Cine Club

Plain Talk and Common Sense

2004-11-19T13:00:00.000-05:00

On his personal website, Jost writes:

Done in a series of radically different sections which collide with each other in a manner intended to provoke thinking, Plain Talk, which was made by an American and intended for American viewers, was indeed broadcast in Britain, but somewhat predictably, not in the USA.

Filmed in the wake of Reagan's 525 to 13 electoral trouncing of Mondale (and Dubya thinks he has a "mandate"), Plain Talk is a critical portrait of an America in the final throes of its decades-long ideological battle with communism. Rather than attempt to characterize a film that I haven't yet seen, I'll just direct you to Jost's personal reflections, which stands as a darn good essay on its own terms. I'm particularly intrigued by the final paragraph. It shouldn't take too great a leap for us to apply the same words to our current situation:

Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses) attempted to unmask this charade, surely a thankless task, drawing on the lore and philosophy of America’s past. It asks questions, poses riddles, and prods the viewer to ponder along with the filmmaker on the meaning of it all. And, in typical American fashion, at end it plops the matter directly in the individual’s lap, following in the manner of Walt Thoreau: in the recurring parlance of the times, "You are what you eat," or what you do. America is, in sum, what Americans do, and let be done in their name.

One other thing. I asked a friend what he thought of Jost, and he offered the following:

If nothing else, Jon Jost definitely has a feel for the pulse of red America, and I don't mean that in a condescending way, but more like a comfortability (and almost exclusive familiarity) for "sameness" (in people, in everyday routines) and the kind of intrinsic propensity for self-reliance that really doesn't tolerate a lot of intrusion of authority into their daily lives. His feature films can be glacially paced, but from what I've seen, there is that shock of violence that ripples through that deceptive insularity that really propels the narrative forward. Plain Talk and Common Sense has a lot to say about why Americans from different parts of the country (and sometimes even in the same state) don't always understand each other, much less the rest of the world (and because of this, seem prey to blanket characterizations of what is good and evil).

The Son

2004-08-27T13:53:00.000-04:00

Assuming that I can track down a copy by Sunday, this week we’ll be watching The Son (Le Fils), the latest film from Belgian brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes. The Son is their third feature, following La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta (1999), both of which are really remarkable. (I wrote a bit about La Promesse for Long Pauses.) The Son premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, where it won the Golden Palm, along with the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and a best actor award for Olivier Gourmet. It was also the highest ranking, non-English language film in Film Comment’s 2003 Critics’ Poll.

At the risk of over-hyping the film (and setting us up for disappointment), I have to say that The Son is the best film I’ve seen in some time. I watched it a few weeks ago and have been haunted by it since. The Dardennes are heavily indebted to French filmmaker Robert Bresson, whose films find their emotional depth via rigid formal technique. (It might be fun to watch a Bresson film together, actually.) The Son is shot with a handheld camera, but it’s a very different approach from the Dogme school (like Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves). There’s no improvisation here, but the handheld camera work and the natural performances give the film a documentary feel.

Like Bresson’s films—Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Au Hasard Balthazar, in particular—The Son also contains very little dialogue, and it is keenly interested in revealing the transcendent in the everyday. For example, Olivier, the main character, is a carpenter, and the film asks us to appreciate the beauty and danger and significance of his daily tasks. (I don’t know if that makes sense, but it will when you watch the film.) I’m still haunted by The Son, I think, because it operates, first, as a visceral experience. (That’s a thin warning, Michelle. It’s no Straw Dogs, but The Son will push you emotionally.)

Don’t go read any reviews. The less you know about the plot, the better.

Généalogies d'un Crime

2004-08-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

My interest is officially piqued. From the IMDb plot summary:

At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed. Odd psychiatrists turn up, including Georges Didier, who runs FBPS, and his rival, Christian, who believes crime originates in a story's taking hold of a person.

When I asked the friend who recommended Généalogies if he had any advice for our screening, he said, "Just sit back and enjoy. Don't get too wrapped up in keeping all the details straight (and there will be a lot!); it all comes together anyway." From a quick scan of Internet resources, the general consensus seems to be that Ruiz fits somewhere along the line of surrealists that includes Luis Bunuel and Jacques Rivette.

Rivette, in particular, is often compared to Ruiz, and they appear to share a co-writer, Pascal Bonitzer. Bonitzer is also a film theorist whose readings of Hitchcock I’ve found of some use in the past. (His essay, "Hitchcockian Suspense" in Slavoj Zizek’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) is good stuff.) So anyway, the film should prove interesting visually, and it will likely direct our discussion into the realm of psychoanalytic criticism. Or not.

Ruiz is ridiculously prodigous, knocking out 91 films since 1960 (when he was 19) and 26 since 1990. His latest project is a biography of Gustav Klimt starring John Malkovich, which is scheduled for release next year. Ruiz is also a writer and critic. Here's a blurb from Adrian Martin's "Ruiz in the '90s":

Narrative gaps constitute true Ruiz territory. He is the cinema's greatest poet of discontinuity, of black holes, empty spaces and alarming fissures riddling every story. Ruiz likes to muse a lot, in interviews and in his marvellous 1995 book Poetics of Cinema, about how there's always something hidden and mysterious, a hidden piece, an interval, between every shot and the next in a movie. Even within a single shot, funny things happen in his films: images are split down a fuzzy, almost imperceptible line in the middle of the screen so that, for instance, we might see Mastroianni sitting down and drumming his fingers at the dinner table in the left of the shot, and in the right, a view of him in a mirror showing him doing something similar, but just slightly, nigglingly different.

In the immortal words of Arte Johnson, "verrrry interesting.

Caveh Zahedi

2004-08-04T13:58:00.000-04:00

I first encountered Caveh Zahedi in Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001), one of my favorite films of the last five years or so. Caveh appears just long enough to deliver this rambling, but oddly inspiring, lesson on the film theories of Andre Bazin. What most excites Zahedi is Bazin's peculiarly Christian film aesthetic, his faith in the cinema as a medium uniquely capable of recording and revealing God's active presence in our lives. Because God is manifest in all of creation, or so the argument goes, film by its very nature necessarily documents those manifestations, capturing them on celluloid or video and representing them to us in a darkened theater. For Bazin, the master filmmakers are those most adept at filtering out the mind- and soul-numbing white noise of life in the process, thereby offering us brief glimpses of the transcendent. Zahedi argues that, by revealing these "Holy Moments," film should (though it seldom does) reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

We walk around like there are some holy moments, and there are all the other moments that are unholy. But, this moment is holy, right? Then, in fact, film can let us see that. It can frame it so that we see this moment: holy. Holy, holy, holy, moment by moment. But who can live that way? 'Cause if I were to look at you and just really let you be holy, I would just stop talking. . . . I'd be open. Then I'd look in your eyes, and I'd cry, and I'd feel all this stuff, and that's not polite. It would make you uncomfortable.

When I first met Paul, I mentioned this being one of my favorite sequences from any film, and he told me that it works because Linklater "let Caveh be Caveh." This week, I'd like to show the Holy Moments sequence from Waking Life, followed by two of Zahedi's own films: The World is a Classroom (his contribution to the Underground Zero project to which Paul also contributed a film) and In the Bathtub of the world.

I've watched Bathtub several times over the past few weeks and am anxious to share/discuss it with others. I'm guessing that Zahedi's films will be polarizing, but whether you like them or not -- whether you like Zahedi himself or not -- they will give us a lot to talk about. This profile is a pretty good introduction to his life and work:

CAVEH ZAHEDI HAS found god, but I'm not sure: perhaps he is god. His presence in his films (most of which he stars in) is in many ways divine, an aura formed by an almost obsessive sensitivity, a complete and utter sacrifice to the camera. No matter who he's playing – and he's not only featured in his own movies but also those of Richard Linklater (Waking Life), Greg Watkins (A Sign from God), and Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth) – Caveh Zahedi is Caveh Zahedi, who just happens to be a compelling cinematic character.

"I'm actually a very poor actor," he says. "I really can't do anyone else but myself." When Linklater, whom he's known since 1991, sent him a draft of Waking Life and asked him to appear, Zahedi told him he couldn't use the language on the page and offered the director alternate spiels; Zahedi's musings on metaphysics turned out to be the most universally praised, revelatory sequences in the film.

With the 2000 film I Was Possessed by God, Zahedi's documentary lens captures the most unreal of worlds, the convulsive spirituality of a major mushroom trip, channeling a Jean Rouch film from far, far away. Zahedi has often recorded himself in altered states; his most recent was a mushroom scene in In the Bathtub of the World (2001), a day-by-day video diary of an entire year. The film is his most elegant – and raw – visual achievement to date.

The term "raw" could be applied to all of Zahedi's films, as a compliment. With "The World Is a Classroom," Zahedi peels back the layers until there's no protective skin. The piece was his contribution to the 2002 "Underground Zero" program – the independent shorts collection he curated with Jay Rosenblatt in response to Sept. 11 – and in it Zahedi trains his camera on a San Francisco Art Institute class he's teaching, until the formerly peaceful group falls apart. Zahedi measures the power balance between himself and his students, and the process recalls the work of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and other Iranian filmmakers who, like Zahedi, mix fiction and nonfiction with self-revelation, reenactment, and an occasional touch of cruelty.

Zahedi has explored alienation and assimilation as the son of an Iranian émigré, particularly in 1994's I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, but finds his cinematic connection with Iran a strange coincidence: he admits he hadn't even seen any Iranian films until well into his career, after he'd already claimed Cassavetes and Tarkovsky as his guides.

A few other links of use:
1. CavehZahedi.com
2. Another overview
3. Tripping with Caveh
4. Film Threat Interview

Home Cinema Guilt, or My First Blog

2004-08-01T10:57:00.000-04:00

This is the first time I have ever "blogged" and it seems fitting that, in a post that is largely meant to test this new (to me) technology, I comment on the thing that got me here -- DVD home cinema.

This week, I found myself in possession of a video projector for a couple of days. (I had borrowed it from UT for a screening of youth video projects at the public library.) I've used video projectors countless times, but never in my own home. So, inspired by my first experience of Darren's home cinema system, Ashley and I decided to set up a makeshift home cinema of our own. We moved the couch so we could the living room's largest wall could be our "screen”, used a chair and a Rubbermaid container full of camping supplies as our projector stand, ran cables across the floor wherever they needed to go. It was great.

We chose to watch A Personal Journey Through American Movies with Martin Scorsese. If you haven't seen it, do. It’s a fantastic parade of clips from Hollywood B-films with Scorsese giving a master class in why he loves and what he sees in movies. Its running time of almost four hours made all the rearranging we did seem worth it.

The next day I read an article in The New York Times that reminded me of the times in Philadelphia when I walked down to my neighborhood park to watch things like The Third Man screen out of the back of moving van. I showed the article to Ashley and told her I was thinking of buying a video projector – so I could screen at home, but also so I could screen stuff outdoors. Halfway through the article, she turned to me and said, “Do it.” Within hours I was online shopping for a video projector. It should arrive this week.

I’ve long valued the importance of seeing a movie projected as large as possible and hearing it through good speakers, but viewing Spirit of the Beehive on Darren’s home cinema, and then the more-modest experience in my own home this week, made me realize I’m no longer content to settle for watching cinema, even at home, on a screen that is 1/100th the size it’s supposed to be. Somehow, 1/20th seems a lot better.

As I write those words, I realize that this is exactly how the Home Theater manufacturers want me to think. One hallmark of American luxury (or at least middle-class American luxury consumption) is the notion that “I’ve been settling for less. And why should I settle for less?” Indeed, this is how and why we keep up with the Joneses (in my case, the Hugheses). So I’m aware I can be accused of conspicuous consumption (and blogging about this gives special emphasis to the first word in that phrase).

Of course, the other hallmark of middle-class American luxury consumption is earnest self-justification and, accordingly, a part of me wants to plead: “I’m a filmmaker! I need this for my work! I'll really use this!” Or, “Like Darren, I plan on sharing this with others, instead of showing it off as something for others to covet.” Or, “The men and women that made these films would endorse my decision. Movies were meant to be seen BIG.” Or, “C’mon, it’s not like I just bought a Hummer.” And so on.

But then another part of me reads an article like Jonathan Rosenbaum’s column this week (which reminds me of a very fine talk given by Darren) and thinks, “Stop feeling guilty. This is going to be fun.” Consider yourself invited.

Unknown Pleasures

2004-07-31T10:09:00.000-04:00

Unknown Pleasures is the third and most recent feature from filmmaker Jia Zhangke. Like his previous films, Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures was made without the permission of the Chinese government and, therefore, cannot be shown in the director's homeland. Jia's latest project, The World, which is scheduled to be released later this year, will be his first "aboverground" film.

I'm relatively familiar with the big names of Taiwanese cinema -- people like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang -- but don't think I've ever seen a contemporary film from mainland China. I've tried to avoid reading too many reviews, but I do know that the film falls pretty comfortably into the "disaffected youth" genre, and most critics seem to read it as a commentary on the alienating effects of encroaching Westernization. This is a common theme among many interesting filmmakers right now, particularly those in "developing" nations like China and Iran. When I watch Tsai's films, I'm often reminded of Modernist writers like Hemingway and Amy Lowell -- slow, simple meditations on alienation that show a real ambivalence toward "progress."

Unknown Pleasures was shot on digital video, and if the screen shots below are any indication, it looks like Jia captures some of that alienation even in his compositions, positioning people on opposite edges of the frame and dwarfing individuals against a massive landscape. Click on the thumbnails to open larger images.

Here are some useful links:

1. An interview with Jia Zhangke
2. An overview of Jia's life and career
3. A whole mess of reviews

Christ in Concrete

2004-07-24T18:08:00.000-04:00

Paul sent along the following:

I decided to assemble a few pre-screening resources for Sunday's screening of "Christ in Concrete" by Edward Dmytryk instead of writing and delivering "introductory comments." Doing it this way allows you more time to consider the info before the screening, and means you can return to the resources after seeing the film.

"Christ in Concrete" was made in 1949 and is also known as "Give us this Day". It was directed by Edward Dmytryk. The screenplay, by Ben Barzman, was adapted from Pietro di Donato's novel. Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) calls it a "moving and durable" film.

The film is the first made by Dmytryk after he was blacklisted and sent to prison for contempt of Congress in 1948 for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film was made in England. Like Dmytryk, Barzman was also blacklisted and moved to Europe. (He also worked with Joseph Losey, another blacklisted filmmaker.) Dmytryk, however, returned to the USA and became a "friendly witness" to HUAC.

1. General information on "Christ in Concrete" from Internet Movie Database

2. Review of the "Christ in Concrete" DVD by Scott Tobias (Onion AV)

3. A brief bio of director Edward Dmytryk. Includes links to information on HUAC

4. An interview with Dmytryk done shortly before his death. (No mention of "Christ in Concrete".)

Finally, if you're interested, here's a bio of Victor Erice, director of "Spirit of the Beehive"