My favorite shot in this film is, for some reason, the shot of the goth at the Le Aviateurs bar, with the light on the left side of her face coming in and out, in the latter third of the film. I found myself looking forward to this shot throughout most of the running time. Close seconds are the moments when El is following the, potentially fake, Sylvia, and a streetcar dives between them, and the sound momentarily swells and throbs of machinery and motion, and then back to reality, as well as the moments of, potentially fake, Sylvia’s reflection on the windows of passing streetcars. Very nice, but I preferred when it was subtle. We see her reflection at few too many times and a bit too clearly after a while. Like in a Haneke film, particularly the ending of Cache, I like the moments in this film where the meat of a shot is so subtle that when you notice it, who get the sense that you could be the only person who noticed it. Film is still lovely, though, and now I can’t wait to dive into my Jose Luis Guerín box set in the coming week.
I see on Guerín’s imdb page that he has a small number of films under his belt since his first film, a drama he made when he was 22 called Los Motivos de Berta. A couple are documentaries, and a couple are fiction. All of them, though, are rarely seen and largely unknown even in Spain. The Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA just had a retrospective on all of his films a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t live in Boston anymore, so I didn’t go. Guerín is also an installation artist; much like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he blurs his filmmaking practices with his art, creating pieces that build on the ideas in his films. While I’m unsure of which came first, his filmmaking or his installation work, both Guerín and Weerasethakul advantageously crossover between art and film, while Miranda July uses the medium as an advertisement for her work to the ‘indie’ community (I do like Me and You and Everyone We Know, though, despite its commercial indie presentation). While I think that ‘art cinema’ has become just as much a negative term this century as a positive one as a genre, it is refreshing when filmmakers show that they have genuine artist sensibilities. I think that a filmmaker that is interested in how his films function as an exploration of ideas should also be working in more ‘art’ media like sculpture, installations, and video projects; it’s narrow and pompous to think that celluloid is the only medium appropriate for telling stories. Most of the best visual ideas that I have seen so far this year have not been in cinemas or on DVD, but in art museums, and most of my favorite films were made while being simultaneously explored and developed in other media.
That said, In the City of Sylvia advances the practice of filmmaking like few films this decade have. The task of presenting a film that contains something that a viewer has never seen the likes of is difficult enough, but to translate an idea so simple, and seemingly cliche, into something so fresh, blew my mind. The film follows one character nicknamed El, and contains almost no dialogue except for one key scene. I watched the film without subtitles up until this scene and easily understood everything that was going on; it’s pretty much pure cinema. Shots of flowing hair could have gone on for reels for all I cared. Perfectly frames shots of the characters on a streetcar made it seem as if they were gliding through the city. When El is first scouting at the cafe, layers of women fill the frame at different depths, communicating with people off camera, but collaged so that the goal is to understand who it is that El is looking at. The film I thought of most often while watching this was Cache. Shots are generally low and dense with information. At times I couldn’t tell if I was watching what El is seeing or if there was another character that I never saw that was watching the events, too. The film deals with El stalking Elle, and I was always paranoid that some other force was present, but invisible; another viewer; perhaps the being that tagged ‘Laure, Je T’aime’ all over the city. The graffiti turned the city into a hall of mirrors; when I saw one tag, I could tell that I had seen that tag before, but couldn’t remember which specific one I was seeing. Later, when there are flashes of reflections of people who aren’t there, and dialogue is ominously repeated, I was dazzled and felt unbalanced. Some of the awkward supporting characters and shots reminded me of Jacques Tati, another master of making films about composition and repetition.