Michel Reilhac (Arte producer-distributor, not of this film though) went to Budapest on August 18th to watch the final cut of Tarr's latest (last?) film : The Turin Horse (A Torinói ló). It clocks at 2h30'. Can't wait. Not selected for Venice?
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tie Xi Qu: West Of The Tracks
I’d so far thought that it was Jia’s The World (2004) that truly summed up the state of the third world in the first decade of the new century. While I’ve not changed my opinion entirely, Wang Bing’s phenomenal DV work Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003) forces me to. Epic in scope and size, West of the Tracks is divided into three films subtitled Rust, Remnants and Rails. Between 1999 and 2001, when China had embarked on a mission of mass privatization of the country, Bing lived and shot this film in the district of Shenyang located in the city of Tie Xi in northeastern China where smelting and electrical industries were to be closed down. These industries were purportedly established by the Japanese to help them produce ammunitions for the war, but were nationalized after Japanese retreat. Although these factories were doing well till about the eighties, the profits started waning by the mid-nineties (due to bad management, some workers say) and, by the end of the decade, the factories had filed for bankruptcy resulting in mass layoffs and appalling cuts in pay of the workers. The film is a Herculean effort by a single man, who is credited as the producer, director, cinematographer and the editor of the film (which is ironical considering that this is the kind of film that tries to efface authorship). Bing apparently shot several hundred hours of footage for this film and edited it secretly and illegally in a TV studio. The result is one of the greatest films of the decade.
Rust, the longest of the three parts of this monumental work, opens with extended tracking shots photographed from a train that succinctly sum up the nine-hour film that is to follow. The snow-tainted lens of the handheld camera tells us the attitude of the filmmaker towards his subject – that of a empathetic and trustworthy observer who will place himself amidst the people he will be documenting – and the train, which comes to a halt after trudging through the snow-clad premises of the Shenyang smelting complex, itself becomes a fitting metaphor for the underproducing factories that will soon come to a full stop. In Rust, Bing chronicles the everyday life of the workers at the copper, iron and zinc smelting factories of Shenyang and through it, the failure of a utopian socialist dream. A large part of this section gives us workers going about doing their routine – unloading the metal ores, refining them, operating the blast furnaces and processing the extracted metals – and relaxing at the break rooms where they play chess and mahjong, involve in verbal fights and talk cynically about the state of the factory. This technique is crucial for the film since it is this very technique that aids the film to abstain from making any overt political statement and helps us empathize with the workers’ plight and way of life. It is this experiential mode of identification that justifies the running length of the film too. Had Bing cut down the film to a more viewer-friendly runtime, the product would have been a more analytical and agenda-driven film rather than a humanistic work that it is.
It is in these decidedly mundane sequences that we witness how inhuman the work at the factories is. The communist dream of the glorious worker seems a mere propaganda when one observes what happens at these industries. We are told that the lead content in the factories’ atmosphere is hundred times the allowable limit. The workers later go to a hospital to rid their bodies off the poison that they have taken in from the factory. The machines have literally infested their lives. The workers have become functional accessories required to keep the machines running, literally and figuratively (This personal sacrifice asked of people for a supposedly greater good – a motto that seemed common only to totalitarian socialist regimes – manifests in even more objectionable terms in the second part of the film), but they would have to almost kneel begging for pension before the government. The toughest part in this whole ordeal seems to be to come to terms with the fact that the faith that the workers had towards their government turned out to be an act of naïveté. Rust is the least narrative of the three segments and it is indeed tough to get hold of a perspective through which you can assess the happenings. In fact, the only probable protagonist of this section is, like Tsai’s cinema hall, the industrial complex itself. The complex, through its days of glory and disgrace, appears to denote the death of a civilization – from being a place full of people and public baths to a cold, deserted wasteland. After the industry is shut down, one of the workers, ransacking the now-empty break rooms, finds the identity card of a worker among the debris. We do not get to know the name on the card. We needn’t. It’s the condition of all the industry workers at Shenyang.
The three hour long second segment of the film, Remnants, takes place in the residential complex that houses the family of the workers at the Shenyang factories. Bing employs the same identification technique as in the previous film, following a large number of people living in the area and getting us accustomed to the way of life in the place. The first hour mostly deals with a bunch of teenagers knocking about the township during Valentine’s Day without any apparent work or education to care about. Some of these directionless youth take to violence and turn hoodlums for petty sums of money. It is in this infinitely rich segment that the film opens up numerous avenues for analysis of class, crime, justice and human rights. Like the Shenyang industries, the residential complex is to be torn down as per orders and is to be replaced by privately constructed and owned chain of apartments. Some of the residents, who realize the power of the institution they are up against, decide to dismantle their own houses (like the workers who take the industries apart), sell off whatever scrap metal that remains and move into the criminally unfair amount of compensatory space they are being allocated elsewhere. In that regard, the dilapidating neighbourhood that they live in becomes highly expressionistic and indicative of the moral and psychological downfall they are experiencing.
The more gutsy ones, on the other hand, decide to stay put and force the private organization and the government to give them their due. The latter retaliates by cutting off the town’s supply of water and electricity. The people, again, try to obviate the need for electricity by harnessing daylight as much as possible. Like the gestures of these people, Wang Bing’s film is also an act of resistance, of documenting what remains unheeded and unsaid and of rethinking accepted notions of progress and development. His refusal to stay with the people who don’t leave instead of those who move on clearly exemplifies his stand. What we see in this second segment is the same kind of human rights violation that takes place in every developing country around the world, be it due to the Three Gorges project in China or the Narmada project in India. There are only a few films such as Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (2006), Yu Yan’s and Yifan Li’s Before the Flood (2007) and Simantini Dhuru’s and Anand Patwardhan’s Narmada Diary (1995) that act as voices of resistance amidst the cries of national glory and pride. The important thing to recognize is that these voices exist and need to be heard. One old man in Bing’s film, who is on the verge of throwing in the towel, tells us that we “can’t hold back the tide of progress”. One might call the statement cynical or practical, but the point is that an attempt should be made, even if in vain, to hold the tide back so that there are no more such tides.
The third segment of the film is called Rails and charts the final months at work of the employees of the Shenyang Railway system that manages shipments into and out of the district. This section could be seen as a conglomeration of the first two in the sense that it deals with both the workplace and the residential space of the workers. It is also in this segment that Wang Bing gives the film the semblance of a narrative and boils his character set down to two people – Old Du, a coal gleaner working in the railways with the cooperation of the workers who run the trains, and his son Du Yang. The driving force of this segment is the arrest of Old Du by the railway authorities which causes Yang to break down from his passive state. In the film’s most affecting sequence, Bing photographs Yang in his house on the day following his father’s arrest. Yang shows us a bunch of family photographs, talks about his mother who has left him alone and, just when the clock strikes ten and a melodious tune plays, starts crying. It’s a divine moment in filmmaking. Not once does Bing use non-diegetic music in the film but just at the moment when Yang stands on the verge of a breakdown, the clocks chips in with its heartwarming music (Bing reflexively pans to reveal the source of music, as if vindicating himself!). Earlier, Old Yu tells us: “There aren’t many people who would be willing to live the way we do”. It’s a devastating statement that shows how deep the social ladder descends.
The film’s critical stance against the feverish rate of privatization of industries and public spaces might make Bing seem like a staunch leftist, a leftover Maoist of sorts. But a close look at the film, especially its first part, reveals that Wang Bing is only championing human rights, regardless of what ideology it entails. He is critical of the rapid privatization, but he is also reflecting on the failed socialist dream of the nation. Songs full of empty Maoist rhetoric abound the soundscape (all diegetic, of course) humorously counterpointing the utopian vision of the Cultural Revolution with the systematic corporitization of the country by the same party. As seen in Rails, Mao and Lenin have becomes mere names to be bandied about in conversations. Even in his subsequent film, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007), his interest lies in exploring how the hunt for the rightists of the “black clique” (Maoist counterpart of the red hunt in the United States) resulted in the oppression of individuals, even those who worked for the party, and the confiscation of their basic rights. This passing of national dreams and political visions into the realm of speculation and wishful thinking is one of the numerous thematic connections that Bing’s films share with those of Jia Zhang-ke. In fact, echoes from West of the Tracks can be found in all of Jia’s works – from the impact of the Cultural Revolution in Platform (2000), through the wayward youth of Unknown Pleasures (2002), the ever increasing class rift in a globalized world in Still Life (2006) to the disintegration of the socialist dream in 24 City (2008, the film that starkly resembles Rust). Although these two artists have worked on similar themes, they have, however, done so in their own idiosyncratic ways, with wondrous results
As such, West of the Tracks (and Fengming: A Chinese Memoir more so) does not have a premeditated aesthetic that imposes an external meaning on the reality of the film. The cinematography and editing are almost purely functional and there is barely a cut or a reframing that suggests personal authorship. The film seems to lie so close to the end of that Bazinian asymptote to reality, that it opens up possibilities to read life as art, even if the filmmaker does not intend to create such a meaning. One might say that the naked men who walk around on screen are suggestive of the workers’ identity being stripped down to nothing, but it is only their workplace routine. One might say that the workers are dwarfed and marginalized by the humongous machines they are working on, but it’s just a material truth. One might say that the wife swapping story that the workers share in good jest has considerable parallels in their national politics, but it is just small talk that they indulge in. Same is the case for the trains that often switch tracks. What West of the Tracks does is to create that essential distance between reality and art to give us (pardon the pun) a better picture of ourselves, to create poetry from everyday activities, to aestheticize life. But more importantly, the film makes a strong case for DV filmmaking. Bing’s cinematography is entirely handheld and he prefers to shoot from amidst the workers and from their eye level. Only Digital Video could have provided this material flexibility for Bing. He religiously performs the role of a historian, capturing passages that would otherwise be relegated to the level of footnotes. He neither exploits the grief of the people he’s filming to create his art nor does he try to analyze their situation and make an overarching statement. He merely lives among them, staying in the sidelines with humility and standing witness to the downward spiral they are thrust into. This way, Bing’s film makes a strong case for cinema itself, taking it closer to what it out to be and what it was devised for – to capture and save reality from destruction, negligence and falsification.
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The Films Of Lisandro Alonso
It is sort of funny to write about the works of Lisandro Alonso after writing about the films of Lav Diaz whose one film runs for longer than the entire filmography of this Argentine director. That just goes to show how different filmmakers, even when working towards similar goals, have different perspectives about the length of their films. Diaz and Alonso share a lot in common as far as their aesthetic choices are concerned. Just that Diaz’s narrative tends to be much more expansive than the latter’s. It is highly interesting that, despite this striking disparity, these filmmakers are two of the most important discoveries of last decade. However, one could argue that, unlike the very “Filipino” Diaz, Alonso is not a very “Argentine” filmmaker and that he is not even remotely interested in the national politics of his country. Even his films would testify that he is not overtly concerned with politics of any kind. Alonso instead seems to take the sociopolitical situation of his country as a given (a la late Tarkovsky and Bresson) and delves into something that is more abstract (as in what connects all of humanity) and more immediate. Most of the director’s films don’t even have societies, just wandering singletons. His characters are ones that live not even on the fringes of society, but beyond its edges. One might compare them to the people in Tsai Ming-Liang’s films, but Alonso’s characters seem to long for and work towards, in addition to the warmth of Tsai’s human connection, freedom and self-sufficiency.However, despite the differences, Alonso, like Diaz, is a realist too, probably the most realistic of all directors working today. Like most of the filmmakers in Contemporary Contemplative Cinema canon, he mostly works in deep focus mise en scène, allowing the action to unfold at its own pace. He cuts sparely and allows each shot to breathe and develop its own rhythm. In fact, the whole of Alonso’s cinema is built on rhythms and melodies of everyday work. Consequently, he blends both documentary and fiction in his films. His actors may be playing themselves but they do that under slightly altered circumstances and scenarios. This way, the final trace of artificial professionalism in these “actors” is eliminated and what is uniquely theirs emanates. This refusal to dramatize through actors is only one of the many ways in which Alonso resembles Bresson. For one, the remarkable sound design in his films, which exercises an economy of expression and a tendency to nudge to viewers to complete the film’s world, is justifiably comparable to the French master’s (Ironically, Alonso’s films are bracketed by heavy metal soundtracks playing over the credits, as if placing the films into some sort of an aural vacuum in between). The director’s films also betray his keen eye for landscapes and architectures, which is only befitting of a director whose whole filmography studies man’s position in his universe, both in the literal and the metaphysical sense.
La Libertad (2001)
With La Libertad (2001), Alonso comes close to realizing the Italian neo-realists’ dream of recording 90 minutes of a man’s life, without obstruction. Although such documentary observation seldom leads us to uncover higher truths, Alonso’s film provides much space and time for contemplation. La Libertad is a plotless film that chronicles one day in the life of a woodcutter named Misael Saavedra (played by himself) as he goes about chopping trees, shaping the timber, loading them onto a jeep, dumping them at a wholesale shop, returning to the woods in the evening and hunting down an armadillo for dinner. Misael seems entirely cut off from ‘culture’ save for the odd conversation with his friend from whom he borrows the vehicle. He is almost completely self-sufficient in the sense that he derives both his income and his basic needs from nature itself. One could argue that his way of life is devoid of any form of economical exploitation. The ‘freedom’ of the title takes up multiple meanings in this regard. Misael seems altogether independent of the sociopolitical structures of the world that surrounds him. He achieves what the characters in Bartas’ Freedom (2000) and Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002) wish for – to depoliticize the world they live in and lead a life that they want, in peace. Alonso’s independence, on the other hand, is from the equally suffocating restrictions of generic cinema such as psychological realism, causal narratives and novelistic drama. Finally, it is also the audience that is free to make sense of what it sees, hears and feels in this evocatively rendered pseudo-documentary.
Los Muertos (2004)
If not the best film made by Lisandro Alonso, Los Muertos (2004) comes very close to it. The first great work by the Argentine, Los Muertos follows the Cain-like Vargas, a man in his fifties who is released from prison and who sets off to meet his daughter. Vargas is portrayed by Argentino Vargas himself, but, unlike in La Libertad, he is not entirely the character he plays. In a way, Los Muertos is both an explanation for the befuddling mysteries and a thematically and aesthetically enriched version of the director’s previous film. The prison that Vargas comes out of might well have been the prison called society. His subsequent journey, then, becomes one where he sheds (sometimes literally) the artificial social constructions that ties him down and one where he returns to the nascent human state – a transition from the calculated propriety of the ego to the unbridled irrationality of the id (In that sense, Vargas is like Aguirre too, descending slowly into the darkest corners of his own psyche as he proceeds deeper and deeper into the jungle). It seems like Alonso wants us to relate Vargas’ murder of his brothers and his clinical slaughtering of the stray goat. Alonso’s point might just be derived from Freud’s theory that man is bestial by his very nature and morality, society and civilization are constructs to keep him from exercising his impulses. But Alonso’s film is far from a systematic psychoanalytical illustration. It is deeply human and hence infinitely complex. When, in the heartbreaking final shot, Vargas sits outside his grandson’s makeshift home on the verge of an existential breakdown, it isn’t only him who reassesses his life so far.
Fantasma (2006)
A work that links La Libertad and Los Muertos, Fantasma (2006) is a one-hour treasure that marks a new high for the Argentine filmmaker. Set in a multiplex in Buenos Aires, Fantasma ports Vargas and Misael, this time devoid of any fictional trappings, from the lush, impenetrable greenery of the South American forests to restricted, deceptive and equally alien interiors of this concrete jungle. However, the human yearning for locating oneself within the world around remains as intense as ever. The four or five characters that we see in the film wander the empty corridors of the building like ghosts that have haunted an abandoned cinema hall. They are rarely seen in the same frame and, unlike the earlier films where they seemed to conquer new areas, keep covering the same set of spaces, taking turns (in a humorously Tati-esque fashion). Alonso isolates them from each other, boxing them out within this human grocery store with his (oft-repeated) compositions. But this sense of urban alienation and lack of communication is only the surface aspect of Fantasma. Two or three of the characters watching Los Muertos on screen in that near-seedy theatre is a grand symphony of cultural uprooting that resonates on multiple levels. In a way, the film’s closest cousin would be Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), where too the pathetic human condition was reflected and distilled in the dilapidating condition of the cinemas of yesteryear. Alonso’s film takes an equally nostalgic, elegiac and optimistic look at a world lost and an art rendered irrelevant.
Liverpool (2008)
Alonso’s most acclaimed film, the puzzlingly titled Liverpool (2008) is his most impregnable yet most affecting work to date. The film’s protagonist Ferrel (Juan Fernández) is a worker in a ship that anchors at Tierra del Fuego for a few days. The scenes on the ship are arguably the greatest that Alonso has ever lit and shot in his career. The detached, unfocused figure of Farrel in the opening scene fittingly sums up his condition. The out-of-focus lights of the city far off would remain emotionally out-of-focus for Ferrel even till the end. The warmth of his cluttered cabin is about to give way to a cold, open world that he’s not sure he prefers. One wishes that these scenes would play for eternity. Ferrel decides to take this time off to meet his ailing mother. It is after this that Ferrel progressively resembles Vargas of Los Muertos as he tries, possibly for one last time, to find his footing and perhaps regain his responsibility as a son and, more importantly, as a father that he seems to have disregarded. Alonso cuts his shots in such a way that Ferrel enters the frame after the shot has begun and leaves before it ends. This pattern also reflects the key idea of the film – the world Ferrel enters and exits remains as it was irrespective of his (failed) attempts to integrate himself into it. If Alonso indeed has a knack for finding profundity in the banal, it is in the final quarter hour of Liverpool that he is top form. Before his daughter (and the audience) bids adieu to Ferrel, he gives her a knick knack from his backpack instinctively. It doesn’t absolve him from his guilt, it does not establish a relationship (his daughter is mentally ill to boot) and it does not mean that he has fulfilled his duties as a father. It is a gesture – nothing more, nothing less – and a profoundly human one at that.
The Films Of Lav Diaz
Filipino director Lavrente Diaz is a very versatile artist. He started out as a guitarist (He recently released a music album to accompany his latest film), then wrote plays and short stories for television (a period he seems to hate, as is made clear in his works), later started writing poems (the poems that feature in his films are written by him) and then, in the early 90s, decided that he’ll be a professional filmmaker. The later films of the director present the same kind of problem to both commercial multiplexes and film festival screens – their length. His last four feature films have a total run time of around 36 hours! Diaz believes the long length of his films is an extremely crucial part of his aesthetic and radically alters the way in which the audience converses with his films. There is another specific problem in screening Diaz’s films world wide. That he is a very “Filipino” filmmaker. All his works are deeply rooted in the country’s history and politics. Any attempt to view the films in a de-contextualized manner is only futile. That makes Diaz one of the most uncompromising of directors working today. Diaz’s greatest ambition, as it seems, is to change the Filipinos’ (and rest of the world’s) perspective of their country and culture (He tells: “For me, the issue is: if you’re an artist, with the state the country is in you only have one choice – to help culture grow in this country. There’s no time for ego, you have to struggle to help this country. Make serious films that even if only five people watch it, it will change their perspective. You may make big box office but what do the people get out of it?”).What is really striking about Lav Diaz is how vocal and frank he is about his ideology and his works. Most of modern mainstream auteurs and even festival regulars shy away from commenting on their work or on the ideas they present. Some of them bury their political concerns so deep within their films that they may simply be overlooked. Diaz, on the other hand, is like an open book. In all his interviews, he is always willing to discuss his films and explain what they deal with. None of this actually dilutes the impact of the films or the complexities they contain. Instead, it only opens up a wider and more pertinent band of response to the film. Furthermore, Diaz is also very transparent about his political views and even his personal life (His story is exactly the kind of success yarn pseudo-liberal Hollywood studios are looking for. But one sure has to appreciate the man for what he’s gone through and what he’s become). To say that he feels strongly against the Ferdinand Marcos’s rule of The Philippines till about two decades ago would be an understatement (“He siphoned the treasury as well. He got everything. No matter what they say, he stole everything – the money, our dignity. It is true. Marcos is an evil person. He destroyed us. The hardest part was that he was Filipino”). Diaz is also very optimistic about the role artists play in a political revolution and this belief directly manifests in his films in the form of artist figures present in the narrative.
I’d say that Diaz’s aesthetic stands somewhere in between Contemporary Contemplative Cinema and conventional documentary. Like the former, he prefers long takes shot from at a considerable distance, avoids the use of background music, includes stretches of “dead time” in his narrative and relies on mood and atmosphere more than exposition or psychoanalysis. He employs parenthetical cutting that allows a shot to run for more duration than the length of the principal action, but cuts soon enough to avoid the shot to parody itself. Unlike Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, there are long stretches of dialogue in the vein of early Nouvelle Vague films and the politics the films deal with are much more concrete. All his recent features have been shot in black and white as if they are historical documents and as if the vitality of its characters has been sucked out. His use of direct sound goes hand in hand with his use of digital video, which enables him to experiment with long shots. It is only in a blue moon that he uses close-ups and all his medium and long shots come across as clinical observations of his characters’ lives. That doesn’t mean his films lack empathy or compassion. But the way he generates them is more distilled and uncontrived. He composes in deep space and allows the viewer to get a complete sense of the film’s environment and time. He says: “There’s no such thing as the audience in my work. There’s only the dynamic of interaction. And in time, that dynamic will grow. The greatest dynamic is when people want to see a work because of awareness and they want to experience it; and in so doing, they may be able to discover new perspectives or just put these perspectives into a greater discourse.”
(NOTE: I’ve written here about all the films of Lav Diaz that I could get my hands on. However, I haven’t been able to see any his earlier works or his short films. The most regrettable omission of them all is Batang West Side (2001), which many commentators consider to be one of Diaz’s best films. I’ll append the entries for the missing films here once I get to see them)
Hesus Rebolusyonaryo (Hesus The Revolutionary, 2002)
Hesus the Revolutionary (2002) is set in the year 2010 and follows the titular resistance fighter (Mark Anthony Fernandez) whose loyalty and ideology are put to test when he is ordered by the leader of the movement to kill his cell mates and is subsequently captured by the military. The most noteworthy aspect of the film is that Diaz does not set the film in far future or alter the mise en scène to make it seem futuristic. The fact that the architecture and geography look very contemporary indicates that there has been no progress for quite some time. Additionally, he uses pseudo-newsreels as prelude to the narrative. All these moves aid Diaz’s vision of establishing the future as a mere variant of the past and the present. His intention is to provide a critical distance between the audience and the story and hence make them reflect on how the same kind of events have happened in the past and are still happening. The chiaroscuro driven mise en scène through which the protagonist secretly moves seems to have been derived from American noir films. Diaz films his characters in moderately long shots and uses a techno soundtrack (by the band The Jerks) that enhances the dystopian sense overarching the film. Even while working within the limits of the genre (thereby using some of its conventions), Diaz manages to suffuse the film with themes that he would progressively be concerned with. However, Hesus the Revolutionary, in hindsight, is only the tip of a gargantuan iceberg.
Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution Of A Filipino Family, 2004)
Running for almost eleven hours and twelve years in the making, Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), which many consider to be Lav Diaz’s greatest work, is kamikaze filmmaking of the highest order. Mixing film and digital formats (which might be an economic decision), splicing the real with the surreal and weaving together documentary and fiction, Diaz concocts a glorious and flamboyantly self-reflexive film that slips seamlessly from one mode of discourse into another. The film’s central character is Ray (Elryan De Vera), a child found on the street by the mentally ill Hilda (Marife Necisito) and who goes on to live with another family of gold diggers. One could argue that Ray is the stand in for a whole generation of Filipinos abandoned by their “parents” and left stranded (Diaz himself calls Ray as the Filipino soul). Also central to the film is Hilda’s brother Kadyo (Pen Medina), who helps the resistance fighters by stealing ammunition from dead soldiers of the military. Interspersed among the sequences that drive this fiction are newsreels depicting rallies and riots against the then-existing Ferdinand Marcos regime, interviews of the legendary filmmaker Lino Brocka explaining political film movement during the Marcos rule and footage of artists reciting sappy, exaggerated and hilarious radio serials that everyone in the fictional world seems to be hooked to. Evolution of a Filipino Family is, as the title hints, a document – one that studies and critiques a whole era and suggests what’s to be done.
Diaz shoots almost exclusively in medium shots (to avoid any sort of manipulation, he says) and some of his compositions carry the air of evocatively rendered still life paintings. His soundtrack is even more remarkable and he edits it in such a manner that fiction regularly overflows into reality. Diaz throws in everything he’s got into this film. Examining a number of topics including commercialism versus art, the class struggle, art versus reality and the inseparability of past and present, Diaz creates a dense and incisive film that seems to announce once and for all what Diaz’s cinema is all about. At heart, Evolution of a Filipino Family is a film about resistance – political and cinematic. While Kadyo and the farmer army he works for exhibit their resistance by taking up arms against the military, Lino Brocka and his cohorts manifest theirs in cinematic terms. The link is very important, as Diaz himself has pointed out, since it is through the machinery of cinematic propaganda that the Marcos regime (as any totalitarian regime would) had reinforced its position among the Filipinos. If Hesus the Revolutionary set a fantastical revolutionary movement in the near future, this film uses the one that took place for real in the past. Diaz’s intention is not just to capture the spirit of the age, but, as in the previous film, to use this piece of history to study the present and understand the state of affairs.
Heremias (Unang Aklat: Ang Alamat Ng Prinsesang Bayawak) (Heremias (Book One: The Legend Of The Lizard Princess), 2006)
Heremias (2006) was devised as the first part of a diptych (the sequel is yet to be shot) and follows the titular merchant (Ronnie Lazaro) who decides to bid farewell to the group of artisans he is a part of and go his own way. After a near-mythical journey against the forces of nature, he lands in a shady town where his ox gets stolen and goods burned. After he comes to terms with the fact that he is not going to get justice from the corrupt police department, he decides to observe the scene of crime himself, with a hope that the criminal would come back sooner or later. It is here that he learns that the local congressman’s son is going to rape and kill a girl. And it is here – almost towards the end of this nine-hour film – that there is a trace of any “drama”. Heremias, petrified, tries to convince the local police officer and the town priest to do something about it, in vain. Diaz apparently built the film on the idea of paralysis (“the metaphor of being numbed”) and it is only during this final dramatic segment, where, for the first time, Heremias shows signs of concern and empathy, that he comes out of this (sociopolitical and historical) numbness. In a way, Heremias is the Jesus figure of the story who, after a drastic spiritual awakening, realizes that there are people worst off than him and becomes willing to suffer for the sake of others (Diaz believes this quality to be quintessentially Filipino).
Formally, Heremias deviates starkly from its legendary predecessor. Diaz seems to have found a new alternative to suit his long duration filmmaking style in digital video, where there is no worry of wasting film stock. He shoots in extremely long shots but mixes in close up. Diaz’s compositions early on in the film embody both fast moving objects, such as automobiles, and Heremias’ lumbering oxcart as if providing temporal reference for his kind of cinema. However, he also seems to be in a highly experimental mode, trying to arrive at an aesthetic that he might build his later films on. As a result, Heremias seems a tad derivative and falls a notch below the preceding and following films of the director. Where in later films he would fittingly cut after three or four seconds before and after a character enters or leaves the frame, here he provides a leeway of over a quarter minute, unnecessarily making the shots self-conscious (There is an hour-long fuzzy shot of Heremias watching a bunch of stoned teenagers partying, whose length, I believe, is not justified). But many of these shots are also highly rewarding and some even emotionally cathartic (for instance, the sublime shot where the light from Heremias’ lantern pierces the screen gradually). Ultimately, the film comes across as a minor, transitional (but nevertheless commendable) work that has a lot going for it thematically.
Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death In The Land Of Encantos, 2007)
Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) was made immediately after the typhoon Reming/Durian devastated the town of Bicol (where the director had shot his previous two films), killing and displacing many families. The nine-hour film consists of two disparate threads the first of which plays out as a straightforward documentary where a filmmaker interviews the people affected by the disaster and gathers their opinion about the causes and consequences of the typhoon. The second thread in the film follows a fictional triad of artists who too live in the region of Bicol. Benjamin Agusan (Roeder Camanag) is a poet who has just returned from Russia and has discovered that his ex-lover has been buried under the outpouring of the volcano Mt. Mayon that was triggered by Reming. Then there are his friends Teodero (Perry Dizon), the level headed ex-poet who is now a fisherman, and Catalina (Angeli Bayani), a painter-sculptor who uses the debris spewed out by the volcano for her art. Benjamin is mentally disintegrating and has visions of his childhood and of his stay in Russia now and then. He is also hunted down by the government, which seems to have an agenda of killing all the soldiers and artists involved in the resistance, for his contribution to the anarchist movement. Diaz uses abstract time when dealing with sequences involving Benjamin wherein his immediate past, distant past and present (and possibly nightmares) reside in the same physical space, at times, like in The Mirror (1974) and The Corridor (1994).
Like in many contemporary works from around the world, fact and fiction reside alongside in Diaz’s film, even interpenetrating each other at times. Although this does reinforce the reality that the film is based on, Diaz views the marriage as a purely ethical decision intended to avoid exploitation of his people’s miseries (He had shot the documentary part before even deciding to make the film). As a result Encantos is like a Herzog film that encompasses its making-of. A peculiar thing that one notices about the film is that it is so full of artists – painters, sculptors, poets, filmmakers and writers all over. On that basis alone, one could say that Death in the Land of Encantos is Diaz’s most personal film. The film is built largely around long conversations that invariably end up discussing the role of artists in a revolution. Through the contrast between the two sections of the film, Diaz may just be exploring the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between artists and common folk that, as Evolution had elucidated, exploitative, commercial media have occupied. However, he is also very hopeful about the work of artists. Mt. Mayon is apparently symbolic of everything Filipino – both its beauty and its ugliness. Catalina making beauty out of its ugliness is what Diaz, as a filmmaker, seems to be attempting too – to embrace the state of Philippines in its entirety and use his art to correct its blemishes and restore its glory.
Melancholia (2008)
If Evolution of a Filipino Family delineated the Filipino political situation through the eyes of common folk (some of whom aid the resistance movement) and Death in the Land of Encantos revealed it through the point of view of the artists, Melancholia (2008) confronts the issue head on and presents the struggle from standpoint of the resistance fighters themselves. One gets the feeling that this is the film that Lav Diaz was working towards all along. Melancholia is divided starkly into three segments each of which takes place in different time frames. The first segment is set in the town of Sagada and simultaneously follows three seemingly unrelated characters. Rina (Malaya Cruz) is a nun who wanders the streets of the town collecting charity money for the poor, Jenine (Angeli Bayani) is a streetwalker who seems to be having some trouble doing her job and Danny (Perry Dizon) is a procurer who also surreptitiously runs live sex shows for willing customers. It is soon revealed that these personalities are only characters being played by the three as a part of a rehabilitation program initiated by Danny (actually Julian) to cope up with the loss of their kith and kin in the resistance movement. The progressively elliptical second and third segments of the film respectively show the time periods following and preceding the trio’s stint in Sagada and gradually reveal the actuality behind these masks that the three have put on.
True to its title, Melancholia is a film that wallows in sadness. It is also probably Diaz’s most cynical work to date (although Diaz is staunchly against cynicism: “There’s hope even if we still have a very corrupt and neglectful system. We cannot allow cynicism to rule us.”). It is, in fact, the film non-linear structure that reduces the intensity of this pessimism largely. By presenting the consequences before the cause, Diaz sets up an extended, enigmatic prelude that is put into perspective only after the third part of the film plays out. It is after the film has ended that we learn that these three characters have embarked on a process of unlearning, of shedding the knowledge about bitter realities and settling down into a state of ignorant bliss, of repudiating the harshness of truth for the comforts of illusion. And it is during the very final shot of the film, when the shattered and disillusioned Julian and Alberta move away from each other and out of the now-empty frame that we feel the entire weight of the seven-and-a-half-hour film being exerted on us. Melancholia is a purgatory of sorts – a limbo between the states of resistance and defeat – whose inhabitants can feel neither the vigor of life nor the solace of death. “Many people are like Alberta” tells one of the characters early on in the film. And that is the most disheartening part.
Walang Alaala Ang Mga Paru-paro (Butterflies Have No Memories, 2009)
The director’s cut of Butterflies Have No Memories (2009) is something of a misnomer. For one, Diaz had to shoot and cut the film so that it didn’t run for a minute more than the one-hour mark. As a result, it feels as if Diaz had one eye on his film and the other on his watch. There are shots that are abruptly drained off their life and some that feel perfunctory. But the film also seems to mark a turning point in Diaz’s outlook towards the Filipino people. Perhaps for the first time, Diaz portrays the common folk (and perhaps a particular social class) as being almost completely responsible for their misery. In Butterflies, an ex-Chief Security Officer at the mines, Mang Pedring (Dante Perez), blames the mining company, which has withdrawn production after protests by the church and activist organizations, for the economic abyss he and his friends are living in. But it is also starkly pointed out to us that, while they were getting benefited by the mining company, these folks did nothing to set up alternate ways of business and earning and, as a result, find themselves foolishly hoping for a past to return, even when such a regression is harmful it is to the collective living on the island. Mang misguidedly plans to reverse time and reinstall the factory by kidnapping the daughter of the owner of the mining company (Lois Goff), who has returned to the island after several years and who calls Mang her second-father. What Mang tries to do overrides personal memory and disregards the fact that it is he who has lived like a moth, inside a cocoon. As, in the final shot, Mang and his friends stand wearing those Morione masks (which bring in the ideas of guilt, remembrance, conscience and redemption – so key to the film), they realize that they’ve gone way too far back in time than they would have liked – right into the moral morass of Ancient Rome.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Meditation mode? (bore)
There is a readers' letter in Sight & Sound (Aug 2010, published 2 weeks before August!), paraphrasing Nick James' editorial (S&S July 2010), from a spectator who cares more about the subjective comfort in a theatre seat than about the content of a film program.
The only important point to discuss in there is the "meditation mode" : the idea that CCC lovers would walk in a theatre (after tracking down the only one playing that film, and having longed for months or years for its public release) just for a relaxation appointment, using the filmic material as mere "elevator music"... This assumption is insulting, not only for the spectators, but for the filmmakers' work.
Here is another misconception about CCC : boredom is not an end in itself. And that's what detractors call it, out of ignorance. Modern Cinema called it "ennui" in the 60ies, which had the snub distinction of borrowed French vocabulary. Ennui is an existential state of mind (see the philosophical literature on Existentialism before you compare it to XXIst century internet idleness).
- Meditation is a self-absorbing ritual using a quality environment to reach inner calm (eyes closed, prayer, mantra) = centripetal
- Contemplation is attention of the inner self projected outwards into the environment observed (eyes wide open, quietude, harmony) = centrifugal
Well, that's how I conceive the difference between the contemplative mode at work in CCC, and the other acceptions of the word "contemplation", either connoted with religious philosophy (Transcendentalism), devout ritual (prayer) or some sort of yoga (mediation). Anybody who has seen CCC films would appreciate the distinction between metaphysical introspection (Transcendental Style, Modern Cinema) and the floating rêverie (CCC) offered by an artistic attention to the world.
HarryTuttle (Slower or Contemplative?): The idea of the long take is not to reveal signs that are invisible at the fast pace of intensified continuity. The intent is not to populate this down time, these empty frames with a profusion of hidden signs that would suddenly give more content, more power, more value to slower editing. [..]Is it impossible to attract a public to CCC with an invitation to a momentary contemplative state where the visual embrace of the screen supercedes the rationalisation we could make of it afterward? Can we get lost in the frame for a short while without questions, without answers? Can we appreciate a contemplative film for its contemplative value itself?Can we get a public to visit an art museum for its offering of plastic aesthetics alone? Can we enjoy the self-evident harmony of a natural landscape?It is an evasion without a destination. It is not advancing towards an end in sight with the pull of a suspense or the contentment of progression."
When I suggest that CCC proposes to enjoy emptiness for its sole contemplative value, I don't mean that this is an indifferent exercise in mediation, a lazy nap for the brains, an absent-minded lapse of reason.
In CCC there is no metaphysical cult of higher states of consciousness, like in the purist Zen enlightenment, or in the mystical austerity of a Benedictine monastery order.
In CCC there is no euphoria or Nirvana or catharsis to attain, like in the exposition to psychedelic or hypnotic slide shows, where the succession of images has no intrinsic purpose but to escape consciousness.
In CCC there is no indifference for the aesthetic material, like the tired man who uses easy-listening music or a quiet environment aiding access to deep sleep.
Otherwise all the creative input would come from the spectator's mind, its subconscious or its soul. And it would leave no role to the filmmaker. How could you consider CCC an empty vehicule to put bored people to sleep?
CCC has an artistic content and an artistic form that matter to the aesthetic experience of watching a film. But unlike the traditional narrative drama, a contemplative film does not ask rhetorical questions answered by the dénouement, it does not require the spectator to solve an enigma or dig out hidden symbols, it does not transport us on an escapist journey with immediate frustration/satisfaction, it does not seek stereotypical empathy with a hero. This is why CCC is not the typical storytelling that generates an artificial psychodrama providing a cathartic relief for our phobia and anxiety.
The purpose of CCC, like for non-figurative paintings or contemporary art, is elsewhere. There is no story to tell really, no plot to recount to your friends after the projection. Because CCC does not function with a causal dramaturgy that provides a state of departure and a state of accomplishment after a transformative journey. We cannot consume CCC like any other form of spectacle and entertainment, asking of it its dose of meaning and action.
Like in front of a painting, we venture inside a contemplative film. And despite the fact it unfolds within a duration of time (unlike a painting), the experience with CCC is more like a perpetual presence to the aesthetic landscape offered by the images, rather than a linear progression from one act to the next. It is not true in practice, as CCC also develops a filmic grammar in shots, scenes and sequences, with a de facto beginning and end. But their role in the contemplative storytelling is also changed. Each cut, each transition, each aggregation strive to represent the same presence to the film experience, rather than to add up successive logical bricks to form a big picture by the ending credits. Contemplation is an instant apprehension of the aesthetic universe developed by the filmmaker. The whereabouts of the characters become secondary, their fate accessory. This is not an assertive type of cinema that gives meaning to life with ready-made judgments and patronizing statements.
We don't go to CCC to get a masterclass on the state of the world, but to be present to that world, without fictive assumptions, without misdirected interrogations, without urgent solutions...
Appreciating contemplation for itself means to embrace a vista, to dedicate full attention to the images, to be aware of the details without trying to make sense, to absorb the fullness of its sum without confronting its parts to a competitive comparison.
Filmmakers often instill micro-dosage of intentions and signifiers, for personal reasons, to avoid alienating the narrative audience, to express a bit of themselves, their world view. But it works on another plane, and doesn't distract the purpose of the film constructed under contemplative modalities. It is rare to find a film that functions solely on a contemplative mode (not "meditative mode"), like stasis films for example.
However more and more art films incorporate the contemplative approach to mise en scène, to the point of transforming the narrative norms of storytelling in cinema, and confusing great many critics who have no idea what to do with them but to reject them and blame them for not fitting into the traditional mold they are comfortable with...
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