Now Showing (2008/Martin)

Now Showing (2008/Raya MARTIN/Philippines/France)
Cannes 2008 - Quinzaine des Réalisateurs

Read part 1 of this review here

I was actually shocked to learn the film was entirely scripted and staged (shot in 6 days, edited from 40 hours of footage) because I totally believed I was watching Raya Martin's personal homemovies compilation dating back as far as the VHS era. The staging involved was, in my mind, the kind a member of the family would direct informally by requesting the "protagonists" would pretend the camera is not there, and keep doing what they naturally do everyday, sharing confidences like if nobody was listening. Though there are a few "extras" who occasionally look into the lens when the scenes require a larger crowd foreign to the household.
I could easily picture myself the evolution of a family-movie collection where the subjects learnt over time not to pay attention anymore to that boy in the corner with his camcorder constantly on. There is this very immediate feeling of proximity and integration of the camera in these slices of genuine life permeating from this strange immersion within Rita's family. She's named after Rita Hayworth for the same reason Camilla Rhodes names herself Rita in Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001), an homage to the timeless silver screen diva.

The first "epoch", in the nineties, with images (as if) from a cheap VHS [Hi8] camcorder, Rita might be around 10 years old (when a distant relative came for her birthday asks her her age, she doesn't answer). The visual aspect shows the amateurish jerky framing of an inexperienced filmmaker filming around for his entertainment and for collective family memories, excited about the smallest things, catching whatever comes in front of the camera, recording family reunions in a discontinuous way. We see random street shots at night, a ball game down in the neighbourhood alley, Aunts' arguments, Rita's Birthday, poetically rendered mundane whereabouts. All rings true, real life experiences both in the content (script) and enactment (non-actors), which is a prowess in itself.
It also includes home-made stop-motion animation with toys, which every teenager with a camera would do.

In her bedroom, Rita jumps on the bed and performs solo "karaoke" songs, but the sound is curiously erased. Maybe it's just to avoid copyright fees because even the a cappella "Happy Birthday" song is off (which is a song notoriously known to be copyrighted whereas it should belong to the worldwide public domain by now!)
Though we don't really miss it given the atrocious sound quality of this epoch. Raya Martin explained he duplicated the footage numerous times on purpose with low-grade equipment to artificially generate the quality loss endured by VHS tapes when watched over and over, to give a sense of distant worn out past.
I was compelled to view it with the patience and compassion we grant to a document close to our heart, and completely overlooking after a while the VHS statics and the grating noises. There is this strange captivation focusing our attention on the reality happening rather than its distorted appearance on screen, like for example for a sonography, a decayed silent film or the uncomfortable peeping through a keyhole...

One of my favourite scene is a static extended long take of Rita and her mother watching [listening to] a late horror program on TV [radio]. The camera is so positioned that we are looking at them sideways (framing the entire sofa [bed]), their faces bathed in the pale glow of the offscreen TV set. Rita seems tired and is cuddled up against her mum, she doesn't even look at the screen, but she listens to the frightening voices from the movie (like us, blind spectators) [radio program]. Her mother is amused by the silly sound effects, the threatening narrator, and the wincing faces of her daughter. Both are less than riveted by the show, and probably only stay there just to be together in a silent communion.
This is the kind of intimate moment with zero plot drive that gives contemplative films their unique realism. The significance of this scene could emerge from its cumulative combination with other mundane moments. We gather that Rita's father is constantly away for work, that she misses him even if this emotion remains repressed as evoking his absence is a sore subject. This mother-daughter moment condenses alone all the unspoken sedimentary tension in a "single-parent" nucleus family.
I think the horror show is also quite a clever psychoanalytical symbol for the lack of masculine education in the house. The father figure being there to help the child overcome fears and to nurse self-confidence. The attitude of Rita towards this exposition to horror reveals her juvenile regression in this respect, which incarnates the absent father in a scene where he's not even mentioned.

We also overhear that Rita's grandmother used to be a famous Filipino movie actress in her youth, before the news of her death closes Rita's infancy segment with another beautiful scene on the beach at dusk. Rita cries and dark silhouettes move around a boat on the sand, maybe the return of the estranged seaman father for the funeral. But I might have missed a subtitle line and misinterpreted the succession of events because Cahiers says it was the father's funeral...
The following interlude would be more significant in my opinion if it was an homage following the death of the grand-mother.


A structuralist interlude divides the film between the nineties and the present days, with an insertion of Black&White found-footage of the grandmother's movie. Even though it's a sound film from 1939 (see details in Oggs Cruz review), the sound is off (but the collage of clips is so random that we couldn't follow the dialogues anyway). It's like a best of collection of screen moments from her career. We see her in various scenes and dresses. The image is artificially altered by multiple copies of copies across different support, from 35mm to VHS [Hi8] to digital. Pushing the texture of the image to extreme contrast, as if going back in time to early silent film decayed by bad storage. This reminds Tscherkassky's aesthetics of found footage experiments. Raya Martin plays the footage (in a much quicker montage than the other parts full of long plan-sequences) alternatively backward, upside down, back to front or in slow motion... which appropriately convokes the vanishing impression of fragmentary memories, like a nostalgic foregone era, fading away relentlessly. This is the film-within-the-film that really questions the perceived reality of TV imagery.

[EDIT: correction made for the radio horror show I mistook for an offscreen TV show]

Part 3 continues here

Raya Martin in Cannes 08

In his video interview for Cahiers, Raya Martin explains that Now Showing (2008), this 4h40 long film is the first episode of a new "trilogy" called Box Office (Now showing, Next Attraction, Coming Soon). If this doesn't blow your mind coming from a decidedly ambitious 23 years old filmmaker, wait for his two other trilogies already planned for future developments.
A Short Film About Indio National (2006) is the first of a trilogy following the foreign occupations of the Philippines (Spanish, American, Japanese), which recreates "pseudo-found-footage" of cinema made during these different periods. This one reminds the similar narrative structure used by Hou Hsiao-Hsien in Three Times (2005), to tell the story of historical occupation of Taiwan in three periods (1966: American occupation, 1911: Japanese occupation, 2005: Independence).
His second, more autobiographical trilogy started with Autohystoria (2007), now followed by Possible Lovers (2008) which premiered in the Buenos Aires Film Festival.

If I was short of ideas about this film (and if I had seen all his films), I would go on about this sprawling preconceived "trilogy" mindset, especially that early in a career, like if filmmaking was such a steady job you could actually project yourself in three simultaneous series of films without worrying if the success of the current film will make you able to even make another film... The trilogy used to be the theoretical device of critics who identify it within a finished oeuvre, now it seems the filmmakers writes their biography ahead of time... [Is he some kind of George Lucas?] I'm only joking. I'm impressed how Raya Martin answers intelligently and most confidently to Cahiers critics' (Renzi & Thirion) uninspiring questions. (here is their review in French)

Indeed this film (Now Showing) is amazing. It is actually a trilogy in itself, recounting the pseudo-documentary life of a young girl, Rita, living in Manila, in three epochs. Cahiers loves this work because it's a quintessential evidence of their dubious theory on "Cinema Subtil" that nobody can explain. In fact it uses the digital technology to re-enact a staged documentary where the uneven quality of images tells the recent History of our audiovisual culture recorded on magnetic storage. We can appreciate how video ages in a different way than celluloid. And the film shows the aesthetic leap from VHS to HD digital in family-movies. In this regard it does represent perfectly the identity crisis of images. Especially since it is an artificial reconstitution of archival material, it questions the reality of TV imagery, like other contemporaries filmmakers do (Redacted, Cloverfield, REC...) This is an issue that fascinates the Cahiers team for a couple years now.

Personally I admire it for its "contemplative" tendency. To each its own...

part 2, part 3...

Interview with Kunal Mehra director of "The Wind Blows Where It Will"

HermyBerg: First I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Kunal. This is a wonderful opportunity.

Kunal Mehra: Pleasure's mine. Glad that it all worked out.

HermyBerg: I wanted to start by saying I think you made a really excellent film here.
A film I hope others will be able to see soon.

Kunal Mehra: Thanks! It's always nice to meet people who took a liking to the film.

HermyBerg: First I want to start broadly with how you found your lead actor Josh Boyle.

Kunal Mehra: Craigslist is the word.

HermyBerg: Ha!

Kunal Mehra: I had put up audition calls for pretty much everything - cast/crew/catering/producer - on CL and believe it or not, found pretty much 95% of the cast/crew on there.

HermyBerg: That's interesting.

Kunal Mehra: It took me a while to find the character for Philippe, though. I had it narrowed down to 3 actors and I spent quite a lot of time just informally chatting with them, trying to get a sense of how their persona in real life is like.
Josh seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

HermyBerg: I agree. And your cinematographer Aron Noll?

Kunal Mehra: Craigslist. I had put up an ad on CL a few years ago for a film that I never really made. Aron responded to that ad and even though I never made that film, we kept in touch, so when I wanted a DP for TWBWIW, I got in touch with Aron right away. Thankfully enough all the scheduling worked out and he was on board.

HermyBerg: And what camera did you shoot with?

Kunal Mehra: Panasonic DVX100. Probably more detail than you asked for, but we started shooting with dvx100a (which is what Aron owned). The next day, one of the crew members offered to lend us his brand new dvx100b (which had 16:9 anamorphic mode) for the shoot. We shot with that for a week before a freak accident happened in which a bicyclist tripped over the camera and totaled it. I paid the crew member for that camera and rented another 100b from a local store for the rest of the shoot.

HermyBerg: Now that’s a story. Ouch.

Kunal Mehra: Yeah… it was painful. Ironically, I had insurance for everything other than equipment. C'est La Vie.

HermyBerg: Smart man. So What is your background? Where did you grow up? Go to school?

Kunal Mehra: I grew up in India in a small town (Aurangabad) that's about 200 miles east of Bombay. My undergrad was in electronics and after a brief internship in Singapore, I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for my Masters in computers in August 2000. A couple of years and some celestial alignments later, I found myself in the rainy Pacific Northwest in Portland, Oregon, working for Intel, which is where I'm working as of now.

HermyBerg: And your influential filmmakers and/or films?

Kunal Mehra: It's hard to pin influences down on any one artist since, in my opinion, the creative process is continuously being nurtured as one observes and learns, with influences and inspiration abounding all around us and seeping into our consciousness without our being necessarily conscious of it. That being said, if I had to take names: the intoxicating pessimism of Bergman, the keen insight and sheer prolificness of Fassbinder, the Zen'ism of Ozu, the surrealism of Tarkovsky, the stark and ascetic minimalism of Bresson, the fluidity and humanness of Renoir and more recently, the keen eye of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

When it comes to films: I would definitely put Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and Bela Tarr's Satantango as a couple of direct influences on the writing/editing of TWBWIW. Other indelible works: Fassbinder's Why does Herr R. Run Amok, Herzog's Aguirre, Bresson's Gentle Woman, Karoly Makk's Another Way, Sokhurov's Mother & Son and Confessions, Ozu's Tokyo Story, Imamura's Ballad of Narayama, Jean Vigo's L' Atalante.

Read the entire interview here.

Review: The Wind Blows Where It Will

The Wind Blows Where It Will directed by Portland, Oregon, based director Kunal Mehra is rigidly constructed film, running slightly over three-hours, which demands the viewer’s attention. Holding fastidiously to a Bressonian austereness and its own wrought-out languidness TWBWIW, in the end, reaches a deep and resonant poignancy.

It’s a remarkably simple story. Philippe, a solitary young man, works in a small office selling blinds. He’s in a long distance relationship with Jeanne. She comes for a visit and tells Philippe she wants to breakup; no real explanation is given. Thus Philippe, already a quiet soul, must learn to live truly on his own; their rupture serving as an impetus to his silent and spiritual unraveling.

In essence TWBWIW is a intense character study and Mehra with monk-like patience trains his camera on the recondite Philippe excavating his internal struggle like a surgeon. The world Philippe inhabits is extremely minimal with a distinctive pace and mood. Mehra’s strength lies in his ability to slow to that pace, to listen the silences, to take the slow breathes, and reveal a depth of character rarely seen.

-Read whole the review here.

Sin Titulo

At The Evening Class, Michael Guillen interviews a film student from Berkeley, Matt Losada, and about his non-conventional film, Sin Título (2007). They talk about so-called "boring" films:

Michael Guillén: In the Q&A after the program you spoke a bit about being fond of "boring" films; what are you referencing in particular?

Matt Losada: I meant "boring" in quotes, of course. It's a matter of expectations, like when you tell someone they just have to see a certain film, then sometimes afterward they avoid mentioning it, and if you ask about it they say it was slow or boring. If they're used to lots of camera movement, lots of cutting, dense narration, they'll find certain films boring. I think this is what Pedro Costa meant when he said how lots of commercial films need to create "energy" where sometimes there is none. So I suppose I might have been apologizing for my piece not being like that. But I think that "boring" films are often much richer films, so I was trying for that kind of richness in the piece.

The story told provided a good opportunity to use the frame as a immobile boundary between what you see and what you don't see. At the end you see my cousin's photos, which I tried to respond to in the form of the individual shots, and that called for a fixed frame and long takes. So I started out lots of the shots as empty spaces, abstracted because there are no people for scale, and then I didn't move the camera at all. So the frame forms a strong boundary between what's on screen and what's off, and you can play with that divide, especially with the sound. When you're not following the elements of the story around with the camera, or cutting to different shots to follow what's important to advance the narration, then the off-screen space becomes pure opportunity to use sound to create a world out there. Sound takes on a completely different dimension, one that's not there if you don't establish that code, that you're not going to move the camera, or cut to tell the viewer what he should be looking at. So the minimal story allowed this, and the photos provided a reason to fix the frame and use long takes, which results in the "boring" I was referring to.

I tried to play with this boredom too. [For example,] in the endless shot of him building the camera, the phone starts to ring and he doesn't answer it, and it keeps ringing and ringing. The interval between each ring gets a tiny bit longer each time. I was trying to create that feeling of relief when you think it has stopped …but then the thing rings again … and again, until he finally gets up and leaves, [which] probably most of the audience wanted to do by that point. His photos also allow chance to come into play. Some are from the camera with the three pinholes, and they make three images of the same thing appear, but each image is different, because the pinholes aren't exactly alike, and the light kind of scrapes through on the rough edges and bounces around, creating all kinds of effects on the images. This element of chance is also present in a different way in the video shots, which show simple things like my cousin waiting to cross the street, and the city provides the rest, like people passing into the frame, smoke, dogs, sounds, all these little events. With video you can shoots lots of takes and eventually something interesting will happen.

To get back to the question, specific directors that are "boring", but in a very good way: the first [who] comes to mind is Ozu. Maybe Kiarostami. My favorite of all is Bresson. There's a great Argentine film from the '60s I showed in my course called El dependiente [1969] by Leonardo Favio. And some experimental films … Chantal Akerman is great, her Jeanne Dielman [1975] is a wonderful use of long takes and repetition with variation. Michael Snow's Wavelength [1967] is another. These films take you mental places where more narrative cinema can't go. If you describe them to someone, they sound really horrendous, but hidden in that "boredom" is a wonderfully rich perceptive experience. There are lots of newer narrative films. One that uses a fixed frame and very long takes and narrates with just sound, but in a different way, playing with different temporalities, is Hamaca paraguaya [2006] by Paz Encina. It's a film about waiting, which motivates the form. I showed it to my students, they'd never seen anything at all like it … some of them loved it, felt really strongly about it. Another good one, in a different way, is Honor de cavalleria [2006] by Albert Serra. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza's down time, when they're hanging out between adventures. It sounds kind of boring, doesn't it?