedly bypasses canvases it isn’t “interested” in. At one point it uses its mirror reflecting capability to “compare” two paintings side by side, in the Heinrich Wölfflin style. And indeed, it zooms in on “us,” the camera eye, before retreating into itself. Much as Snow’s film demonstrated the landscape’s bald existence apart from any human life, Black Mirror seems to postulate a hermetic world of self-sufficient masterpieces, a forest of signs that “makes a sound” even when our eyes are averted.
Untitled (Neïl Beloufa, France) [s]
In many respects Untitled is the closest thing that this year’s Wavelengths has to a narrative work or “calling card” short. Even Rudniskaya’s film has more in the way of looping and non-characterization – hallmarks, after a fashion, of the avant-garde’s customary non-psychological approach – than Beloufa’s film, with its unity of place and time, symphony of consistently assigned voices, and exploration of a particular social / emotional complication. However, there is absolutely nothing conventional about Untitled, or about the films of Beloufa, one of the more interesting figures to come onto the scene in recent years. The “story” of an Algerian villa occupied, and ostensibly abused, by guerrilla rebels, Untitled is a surreal quasi-stageplay about trying to repair a massive rupture in the colonial membrane, a vulnerability displaced onto a building continually referred to as “her” and “she.” We see and hear the servants, neighbors, and the elderly master of the house, all as turned backs or truncated torsos. We never see them straight on. And “she,” the house “herself,” is also never seen in a straightforward manner, largely because the home’s existence is manifestly a projection, a physical fantasy. Look closely, and every vista is a photographic blow-up. The walls are cardboard and veneer. So what does this tell us? For one thing, the trauma of colonialism's protracted end is staged like a drama; everyone has his or her role to play, including the scenery. What's more, there's something vaguely unconvincing about the trauma, as though everyone understood that this rupture and loss (in the form of expropriation) was coming, and yet the participants felt an obligation (perhaps out of national pride?) to be stunned into a state of mourning.
Young Pines (Ute Aurand, Germany) [m]
Aurand’s film Hanging Upside Down in the Branches, an intimate film-portrait of women friends and relatives young and old, was a high point of Wavelengths in 2009, and she returns this year with a medium-length film that, while quite different in subject and approach, maintains the same tactile curiosity with the world in front of the camera. Young Pines records Aurand’s movements during a stay in Japan from May 2009 to November 2010. Her hand-held, staccato jump cuts (the result, it would appear, of in-camera editing) instigate a kind of “breath” in the images before us, a mark of the watching woman who maintains a respectful distance but nevertheless remains fully engaged. This is no “empire of signs” (to borrow Roland Barthes’s term); Aurand never reduces Japan to stock signifiers, even when examining such cultural markers as ink and brush calligraphy or Shinto shrines. In fact, Aurand’s formal approach could be said (if you can imagine it) to reflect a kind of dialectical position between the placid, timeless emanations of Nathaniel Dorsky and the vibrating, restless inter-frame fluctuations of Rose Lowder. (They’re both on this year’s program, so see for yourself. Oh, Andréa, you sly fox!)
But actually, Aurand does possess her own unique rhythm, one that becomes clearer as the film unspools. Young Pines has a macro-structure that, while hardly “narrative,” does mark definite shifts in perception and stance toward the locale before the lens. The shots become less jagged, and Aurand’s images are less murky, more vivid and (for lack of a better term) “involved” as the film goes along. (A turning point of sorts comes when Aurand observes a couple of elderly farmers harvesting cabbages. She hands them to him; he pitches them into the basket on his back, over and over, in a series of NBA no-look alley-oops. Growing old, lest we forget, means mastery.) Young Pines is mostly silent, but there are occasional passages of sound, Aurand providing a sustained sense of depth in these moments. The general arc of the film comes full circle, as nervous train-window shots indicate another uprooting, the end of hard-won belonging. But we also see the gorgeous, imposing normalcy of the natural world – bright flowers, red peppers on the vine, some kids unearthing a sweet potato. Only once does Aurand introduce text, and the 30 minute mark. A title card reads, “Matsushima, ah!” It’s at this instance, perhaps, that Young Pines evinces a melancholy recognition that belonging has its limits, beyond which lay only empathy.
Coorow-Latham Road (Blake Williams, Canada) [v/s]
There’s something afoot in the seeming long take down the long road in the Australian outback in this highly attenuated (in more ways than one) new work by newcomer Blake Williams. After a few seconds of possible cringing (festival veterans may initially think there’s a projection or digital rendering problem), it becomes fairly evident what Coorow-Latham Road is up to. It’s the mirage-like gaps that give it away; they almost imply that we’re entering some other dimension, like those shimmering portals Walter Bishop opens up on “Fringe.” Or maybe it’s just a wall of heat. But of course, what we’re seeing (pace Eric Morecambe) is “the join,” not an entry into another space but a mismatch-up from another time. Williams has created this “tracking shot” artificially using Google Earth, and so we’re witnessing the record of multiple passes, a kind of spatial average that refuses to smooth out into faux-singularity. For his part, Williams is able to reduce the older tropes of structural realism – duration, physical presence, the flat correspondence of time with space – to a desktop procedure. For his part, it isn’t perfect, and I’m not sure it’s meant to be. (I have trouble figuring out why Williams pans left when he does; his move into reverse-shot is anything but smooth.) But Coorow-Latham Road does adhere, in its problematized 21st century way, to the early dream of the Lumières, to bring the distant closer. The smeary trees, meanwhile, remind us that this proximity is a form of distance.
Thursday 9/8:
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Back To Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina / Switzerland / The Netherlands) [5]
Review forthcoming.
Pina (Wim Wenders, France / Germany) [5]
Review forthcoming.
Hotel Swooni (Kaat Beels, Belgium) [3]
Review forthcoming.
The Return (Nathaniel Dorsky) [m] [8]
Review forthcoming.
Generation P (Victor Ginzburg, Russia / U.S.) [4]
Review forthcoming.
Friday, 9/9:
Play (Ruben Östlund, Sweden / France / Denmark) [v] [W/O] (1:30) [but saw the rest later, so...] [4]
Review forthcoming.
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve, France) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico) [4]
Review forthcoming.
Porfirio (Alejando Landes, Colombia / Spain / Uruguay / Argentina / France) [6]
Review forthcoming.
Low Life (Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval, France) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Saturday, 9/10:
The Silver Cliff (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Faust (Alexander Sokurov, Russia) [5]
Review forthcoming.
House of Tolerance [L'apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close)] (Bertrand Bonello, France) [8]
Review forthcoming.
Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning) [v] [7]
Review forthcoming.
Bouquets 11-20 (Rose Lowder, France) [s] [7]
Review forthcoming.
Sunday, 9/11
Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, France / Belgium) [8]
Review forthcoming.
Fable of the Fish (Adolfo Borinaga Alix, Jr., The Philippines) [v] [4]
Review forthcoming.
/The Return (Nathaniel Dorsky) [m] [8]
Additional notes forthcoming.
Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure (Luis Recoder / Sandra Gibson / Olivia Block) [s]
Review forthcoming.
Monday, 9/12:
Review forthcoming.
The Cardboard Village (Ermanno Olmi, Italy) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Review forthcoming.
A Funny Man [Dirch] (Martin Z. Zandvliet, Denmark) [5]
Review forthcoming.
Tuesday, 9/13:
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev) [7]
Review forthcoming.
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, U.K.) [W/O] (1:00)
Comments forthcoming.
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece) [5]
Review forthcoming.
Wednesday, 9/14:
The Island President (Jon Shenk) [7]
Review forthcoming.
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, U.K.) [7]
Review forthcoming.