2008: The Year in Film

As most readers of this site are well aware, two studio releases dominated film conversation in the U.S. this year: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (WB) and Andrew Stanton's WALL·E (Disney-Pixar). With each manifesting a clearly identifiable - and divergent - politics, Hollywood did its best to provide choice in its multiplexes. Yet the alternatives were not those so much of 2008, but retroactively 2000, with the Bush-era, go-it-alone-unpopularly allegory The Dark Knight pitted against the ecological-alarmism of Al Gore. And as with that election, the same result, in box office terms, resulted: The Dark Knight moved to two second all-time in unadjusted numbers, while its opponent surpassed the very respectable $200 million mark, without winning the crown. Aesthetically, for this writer at least, The Dark Knight was much better than expected, as it improved on Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) by infusing its profoundly-visceral technique with a moral seriousness - and a real sense of living in the midst of terror - absent in Scorsese's nihilistic crime opus. (It also manages an equal somatic effect with far less gore.) WALL·E, on the other hand, suffered in comparison to Brad Bird's superior efforts of the past few years (namely, 2004's The Incredibles and 2007's Ratatouille), from a narratively-leaden final hour and the hypocracy of its anti-consummerism - as well as from its cheap jabs at the obese. None of this of course mattered for the film's appointment as the year's most critically-beloved work.

Not that WALL·E is entirely lacking in virtues: the film's famed first forty minutes are as good as everyone says. Where critical laurels truly seem misplaced (for this writer) is in the praise lavished on Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Tarsem's The Fall (2006), my joint selections for the year's worst. With regard to the Kaufman, Synecdoche provided 2008's most unrelentingly bleak vision of the world, effectively extrapolating from the filmmaker's proxy's own unhappiness a world in which all suffer from this same despair. Clear point-of-view? Yes. Unbelievably myopic and staggeringly unpleasant self-portrait of extreme self-concern? Certainly. The Tarsem, on the other hand, manages a balance of cloying sentimentally and sadism, supported by, as Lisa K. Broad puts it, a film grammar that is the functional equivalent of a novel penned by an illiterate.

Now on to the not awful... heck, on to the very good. For Tativille's two authors, Anderson and Broad, the distinction of the best American narrative film of the year belongs to Michel Gondry's evidently-undervalued Be Kind Rewind (pictured). Improving on his strong The Science of Sleep (2006), Gondry once again pulls together the often antithetical spheres of the cinema and the visual arts in his relational aesthetic-inspired latest foray into videotape nostalgia. This wasn't the funniest of a handful of strong American comedies in 2008 (Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Role Models and Forgetting Sarah Marshall were all funnier individually; Adam McKay's Step Brothers had its moments, most of which made their way into the film's many trailers, though McKay's mise-en-scène was mind-numbingly lazy) but it was certainly the finest in many other respects.

Then again, Japan provided a number of challenges to Gondry on the comedy front: Adrift in Tokyo (Satoshi Miki, 2007), Dainipponjin (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2007) and Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita), the purely funniest of the group, represent three rare instances of comic filmmaking that all touch on human transience and the institutions of its country of origin - which is to say, these were three remarkable works of art. Yet, none of the above could touch a fourth Japanese film of the past twelve months, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterpiece Tokyo Sonata, which like the former grouping dissects its nation's mythology and its present-day economic situation. Tokyo Sonata was Broad's choice for the film of the year and a very close second for Anderson.

My own choice for the film of the year - and Broad's #2 - was Lucrecia Martel's career-peak The Headless Woman (Argentina). For me, The Headless Woman proved the year's fullest inter-mixture of form and discourse, providing a genuine attempt to remake film language in the image of its material. It was the un-Diving Bell and Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel) in its achievement in providing a plausible platform for its protagonist's perceptual irregularity. In fact, from global reports, 2008 may well be a year defined ultimately by the Latin American cinema generally and Argentine film specifically.

But back to the local. Posted below are Lisa and my choices for the year's top ten, selected from our favorite New York and New Haven theatrical and festival screenings (with an additional unreleased picture from Northern Europe making the cut). Through the New Year, I will also link to our favorite colleagues' selections on various sister sites. Please check back in the coming days for these updates.

-Michael J. Anderson, 12/23/2008

• Michael J. Anderson, Tativille
• Lisa K. Broad, Tativille
• Andrea Janes, Spinster Aunt
• Pamela Kerpius, Scarlett Cinema
• Mike Lyon, Tits and Gore
  
• Matt Singer, Termite Art
• Richard Suchenski, Ten Best Films
  
• R. Emmet Sweeney, Termite Art
• Karen Wang, Scarlett Cinema
• Alberto Zambenedetti, Termite Art
  

Updated: A 'mini' year-end poll, comprised of tabulations of the above lists, is also available on Tativille affiliate Ten Best Films.

2008: Michael J. Anderson

The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, 2007)
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, 2007)
RR (James Benning, 2007)
Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
Adrift in Tokyo (Satoshi Miki, 2007)
Chouga (Darezhan Omirbaev, 2007)

Runners-up: Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita), Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood), Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky), Sparrow (Johnnie To), You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007).

Updated (3/15/09): My 2008 only list is now available here, with an English-language version here.

2008: Lisa K. Broad

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita)
The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, 2007)
Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky)
Sparrow (Johnnie To)
Redbelt (David Mamet)
You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

Retrospective Favorites of 2008: The Daughter of the Samurai (Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami, 1937), Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978), L'Immortelle (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963), Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968), Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957).

New Film: Gran Torino

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

That Gran Torino represents actor-director Clint Eastwood's best work in four years should come as no surprise: after all, this is the septuagenarian hyphenate's first on-camera turn since his 2004 masterpiece Million Dollar Baby. Though Gran Torino perhaps does not deserve that film's well-earned 'best picture' and 'best director' statues, Eastwood's latest embodiment minimally merits a third 'lead actor' citation. Indeed, Gran Torino showcases Eastwood's latest 'Dirty Harry' incarnation in his scene-chewing best, very much in the supremely-entertaining Heartbreak Ridge (1986) mold. Perhaps the Academy will seek to reward Eastwood in the same lifetime-achievement fashion that it did Paul Newman in 1986? If so, Eastwood's award would coincide appropriately with what might stand as his final career summation.

Gran Torino locates Eastwood's Walt Kowalski in modern-day Highland Park/Detroit, amid a decaying urban-scape populated by gang members and first- and second-generation Hmong immigrants. And Kowalski: a Korean-war vet, widower and retired auto worker, whose semi-estranged sons have long moved on to the suburbs and foreign-model SUVs. Kowalski spends his days alone with his golden lab, drinking copious amounts of PBR, coughing up blood and grunting at the indignity of living among brown lawns and unkempt homesteads - and given less than the slightest justification, initiating an unending (and admirably varied) string of racist profanities.

Following the attempted theft of Walt's eponymous car and an encounter with Hmong gang-bangers on the neighbor's front lawn, Eastwood's character grudgingly integrates himself into the lives of his neighbors, laterally stopping African-American youths with a firearm from harassing daughter Sue (Ahney Her), while her "pussy" white boyfriend cowers on the side, and supervising brother Thao (Bee Vang) as he works of his debt. Walt is befriended by the plucky Sue and mentors the introverted Thao, even managing to find the latter employment on a construction sit, following an exceedingly funny set-up in which Polish-American Walt and his Italian-American barber teach Thao how to talk like a man; Gran Torino is one of the year's funniest films.

It is also one of the most harrowing. A subsequent, lawless defense of the hard-working Thao collaterally leads to the young man's wounding in a drive-by shooting and to Sue's brutal rape at the hands of her cousin's gang. Having thus prompted the violence, Walt settles on a course of action that ultimately leads to his character's Christic sacrifice, replete with a crucifix pose after performing a sacrificial gesture. (Eastwood belies his hostility toward the Christian faith with his supreme act of brotherly love.) At this moment, as likewise in the film's commencing expository dialogue, Eastwood's direction demonstrates a noticeably heavy hand nonetheless that does Gran Torino few favors. As with his weaker offerings of the past three years - namely, Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Changeling (2008) - Eastwood's cinema does drift toward the tendency of producers Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard to overtly-literalize character psychology. Gran Torino is not entirely beyond their negative influence.

Nonetheless, this is an Eastwood film to its core, calling his famed character-construction to account for the vigilantism that manifests itself both locally and across a forty-year corpus. Here, the solution of sacrifice becomes the fated consequence of a life's work, unavoidable as it is imperative within the film's narrative logic. Speaking of, revenge is shown less to be immoral in Gran Torino (as it is represented in the similarly-revisionist Mystic River, 2003) than tactically-ineffective. Either way, the vigilantism of Dirty Harry (1971) et al. continues to reveal unintended consequences. Eastwood extends his auto-critique.

He also demonstrates a continued engagement with the present, which in the case of Gran Torino finds a form in his lament over white-flight and in a symbolic passing-of-the-torch to an immigrant next generation. With respect to the latter, Eastwood seems to favor assimilation in contrast to another 2008 flash point, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which assumes a more politically-expedient multi-culturalist perspective. Of course, none of the above makes Gran Torino particularly timely, which is unusual for the director of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Heartbreak Ridge, A Perfect World (1993), Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). In these films, Eastwood successively summons the spirit of post-Watergate distrust in institutions, Reagan-era patriotism, late Bush/early Clinton-era anxieties over single-motherhood, post-9/11 discourses of violent response, Terry Schiavo and Bush II-period wartime equivocations. However important in reality, gangland violence's current under-reporting in the media makes Gran Torino feel behind its time. Yet, in uncharacteristically extricating himself from topicality, Eastwood has again renewed his cinema.

Feliz aniversário, Manoel!

Manoel de Oliveira, one of the true giants of world cinema and a strong contender for the greatest of all Portuguese artists (in any medium), turns one-hundred today. It has been reported that Oliveira will spend the centennial of his birth on the set of his latest production, Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loira. Nothing could be more appropriate certainly, nor anything quite so gratifying for those admirers of Oliveira, who, much like myself, have long entertained this scenario. After all, does not a filmmaker who has succeeded in making more than one film per year throughout his nineties deserve to make history as the first active 100 year-old auteur?* That his primary subject has long been an ironized assessment of Europe's waning civilization - from the standpoint of an inheritor of its aristocratic high culture - makes his unparalleled time as a working artist all the more poetic. For those of us in the cinema, today belongs to one of our greatest masters.

For those who are less familiar with the director, let me direct you to a series of posts (linked to below) that I have dedicated to Oliveira during my three-and-a-half years writing for this site. The fact that I have written on the Portuguese filmmaker more than any other individual is I suppose the greatest testament I could offer to the artist's continued vitality; his films have inspired me to make my thoughts public like none other. Feliz aniversário, Manoel!

Full-length reviews and essays available at Tativille: Doomed Love (1978), Francisca (1981), No, or the Vainglory of Command (1990), Magic Mirror (2005), Belle Toujours (2006).

Capsule pieces (for my annual 'top ten' lists) available at Ten Best Films: I'm Going Home (2001), The Uncertainty Principle (2003), A Talking Picture (2003).

* Leni Riefenstahl's Impressions Underwater (2002) was released to commemorate the then-living German filmmaker's 100th birthday. Riefenstahl, however, shot the documentary film while still in her nineties.

New Film: Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

Wang Bing's non-fiction Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming, 2007) establishes a new twenty-first century standard for conceptual minimalism: a single frontal camera set-up for most of its 186-minute duration, occasionally alternating between a default medium-length composition and less ubiquitous medium close-up framings. In front of the documentarian's mini-DV camera, He Fengming (pictured), in a near endless stream of expertly-narrated anecdotes, recounts her experiences as the victim of Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist purge and the subsequent Cultural Revolution. Wang uses neither archival footage nor photographs to illustrate Fengming's personal history, limiting his film instead to his subject's on-camera act of recollection. Fengming is more than He's opportunity to tell her story, it is her chance to speak.

Fengming's identification with anti-Maoist factions began with her husband's publication of an article warning against the dangers of bureaucratic excesses. In spite of the fact that both He and her husband were avowedly socialist in their politics, and that Fengming offered no anti-governmental statement either publicly or privately, the PRC successively labeled each as "rightist," leading to their submission to "struggle sessions" in which their friends and colleagues were called upon to offer denunciations. With their guilt thereby established, each was reassigned to labor camps - Fengming with a substantial reduction in her pay grade and change of vocations, and her husband with a loss of employment. Fengming and her husband - whose love story is among this year's most luminous - were thus among the victims of the first Anti-Rightist movement, which commenced in 1957, and would lead to the internment of hundreds of thousands of persons, 99.8% of which were exonerated after Mao's death.

Fengming and her husband's assignments occurred during the early stages of the Greap Leap Forward (1958-1961) in which Mao's disasterous agricultural policies lead to the starvation of 30,000,000. Miraculously, Fengming was somehow able to escape this fate, unlike so many in the camps - she and her comrades were forced to eat stolen cotton seeds - and was eventually cleared of the Rightist tag in the early 1960s. With the Cultural Revolution, however, Fengming was again identified as a Rightist and was accordingly sent to live with an extremely poor country family. As Fengming notes, theirs was a dirt-walled house without rafters or ceiling panels. (Cinematic comparisons to the family in Yellow Earth [Chen Kaige, 1984] seem apt.) Yet, as poor as they were, Fengming's newest hosts showed a great deal of compasion, as did those at the Dry Gulch farm, who housed He during her visit.

Speaking of, the Dry Gulch anecdotes offers two of the year's most vivid images: a cave filled with the discarded blankets of the deceased, and, thirty years later, the mounds and faded grave-markers of a make-shift cemetery. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir in this respect is a supremely visual work, even as Wang's camera does not stray from the film's eponymous subject. However, it is an imagery generated not by potentially-problematic reproductions (given the film's inherent melodrama, an entertainment in suffering might entail) but through He's expert storytelling, shading and foreshadowing - a perfect, similarly visual moment is her description of a possibly wolf-filled winter landscape - concealing and repeating for clarity. Fengming brings her unspeakable world back into existence.

Of course, Fengming put her narrational facility to use in an earlier written memoir on the same subject, thereby prompting the question of why a film version. The answer, it would seem, is present in the camera's ubiquitous subject: Fengming's face and more generally, her corporeality. Wang's film offers its spectator the experience of this woman's presence, her imminence at the time of Fengming's filming. Once more, we do not simply have the telling of a story, but the body (and spirit) of the woman who suffered, before our eyes, letting her memories roll of her tongue in near real-time.

Wang emphasizes this embodiment in a prefatory passage and coda that both film He in her everyday environs. In the former, we see her walking to her apartment house over the surrounding icy streets, and in the latter, sitting on her couch watching television and answering a phone call (from another survivor of the camps). She is not the abstract author of her written memoirs, but a physical member of the world we share. Fengming is also representative of the 550,000 denounced rightists; this again is a 'Chinese' memoir.

Ultimately, a story like Fengming's needs no aesthetic justification. Her's is an enormously vital story in any society - and no less in liberal ones like our own. Fengming's life is a reminder, if any is necessary, that we must always resist the suppression of opposing points of view, no matter to what end. Nonetheless, Wang's film does more than instruct, it does more than give voice to its' extraordinary subject, which is certainly all that we might ask of a work of Fengming's importance: Wang's latest provides an ontological justification for its (otherwise redundant) celluloid representation.

I would like to thank Lisa K. Broad for her many insights included above. I wish to dedicate this piece to the memory of Andre Bazin, whose life - and the fiftieth anniversary of whose death - has been celebrated this weekend at a Yale University conference organized by Dudley Andrew.

New Film: You, the Living

Writer-director Roy Andersson's You, the Living (Du levande, 2007), which as of the date of this writing remains unreleased in the U.S., represents the sixty-five year old Swedish filmmaker's second feature this decade, following his superlative 2000 release Songs from the Second Floor. For this author, the somewhat qualified, if not mixed response to the earlier film made for one of the new decade's biggest surprises, inasmuch as Songs...'s admixture of Luis Buñuel and Tativille namesake Jacques Tati resulted in one of the finest Swedish films since Ingmar Bergman's late masterworks (namely his 1982 Fanny and Alexander and 1984 After the Rehearsal). Whether or not You, the Living equals the earlier film's stature - I disqualify myself from making this judgment on the basis of my hazy recollections of the prior work's particulars, which of course I should have done likewise when making the larger claim for Songs...'s relationship to a national cinema that I know very little about - it minimally qualifies as a major work of the European fin-de-siècle cinema. (The rarity of internationally-distributed Swedish films of this distinction obviously occasioned the above claim.)

With two exceptions, You, the Living is structured as a series of sometimes related sometimes not one-shot scenes that culminate in a punch-line or in its withholding. Parenthetically, the two aforesaid variations occur when one set-up is followed by a second (though never a third) in an adjacent space. In most instances, the characters of one take do not return in the following shot, though in many instances they do return sporadically throughout Andersson's narrative. Occasionally, however, a variable series of places are linked in the telling of a mini-narrative embedded within the film's broader structure of largely unrelated episodes. In a number of these sub-narrations, the sequence is initiated by the sketching of the contours of a dream. Thus, the proceeding reads as surreality, as in the very funny passage where a figure's breaking of age-old china leads to his electric chair execution or to a more poignant marriage fantasy with a domestic interior rolling atop rails.

Yet, it is perhaps less You, the Living's exceedingly droll humor than its articulation of its comedy within extreme depth, and again with infrequent recourse to cutting, that provides the film's relationship to the cinema of Tati. Though Andersson typically does not opt for the French maestro's multiple centers of interest (that compete for the spectator's attention within a single frame) his use of a similarly deep space does register in much the same way as 'objective.' They are read as subject to the viewer's act observation, even when it becomes clear that what follows is the visualization of a dream. The reason for the maintenance of this ontological distinction, and for our dissonance in viewing the internal as an external, Albertian space, seems to be Andersson's adoption of forced perspective, as site collaborator Lisa K. Broad puts it, of the looking into a diorama-like space. The film's studio setting acts to contain the action.

Nonetheless, Andersson does not allow his viewer full protection from reciprocity. Indeed, the dreams again are told directly into the camera, just as the film's second set-up features a grizzled female figure singing to the apparatus. Beside her, a pink, late-day light reflects upon a tree, as it does on the skyline behind her, though in the instance of the latter, unlike on the tree, an appropriate angle is maintained. As such, it becomes evident that You, the Living's mise-en-scène obtains an extreme artificiality to parallel the outburst of song that has become this scene's ultimate subject. Andersson's work truly earns the distinction of surreality in its expression of another reality consubstantial to the real world we think we know. Though You, the Living's does mark it dreams, those passages outside it obtain the same dream-like quality.

The previously-mentioned hard-living female returns in another set-up shortly, though she quickly disappears into the stage craft, with an apparent shift to other sources of interest. That is, the punch-line in the passage would seem to lie elsewhere. When, in this scene, last call is announced, the convergence of persons around the bar, from outside the original frame, would seem the natural source of comedy, though Andersson avoids the obvious joke - that is, to absolutely fill the frame. In this respect, our expectations and their subversion each derive from the set-up's static framing. Hereafter, a second chance for comedy comes with a young woman professing her admiration to the lead singer of the Black Devils. (They will be the married couple of the subsequent dream.) However, it is not even this aggressive fanaticism, but the sudden reappearance of the older woman, who continually claims to be misunderstood, that proves to be the punch-line. You, the Living's comedy, at least throughout this particular take, is generated by our narrative expectations.

Other punch-lines require a baseline, as for instance with the aforesaid dish-breaking. Here, the passage opens with a group of dinner guests surrounding an extraordinarily long table covered in fine china. Since the forthcoming pulling of the tablecloth does not exactly leap to mind, Andersson creates the comedy by planting an expectation of spectacle in the dream narration; consequently, the waiting proves as important as the gutsy action. Of course, a disconcerting note is struck with the swastikas that are revealed by the act. This dark undercurrent, a reminder of Sweden's "neutral" WWII stance, is reaffirmed by this narrative-within-the-narrative's conclusion with the protagonist's execution.

While brassy, a subsequent graphic sex scene outdoes every other moment in You, the Living on the level of its audacity. With a large woman on top supplying all the effort as the skinny gentleman below complains about finances, Andersson has very lewdly succeeded in sketching the archetypal impervious Scandinavian. (Let us just say that the comedy here resides in what we are not able to see.) As in the film's closing shot, the fin-de-siècle malaise is precisely construed at this moment.

With regard to the film's conclusion, You, the Living's opening set-piece is belatedly fulfilled, albeit at the expense of a dream that is not represented directly (unlike the aforesaid fantasies), creating a structure where the vignettes, ultimately, embed themselves within the large structure of a bracketing dream. Then again, Andersson's closing note, his final dream reality, though extraordinarily light in tone, reaffirms the film's occasional inquietude. Andersson's is a Sweden and Europe on decline, awaiting the bombers, even as his alienated protagonists face 'Lethe's ice-cold wave.'

You, the Living is available on a subtitled, region-2 DVD through UK distributor Artificial Eye.

New Film: A Christmas Tale / Un conte de Noël

Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), from a screenplay by Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu, opens stateside to near unanimous orgiastic praise, save for a smattering of immediately dismissible complaints that the film is overly long and/or boring - one's inability to engage with a film is not a sufficiently empirical argument by which to establish a work's relative merit; chances are pretty good in such instances that it is the reviewer rather than the work solely that wants - and to resident critical curmudgeon Armond White's critique that the director's latest "isn't repugnant, just regressive." (For this writer, White's contrariness and his lack of political correctness does not only not disqualify his opinions, but in fact confirms the vitality of his film criticism, even when he gets it wrong; dissent is nothing to fear, or to classify as "dangerous," as the anti-White watchdog site once qualified it.) On the side of more measured praise, Time Out's invaluable Geoff Andrew, who as it happens was "consistently engaged," remarked on the film's "lively if sometimes annoyingly arbitrary use of flamboyant stylistic devices." Setting aside whether or not Desplechin's formal choices are indeed 'annoying,' it is through this question of the arbitrariness of A Christmas Tale's formal choices that this writer seeks to place Desplechin's latest, both film historically and qualitatively.

A Christmas Tale opens with voiced-over narration and black paper cut-outs enacting the tragic history of the Vuillard family. Desplechin utilizes the former technique repeatedly in the film, though in future he frequently transforms the initial interior monologues into exterior vocal exposition, addressed directly into the camera. In these moments A Christmas Tale achieves a measure of immediacy, of vitality effectively foreclosed against by classical narrative cinema and its system of diegetic formation. Here, classical form is not only continually an option, but so is its transgression, for which Desplechin repeatedly opts.

On the conventional side of this rule-breaking, Desplechin's cutting reads as Godardian in its frequent usage of the jump cut and derivative of Alain Resnais circa 1963 (Muriel, namely) in its narrative elliptically. Musically, A Christmas Tale's selections range from Charles Mingus - this former sign of modernity now signifies the film's older generation - to hip hop, with youngest son Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) acting as D. J. In the utilization of this latter musical form (likewise present in the director's 2004 Kings and Queen) the film's current-ness is vividly construed. A Christmas Tale is resolutely a work of the present, of a post-modernity.

Why postmodern rather than modern, given especially the narratological inspiration of the 'New Wave'? For starters, A Christmas Tale trades on a strategy that combines the disparate, particularly on the somewhat ephemeral level of texture - hence the frequency of bad metaphors (in reviews of the work) comparing Desplechin's work with over-filled holiday confectionery. Narratively, this sense of 'post' finds representation in the feeling of aftermath, of a dysfunctional family experiencing qualified restoration. A Christmas Tale comes from precisely the same mold as Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), with which it shares the classification of modern, or again postmodern Christmas classic. (Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander [1982] likewise is a much remarked-upon source, as is the less commonly quoted The Dead, John Huston's masterful 1988 adaptation of James Joyce's The Dubliners.)

So now that the qualitative is being articulated, it remains to be said that Desplechin's is often a distinctively funny, and yes entertaining work, thanks in no small measure to Mathieu Amalric's anti-functional middle son, which is perhaps best illustrated in his misanthropic exchange with matriarch Catherine Deneuve, who professes to dislike her third child as much as he does her. Desplechin axiom Emmannuelle Devos and Deneuve's real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni additionally make welcomed supporting turns as the lover and wife of the aforementioned brothers. They helped to bring the Vuillard's to vivid life.

But back to the matter at hand: again, is the form organically-generated or is it arbitrary? The short answer is that it is both. On the level of effect, Desplechin's intuitive filmmaking does demonstrate his care with selecting variable forms, in creating a work that continually succeeds in being formally unexpected. The word that most immediately springs to mind is free - though a freedom that is hard-worn by the film's formal choices. To once again evoke Godard, and especially My Life to Live (1962), A Christmas Tale is a work that opts for every non or anti-classical technique open to its maker. A Christmas Tale never falters texturally.

Yet, on the level of the specific, the director's choices do not always or even often follow from the work's narrative content. One of the most remarkable examples is a sudden split screen in the doctor's office that Desplechin seems to adopt in lieu of shot/reverse cutting. Similarly, there is the usage of irises with no other clear justification than their unusual-ness. Or I suppose the director's free application of technique, his intuition. A Christmas Tale is properly postmodern in the sense that the signifier dislodges from the signified. Style no longer serves its narrative or thematic content as much as it seeks an effect: to procure the unexpected. Though not unexpected in the sense of shock. Rather, Desplechin's point seems to be the film's multi-grained texture; its ornate filigree as Lisa K. Broad puts it. In the words of this author, the semantic meaning of forms has been expelled and replaced with figures chosen purely for their syntactic effectiveness.

Sarabande: The Poetic Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky (Co-Written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

Screening under the heading "Sarabande: The Poetic Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky," the American avant-garde filmmaker's three most recent works represent a peak in not only the artist's superlative latter-day corpus, but in the experimental cinema of the first decade of the twenty-first century - alongside the 16mm cinemas of James Benning and Tacita Dean, among others. United not only by this same 16mm format and their enveloping silence, Dorsky's most recent films (Song and Solitude, 2006; Sarabande and Winter, 2008) likewise share a preternatural color palette, abyssal spaces, and "crisp" and "soft" variations in texture. Sarabande, for example, achieves many of the most luminous hues, as with the supernatural crimson of the leaves (pictured above); an indistinct, gauzy green that saturates the celluloid; and scores of tones and their combinations from a single coral to a spectural set of lens fares that paint the camera lens. The same short, moreover, supplies one of the best examples of the final category with a soft blue along the bottom of the frame, which plays against more metallic diagonal gold streaks that descend from the upper left. Sarabande, along with Song and Solitude in particular, affirms the aesthetic potential of the 16mm medium.

Yet, it is not simply the found subject matter or even the films' extraordinary light sources that account for their successes; rather, what is truly distinctive in Dorsky's most recent films is their unwavering plastic sense. In each work, Dorsky does not so much shoot a variety of subjects through found filters or lattices, but instead films spaces that compress and erase a series of planes that alternate the deep blacks and vibrant highlights spoken of above. To quote the filmmaker, he produces "models of existence" as opposed to images of the world - models of subjective vision that articulate a set of spatial vectors which crash (silently, of course) into a single, two-dimensional composition. This is not exactly to say that the images are flat. More precisely, they play with flatness and depth, dictated by the degree of illumination found in the specific images.

Or, in the words of Lisa K. Broad, Dorsky's graphic compositions resist a theatrical cinema conceived not only as fiction, but as the cinematic space as a box that holds objects. Sarabande, etc. think of the screen as a screen. This is not cinema as painting but cinema as itself in the truest sense - a cinematic flatness.

New Film: Rachel Getting Married (Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, condenses many of the key preoccupations of a three-decade directorial career that is better-known for its less personal The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Oscar-aspirant Philadelphia (1993) examples, or even for its inexplicable remakes - The Truth About Charlie (2002) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) - than for its more accomplished and integral Melvin and Howard (1980) and Something Wild (1986), or for his assured cycle of concert films, including Talking Heads instantiation Stop Making Sense (1984). Thus, to rephrase slightly, Rachel Getting Married condenses Demme at his best - a Demme that is all-to-often not on view.

Shot on hand-held DV by frequent collaborator Declan Quinn, Rachel Getting Married follows sister-of-the-bride Kym (Anne Hathaway) as she returns to her southwestern Connecticut home for the marriage of big sis Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) to musician Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe). With Kym in rehab as the film commences, Demme and Lumet's narrative gradually discloses the traumatic underpinnings of her chemical use, which she has kept under control for the previous nine months. In one of the first scenes following her somewhat ambivalent reunion with Rachel, Kym clumsily enters a mandated twelve-step meeting where she unknowingly crosses paths with best man to be Kieran (Mather Zickel). Though Kieran and Kym will shortly engage in a romantic tryst, the primary dramatic upside of their coupling becomes the revelation that Rachel has chosen best friend Emma (Anisa George) as her maid of honor.

It is indeed the estranged bonds of Rachel and Kym's broken nuclear family that will provide much of the film's melodramatic grist, just as it is the wedding's preparations and ceremonies that account equally for its unmistakable texture. Set in a communal-minded, multi-racial milieu, the WASPy girls' frigid interactions introduce dissonance into Demme's utopia. Musicians are constantly rehearsing, vows are delivered in a Capella (in Neil Young lyrics - recall Neil Young: Heart of Gold, 2006), and Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock, 1998) makes an appearance at the wedding reception. In other words this a very Demme-ian utopia, brought to life with the songs and the performers that have populated the director's documentary sidebar.

Moreover, the synthetic quality of the ceremonies' cultural sources strongly mark this as (good) Demme territory. Whereas Something Wild provided one of the templates for generic inter-mixture in the American cinema, along with the work of fellow post-modernist Jim Jarmusch, Rachel Getting Married's combine occurs on the level of culture, incorporating jazz, Brazilian percussion and South Asian dress into the bi-racial ceremony. Obviously a taste for any of the above is by no means a criticism, though their artificial applications, especially in the very current if altogether arbitrary interest in India, is. Demme has always been cool - after all Something Wild does feature The Feelies - for better or for worse.

This worse comes in on the level of Rachel Getting Married's inauthenticity. Make no mistake, to say that the film features inauthenticity is not to say that it is inauthentic, even if Demme seems to endorse the values his picture espouses. This is a real world of real people who share the same artificiality. Theirs is a world immured from the stresses of finance or class, where a utopianism can be practiced between outbursts of bourgeois self-distruction. Contrary to those critics who have professed their desire to attend a wedding like the film's, this piece's writers were more irritated than envious.

Yet, none of the above is to argue that Rachel Getting Married is anything other than a good film. Whatever one may feel of Demme's calculated cool, the director does know the world he inhabits, and one suspects, the people with whom he associates. The film's politics may suffer from streaks of the utopian and the self-congratulatory, but Rachel Getting Married nonetheless wears its ethos, from the aforesaid cultural pluralism to the touchingly expressed wish that a soldier come home soon, lightly and with grace. There is a life to Demme's film, whatever its shallowness.

The 46th New York Film Festival: Tôkyô sonata (Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

Warning: the following post contains spoilers in the fifth paragraph.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tôkyô sonata, from a story by Max Mannix and screenplay by Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, caps what has been a very strong year for new Japanese cinema in New York. Following three superior comedies at this year's New York Asian Film Festival - Adrift in Tokyo (Satoshi Miki, 2007), Dainipponjin (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2007) and Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita) - Kiyoshi Kurosawa's telescopic latest stakes out more dramatic terrain in its portrayal of Japanese institutions in crisis. In Tôkyô sonata, Kurosawa challenges the Japanese male, the stability of the familial unit, the economic health according to which many of its institutions have been re-orientated and Japan's (seemingly) diminishing place on the world stage. While Adrift in Tokyo (the Japanese family), Dainipponjin (its cultural mythology and the status of the male) and Fine, Totally Fine (again the family and also the more universal subject of maturation) all address topics of Japan's institutional health and self-image, no film this year can claim the comprehensiveness and ambition of Tôkyô sonata's diagnosis.

Tôkyô sonata commences in the same narrative territory as Laurent Cantet's 2001 Time Out, and even Yasujiro Ozu's I Graduated, but... (1929), with family patriarch Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) losing his job at the outset in a cost-cutting measure that will relocate his firm to China. As with the earlier French picture, Sasaki finds himself unable to tell his wife that he is newly unemployed, compelling the middle-aged former administrator to spend his days amid the island nation's unemployed throngs, standing in line at work agencies - where he is assured that he will never find work to match his earlier position (concisely describing an economy and nation in decline) and where he rejects their initial offers (cf. the Ozu) - and for free rice porridge, in spaces that look directly lifted out of My Man Godfrey's (1936) Depression-era waterfronts. Sasaki soon meets a former classmate who has a three-month jobless head start on his pal, having cultivated a routine that includes a very funny, little-known cell phone feature. Indeed, in spite of the tragic nature of his position, Sasaki's classmate infuses Tôkyô sonata with much of the film's distinctive light humor.

Younger son Kenji's (Inowaki Kai) plot-line likewise introduces the comic into Tôkyô sonata with the twelve year old's audacious defiance of his school teacher, whom he notes was reading manga porn on his commuter train. This defense leads to complete classroom chaos, wherein one of the young Kenji's classmates claims that a "revolution" is afoot. Societal dissolution has spread, in other words, to the school house. Yet, Kenji, in spite of his teacher's insistence that he is being bullied by the mostly introverted young teen, is most interested in learning piano, which his father opposes on principle, even after he receives indications of his son's virtuosity. Piano seems to be an ill-suited hobby for the young Japanese man.

Sasaki's harsh treatment of his younger son proceeds from his feeling that his older son Takahashi (Yû Koyanagi) was coddled in his younger years. After breezing into and out of the family home earlier in the film, Taka suddenly proclaims his intention of joining the United States military, which he points out protects Japan. (At a festival where an opening weekend screening prompted a "down with capitalism" shout at the end of the picture, and where any anti-American screed, no matter how trivial or poorly conceived, receives reflexive applause, the apparently reasoned choice to join the American military absolutely silenced festival-goers.) While Taka will ultimately resist Japan's one-time war enemy, his desire to serve his nation again falls outside of the corporate paradigm that the quintessential Sasaki believes to be the only path for the Japanese male, in spite of his personal failure.

The most passive resistance to the film's patriarch and to circumscribed societal positions is enacted by stay-at-home mother Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi). Refusing the divorce that Taka encourages, Megumi finally defies her husband in playing an active role in a crime for which she is the victim. Without being too specific, suffice it to say that this incident prompts an allegorical "earthquake," hoped for in an earlier line of dialogue, that finally leaves each of the family members effected and in need of a new beginning after a late film trauma. The rattled Sasaki family, seated together at the end in a messed living space, will thus begin their collective redemption, figured in the father's tacit acceptance of a new class (occasioned by his evident peace with a janitorial position and his return of a large sum of money) and Kenji's concluding piano recital. As a family unit, the Sasaki's resist Japan's capitalistic value system.

Of course, 'the earthquake' spoken of above is a long time coming - that is, without a revolutionary turning over; perhaps it is closer in spirit to a landslide. Kurosawa and his fellow screenwriter construct their narrative upon a pattern of repetitions with an increasing set of variations that finally shatter the familial cohesiveness that is under burgeoning pressure from the first. The tension of Sasaki's efforts to preserve normalcy lead to the film's late passage devastations in an ever increasing pace of cross-cutting. In this regard, Tôkyô sonata's elegant conclusion provides needed, real-time relief.

More immediately distinctive, however, are Kurosawa's expressionist spaces, with their projections of narrative dynamics and drama in a sudden rain, background pools of blue light and in the muffled sight and sound of a passing train detectable in a horizontal slit of glass. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's filmmaking touch appears most vividly in his mise-en-scène, in those visual accents that perfectly underline accompanying narrative feeling. On this level, Kurosawa has never been better; and yet, it is ultimately the breadth and ambition of Tôkyô sonata's societal critique that determines its status as the director's masterpiece. Needless to say, this is one of the year's very best films.

Tôkyô sonata will receive U.S. distribution through Regent Releasing.

The 46th New York Film Festival: The Headless Woman

Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin cabeza), from an original screenplay by the director, marks 2008's first piece of unequivocally great filmmaking. Contrary to critical intimations of The Headless Woman's narrative opacity, Martel builds her picture entirely around female lead Veró's (María Onetto) distressed psychology following an automobile accident of her own distracted making. Driving down a rural road paralleling a concrete ravine, Veró hears and feels a sudden thud as she attends to her cell phone. A dog, which Martel introduced previously as belonging to a group of indigenous Argentine boys, lies lifeless on the road. Veró shortly stops her car, exiting into the sudden rainfall. Martel's camera remains in the vehicle, maintaining an extreme shallow focus (putting Veró outside the thin foreground focal plane, beyond a rain dropped-studded window) that dominates not only this sequence but the whole of the Argentine director's film.

Martel's decision to maintain excessively shallow depth of field in her wide screen compositions, many of which present Veró and Veró only in focus, serve to emphasize the cardinality of her psychology to the film's narrative - that is, it is purely Onetto's registration of the various shades of her character's anguish and discomposure that comprise the sharply-focused vectors of the mise-en-scène. Moreover, her addled mentation finds a corollary in the film's elliptical narration, which jumps ahead with protagonist and spectator alike uncertain as to where we find ourselves and how we got there. Of course, Martel's refusal to introduce her spaces with establishing shots promotes this sense of spatial unmooring that clearly inflicts Veró.

Ultimately, Veró acknowledges that she may have hit something more than the canine that we see in the film's opening, thus explaining the depth of her despair. However, with police confirmation that no deaths have been reported near the accident site, Veró's anxiety begins to dissipate, and as such, the film's mimetic fog begins to lift. Veró, in other words, increasingly seems capable of processing her surroundings (though in keeping with the film's spirit, further reversals will dictate additional stylistic modulations).

Yet, Martel continues to maintain the aforementioned framing strategies even when the psychological haze becomes less all-consuming. In this respect, Martel's stylistic choice takes on a second, in its case social function: to close off Veró from the surrounding lower depths. The Headless Woman's narrative, following the additional turn(s) of the plot alluded to above, will likewise articulate Argentine class relations, visible not only in the manual labor performed by the indigenous populations, but in the corrupt dealings that ultimately deny Veró her just fate. This use of metaphor, similarly richly mined in the director's strong debut feature, La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), is both as precisely articulated as the lead's psychology, and also as richly-layered. The director's social critique must be seen additionally, for instance, in the film's notation of incest and the insistence of Veró's aunt that her still beautiful, though middle-aged niece has not kept herself up. Indeed Veró's extended family surely functions as a metonym for Argentina's corrupt upper class, which is by no means exonerated by the sudden pangs of liberal guilt that Veró seems to experience.

All of this is to argue for the organic rigor of Martel's latest, and most certainly greatest work. What the above largely fails to note in its emphasis in the relationship of form to content in The Headless Woman is the sheer beauty of the imagry that enacts Veró's remarkably credible psychology - unlike such lesser lights of recent art cinema such as Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), which attempts a comparatively similar visualization of non-normative cognitive states, though without a shread of Martel's film's success - while concealing the world beyond her mental and social spheres.

I would like to as always thank my wife, Lisa K. Broad, for those insights of hers that I have cribbed either knowingly or unknowingly. She certainly knows which they are.

The 46th New York Film Festival: RR

If James Benning's RR (2007, 112 mins.) does indeed prove to be the filmmaker's final work in the 16mm format, as was suggested by Mark McElhatten prior to last night's Views from the Avant-Garde screening, Benning will have selected the ideal content for his farewell to the medium: projected celluloid's first subject, the arriving train^. More accurately, RR is comprised of 43 separate set-ups of trains crossing into and out of the filmmaker's static landscapes, thus repeating the essential format of his 2004 masterworks, Ten Skies and 13 Lakes - where the filmmaker procured variations in immobile ten-minute takes. Of course, RR refuses the countdown structure of the previous two entries, as well as their fixed durations, adopting instead a logic, once again, that requires the appearance and subsequent disappearance of the eponymous trains. In this way, RR denies the anticipation of its end that is written into the earlier films'; Benning's latest offers no similar substitution for expected narrative closure.

RR does however present a structure that is otherwise identical essentially to Ten Skies and 13 Lakes: like these films, RR proceeds according to the minutest of variations. In Benning's most recent, the visual and auditory content almost immediately proves redundant, less of course on the level of the landscapes themselves, than on the ostensible subjects of the images - the freight trains passing through Benning's assorted landscapes. As such, RR quickly encourages its viewer to search out areas of interest beyond these, corners of the frame where an unrelated movement or sound encourages the spectator's redirected attention. An early instance occurs in an Alabama location where a fish's jumping activates the previously placid water occupying the lower half of the frame. With this sudden ripple and the accompanying sound, we search for something new in the image, for variability in content.

This pursuit of difference manifests itself in many of the film's seemingly less significant details. In a Milwaukee location, a single piece of blue refuse in the lower left corner of the frame immediately attracts our attention, even as the abutting train passes by (at least for a time) unnoticed. Here, it is this primarily color highlight that prompts our interest. Elsewhere, a California view attracts our interest for the strangeness of the space, where a bridge crosses over a dark red flat. In this instance we search for any sign of the landscape's composition - if it is water, which in fact it is (covered in alga) we seek that ripple that would indicate its status. Again, the train crosses through the frame largely unnoticed. Or in yet another subsequent set-up, the appearance of the train no less than cancels the background landscape, largely excluding visual interest from the shot.

Of course, there are places where we do focus more intently on the train, whether it is a zip shadow holding stationary in counterpoint to the moving train or at Caliente curve in California where the foregrounded train's disappearance from the frame is followed presently by its second appearance in the recesses of the composition. In this instance, Benning demonstrates a wryness that appears often in RR: among the more memorable examples are the film's only withholding of a train - the approaching headlights prove to be a truck driving atop the rail bridge - and the NWA soundtrack displaced by the sound of the on-camera train. In the latter case, the shot's primary source of interest becomes whether this music will recommence once the the train is out of ear-shot.

RR further differs from its immediate predecessors in its use of found audio, which in certain cases is calibrated to approximate a plausible source within the frame: as for instance the rap in a RV encampment or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic's" low volume suggesting a location in a distant structure. In others, the audio finds no precise location, as with Gregory Peck's reading of Revelations, a circa 1990s Toronto Blue Jays broadcast or Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address (where he warns against the military-industrial complex). Excluding the baseball game, these latter examples suggest a cursory critical perspective, or better yet a diagnosis of the American present, in addition to the auditory thematic - principally, our attempt to listen under the louder rail sounds.

It is our attempts as spectators to find the subjects of the images, both visual and auditory, as well as its jokes, which provides RR with its substance. It is likewise the film's theoretical foundation: namely, to produce moment-to-moment interest in the introduction of new and novel items in his mise-en-scène and on his soundtrack. Through the film's repetitions Benning highlights the minimum conditions for the temporal side of cinematic form (most commonly, though not here, taking the form of narrative). RR represents yet another essential entry into one of the the contemporary avant-garde's most indispensable corpuses.

^In an earlier article on the filmmaker, I made the comparison to the Lumière's famed genesis of cinema. As such Benning's latest, on the level of conceit, provides me with no small amount of satisfaction, and even confirmation. (I hope my readers forgive this boasting; at least I confined it to a footnote.)

New Filmkritik has compiled stills of each of the film's 43 set-ups as selected by the filmmaker himself.

The 46th New York Film Festival: Night and Day

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

Writer-director Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (Bam gua nat) furnishes incontrovertible evidence that rumors of Eric Rohmer's retirement have been greatly exaggerated. As the third film made by an Asian master in the past two years to engage directly with French film history - along with Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon and Johnnie To's Sparrow - Hong's latest dispenses with the Korean director's trademark two-part, 'twice-told' structures* for Rohmer's diaristic narrative pattern, replete with dated intertitles that are graphically-identical to those utilized in the director's 1986 masterpiece, The Green Ray/Summer. Indeed, Rohmer's Marie Rivière starrer represents one of Night and Day's most conscious sources with its initial August in Paris locale, protagonist Seong-nam's (Kim Yeong-ho) propensity to sob^, and most significantly, object of desire Yu-jeong's (Park Eun-hye) declaration - following a framing emphasizing the late-day sun - that she now knows her feelings. Of course, contrary to Rohmer's work, Hong fixates on a male lead.

In this respect, Night and Day is closer to the French maestro's Claire's Knee (1970), recapitulating that film's character geometry: in both instances, a male protagonist spends time apart from his lover (fiancee and wife, respectively) wherein he comes into contact with an old acquaintance and two younger romantic prospects. Likewise, Hong matches the earlier picture's fetishistic emphasis on a single feature of his female protagonist's anatomy - in this case her feet rather than the eponymous knee. While Jean-Claude Brilay finds satisfaction in touching the latter, Seong-nam dreams of sucking Yu-jeong's toes, which does nothing to satiate his desire. In fact, it precedes his romantic confrontation of the more attractive of his sexual prospects.

This facing contradicts his earlier insistence to old flame Min-seon (Kim Yu-jin) that they resist the temptation to cheat on their spouses, quoting the Biblical passage that it is better to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye if either causes you to sin, rather than to enter hell whole. Seong-nam claims to read the Bible as if it is history, though a later prayer (or napping) session in a French church compels the lead to ask forgiveness of a North Korean he has offended; then again he soon embarrasses his political rival anew in a bout of arm wrestling. (Suffice it to say that as is often the case with Hong, Night and Day is routinely quite funny.) In the film's stew of Christian theology, sensuality and comedy, therefore - to say nothing of its characters' frequent falsehoods, as Lisa K. Broad has perceptively noted - the director's latest also compares strongly to Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969).

Interestingly it is very much on the level of theology that Rohmer and Hong differ. Whereas Rohmer's Christianity demonstrates a Jansenist tendancy - that sect's predestinarian aspect is articulated through the Frenchman's tales of tempted protagonists who return to their original lovers - for Hong, free will remains paramount, and actions continually produce unforeseen consequences. Former lover Min-seon, for instance, claims to have had six abortions secretly during their affair and after being rejected anew by Seong-nam, commits suicide; Yu-jeong tells a departing Seong-nam that she might be pregnant. Though Seong-nam will find his way back to his wife, he will not only experience temptation, as does Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud's, but will actively, aggressively pursue the object of desire, whom he will leave after one of the aforesaid lies. Hong does not merely ape Rohmer on the level of theology, but instead offers a plausible counter-position.

A final point of comparison with My Night at Maud's is Night and Day's frequent use of zooms, rhyming with the earlier film's telephoto exterior framings. Of course, Hong's own A Tale of Cinema (2005) provides the more direct source; yet unlike A Tale of Cinema, where the style seems to organically reflect its film's student filmmaking subject, in Night and Day the technique feels more ersatz, as does Hong's general utilizations of long take, often static compositions. Of course, Rohmer himself confines his technique to a decoupage deriving from Hollywood sources, even if it is carefully manipulated to reflect the film's content. In this respect, Hong's reliance on a relatively uncalibrated style fits the film's principle inspiration.

*On the level of theme, this doubleness is still present in the coexistence of Korea and its expatriot community in Paris. Seong-nam's phone conversations with his wife make this point most explicitly, figuring a population divided that is further registered in the presence of the North Korean player.

^In the gender reversal of the sobbing, Night and Day reads as a critique, as does so much of Hong's cinema, of the Korean male. The same can certainly said of the protagonist's series of lovers and his serial mistreatment of women. Of course, the Korean female, in her frequenty duplicity, does not come off much better.

New Film: The Sky, The Earth, and the Rain

There is much to admire in José Luis Torres Leiva's The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain / El Cielo, la tierra, y la lluvia: the film's haptic Chilean landscapes, its textured aural compliments, a precise feeling for the region's unceasing winter precipitation and its metaphoric relation of class with the aforesaid deluge. Indeed, few examples of recent world cinema can claim to match The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain's tactile expression of environment, and of the human body's comfortless occupation of its spaces, perpetually soaked by Southern Chile's downpours and by the standing water through which these underclass protagonists cross (or in one case, by the Pacific waters after two of the film's heroines save a third from the powerful ocean tides). The wet is inescapable for the film's working poor, as is the biting, consuming cold that is empathetically imputed to the The Sky...'s spectators. Likewise, the olfactory presents itself in the damp country fields or in the decaying wallpaper framing Ana's (Julieta Figueroa) dying mother. Torres Leiva's picture activates the viewer's full sensorium.

If The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain's achievement is thereby locatable in the details of its mise-en-scène - in the haptic sense of a damp, deteriorating fencepost - and on its animalic soundtrack, weakness is revealed in their narrative combination and in the connotative uncertainty of Torres Leiva's elliptical strategies. This is a film that systematically elides narrative information and dramatic detail, though without a strong sense of the world that is being eliminated. This is to say that it is unclear why Torres Leiva has adopted the poetic tradition that Abbas Kiarostami or later Carlos Reygadas have utilitized to refer to what is left off screen. In fact, following the film's most dramatic revelation (much of course does not get revealed) Ana begins to sob, thereby calling into question whether the surfaces restrict in the same manner as the ellipses. The Sky..., in other words, seems not to present the organic unity of a Kiarostami or Silent Light.

If there are further reasons to be critical - namely the film's cliche-ridden story (a dying mother, its fraught maid-employer relationship, a mentally unstable young woman) or the odd lack of an authorial presence, in spite of its unmissable style - The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain nonetheless suggests real filmmaking promise, grounded in the picture's luminous photography and its real facility to encourage the viewer's tactile participation. Optimally, The Sky... will someday prove to be an immature work.

New Film: Momma's Man

At a time in which the designation of independent cinema suggests a highly formulaic blend of calculated quirkiness and upper-middle class nihilism made for the boutique outfit of a Hollywood studio, which is to say a movement lacking in even the modest virtues of those same studios' big-budget offerings, writer-director Azazel Jacobs' Momma's Man represents a genuine alternative to your Little Miss Sunshine's of our unlucky world, not only for its fully-independent financing and distribution (via true indie Kino International) but for its insistent, actual authenticity. At the most basic level, Jacobs generates his genuineness through his setting, which is not only the New York or Lower East Side of his childhood, but in fact the top-floor loft that his artist parents, Ken and Flo, continue to reside in. And there is Ken and Flo as themselves, co-starring beside Azazel surrogate Mikey (Matt Boren)* in this story of an early thirty-something's inability to leave the world of his childhood once he has returned - following the chance cancellation of his flight. Consider it, as J. Hoberman rightly has, as a Mother (1996, Albert Brooks) for the gen-x set. Or better yet, as an Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Buñuel), where the first step beyond the apartment's threshold becomes - for a time - an impassible boundary. His inability to leave, as we will see with his cooking sherry inebriation, is more than psychological.

Inside, Mikey settles into his childhood space, thumbing through a book highlighted by the presence of a prized garbage pale kid card and singing the lyrics to the very angry song he long ago penned for his first love. In the latter instance, we hear his father Ken - yes, its that Ken Jacobs for those familiar with the New American cinema^ - screaming for him to keep it down. Indeed, it is at this moment that particularity of Mikey and of course Azazel's childhood becomes clearest, where it becomes entirely foreign to those, this writer included, who grew up in the suburbs, small towns and rural interstices of fly-over country. Unlike Albert Brooks returning to his old room, the consummate American act of revisiting one's childhood, Mikey crawls back up onto his loft bed, pressing his face toward a gap in the exterior wall that opens onto the cold New York street. (My regular viewing companion, Ms. Broad, adeptly noted that Jacobs succeeds here and elsewhere marvellously in registering the bright cold of winter common to all New Yorkers. It is an experience that anyone who has spent anytime in the city will know quite well.) Certainly, Jacobs' accomplishment is located precisely in his recreation of the singularity of his own adolescence, of growing up in this apartment.

Yet, it is an accomplishment that extends beyond the film's undeniable local color to its conception of the space it presents, which is to say its mise-en-scène. His camera peers around corners, through narrow passageways into out of which Ken and Flo make their presence felt in the context of this unified, open space. Jacobs' hand-held DV camerawork favors the tightly framed close-up, the extended take medium follow shot, the aerial composition, and in one of the most compelling of the film, a circular panning shot that locates Mikey in different locations (at different times) along an unbroken, circular trajectory. In this one place, Jacobs recalls the ghosts of Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) and the choreographic cinematography that seems anathema to the digital video format. (It still remains for digital medium to show that its up to matching the Japanese master's mise-en-scène, beyond that is Aleksandr Sokurov's impossibly accomplished single Russian Ark take. If it fails to do so it may never claim to be photochemical cinema's equal.) In short, Jacobs' cinema is made to the measure of the loft's architecture - which to reiterate the Mizoguchi comparison or to evoke Ozu is very much the source of a cinema's cultural singularity.

It might not be so surprising then when Jacobs' similarly constructed spaces fail to convince when outside the familiar, comfortable confines of the Lower East Side - when specifically the attention migrates to his wife and young child in California. The same constricted mise-en-scène that is so natural to New York fails to capture the openness of this second location, of living with nature closer at hand (even in America's second largest city). So too does his Californian rival lack the authenticity of his pal Dante and the latter's a Capella rendition of the Indigo Girls which manages to be both endearing and embarrassing. This of course is no criticism of Jacobs or even his Dante, who as much as anyone in Momma's Man reads as authentic to this environment. Jacobs is unambiguously a New York filmmaker. He sees the world, through his camera, as someone who grew up on a bunk in this LES flat.

* Boren's centering performance is one of the better that I have seen this year, while Ken and Flo Jacobs show themselves to be more than up to the task of playing themselves.

^ Significantly, Azazel's film practice deviates greatly from the experimental practice of his father - seen in snatches. A. Jacobs is a narrative filmmaker whose surrogate spends time neither reading "American Fascists" nor listening to reports re the Iraqi Civil War on NPR - though the references place Azazel culturally. He is something less than the intellectual that his parents remain, recognizable in their habitual discussions of Abstract Expressionism or the nature of their own art. Mikey, comparatively, reads comic books and trounces around in his red parka, with the letters U.S.A. emblazoned on the back.

"Doomed Love / Amor de Perdição (1978): Manoel de Oliveira's Greatest?" - Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira's Doomed Love (Amor de Perdição, 1978), an adaptation by the director of Camilo Castelo Branco's nineteenth century novel, has very recently emerged as the knowledgeable cinephile's choice for the greatest of Oliveira's films - a position, it should be added, that has found a convenient alibi in the film's virtual invisibility (it remains unreleased anywhere on VHS or DVD). Following a recent 16mm screening of the 265-minute picture at Washington's National Gallery, this piece's two authors can do nothing but agree with the above position, however unlikely it might seem that one of the director's least seen should rate as his very best. That this position is in no small measure a product of the narrative's real emotive strength only reinforces the unlikelihood of its obscurity (in the clandestine context of Oliveira's high art corpus, of course).

Unlike the impossibly arcane focus on Portuguese history and nationality that characterizes many of the director's better films, Doomed Love trades on the more universal Romeo and Juliet plot that Branco's novel triangulates with a second love interest for its male lead Simão (António Sequeira Lopes). The aforesaid devotes himself fully to Teresa (Cristina Hauser), who naturally is the daughter of his father's sworn enemy. Simão is himself worshiped by the beautiful daughter of a blacksmith, Mariana (Elsa Wallencamp), though his star-crossed love for Teresa, accepted if not tacitly endorsed by the second woman, prevents their coupling. Suffice it to say that neither of Oliveira's pairings will find satisfaction, though Mariana will press her lips against Simão's at the moment of his death and then will join him - diving alone through the canted frame - under the water's surface, following his burial at sea.

With Mariana pulling Simão below the water, to be followed by the latter's correspondences floating to the water's surface, where they are promptly snatched by a single hand, Oliveira crystallizes the central thematic preoccupations that animate Doomed Love: this is a film that uses text to reveal that which is hidden by surfaces, as instantiated by the narrator who reveals himself to be the novel's author, and possessor of the letters, in the film's closing voice over. This strategy, while purportedly exceedingly faithful to Branco's novel, nevertheless naturally breaks with cinema's own predilection for exterior manifestation. Here, the novel's interior voices are related in voice-over, both off-screen and on, which both match the images on camera, procuring a redundancy, or more interestingly perhaps, fail to synchronize. Among the finest examples of the latter is Simão's assassination of Teresa's cousin - and fiance - of which we are told of as the pair face one another. Following a fifteen-second gap, the on-screen narration reaches the aforesaid voiced-over revelation, thereby highlighting the novel form's summary quality.

In fact, Doomed Love is structured upon the formal differences between film and literature, appropriating the latter to underline the artificial quality of narration in cinema no less than in the art of prose. This arbitrary quality appears in Oliveira's framing choices, such as in Simão's brother's horse back departure through the woods - adopting a singularly obscuring angle - or in the picture's utilizations of zooms that traverse the interior spaces before abruptly stopping. Then again, Oliveira's organization of space as often emphasizes the inherently cinematic, as when an extended take framing Teresa behind a diamond-shaped iron screen continues to highlight the architectural device throughout the shot's duration, thus becoming not simply a novelistic detail but a figure generating a phenomenological experience in its own right.

This non-literary duration occurs throughout Doomed Love, as in an excessive passage depicting Simão lying face first on his bed or in an interval in which Teresa's father's servants light the candles of a chandelier and roll up a carpet in preparation for the girl's birthday dance. Here the mode of representation again trades on the experience of lived duration, though it does so with the inflection of opera, and of the servant chorus doing double duty as stagehands. Oliveira has adopted this tradition in a medium that no longer requires its practicality. Likewise, the blacksmith João himself seems to follow from theatrical antecedents, even speaking his lines directly into the camera as an actor in theatre or in the opera might speak directly to its audience. By contrast, Simão's younger sister pulls a chair into the camera's immediate foreground as she discloses her family's fate in direct address. In this moment, it is as though the camera is being addressed as a camera, as a device to record for an unspecified future.

Then again, it is the film's past-tense that shines through most clearly, from the opening titles that will only later be fulfilled in Simão's transport to India, to the picture's obsessive strategy of narration that seeks to tell a family history in the same language as the novel. This is a cinema of the past, and thus of fate, of "doomed love," rather than of the perpetual present-tense that the medium traditionally utilizes. To this end, Mariana's premonitions of Simão's future serves to make the future past, evisioned as it is in her off-camera imagings. These hallucinations, as well as the on-screen spectre of a dead, dictating Teresa provide the film with some of its less conventional modes of address. In the end, Doomed Love is a catalogue of modes of telling in its many cinematic and non-cinematic forms.

Further, this strategy of summary is further reinforced by Oliveira's uses of sound and dialogue that (seem to) literally transpose the source material, such as in a conversation between Simão's parents where the voice-over specifies that they argue. In so doing, the filmmaker eliminates the dialogue that would comprise this argumentation, choosing instead to adopt the novel's summary quality. They simply argue, silently.

This effort of transcription may also be found in the extreme low-key nocturnal passages that recur in Doomed Loved, though in these instances it is a matter of detail rather than elision, even if elision is the visual effect of pronounced darkness. Most spectacularly, the film's principle action set piece occurs in the pitch black of night, eschewing cinema's technically-demanded perversions of naturalism in conventional day-for-night strategies. In greatly reducing the visual field, Doomed Love, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Victor Erice's El Sur (1983) follows Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) in simulating its period's lower key lighting. In other words, it seems to be very much an art film of its particular moment.

Then again, as always, Manoel de Oliveira's modernism singularly partakes in a relation to the arts that generated cinema, from the novel to opera. Indeed, its stage-bound settings refer more to opera or theatre than art cinema's conventional documentations of place, such as in the plaster board sea-going and stage-coach vessels that reinforce its constructedness. Yet, while much of the director's corpus ultimately underscores cinema's deficient nature, as an augment of theatre, here Oliveira's anti-cinema adds to its medium, providing a means to supply the sub-surface while reframing cinema as precisely what it is: not life, but art - and art which is as gloriously and exhilaratingly arbitrary as its many antecedents.