By Daniel Gorman
“During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing – watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life – I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. To imagine such a cinema requires traveling some distance from where we are…”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Essential Cinema”
“…the way the world is changing in general: How the big history of modern society changes the small history of a group of people, how the globalization we deal with in abstract terms – we read about it, we watch movies about it, we hear it in the news – is in fact something that hits home in very dramatic ways. Ultimately I wanted to show how those characters are defined in ways we are not so aware of, by the way global economics are changing…. These bigger trends are about the intimate daily lives of individuals.”
Olivier Assayas on Summer Hours
“The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.”
John Berger
In this day and age, returning to a film for a second (or third) viewing is increasingly anathema to our critical apparatus. After all, movies are simply “product”, and the old product must be consistently, continually replaced with the new – as if they were items in a grocery store, complete with expiration dates. Not unrelated, we must pay less and less attention to, and spend less and less time with, even the newest releases, lest we inadvertently miss what comes next (always there is a next). Call it an assembly line of critical thought, churning out ideas and words with increasing speed, quality control be damned. The most recent Cannes proved particularly fertile in this respect, with “tweets” and live blogging establishing opinions and consensus before the last frame had advanced through the projector gate. Never mind the notion of grappling with complex works after only one viewing – speed is of the essence here. This doesn’t leave much time for contemplation or reflection, not withstanding those increasingly rare films that linger in ones mind for days or weeks - in with the new (Next!). One might be tempted to link this back to the Kael school of critical thought, although that seems both unfair and too limiting in scope. Our entire society has advanced past the point of lingering – to linger is to admit defeat in advanced capitalism.
I tinkered with some thoughts on Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City after a first viewing last year during the Chicago International Film Festival, despite my own misgivings (with my writing, not with the film). Such a complex work was bound to have details I hadn’t retained, rhymes and compositions that I hadn’t quite processed the first time through. Feel free to read those musings here. While I don’t fundamentally disagree with or recant any of those words (2008 is so long ago – do words themselves have expiration dates?), I admit to giving short shrift to several key elements of the film. The film’s structure, for instance (the two of us being reintroduced after a seven month hiatus), takes on an even more essential function. It is a testament to the stories being told on screen that the occasional fades to black might only register as punctuation to the inattentive (or first time) viewer. Far from it, as the fade outs become a key indicator (ala Resnais’ Love Unto Death) of expression – it becomes a matter of “Where the Stress Falls”. Zhang-ke indicates emotional beats, certainly, but also possible elisions – what someone doesn’t say becomes as important as what they do say. I also noticed a clearer sense of chronology, which is indicated in a series of visual motifs. A sign above the factory entrance is reduced, gradually, letter by letter. The flow of people into the factory is reversed later in the film with their flow outward, into a world they no longer know, with no work and a culture that has left them behind (it is a brave new world). A factory worker recalls the story of his first love dumping him while at a roller rink – an hour later, a young girl roller skates on the roof of a building, telling the filmmakers that her parent both work “at the factory”. The elderly worker who recounts his affection and admiration for his foreman is mirrored in the last interview, a young woman who reconnects with her parents in an effort to advance their social status and living conditions.
Most essential is the woman who recounts a testimony of profound loss – on a sanctioned leave from a passenger ship transporting workers to the munitions factory, the mother is separated from her child. Words can barely express the sense of loss projected from her eyes – her gaze, her tears indicate a trauma that few of us can even begin to fathom. And this trauma becomes the key organizing factor of the film – violent, irreparable separation, literal but also as broader metaphor - the violent wrenching of history progressing leaves a trail of collateral damage. The human psyche can only bear so much.
* * *
Zhang-ke has already arrived in the upper echelon of essay film/documentarian hybrid artists – Godard, Marker, Varda, late period Kiarostami, some Hou, early Weerasethakul - none of whom have totally abandoned certain aspects of narrative (read: fiction) film. But the point is that, increasingly, such distinctions mean less and less. Here we have artists intuitively engaing in the world around them, using any and all tools at their disposal. I hesitate to use the term “mix-artist”, which seems to refer to the more pop-art inclined, and any way my laundry list of luminaries pre date the terminology. Regardless, after a second viewing, the use of both professional actors and real documented factory workers becomes, paradoxically, both more and less important. Less because the inherent human drama is so profound, the impact so great, that one might be inclined to simply erase, or ignore, such distinctions. More so, because, as Manohla Dargis has pointed out, such distancing effects “can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation”. I originally suspected that actress Joan Chen recounting tales of her own first film was simply too pat, too meta, to be anything other than a overreaching, cute idea. But the complex ways in which the personal and the hisorical intermingle seem to demand such attention – legend has it that Mrs. Mao herself hand picked Ms. Chen for her first starring role. The “Great Leap Forward” was many things to many people, and Zhang-ke’s latest would seem to be so as well. Nostalgia and regret intermingle seamlessly, in fact as well as in fiction. Funny how few people realize that the past will point the way to the future, leaving us to sort out an increasingly complicated “now”. Welcome to the present tense.
Thursday, July 2, 2009 18:17 - by Daniel Gorman
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Roland Barthes didn’t like Le Beau Serge. No use arguing with a dead man, but you can argue with his ideas. Barthes was a reader and not a viewer. A reader always imagines the author’s voice; he sees something monstrous and imagines that it has to be the product of a monstrous mind and not his own reaction. Barthes believed he was critiquing a film, but what he was critiquing was the author he imagined. His criticism of the imagined Chabrol is valid; Barthes was right, but the idea was wrong. When he criticizes the characters of the film, he thinks of them in terms of literary characterizations and signs, and not as the many other things movie characters are: actors, performances, images, real people. He was right, for instance, to attack the simplistic characterization of the country folk; what he ignores is that the people of Sardent play themselves. Le Beau Serge is so hard to see in the US that Barthes’ attack on the movie is probably as well known at this point as the film itself — something we’ve all learned to hate without seeing, like that tracking shot in Kapò. Doc Films had the audacity to show us the truth about The Struggle before Kino gave it a reputable DVD. A year later, the first week of their summer program includes Le Beau Serge.
Barthes saw the Chabrol film and read in it the director’s right-wing tendencies. But the politics of a filmmaker are second to the politics of the image. The thing that makes movies dangerous is that they are inherently radical. The most conservative idea takes on a radicalism when it informs a movie. I won’t argue Clint Eastwood’s politics, but there aren’t many American directors working right now who are as radical. The history of cinema shows us that the most reactionary films were mostly made by people who believed themselves to be forward-thinking, while the modern was largely invented by late Victorians, right-wingers, monarchists and anti-communists. Forty years later, we know that the real Chabrol is a lot more complicated (and more left-wing) than Barthes’ imagined one. But it’s not Chabrol’s politics that I want to write about, it’s the movie itself.
Francois (Jean-Claude Brialy) arrives home for the winter; just off the bus, he spots Serge (Gérard Blain), as shabby as Francois is prim. Brialy with the leather gloves, mannequin hair and rolled-up magazine, Blain ambling away with a half-smoked cigarette and two days’ worth of beard. “What happened to Serge?” Francois asks, “he used to be such a terrific guy.” He’s filled in on the details: who’s dead, who’s alive, and how Serge got married and abandoned his studies after he knocked up a local girl. It’s the sort of town where the streets are empty but there’s always someone in the bar.
Interpreted “psychologically,” Le Beau Serge’s images are jarring. We’re shown Francois’s Serge, Serge’s Francois, sometimes even Chabrol’s Blain or Brialy, but never at the same time. So we have Francois’ cool and disheveled image of his old friend, and we have Serge’s recognition of Francois as he is roused from a drunken stupor, first as a pale hand that enters the frame and finally as a half-angelic face. But we’re also given Serge as a handsome, needy mess, and Francois as the distant dandy. We are given the chance to see them as monsters, as ordinary people, as faces abstracted by street lights.
Barthes complained that movies undermined themselves because they gave us too much. Too many conflicts, too many mixed signals. He liked films for what they could show their audiences, not for what they gave their audiences the opportunity to see or feel. But the beauty of Le Beau Serge is in the way it interrupts an “important” tracking shot so that the camera can catch a group of children running across the street. In the way that every image of the dance hall scene gives us pathos, from the old man stamping forearms to mark that people have paid the price of admission to the confrontation between Brialy and Blain in the light of the windows. In the sensation each of us imagines as Brialy rubs a handful of snow in Blain’s face at the end. The Beau Serge I’ve seen and the one Barthes wrote about are different films because we’re different people. Therein lies its greatness.
Le Beau Serge will be playing Wednesday, June 24th as part of the summer program at Doc Films at the University of Chicago. It will screen August 7th at Cinematheque Ontatio.
Friday, June 19, 2009 17:25 - by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
By Daniel Gorman
Opaque – adjective: “hard to understand; not clear or lucid; obscure: The problem remains opaque despite explanations”
Uncertainty, aridity, peace – all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.
- Kafka
By the looks of it, Jim Jarmusch has committed the cinematic atrocity of the year. Despite a couple of reasonably high profile defenders, The Limits of Control has to be one of the worst reviewed films of recent memory. Even more curious is the vicious hyperbole and acidic vitriol being hurled his way, questioning Jarmusch’s integrity, sincerity, intelligence – as if the simple act of viewing his most recent film has somehow damaged the individual critics psyche in unknown, irreparable ways. Perhaps this is the price one pays when playing the kinds of games Jarmusch seems interested in here. Mysteries abound, and more to the point, remain unsolved, open ended…
1. Mystery:
A mysterious man has appeared, as if from nowhere, to perform mysterious tasks, apparently at the behest of mysterious people. He will go on to meet other mysterious people, interacting with them in mysterious ways, before seemingly attaining his ultimate goal – a goal which, by and large, we are unclear about.
2. Being and Nothingness:
In his dismissive one star review, Roger Ebert assumes the persona of Isaach De Bankole’s elusive hit-man spectre in a snarky speculative fiction about a day-in-the-life on the set. His Isaach wonders about what the director and cinematographer will ask him to do, and how long he will have to wait before being done. Presumably unwittingly, Ebert sums up much of the film’s modus operandus, the idea of languidly waiting, of simply being.
3. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.
4. Point Blank:
As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the film bears a resemblance to John Boorman’s pseudo-psychedelic thriller, with De Bankole assuming the role of Lee Marvin’s carved-out-of-granite perpetual motion machine, a pit bull on a singular mission who’ll be damned if he’s letting go. Jarmusch honors the film, and lays bare his intentions, with an opening credit – the production company that birthed the film has been named after Boorman’s film. But to what end?
5. Godard, et al.
Not quite (not simply) a homage to the French New Wave, Jarmusch instead casts his net a bit wider. Glenn Kenny, as well as Rosenbaum, sense the spirit of Rivette at work in Jarmusch’s puzzle-without-an-answer. There is a bit of Antonioni’s spiritual and spatial ennui, as well as odds and ends from the noir love letters/deconstructions of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player. De Bankole’s stone faced non-acting aligns him with a legacy of Bressonian models, while Chris Doyle’s elusive, shimmering cinematography, beyond the most obvious connotation, evokes that other great contemporary DP, Agnes Godard. The other Denis connection? The presence of Alex Descas, Denis’ favorite leading man. The camera ogles the local architecture like it was a Gaudi masterpiece, and there is a diffusive sense of space that Pedro Costa has been exploring in his recent pictures. The narrative (which does actually exist, although perhaps not in the sense that most people would prefer) proceeds in fits and starts, with scenes seemingly motivated by exquisite corpse-like free associations, or, (Kenny again) Robbe-Grillet zero-degree word play. Another association, again involving play – the games/narrative puzzles of Resnais’ early trifecta (Hiroshima/Marienbad/Muriel).
6. Doubles and Doppelgangers:
Having nothing to say - having no point - is different from arriving at ones point in a round-about way. Jarmusch seems to have a handle on his material at all times, and while one can disagree with or dislike that point, or its system of delivery, it is entirely inappropriate to confuse that dislike with idiocy on the filmmaker’s part. Whatever one makes of The Limits of Control, to assume that, like Ebert, every shot and gesture is simply a passing whim is, not to put too fine a point on it, missing the point. Paz de la Huerta’s “Nude” is the quintessential femme fatale, her goal stated and pursued with, um, naked abandon. She is all surface, every gesture simply there, and truthful. She seems incapable of subterfuge, although her existence implies it, and her eventual death is simply inevitable. Her role (and there is nothing else – the lack of depth is (purposefully) comical) requires it. She occasionally reappears as Tilda Swinton, her double/opposite – fully clothed from head to toe (not naked, unfortunately), with pale skin and blonde hair (not dark skin and deeply brown hair). Jarmusch also links them with raincoats – neither functional, one is heavy and thick, the other is totally transparent. Descas and De Bankole could be brothers, and both speak French, although Jarmusch has them interact, perversely, with a translator. The brief cameos by John Hurt (“Guitar”) and Gael Garcia Bernal (“Mexican”) are, despite obvious differences in age and ethnicity, linked by similar garb – the film briefly digresses into trying to redefine bohemia in the modern age – as well as interest in a particular guitar case. There is also a visit by Youki Kudoh as “Molecules”, who provides a dubious scientific explanation for the film’s far-fetched, comical ending. Needless to say, an international cast of actors meeting in terse vignettes and having pseudo-comical interactions, interrupted by the occasional language barrier, should be no surprise to Jarmusch fans.
7. Politics:
Make no mistake – beyond the genre trappings (lovingly violated), Jarmusch has made a boldly political film. I don’t necessarily agree with Rosenbaum’s assertion that Bill Murray’s “American” is a Cheney stand-in (an unreasonably limiting perspective, to my mind), but I do agree that Jarmusch has, for better or for worse, laid out a very specific statement of purpose – a kind of personal declaration/summation. The limits of a very particular kind of “control” become clear, as Jarmusch is railing against a society that no longer values art, museums, film, genre, the act of looking and sitting quietly, waiting, meandering through quasi-defined space, repetitions that become mantra-like – those elusive secular prayers.
8. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.
Postscript: In the most recent issue of Film Comment, there is an appreciation of the film by Kent Jones, which I very purposefully avoided. And, as it turns out, with good reason – as usual, Jones elucidates difficult material with remarkable poise and a disarming ease. I don’t think there is any critic working right now in English that makes the art of writing seem so incredibly effortless. I worried that the above post would come off as the very snark I was decrying, or even worse, as pretentious. But if that is the case, so be it. While writing about film as a pastime engenders quite a few benefits – reflection, hindsight, sometimes a second or third viewing – it can also be encumbered by all the cultural noise around it. Unless one lives in a vacuum, it is impossible to avoid reviews, conversations, all those opinions both pro and con, and it becomes something of a chore to sift through the avalanche of words and try to remember something of ones initial response to the film at hand. In other words, it is entirely possible that I value The Limits of Control so highly simply because everyone else dismissed it so easily. I certainly hope this isn’t the case – only time, and a few more viewings, will tell. I’ll end with Jones’ words, “Jarmusch’s new film stands alone, within his own body of work and in the landscape of current cinema. It is militant, and it is serene.” I can’t wait to see the movie again.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 8:02 - by Daniel Gorman
By Kalvin Henely
When we go to a movie we sit with strangers in silence; when we leave we go our separate ways. If we share our thoughts and feelings about the movie with anyone, it’s almost always with people we already know. Thus begins Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Girlfriend Experience, as upscale call girl, Chelsea (played by porn star Sasha Grey), sits with a client in a New York City restaurant discussing the movie Man on Wire. While the nature of their meeting makes the conversation private, there’s also something casual about this encounter; the path of least resistance becomes a goal.
This is a lesson of the trade that Chelsea herself knows and speaks of: you turn into what the client wants. It’s easier to handle one thing rather than two. An extra voice would be the mark of an intruder, someone breaking the skin of the couple’s comfort bubble. Could this be partly why we don’t share or inquire into strangers’ opinions of movies? Is there a fear of disagreement, embarrassment, and disharmony? Or would it be because our answers would be dishonest, like Chelsea’s, since we don’t really have a strong interest in one another due to our lack of companionship? While social etiquette and rules of personal space play a large part, one suspects whether these rules of the game were created to avoid awkward moments and whether or not this leaves our curiosity about others to find satisfaction.
The internet is where our curiosity leads us. There’s RottenTomatoes, the collector of professional opinion and easy consensus, for starters. But those kinds of critics probably weren’t the people you were sitting next to in the theater. Looking up the trailer for The Girlfriend Experience on YouTube, one can find 21 pages, or around 210 comments, from people who probably weren’t invited to advance press screenings. Better yet, their opinions don’t reflect those of a million-dollar newspaper; they don’t have editors nor are they edited before publishing. In less time than it look to watch the 2-minute trailer, one simply types a word, a sentence, a paragraph and presses submit. What you get is something close to a raw, emotional opinion as opposed to carefully articulated ideas, well-chosen words, and politeness. Some of these comments come from people who were in a theater, others from those who downloaded the movie, and most, as it turns out, from people who haven’t even seen the movie at all. The internet thus provides a direct pathway into the reactions of audiences we might otherwise not have interacted with. Myspace, incidentally, is also how Sasha Grey was contacted and offered the part.
Taking a look at the YouTube comments written in response to Soderbergh’s new movie, one can see that the choice to use a porn star in a “cinematic film” (as one YouTuber put it), as well as the trailer’s emphasis on money, caused a strong, mostly negative, and moral reaction. A level of discomfort and bewilderment remains. From the comments, the movie seems to be drawing a few different crowds and a couple prominent reactions. Most notably, there is a sense of amusement and curiosity: “A porn star in a mainstream movie!? That’s something else.” And it’s true. The worlds of porno and mainstream films rarely mix, despite being in the same business. One can represent or acknowledge the other without ever actually combining them. There are, of course exceptions: Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell features porn star Rocco Siffredi, who took his stage name from Alain Delon’s character in the 1970 movie, Borsalino. (Sasha Grey mentioned that she considered using the name Anna Karina, stemming from her own cinephilia).
Those who are opposed to Sasha crossing over feel outraged that the dirty could become clean. As these comments reveal, there’s a sense that a woman who enters the world of sex for money can never back out.
“I think it’s cool that she did this if that’s what she wants to do, but I would never pay money to see it. The only thing I want to see Sasha Grey do is drop to her knees, open her sweet little mouth, and drink some cum like fucking whore that she is. I like when she stretches her anus really wide too. Unless she’s doing something like that - I ain’t interested.” -jimjiminy76 (3 days ago)
“ugh…they just validated her shit life choices by actually putting her in a mainstream movie…now shes gonna be proud of being a porn star…society is fukd” -justforwatchingcraps (4 days ago)
“This is about a whore playing a whore wtf? stupidest movie ever”-1337speeed (1 week ago)
“Boring movie, no real meaning to it or purpose.. you just end up where you started.. just a waste of your time watching it. I think Sasha Grey is gorgeous, but what a waste of a beautiful smile.. She is a disgusting person.”-Shawkab (1 week ago)
“Looks shallow and stupid. She’s still an empty, burned-up porn star, no matter how articulate she is. Another throw-away project by an over-rated director. Hope the b.j. was worth it.”-philcr (2 weeks ago)
This desire to keep those like Sasha “hidden” isn’t without reason. For one, it’s in a person’s interest to keep their affairs away from their families and those that would judge them unfavorably. But there’s a difference between having sex with a real person and being a viewer of pornography, a distinction that may be beyond our evolutionarily programmed behavior. For the creators of these comments, the thinking seems to be that, since she’s had sex with many people outside the parameters of a romantic relationship - because she is in a business relationship, after all - Sasha Grey is “disgusting” and poses a threat to their idea of how the world should be. If someone were to witness this kind of scenario in his or her own lives (say with a coworker sleeping their way to the top), there would be good reason to react sharply because it would invalidate an honest effort. This sentiment is stated here:
“So what does that movie show us? In my modest opinion, A DECADENT world…promiscuos…thats a movie that show u how to make easy money, just FUCK for money….. bad for people litle heads…plus a Boyfriend tHATis cool with it?!??!?WTF?? is he a PIMP??….uau how nice…”-Navalhas81 (2 days ago)
In show business, however, crossing over is hardly unheard of. Think of all the people who were not professional actors and who appeared in movies throughout history. Sports stars, comedians, animals, singers, and entertainers of all kinds. Grey is an entertainer (and not a bad actress), who also happens to have appeared in many movies.
Money is another cause for commotion in the movie. As we watch the trailer we hear the drumming of Shakerleg over images of Grey and her boyfriend, dressed in black, but only together once, crossing the street, going to boutiques, eating, getting dressed, etc. During this sequence, we are shown pieces of text: “This is Christine. She is 22 years old. She has a boyfriend. He’s a personal trainer. He charges $125 an hour. Christine charges $2000 an hour.” (Yes, the name is different). Rarely do movies reveal how much money a person makes, unless it’s a heist picture (Soderbergh’s made those before), in which case the number is so large that we don’t relate to it; or a Charlie Chaplin film, where the money is so little that we feel the same way. But $125 and $2000 are figures we can comprehend; we can wrap our minds around these sums like Chaplin can wrap his fingers around his cane. Which is why many of us we can’t accept that someone could earn $2000 an hour for providing a “girlfriend experience”:
“Who on earth is going to pay $2000 an HOUR for an evening with a call girl? I dont care if you are a rich businessman who needs to impress a client at a lunch or dinner, or movie, and need a girl on your arm…………………….. A five or six hour “date” with someone that makes 2K an hour would be over $10,000 bucks. I doubt this really happens in the real world.
Some “pros” might get $300 bucks an hour, but I doubt its more than that.”-taghl (1 week ago)
“Some guys pay more than that. 300/hr is for a prostitute a step above what you’ll find on craigslist. A street hooker alone… STD’s and all, will run you 100 or 150 just for the sex itself, which usually lasts less than 20 minutes. Sex is expensive. It’s why women who aren’t desperate choose the profession, despite what the average feminist will say about the average prostitute.”-ryanman7 (1 week ago)
“$2000 an hour? God damn it! I take two months to earn this.”-diogo86 (1 week ago)
“i’ll pay 300hr for some low grade teenage ass in lower alabama, whereas a place like atlanta has high end girls at around 1200 and up.”-amplexorj (1 week ago)
Thus, trailer brings up something people don’t readily share: their wages. The movie, however, brings up even more. Chelsea keeps a diary that we periodically hear her read from in voice-over, wherein she describes all the luxury apparel she wears on each “date” in ways that recall a Mastercard commercial. We see her primarily in high-end settings, making it clear that a lot of money is being spent both on her and for her. In one scene, her boyfriend explains the cost of a personal training session plan, detailing the price differences of other plans. He also negotiates a salary with his boss after finding another job opportunity. Surrounding these activities is background chatter about the economic crisis and Hard Times For All. Shot during the 2008 presidential election, discussion of Obama and McCain can be heard; in the last scene, one of Sasha’s clients tells her that she must vote for McCain to save Israel. One YouTuber commented:
“Who edited this trailer? Obama?”-FefuFX (1 week ago)
FefuFX is referring to the general agreement that the trailer is bad:
“this trailer sucker.. bad editing.. i dont ecen wanna watch this movie… SPANKWIRE HERE I COME! lol” - roger3001
“This bucket of shit wasnt much to brag about.. The person who had the responsibility for the making of this trailer should be fierd, and be made to watch this clip for 48 hrs straight as punishment” -alrathas23 (1 week ago)
“any better than her previous movies?” -elocholero (1 week ago)
“This trailer makes me hate the editor more than anything in the world.”-n0time2spare (1 week ago)
“agree . worst trailer ever in history”-jitpunkia (1 week ago)
“stupid ass movie. i wish they could make movies like the onces in 1992s and 93s. Now they all suck.” -saykey2009 (1 week ago)
But there is a minority who do like the trailer and who may or may not have ever willingly paid money to see a Soderbergh movie:
“this film looks quite interesting. havent seen this kind of trailer in ages…. i miss watching non-action films.”-dwasten90 (3 weeks ago)
“this looks soooooo strange…..but resently i’m pleasantly surprised by weard films,so why not” -874497 (6 days ago)
“love the trailer and looking forward to seeing this film. geez, ppl are critical these days…talk abt being judgemental to a pornstar…. truth is, film’s not out - watch and then comment.”-withOphelia (2 weeks ago)
And those who most likely are interested because it is a Soderbergh movie:
“looks interesting. i think soderbergh has always been a risky film maker, judging from films like Solaris, Eros, and the Che films. I think it’s a brave thing to cast a porn star as the lead of a film and genuinely want to make a cinematic film from it.” -MyMelancholyDodo (4 days ago)
“I’m actually really interested in seeing this. I think Steven Soderberg is a brilliant filmmaker, and I’m curious to see how this Sasha Grey actually does with the roll.
The way Ebert described the film made it sound mature and tragic, and I’m kinda interested to see where it goes from there.”-KiernanMooney (15 hours ago)
“Soderbergh is overrated as is, but his movies lately have been complete shit. Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight are easily his best films.
Hopefully this is good. He has to redeem himself.” -Voltmx45 (1 week ago)
And then there are those who may like or dislike Soderbergh, but are interested in movies in general - movie buffs:
“For those of you who think the trailer is boring, then this film is not for you because the film is basically 77 mins of that. Majority of it is dialogue, shot in cinema verite style in a non-linear, fragmented narration with minimalistic sense. I mean it’s a decent film. It’s just not for everyone or even the general mass. Certainly not for guys in basement, masturbating to hardcore porn in front of the computer wanting to sit thru this film at a theater.”-genericaccountuser (2 weeks ago)
“this seems like a rip off of Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan.”-jcinla76 (2 weeks ago
What’s interesting about reading these opinions is the surprise (”Do you really think that?”) they can cause, even though one is aware that a variety of opinions exist. We went to the theater, shared a movie-going experience, had reactions that we kept to ourselves or amongst our friends, and then went home. Some of us then shared those opinions on the internet, but most of us didn’t. But it’s a movie that stirred up and brought to the surface a variety of feelings and opinions. It’s a fear of confrontation about politics, money and morality, that keep us from sharing our experience. But it’s movies that we keep going back to. What other medium does such a good job at getting us to think about our lives and our society in a communal setting? While movies provide the opportunity to engage in discussion, they also preempt discussion precisely because we aren’t fully aware of differences between one another; we simply aren’t wired in such a way. If you were watching The Girlfriend Experience in a theater where everyone in the audience freely shared their opinions (like on YouTube), the situation would be uncomfortable. We need the distance that the internet provides to give us comfort, just as we need the distance movies provide from real life in order to reflect and think.
So, The Girlfriend Experience is a movie upfront about the situations and feelings we keep private. The trailer is at once frank and confidential: you know that the movie is about Sasha Grey, her boyfriend and how much money they make, but the images don’t tell you much besides what these people look like. Presenting the movie in this way can leave you feeling “bored,” as so many reported, or curious to get behind that cracked door, like the one Sasha says that she’s closed for the majority of people she meets. Soderbergh’s frankness about money makes us feel as uncomfortable as when we confront our own differences. The movie is as fractured - scenes happen out of order - as the general consensus about it is. It is as private as the internet.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 17:20 - by Kalvin Henely
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
A mysterious transmission, an MS. found in a bottle that somehow ended up on the screen. This inhuman film. This monster. There’s a lot to write about The Happening–a lot to write because so little has been written. When the movie was released last summer, the response from reviewers was a steady monotone. The reviews’ll tell you very little about the movie, but a lot about their authors: that they think cleverness is more important than intelligence, plotting’s better than feeling, and verisimilitude is important above all else. That they think that there are such things as “good” and “bad” acting and that a movie is not itself, but the interpretation of a screenplay. That cinema is a grammar. That they want that mysterious variable–”quality”–which The Happening completely lacks. And it’s the better for it.
It’s easier to identify decor than ideas. So we call anything with a cowboy hat a Western, anything with dancing a musical, anything with guns an action film, anything with a handkerchief a melodrama, anything strange “science fiction,” and anything with a sharp knife horror. It’s degrading, not because it misidentifies (ultimately a pedantic footnote), but because it’s usually used to denigrate movies classified as “genre films.” No one would say that The Quiet Man “is a drama” and end at that, but we’re fine with saying that Canyon Passage “is a Western,” as if that’s enough to let people know whether they want to see it or not. And when we feel there’s more to say than that, we write that a movie “transcends the genre.” So we say The Happening is a “horror film” and we use that word as if it refers to one thing. But it’s a term whose beauty lies in its vagueness. Horror can be a confrontation, as in Haneke. It can be a liberation, as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recently demonstrated with the little, personal horrors of Tokyo Sonata. It can be the description of a struggle, like in Carpenter. It can be a violation of taboo, like in a Coffin Joe movie, or the reinforcing of a social code, like in Nakagawa or Craven. But The Happening isn’t any of these. We attack it, we’re disgusted by it, because it doesn’t seem to be horror at all–and then again, what’s it supposed to be? The Happening is made in a language entirely its own. It begs to be decoded. It ignores every convention of contemporary American cinema. There’s no naturalism here, little handheld camera. The characters are banal, not fashionably quirky. It’s asking, “What kind of movie am I?”
Well, first off, it isn’t a thriller; The Happening’s got no highs or lows, only a flat, inevitable doom, an abandonment of “drama” in favor of images and sounds and of “plotting” in favor of edits. There’s no twist ending. The final scene, which repeats the opening, confirms what we already know. It isn’t visceral, and is the more unsettling for it: there are maulings and deaths and mutilations in The Happening, but no “violence.” Violence is something social; violence is inflicted, it’s a matter of choices and actions. It’s emotional; for something to be pain, it has to be felt. No one killed in The Happening feels it. No one flinches or screams. People stick pins through their necks, hurl themselves off of roofs or smash their heads through windows with no emotion, not even calmness. There’s that infamous scene where the characters huddle to watch a video of a man having his arms bitten off by lions. What’s unsettling is not what’s on the iPhone screen, but the calmness of the reactions. It’s only a video, and so they’re able to watch unflinchingly.
If there is a horror to The Happening, it’s the horror of Bigger Than Life: a world that is empty. It has the directness of simple terror: The Happening is a series of little panics, episodes that are disconcerting in their acceptance of the fantastic. There is more Buñuel here than Hitchcock and more Shyamalan than any of his other films: with The Happening, he essentially strips away any attempt to be anyone else (namely Steven Spielberg) and any trace of the neat sentimentality that he’s often intoxicated by. It’s more expression than entertainment.
An expression of what? Maybe the director’s fears. There isn’t just “the situation,” but the unsettling way in which characters react to it. The irony of so many reviewers attacking the film for the implausibility of its plot (besides the fact that that kind of criticism belongs to another century), is that the movie isn’t an “ecological parable;” what’s horrifying isn’t that nature can turn against us, but that we are essentially machines, an idea that is spiritually unsettling to Shyamalan. To believe in the soul, Shyamalan must believe in free will and the world of The Happening is a nightmare where humanity is negated. When we talk, we’re merely transmitting information, not expressing. People are just fleshy machines.
The plot is a simple B-film set-up, the kind that would’ve been written for Lippert Pictures fifty years ago. For reasons unknown (i.e. unnecessary), flora in the US Northeast have begun releasing a chemical that forces people to kill themselves. A high school science teacher, his wife, his friend from the math department, the friend’s daughter and a dwindling group of refugees flee Philadelphia for the country. The high school teacher is Mark Wahlberg, all flesh and muscle; his wife is Zooey Deschanel, an image who almost resembles a human being. If the film has a human, it’s John Leguizamo, who doesn’t manage to live to the end. As in the films of Joseph H. Lewis, every image is not merely forceful, but seems to have been made forcefully. When the camera is stationary, it isn’t resting, it’s bolted down. When it moves, it’s a shove, not a glide. M. Night Shyamalan strips away all pretensions of verisimilitude: The Happening is a film without details. Every face is gigantic, even on the small screen, the features somehow distorted. Every line of dialogue is like a thudding footstep–a conscious progression.
To a man who believes in God, as Shyamalan clearly does, there is only one thing scarier than the chance of his non-existence: the possibility of his indifference. This is not the prodding God of Signs or the unmentioned God of Unbreakable and The Village, who watches while we go about our pathetic little lives. Heroism and virtue exist in those films; our actions have weight. But in The Happening, God, if he exists, doesn’t give two shits. Affection and friendship are nullified. It’s a world in which children are killed with no consequence. Our protagonists live to the end through a combination of circumstances that have little to do with fate or ability. They haven’t survived–they just haven’t been killed yet.
Thursday, May 14, 2009 19:55 - by Ignatiy Vishnevetskyby Monica Sandler
A film that follows the lives of a group of upper class elites and their servants as they spend a banter-filled, love-tangled weekend hunting sounds like the plot to any 1930s comedy of manners. However, scholars such as André Bazin have championed Jean Renoir’s classic The Rule of the Game as “true cinematic realism.” A recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art was a reminder of how the film’s brilliance lies in its opposing realist filmmaking and chaotic screwball narratives styles.
Stylistically, The Rule of the Game is characterized by its mobile camera, which André Bazin called “an invisible guest wandering about… with a certain curiosity.” This “wandering” movement is best seen in an elongated chase sequence between two of the lower class characters. It begins when one man accuses another of having an affair with his wife, the camera following him as he angrily runs after the other man, panning across rooms, spanning through the entire house. This fluid camera movement is very different from the more static, intercut shots of fighting characters. Deep focus and odd framing (seen in shots of doors in the front of the frame and movement in the background) furthers the realistic element of the scene.
Renoir's Depth of Field: Notice the figures present in both the foreground and background of the frame.
While all of these formal elements make the film “realist,” its narrative shows images of disorder and violence. In the same chase sequence, we see nearly everyone at the party burst into fighting: the two lower class men run chase each other around the house as their lover yells in the background; the master of the house confronts a man about his relationship with his wife. Within each frame, punches are thrown, papers go flying, and people are screaming. Chaos is being shown while the camera moves and focuses in a “realist” manner.
The film’s use of realism to portray disorder is linked to the realities of the film’s time period. This was the era at the cusp of World War II; France was neighboring a violent, erratic nation threatening to take over the content. As the structure and narrative of The Rules of the Game reveals, chaos was a frightening possibility.
These chase sequences are executed with a lightheartedness that makes the film enjoyable for any viewer to watch. As such, The Rules of the Game is regarded as one of the most important achievements in world cinema. The combination of wit, realism, and chaos make Renoir’s a film worthy of study and repeated viewing.
Thursday, April 23, 2009 21:13 - by msandler
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Went to see Two Lovers a second time. A warm March evening, driving drizzle–more wind than rain. A weekday–the theater was so quiet that the box office had been shut down; tickets were being sold from behind the concessions counter. The movie had been playing for a few weeks; it had moved to the smallest house, and we were there with only a handful of people in the audience, mostly old ladies. There were two teenage girls, college freshmen probably; they talked through most of the movie and then left 30 minutes before the end. I’ll say that there’s something affirming about a walkout: the moment someone dramatically leaves a movie, it forces the rest of us in the audience to become aware of the fact that is our decision to stay. We become, if only towards these two people, defenders of the film. We confirm that whatever they’re bored with, we’re invested enough in to go through with it to the end. We and the old ladies confirm that we are pro-Gray.
Considering the amount of time producing a movie takes nowadays, we can be pretty sure James Gray won’t release another feature before the decade ends; he’s got only 8 months, and these aren’t the 1930s. So the calendar has provided us with this complete thing–”James Gray in the 2000s”–to think about. Three features: one at the start of the decade, two towards the end, and each one better than the last. A cast of familiar elements: those cramped family gatherings (if Ernst Lubitsch owned the bedroom, Gray owns the den in American cinema), the metaphors of the Brighton Beach boardwalk, relatives in all of their permutations, the loud dance clubs, the neighbor, the city that doesn’t seem large enough. And, above all, a feeling, the unintellectual intelligence of a man who knows people but doesn’t pretend to understand them. And who knows and feels the Movie but doesn’t pretend to be its only master. Gray’s abandonment of youthful posturing might be what’s keeping him from being respected in this country. We like to have people point out where we should be looking. We like films that tell us that they’re important or tell us that they’re original. None of Gray’s last three features tell us these things. And every one of them is important and is original–from the milky criminality of The Yards to the moral fog of We Own the Night to the inelegant beauty of Two Lovers, which embarrasses us into honesty. This red-bearded man from Queens, this self-deprecating talker is, almost secretly, one of America’s most passionate directors.
The young gangster who cuts his own throat. Robert Duvall nonchalantly collapsing into the arms of a boxer. A man running his hand over the hand of his comatose brother. A tear running down the cheek of a cool and careless young tough, his hair slicked back, a stud earring glistening from his right earlobe. A man drinking awkwardly in the corner of a fancy restaurant, the table too large for him. The great railyard, with the train passing in the distance. The loner who watches a beautiful woman walk away from his apartment through the peephole in the door. There are hundreds of images to remember from the movies of James Gray. But, above all, we remember feelings.
Lonesome
Gray once described history as “an accumulation of details” in an interview. It’s a fairly good way to approach his films: they are accumulations. The viewer Gray envisions for his films is an audience and not a reader; a movie directed by him invites feeling the same way it eludes analysis. We’ve taken to calling this naïveté or old-fashioned simplicity, which is fucking misleading: analysis is easy; emotion is embarrassing. Gray is uncool, terminally undistanced. His camera doesn’t so much capture something as throw its arms around it, embracing it with the lens.
It’s a film noir plot: an ex-con framed by his upstanding best friend for murder. Joaquin Phoenix is an impulsive and unwitting Death, pale with jet-black hair, and Mark Wahlberg is the man forced to suffer the consequences of his friend’s actions. He’s on his own, trying to outrun personal motives disguised as political ones; politics here is just a way to disguise crime, and society is just the sum of caprices.
Night and Fog
The world seems simplest to those who ignore its complications. We Own the Night presents morality as a cloud of cigarette smoke that can be swatted away. Here the image of the person who wants to act morally is not that of someone answering some trumpet call, but of a man who chooses to disappear into an opaque fog. It begins so crisply and articulately and travels into an increasingly hazy world.
A misunderstanding that might be attributed to marketing: We Own the Night was reviewed largely as a brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law drama, as if the reviewers were comparing the film against the promise of its poster. Really, it concerns only one brother (the second spends most of the film in a hospital and has only a fraction of our attention) and he’s not a criminal, a point that’s central to the film. He lives as most people do, never actively engaging with either “morality” or “immorality.” Joaquin Phoenix is the manager of a dance club in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. His family (brother Mark Wahlberg and father Robert Duvall) are Russian-American police officers. Phoenix has changed his last name and assumed a generic “American” ethnicity. His life is full of ordinary pleasures (good company, sex, pot) and affections (his friends, his job, and his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendes). His serious family seems to live apart from the world and the film chronicles his withdrawl from life as he becomes a police informant and then a full-fledged cop. Secreted to a cocaine sorting facility in a dimly-lit apartment, he is forced to put on a face mask that turns every face into a set of darting eyes: “morality” doesn’t provide a design for living, and its ambiguity only drives him to become more paranoid and vindictive.
Knife in the Head
The Yards, like his 1994 debut Little Odessa, showed a James Gray who was part of a larger tradition of American movies. With We Own the Night he seemed to get further away from it, and with Two Lovers he now stands on his own, completely unlike any of his American contemporaries. Almost an inversion of We Own the Night, it’s a humiliating romance that begins as a dream and at the end coalesces into painful reality, sharp as a knife.
Traveling outward instead of inward, Two Lovers starts as a film about the soul and becomes a film about the body. The body, which is really an anchor or a stone, dragging you down to some murky depth, never as agile or graceful as you want it to be. The body makes children older than their parents hope and makes time pass faster than it should and gives us a quivering voice when we wish we could be eloquent. So here is a movie about people who can’t speak like they want to, who make jokes but aren’t funny, who try to kiss but realize they aren’t romantic. About sunlight, which blinds instead of warming, and night, which casts unflattering shadows instead of enveloping. And about the tenderness that occurs despite all of these things and that weird miracle that allows us to almost understand what another person is saying even if the words don’t seem right. A sort of ballet for awkward dancers or an opera for untrained singers. It’s a movie, in some ways, about the success of failure, full of grand gestures that go unnoticed, where a person ready to throw their whole life away finds it sneaking back, like a cat.
The Unbelievable Truth
I’m thinking of a phrase: “the unbelievable truth.” It’s could have been an alternate title for We Own the Night or Two Lovers. Gray, like the similarly “unbelievable” Hal Hartley (who used the phrase as the title of his debut feature), is at odds with the attitude that values “authenticity” (i.e. verisimilitude) over truth. Gray is Realist in a strictly pre-Neo-Realist sense: he is after what he sees as real without trying to create an aesthetic of “reality.” We like directors to be, above all, convincing liars, and Gray (like Hartley) is incapable of lying.
I’m also thinking of the deeply emotional work of two great anthropologists-turned-filmmakers, Pál Fejõs and Jean Rouch–especially Fejõs and his New York-set silent film, Lonesome. For all the sociological details that make up their films (for Gray, Brighton Beach and its Jewish community; for Hartley, working class Long Island and, later, the post-national cities of Asia, Europe and the Middle East), they’re less the aim of the films than the natural result of the directors’ backgrounds. What they’re getting at is not observation, but expression: the movies are inarticulatable articulations of the humanity they feel around them. So Gray sits alone, and tries to describe what he sees: moral murk and failed tenderness.
Two Lovers is currently playing in theaters.
We Own the Night and The Yards are available on DVD.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 11:26 - by Ignatiy VishnevetskyBy Drew Hinshaw
Like many Americans living in Africa, I expected the local reaction to Barack Obama’s election to be instantaneous and euphoric, but was surprised to note how much more gradual—and more meaningful—his election has played out in the culture. Election night passed without firecrackers or confetti, but in the four months since, the president’s exotic name has been woven into proverbs, placed on a pedestal, then incessantly dropped with awesome reverence by musicians and talk show hosts alike. Surely, in time that wave of hopeful re-examination will touch the lens of filmmakers–maybe even Nigerian filmmakers, who tend to exploit post-colonial pessimism as ruthlessly as Nigerian politicians. One positive sign: Nollywood tabloids report that the country’s studios are in a kind of moon race to produce the first (and therefore definitive) Obama biopic, although that pursuit seems to have been deferred by all following the realization that very little of our president’s life took place in a location that could pass for Nigeria. But still. Even if Nollywood’s film crews never manage the capital to ship their gear to Chicago, there are scattered signs across the continent—fair elections here, emerging private sectors there—that the usually vexed tone of African cinema has a corner to turn. One day, some day.
Yet one wouldn’t catch Hope Fever from FESPACO, Burkina Faso’s Pan-African Film Fest, where films are generally funded by and screened before wealthy foreigners; homegrown Nollywood videos, with their crude and jarring depictions of African distress are effectively disqualified on technical criteria. Strange that even without the input of trauma-mongering Nollywood directors, the 21st edition of FESPACO showcased a fairly gruesome set of films. Here’s how “The Seed” director, Joshua Bee Alafia sums up the prevailing mood: “It’s been brutal. I’m seeing prostitutes getting their faces cut. Stabbings. Beatings. I’ve been really struck by the nihilism of the films.”
As if to collaborate Alafia’s take on the atmosphere, the awards committee hands their Golden Stallion to Ethiopian Haile Gerima’s “Teza,” a movie about the powerlessness of common Ethiopians during the violent regime of Haile Mengistu—who was an asshole. Their Silver Stallion goes to “Nothing but the Truth,” an equally dour entry in which director John Kani explores the maddening moral ambiguities of post-apartheid South Africa, where freedom has by no means brought prosperity.
In a different, more stagnant or malaise-marked year, either film would have defined the historical moment–but this was 2009, a year whose memes of hope and change were not lost on African audiences, and this year only one film I experienced hinted at a grander and more coherent direction for African cinema: Tunde Kelani’s “Aurgba.” Kelani’s film tells the story of a corruption-bedeviled village that embarks on a magnificent and transformative cleansing ritual. And, true to the times, Obama b-roll is plastered all over it.
Kelani is a Nigerian filmmaker, of and yet above the Nollywood circuit. His themes, settings, elaborate wardrobes, and the grandiose theatrical performances he coaxes out of his actors all signify as Nollywood; so too, does the contemplative grammar of his films. Less Nollywood-esque is his resplendent attention to visual detail—he shoots in HD, either unaware or unconcerned that his films will likely be compressed and sold via poor-quality VCDs. His actors speak little English, mostly Yoruba—which intrigues academics–and his subtitles convey the euphemistic beauty of that language. In fact, he may be among the first Nollywood filmmakers to use subtitles—ever.
By itself, that approach to African cinema would be noteworthy, but it’s an even larger distinction in FESPACO, a film festival that has struggled for nearly half its existence on how or whether to acknowledge Nigerian home video. Founded in 1969 at a time when director Edward Rice Burrough’s Tarzan imagery was bouncing back onto African screens, the biennial film fest was an intended as a gathering ground for filmmakers in the newly-liberated continent. FESPACO was to be place where Africans could negotiate what images of themselves they wished to project, not only to the outside world, but across African borders as well. If colonialism had denigrated and divided Africans, film was seen as a redemptive medium, one on which black people could re-unite and re-discover their greatness. For a continent reeling from overpopulation and underdevelopment, it was an illogically hopeful and expensive medium to pursue.
“It was a revolutionary period,” film professor Fara Awindoor says. “Africans wanted to prove that we can do it, too.”
Unfortunately, by “ do it” we can assume Awindoor means “produce aesthetically pleasing films on 35 mm equipment.” But the high-costs of film production proved to be the tripping wire for FESPACO, as African directors found themselves dependent on foreign funders, primarily French. Naturally, that initial quest for artistic self-realization was compromised by investors who, however well-intended, tend to promote their own ideological agenda. African voices were obscured, if not actively marginalized in the process.
“Here we are,” Awindoor continues, “we want to produce films that show us for ourselves, and we have to seek foreign funding to produce them.”
And yet, while FESPACO was sputtering out, downplaying its radical aims for the sake of of foreign capital like so many African nations at the time, the world’s third largest movie industry was emerging by surprise from the sprawl of Lagos. Apocryphal tales surround the birth of Nollywood—it is often said that the genre was created by electronic storekeepers who needed a way to get rid of excess VHS cassettes–but those stories express a certain truism: In the early 1990s, as VCRs landed in Nigeria, aspiring and extremely business-minded filmmakers discovered an emerging market, and a cheap means through which to reach that market. Produced entirely on video equipment, then rapidly edited and dubbed to cassette, the costs of producing a Nollywood hit were entirely within the reach of Nigerian venture capitalists. With 140 million Nigerians to reach, it didn’t take long for the genre to grow by exponents.
Artistically, the fertile economics of Nollywood were reflected quite plainly in its brazen sense of self: Filmmakers relied upon and catered to nobody beyond the borders of Nigeria. Films dealt in recondite Nigerian mythology and equally cryptic Nigerian English—both of which were completely incomprehensible to most outside audiences. While the high-brow African cinema of Kwah Ansah and Souleymane Cissé strove to explore universally modern experiences of alienation and uncertainty, the Nigerian video industry tended to dive towards the lower of the two common denominators, earning the -ollywood in its Nollywood. Hallmarks of the cinema include drawn-out shouting matches that breach the limits of distortion, sight gags often against the disabled, and slapstick bordering on domestic abuse. In fact, the slap fight could be safely considered central to the entire art form: “A Nigerian flick without slaps is like a Bollywood movie without the dance,” Nigerian poet Tolu Ogunleshi writes, only half sarcastically.
Yet no matter how technically careless, base, and Nigeria-centric their work may been, the country’s filmmakers ultimately achieved a Pan-African audience that the continent’s high-brown filmmakers can only envy. Today, Nollywood’s distribution chains stretch throughout the Black diaspora, from Kenya to Crown Heights to the Caribbean; within Africa, the popularity of their work leaps over otherwise stubborn boundaries of class and ethnicity, extends through remote villages, as well as megalopolises. If the agonizing production values seem like the handiwork of thoughtless filmmakers, they could also be construed as a sensible response to the urban hell of Lagos—an attempt to replicate on camera the aesthetics of urban turmoil. Sound issues—unbearably loud arguments, inaudible mumblings—have their own unnerving and perhaps not unintentional effect: Women in Nollywood quite literally have a difficult time being heard amidst the loud belligerence of tyrannical “big men” characters.
And yet, how ever critically or popularly viable the art form has become, Nollywood movies are virtually disqualified from FESPACO, largely on the grounds that this is video—not cinema.
“Our festival is for films,” FESPACO organizer Baba Hamma told the BBC at the onset of FESPACO’s 20th edition, in 2007. “That means you have to bring films on 35mm and Nollywood usually makes movies on a video tape.”
Two years later, the 21st edition made an enormous half-step towards accommodating Nollywood: This time around, FESPACO accepted entries filmed on HD video. That would be fantastic and auspicious news, except for the fact that few Nigerian filmmakers have completed the transition to HD. Many, for example, shoot on HD, then edit on antiquated systems. For the film buffs who pack FESPACO’s bleachers, this is exactly the kind of heedlessness that should disqualify any filmmaker, Nigerian or not.
But even beyond the format hurdles, there is a pervasive sense among many Africans that FESPACO belongs to Francophone Africa, to French-speaking audiences, to the French. English-language films at the festival are commonly screened in distant and dilapidated theaters; Often, French-language films are subtitled in a second layer of French for clarity. At the 2009 festival, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and other Anglophone Africans complained in public and in print of feeling unwelcome; no doubt their feelings mirror the sentiments of Nollywood directors who rarely bother to submit their work.
“It’s technological, sure, but it’s also attitudinal,” Awindoor says, regarding FESPACO unofficial “ban” on Nollywood.
To get a grasp on these attitudinal issues, I sit down with a FESPACO panel of mixed Anglophone-Francophone film critics to explore their view on Nollywood, and its place in African cinema. Their grievances run the gamut: A drama student complains that Nigerian producers only cast light-skinned actresses, another complains that Nollywood’s glamor standards set an impossibly high bar for African women, and promotes artificial and superficial ideals of beauty. A Jamaican professor, living in Niger, complains that the filmmakers have an ahistorical attitude towards Africa’s problems, obsessing over social ills without contemplating their source. She, probably figuratively, encourages more filmmakers to make movies about the pyramids and other highlights of African history. The recklessness of the cinema is roundly mocked, in waves of laughter—the typecast actors, bombastic trailers, inane plots, all very humorous. Ghanaian cultural critic Kofi Anyidoho recounts that the purpose of FESPACO is to combat the Western World’s degrading, Joseph Conrad notions of Africa, but laments that “we [Nigerian filmmakers] are complacent in projecting some of these same images.”
However muddled the panel’s commentary may be, it’s not hard to miss the underlying and sensible objection FESPACO’s elite, academic audience has with Nollywood; that Nollywood, with its haphazard slap fights, crippled man gags, superstitious witchcraft plots, and sloppy approach to filmmaking depicts Africa in a bad light. Or, from the point of a discerning film buff, in a single cheap kino flo with the doors spread wide.
These awkward and seemingly irreconcilable differences between the world of FESPACO and that of Nollywood would be an easily compartmentalized predicament–an aesthetic issued buried in the obscure cinema of an under-reported segment of the globe—if the rivalry between FESPACO and Nollywood didn’t so uncannily mirror the fundamental political divide that has complicated Africa’s forward movement since independence. Across the continent, the end of colonialism opened up two great rivalries in African politics: strident mass politicians who attracted huge followings; and more conservative, pragmatic elites who endeavored to make Africa presentable to foreign investors. It’s the feud, to take Ghana as an example, between Ghana’s founding father J.B. Danquah, who spoke Oxford English about Oxford values, and its first president Kwame Nkrumah, who did things like stomp in sheep’s blood when he won elections. In Nigeria, that same pattern played out in the form of a civil war between radical secessionists and Nigeria’s foreign-backed federal forces, while in Burkina itself, that pattern pit Thomas Sankara—the theatrical military coup-leader who forced corrupt ministers into peasant’s work—against Blaise Compaoré, the French-friendly current president who had Sankara executed.
The fact that African cinema so closely mimics the divisions over which coups and civil wars have been launched suggests that cinema may be one of the world’s most inherently political art forms–and that in African cinema, there is even more at stake than usual.
What is both telling and inexplicable, then, is how films from both camps tend to arrive at the same fatalistic conclusions. Whether in the galleries of FESPACO or the Nigerian chop bar, I’ve come to see a lot of plots where well-intentioned yet tragically ordinary Africans are repeatedly overwhelmed by larger powers such as–in the case of FESPACO–economic forces, military regimes, pernicious social structures, or–in the case of Nollywood movies–hysterical mothers-in law, disease, some kind of witchcraft potion, mafias.
• • •
Of course, not every film at the 21st edition could be safely pigeonholed as pessimistic, nor was every film stylistically divorced from the aesthetics of Nigerian movies, either. Abdoulaye Dao’s “Une Femme Pas Comme les Autres”—a women unlike the others—deservedly wins (NAME OF AWARD), for its perky satire on polygamy. The film posits a woman who repays her husbands infidelity by recruiting a second husband/partner-in-prankery. Aesthetically, the film employs harsh lighting, bourgeoisie settings, long-winded grammar, slick background muzak, predictable sight gags–all hallmarks of Nigerian home video that nonetheless bedazzle and amuse the theater’s largely European audience.
But it’s Kelani’s film that amplifies the stakes. It’s difficult to imagine a film that swings for an audience as broad as Kelani’s—he transmogrifies common Nollywood devices like the slapfight and the inexplicable illness into more dignified and universal devices—and yet the film is almost provincial in its concerns. When a central character’s infant falls horrifyingly ill, her far more levelheaded friend takes time to prescribe a series of thoughtful remedies, concluding in an AIDS test (a subject all too many Nollywood films would deal with deal with in a vocabulary of witchcraft). The ever vexed subject of rape—and how to depict it—is dealt with remarkable prudence, while corruption is transformed from an abstract evil, into a localized and relatable vice. Rather than sensationalize his character’s hardships, Kelani uses them as a chance to demystify African dilemmas, meticulously so–the film offers an extremely tailored response to a very particular set of agrarian, African concerns.
Yet “Arugba” contains glimpses of the village’s place in the wider world. The impetus of change for the village is a series of ex-pats who have returned home: the foreign-trained doctor who comes back to build her clinic despite a culture of corruption, the Nigerian “been-to’s” who bring money, ideas, and a certain can-do spirit, the quasi-Rasta mindful of a larger black consciousness that dwarfs ethnic or parochial ties–these characters bring hints of an outside world that is clamoring for this small village to achieve its greatness. Through them, and through other inklings of the world beyond, Kelani hammers his point relentlessly. At one point, the village chief flops down onto a living room couch in a state of despair, when who should come walking across the TV screen? The 44th president of the United States, striding on stage for his victory speech. The lesson is an unmistakable “yes, we can.”
But more than offering barefaced, pep-rally encouragement, Kelani’s film is about reaching a working medium between Nollywood cynicism and new century idealism. It is pragmatic, mindful of Nigeria’s unfortunate past, and respectful of it’s characters cynicism, but flush with ideas and confidence that even this troubled, sin-ridden community can transform itself through collective optimism. It honors a certain majesty latent in Yoruba culture that is often obscured not only by Nigerian cinema, but by foreign conceptions of Africa as a sufferable place. Almost incidentally, it bridges the broad and awkward gap between African and European audiences, and wraps FESPACO neatly into its fold. The festival-goers largely missed it—perhaps it was a language barrier thing—but there it was, a great film ghettoized into one of the city’s humblest theaters, suggesting that African cinema can be that common gathering and healing space FESPACO’s founders intended it to be. Hope and unity. Unity and hope.
Sunday, April 5, 2009 17:40 - by Drew Hinshaw
by Gleb Sidorkin
Alexei German, Jr. has learned the lessons of his father well, but Alexei German is not the only great late-Soviet filmmaker whose work is evoked in Paper Soldier. It is the story of a Soviet doctor in the 1960’s, whose passion for his work in the space program, self-doubt, and weak heart lead to his death at the exact moment when Yurii Gagarin becomes the first man to exit the earth’s atmosphere, strapped precariously to a rocket. The death scene, which takes place in a wintry Kazakhstan cosmodrome, is pure Tarkovsky, evoking the candle-holding death scene in Nostalghia, and the bicycle-riding mailman in The Sacrifice, among other tropes. Like in most of Tarkovsky’s films, the hero’s martyrdom brings about a miracle and a return to a long-lost home.
The visual and dramatic style of Paper Soldier, however, follows directly in the footsteps of the director’s father. Alexei German, Sr. is one of the preeminent filmmakers of the Late Soviet period, but is little known in the West. His most important film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), toured briefly in the U.S. and Europe, but was never released. In fact, not one of the four meticulously researched, historically grounded films that German has directed has made it to English-subtitled circulation, despite the fact that the Russian Film Critics Ассоciation named Lapshin аs one of the ten best Russian films ever made. So when I say that German, Jr. is taking up his father’s methods, this is by no means a criticism. There are so few of these films, and they are so valuable to our understanding of history and the emotional lives of past generations, that any effort to add to this repertoire should be applauded– especially one as visually and dramatically accomplished as Paper Soldier.
German, Sr., a former theater director and the son of a prominent Socialist-Realist fiction writer, became a master of the period piece, and developed a style in which period became an end in itself. In Lapshin, which was based on some of his father’s short stories, German sketched 1930’s Soviet life in buzzing, pulsing detail. The criminal plot and love story are interwoven with more mundane episodes, and the driving force of each scene is German’s single-minded quest for historical truth, rather than narrative. Creating such total authenticity in the context of Soviet historiography is quite difficult, since the ideological bent of the official archives forced German to scour the personal archives and memories of people that actually lived through those heady yet dangerous years between Stalin’s rise to power and his descent into madness.
If Lapshin is a loving portrait of the idealistic but doomed members of the fist Soviet generation, then Paper Soldier takes up the narrative at a similar point in the lives of the next generation: those that lived through the death of Stalin and inherited the fraying banner of the Revolution in the 1960’s. Danya is the tortured son of a famous surgeon who, like many prominent doctors, was imprisoned and killed by Stalin. He is idealistic, but his zeal to give himself to a greater cause, to make that last leap forward into utopia, is no longer that of the “true believers” of the first generation. The dream of a world revolution is gone, a communist economy has been built, and nothing seems to be changing. The unofficial music of Bulat Okudzhava, whose ballad about the doomed paper soldier provides the title of the film, has replaced the revolutionary marches that Lapshin and his friends sang at their dinner table. The other members of the embattled Soviet intelligentsia that gather at Danya’s dacha showcase the beginnings of totalitarian decay. Some, like his wife, are jaded and materialistic. Others plan their escape into the West, while the rest just go along with their daily lives. They all argue over what it means to be an “intellectual”. Only Danya, who is burdened by the legacy of a great and heroic father, obsessively struggles to carve a notch for himself and his generation into the glorious revolutionary dream.
The 1960’s stand-in for the project of communist utopia in Paper Soldier is the space program, namely the quest for the first manned space flight. When the film opens, some dogs have already been launched into space, and one cosmonaut has already burned up in a failed attempt. What is immediately striking is the theatrical nature of the space program: a few people engaging in incredibly complex but ultimately silly acts for the sake of …what, exactly? In retrospect, manned space flight seems like part of the inevitable progress of technology, but in the 1960’s it was basically a few people sitting in shacks in a field in Kazakhstan, hoping that the next boy they strap into a rocket won’t come back in pieces. The odds are good that he will, and the real benefit from this silly escapade will be zero. And yet, the dream lives on, and the balance between human life and Utopian striving is once again revealed as the central tension within the Communist project. Only this time, history repeats itself as self-reflexive, tortured, intellectual farce.
The release of this film bodes well for the progress of Russian cinema. Though it is a bit too overwrought to compete with the subtlety of German Sr., and lacks the visual genius that makes us forgive Tarkovsky for all his self-dramatizing excess, it is a finely crafted work. German, Jr.’s effort gives me hope that the Lenfilm studio can once again bring together the finest Russian actors, directors, and cameramen to create works of true artistic depth and historical accountability. It’s even more difficult to make this happen under the soft censorship of the mass market than it was under the scrutiny of the Soviet censors. But now that there are two generations of Germans making films in Russia, there is a hope– if only a futile, Utopian one– that the tradition of Soviet cinema can be reborn out of the ashes of the 1990’s economic collapse and the commercial quagmire of the 2000’s.
Paper Soldier screened as part of New Directors/New Films. The second screening is on Thursday, March 31st, at Lincoln Center.
Alexei German, Sr. is currently working on his fifth film, based on the Strugatski Brothers novel “Hard to be a God.”
Monday, March 30, 2009 9:59 - by Gleb SidorkinBy Anna Bak-Kvapil
One of the nation’s most acclaimed film critics, J. Hoberman has written for The Village Voice for over 30 years, and is the author of nine books. In a recent article in the Voice, “Brother Can You Spare $12: Why Hard Times Won’t Mean Good Times at the Movies Again” (Feb. 3, 2009), he reflected on the Great Depression, 
the current economic crisis, and the rising cost of both making and seeing movies. In our conversation, he elaborated on his predictions and thoughts about the fate of movies and moviegoing.
ABK: How do you expect the recession to affect the film community- both the studios and the film going audience?
JH: What’s going to happen generally is that all the studios are going to be hurt because people are not buying as many DVDs. If you see that there is a rebellion by the audience against paying so much money to go to the movies, the theaters will either lower their prices or some theaters may close. The most vulnerable exhibitors are in places that show more non-mainstream movies. I think independent production could suffer because that depends on being able to borrow money and studio production will probably be the last to be affected, because they must be borrowing money too, but you can’t tell where the hell they’re borrowing it from. They’re all owned by big conglomerates. Time Warner is a huge company. I know the magazine, the Times part of it, is really suffering now. But there’s no indication yet that Warners is suffering. In fact, they made a lot of money from The Dark Knight, though probably not as much as they thought they would make. So things will happen, but not everything will happen at once. You have to figure out where the audience is going.
ABK: What do you think about the success of 3D, which actually costs more money to see?
JH: Yeah, Coraline. I was shocked. I had to pay $15 to see that. Is that because you’re renting the glasses? The theory behind all these special effects things, going back to the 50s, like widescreen, stereo sound, 3D, is that it’s stuff people can’t get at home. And my guess is, it’s not just that people are renting DVDs and looking at them on TV monitors or cable TV- they’re renting them and looking at them on computers, on a really small screen. So when people go out to the movies, there’s a built in imperative to make it more spectacular. An article in the Times reported that the studios are all happy that people have been going to the movies a lot recently. But you have to think of what that might be instead of. It’s cheaper to take your kids to see Coraline than it is to see one of those Disney shows on 42nd street. People will still go out and want to be entertained. The question is, what will they spend the money on?
ABK: In your article, “Brother Can You Spare $12”, you wrote “Movies are expendable. Folks will give up $12 tickets, cancel Netflix, and cut cable to save their high-speed Internet connection.”
JH: I had this vision of people living in shacks but keeping their high speed internet connection-what would be the absolute necessities, what will people hold onto the longest? The studios and networks are trying to figure out how to get their stuff online. They just don’t know exactly the best way. South Park making a deal with YouTube. Some other studios were talking about Hulu. I was being a little hyperbolic. I was essentially trying to make the point that the amount of money, the discretionary income is going to contract. And you have to figure out how that is going to manifest itself. The thing is, the studios are so smug now they’ve completely rewritten history. The idea that the movies, during the depression, were incredibly successful, that people went to the movies no matter what, just isn’t true.
ABK: That’s such a big part of the 1930s mythology at this point.
JH: The studios like it too. It’s very flattering.
ABK: Do you watch movies online?
JH: No, but I will occasionally watch one on a computer. I have a big stack of screeners.
ABK: So you watch movies at home because its part of your job?
JH: Yes.
ABK: But as a regular filmgoer, you’d go to the theater?
JH: I’d like to. I certainly wanted to see Coraline. It was worth it to me to go see it at the Ziegfeld.
ABK: What do you think of New Yorker Films going under? Do you think other distributors will have problems?
JH: I think Dan [Talbot] was stuck with a tremendous amount of debt and he was not in a position to pay that off. Maybe the economy didn’t help, but I think there was already a problem there. If similar places are suffering, something like Kino is probably the closest, but they have a better DVD/Video set up. Zeitgeist is even more of a boutique. And those are the places that really model themselves after New Yorker.
ABK: Do you think a recessionary climate will inspire a new underground film culture?
JH: It might. I like to think there’s an upside to the bad economy. Because at least in New York, maybe the rents will go down, then the city will become a more interesting place. It may be too late in Manhattan, but it’s not too late in the outer boroughs.
ABK: What about Light Industry, which shows avante garde films in a Sunset Park warehouse? It seems like a renewal of the underground film culture that you wrote about in your book with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies.
JH: There was a place like that in Williamsburg for a number of years, Galapagos, which just moved to DUMBO. The guys who program it, one of them was a student of mine years ago. But Light Industry certainly sounds like a continuation of something, the grassroots film culture, which is really healthy. There are a lot of places where it still exists. It still exists in San Francisco. And maybe that’s it. Los Angeles for some things.
ABK: In your article, you write about how the 1930s film industry that persevered through the Great Depression reflects on the situation the film industry is currently in. Are there any other periods of economic or political struggle that could be revisited now?
JH: The other period that I use as a reference is 1968-74, with the recession caused by the oil crisis. But it’s mainly because of the war, just general social chaos. I think that’s good for movies. Even in the period after WWII, which is the period I’m studying for my new book, there was enough money but the industry was in crisis and that created possibilities and confusion, which was healthy. And Hollywood forgets what bad shape they were in in the 60s. Studios were losing money. That was a bad time and it wasn’t even caused by a catastrophe. We’re now in a state where unemployment is now where it was in 1983 when Reagan came in, when there was inflation and all these things that put people out of work.
ABK: I’m curious to know a little about the book you’re working on now.
JH: I did a book called The Dream Life, [about film in the 60s] and this is a prequel. It covers the periods from after WWII to 1956 or 57. My feeling is that Hollywood came out of the war mobilized and stayed mobilized for a while, including through the Cold War. So it’s about Hollywood’s contribution to the Cold War, sort of the making of the Cold War. I’ll get very involved in the politics and the studio politics.
ABK: Are you researching the House of Un-American Activities?
JH: There’s a lot of that. I’ve been reading the transcripts. I think they’re very interesting. It’s dealing with films, at the same time, the relationship between the movies that were being made and what was happening in American politics. Hollywood still exists, but by the 60s, there’s something else. It’s more anarchic in a way.
ABK: What films are you specifically covering?
JH: The main genres are political thrillers, westerns, spectacles, Technicolor. For example, Hitchcock and Sirk were two great directors of the period- I’m really not that interested in what they’re doing. But Sam Fuller and Elia Kazan are important. Some other filmmakers, John Ford, Hawks, it depends on the genre. The Thing From Another World, yes. Land of the Pharaohs , yes. Monkey Business, no. Nicholas Ray also.
ABK: Bigger Than Life?
JH: That falls after. I’m ending with 1956/57. I think the zeitgeist changes then, with the Cold War, the counter culture really starts. That would work but it’s just too late. Rebel Without a Cause is the swan song of this book.
ABK: Do you think of the outcome of the Oscars was at all motivated by the economic climate?
JH: I think it’s still show business. They’re always responding to something. The thing that was the most striking was the unbelievable number of nominations they gave to Benjamin Button. I thought that was a touching show of support. The movie did better than I ever thought it would do but it’s so expensive, there’s no way it can make its money back. But it didn’t win anything. But sure, Slumdog Millionaire is fun. They outsourced their Oscars.
ABK: Let me read you an excerpt from an article in Film Journal on repertory movie theaters ["Reviving Cinema" Sarah Sluis, Dec. 19, 2008) - Film Forum’s repertory programmer Bruce Goldstein is quoted as saying, “Movies will survive. They survived the Depression, because unemployed people would go to the movies. It was cheap, and it’s still relatively cheap compared to other things you can do in New York…Young people are interested in seeing films they’ve never seen before, classics, in a theatre. Even if they can get the film on DVD, I think they’re really into going to see a movie in a theatre.” What’s your response to this optimistic viewpoint?
JH: He’s putting a very positive spin on things and I hope he’s right. He told me that they did incredibly well with their Depression films [the Breadlines and Champagne series this February]. And it’s tough: they’re not on DVD, they don’t show them anymore on Turner. It’s amazing stuff there and its great that people show up. What does Film Forum charge, also 12 dollars? That’s a lot of money, even for a double bill.
ABK: Even movies that are extremely popular on DVD get a big turnout at Film Forum.
JH: There’s still this communal thing, people still want to go to the movies to be part of an audience. And that hasn’t disappeared. But New York is an anomalous place. The movie culture here is not the same as even other large cities. There is nothing comparable to Film Forum in Los Angeles, where you think there would be revivals all the time. There are a lot of variables: the density of the population, the nature of peoples interests, and so on.
ABK: Does that mean the New York film community will weather the recession with a minimum of casualties?
JH: I’d like to think so. I’d like to keep my job. I think there’s a better chance in New York.
Sunday, March 15, 2009 15:31 - by Anna Bak-Kvapil
