Il faut attendre... (Bartas)

Le dernier film de Sharunas Bartas (dans lequel il joue le rôle de Gena) :
 Indigène d'Eurasie / Eastern Drift (2010/Sharunas Bartas/Lithuania/France/Russia)

"Ceux qui connaissent le cinéma du Lituanien Sharunas Bartas seront peut-être surpris. Par rapport à ses films précédents (Corridor, Few of Us, The House...), à leur mutisme radical, leur scénographie hallucinée, hantée par un désespoir qui se cogne contre les murs des maisons et résonne dans de sidérants tableaux de paysages, Indigène d'Eurasie marque un tournant. C'est un polar. [..]
Faut-il voir dans cette bifurcation la conséquence du raidissement d'un système de financement qui exige aujourd'hui des films qu'ils aient un scénario en bonne et due forme ? [..]
En s'engageant dans un cinéma plus narratif, Bartas n'a pas renoncé à son approche plastique. Ses longs plans-séquences sont toujours aussi puissants, aussi habités - par une mélancolie tranchante indissociable chez lui d'une conscience de l'Histoire, d'un point de vue fortement politique, mais aussi par sa propre présence physique, puisque pour la première fois de sa carrière, il interprète lui-même le rôle principal. [..]"

"Indigène d'Eurasie : la course éperdue d'un trafiquant pour s'extraire de la mafia", Isabelle Regnier (Le Monde, 7 Dec 2010)

Extrait 1 (1'15")

"Indigène d’Eurasie, c’est un mix entre l’écriture que l’on connaît et que l’on aime du cinéaste lituanien (stases contemplatives, mutisme, plans au cordeau, humanité ruinée…) et le film noir que l’on connaît et que l’on aime tout autant (trafics, trahisons, femmes fatales, fuites, règlements de comptes…).
Au début, on craint que la singularité du cinéaste lituanien ne se dissolve dans un matériau cinématographique plus balisé sans pour autant remporter complètement le pari du genre. Et puis finalement, la mise est gagnante : alors que la vision de Bartas s’ouvre au récit et au classicisme, le film noir se reféconde au contact d’une mélancolie slave aussi puissante que rare dans un genre habituellement dominé par les corps et les lieux américains ou extrême-orientaux. [..]
A travers les péripéties de son récit noir, Bartas filme l’Europe de la mondialisation libérale et de la dislocation sociale, dans son style épuré et laconique habituel.
Au fil de ce road-gangsters-movie, il invente des plans à couper le souffle, mais d’une beauté plus vivante, moins statufiée que dans certains de ses précédents films. [..]"

"Le contemplatif cinéaste lituanien s'essaie avec brio au film noir", S. Kaganski (Inrockuptibles, 7 Dec 2010)

Extrait 2 (2'12")

"Le tout nouveau Bartas est un film qui revient de loin. Il suffit d’en compter les écorchures sur le corps et prêter un tout petit peu attention à cette forme particulière de silence qui en dit long sur l’intensité du chemin parcouru. [..]
Pur et dur. Bartas a suffisamment prouvé par le passé qu’il pouvait être notre homme : ses images ont toujours eu quelque chose d’immédiatement magnétique. On sait aussi que, depuis plus de dix ans, il butte contre ses propres facilités, contre une certaine complaisance auteuriste. On sait encore qu’il cherche à sortir de cette étiquette de grand Lituanien pur et dur. Elle l’encombre, elle ne lui sert plus à rien. Ce que veut Bartas en 2010, c’est communiquer. Ceux qui connaissent son cinéma, jusqu’ici taiseux, ceux qui appréciaient ses images somptueuses mais auxquelles on avait comme arraché la langue, savent combien pour atteindre cette communication il faut à Bartas se faire violence. Mais, comme la violence du monde est par ailleurs le sujet de ce film indigène, il y a, dirait-on, corrélation entre la forme et le fond, entre le désir de filmer et le constat à tirer. Désespéré, dans les deux cas. [..]"

"La ligne zone de Sharunas Bartas", Philippe Azoury (Libération, 8 dec 2010) 

Extrait 3 (2'13")

"Tout ce que je peux faire dans le cinéma, c'est montrer un peu l'existence humaine. Faire en sorte que le spectateur ressente et s'identifie aux personnages. [..]
Ce film inaugure pour moi une nouvelle periode. Cette fois j'ai voulu travailler à partir d'un scénario construit. Raconter une histoire. Avant il y avait un monde de silence et maintnant mes personnages parlent. Il me faut donc expérimenter de nouvelles façons de travailler avec les acteurs.
Dans le fond, la chose constante, et la plus importante, c'est que le plan ne soit pas assujetti  à la seule nécessité de raconter une histoire. Qu'il n'ait pas pour seule fonction de faire cheminer un récit.
Le plan doit être un tout, une unité pleine et entière, où la mise en scène s'articule autour du mouvement des êtres et des choses dans l'espace et le temps du plan. Que le plan suffise à lui-même, donc mais aussi qu'il nourrisse le récit. Ce sont ces deux injonctions que ce film devra conjuguer. La volonté de saisir une totalité de l'expérience qui est de vivre. [..]"

Sharunas Bartas

Extrait 4 (2'20")

The Limits Of Control

If I had to resort to one of those crude movie equations to describe Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009), it would have to be “Quentin Tarantino minus the hyperkinetics”. Studded with a plethora of movie references, Jarmusch’s movie is a film buff’s dream, literally. In some ways, Jarmusch is like Pedro Almodóvar, who has been consistently accused of being apolitical in his movies (Is it a mere coincidence that The Limits of Control is based and shot in Spain?). But a little investigation shows that the very nature of Almodóvar’s films – with their explicitness of ideas and visuals – reinforces the difference between contemporary Spain and Francoist Spain and, in the process, draws a portrait of a country that has come a long way since those oppressive years. Jarmusch’s cinema, too, does not exist in vacuum. With their plotless scripts and unhurried pacing, his movies are the perfect antidote to the summer blockbuster of Hollywood. These films have been relentlessly repudiating Hollywood’s ideas of filmmaking and its mantras for success through the years. However, with this movie, Jarmusch establishes himself as the absolute antithesis of the industry-driven cinema of America. It is almost as if Jarmusch believes that he exists only because an entity called Hollywood exists – a kinship like the one between The Joker and Batman. Hollywood and Jarmusch, it seems, complete each other. In that sense, not only is The Limits of Control Jarmusch’s most political movie, it is also his most personal and most complete film.

The Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) dresses in snazzy formal clothing and meets up with two men at an airport, one of whom speaks Spanish and the other translates. The conversation is completely tangential to the mission briefing, which seems like some illegal job, possibly an assassination. He listens to them keenly, gets up and leaves. Cut to Madrid. In the city, he visits art galleries daily before retiring for the day at the local restaurant, where he orders two espressos in separate cups. He is, of course, waiting for Violin (Luis Tosar), who, like all the other agents in the film, exchanges matchboxes with him. The Lone Man draws out a piece of paper from his matchbox, which has some kind of codes written on it. He memorizes them and eats the paper. A day or few later, he has a rendezvous with a blonde woman (Tilda Swinton). The matchbox routine is followed. This time the matchbox contains a bunch of diamonds, which the Lone Man hands over to the woman (Paz De La Huerta) who has been staying with him in his hotel room. He leaves Madrid and on the next train meets up with an oriental woman, Molecules (Youki Kudoh), who has her own scientific, religious and philosophical theories to tell him. After the matchbox ritual, he checks into the hotel at Seville. There, he attends a dance rehearsal and meets Guitar (John Hurt) who tries to derive the etymology of the word “Bohemian” and hands him over a priceless guitar. Lone Man leaves the town. On the way to his next destination, where he would meet a Mexican (Gael García Bernal), he snips off one of the guitar strings that he will soon use to assassinate an important man. Make what you will of this weird plot, but you can’t blame the film for what it does not have. Jarmusch has written and directed the movie exactly the way he wants it to be.

The Limits of Control continues to explore one of the director’s favorite questions – How aloof can a man be from his surroundings? Till this film, this idea was most manifest in Ghost Dog (1999) (which clearly takes off from Jean-Pierre Melville’ austere Le Samourai (1967)), wherein a Black American lone ranger living in Jersey City follows the code of the Samurai and, in effect, constructs his own moral and psychological world. In The Limits of Control, the Lone Man – an American who performs Tai Chi in dressing rooms, hotels and train compartments in Spain – is a blue whale in a baby carriage. The film opens with a quote by Arthur Rimbaud: “As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen”, recalling the final scene of Dead Man (1995). This “impassable river” soon goes on to take multiple meanings in the film as Lone Man commutes from the labyrinthine western structures of Madrid to sparse and open locales of the Spanish countryside. This fitting quote is followed by the bizarre opening shot whose camera angle presents us the Lone Man in a seemingly reclining position, like that of William Blake (Johnny Depp) in Dead Man. The Lone Man has already entered the mystic river. Production Designer Eugenio Cabarello’s fabulous work gives us ominous vertical, horizontal, diagonal and spiral structures that attempt to devour the Lone Man. Christopher Doyle’s camera arcs and glides to trap the Lone Man within the convoluted architectures of the film, in vain. Evidently, the Lone Man is Jim Jarmusch himself, like a monk, relentlessly wading through from the corrupt, impassable and savage rapids of Hollywood.

The Limits of Control is an unabashed celebration of art, of its eccentricities and of losing oneself in it. The film is loaded with conversations about paintings, music, dance, films and books. In fact, Jarmusch’s film is closer to Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than any other. “It’s just a matter of perception”, says one of the characters in this movie. The world in The Limits of Control is one that exists solely in the mind of its protagonist. Like in Marienbad, Jarmusch uses parallel structures – hedgerows, pillars and hallways – to underscore the idea that what we see is not a physical world built out of concrete and cement but the labyrinths of the mind – memories and experiences, particularly, of art. If the surroundings, at times, seem highly artificial, it’s because that is how the Lone Man perceives it to be. It’s a world that is completely parallel to the real one, like Jarmusch’s cinema. It’s a world which is far more valid, uncorrupt, honest and truer than the real world for the Lone Man, very much like Jarmusch himself. One character quotes that “For me, sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected” and that “La Vida No Vale Nada” (Life is worthless), as if believing that if at all there is some meaning to be found anywhere, it is in this world of art – the one which they live in. It is this alternate world that interests Jarmusch more than the real one. The film is parenthesized between shots of the Lone Man entering and leaving his dressing room –the portal to the film’s world. The first cut in to the movie signals, through the skewed camera angle, the other worldliness to come and the final cut out of the film, an unmistakable Jarmusch signature, segregates the film from squalor of the real world (This cut recalls the final one in Broken Flowers (2005), where the director nudges the hitherto Jarmuschian protagonist into the melodramatic clockwork of the pop cinema and cuts away to indicate the end point of his world).

Throughout The Limits of Control, there is the notion of interchangeability of art and life – of reality and memory. Representation becomes perception and vice versa. One character even believes that violins have a memory and can remember every note that is ever played on them. The Lone Man watches the paining of a nude woman, only to find a nude woman lying on his bed, in a similar position, a few minutes later. His point-of-view shot of the vast expanses of the city of Madrid is intercut with a similar paining of the city. Life becomes images and images come to life. The Limits of Control reinforces George Steiner’s theory that “it’s not the literal past that rules us, but the images of the past”, through works of art and through one’s own memory – the two carriers of history – that have preserved them from being destroyed completely. Jarmusch’s movie reflects on how these images of the past – our masters – are being rapidly corrupted and replaced by the ones from popular media in an attempt to forge false histories, destroy critical mythologies and homogenize world culture by influencing their past (art) and present (life), through endless stereotyping and manipulation of truth, to reflect kindred iconographies and system of beliefs (One can sense seething anger beneath the cool exterior of the film). The climax of the movie (that I, first, felt was crude and which, now, I feel is deliciously Lynchian) depicts the Lone Man in a remote region in Spain getting ready for a face off with his adversary, a typical Conservative, American executive (Bill Murray, top class), who does not understand or give a damn about these “bohemian” ideas of art and who has infiltrated the deepest of foreign regions on a mission, perhaps, to establish the biggest studios, worldwide.

The Limits of Control seals Jarmusch’s position as a reactive filmmaker. Each facet of the film seems like a move against the “industry norm”. The cast consists almost entirely of non-Hollywood actors. The film is shot on location in Spain, a world away from the cluttered studios of Fox or Universal. The average shot length is way too high compared to that of the blockbusters. The colour palette isn’t at all like anything we see on TV every day. On the surface, Jarmusch’s is the typical man-on-a-mission movie. His script, however, is made up entirely of in-between events that are taken for granted in such movies. There is a Bourne movie, a Bond movie and a McClane movie unfolding somewhere in the background. But that is not Jarmusch’s world. What Jarmusch did with cinematic time in his movies, so far, is applied to cinematic space in The Limits of Control. Jarmusch’s “dead time” has always complemented Hollywood’s “show time”. In The Limits of Control, he goes to the extent of dividing his protagonist’s world into Hollywood zones and non-Hollywood zones. The moment our man enters a “Hollywood infested zone”, the camera goes crazy, the editing becomes rapid and the soundtrack starts blaring, while at other times they remains sober. None of the “actions” of the mission are shown on screen. Like Le Samourai, which opens with an photograph-like shot of the protagonist, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), on his bed and goes on to show us a zombie-like detached figure walking through familiar checkpoints in a genre movie as if performing a ritual, Jarmusch’s Lone Man is seen, for most part, lying down on bed and walking towards his next strategic position. We come to know neither of the meaning of the codes that he gathers, not of his business with diamonds and matchboxes. Heck, we don’t even get to know his name.

Quentin Tarantino said about The Bride in Kill Bill (2003-04) that she was, in fact, fighting through all the exploitative cinemas from around the world. Tarantino’s movie both paid homage to and incriminated all the exploitative movies that the director had grown up on. Likewise, within his world of art, Jarmusch integrates cinemas from around the world in an attempt to illustrate that all art is one (Molecules tells us that Hindus believe the whole world to be one and that she thinks people are nothing but molecules rearranging themselves regularly). There are actors from almost every continent in the film. Like The Bride, the Lone Man wanders these empty corridors on a mission to keep art untainted. His arch nemesis seems to be the “art industry” that tries to infiltrate his perception (of the world, of art and of this art-world) and impose its own dynamics in it. The Limits of Control is a clash of these two perceptions where the title of the film refers to the ability of one to “think the right thing”, free from TV-driven emotional response systems. During the final scene, upon being inquired, not so politely, how he got into the heavily guarded building, the Lone Man says “I used my imagination” as if pointing out that one’s acceptance of rejection of popular beliefs is purely a question of the psychology. So the film also unfolds as one man’s journey into his own subconscious, to free himself from the chains that bind him to predictable ways of acting and thinking. It’s an odyssey to rid art of capitalistic models based on consumerism and marketability (The post credits sequence flashes a huge marquee that reads: “No Limits No Control”). The film is counteractive to every “formula” that pop cinema sticks to for keeping its “products” of art saleable (“No guns, no cell phone, no sex” quips someone in the film). Again, Resnais’ and Marker’s Statues Also Die (1953), an overt, one-sided but well-crafted bashing of the western world’s fetish for exotic art and its detrimental effects on lifestyles and cultures, comes to mind.

But, by no means is Jarmusch’s film a propagandist assault on this conveyor-belt mindset of ours. It is far too assured and composed for that kind of conversation. “I’m among no one”, claims the Lone Man. Jarmusch makes it clear that he does not have an agenda here. He just wants no other agenda to be made with respect to art. He is not against any particular system or a film industry, he is against the very notion of industries that try to regulate and quantize the quality of art. And justifiably, his movie is a celebration of all such films that have survived the concentration camps of major studios. Jarmusch adorns the movie with references to iconoclastic movies that have raised their voice against the oppressive, money-driven tendency of the studio systems. Early in the film, the Lone Man returns to his hotel room in Madrid to find a nude woman named, well, Nude on his bed. She asks him if he likes her posterior. This, of course, is the hyperlink to Godard’s polemical Contempt (1963), where the director bit not only the hand that fed him, but all such hands which feed only conditionally (Jarmusch even recreates the shots of Brigitte Bardot swimming). Later, Blonde, a film buff, talks about The Lady from Shanghai (1947), where Welles had to put up with a lot of meddling by the execs at Columbia Pictures. Jarmusch even sneaks in pointers to his own movies, effectively categorizing his movies under this kind of cinema of resistance, although he never takes sides. There are broken flowers, there are coffees and cigarettes everywhere in the film and the Lone Man, whose cousin lived by the Samurai code, travels in a mysterious train with that Japanese girl who we saw in Memphis a few years ago. There are also movies that Jarmusch loves and pays tribute to. There is Jean-Pierre Melville, there is Aki Kaurismaki and there is Andrei Tarkovsky, packed somewhere into this seemingly sparse and empty film.

Because of all this and more, watching The Limits of Control is like having a déjà vu marathon. Notwithstanding the fact that many lines in the movie, as is the case in other Jarmusch films, are recited over and over throughout, one gets the feeling of having seen these people, these objects and these setups somewhere, sometime ago – another Resnaisian trait of the film (specifically redolent of one of Marienbad’s powerful, enigmatic quotes “Conversation flowed in a void, apparently meaningless or, at any rate, not meant to mean anything. A phrase hung in midair, as though frozen, though doubtless taken up again later. No matter. The same conversations were always repeated, by the same colorless voices.”). It is the kind of experience some people have watching Vertigo (1958). “The best films are like dreams, you’re never sure you really had.” tells Blonde. Indeed. Like Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992), The Limits of Control blossoms out as a dream in which you meet the most unexpected of movie stars in the most trivial of roles. Jarmusch’s self-referential tricks only add to this strange familiarity that we feel with the movie. Blonde likes movies where people just sit there, doing nothing. Ring a bell? She tells the Lone Man that Suspicion (1941) was the only film in which Rita Hayworth played a blonde. The Limits of Control must be the only film in which Swinton plays a blonde. Seemingly pointless lines such as “You don’t speak Spanish, right?”, “Life is a handful of dirt” and “The universe has no center and no edges” go on to become central to the ideas of the film (there is a strange little prank involving subtitles in the all important opening conversation of the film). The major attack against The Limits of Control, I imagine, would be regarding the self-indulgent nature of the film. Sure the film is self-indulgent, but it is also more than that. It is a self-indulgent movie that promotes self-indulgence. It is a movie that dares to almost profess that art can exist for only its own sake (what else can it exist for? World peace?). That there is nothing called “progress” or “superiority” in art. That all art is one and, to kill the most frequently uttered maxim in this movie and elsewhere, everything is subjective.

Werckmeister Harmonies

Pick up the ordinary film that chronicles the rise of fascism prior to the second world war and you know what to expect – a nation penalized for the first war, a corporal in resentment, his becoming a key figure, formation of ideology, those mesmerizing speeches, rise to power and finally, the ruthless extermination of humans. Well, you know the routine. Rare is the case that such a film is historically inaccurate or morally flawed, but what is troubling is that a single person is made the focal point of such monumental passages of history – as if satisfying our need for a villain as we do for a hero. Not that I am in defense of any such individual, but how on earth can a single person independently cause the galvanization of a whole nation? However convincing his words and however significant his moves are, it is finally the mass and the intentions that run through it that make it possible. From what can be seen as an adversarial position, Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) chillingly exposes the other side of the loudspeaker – a film that is to the ordinary documentary what Goodfellas (1990) is to The Godfather (1972).

Like most films by Tarr and similar directors, Werckmeister Harmonies does not rely heavily on its plot. Based on a book, The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies plays out in an unnamed town in an unnamed country in an unspecified year (though images indicate a year in the eighties). The whole town seems to be in a state of total fear and insecurity after the arrival of a certain circus whose performers include a dead white whale and a man called The Prince. Unrest ensues as the town mailman János Valuska (Lars Rudolph) witnesses the place fall apart, unable to do anything about it. János is the epitome of curiosity and learning about nature and creation for him seems to bring abundant joy. He often attends to György Eszter (Peter Fitz), a music theorist whose interest lies in exposing mistakes of the past. At this terrible time, Tünde Eszter (Hanna Schygulla) – the Satan figure of the story – tells Valuska that she would restore “order and cleanliness” within the town if only he gets her ex-husband, the theorist, to gather a few important signatures. But “order” too, seems to be a subjective term.

Werckmeister Harmonies does form an interesting companion to Tarr’s magnum opus Sátántangó (1994) in some ways. While Sátántangó is about the disintegration of a collective will due to fear, passivity and plain ignorance, Werckmeister Harmonies is about the formation of one because of the same factors. The characters, too, seem to repeat themselves across the films. The working class in Werckmeister Harmonies (the foreign workers) succumbs supposedly to the speeches of The Prince owing to its ignorance and social condition whereas, in Sátántangó, the same group (farmers) buckles under the conflict between personal and collective will and, simply, the inability to adhere to an objective. The inebriate doctor – the only sign of intelligence in Sátántangó – is not much different from the music theorist here. Tarr teases us with questions about the role of intellectuals in revolution in both films. Both the doctor and the music theorist, perhaps disillusioned by the state of the affairs, force themselves to become apolitical and into a personal shell out of which they come out only in order to maintain it so (The doctor leaves the house to get his quota of booze whereas the theorist, to avoid the return of his wife to his house). And the only “sane” person – Futaki in Sátántangó and János here- who sees the misfortune coming is completely helpless and battered about by the mindless workers and the spineless intelligentsia.

The element that seems to be a new addition in Werckmeister harmonies is the tangible presence of a middle class. Leftist filmmakers have maintained that the prime reason for the rise of fascism is the complacent nature of the bourgeoisie and the political and social passivity that it seems glad to wallow in. Here too, the bourgeois seems unwilling to give up that position. They are never seen outdoors in the film, they are contented with having sex and delivering monologues about the state of the world. Neither are they desperate and active enough to be The Prince’s followers nor do they seem capable of pursuing higher interests. The doctor notes about the farmers in Sátántangó: “They haven’t a clue that it is this idle passivity that leaves them at the mercy of what they fear most”. But here, it seems like it is the middle class that is too short-sighted to see the doom heading towards them and hence too happy maintain status quo.

In the film, The Prince apparently quotes that people who are afraid do not understand. Tarr too seems to be concerned with the notion of fear, ignorance and violence being stimulants of fascism and presents them as the three sides of a triangle with each one perpetuating the others. Being the Wong Kar Wai of monochrome, Tarr employs black and white colours extensively and in an expressionistic fashion to juggle with the ideas of ignorance and knowledge, fear and courage and war and peace. János’ shuttling between his desire to learn and the inertia imposed upon him by the townsfolk culminates in his witnessing of the inevitable streak of violence. In what may be one of the most effective and chilling depiction of violence in cinema, we see the rabid folks enter a hospital and put down its inhabitants. There is complete detachment by the camera which continues to track away as ever to leave a lump in your throat. It’s a sequence that is so stunningly choreographed that it almost deserves to be called beautiful despite its nature.

In his superb article on the ontological entities of the filmic medium, Mani Kaul reflects upon the Deleuzian theory of time and movement in cinema. Watching Tarr’s later films, now, seems like a practical demonstration of the theory. It is a unanimous opinion that it is Tarr’s shot composition – seemingly endless, rich in detail and “atmospheric” – that captures the attention of the viewer first. Where other films subordinate time to the action and space under consideration, Tarr’s sequences have time as the primary axis on which movements are choreographed. Instead of questions like ‘What will he do next?’, we are forced to ask questions like ‘When will this motion end?’. What this does in essence is to make each second of the sequence precious and the audience conscious of the same. And why this seems to work exceedingly well in films like Werckmeister Harmonies is because it provides that sense of impending doom – of the inevitability of a massacre – throughout the film.

Tarr presents us an utterly bleak world where death seems to be the only destination for all its inhabitants. He creates a colourless land that is flat, barren and infinite – an isolated world where almost no two social classes are seen in the same frame, except János himself who seems to percolate everywhere. In my favorite of the 39 shots in the film, János and the theorist walk without speaking a single word for a long time. Tarr, unusually, frames them both, in profile, in the same frame such that they seem stationery with the world moving behind them – choking them into the frame and sealing the fate of their journey. The world in Werckmeister Harmonies is devoid of any notions of Faith and Karma. It’s a Godless universe like Tarr’s own (as the director has claimed in interviews). But perhaps there is God here, but not one that goes by the conventions. Towards the end, when János tries to flee the town, an enigmatic black helicopter – a possible nod, along with the army tank in the town, to the Spider God of Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Silence (1963) respectively – forces him to return back. It’s worse than God’s indifference, it is Satan’s Tango. It is in this instability where people like The Prince – a distorted version of the circus director, whose troupe is the whole town – take advantage, create a symphony of destruction and well, play God.

But that is the exact kind of narrative that seems to suit our “ordinary documentary”. The Prince can easily be called the root cause of the entire disturbance, but that would only be too easy. We actually never know if The Prince (or the whale) is responsible for it at all. The whale is dead and hence a mute observer and The Prince, who speaks in a foreign language and whose words we obtain only secondhand, isn’t even seen in the film. In what may be a “whale” of a Macguffin, Tarr tempts us to pin the blame on the two foreign entities. But it eventually becomes evident that it is the people themselves – the workers and Tünde Eszter – who are the fascists, taking the mute and the invisible “guests” as pretext for violence. Violence that exterminates the apathetic bourgeois, persuades the hermetic clerisy out of its shell and makes the working class the pawns of a power game. One may remember Tarr’s sarcastic take on “Let there be Light” in Sátántangó, where the doctor seals off every possible entry of light into his hut (and where this film seems to take off from, in a way). At the end of Werckmeister Harmonies, the only survivor in this war, Tünde Eszter, who is the most patient and diabolically thoughtful of all the characters in the film, goes on to rule. I can see Mr. Tarr chuckling as he quotes “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”!

The Wind Will Carry Us

What would cinema be without Abbas Kiarostami? Watching his films is a process of unlearning cinematic conventions and relearning the humanity within. He has time and again proved that the audience can be emotionally stimulated and for the right reason, without ever engaging them in the film. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) is a testament why he never sacrifices Kiarostami the humanist for Kiarostami the filmmaker. The moral questions – of choices, of priorities and of conscience – which the film presents seem pertinent now, in these tough times, more than ever. I can guarantee that one ready to confront them would have understood him(her)self better at the end of it all. All it takes is a little patience and a willingness to introspect after the film has ended.

More than the apparent issue of communication and the lack of it, The Wind Will Carry Us seeks to question the definition of communication. Sure, the protagonist Behzad (played to perfection by Behzad Dorani) does have a cellular phone and the speedy vehicle to move around, but what was the use of it all? He is shortsighted in more ways than one and seems to forget details that he had voluntarily gathered moments ago (Ironically, the villages consider him to be a telecommunications engineer!). The villagers, on the other hand, are scientifically handicapped but that seems to be utterly insignificant. They commute very easily, they have multiple paths to the same destination for easy and quick access and they seem to be able to even move vertically though the village using ladders and the serpentine alleys. They seem to know who lives where and at what distance a resource is to be found. This partly is reflected in their priorities in life and their attitudes towards it – gratefulness for the present and a reverence for the future.

The Wind Will Carry Us can very well serve as a commentary on how the developed nations and the Third World look at each other, but that would only be of minor significance compared to the seething humanity within and around the film. More than anything, The Wind Will Carry Us is a meditative self-portrait, or rather an attempt to look at oneself objectively. Kiarostami observes his own intrusion in the lives of unsuspecting locals and in general, the exploitative and manipulative relationship that exists between the filmmaker and his subjects. He drops enough hints suggesting this in the film. At one point in the film, Behzad is seen shaving facing the camera as the latter assumes the role of a mirror, which is not much different from what Kiarostami uses it as. Unlike in other Kiarostami “car trips”, the filmmaker protagonist is often filmed head on while driving the car, thereby obtaining a literal and figurative reflection of the camera on his spectacles – an indication that the person in front of the camera is not very unlike the one behind it.

Behzad, his alter ego, is the symbol of encroachment. He arrives ominously in his giant vehicle, tearing through the serene landscape of the secluded village, with a motive that is no more selfish than ours. His work involves the demise of an elderly woman of the village who is presently on her deathbed. Behzad spends time hoping against nature for the process to happen fast but things are not to be so. His attempt to strike up conversations with the village folk, more often than not, turns them off and renders them uncommunicative. In a remarkable scene, Behzad, in a fit of frustration, overturns a turtle on to its shell and leaves the place. The turtle, after a minor struggle, corrects itself and carries on with its journey. A while later, after he realizes that there is nothing now to fret over, he comes to understand how inconsequential his attempts are to dictate nature are, much like his car which is dwarfed by the colossal landscape.

In the court sequence of his marvelous film Where The Green Ants Dream (1984), Werner Herzog cuts away from the centre of attraction after the tribal chief starts unraveling a package that supposed to contain a sacred emblem as a sign of respect for the divine and the unknown. In The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami keeps a host of characters off-screen and denotes their presence employing just subdued voices and Behzad’s response to them. Nor does he show us the interior of the houses in the village. The camera is fixed on Behzad throughout the film but prefers to stay at the doorstep even if he doesn’t. And this is where the contrast between Behzad the actor and Kiarostami the director– the past and the present of Abbas Kiarostami, his mistakes and their corrections – is established. It is a reverence that Kiarostami seems to have gotten the hard way. A reverence that acknowledges the right of things to exist as they are.

The final scene is perhaps the most heartwarming and ethical Kiarostami has ever filmed. Behzad, convinced that his stay of two weeks has taken its toll on both him and the villagers, decides to do away with the final physical traces of the village on him, After washing the dust off the windshield of his car, he throws into a stream the last remnant he possesses – a thigh bone that he picked up earlier – in an attempt to restore the spiritual balance of the land that he may have disturbed. Like Herzog who has consistently been against the intrusion of man in the clockwork of nature, Kiarostami calls for a “calculated indifference” towards the way various cultures work and a regard for its methods against one’s own judgment. However, it should not be assumed that Kiarostami is lashing out against the domineering and subsequently destructive nature of man. Behzad is anything but despicable. He merely acts by impulse and his notions of right and wrong, which may well differ from the villagers’. By creating a multi-dimensional protagonist whose morals and desires are very much our own, Kiarostami’s gesture comes out both as a token of heartfelt atonement and a subtle appeal for recognition and preservation of diversity.

A Song of Growing up Delivered from Fear

On behalf of Yvette Biró I post her review of Claudia Llosa's film : La Teta Asustada / The milk of sorrow (2009/Peru)

A Song of Growing up Delivered from Fear

Winner of the Golden Bear, the Best Actress and the International Critics Prize in Berlin 2009

There is a prologue to this beautiful film. A saddened young woman accompanies her mother to death. Before saying farewell, the mother sings a terrible, ageless song of horror and sufferings she underwent while bearing this child in her womb: violent rapes, experiences of cruelties she transmitted to the girl with the milk from her breath. Therefore the malady she is afflicted with: “La teta asustada” [the milk of sorrow] - as the folkway name it.

Fausta, the heroine is marked by fear, unable to speak, to be touched by anybody. “She is the metaphor of a torn country…which has known repression and can’t express itself only through which is hidden in the unconscious: the myths, terror, and its traumatisms.” – says the author. While the past events have been real, the myths that encompass them are floating between superstitions, deep anxieties and memories of brutal facts. It is the body which bleeds, which is sick in the literal sense bringing to life an existence between muteness and rare poetic manifestation: chanting, humming in their indigenous language: Quechua. Moreover: there is a potato hidden in Fausta’s vagina, in order to protect her from any violence. And this potato “grows roots and sends germs into the body”, it is a deadly dangerous harm.

This is the unusual, bold setup of this captivating, unclassifiable movie. Is its world real or a metaphor, half physical fact, half symbolic allusion? The decision to place a potato in her sex has been a mere nightmare, the imaginary continuation of a hereditary tradition, learned from her humiliated, raped mother? Or is it an absurd reality? The genre of the film doesn’t intend to clarify it; it is part of the movie’s almost unfathomable poetic aura.

We are in an eerie sandy desert in Peru, not far from the city of Lima, but the life in the emptiness and favellas are poor, miserable. Only exuberant wedding parties, full of music and food stir up the bleak routine. Heavy set young ladies and puny bridegrooms enjoy the extraordinary feasts, in which the whole small community participates with the many children in a boisterous festivity. The scenes are grotesque, funny and repetitive. Taking pictures before the huge “Niagara Falls” photo, dressed in the most beautiful white garbs, - these overly cheerful events are always identical, followed always by the same silly rituals… as they were parts of their everyday life and/or pleasure.

Fausta remains in the silent background, preoccupied with her obligation to bury her mother. There is no money to take her back to the native village, they have to embalm and hide her under the bed before an occasion comes about to arrange it. In this way again: imaginary dreams and physical deeds, life and death border on and her liberation will occur when she arrives with the mummified mom to the open sea…

All these actions take place in the deliberately indefinable border of allegoric and earthy moves. Since the real truth belongs to the painful memories, never fully taken into accepted and elaborate history of the country. Only songs, the traditional, forgotten language keep alive the traces, but once they have to be spoken out, freely in order to liberate the people from their long lasting, ill-fated past history.

Fausta’s story is the story of unresolved memory, savage, concealed, and very particular keys are needed to partially open it. When she is forced to come in touch with people, she is employed by a wealthy pianist woman who herself is in crisis of inspiration. Then, she is the one who will, surprisingly, offer new impulse, energy, for the artist, precisely with the genuine power of her authentic, poetic songs.

Fausta’s slow and dolorous development is at once symbolic, representing the wading out of a divided country from its dark history ravaged by wars, which has left terrible wounds. But it is personal, as well. She has to discover herself, her power and “beauty” (in all senses of the word) daring to have confidence in her.

Since Fausta, performed by the wonderful actress, Magaly Solier, is stunningly beautiful. Her eyes, pervasive gaze under the dark crown or tail of hair, the particular colour of her Aztec Indian skin, radiating from her so perfectly shaped face…her look is bewildering and awe-inspiring at once. She seems genuinely extraordinary, more than a simple individual. There is such an unusual intensity in her presence that one has to watch each moment, small gesture or just the lack of movements. She is truly mesmerizing, having the power to carry on the fascinating, though very simple story. She can sit immovably in an empty room, going through silently from the kitchen to the landlady’s place. And waiting, waiting motionless, yet full of sensible emotions. In her close ups only her eyes speak, in her very slow gestures in order to open timidly the door for the gardener she accumulates so much tension that we really identify with her unnamed anxiety. No wonder that when she faints, it seems to be inevitable, it could be expected, so much tenseness can be felt in her discipline.

She is strong, still frail, always subordinating herself to the exterior demands. Only the instinctive, scarcely audible chants show some more vivid expressions on her face, which usually maintains its steady countenance. Two occasions show important changes: one, when the landlady betrays her in a humiliating way, when she orders her to step out from the car, after she dared, for the first time! to comment – although in an appreciative way –the lady’s success; and by the very ending, which is the final liberation. Arriving at the sea, with the body of the mother she loudly cries out: “See, here is the sea!” and this sudden, happy encounter with the openness is her own deliverance, her discovery of the beauty, beyond offering it to her defunct mother.

This is a courageously uneventful, plain drama. The spectacle, beyond the central character’s interior torments is in total harmony with the exceptional marvel of the landscape. Large, open vistas of the greyish region, with the surprisingly fluctuating “mountains and valleys” of the sand. Huge, almost immeasurable space and the infinite steps leading to the top in order to rise above everything, - the images appear as visually summing up the whole tale.

Thinking of the power and fullness of minimalism, Claudia Llosa’s film joins the rich examples of many oriental films. Full of withheld emotions, finely chiselled small actions, rarely seen or discovered beauty offered for the eyes – the saturated experience and vision enchant the spectator. Fantastic and precise realism assure the particular flavour of its modest magic.

With this Peruvian film, Fausta, Latin America has deservedly entered the domain of the memorable, fortunate successes of our not so long discovered and appreciated films, coming from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Moving bravely against the mainstream it strengthens the values of emotional identification, achieved without pathos, avoiding to describe sheer misery or solitude. Intensity and masterful composition complement each other. …. Sensibility, refined attention, slow and silent treatment of deep human and historical dramas have found their appropriate form and style in this orientation.

YVETTE BIRO

Jeanne Dielman

Chantal Akerman’s most famous film gives away all that is factual about it in its name itself. The rest of it follows what the titular Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) does in this 23, Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles house of hers, over a three day period in almost in its entirety. Using completely stationery cameras, Akerman creates a claustrophobic document of life in its most mundane form. Even with a screen time of over three hours, there isn’t much in the movie that could be fit into something called plot. That, precisely, is Akerman’s intention. Details are given with extreme reluctance and in exceedingly small measures (with hardly 10 minutes of spoken dialogue). On the first day, we witness Jeanne ritualistically moving about in her house, switching on and off the room lights, cooking potatoes for her obedient son, arranging tables, doing the dishes and making the bed. She earns by selling herself during the afternoons in her very house. All this is done by the book, if there ever was one.

It is precisely these systematic acts which become our reference for the next day. The next day follows almost the same pattern. Only that Jeanne drops a spoon and the polishing brush. Oh yes, she also goofs up the dinner! On the third day, the bank is closed, she reaches a shop before it opens, the coffee is spoilt and a button snaps off from her son’s blazer. This is all the change that Akerman allows Jeanne. What surfaces is a gradually progressive deviation from our “reference” and perhaps for the worse. Like the geometrically flawless décor and lighting of the film, which exude cheerfulness, contentment and sanity are only apparent. It is almost as if one can mathematically calculate, using these extremely small “mishaps”, when Jeanne will completely succumb to her condition. And this is the kind of gradual disintegration of sanity that many films fail to portray credibly (Revolutionary Road (2008) comes to mind first). What happens obscures how it all happens. Cinema becomes text. Although Jeanne Dielman is much more extreme in its form than the mainstream narrative cinema would require, it clearly shows that why a formal stance doesn’t merely justify the medium chosen but enhances its possibilities.

It wouldn’t be unfair to call Jeanne Dielman an experimental film. Where other films that deal with similar theme of urban alienation tend to bend towards the cerebral side, Jeanne Dielman is more experiential. At any point in the film, once the viewer gathers everything there is to an image, like Tarr’s movies, fatigue sets in. We start experiencing time as it is, undiluted. In other words, we begin taking part in Jeanne’s life by experiencing the savage inertia of time. The only difference is that she is oblivious to it while we, possessing knowledge of the artificial and transitory nature of cinema, are not. Jeanne doesn’t pass through life. She lets life pass through her. Not once does she show signs of emotional fatigue. She is insensitive to her condition much more than her cerebral counterparts. Except for one sequence at a button store, where she shows clear indications of mental derailment, there apparently is no outlet for her emotions at all. Apart from the perfunctory conversations with her son and the occasional visit by the neighbour, who asks Jeanne to take care of her baby (who could well be considered a miniature Jeanne) from time to time, Jeanne is completely cut off (at times literally, in the frame) from the world.

In his extraordinary article on Tarr, Kovács writes about the director’s style:

In Tarr’s world, deconstruction is slow but unstoppable and finds its way everywhere. The question, therefore, is not how to stop or avoid this process, but what we do in the meantime? Tarr asks this question of the audience, but if the audience wants to understand the question, it first has to understand the fatality of time. And in order to grasp that, it has to understand that there is no excuse in surviving the present moment: time is empty—an infinite and undivided dimension, in which everything repeats itself the same way.

Akerman’s own style does not seem far from this. Through repetitions, in gratuitous amounts, Akerman creates a film of high precision and low life quotient. In fact, everything in the film seems to exhaust itself the moment it takes birth. Akerman repeats every element of the film – time (Jeanne’s daily routine), space (the viewer is immediately acquainted with the couple of rooms that the almost the whole film takes place in), the actors’ movement and gestures (Jeanne act of switching off lights moves from interesting to an in-joke) and even camera angles (as if the actors are passing in front of stationery cameras installed at various locations in the house).

The only hope for Jeanne to snap out of this vicious loop comes in the form of the final sequence in the film where she stabs to death an unsuspecting client of hers (Actually, it is never made clear if the scene takes place in Jeanne’s present or not. The man could well be her husband, whose death is talked about regularly in the film, thus, also, creating a narrative loop within the film. But considering the realities of the world, it is unlikely). This is where Akerman deviates from Tarr. Tarr seals his characters in their own existence until they fade into oblivion. His characters neither have history or hope. Akerman, on the other hand, gives her characters a past and a future. The circle in Jeanne’s life may just be a stray deadlock that had to be resolved by her action (rather, by ceasing her inaction). There is certainly a gaze at a different future throughout the film. Jeanne is expecting a gift from her aunt, which is revealed to be a dress later. She deposits money in the bank for future use. Her aunt even urges her to migrate to Canada. Even though, a large part of the movie is concerned with her empty life, it does offer a hope for renewal.

Obviously, Akerman is far from being a romantic. It is true that she does not choose to tread Tarr’s spiral, which seems to go in circles but ends only in decimation, and concocts an open ending, thus leaving margin for hope of escape. But why Akerman’s masterwork feels ultimately like an exercise in despair is that she generalizes Jeanne’s existence. As a matter of fact, we don’t even know if the lady we are watching is Jeanne or if the building is the one mentioned in the title. By not pinning down particulars, Akerman seems to speak for an entire generation and era. Of course, the whole film could be deconstructed to unveil political, social, sexual and cultural outlook of the age, but what makes Jeanne Dielman stand out from its contemporaries is not its keen study of lives in modern times, but its ability to make us experience what every Jeanne Dielman experiences and understand why we each of us, in a way, has become a Jeanne Dielman.

[Originally published at The Seventh Art]

Evolution of a Filipino Filmmaker

A follow-up to this post.

Gleanings from print material on Lav Diaz:

As with Filipino society itself, the gap between rich (big films) and poor (small films) is noticeable and growing. In 1998, “Mother” Lily Monteverde, matriarch of Regal Films, set up the ultra-low-budget division Good Harvest to produce films on pito-pito (“quickie”) 10-day schedules and shoestring budgets of around P2.5 million (around $65,000) each, compared with the average Filipino feature cost of P12 million. Ostensibly genre pictures, but embracing a peculiarly Filipino mix of the lurid, political and religious, this initiative has produced some of the most promising mainstream films since the Seventies.

Good Harvest has launched the careers of young filmmakers like Jeffrey Jeturian, whose hit, Fetch a Pail of Water (Pila Balde) has Brocka’s social conscience and a touch of humour, and Rico Illarde, with his American-style horror action in El Kapitan, and made a star out of the well-endowed “bold” actress Klaudia Koronel. But it is with Lavrente (Lav) Diaz, with three Good Harvest features and a string of international festival credits, who has emerged as the major writer-director talent of this group.

Forty-year-old Diaz is a celebrated writer. His script for The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (Kriminal Ng Barrio Concepcion, 98) and collections of short stories have won the prestigious Palanca award. Originally a guitarist, he toured with his band Kutabao for a couple of years in the south. His writing career began with music magazines, komiks and fantasy adventures such as Pinoy Ninja. Diaz began writing scripts in the mid-Eighties for TV drama, Regal Films and for the Philippines’ biggest star, Fernando Poe Jr.

In the early Nineties, Diaz lived in New York. He watched movies and crewed on independent productions. In 1994 he started his own film, the still-unfinished 16mm black-and-white Evolution (Ang Ebolusyon Ni Ray Gallardo), an experimental, personal epic about identity. It is one of several projects set in New York, including an English-language metaphysical thriller with a Filipino protagonist, The Villagers.

Diaz returned to Manila to make his first film for Good Harvest in 1997. Burger Boys (98) is about three boys and a girl who decide to rob a bank – until we discover they are actually writing a script about themselves robbing a bank. Crazily audacious, it applies a literary conceit to the teen bubble gum movie and then loads it with angst. It careens between drama, fantasy and the supernatural with the screwball abandon of a Hong Kong gangster comedy. In a sense it reflects how intellectuals and independents have used the pito-pito to enter the realm of populist cinema, and how they have broken many of its conventions.

Burger Boys’ chaotic comedy is uncharacteristic of Diaz’s subsequent dramatic films. However, its motif of a (fake) angel appearing to a boy when he worries about what he’s done introduces a key theme of Diaz’s work – the burden of conscience that haunts his later protagonists. The film also points to two important bearings of Diaz’s stylistic compass – he is a sly genre-flipper, and his scripts have an intelligence and ambition that go way beyond the pito-pito budget.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky, The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion began filming towards the end of the Burger Boys shoot. A peasant (Raymond Bagatsing) needs money for his sick wife and gets involved in a kidnapping that goes vividly and violently wrong. Unable to shake nightmares about this crime, he tells all to a journalist who is herself investigating political corruption.

The juxtaposition of poor people who are forced into crime and a selfish and criminal political establishment places the film squarely in the ambiguous moral space of film noir. Some images are surprising (Bagatsing’s worsening tooth abscess in the course of the movie is a metaphor for government neglect and decay), and the montage, slipping seamlessly from nightmare to reality to flashback, suggests both Bagatsing facing his guilt, and society confronting itself. In the context of the complacency and escapism of much current Filipino cinema, Criminal is something of a milestone – angry, intelligent, and critical.

There is a quietude about Criminal’s characters that suggests dark secrets. This sense forms the core of Diaz’s third Good Harvest film and most accomplished work to date. Naked Under the Moon (Hubad Sa Illalim Ng Buwan, 99) opens with a stunning wordless sequence as a family drives through a barren desert landscape, immediately signifying dysfunction and perturbation. They have left the city for the simpler and cheaper living of their rural home. One daughter, played by Klaudia Koronel, was abused as a child and is a nude somnambulist. The father (Joel Torre) has failed at being a priest and a businessman, and is impotent. The mother, who has had an affair with the village rake, kills herself. The other daughter is the product of this union. Diaz skilfully transcends the genre of this lurid sex melodrama to produce a Bergmanesque discourse on faith and a critique of Filipino macho.

Diaz tells the story from the points of view of daughter and father. The daughter played by Koronel has an affair with a local fisherman and in a vision imagines passionate lovemaking with him that turns into rape. It is an image of violent poetry, alluding not only to the relationships between macho men and “their” women, but also to the government and “its” people. At the end, Koronel walks through the town, cured of her affliction but still wondering about her abuser, whom she sees “in the face of all the men that I meet.” It is a politically and spiritually charged notion that practically defines Diaz’s cinema – why did this happen? Who is responsible?

As a failed priest, Torre grapples with his faith – he questions the existence of God and punishes himself for this crise de conscience, slashing himself in the local church. Spiritually empty, sexually impotent, and financially destroyed, Torre is living out the last, tragic stages of his life – an anti-macho portrait rarely seen in Filipino cinema. Again, Diaz’s imagery is startling and religiously charged – Torre dies while fishing by a pond. He has caught no fish. He leaves this life unfulfilled, as empty as the desert in the opening scene.

A country that has been abused and raped, a nation with a hollow centre, the search for moral sustenance – Diaz’s cinema resonates with these themes, a rich poetics in the poverty production values of the pito-pito.

Together with the work of independent filmmaker Raymond Red, the first Filipino ever to win at Cannes (he received the Palme d’Or this year [2000] for the short film Anino), Lav Diaz’s films show that the legacy of Brocka and the great Filipino cinema of the Seventies has not been lost. It’s just been waiting for some worthy successors. (p.54-55)

Garcia, Roger. “The Art of Pito-Pito”, Film Comment 36.4, July/August 2000, p.53-55.

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Contemporary questions

The Filipino filmmaker today exists in a filmmaking world whose reality is much different from that of his forefathers. The affordability of modern cinematic technology, from DV and HD cameras to home editing suites, has made working independently a realistic and viable economic option. Today’s filmmaker, no longer working under the pretenses of a controlling martial law regime and graced with the tools that make working entirely outside the system a genuine possibility, need only to battle themselves, confronting personal ethical questions with regard to purpose, compromise, and their desired role in the status quo, in order to make the films they want to make. Many younger filmmakers, witnessing the difficulty their fellow directors have endured when attempting to work in the star-driven studio system have chosen to go the independent route, sacrificing financial security in the name of artistic integrity.

Commercial versus independent filmmaking

The current leading light and father figure of the independent filmmaking scene in the Philippines is writer-director, Lav Diaz. Although widely considered as the prime example of an independent filmmaker, Diaz actually made three commercial films – Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion) (1998), Burger Boys (1999a), Naked Under the Moon (Hubad sa Ilalim ng Buwan) (1999b) – before embarking on his first full-length independent feature, West Side Kid (Batang West Side) (2002a). Ambitious for the time and conditions in which they were made, these works were well received critically, despite having been made on small budgets and extremely tight shooting schedules. Praises aside, Diaz himself admits that they left something to be desired and, often, a lot still to be shot and a lot left on the cutting room floor. In extreme instances, he has even expressed his love for the script and desire to shoot them again, as they were written to be longer films.

In 2000, Diaz linked up with wealthy accountant Tony Veloria, who was shopping for scripts that would be suitable to launch the career of young actor, Yul Servo. Diaz gave Veloria a copy of the Carlos Palanca Award-winning script West Side Avenue, JC (Diaz 1997), and not more than a week later, Veloria gave Diaz a check for the script. The script, West Side Avenue, JC, was an early incarnation of what would eventually become the Cinemanila, Singapore, and Brussels Best Picture winning Batang West Side – a thorough and engaging examination of the Filipino diaspora in the United States that, to quote film critic Noel Vera, addresses ‘the ultimate direction the Filipino people have taken’, engaging questions about the family, migration, and the future for Filipino youth (Vera 2004).

Batang West Side arrived at a decisive point in Philippine Cinema. The film industry had lulled cinema artistically into such a deplorable state that it had become nothing short of a miraculous event when any above average works were made. It is from this era that was born what filmmaker Peque Gallaga referred to in FLIP Magazine as the ‘Cinema of Intent’ – a cinema where works are lauded and deemed noble on the basis of their intentions – what they purport to have wanted to accomplish – and not for the actual merit of the finished work. Thus, all the more reason that Lav Diaz’s opus stood out. Clocking in at five hours, and the longest Filipino film ever made, Batang West Side was an anomaly in Philippine Cinema, not simply for its duration and aesthetic (as deliberately paced as the works of Taiwanese filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang) but also, and more significantly, for its ambition in subject and scope, and the relentless defense of its length by its maker: "Batang West Side is five hours long … For many this is an issue. A huge issue, and a headache to many here in the Philippines. But not an issue if we remember that there are small and large canvasses; brief ditties and lengthy arias; short stories and multi-volume novels; the haiku and The Iliad. This should be the end of the argument" (Diaz 2002). With West Side, Diaz laid down the gauntlet for all filmmakers, independent or otherwise, challenging them to make serious, relevant works, and proving what recent years led us to believe impossible: that it could be done in the Philippines. In its quiet way the film resounded, serving as a wake up call to a sleeping cinema.

After completing one last studio feature for Regal Films, the ambitious science-fiction film Hesus the Revolutionary (Hesus Rebolusyonaryo) (Diaz 2002b), Diaz then proceeded to iron out his point about large canvasses by embarking on the completion of a work that first began production nine years earlier in Jersey City, New York, Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino) (Diaz 2005). Set in the years 1971–1987, and shot entirely in black and white, in a mix of 16 mm film and digital video, the film has the feel of an intimate epic; examining the effects of the macro – martial law, on the micro – two rural families, documenting the turbulent turns each individual member’s life takes. The incredible length of time that it took to make Ebolusyon adds a realistic, almost documentary-like, feel to the work, as audiences bear witness to certain actors ageing along with the characters they portray. This quality is most evident in the young Reynaldo, who matures before our very eyes from a child into a young man. Financed entirely independently by Diaz and friend, photographer and first-time producer Paul Tañedo, a nine-hour rough cut of Ebolusyon was exhibited in the Asian American Film Festival in New York in July of 2004, with a finer cut of the film shown in the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and the final cut premiering locally in the University of the Philippines in December, and internationally at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2005. By March of 2005, the film had already been selected for exhibition in festivals in Goteborg, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Torino, and is expected to travel to many more. (p.298-300)

Tioseco, Alexis. "Shifting agendas: the decay of the mainstream and rise of the independents in the context of Philippine cinema", Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8.2, 2007, p.298-303.

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This year's Turin Film Festival has just devoted a special section to Filipino writer-director Lav Diaz - whose 11-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family is billed as the longest-ever feature from Asia.

It also took 11 years to make. When production started in 1994, Diaz did not anticipate the marathon that lay ahead. "All I wanted was to look at the struggle of the Filipino people when the country was under martial law from 1972 until the downfall of the Marcos family in 1986," he says. "That was a time of poverty and political choas, an important era which defined the problems of the present day Philippines, such as corruption and apathy."

Unlike previous features dealing with that era, which focus on Ferdinand Marcos or his extravagant wife Imelda, Diaz's Evolution examines one poor family, the Gallardos, who are caught up in a political whirlwind over the course of 16 years.

The picture was filmed in black and white, initially in 16mm and later in DV and mostly with natural sound. It took so long to complete because of funding problems. "I filmed it the guerilla way, with scarcely any money," says Diaz. "I shot when there was money and stopped when it ran out. It's easier to raise money for commercial films in the Philippines, but not for serious work like Evolution. People call me stubborn because I refuse to yield."

During the making of Evolution, he completed five other films which were released commercially in the Philippines, except Batang West Side due to its long running time - although the five-hour thriller was named best film at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2002.

While Evolution has toured film festivals from Toronto, Gothenburg and Rotterdam to Singapore, Barcelona and Hong Kong, only three screenings have been held in the Philippines.

"I can't afford to screen it in theatres. It costs $1,800 (100,000 pesos) for just one screening due to its long running time. A cinema ticket only costs $1.30 - $4.50 (70-250 pesos). Where do I get the money from?" asks Diaz.

Now he is working on a new project called Heremias, the final part of the trilogy which started with Batang West Side and Evolution. Filming began in June but was stopped three months later when he again ran out of funds. He received $10,500 from Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund, as well as $12,000 from the Gothenburg Film Fund at the inaugural Cinemanila independent feature film co-production meeting last year.

He has just received a further boost in post-production funding from Hubert Bals, which will enable him to resume shooting towards the end of the year. About 40% of Heremias was completed during the three-month shoot and a work-in-progress was screened at Turin. Diaz is determined to plough on - through the trilogy he wants the Filipino people to look at their recent past. "Filipinos are apathetic people," says the director. "The young and the old seem to have forgotten about the past. Marcos has done many evil things to people. But no justice has been done to the people who suffered so much."

Wong, Silvia. "Evolution of an Epic", Screen International 1525, November 2005, p.11.

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A l’ogre Brocka, quelle relève possible ? A la fin des années 1990, un nom est apparu : Lav Diaz, six films diversement remarquables et un chef-d’œuvre: Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang pilipino (« Evolution d’une famille philippine », 2004). Chronique courant sur seize ans de la vie d’une famille de paysans et de chercheurs d’or, épopée à forte teneur biblique, Evolution est un film impressionnant à plusieurs titres : sa durée (10 h 43), ses conditions de fabrication (Diaz a mis dix ans à l’autoproduire). Il n’a jamais cache que c’est en voyant les films de Brocka qu’est né son désir de devenir à son tour la conscience cinématographique de son pays. Capitale, cette volonté passe pour chacun par des formes très éloignées: concision, densité, volonté de se rabattre sur des formes populaires chez le premier, recherche de la plus grande radicalité pour le second, qu’obsède la passion du temps réel : Evolution est un long ruban de plans séquences étirés jusqu’à leur point limite, cousus grossièrement, parfois piqués de stock-shots contrebandiers (une manifestation, des militaires entrant dans un avion et tuant en passager). On y parle peu : dans cette société en lambeaux, le plus proche est devenu le plus lointain. Le plus dangereux ? Chez Diaz, l’amok ne guette plus seulement aux angles du plan, il loge au plus profond du cœur des personnages. (p.56)

Lequeret, Elisabeth. “Amok cinéma”, Cahiers du cinéma 609, Février 2006, p.55-56.

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There remains but one film left to celebrate, among the greatest in Venice, and certainly the longest at nine-plus hours: Lav Diaz’s monumental memoir to suffering, Death in the Land of Encantos, a modernist mosaic cobbled together from the most modest of means. In 2006, a typhoon devastated the region of the Philippines where Diaz shot much of his last two works – so the filmmaker went back and began filming, although with no clear game plan. Eventually he developed a narrative about a generation broken by their country’s seemingly inescapable corruption: an assortment of the living dead wandering a landscape filled with the grief-stricken. Diaz’s protagonist is yet another of the festival’s schizophrenics, and manic-depressive in the bargain.

As in his 2005 Evolution of a Filipino Family, the filmmaker creates a massive tapestry, here incorporating documentary footage of typhoon survivors speaking out about the government’s neglect of their plight, as well as fragments from an unfinished short horror film shot in Zagreb in 2003. The latter concerns a lost tribe of Aswangs – ghouls of popular Philippine folklore – who have found a home in southeastern Europe. Little if anything at the Lido was as emotionally exhausting and exhaustive, as rich an experience and as crushing as Diaz’s film. (p.61)

Möller, Olaf. "Dust to Dust", Film Comment 43.6, November 2007, p.56-61.

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A comparable feeling of displacement [to Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers] permeates the first two hours of Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz’s Horizons prizewinner Melancholia. We’re presented with a prostitute, a pimp, and a nun, none of whom seem to be who they appear to be. And indeed, they’re not: Alberta, Julian, and Rina are bourgeois professionals who get together annually to participate in a role-playing game devised by Julian as a kind of group therapy. Driven by the need to distance themselves from their own feelings of pain and loss, they temporarily take on the roles of others in the hope that, when they resume their regular lives, they can find themselves. The final three hours show Alberta and Julian drifting through their mundane existences, with the focus shifting from Julian – the author of a novel called Melancholia – to Alberta, whose husband has gone underground to join a group dedicated to overthrowing the government. The last two hours show what this struggle is like: underequipped men in torrential rain being hunted until they’re dead. But even in madness, at least they know who they are when the bullets hit. (p.61)

Möller, Olaf. "Minority Report", Film Comment 44.6, November 2008, p.58-61.

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The Least Gesture (Deligny)

Le Moindre Geste (1971/Fernand Deligny)

Review of the first shots of the film by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, on France Culture (3-4-2009). Take a look at what could look like another way to talk about cinema without plotline. My tentative translation :

The story of Le Moindre Geste is a novel, a genuine mad story. Never a film had been more improbable. Made against all logic from end to end during 8 years. From 1962 to 1970, only 2 years of shooting. And in 1969, a young cinematographer, Jean-Pierre Daniel decided to edit the dailies. Meanwhile around Fernand Deligny, a group begins this shooting in 16mm Black&White, aspect ratio 1:1.33. As a method of observation of a young autist : Yves Guignard. For a camera : diamond in the rough. For a sound engineer : incandescent embers.

The film opens with a slate : "Yves is Yves in the film. Annie is Annie. Her father is her father. Her mother is the mother of Richard. Marie-Rose is Marie-Rose. The Cevennes mountains are the Cevennes." Which is to say everybody is from The Cevennes, hard-boiled, raised with chestnuts, not really sentimental. The first image is a drawing being traced. We hear an encouragement : "Go Yves!" and grumbling, probably from the one drawing this. "There", he grumbles again "there, it's nice, oh shit".

Then on the finished drawing, the voice clear and precise of an aged man :

"Deligny speaking. This sort of man, it's the hand of a 25 years old young fellow which traced it. 'Mentally retarded' say the experts. Such he is in Le Moindre Geste. Such he is in real life as we lived it for 10+ years together. Such he is for us, never-ending cause of laughters, no matter what happens. And in this film like in daily life, I certify his voice is not mine. Could we say this voice is his? But why should a voice belong to someone? Even if someone voices it out."

What Deligny says there, as an experienced educator, maybe inventor of another manner to accompany autist children, is at the same time, unbeknown to him, a very question of cinema.
-- "Why should a voice belong to someone? Even if someone voices it out."
Thus breaks down here this filmic tyranny of the "continuité dialoguée" [script with dialogues only]. Cinema, before all, is made of images and sounds, the adventure of their mating, the very adventure of the film.

Le Moindre Geste is divided in 3 chapters :

1. Yves and Richard escape the mental asylum
2. Richard while hiding falls in a hole
3. The daughter of a quarry worker observes Yves left alone, and bring him back to the asylum

After an introduction on the life at the asylum, first image of Yves and Richard near the stream. Zoom on Yves's back. Strange body. Other shot : Richard, small, agile; Yves, heavier, follows him walking downstream. Other shot : Yves stops to drink water from the stream, using nature naturally. Water runs down, he drinks it. Richards comes back for him and takes him to the right side of the frame to continue their walk. Later, like in Kiarostami's Where is The Friend's Home? (1987) a wide shot, high angle, on a path in a S shape. Grass everywhere. Short on the left of the path, higher on the right. The 2 silhouettes of Richard ahead followed by Yves, leave the path. The loud sound of two police motorcycles which we saw in the previous shot. Now a shot at eye level. The two boys walk toward the camera. The heavy walk of Yves, as his body seems to be more adapted to the weather. He took out one of his shoes, his right foot is thus naked on the ground. The next shot, is almost a Bresson shot. The 4 legs of the 2 boys in close up. One with shoes on, Richard; the other with only one shoe, Yves, scratches his ankle with a single finger, while Richard speaks his head off. And then, voluntarily, with a slight movement downward, the camera avoids the boys' faces. This is how the system of the film install itself, finds its form. Dissociation of image and sound. Concomitance, as would say the man who invented the timecode. And throughout the film, emotions will come from there. The body of Yves, the autist, the so-called 'retarded', walking this Cevennole nature, as if being part of it, without crossing it. Almost a moving tree. A rolling stone. A cat. A lizard pointing his face to the sun. All this is contained in the image, dilated. On the soundtrack, grumbles. Sometimes Yves' shouting who talks a lot of DeGaulle, the Virgin Mary, who swears a lot. These sounds, these words are frightening. The signify clearly the mental disease. The image doesn't. By necessity, the image follows him, caresses him, embraces him.

Did Deligny, and his entourage, know that he used cinema as a scientific thinker? that he granted cinema its highest function because they needed it ? Turning all the shot-countershots of "continuité dialoguée" in miserable things. Cinema to see and to listen, and feeling between the two a mysterious exchange.

This film was made by people who had no experience of cinema. Except for the editor, who made sense of all the takes filmed all these years, when Yves was willing to participate to a shooting. Fernand Deligny was a psychiatrist. His collaborators took care of autistic children in an open space center, unlike any psychiatric institution at the time. The camera was held by an amateur, and this is among the most beautiful images I've seen in my life. Its aesthetic is almost involuntary or terribly inspired, with a sharp, risky stance of high contrasts, long takes and discontinuity. The kind of high-wire work that only a master could pull off. And yet, it was filmed without budget, like a home-movie, as a therapeutical exercice to communicate with an autist.
My review, written a few years ago now.

Review Of Damnation

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And, it’s no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar, in structure, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos’s films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s.

The film opens with a long slow pullback from a hot of a tramway of mining buckets moving back and forth, suspended over a bleak landscape, part of a small mining town. The sounds of the mechanized drudgery set the tone for the film, and as the camera pulls back from the buckets we see that we are inside an apartment, looking out the window at them. The camera then pulls even further back and around the silhouetted of a man’s head. The slow reveal moves from almost a documentary-like feel to one of utter expressionism, as it finally ends, and we see a man shaving with a razor. This break, several minutes into the film, ends a shot that is almost a mirror image of the final shot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. Antonioni, of course, is another filmmaker that Tarr is often compared to, and without a doubt, there are also similarities. Like the Italian cinematic master, Tarr’s shot is, at once, the essence of simplicity, but also complexity and duplicity, for, while we start out with what seems an objective documentary shot of an industrial landscape, suspended in mid-air, it soon morphs into what seems to be a subjective shot of a character looking hopelessly out of a definite place. But, then, as the camera pulls back behind the putative eyeline of the silhouetted figure, the shot again becomes objective and omniscient, then switches to a more conventional shot of the main character, whom we learn is called Karrer (Miklós Székely), shaving. Then, we see, as the camera, again pans behind him, how his reflected image disappears behins the imposition of the darkness Karrer’s body casts, until his face is swallowed by his body’s darkness.

Within the first few minutes of the film, two themes emerge. The first is that Tarr is challenging concepts of the viewer’s perspectives and assumptions, and the second is that his main character is a man whose essence is slowly disappearing, even before we get into the main thrust of the film’s tale. Then we get shots of a car in front of a dilapidated apartment building, only to have it pull back and reveal Kerrer, again, spying on the car’s occupant. As the man leaves, Karrer goes into the building to see a woman (Vali Kerekes), an ex-lover (presumably) of his whom he is still obsessed with, and wife of the man with the car, feeling only her love can save him from a life of seeming unemployment (we never see Karrer do anything of a positive note- work nor otherwise), staring at the buckets that pass by his apartment window. She sings at the town’s grimy bar, the Titanik, and dreams of making it to the big cities, so she can have comforts, with or without her husband (György Cserhalmi), or Karrer, whom she treats like a pathetic insect. Instantly, we know what the relationship between these two is. By visually presenting Karrer’s seamier insecure side with visuals, and seeing the faux confident posturing of the slatternly singer, with almost no words, Tarr has set up a universal situation, familiar to lonely men and manipulative women worldwide.

Throughout the rest of the film, a simple tale plays out. Karrer is given an opportunity to earn money smuggling things for the local bar owner (Gyula Pauer), but instead pawns off the opportunity on the singer’s husband, so he can be out of town more, and he try to restart their romance. The husband warns Karrer away from his wife, even though he views him as no threat, and takes the smuggling gig. Numerous scenes depict the suffocating life the people in this town lead, at the end of the Communist era. Karrer eventually gets the singer back in to bed, after a physical fight (although both what we see of their lovemaking, and the way it is presente4d- via peepholes and mirrors, makes it one of the least erotic sex scenes ever filmed- despite its nudity), but loses her affection soon afterwards, even as he ignores the potential of a deeper relationship with another woman (Hédi Temessy) who seems to have feelings for him, and always has a kind word for Karrer, and a spiteful, if accurate, opinion of the self-centered and vain singer. When the husband returns, things sour between Karrer and the singer, and when she ends things, after some well composed and choreographed shots, he eventually finks on the singer and her husband, telling the authorities of the husband’s role as a smuggler, and gets his revenge that way. He also turns in the bar owner, for his part in the scheme, and the fact that the singer let him do her while Karrer and the husband fought about the wife. In a sense, if one understands what the system was in Communists states of the last century, the ending may have been predictable. But, the results of how it affects Karrer are not. He seems to slowly lose a grip on reality, and in the final scenes of the film, in a hellish junkyard, he ends up on all fours, barking and driving away a stray dog that, along with some others, has spent the film scavenging through the wasteland looking for scraps of food in the gloomy rain that pervades almost every scene. Karrer is not only still a loser, and a bigger one than at the film’s start, but he has set up people and ruined their lives, not content to be alone in his own misery, but needing to have company in his swill.

The film is, despite its black and white, dark and sodden landscapes, amazingly beautiful. Rarely has the geography of the human mien been captured so wrenchingly, whether in the faces of the main characters, or in shots that seem to be social commentaries that underscore and play out against the main narrative, and featuring people who are never seen again. There is almost a clinical aspect to the way that Tarr pores over not only the human aspect but also the ruins of a small town. Yet, never is it technically clinical. The slow motion of camera movements away from the seeming center of the story is something that few filmmakers do, Yet Tarr does so, not only with ease, but a purposiveness that hints at the fact that the putative focus of that is just that, putative, and of no more genuine interest than a small portion of a derelicted building he turns his camera on.

The DVD, put out by Facets Video, has a good transfer, although, here and there, there are some flaws and splotches. The film’s subtitles are in white, but unlike the often unreadable subtitles The Criterion Collection uses on black and white films, Facets uses a black outline around the white lettering so that the words stand out very well. There are no features to speak of, and the only ‘extra’ is a small booklet that features some pretty good essays on Tarr and his canon. The film’s screenplay, by Tarr, adapted along with László Krasznahorkai, from Krasznahorkai’s novel, is the sort that most critics would not rave over, because it is not larded with dialogue that sets the mind ablaze, nor is its pacing something that most video game addicted Americans will find stimulating. But, like Last Year In Marienbad or 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film’s screenplay is key to its greatness, for its holds together the often conflicting images, which would fall to anomy without the script. The pair, Tarr and Krasznahorkai, have become Europe’s latter day film-novelist equivalent to the 1960s pairing of filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara and novelist Kōbō Abe. The cinematography, by Gábor Medvigy, is suoperb. Often in black and white films, especially those of recent decades, the use of that palette has no real significance, for all it does is present a blanched world. Tarr and Medvigy, however, make full use of total blackness, and its interruptions, as well as the plenum of grays that run between it and its antipodes, showing the superfluity of color in many films, and just how effective black and white cinema can reflect dreams, their lack, and the horror that fact can present. In this sense, Damnation truly is a horror film, with its desolated urban landscapes (which were a set, not real), often shown at odd angles, often reminding a well rounded cineaste of earlier horror films like Vampyr, Frankenstein, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, or many other German Expressionist films from the silent era.

As wonderful as the cinematography is, I must, however, return to the screenplay, and compare this film with another film about a near-sociopathic loner, filmed a dozen years before this one, in color, but mostly at night, so that the color was minimized. I refer to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, for like Damnation, much of the film follows the singular lead character, who is rapt by his reflection in mirrors and windows, who is obsessed with a woman who disdains him for dreams that she will never achieve. While Taxi Driver is, for most of its length, a film that deals with the impotence of the modern man, at least Travis Bickle (portrayed by Robert De Niro) eventually shoots his load. Karrer does not. In fact, he is so impotent that he is reduced to arguing with a feral dog, one who, when we see them muzzle to muzzle, we are not quite sure if Karrer may even attempt to sexually mount. This is another way in which Damnation can make its claim to being a ‘realistic’ horror film.

Yet, Taxi Driver provides another ‘in’ to how Damnation works, the cinema of misdirection. There is a scene in the Scorsese film where, after Bickle has taken Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) to a porno flick, he tries to apologize and call her from a payphone in a shitty hallway of a tenement. As we hear only his end of the conversation, the audience can tell that Betsy is brushing him off, and the camera ‘looks away’ from the internal angst of Bickle, and down the corridor, out into the bright daylight. We hear Bickle deal with his rejection, but we do not see it. Similarly, Damnation uses the same technique, although it is used repeatedly, and not with such dramatic emphasis as Scorsese used it. In a number of scenes, characters walk in to and out of frame, and the camera lingers on a structure of building, and even looks in a direction away from it, to see dogs, or insects, or the beading of rain on a window, as if to subtly suggest that the ‘story’ we feel the film is about is not necessarily the only thing of concern to the film. The most damning shot in Damnation, of this sort, is at film’s end, after Karrer has scared off the wild dog, and walks off, leaving the film to end pondering the rain, mud, and destruction, in a scene that reminded me of the end of Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe Of Heaven. In an earlier shot, the camera slowly pans through the local bar, from Karrer, and the husband and singer conversing, to follow the husband as he speaks to the bar owner in back, and then around the pool room, past Karrer and the singer, and back to the husband’s return. This plays out over several minutes, even as we hear Karrer and the singer speak. Yet, the most interesting things in the shot are nor what is said, but the little and manifestly predictable habits we see totally minor characters engage in, even over such a brief time. After all, it’s a pool bar, and whether in Hungary, Chicago or Singapore, they have their own rules of etiquette, so to speak.

Naturally, most critics, even those who praised the film, barely got what the film is about, and often imbued blatantly wrong ideas from the barest of threads. Instead, they digressed on to treatises about Tarr’s conflicted take on existence, his being an anti-Communist zealot, or his merely being derivative of earlier directors, especially the nominally similar Tarkovsky. Where Tarkovsky is explicitly spiritual, Tarr is overtly materialist. His characters not only reject inner lives, but they are seemingly incapable of understanding what they are. Karrer, as example, reiterates his desires for a ‘life’ with the singer, unawares that what he has, pathetic as it is, is still better than nothing, and that if he ever got his wish, it would likely only hasten the end of that relationship. The singer cares nothing of anyone but herself, and her husband veers between testosteronic threats and an impotence of mind that equals Karrer’s. Only the woman played by Hédi Temessy shows any depth, yet she is not only marginalized by Karrer’s lack of attention to her feelings and entreaties, but by her own inability to see that she is as rote a creature as the others are, despite her ability to see the Möbius Strip life she, and the others, inhabit. In this way, Orson Welles’ The Trial is the most direct antecedent for Damnation. The Kafka tale is as circular, if a bit grander, but nonetheless fatal.

Too many critics and filmgoers (even twenty years ago) have too delimited an idea of narrative, and what it is and can do, to appreciate an artist like Tarr, who exploits those very conventions, but not in radical antitheses, but in sly digressions to the next door, so that what the viewer is left with is not a conventional tale, but a story that almost ghosts its essence upon the expected. Dourness becomes a thing to marvel, and beauty becomes a thing tossed aside, and the camera often makes the viewer question their import, something few works of art do, taking too much for granted. When the camera focuses on something, therefore, it is not the thing in front of the eyes that is the subject, but the watcher behind. This subtle displacement of the everyday is a thing that adds psychological heft to the film, even though not in a manner discernible to most arts lovers. Often, silly appellations like a ‘noir Angelopoulos’ are used, even though their utterers have not a clue what such a claim means.

Damnation is a film that achieves greatness in many moments, but sometimes does not know when its points have all been made. The slight excesses of lingerance are the only down sides to a film that is a terrific document of the human creature; one that still has relevance to its viewers, as well as its viewed.

[Originally posted at Blogcritics]

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The Dan Schneider Interviews: The Most Widely
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