That End of the Year Post
Sunday, December 31, 2006 | 0 Comments
I've been debating for the last few days what I should write about in my year-end film post — wondering, frankly, if a write-up was necessary at all — and I've decided that the source of my ambivalence is the presence of so many similar lists and accompanying essays already out there. And that, I've just realized, is the real film story of 2006: the coming-of-age of online criticism. (See? Time magazine was right. We are the People of the Year.)
Not too long ago my twenty-link selection of "Daily Reads" constituted a near-complete list of the quality, regularly-updated websites that focused on world cinema. Now, with established print critics moving online and new voices chiming in everyday, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of writing that greets me each time I open Bloglines — so much so that, to be honest, I've fallen out of the habit of reading much of it at all. I find that I now approach the film blog-o-sphere in much the same way that I would behave if we all gathered face-to-face for a massive cocktail party. I grab my drink and find a quiet table over in the corner where I chat with the folks I've known the longest and the best and whose tastes are most similar to my own.
All of this is good news in every respect, I suppose, but one: As the film blog-o-sphere has evolved, I've felt my relation to Long Pauses change as well. Strange as it is to say, I feel a greater pressure these days to make declarations, to take a side, to join in "the critical conversation." That bloggers now have a legitimate (or legitimated [by marketing departments]) voice in that conversation blows my mind. But, as anyone who has festival'd with me can tell you, making declarations and shaping consensus is the last reason I started writing these "responses" six years ago. Which is why I found it so odd to find myself thinking recently, "I really need to see A Prairie Home Companion, When the Levees Broke, and those Scorsese and Eastwood films." I needed, in other words, to make my Top 10 "count." Strange.
The tenor of this post might imply that I have a deep stake in the debates about the current state of film criticism. I don't. Or, at least, I think I don't. I'm genuinely grateful for the film blog-o-sphere, for the close friendships that have developed because of it, and for the remarkable resource it has become. It's exciting. To continue the analogy, the cocktail party's warming up and the room is getting noisy. But I'm a hopeless introvert, and crowds make me anxious.
But anyway, here are the obligatory lists. The top three films (I count Jia's two films as halves of a whole) are as great as anything I've seen since The Son, and the rest of the top 15 (yes, I needed 15 this year) are all fantastic as well. I can't wait to watch Syndromes and Century and Colossal Youth again. Both are crammed full of beauty and mystery, and I'm eager to reexperience their magic. I forced myself to order the list this year and was surprised by the rankings. So Yong Kim's remarkable debut, In Between Days, climbed a notch or two higher with each revision, as did Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction (Will Ferrell's is probably my favorite performance of the year); Tsai Ming-liang's surprisingly conventional and touching I Don't Want to Sleep Alone dropped a bit.
As usual, I've ignored "official" release dates and am, instead, listing "new" films that I saw in 2006. It's just easier that way.
Fifteen Best New Films I Saw in 2006 (by preference)
- Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
- Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
- Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
- Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006)
- Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
- Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006)
- Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, 2006)
- A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)
- In Between Days (So Yong Kim, 2006)
- Schuss! (Nicolas Rey, 2005)
- I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006)
- Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006)
- Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)
- Flandres (Bruno Dumont, 2006)
- The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006)
Five Best New Short Films I Saw in 2006 (by title)
- A Bridge Over the Drina (Xavier Lukomski, 2005)
- Hysteria (Christina Battle, 2006)
- Nachtstuck (Peter Tscherkassky, 2006)
- Silk Ties (Jim Jennings, 2006)
- Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2006)
Ten Favorite Film Discoveries of 2006 (by title)
- Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
- Counsellor at Law (William Wyler, 1933) *
- Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
- The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998)
- New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)
- No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)
- Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
- Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) *
- The World (Jia Zhang-ke, 2004)
- And a bunch of great films from 2005 that I didn't see until this year (by preference) — Good Night, and Good Luck; Mysterious Skin; Kings and Queen; Last Days; Tropical Malady; The Beat That My Heart Skips; Junebug; Clean; Grizzly Man
* For the record, this list could very easily have consisted solely of Wyler and Godard films. The time I spent with them (37 films and counting) will be my main film memory of 2006.
Godard '66-'67
Friday, December 22, 2006 | 0 Comments
(still from La Chinoise)
Seven or eight years ago, when I was just beginning to explore world cinema, I went through a Godard phase during which I watched most of his early features -- Breathless, Les Carabiniers, Contempt, and five of the Anna Karina films. I ended my run with Pierrot le Fou, partly because the later films weren't then available on DVD but also because Godard's turn at that point in his career threw me for a loop. It wasn't the formal complexity of Pierrot that startled me (formally, it isn't terribly different from the films that preceded it); it was the anger, bitterness, and despair. The final sequence in that film -- Belmondo painting his face, wrapping his head in dynamite, lighting the fuse, struggling for a few terrifying seconds to put it out again, and then (after a cut to a long shot) blowing himself to pieces -- scared the hell out of me. I wasn't sure I was ready to follow Godard in this new direction.
Over the last few weeks I've watched for the first time the five features that followed Pierrot le Fou, all of them released in 1966 and 1967: Masculin Feminin, Made in U.S.A., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise, and Weekend. They mark several key transitions in Godard's career. As his marriage to Karina dissolved, so did their working relationship, and Made in U.S.A. would be their last collaboration. Jean-Pierre Leaud, who'd made uncredited appearances in a few of Godard's earlier films, stars in four of the five here, the exception being 2 or 3 Things . . . , which Godard filmed concurrently with Made in U.S.A. (one was shot in the morning, the other at night). Godard's use of Leaud seems to reflect his growing disenchantment with his own generation, who are increasingly represented as grotesque bourgeois decadents (the couple in Weekend, for example) by comparison to the young radicals who were then animating so much political unrest in France and the rest of the world. We see this also in Godard's use of his new young wife and leading lady, Anne Wiazemsky, whose expressionless face offers a stark contrast to Karina's glamour, and whose characters are more likely to assassinate government dignitaries or spraypaint Maoist slogans than to sing or dance.
It's the formal turns, though, that make these films so damn exciting. I happened to have watched Masculin Feminin just a few hours before meeting Caveh Zahedi for dinner last month, and I was surprised when he told me he'd never seen it all the way through. Always the Brechtian, Godard had been using distancing effects and winks to the camera (both literal and metaphoric) since his pre-Breathless days, but the interview segments in Masculin Feminin disregard, once and for all, the documentary/fiction distinction. (They also strike me as the most Caveh-like sequences in any Godard film I've seen.) I especially love the long interview with France's "real" Miss Nineteen, which begins as an innocuous enough conversation before turning to more sensitive and awkward subjects like birth control and reactionary politics. Godard echoes the interview with similar conversations between his "fictional" characters. By La Chinoise, one year later, Godard has dropped the formal artifice completely, including in the final cut his off-camera questions to Leaud, the actor/character -- questions about the film itself!
Tearing down the distinctions between documentary and fiction is a key step in Godard's deliberate move away from genre (the gangsters, singers, soldiers, and sci-fi detectives of his early films) and toward something closer in spirit to an essay. Juliette Jeanson of 2 or 3 Things . . . might call to mind Nana of My Life to Live, but her turn to prostitution isn't some inevitable concession to narrative convention; it's an economic transaction. Godard's growing dissatisfaction with commercial cinema is palpable here. With 2 or 3 Things . . . he is exploring film, instead, as an explicit method of analysis -- in this case to study and critique the suburbanization of Paris and the growing middle class. In this context, the apocalyptic violence and decay of Weekend is downright sublime. "End of film. End of cinema."
I'm less willing at this point to comment on the political content of these films. I still hope to track down a few of the Dziga Vertov Group projects, which, I assume, will help to unravel Godard's thinking in this regard. That a film like La Chinoise even exists says a great deal about the tenor of the times in which it was made, and I'm eager to give it another viewing. (I watched it last night, so it's just begun to percolate.) For now, I'm content to allow the sloganeering and the recitations stream right on by and to enjoy, instead, the revolutionary dissonances of Godard's aesthetic choices (and surely that was his intent): His Mondrian-like use of blue, white, red, and yellow (see image above); the minutes-long tracking and crane shots; the piles of burning wreckage; the urgent absurdity of it all.
Schuss! (2005)
Thursday, December 21, 2006 | 0 Comments
Dir. by Nicolas Rey
"Do you ski?"
Pause. Sly grin. "I used to."
-- First question at the Q&A with Rey, TIFF 2006
Nicolas Rey's Schuss! is an experimental essay film that is concerned, ultimately, with the spoils of capitalism. More specifically, it's about the rise of the aluminum industry, the building of a French ski resort, and the economic interests that joined the two. Also, Schuss! is about the cinema, which, I realize, is one of those lazy critical phrases that gets attached to every film that pushes, in even the vaguest of ways, the boundaries of film form. But in this case it's a fair assessment, I think. During the post-screening Q&A, Rey told us that the overarching subject of his work is the 20th century, and in this film he's particularly interested in chemistry -- specifically, the radical innovations that improved manufacturing processes and that made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey participates actively in his investigation by scavenging decades-old film stock, shooting it with restored cameras, and processing his footage by hand. (His previous film, Les Soviets plus l'electricite, was apparently shot on Soviet-era Super 8. Not surprisingly, he's in no hurry to buy a DV cam, and he doesn't want you to either.)
Schuss! is divided into several chapters, each of which includes: early 9 1/2mm skiing footage, recent footage shot atop a ski slope, archival documents that unearth the history of an aluminum manufacturing plant and the local economy it fueled, and contemporary images of that plant and the owner's large home that towers over it. A voice-over (I can't recall if it's Rey's or an interviewee's) comments on the images, filling in some -- but not all -- of the gaps. I'm ambivalent about the film's rigid structure, but the aspect of the film that I most admire would be impossible without it: the repetition of the skiing footage. The man in the image above is one of the sixty or seventy vacationers we watch take off from the same spot. Each acts in precisely the same manner. They pause briefly, stare down the slope, push off ("schuss" is a German word that describes a fast downhill run), and turn to pose for Rey's camera as they pass. Rey cuts the skiers together into a montage that begins to feel like a loop until interrupted, from time to time, by black, "empty" frames. (I've been following Zach's recent posts on cinema violence and flicker films with interest because I suspect that much that I liked about Schuss! is wrapped up, somehow, in those ideas. I remember, after the screening, making some vague comment to Michael about how I wanted to understand "what those black frames were doing to my eyes." Any guidance in this area would be much appreciated.) Schuss! is a long film -- unnecessarily long according to the few reviews I've found online -- but the effect of the duration, the constant repetitions, is to defamiliarize those skiers, making them . . . well . . . gross.
Songs of 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 | 0 Comments
"Reena" by Sonic Youth
Rather Ripped
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"Reena" isn't necessarily my favorite song of the year, and Rather Ripped isn't my favorite album, but 2006 was my Sonic Youth year so they get the top spot. "Reena," which opens the record and was also the opening song when I saw the band back in June, is a beautiful little three-and-a-half minute pop song, full of uncharacteristically melodic and feedback-free rhythm guitars. Hearing this song now puts me back in Asheville, pressed up against the stage, regretful for the fifteen years I wasted not seeing every Sonic Youth show within a 200-mile radius.
"Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" by Neko Case
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
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"Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" (which is my favorite song and album of the year) is like an epic-in-miniature, two-minute, 42-second suite. It changes tempo and tonality four times but does so organically, held together by a deceptively complex melodic line and a heartbreaking lyric. But Neko makes it all sound so simple. Like Gillian Welch, she can fool you into thinking that every song she sings is a hundred years old and haunted. "Will I ever see you again? / Will there be no one above me to put my faith in? / I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again." Beautiful.
"Lazy Susan" by Oakley Hall
Gypsum Strings
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As I wrote back in October, Oakley Hall is the real deal, and "Lazy Susan" is everything that I love about them: loud, grinding, sloppy, and deep, deep in the groove. As great as their show was (and it was really, really great), the historic Bijou Theatre was the wrong venue for Oakley Hall. I'd like to see them again in a smaller club, standing room only, where the volume makes conversation impossible and the beer is cheap. Where everyone (even the self-conscious like me) is sweaty from dancing and the room reaks of smoke. That would be a damn good time.
"Black Swan" by Thom Yorke
The Eraser
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Amnesiac has always been my favorite Radiohead record, so the laptop-flavored noodling of Yorke's solo album went down easy for me. The lyrics of "Black Swan," not surprisingly, are maddeningly obscure and have been read as both an ode to a failed relationship and a vitriolic screed against Tony Blair. I don't particularly care one way or the other. The song is meaningful to me because it captures something of the despair I battle from time to time, particularly when I'm reminded of Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, or the Bush presidency, generally. I suspect that's why Richard Linklater chose it (perfectly) for the closing credits of A Scanner Darkly.
"The Race is On Again" by Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
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I could have chosen any number of songs from I Am Not Afraid of You . . . , and each would give the first-time listener a completely different impression of the album. It's such a diverse and satisfying collection. I went with "The Race is On Again" simply because it's the loveliest song I heard all year. Georgia and Ira sound so good together here, and the Byrds- and Murmer-like Rickenbacker twang makes me smile everytime I hear it.
ALSO GREAT:
"All Systems Red" by Calexico
"The Avalanche" by Sufjan Stevens
"Black Star" (Radiohead cover) by Gillian Welch
"Brite Nitegown" by Donald Fagen
"Fucking Boyfriend" by The Bird and the Bee
"Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken" by Camera Obscura
"Love and Communication" by Cat Power
"Microscopic View" by The Pernice Brothers
"Roscoe" by Midlake
"See You Tomorrow" by Bruce Cockburn
"Soldier Jane" by Beck
"Steady as She Goes" by The Raconteurs
"We're Not Supposed to be Lovers" by Dean and Britta
Counsellor at Law (1933)
Friday, December 15, 2006 | 0 Comments
Dir. by William Wyler
In the foreground sits Harry Becker (Vincent Sherman), a young radical who only the night before was beaten and arrested by the police for, as his mother explains it, "making Communist speeches." He sits here with George Simon (John Barrymore), a high-powered attorney whose office overlooks Manhattan from atop the Empire State Building. Harry is in Mr. Simon's office begrudgingly, having only come at the behest of his mother, a stereotypically diffident immigrant who had once lived down the street from George's family. That was back in "the old days," back before George had worked his way through school and made his name and fortune as a ruthless defender of promiscuous divorcees, corrupt politicians, and rapacious business leaders. "Keep your charity for your parasites!" barks Harry, shaking with rage. Simon, both wounded and piqued by the comment, turns to look at the angry young man. And then the fun begins.
Adapted from a successful stage play by Elmer Rice, Counsellor at Law was a production of Universal Pictures, then still under the control of founder Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Jr. In 1925, the elder Laemmle had allowed a cousin's young son to direct his first film, a two-reel western called Crook Buster, and in the eight years since, William Wyler had made forty or fifty pictures for Universal. Except for The Love Trap (1929), a charming romantic comedy and Wyler's first talkie, none of these early films are, as far as I know, readily available on DVD. While I enjoyed The Love Trap -- and enjoyed the natural and nuanced lead performances, especially -- I wasn't quite prepared for Counsellor at Law, which, unlike so many other studio dramas of the '20s and '30s, is shockingly contemporary in tone, characterization, and mise-en-scene. It is also the perfect introduction to the films of William Wyler.
Rice's play premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on November 6, 1931, some six months after the Empire State first opened its doors. It was the second of two new plays written and produced by Rice that year, joining The Left Bank as a great critical and commercial success. Rice sold both scripts to Universal, but only Counsellor at Law made it into production. Carl Jr.'s growing confidence in Wyler was evident in his handing over of such a valuable property to the young director. Laemmle had paid Rice $150,000 for the play, an impressive sum during the Depression, and as a kind of insurance on his investment had also contracted Rice to adapt the play himself. After a quick first meeting between the writer and director in Mexico City, Rice flew home to New York to begin revisions and Wyler returned to Los Angeles to begin casting. Principal photography began three weeks later, and exactly three months after that the film opened at Radio City Music Hall to rave reviews.
Pauline Kael later described Wyler's film as "energetic, naïve, melodramatic, goodhearted, and full of gold-diggers, social climbers, and dedicated radicals." That is to say, it is a product of those peculiar days of the early-1930s, when the collapse of world markets revealed for all to see the diseases that plague capitalism and when "being Left" in America was still uncomplicated by Stalin and Mao. Counsellor at Law is no Waiting for Lefty (1935) -- Rice was a generation older than Clifford Odets and the other founding members of the Group Theatre, and didn't share their idealism or fervor -- but the play/film is still very much of the era in its ambivalence about (if not quite antagonism toward) economies founded on greed and exploitation. Waiting for Lefty ends, famously, with a chorus of actors chanting "Strike!" as they make their way off stage and past the seated audience. If Counsellor at Law can be criticized for surrendering to a "happy ending" convention that mucks up any would-be "sound-as-brickwork-logic" Marxist reading of the text (to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer), then it should also be commended for sparing audiences Odett's brand of didacticism. As would be the case again and again throughout his long career, Wyler mines the source material for its humanity and, in doing so, gives us a compelling critique of specific historical conditions that rises above sloganeering.
Note: I hope to return to this post someday and give Counsellor at Law the formal reading it deserves. It's really a fantastic film.
Half Nelson (2006)
Thursday, December 14, 2006 | 0 Comments
Dir. by Ryan Fleck
It's rare these days when I find myself identifying with a character in the same way that, say, the 7-year-old version of me identified with Charlie Bucket or the 15-year-old version of me identified with Holden Caulfield. But Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted, idealistic History teacher played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, is more like me than any other character I've met in quite some time. I don't share his drug problems, fortunately, but I identify with what they represent in his life -- the hypocrisy and disillusionment and isolation. (We all have our fatal flaws, right?)
What rescues Half Nelson from the trappings of Movie of the Week melodrama -- and what makes it one of my favorite new films of 2006 -- is the care with which Fleck and partner Anna Boden ground Dunne's struggles in a specific historical and political context. He's not some Everyman Teacher fighting a universal battle for the hearts and minds of Today's Youth; he's the child, both literally and philosophically, of the '60s generation that fought bravely and successfully for Civil Rights and Free Speech before watching their idealism shattered by personal excess, in-fighting, the horrors of Vietnam (or their inability to stop it), creeping apathy, and, eventually, the dawning of a new "Morning in America."
In the classroom, Dunne throws out the approved curriculum and, instead, teaches his students dialectics, forcing them to recognize the complexity -- the counter-arguments, the push and pull -- of every issue. As a simple echo of Dunne's own swings between good and bad, light and dark, all the talk of dialectics is, perhaps, too easy a metaphor. But Fleck and Boden, I think, are interested in larger issues as well: the essential nature of debate for the health of a Democracy, for example, and, more specifically, the difficult but necessary intersection between idealism (even naive idealism) and pragmatism that every movement must maneuver in search of a progressive politics.
I continued writing my dissertation long after I'd lost my enthusiasm for academia and the specific texts with which I was working because I was (and still am) personally invested in the central questions of the project: How do I take this "theory" -- specifically, the ideas about democracy that animated the best aspects of the American New Left -- and transfer them into "action"? How do I find "praxis" at the historical moment when capitalism won? How do I fight off the cynicism of my generation and participate, in a practical and meaningful way, in a progressive movement toward goodness and justice? How do I hold onto hope when I see so little cause for it?
There's a moment two-thirds of the way through Half Nelson when Dunne drives across town to confront Frank, a drug dealer who is angling to pull one of Dunne's favorite students out of school and into the business. Dunne is high. He's bought drugs from Frank (and other dealers just like him) many, many times. The right/wrong dialectic here has exploded into a dizzying miasma, and Gosling's performance nails it. "What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to do something, right?" he finally gasps. I didn't know whether to cry or cheer.
Satantango (1994)
Tuesday, December 12, 2006 | 0 Comments
Dir. by Bela Tarr
See Also: Damnation
Perhaps the best way to begin this response is to just be out with it: Satantango is not the Greatest. Film. Ever. Also, seeing it projected in 35mm at a good theater and in one sitting (minus two fifteen-minute intermissions) was not one of the defining experiences of my cinema-going life. And unlike Susan Sontag, I'm in no hurry to watch it again, once a year, for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, it was still one of my favorite film moments of 2006. How could it not be?
After my only other experience with a Bela Tarr film, I wrote:
The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It's the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: "A bucket is a bucket is a bucket." The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion.
I felt the same frustrations throughout the seven-and-a-half hours of Satantango. There's an odd tension generated by the collision of Tarr's form/aesthetic (long takes, slow tracking shots, expressionless faces in close-up) and his vision of the world, which strikes me as pessimistic in the extreme. The influence of Tarkovsky is so heavy, I can't help but compare the two, and what most fascinates me about the comparison is how Tarkovsky's films, even at their most bleak (Ivan's Childhood, Nostalghia), feel guided by a generous (spiritual?) wisdom, while Tarr's seem to have been constructed in Nature's laboratory. In contrast to Tarkovsky the Mystic, I imagine Tarr as the Skeptical Scientist, training his eye on his human subjects, determined to prove his cynical hypotheses.
Take, for example, the story of Estike, a young girl who is pulled from a sanitarium by her mother and brought back home, where she suffers all manner of neglect and abuse. We meet her just as she's being tricked out of her last few cents by a thieving older brother, and then, over the next forty minutes or so, Satantango becomes her film. We see her act out in a desperate effort to take control of some aspect of her life, wrestling with her cat in one of the most disturbing film sequences I have ever seen. ("I am stronger than you," she hisses at the terrified cat.) We see her make one last attempt at human contact, but, cursed and rejected, she is sent running off alone into the dark woods. We see her walk, without blinking, down an empty road, and this time we watch her even more closely; Tarr holds her face in focus for minutes at a time ("a face is a face is a face"). And then we see her die. We watch as she curls up beside her dead cat and eats the same rat poison that killed it.
Before she dies, Estike imagines an angel looking down on her with sympathy. Right now, as I struggle to find the next sentence -- and despite the many misgivings I've already expressed -- I'm aware of a tenderness in Tarr's gaze that I didn't experience during the film itself. I keep thinking of another shot, a minutes-long close-up of Estike's face as she peers through a window at the drunken townspeople dancing in a pub. Why has she been rejected by this human community? Is she too pure? Too uncorruptable? (Are these even the appropriate questions to be asking of her?) And, even more importantly, does this human community have access to any means of redemption, whether transcendent or humanist? My sense is that it does not, but I'm feeling an urge to reacquaint myself with Tarkovsky's Ivan, Bresson's Mouchette, and the Dardennes' Rosetta to test my own hypothesis.
Satantango is, inevitably, a defining experience in one respect: As a self-proclaimed lover of boring art films and a proselyte for the long take, I'm grateful for having had the opportunity to immerse myself in that aesthetic for an entire day. (I'm reminded of a friend in Toronto who recounted Andrea Picard's response when he expressed his misgivings about spending a weekend with Warhol's Empire. "But what happens?" he asked. "Life happens," she said.) Like the coal buckets in Damnation, the opening shot of cows being loosed into the fields in Satantango is as beautifully strange and breath-taking as any image I saw all year. Following it with a hundred more long takes pushes, in interesting ways, the limits of the affect. At times I became fatigued by it all and began praying for a cut. But two or three shots later I would become mystified again. I'd be curious to get the DVDs and hold the "boring" (in the best sense) shots up beside the "boring" (in the worst sense) shots to get a clearer sense of the distinction. Is it a matter of aesthetics? (Is beauty more compelling?) Is it a function of narrative? (The cat-wrestling scene was certainly the most heart-pounding.) Is it an elemental question of form? (Given similar content and cinematographic style, how would variations to mise-en-scene, for example, affect our viewing pleasure?)
I still don't think Satantango is the Greatest. Film. Ever. But, damnit, I think I've talked myself into wanting to see it again. Soon.
Silk Ties (2006)
Monday, December 11, 2006 | 3 Comments
Dir. by Jim Jennings
Avant-garde cinema remains a new frontier for me. I don't have the vocabulary for it yet, and I often find myself mystified (in the best sense of the word) by the experience of most experimental films. At this point I trust my critical judgment only to the point of distinguishing the very, very good from the very, very bad, and Jim Jennings's Close Quarters (2004), which I saw at TIFF 2005, impressed me to the extent that I now use it as shorthand for the style of filmmaking that discovers transcendent beauty in the everyday. Close Quarters, which was shot entirely within Jennings's New York home, is a montage of near-abstract images -- shadows moving against a wall, light pouring through a curtain, the face of his cat -- but his mastery of chiaroscuro never subsumes the "real" subjects of his gaze. Or, as Michael Sicinski puts it (much better than I could):
The film is a play between the urge to "escape" the domestic via an aesthetic sensibility, and an undiluted love for the domestic, a gathering of bodies and shadows as co-equal loved ones. This is the film that a certain segment of the avant-garde has been trying to make for nearly fifty years, and the painful, radiant beauty of it -- its full embrasure of a sliver of ordinary life, one that shines forth simply because it is so unreservedly loved -- brought tears to my eyes.
Jennings's latest, Silk Ties (2006), is a lesser film, I think, but it was still among the best shorts I saw in 2006. A city symphony in miniature, Silk Ties is never short of stunning to look at. Like so many great photographs, the stark black-and-white images here seem to have been stolen from some slightly more magical reality. (After seeing the Jennings film and Nathanial Dorsky's Song and Solitude on the same program, I walked away wishing I could recalibrate my view of the world around me, which, I guess, is one of the more noble functions of a-g cinema.) If I was less moved by Silk Ties than by Jennings's previous film, then (borrowing from Michael's comments) I wonder if it's simply a matter of his moving from a domestic space to a more impersonal cityscape. His changed relationship to his subject would, perhaps, necessitate a changed relationship for the viewer as well.
Coming Attractions
Monday, December 11, 2006 | 0 Comments
It's now mid-December, which means that every dork (like me) with a keyboard and a penchant for navel-gazing is whittling away at his or her year-end Top 10 lists. Over the next two weeks, I plan to post short responses to my favorite film experiences of 2006. This post here is both an explanation for why these short pieces will soon begin appearing, and it also gives you permission to pester me if/when I fail to follow through. If no new content appears here for a day or two, please feel free to tell me to get off my lazy ass and write. (I reserve the right to not post on weekends.)
Darren Hughes is a web designer and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee.