signpost films

Girish Shambu writes in Days and Nights of a Cinephile…

There are movies we encounter at certain points in our appreciation for the medium that become, almost by accident, little breakthroughs in our viewing life. They may not be great masterpieces—though they well might—but the important thing is that we have the fortune of meeting up with them at just the right juncture in our development. I think of them as ‘signpost films’: they take a patch of aesthetic territory that was previously foggy or unmapped to us and they suddenly open it up, making us see and learn something revelatory about this art-form that we love. Each ‘signpost film’ offers us some sort of lesson or fundamental insight about cinema that we then proceed to carry with us and apply to hundreds of films we encounter in the future.

What are your signposts?

I’ve but a simple mind, so I’ll chart some of mine linearly in terms of when I encountered them.

 

Back to the Future (1985)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

As a son of the 80’s, it would be pretentious and patently false to deny that the Lucas/Spielberg junta that took American movies (and audiences and pop-culture and ethos and…) hostage are to credit for captivating my imagination and sparking my life-long cinematic love affair. As a wee lad, there was something about the ‘To Be Continued…’ that roared on-screen at the end of Back to the Future that made my mind reel. “Wait. What? There’s more? Woooow.” I knew then that no matter what else was going on in the world, I wanted to remain in the company of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. Apparently, Zemeckis’ time travel trilogy was not the first to serialize stories, nor were motion pictures the first medium to do so. But with that ellipses, I was forever beholden to the movies.

See also: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)/Ghostbusters (1984)/Back to the Future Part II (1989)

 

The Graduate (1967)

Directed by Mike Nichols

One word, just one word, may not have been all it took to redirect Benjamin Braddock on his career path. But one film was all it took to guide me towards a deeper understanding of how movies work. When I encountered The Graduate as a teenager, it flipped a switch on in my head that showed me that movies could do more than just entertain. There is a lot more than meets the eye to moviemaking, and Mrs. Robinson pulled back the curtain so that I could pay attention to it.

See also: Harold and Maude (1971)/Rushmore (1998)

 

Stranger than Paradise (1984)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch got down to the bare essentials with this early work. It’s actually quite a straightforward narrative told in clearly delineated three acts. It’s that he told it without any superfluous bells and whistles that makes it an eloquent rejoinder to the Lucas/Spielberg call for bombast.  In the same decade that Reagen was reworking the national landscape, Stranger than Paradise showed the world a quieter, more Beckettian America. I was too young to be aware of it at the time, but through the magic of movies I was able to experience it as though I were.

See also: She’s Gotta Have It (1986)/Paris, Texas (1984)

 

Ikiru (1952)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa got my attention with clanking samurai swords and creepy, eyebrowless mediums channelling dubious reports from the grave (Rashomon). But it was his unsentimental tale of a bureaucrat with stomach cancer given mere months to live that floored me. The first half of the film is spent with the protagonist in the moments after he is made aware of his fate. He processes the information, ambles through an aimless night then decides to use his position as a paper-pushing drone to build a children’s playground. The second half is spent at his wake, with those that thought they knew him flashing-back and dissecting his existence. It literally did not occur to me until the writing of this post that the bifurcated structure of this narrative has been echoed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hong Sang-soo, both of whom favor splitting their films into two over a three act structure.  

See also: The Power of Kangwon Province (1998)/Syndromes and a Century (2006)

 

The Heiress (1949)

Directed by William Wyler

I was raised on the classics, from Capra to Hitchcock, by my parents, themselves no strangers to good cinema. But it was not until I was reacquainted with old Hollywood by Wyler’s adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square that I comprehended the breadth of the studio system. It may have been a flawed factory – genre films only, outsiders need not apply, distribution controlled by censoring gatekeepers - but I’ll be damned if some amazing work wasn’t produced by it. Exhibit A: the depth of the cruelty of Ralph Richardson as an emotionally abusive father. Exhibit B: the evolution of Olivia de Havilland from pitiable naïf to intractable woman-of-the-house. If one need see any more proof of the superiority of the studio system over today’s studio films, place the well-pedigreed but by-the-numbers Washington Square (1997) next to The Heiress. See for yourself. (Didn’t mean to make that comparison come off as a taste-test ad. Oh well.)

See also: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)/Notorious (1946)/Winchester ‘73 (1950)

 

What Time is it There? (2001)

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang

It’s no secret that I’m an unapologetic fan of deliberately paced contemporary Asian cinema. Tsai Ming-liang once said that the world moves at such a fast clip, so he makes movies that take their time to breathe. What Time is it There? is as solid an expression of that M.O. as any. It articulates itself with hardly any exposition. I found the care with which each shot, each gesture was composed ceaselessly captivating. Numerous other films of his, of Hou’s, of Yang’s, of others follow suit, some predate it, but this was the one that I encountered first. So it gets the credit.

See also: After Life (1998)/Yi Yi (2000)/Café Lumière (2003)

There are countless other films which I could cite as signpost films for me – Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985), Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002), Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds (1955), David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), Edward Yang’s A Brighter, Summer Day (1991), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964). Thankfully, the list goes on.

putting down the whip

Forty Guns (1957)

Director: Samuel Fuller

With: Barbara Stanwyck

Samuel Fuller made the most of what little he had, not unlike those scrappy pioneers that tamed the West. He made an art out of taking what might have been slight B-pictures and terraforming them into substantial genre/gender/generation-challenging films.

40 Guns opens with a majestic Scope panorama of three men, the Bonnell brothers, riding through a valley. Soon they are not only dwarfed by the shadows of clouds passing overhead, but by the stampede of Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) and her titular posse of hired hands charging in the opposite direction. The men, coughing and wiping their eyes, are left in the dust to wonder what just passed. This brief prelude neatly sets up the dynamic at play in the film.

Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) reluctantly accepts being deputized by the town that he and his brothers have wandered into to respond to the whip that Drummond wields over them. Bonnell accepts his call to duty by way of a thoroughly exhilariting showdown between him and Stanwyck’s drunken brother, Brockie, who has been tormenting locals. Some of these townsfolk are portrayed by thoroughly unconvincing line-readers, evidence of the meager portions the studios were offering B-picture directors like Fuller. He made up for that handicap by editing the hell out of the showdown – cutting between close-ups of Bonnell’s steely, focused eyes and a pathetic Brockie scrambling for his gun, which leaves no question who’s in charge of the scene.

The next wow scene comes in the form of a windstorm, minus Auntie Em. Stanwyck, ever the poised bad-ass, and Sullivan are forced to help each other survive a grueling windstorm. There is no music to enhance the action and emotion of the scene. None is needed. The sound of the wind whipping the two of them around is visceral enough. The expert craftsmanship of pulling off an action scene like this, without the aid of CG, is enough to leave one’s mouth agape. And a convincing set-piece to bring the previously rivaling pair together, while also portending the destructiveness of their bond.

Fuller punctuates his film with well-placed songs. Jessica Drummond is introduced by a strolling troubadour, who touts the woman’s ability to command authority with her whip, but confines her to being ‘a woman, after all,’ a sentiment that haunts and eventually gets the best of her. A particularly poignant scene late in the second act features a dirge, which efficiently encapsulates the sense of loss felt by almost all of the characters.

Barbara Stanwyck (Brooklyn!) portrays her weathered landowner with a well-worn toughness. She has earned her forty goons, just has she has fought for every inch of land, every scar upon her brow. Some might find the fact that she ultimately rejects her independence and land for a simpler, quieter life with a man as regressive or at least dated. But I believe Fuller is up to something. It is important to remember that 40 Guns, Fuller’s last western, takes place in the twilight of the Wild West era. Not only is Stanwyck’s woman putting down her whip, but Griff Bonnell is also laying down arms, accepting his fate. Bonnell had been a gunslinger, feared for miles. While the townsfolk were happy to call on him for his skills, he always knew that there was really no place for a ‘freak’ like him amongst them. As the West became less ferocious, less wild, less West, the less room there was for men like Griff Bonnell and women like Jessica Drummond. Far from trumpeting the taming of this wild woman, Fuller was, I believe, lamenting the end of an era, the passing of the torch from the pioneers and the ‘freaks’ to the common, law-abiding, God-fearing, domesticated citizens. If anything, given their bloodied history together, Drummond and Bonnell’s future is as uncertain and potentially doomed as Ben Braddock and Elaine Robinson’s is.

shot through the heart

35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum) (2008)

Director: Claire Denis

With: Alex Descas

It’s been some time since I’ve put pen to paper (or digits to keyboard, as it were) to hash out my thoughts on the seventh art. Not much to say about it other than that, um, I’m sorry.

What then would be the film that would bring me out of this half-assed early retirement?

In the past few months, numerous films have impressed, wowed even, but few of the recent crop achieve the level of unadulterated awesomeness that is Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums. Her masterpiece wined, dined and shot a rum-soaked arrow through my cinema-loving heart.

In a field of strong contenders, it is the deftness with which she tells her tale that stands out the most. The performances she scores from her actors, the expertly executed elliptical editing, the generous cinematography and the nuanced narrative itself are all remarkable. But it is the way she makes it all appear so effortless that makes me gaga.

I will attempt to refrain from exposing the slightest bit of plot or even the characters’ relationships to each other here. Forgive me, but one of the singular joys of the experience of watching this film is in the reveal. One character will enter and greet another. It is only through a gesture or a word minutes, sometimes scenes later, that their relationship to each other is made clear. The same is true of each character’s relationship to his or her environment. In a lesser work, this deliberate exposition might obfuscate to the point of frustration. But in 35 Rhums, it invites you in, allows you to sit with the characters and get accustomed to their surroundings just as they do. Given certain of the protagonists’ uncertain stations in life, this is narratively and tonally fitting.

One character, seated at a bar, removes her jacket and smiles at the man next to her, who is not paying her too terribly much mind. The camera lingers on her exposed shoulders as she looks at him fondly. This is the way she wants to be seen, to be noticed. This gesture of the actress, of the camera and of the director speak to the sense of acute longing for connection that fills 35 Rhums.

The much ballyhooed stable of young neo-neo-realist directors would do well to take note. Their labored woebegone tales of those who live on the margins of society are too often concerned with eliciting sympathy from the audience. It’s a cart-before-the-horse problem, I suspect. The audience is never told how to feel in Denis’ film. Any sympathy felt for the characters is earned. What’s more, the graceful way Denis deals with identity – racial, ethnic, familial, community-based or otherwise – never reads as a treatise, as many well-intentioned but undergrad-thesis-like films that attempt to deal with those themes do. Instead, 35 Rhums only approaches the issue as the characters do, which is to say as a man walking up to a round of shots and taking a deep breath before imbiding would.

Again, forgive me for being vague, but I would encourage you to know as little about 35 Rhums‘ plot and story before going in. It will still look good in the harsh light of day.

freedom’s not just another word

Vagabond (1985)

Director: Agnes Varda

With: Sandrine Bonnaire

 I first saw Vagabond years ago, when I was going through a dirty-on-purpose phase in college. Agnes Varda’s story of a wandering, or as one character put it, ‘withering’ vagrant struck a chord with me. As the years passed, I had forgotten some details of the film, but the sense of accutely-felt heartbreak and devastation has stuck with me. Seeing it again years later (and after having come to appreciate the value of a good shave) the film still resonates with me.

The film opens with the melancholic, distancing strains of a violin, a recurring motif which could serve as the musical definition for the word ‘descent’. In a chilly, mostly barren farm landscape, the corpse of Mona Bergeron is hidden from view. Once her lifeless body is revealed lying in a hole it appears as if blurred into the earth. Her face is smeared with dried red wine, and her clothes have collected enough dirt, that it’s difficult to tell where her body ends and the earth begins. The film then looks back to chronicle the final days of this earth-covered specter. Even before her life is snuffed out, she hardly stands out from the buildings she inhabits and the fields she drifts across. As the one brief intervention by a narrator suggests, in what I can only imagine are the words of Varda herself, for all we know, Mona might as well have ‘come from the sea’. She is of the earth, intimately tied to it and doomed to completely blend into it. Like the earth, she is just as easily taken for granted.

Mona’s travels are recounted by the people that she comes across in her travels. Often merely a passing thought as to what it might be like to be in her tattered shoes is all that occurs. It might be a classist indictment, a bourgie exoticization of her state, or an overly-romantic sympathizing with her plight. Whatever it is, everyone judges her, sums her up in their own way. While Mona exists as a different entity to all the people she comes across, she remains true to herself the entire time. She left her job, whatever life she had, we learn, to be free. Freedom, on her own terms. The film neither glamourizes nor looks down on her. It presents her story from as many vantages points as possible, knowing that somewhere amidst all of them, lies the truth. The film is shot almost entirely on a flat plain, leveling her with the landscape, as well as presenting everyone as existing on the same stage, despite whatever judgements anyone might use to seperate them from her.

In this eloquent examination of this woman’s life, Varda manages to refrain from sentimentality yet remains emotionally dedicated to her subject. In each meticulously orchestrated tracking shot, the camera terminates its movement before cutting away, echoing the fate of the protagonist. These finite shots may end on a sign post, a piece of machinery, a tree or people waiting at a bus stop, all things that exist outside of Mona’s trajectory, things that are paying no attention to her.

One tracking shot, as D claimed, ’says it all’. The shot begins on some arbitrary street and tracks past Mona seated, minding her business, and continues on without stopping or even slowing to notice her. She is hardly there. I am reminded of Joan Fontain’s Lisa in Letter from an Unknown Woman. However, where in that film Louis Jourdan is the only one to have truly failed to notice her, in Vagaond, it’s the rest of the world that fails to take notice of Mona. Unlike Lisa, however, who devotes her unnoticed life to a man, Mona devotes herself to herself only. While she is hardly there for others to see, she is all there is as far as she is concerned.

A former philosophy professor and goat-herder, who ultimately deems Mona’s path as doomed, makes the observation, when she claims to not know what road she was on, that the road she is on is hers. She has to know what road she’s on. This raises the question, is Mona truly free? While she dismissed as many outside forces as she can (does she embrace anything?), she is not able to dismiss the cold winter air, her dehydration, her hunger. The only way she can be free of everything is by being freed from life, from the earth. I can’t help but find this heartbreaking, as I did nearly a decade ago. For some reason, all these years, one shot has remained in the forefront of my mind and it typifies this heartbreak for me. One of the lovers she picks up along the way, a Tunisian field hand, recalls Mona silently. Whereas most of the passersby describe their encounters with her through words, he simply smells the scarf that she left behind, a gesture that signifies not only his longing for her, but his appreciation for her physical presence on the earth. One need not be a vagabond to be accutely aware of how fleeting life is and transient we all are on this earth.

I have hardly addressed Varda’s expertly crafted telling of the narrative. She jumps around interspersing Mona’s linear arc to her untimely end with recollections from people she encountered seemingly at random, the way memories of someone you have come across can hit you when you don’t expect them to. The only distraction that I found was in one character who would pointedly address the camera when discussing Mona. It’s a tricky device, especially, since this character is often articulating finely noted observations of Mona. But in a film in which so much of the monochromatic mise-en-scene blends together, it stands out like, well, like a character talking directly to the camera in a film in which other characters don’t.

Vagabond has managed to never prey on my fears of being a degenerate the way that films like L’Enfant and Straight Time have, which are both great films, by the way. I take that as a testament to Varda’s choice of direction for her narrative. Mona’s plight is uniquely her own. The film is less about how pitiable she is, or how difficult her road is, and more about how we see her, or better put, can’t see her.

Vagabond is available on DVD through the Criterion Collection.

the man from hungary

new york film festival commentary

THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007)

Director: Bela Tarr

With: Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton

Written by: Bela Tarr & Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Based on the novel by: Georges Simenon

The films of Bela Tarr will most likely never be for the hoi polloi. Which is a pity, really, as he is one of the most original talents working today and certainly one of the greatest craftsmen. But you will not see a gaggle of giggling groupies crowding around a red carpet premiere of a Tarr film. You will not see a line of nerds dressed as their favorite impoverished Hungarian villager character wrapped around the block of a theater on opening night. You will not see gossip columns devoted to the latest turn in the relationship between one of Tarr’s stock actors and a pop singer. Although if these are the indications of a film having reached a certain level of acceptability with the masses, perhaps it’s a good thing his films are a bit more rarefied. It just means that the vast majority of filmgoers will miss out on this filmmaker par excellence. Anyhow, I suppose it would be a bit much to ask the YouTube-informed attention spans of today’s movie watchers to elasticize themselves to tolerate a 7 and a half hour Hungarian film in black and white with very little dialogue.

Given Tarr’s esoteric inclinations, it’s curious then that he would make what, after all is said and done, amounts to a genre picture. The Man From London is based on the novel by Georges Simenon, which has the end effect of feeling a bit like Bela Tarr doing Graham Greene, an unlikely pair. Sort of like John Ford doing Franz Kafka. Or Quentin Tarantino doing Jane Austen. Well, maybe not like that. But it’s fair to say that while Tarr remains at top form directing the camera and the atmosphere in The Man From London, the narrative feels as though it’s not best served by his style, nor does his style feel complemented by the story.

The sequences, the long passages of Tarr’s films, London included, serve to draw the viewer into a contemplative state. If that was the intended effect with London, then it succeeded. However, there’s the nagging sensation that the plot is calling for a noir-like dramatic tension, which never quite comes across. The story follows a mysterious package that arrives, a murder, and the innocent man who ends up with the package. That the mystery contained in the package is merely gobs of British currency, as opposed to the magnificent whale that arrives in the town in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) or the complicated return of the character of Irimas in Satantango (1994), speaks to the lack of excitement that I have for this film when it is held up next to these other Tarr works.

When Tilda Swinton arrives on screen, her presence is more of a distraction than anything else. Her overdubbing in Hungarian stands out like a sore thumb in a way that Hanna Schygulla’s role never deterred from Werckmeister. Pardon the frequent comparisons to his other films; there’s really nothing quite like the more recent films of Bela Tarr though, so it’s hard to contextualize it within the framework of any other films. Swinton is fine, as usual, but it’s as though she’s in a different film than the rest of the internationally unknown Hungarian cast. Furthering the chasm between Swinton and the rest of London, the scenes between her and her husband harkens back to Tarr’s early work, which was more Cassavettes-like in style than the moody, ponderous tone of his later films.

Tarr is well known for taking months – months! – to prepare every shot in his films. His careful, studied effort and his meticulous execution are second to none, and are apparent in every frame of his recent films, even London. If you are familiar with Tarr’s work, used to admiring how well the formal elegance, his mastery of craft fit in with his examinations of the human condition in loose narrative structures, then you might be disappointed with the more conventional arc of London. The bottom line is, while it’s not a failed film, it’s not a step forward in his career, either. This is unfortunate particularly because I had sensed that, like Gus Van Sant, who credits Bela Tarr for his own artistic renaissance, Tarr was one of those directors who was getting better as he got older and made more films. London is most like Damnation (1988), which was a more like practice lap for what would come to be the master-classes in well-crafted, thoughtful filmmaking of Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

Bela Tarr has not lost his, if I may, mojo, nor has he sold-out, but the merely satisfactory London will have to tide Tarr aficionados over until his next great work. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a die-hard fan club for Tarr that would follow his filmmaking anywhere, and line up around the block to attend a premiere. After the lights came up in the screening I attended, I overheard two other audience members delight in recognizing the main character’s daughter as the girl who killed the cat in Satantango. Tarries may not be as many as Trekkies, but they are just as dedicated.

The Man From London is currently without a distributor.

4… 3… 2… won.

new york film festival commentary

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (2007)

Director: Christian Mungiu

With: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu

Written by: Christian Mungiu

It is 1987 in Romania. You have to wait for things. A lot. It is before the time of cell phones, and you have to seek out a phone wherever you can find one. In the case of a rotary phone, you have to sit there as the dial revolves back to zero with every number. Before the advent of the easily accessible and questionably sound internet, you have to solicit information from the hard to find and questionably sound word on the street. But all of this is nothing to the arduous process of having an abortion, which is illegal under the communist dictatorship of Ceaucescu.

Having spent his youth living through this harsh time, director Christian Mungiu, sets his film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in the bleak twilight of the regime, which ended in 1989. Abortion, while legal and even encouraged in other communist countries of the time, was a grim choice for a woman in Romania then. Mungiu based the film on the stories he collected about women who suffered, many of who died, because of this law. His film, which has already found success – it won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – is not exactly a political film, however. It is more a story about the trials and tribulations of being alive, which allows for the universality of its scope and has lead to its acclaim. Furthermore, rather than focus his story on the woman having the abortion, he instead gives his attention over to the woman’s friend who helps her through the process. By making this inspired call, Mungiu casts a wider net. It’s more about how far Otilia will go to do the right, humane thing to help her friend, than it is about the direct plight of the woman going through the illicit abortion.

The film opens with a shot of two goldfish moving about in a bowl. Mungiu then expands the frame to include Gabita, played by Laura Vasiliu, the student about to undergo the operation, and Anamaria Marinca as Otilia, as they move about their dorm room. The next 110 minutes are an exercise in likening these women to the fish trapped in the bowl. They are trapped by the direness of the situation, by the difficulty of making any kind of informed decision in such an environment. People in dire situations make panicked choices, and a government that does not allow for the freedom to choose is just such a dire situation. Indeed, Gabita struggling to keep her self together often jeopardizes the one relationship, Otilia’s, that can help her.

Mungiu trains his camera on his subjects with a Dardenne-like care. Otilia, like Rosetta, goes from task to task in order to do whatever she has to do to get through the ordeal. Mungiu’s lens imbues Marinca’s somber visage with a heroic stoicism similar to the way Dreyer presents Maria Falconetti’s face in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Newcomer Marinca shows great promise in her ability to restrain Otilia’s frustration, yet never letting her lose her sense of her own humanity. Marinca says that she sees Otilia’s struggle as Shakespearean – quite simply, to be or not to be. To help Gabita through is what Otilia decides she has to do to merely be. A lofty claim, maybe, but that instinct drove Marinca to hit nearly every right chord. A protracted dinner table scene, in which she is begrudgingly planted in between her boyfriend’s boisterous and ranting parents, beautifully highlights her agony suffering in silence. And if that weren’t enough, Mungiu and Marinca follow that one-shot scene with another long one-shot scene in which Otilia opens up/breaks down/runs the gamut of feelings with him.

Out of respect for the director’s wishes, I will refrain from divulging more than I already have about the plot. Mungiu hopes, as most directors do, the film be seen by eyes untainted by expectation. Much had been made of a certain gasp-worthy shot in the film, which I wish had not been discussed as much as it had before my own eyes saw it, primarily because I don’t think it’s as striking, or even as necessary as the gossip mill made it out to be. I will conclude, instead, by contextualizing the film in two ways.

First, as a point of comparison, I recommend Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up as a companion piece to 4 Months, both made this year. Knocked Up is set in America, a free country, twenty years after 4 Months‘ story takes place. It is a powerful statement about the prevalence of religious fundamentalism in America that in a movie about an unplanned pregnancy, abortion is discussed only twice, and one time the word is fudged into “shma-shmor-tion” to avoid actually saying it. I’m certainly not accusing Apatow of cowing to Christian conservativism. Far from, in fact. I think he’s made an appropriate diagnosis of the current climate in America, and is responding with the appropriate satirical humor. 4 Months strips all humor from the discussion, however, and shows what happens when humans are stripped of their freedom to choose. It’s as not pretty, as it is not funny.

Secondly, I went into 4 Months believing the bar for contemporary Romanian cinema having been set quite high by Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). I heard a fellow cinephile recently say that while it took the Iranians a decade or so to catch up with Kiarostami, it’s taken the Romanians only a year to take cues from Puiu. 4 Months may not have quite reached Lazarescu’s phenomenal heights, but it comes pretty damn close. Puiu has claimed that his was the first in a series of tales about love, inspired by Rohmer’s Moral Tales undertaking. Likewise, Mungiu calls 4 Months the first in his own series, Tales from the Golden Age, a name ironically lifted from the propaganda of Ceaucescu’s era. With Puiu and Mungiu, I foresee an actual Golden Age in Romanian cinema bubbling up to the surface. That’s something worth waiting for.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an IFC First Take release. Look for it soon.

out with the old, in with el nuevo

Jeronimo Rodriguez and Alejandro Fernandez are on a mission. They wish to share their particular love of cinema with the world, and thereby adjust how the world watches movies. Along with Jose Luis Torres-Leiva, these Chilean-born filmmakers and avid film buffs have discussed what they like about movies, what they think is necessary for movies to evolve, and decided that they agree with each other. On September 1, what turned out to be a placid Saturday evening in a small studio in Queens, Rodriguez and Fernandez pulled back the curtain on el nuevo canon for others to see.

After screening four short films, one by Torres-Leiva, two by Fernandez, and ending with one by Rodriguez (more on those in a bit), the filmmakers present (Torres-Leiva was in Chile working on another film) offered a brief discussion of what el nuevo canon means, and availed themselves to questions from the packed studio audience. Fernandez suggested that it may be a misnomer to call it el nuevo canon, and might be better to say that they are interested in looking beyond the old canon. They have much admiration for the masters of the old canon, Hitchcock, Fellini, Ford, Welles and so on, but they believe that it is time for cinema to move past the staid formula – three-act structure, grandiose plots, overly significant climaxes and revelations, and so forth. If cinema is going to move forward and evolve, it will need to champion filmmakers who have a sense for storytelling that transcends the boundaries and guidelines of the old canon. Indeed, they were adamant that there are no rules, a la Dogme ‘95, to el nuevo canon. That said, they are strictly concerned with narrative filmmaking. The avant-garde and films that fall under the general experimental umbrella are not what these three are after. El nuevo canon is more concerned with atmosphere, characters living as they actually would, economy of storytelling – the ellipses and the long take typify what Rodriguez is interested in, for example. Conversely, any unnecessary exposition, characters acting out in that way that people only act in movies, and story arcs bordering on high drama are anathema to the canon of the new. That’s pretty much the long and short of it. As Rodriguez often says, “You understand?”

Fernandez humbly claimed to lack the talent of a great director. Hence, his careful attention and studying of the cinema. Unlike some who seem to innately have a sense for it, he confessed that he has to work very hard to do what he does with film. In fact, he clarified that el nuevo canon is born out of a generation, the first to have grown up with movies omnipresent in the world. Going back just a few decades, a film could be made in Germany, say, and not make it’s way to Chile, for instance, for an interminably long time. And while many films still struggle to find their audience, video distribution, the internet, and the proliferation of international film festivals and film schools have extended the global reach of the cinema’s audience. These days, filmmakers from virtually anywhere – Fernandez grew up in a rural farm community watching films from the TV in his living room – have theopportunity to be educated in film in ways not previously possible. Indeed, their idea for el nuevo canon might never have had its genesis had they not seen Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990). That is also key to what Rodriguez and Fernandez profess – el nuevo canon has already existed in the world for some time. They’re just noticing it and making sure it gets talked about. They clearly struggle with their own self-applied label, el nuevo canon, as they do not see it as a mere movement or a fleeting fad. They see it as the future. But the handle could hobble them in their efforts to gain traction. What is more, this nuevo canon isn’t entirely nuevo. They acknowledge that Yasujiro Ozu, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Ermano Olmi and some others are forebears of the current crop of nuevo-canon-minded directors, thus exposing the limitations of the term nuevo. It’s hard to say though, people like simplicity and ease and the banner is catchy, to-the-point and efficient. Time will tell.

In what was probably a good move and an honest one, before they gave their talk, they offered up their films. Torres-Leiva’s film, Obreras Saliendo de la Fabrica (Women Workers Leaving the Factory), has already won awards, enough to the point that he’s working on a feature film in Chile. In the vain of the Dardennes, but lacking the Belgian brothers’ interest in challenging moral dilemmas, Torres-Leiva’s camera follows four women around a factory as they toil, then stays with them as they leave and head for the beach. A few unneccesary shots and staged moments punctuate the film, but it nonetheless leaves a deep impression of these women’s lives without hitting you over the head. Despite its few flaws, this one took the cake, for me.

The consensus seemed to be, though, that the second film screened, Fernandez’s Lo Que Trae La Lluvia (Along Came the Rain), was the most successful. Unfortunately, something kept me from sinking my teeth into it at the time. Some suggested that the similarity of tone of all four films may have something to do with that. And that may be the case. As much as I have come to understand and appreciate el nuevo canon, perhaps I still find myself guilty of expecting a certain structure to a film. Fernandez’s very simple film doesn’t offer that. It follows an older farmer as she prepares for her family to arrive with no dramatic tension other than the expectation that something might go wrong. To be able to view this work without that expectation, and just as the quiet moments they are, would be a victory for el nuevo canon. Considering that in retrospect, I appreciate it more than my old-canon-addled mind allowed me to while viewing it. Also, even if it’s true that Fernandez has to work harder than, say, a Hou Hsiao-hsien or a Lucrecia Martel, as he suggests he has to, his efforts don’t go unnoticed. He might go from a flawless moment between actors, very well studied and executed, to a shot in which you question the motivation of the camera placement. That said, I think he clearly has more innate talent than he claims to.

His second film, Desde Lejos (From Afar), made before La Lluvia, wears its influences on its sleeve more than his later work. A man from the city goes to the coutryside to visit his mother, then returns. Nothing significant happens. I loved it. Possibly tying the lack of dramatic tension to a more discernable story arc than in La Lluvia is what made it connect more with me. In one scene, which exemplifies the rest of the film, and could have been cut directly out of a Tsai Ming-Liang film, the main character attempts throwing pears into a bucket, while his mother’s dog watches incuriously. In an attempt to increase the odds of making a successful basket, he gets up to move the bucket closer and continues trying. He finally gets one in but knocks the bucket over in the process. Very nice.

Cercanos (Around) by Rodriguez finished off the screenings. Originally titled Mejor (Better), the film, shot by Torres-Leiva, follows a brother and sister through the streets of Santiago as they drive around, mostly in silence. The brother heads off to a construction site – framed with an Antonioni-like specificity – where he waits for his father. As he stands there waiting, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’sUzak (Distant) (2002) comes to mind, in part due to the the likeness of the main actors in both films. He then eats with his father in silence. Later, driving with his sister again, he lets her know that their dad is better. All of the exposition that I’ve revealed to you is not made clear until the film passage of the film, which I consider the achievement of an accomplished director. Rodriguez is clearly more interested in atmosphere. The specifics of the characters’ family struggle is left unsaid, leaving you to sit in the back seat of their car and fill in the blanks of what is going on between them.

If you share a drink with Rodriguez or Alemendras, the gloves come off. They will call for the ‘executions’ of certain directors who, in their opinion, have lost what it means to be a filmmaker. However, that boldness gave way to diplomacy on September 1. Perhaps, as they were attempting to gather more new fans, they feigned humility in hopes of not putting off their audience. However, just as la nouvelle vague wasn’t for the masses, necessarily, el nuevo canon is clearly not for everyone. At least, not yet. Audiences the world-over, and certainly here in the US, are still trained to look for plot points, to take comfort in the anticipation of the story arc, and to revel in well-crafted theatrical dialogue. As more access becomes available to the work of filmmakers like Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr, Cristi Puiu, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and so forth, directors firmly entrenched in the ethos of el nuevo canon, audiences will evolve, just as Rodriguez and Fernandez preach films need to.

The moviegoing audience famously ran from the projected image of a train barrelling at the screen when motion pictures made their dramatic debut. Audiences had to adjust to sound in pictures. They had to blink when color painted in the black-and-white images. They had to widen their point-of-view to include their periphery when Cinemascope expanded the frame. They readjusted themselves in their seats at the unfamiliar jump-cuts and storylines of the French New Wave, the Czech New Wave, the Yugoslavian Black Wave and the like. As the decades have passed and now include all these benchmarks in film history and more, audiences are more accepting of them. Even though the Iranian New Wave, perhaps the wave that got the nuevo canon ball rolling, has been around for a few decades, it alone was certainly not enough to retrain the world’s audiences. It’s a lot harder to get a fidgety audience with a short attention span to learn how to take their time and be patient with a tranquil film about a factory worker, say, than it is the other way around. But now, as it is not just Iranian filmmakers that are making evolutionary steps in cinematic storytelling, the audiences will start to catch on. The back-to-back screenings of the four short films by Torres-Leiva, Fernandez, and Rodriguez, all with preciously few lines of dialogue and an abundance of quietude, may have tested the patience of some of their audience members in 2007. As I said, even I drifted during the second film and I like watching paint dry and gazing at navels. By 2027, perhaps, more audiences that have tired of music videos, quirky YouTube videos and hyperkinetic Hollywood dreck will have the stamina for simple, atmospheric narratives. At this point, though, I wonder if it would not behoove el nuevo canon if Rodriguez and Fernandez didn’t hide behind false diplomacy. If they would be as brash and audacious in enthusiastically talking about el nuevo canon as they clearly passionately feel about cinema, it would, at least, get them heard by more people. It’s ok for the filmmakers themselves to use exclamation points – the far-from-splashy films of el nuevo canon certainly don’t. The (r)evolution won’t happen overnight, but it won’t happen at all if they don’t stand up and fight for it. Viva El Nuevo Canon!

For more information on El Nuevo Canon, check out elnuevocanon.blogspot.com.

all that remains

semi-weekly film recommendation

AFTER LIFE (1998)

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

With: Erika Oda, Arata

Written by: Hirokazu Kore-eda

The premise of After Life may sound cutely novel or even like the subject of psuedo-philosophical quandaries considered by intoxicated college students. It goes something like this – after you die, you go to a way station, where you have a couple of days to decide on one memory from your entire life, the memory that you will take with you on into perpetuity, and once you’ve selected, you recreate the memory on film, view it, thus ending your life, and that, as they say, is that. However, simple and innocent it comes across as on paper, it is executed by Kore-eda with much more layered complexity and subtlety than the charming quaintness of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). After Life resists the temptation toward Capraesque sentimentality, which elevates the film to something more than the limited novelty of its central question would otherwise allow for. That said, the original Japanese title literally translates as Wonderful Life, a none-too-subtle homage.

For many, it may be enough to ponder which memory they would pick as they drift in and out of watching the characters in the film go through the same struggle. Indeed, two hours can fly by, when one is considering such a choice. However, for me, the film succeeds, more than anything, as a love letter to film, itself. (And quite a different ode to film than David Lynch’s love letter to the cinema, Mulholland Drive (2001).) The method that the mostly melancholy bureaucrats, who run the way station in limbo, employ to recreate the memory for each recently departed is to dramatize it and shoot it, as you would a short film. Film imitates life, triggering the memory for the viewer, and sating them for eternity. A metaphor any cinephile or average filmgoer can appreciate. What is more, one character, who struggles to think of a single memory, is granted access to videotape of every waking moment of his entire life, to assist him in his plight. Video, a cruder medium, but relevant and helpful when requiring a protracted attention to detail that film, due to its more costly nature, simply cannot provide. Ah, the cinematic metaphors just keep on a-comin’. I love it.

Finally, one of the most lasting images for me in the film is of the moon – sort of. (Vague metaphor spoiler warning!) One of the station clerks (how perfectly Japanese, by the way – after you die, there’s still a certain amount of bureaucracy you’ve got to go through to get to the great beyond), comments to another how much he likes looking up at the moon from a certain spot in the hallway. Later on, in the middle of the day, the other attendant looks up in the same spot, and is startled to see the moon just being light projected through a hole in the ceiling, and not the lunar satellite, after all. Where one person sees the moon, another a trick of light. Where one person sees a soul-soothing and pleasant memory, another sees a filmstrip of someone else’s life.

It’s a wonderful film.

After Life is readily available on DVD at most internet retailers.

lookin’ for a good time…?

semi-weekly film recommendation

THE GOODTIMESKID (2005)

Director: Azazel Jacobs

With: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Narnjo, Sara Diaz

Written by: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo

As the now-redundant mumblecore movement has the press of the print world a-twitter this week, just as they have enthralled the film blog world for a few years, I thought I’d point out a film that, for no reason I know of, slipped under most people’s radars. As someone in his 20s, I connected more with what The GoodTimesKid had to say about young life and love than with whatever the followers of Mr. Bujalski seem to be mumbling on about. I’m not intending to knock Funny Ha-Ha (2002) or Mutual Appreciation (2005). Those films accomplished a great deal and with very little, making a strong statement about this generation. But beyond that, I’m ready for what was once a humble core of filmmakers to get over their ineloquence. Speak up! or shut up. For the most part, Mr. Jacobs refrains from flapping his gums, letting the characters’ action and inaction do the talking. Made the same year as Mutual Appreciation and ’shot on stolen film’, The GoodTimesKid goes deeper than the rambling nature of the ‘talkies’. The GoodTimesKid sends-up, at the same time it effectively deals with identity-crisis – two charcters share the same name, and something more than just hilarity ensues. What’s more, the reality of today’s world – war, albeit a war fought ‘over there’, but war, nonetheless – lurks in the background, threatening to intersect with the lives of the characters. This, coupled with the emotional late night bus ride of two hearts competing for the attention of another, leads to one of those rare, soul-stirring moments that only film can achieve, causing this audience-member to hold his breath. The need an audience has for a protagonist to root for – Viva Depresso! – is as cinematically timeless as it is universal. The GoodTimesKid provides three such protagonists with whom to identify. Whether you root for one or all of them is up to you. Just as Jacobs is not interested in clearly revealing characters’ intentions, he is not going to dictate how to feel about them. And yet, he is making a singular cinematic statement. With a few Godardian audio cuts and more than a few Jarmuschian tableaus, Jacobs takes cues from these predecessors in order to fit his take on the current moment into a larger picture, one that I predict will last longer than the aging-prone mumblecorers. At the heart of it, the new DIY movement makes a well-intentioned clarion call – anyone can pick up a camera and tell a story. And that’s all fine and good, and they may make some Bujalski rip-off with ease, but The GoodTimesKid is not just a statement about the current generation of twentysomethings that anyone could have made. It is a film that only Azazel Jacobs could and did make.

As far as I know The GoodTimesKid is currently unavailable on DVD.

For more info: www.goodtimeskid.com

porque te vas

weekly film recommendation

CRIA CUERVOS! (1976)

Director: Carlos Saura

With: Ana Torrent & Geraldine Chaplin

Written by: Carlos Saura

Can film really allow you to see the world through the eyes of a child? That is, without being juvenile or condescending? Carlos Saura does so in a way that few filmmakers have acheived. Well, with the help of Ana Torrent, who turned in an equally phenomenal performance in Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Ana, as Ana, experiences guilt, death, and family strife as well as the fleeting frivolity of youth, through eyes so vulnerable and yet knowing. Each glance conveys a depth of understanding that goes beyond what the two-dimensional screen actually contains. Fans of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) (why?… why?) will be astounded at how much Saura was able to get out of Ms. Torrent, and without the assisstance of special effects.

Cria Cuervos! will be screening Wed. Aug. 15 in Brooklyn.

See http://projectfilmschool.blogspot.com/ for details.

The DVD is available at the Criterion Collection, www.criterionco.com, on Tues. Aug. 14.