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
The sketch group, Derrick Comedy (Dan Eckman, D.C. Pierson, Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes and Meggie McFadden), known for their popular Internet shorts, has taken a step forward with their first feature, Mystery Team (which had preview shows this week). Mystery Team follows three high school students, known in the town as detectives who solve small mysteries, hired to discover the killer of a young girl’s parents. Faced with this new responsibility, the team begins to discover the real world. Not surprisingly the film is filled with talented comedians (who are mostly Upright Citizen Brigade alums, along with Derrick Comedy) who play along the lines of the boy’s world of fantasy and reality.
When given a chance to take their short videos and turn them into feature-length films, filmmakers are usually prone to hesitation. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is an example of this: the 11-minute cable television show, released as a feature in 2007, was panned by critics and left fans on both sides of the film. There’s a big difference between short videos and feature length projects, and this difference is often a testament to the success of the creator’s vision.
Whether or not you’re familiar with the group, Mystery Team can satisfy old and new fans alike. It bears traces of sketch comedy (at one point, the team tries to enter a gentleman’s club, dressed in tailcoats and top hats, thinking it’s a spot for distinguished men rather than a strip club), and fuses these traces together in ways that develop strong characters and fresh humor.
What is striking in this film is its use of framing. In most comedies, audiences want to be moved by humor, not by cinematography. However, I was both by the comedy and the images, seeing that the filmmakers employed many techniques used in their short films.
On the whole, the film is a fairly strong showcase for the group’s comedic voice. Derrick Comedy have been successful at moving their ideas from the world of YouTube to the big screen. Unfortunately, because of today’s film market, they are struggling to find distribution; this is difficult to believe considering how funny this movie is. As such, Mystery Team is unlike any other American comedy that you’re bound to find in theaters this year.
Thursday, March 5, 2009 21:25 - by Meseret HaddisBy Dan Jackson
There’s nothing an audience loves more than a good dose of single-minded male romantic obsession. American films in particular have a tendency to celebrate and reward borderline- sociopathic male protagonists: picture Jimmy Stewart’s grizzled face in Vertigo, John Wayne’s sexual snarl in The Searchers, Robert DeNiro’s demented gaze in Taxi Driver. Though these movies criticize and condemn their main characters to varying degrees, this has not stopped these men from being viewed as celluloid icons, violent heroes with love in their hearts and passion in their veins. Feminine romantic obsession however, is often treated as a sort of psychosexual deficiency, a dangerous threat. Female characters with fanatical tendencies are rarely allowed to star in their own movies, are often cast as villains (a la Glen Close in Fatal Attraction), and their actions are filtered through the prism of an often dull male lead. Though the Greeks gave us Medea and her murderous desires, she was a woman scorned; this image is in no short supply. Films that glorify the perspective of a romantically obsessive feminine anti-hero remain somewhat elusive. John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven just might be the closest thing we’ve got.
Part melodrama, part noir, all Technicolor, and all completely nuts, Leave Her to Heaven tells the story of Harvard-educated novelist/dolt Richard Harland (or Dick) who meets the beautiful and enigmatic Helen (played by Gene Tierney) on a train. Helen gives Dick the alluring pick-up line, “I’m sorry I was staring at you. You look just like my father.” With this line the film’s Freudian subtext is underway and doesn’t let up until the final credits. Soon enough Helen and Dick find themselves married (Helen proposes, further emasculating wimpy Dick) and the two are whisked away to a romantic cabin where Dick attempts to finish another novel and Helen seeks only to show Dick how much she loves him by cooking, cleaning, and— one imagines and the film implies— screwing his brains out. At one point she tells Dick, “I don’t want anyone in the house but us,” foreshadowing the drastic measures she will take to achieve her goals.
The presence of Dick’s wheelchair bound and increasingly irritating younger brother Danny further complicates matters. It’s difficult to avoid the vague homoerotic undertones in Danny and Dick’s interactions, especially when Helen makes suggestive statements like, “I gave up my honeymoon so my husband could be with his brother.” Moments of code-era sexual repression and images of fertility fill the screen. In fact, Stahl injects just about every moment of the film with sexually and psychologically suggestive undertones. Like Douglas Sirk’s luscious melodramas, this is a film where the abundance of sub-text and the possibility of multiple interpretations almost engulfs the actual text, making it at times more fun to think about than to actually watch. However as Helen’s obsessive tendencies become more violent and vile— an exquisitely crafted drowning sequence and a joyfully overblown staircase-induced abortion are the highlights— the film takes on a perverse, nightmare-like intensity.
The dream-like tone is aided by some of the most vivid Technicolor images ever put to screen. The early sections of the film are overflowing with deep purples in contrast with bright, radiant yellow tones, giving even the interior shots an impressionistic glow. As the story becomes darker and morally troubling, Stahl and his cinematographer Leon Shamroy fill the frame with ominous shadows, visually conveying Helen’s sense of entrapment. The visual beauty, expert pacing, and devilish sense of fun in the film begin to waver once Helen’s reign of violence and jealousy comes to an end; the filmmakers make the almost fatal mistake of thinking we care about any of the other characters. The film ends with a rote and over-long courtroom sequence (though a hammy turn by Vincent Price as the jilted prosecuting attorney almost saves it) and a wrong-headed attempt at a happy ending. Tierney’s performance is the icy heart of the film and when she’s off screen it flat-lines.
Though the film has pulpy trappings and moments of pure kitsch, the title itself is taken from that beacon of high culture, The Bard himself, particularly Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Early in the play the Ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks of his wife, Gertrude, by saying, “Howsomever thou pursues this act, taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her.” Given this literary allusion it should come as no surprise that Helen and Gertrude meet the same fate: death by poison. However it is a bit difficult to imagine a character like Helen enjoying the boring world of heaven very much; she would probably find the flames of hell far more fun.
Leave Her to Heaven will be playing at the Film Forum in New York from March 6th to the 12th.
Thursday, March 5, 2009 17:31 - by Dan JacksonBy Dan Jackson
A man sits in front of a television set. His hair is sweaty, his shirt unbuttoned, his eyes filled with intensity and a touch of madness. On the screen a woman beckons to him with her lips, urging him, calling him— “Come closer.” He’s on his hands and knees in front of the television set, like a monk bowing before a holy shrine, and the image on the T.V. begins to zoom in on the woman’s lips, getting closer and closer. The image is shrouded in bits of television static— obviously this is not a strong signal— but the woman’s allure, her mysterious sexuality, shines through. The man begins to touch the top of the T.V. and it becomes apparent that the black panels on the side have veins; the television begins to swell as if it has breath, then quickly deflate. The screen pushes out towards the man’s face like an electronic breast. The voice continues to beckon the man until finally he takes the plunge: the man sticks his head into the television screen.
While watching this scene one cannot help but be reminded of the words of famed Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan: “If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody.” These observations could also be applied to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a movie in which the line between man and media is so blurry that one begins to question even the most fundamental rules of reality, to the point that a man can stick his head into his T.V. screen. This moment is not unique to Videodrome— it’s vintage Cronenberg. Almost all of his preoccupations as an artist— the dangers and allures of technology, the ways human biology intersects with other forces, the power of the mind to create an alternate reality, and of course the dark, sweaty connection between sexuality and violence— are on display. To untangle all of this is difficult, but beneath every theme and idea lays one word: body. In every Cronenberg film the body acts as a threat, and, truthfully, what’s more terrifying than the idea that you cannot even find safety within the confines of your own body? You can run, you can hide, but you cannot escape yourself.
If one were to make a broad claim about Cronenberg’s career it would be reasonable to say that he has successfully made the transition from trashy horror films to respectable psychological dramas. This simple and relatively insulting position fails to notice the aesthetic and ideological principles that make every one of his movies— from the big budget to the no budget, the sleaze to the prestige— a challenging and revealing work of art. The backbone of Cronenberg’s work is not disjointed and knotted; it is not a series of leaps and bounds, but a fluid transformation in which themes and ideas are mixed like a scientist preparing a serum, stirring all the chemicals and measuring each quantity, trying to create the perfect reaction. One of Cronenberg’s literary heroes Vladimir Nabokov once said, “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” When gazing through the bizarre house of mirrors that is the career of David Croneneberg, this quote becomes impossible to deny.
This house of mirrors is on display in all its demented glory for the next seven weeks at the IFC Center where a different Cronenberg film will be screened at midnight each weekend. For the uninitiated the series could serve as an excellent primer on the man’s work, although I do have a few minor quibbles with the selection; the idea of staging a midnight Cronenberg series without some of his trashier though still fascinating horror films from the 1970’s feels a bit odd to me. A film like Rabid, one of his early Canadian tax-shelter productions staring porn actress Marilyn Chambers as a women with a strange orifice beneath her armpit, would make for perfect midnight viewing— at least more thrilling than the more conventional (and overrated) pick The Dead Zone. It is also odd that the theater would choose to run 2002’s slightly off psychological slow-burner Spider, while at the same time not screening the slowly paced but completely terrifying Dead Ringers (1988). Of course it’s tough to complain about any series that showcases films as thoroughly disturbing, aesthetically accomplished, and fundamentally odd as Naked Lunch, The Fly, and Videodrome.
Despite Cronenberg’s artistic successes throughout the 90’s and in the last few years, Videodrome remains his most pertinent and unsettling film. Like a more genre-based cousin of David Lynch’s cult classic Eraserhead, the film is both a disturbing horror movie and a surreal work of art, firmly rooted in science-fiction conventions and more cerebral pursuits. At one point in the film crazed professor named Brian O’Blivion (a character based on Marshall McLuhan) explains his theory of how television works on the brain by saying, “The television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it.” “Raw experience” is perhaps the perfect phrase to describe what it feels like to be trapped in Cronenberg’s perverse yet beautiful world.
Crash, Spider, The Fly, Existenz, The Dead Zone, Videodrome, and Naked Lunch will all play as part of midnight Cronenberg Classics series at the IFC Center in New York.
Sunday, March 1, 2009 15:10 - by Dan JacksonBy Monica Sandler
The recent film Dreamgirls (2006) starts as a typical backstage musical. For the first quarter of the film, an all-girl group sings on stage and in montage sequences, recounting their careers. Suddenly, however, the characters begin singing dialogue to one another, completely outside of the stage setting. The film suddenly changes its rhyme and reason for why the characters sing.
Dreamgirls is merely one example of my growing concern for the modern musical genre. At the Oscars last Sunday, Hugh Jackman exclaimed, “The musical is back.” True, recent musical such as Momma Mia (2008) and Hairspray (2007) have had box office success; however, before Hollywood triumphantly declares that musicals are again wanted by the public, perhaps they should insure that competent directors - who understand the importance of narrative structure in imaginary worlds where characters burst into song – are up to the task.
The film musical is one of the most structurally complex genres in existence. While critics such André Bazin have argued that film is a representation of reality, the musical is frequently outside of the domain of the normal. When a viewer watches a musical, they step into a world beyond reality and are, therefore, estranged. How, then, is someone able to relate to the musical genre?
One could argue that it is then the job of the filmmaker to create worlds wherein the viewer feels comfortable watching characters burst into song. Most of the greatest musicals provide clear reasons for why the characters sing to one another. Thus, perhaps the musical is most similar to science fiction. In both genres, viewers enter foreign places; narratives are structured in particular ways, specifically in relation to continuity. A musical creates continuity by explaining why its characters sing and by providing a blueprint to adhere to. This keeps the viewer absorbed in the narrative.
Singin’ In the Rain (1952) perhaps best demonstrate how musicals feature explanations for their characters’ singing. The film opens with Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor joyously singing the film’s title number. Afterwards, we learn that the Kelly and Reynold characters haven’t yet met one other. The following scene suggests that the film’s characters sing to express feelings of love and joy. It works as a heads-up, notifying viewers that outbursts into song should be expected. Other films, such as The Band Wagon (1953) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), similarly indicate the structure of the musical early on. By following this structure as way to insure continuity and to provide explanation for the singing, these films allow their viewers to seamlessly enter into an unrealistic on-screen world.
Breaking away from motivations for character singing also breaks the film’s continuity. In cinema, editing techniques such as the jump cut can interrupt seamless transitions. In musicals, breaking with these established motivations brings the viewer out of the narrative and leads them to question the believability of the numbers.
The modern film musical presents a different picture. Films such as Rent, Sweeney Todd, Dreamgirls, and the entire High School: The Musical series have all fallen victim to a trend whereby characters sing for unexplained reasons. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with breaking continuity. Perhaps these newer musicals are, in fact, attempting to reconstruct the ways that viewers think can about how they watch films.
The classic musicals 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Golddiggers of 1933 will play this weekend (February 28 and March 1) at Film Forum.
Thursday, February 26, 2009 22:20 - by msandlerBy Anna Bak-Kvapil
An uneasy feeling of sexual shame permeates Inferno of First Love (1968), a film by Hani Susumu playing in the Japan Society’s Japanese New Wave series, “Shinjuku Ecstasy”. Shinjuku, a section of Tokyo, is described in the series program as “the center of Japan’s vibrant counterculture” during the 1960s, today a hive of skyscrapers, underground shopping malls, and the location of Japan’s largest red light district. Available in America only on VHS, censored and re-titled Nanami, the chance to see an unedited Inferno of First Love on screen is rare, and some of the uncensored film is genuinely problematic.
Chronicling the sexual awakening of Shun, the repressed teenage ward of a metalworker, Inferno is an impressionistic series of vignettes that become progressively more complex until a narrative through line reveals itself in the last half hour and concludes with a disruptive bang. Susumu is well versed in Godard and Truffaut, but has his own painterly twist on New Wave style, shooting through blurry lenses, rotating the camera to off-kilter angles, melding Vivaldi with classical Japanese song. The opening scene finds Shun in a cheap hotel with his girlfriend, Nanami, a young “model” (a subtle term for go-go dancer and possible prostitute). Their tryst in a love hotel is an attempt to get away from their cramped and public living situations, like two high schoolers necking in the back row of a movie theater. She approaches sex with accustomed ease, quickly undressing and making easy conversation, while he, a virgin, freezes up at the demands of intimacy, and begins to flash back to the traumatic and degrading circumstances of his childhood.
Here, Inferno starts to grapple with the perversion that haunts almost every interpersonal encounter in the film. Shun has only one friend, a four-year old girl he loves, but in a sequence full of obscuring jump cuts, he appears to molest the child in a public park. A bystander raises the alarm, and Shun is sent to a hypnotherapist, who discovers that his adoptive father molested him. Although Shun’s actions have a tragic psychological explanation, child molestation has become such a powerful threat - a symbol of ultimate depravity, especially in the U.S. - that the visceral revulsion the scene inspires takes time to recover from. In a later hallucinatory vignette, naked children wearing grotesque ceremonial masks and holding bunnies march in a solemn procession, in a troublesome but strangely nostalgic demonstration of pre-sexual innocence, a Henry Darger mural come to life.
The disquieting co-existence of innocence and deviance extends to Nanami, who, although fresh faced and sweetly untroubled, is willing to make lacerations on her back for a mysterious client. One of the most stunning sections of the film takes place during a photo session set up for businessmen, who stand by snapping their shutters during an orgy of theatrical sadomasochism enacted by models. Scored to a Gregorian chant, Susumu shoots in slow motion, as the women’s muscular bodies heave and contort, a mock strangulation turning visually transcendent. Shun watches from a hiding place, and the symbolic pain demonstrated by the women becomes a kind of carnal exorcism, a release of his internal demons.
When Shun and Nanami visit a private school to see a movie made by her intellectual friend, the school girls, dressed in decidedly un-fetishistic long skirts and loose blouses, make fun of her heavy eye makeup and short skirt. The same observant students walk out on the film within a film, an idealistic story about a girl the filmmaker has loved from afar, which is interspersed with startling fragments of color. Shun later mocks the film for being simplistic, unaware that his love for Nanami is just as uncomplicated.
Inferno tries and fails to find a place where love can co-exist with sexual desire, bailing out on the conflict with an ending reminiscent of My Life to Live. Because its true subject is not molestation, or prostitution, but the ephemeral emotions of two people, Inferno finds a place beyond sensationalism. Yet the film still leaves a nagging sense of voyeuristic guilt that comes from seeing something explicit and not turning away.
Shinjuku Ecstasy continues at the Japan Society through March 1st
By Monica Sandler
Salvador Dali famously declared, “I’m in Hollywood where I’ve made contact with the three American Surrealists: Harpo Marx, Disney, and Cecil B. DeMille. I believe I’ve intoxicated them suitably and hope that the possibilities for Surrealism here will become a reality.” Dali believed that his own representations of chaos were also present in the Hollywood cinema of the period. Dali seemed particularly fascinated with the Marx Brothers (he collaborated with the trio on an unmade film script), but comedy subgenres - such as slapstick and screwball - also feature a fascination with the breakdown of narrative order.
The Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1931) features a series of gag sequences that piece together elements from earlier moments in the film. The plot’s main conflict occurs between Groucho and a boat passenger. Each of the brothers is hired as bodyguards, yet they flip from side to side as the plot moves forward. The purpose of the plot is to create an odd situation with humorous results; their comedies centered on a series of adventures, loosely tied together by a common theme or limited storyline.
The Marx Brothers weren’t the only comedians who made use of a chaotic, episodic film structure. Mae West films feature the quick-talking actresses, bouncing from one man to another as the plot twists and turns, usually ending in a world of crime. These comedies seem structure-less and function as a series of gags that are loosely tied together.
The screwball comedy featured a traditional cause and effect narrative in which each event and scene moves the plot forward. Each scene, however, lead the film into a more irrational situation. For example, in Bringing Up Baby (1938), a series of scenes bring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn together. The plot climaxes in an erratic search for an escaped leopard; hunters try to kill the animal while others try to catch it. Soon, however, the characters are arrested and the animal remains at large. This scene reflects a moment of cinematic chaos, whereby rules and regulations collapse and the plot structure unfolds into disorder.
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The appearance of surrealism in the cinema indicates the threat of chaos within societies. In Europe, two seemingly opposite forms of government (in Germany and Russia, in particular) made attempts to control the masses and instill social order.
America, with its New Deal Policies and conservative film and radio regulations, seemed caught in the middle of the two ideologies. The American attempts to control mass media were encountered in Hollywood, with the development of a more strict regulation code in 1934. While stars whose personas revolved around sexuality were practically washed away, many of the comedic groups of the period underwent sharp restructuring. In the Marx Brothers’ A Night At the Opera (1935), for example, the characters again play stowaways; however, in this film, all of their actions move a romantic plot between a lovelorn couple forward. The film is no longer purely episodic.
Despite of these regulations, screwball comedy rose to prominence in the later half of the 1930s. By 1939, war broke out in Europe and its threats loomed over America. This threat, combined with the aftermath of the Great Depression, also revealed that government simply couldn’t control social order. The chaotic cinema of the period reflected these concerns, hinting at a future breakdown of order and the emergence of fighting and destruction.
Thursday, February 19, 2009 19:26 - by msandler
