Author name: Blake Williams

 
 
I Vitelloni (1953, Federico Fellini) – 3.5
 
Moved into the ‘re-visit’ pile for, let’s say, 10 years from now, because clearly I’m missing something at the moment that allows everyone else to connect with these characters. I tried to see if it was just a fluke mood I was in by watching some clips a couple of days later on youtube to see if they’d play any better for me, but no dice. It’s likely an aversion to Fellini’s tell-don’t-suggest style, which is evident, even at this early Neorealist stage in his career, from the opening montage introducing the characters. The narrator details, “Another day has come to an end. Nothing to do but go home, as usual” (italics mine), followed a couple of minute later by, “Just like every other night, only Moraldo walks the empty streets.” Perhaps this should be forgivable given that it’s just an opening, stage-setting bit of background info, but in this case, the ‘as usual’ and ‘just like every other night’ seem to be what the rest of the film actually details. For a film about the numbing mental and physical stasis of post-adolescent manhood, would it not be more poignant, compelling, engaging, etc. to actually learn of their lives’ monotony by experiencing it with them? As promised, these men have nothing to do to but lounge around, sleep with women who aren’t their wives, and partake in mildly amusing yet fleeting shenanigans, only to climax in a fairly beautiful escape for Moraldo, whose panning visions of his friends sleeping as he takes off for Rome effectively whisked me off into the relatively elating task of biking home. This is all more or less what happens in Diner (below), which is delightful; having watched Levinson’s film immediately after I Vitelloni just makes me suspect that Fellini’s portrait of bumbling hill-peakers is playing at a frequency that I am deaf to.
 
 
Diner (1982, Barry Levinson) – 6.9
 
I was surprised to learn that this was not my first Levinson experience (that would be Sphere, which I loved and lobbied for endlessly in middle school), and, more so, that this was nearly optioned into a TV series with Michael Madsen as Boogie (there was a 30-minute pilot, but it doesn’t look like it really got off the ground). Interesting, though, that the TV show was supposed to focus more on the wives, because the women in Levinson’s feature are the standout, with an extra special mention for Ellen Barkin, whose turn in the record cataloging fight would be enough to win me over for forever if her part in Shit Year hadn’t already done so. A film that will almost certainly shoot up with successive visits, it captured perfectly the crippling and often insanity-inducing incompatibilities that must be coped with for a relationship to work.
 
 
Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini) – 7.6
 
Kind of the same idea, toward the end, as I Confess, but with grueling stakes that go beyond vanilla movie violence as the consequence. The first half sets up sympathetic characters with affectionate aspirations in life, and the brutal brevity with which these lives are obliterated is upsetting on a visceral level. A shocking act of violence removes a central character to the webbed narrative with whose life we’ve very much become complicit, closes the curtain on the first half, and does not relent as the second half ultimately verges on torture porn. The style is a well-seasoned balance of neorealism and Hollywood studio flair – the hopefulness of Hollywood crushed by the Italian tinges of wartime fatalism. Also, it ends up as a pretty damning portrayal of the consequences of catholic rituals, pretty much opposing Hitchcock’s heroizing of his faithful priest head-on.
 
 
Bitter Rice (1949, Giuseppe De Santis) – 6.8
 
Captures a place, era, and struggle with supreme detail despite it’s classical flourishes (say what the programmers will, this film does not belong in an Italian Neorealism retrospective unless it is meant as an example of contemporary filmmaking going against the movement. Sure, it’s shot on location, but these are budding and seasoned actors in highly dramatic, noir-ish scenarios, lensed by intricately – not to mention elegantly – choreographed shots and set-ups. Even the pessimistic finale ended up feeling like a crowd-pleaser). The piles of rice become like sand dunes, locating the mythical-looking jewelled choker in a mise-en-scene fit for something more like some kind of ancient amulet. And it seems to have some sort of voodoo power anyway on these women, sending those who crave it (with ‘it’ being the choker, but also, basically, wealth & sex) into howling, writhing hysterics. Glides along toward its finale, which isn’t quite tragic, but nonetheless inevitable as if legend, with flair and nary a wasted moment. Had a strong sudden impact, but the airbags are deflating, and I presume this will not play well on another look (grumbles about an upcoming Criterion edition would facilitate that, however). Enthralling tracking shots of the possessed women were startling, terrifying, unsettling, but perhaps it was merely effective because, in the midst of a Neorealist retro, my expectations were for something far more subdued.
 

Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio De Sica) – 7.0

So Wendy and Lucy really was Reichardt’s stab at Italian Neorealism. It’s not the dogs’ ‘dogness’ that makes these films’ finales so heartbreaking, obviously, but their inabilities to comprehend the reasons for their future heartbreak (yes, I believe these dogs will be heartbroken when they realize they’ve been bastardized), which first hits Umberto, as he is dismissed by society, thus spreading to the dog’s fate. The landlady is too villainous, and the young girl too self-serving, but kudos for not making Umberto himself very sympathetic. After he throws poor Flike onto his landlady as revenge for letting him loose, he becomes just as laughably misbehaved and irrational as the other wretches patrolling Rome circa 1952.

The Future (2011, Miranda July) – 7.6

[Spoilers throughout] Goddamn the haters for making me feel guilty for pretty much loving Miranda July. Treating life as if every gesture were a performance art act, she transcends the tweeness by accumulating solid, simple ideas that resonate on a purely human level, and then obliterating the airy worlds of her protagonists with a hit of real-world consequences. Sure there’s the cat (which is not a narrator, by the way; he tells no story but his own), and she plays the same Beach House song about two dozen times (a great song, at least). The worst that any of the first half of this film could be charged is for being ‘too cute’ – perhaps the same as quirky, maybe even hipster, and almost certainly twee. But it’s building up these layers to present a lifestyle that is incapable of really dealing with the real world – genuine drama and pain and suffering: the things that real quirkfests love to forget about. There’s a cat that speaks (or probably just thinks) in English, what’s the worst that could happen? These guys are so damn cute for each other, they’re adopting a wounded cat and cancelling their internet service. Too cute. Things derail, though, when one of Sophie’s (July) gestures (she calls a guy that drew a kitschy portrait of his daughter, and tries to determine where they are in relation to each other by looking at the clouds) gets away from her and starts to become part of a different kind of lifestyle…a different kind of movie. When Marshall and Sophie first speak to each other on the telephone, and much more so when they meet in person at Marshall’s home, there is enough sexual tension to suggest where this is going, but I consciously thought to myself something like ‘if this were another movie, these people would totally start an affair or something’. And then they do. And then Jason’s magic powers to stop time become ‘real’, and the moon starts speaking, trying desperately to change the film back into what it was supposed to be, and yet Sophie’s time moves on in a kind of parallel world straight out of a Lynch film, only it’s disarmingly Normal. Like a movie playing in another room, this thread progresses at an accelerating speed that moves forward as if on a mission to get it all in before the 90 minutes are up, defiantly situating itself to end in the exact way that this film, as it began, had no chance of ending. It’s one of those films that I can only really defend by jiving with it and then acting stupefied at those who couldn’t likewise jive, but this is just a magical movie, through and through.

The Flowers of St. Francis (1950, Roberto Rossellini) – 5.1

Fine enough, but what the hell is going on with the acting? I know they’re real monks (now), but Francis’ expressions of grief are downright presentational in their stilts and hamminess. It works though, in its own way, because these men are supposed to be actively naive, forgiving, and all-loving, and their performances lent a childlike purity that made their actions even sweeter, almost precious, even.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean) – 6.3

As engaging as a huge, blockbuster epic with a climax of two gigantic armies stampeding toward each other is going to get for me. Most affecting moment is easily Lawrence’s confession that he enjoyed his execution of Gasim, which was great but unfortunately seceded by two hours more of film that essentially makes that trait clearer and more extreme. What happens when an egotistical and ambitious man who has been put in charge of a large army also finds himself to be highly sadistic? He gets the job done, that’s what. Glad I finally saw it, but it’s a bit too tidy, even at four hours, to motivate a revisitation in the future (my problem with most of the canon, hence my avoidance).

Under the Sun of Rome (1948, Renato Castellani) – 6.5

Who? What? Huh? Why I’d never heard of this film or filmmaker before now boggles the mind. This is a major entry in Italian Neorealism, with photography heavily influenced by French Poetic realists, and some of the most superb non-professional acting I’ve yet encountered. Little touches, like the shots during the boxing match when the fighter is punching Ciro as shown through the perspective of a jug of water, just elevate it even more above the films typical of the era. Features some of the starkest tonal shifts pre-dating Cassavetes, usually between people (Ciro’s make-up then breakup with Iris), but also extending to the mise-en-scene as it abruptly puts on the breaks of adolescent summertime patrolling to harsh war-time panic. All of the key characters seem to love and hate each other, always. I’m not yet prepared to address the blatant homoeroticism going on between Ciro and Geppa, but it’s totally there in the ‘Primo tempo’.

City of Women (1980, Federico Fellini) – 5.0

As pointed out by my new friend Scott, this is essentially an amalgam of 8.5 and Casanova, for better and worse. For all of the attention drawn to Fellini’s fascination with Jung, he sure shows a low capacity for subtext. Angry feminists, copious phalli, a rooster mounting a cat (get it?), and a final shot of a train rushing into a tunnel (DO YOU GET IT???), he tries to reconcile how juvenile archetypes shaped, tortured, and nurtured his sexuality; it is at once too universal and obnoxiously self-absorbed. The film is essentially a trip through Fellini’s Phallic stage (to mix psychoanalysts’ metaphors) which potentially never reached latency, explored as a dissection of his dream-state psyche. While many of my favorite films could be described that way, it is really only valuable when coming from those whose psyches house more complex desires and thoughts that Fellini’s apparently does.

The Swimmer (1968, Frank Perry) – 6.6

Love the idea, but the execution is hit-and miss (the ‘hits’, though, are doozies). I had to look up Nathaniel Dorsky’s wikipedia page to make sure that he didn’t start making films after this – his first shorts, which I’ve recently seen in Chris Kennedy’s Early Monthly Segments at the Gladstone Art Bar (end plug), were made just a few years earlier, though Dorsky wasn’t yet making the type of work that I thought was evoked here – because there are several impressionist passages that are tied directly to Dorsky’s signature poetic style (at least, to his Compline, Aubade, and Pastourelle that played in the TIFF 2010’s Wavelengths sidebar). This isn’t even touching on the other big art extract, Hockney’s pool paintings, which he began making in ’67, just a year before this film’s release (these are probably coincidences, or maybe these guys had more connections to each other than I am able to source out). Anyway. Lancaster’s physique is really the star here; at first well-sculpted and youthful when first glimpsed emerging from the woods toward his first pool, gradually exposing scars, wrinkles, crevices, and flab that show a weathered and worn man past his prime, struggling – like all of the bourgeois elite he encounters – to retain the significance and ideals of their past. I couldn’t decide if Perry was embracing an intentionally hammy vibe striving to make this into a readymade cult picture, or if that was all just inherent in the film’s ideas and its casting of Lancaster. Either way, it downplays the weight of Ned’s deterioration – the exact opposite of an ‘awakening’ that the film’s premise hints at – and makes many moments that should be heart-wrenching into giggle-worthy cringe-inducers.

Attack the Block (2011, Joe Cornish) – 5.4

British humour has always been a bit lost on me, a fact I finally accepted when I laughed exactly four times at In the Loop. It’s a combination of my difficulty with hearing the words they’re saying, and that I know next to nothing about the cultural quirks that are the subject of so many of the jokes. Or does it all hinge on the fact that they talk funny. This is not to say that Attack the Block is a comedy that I did not appreciate because I didn’t think it was funny, but that I couldn’t imagine this generating the kind of buzz it has without its supporters thinking it was a laugh-a-minute riot, because as an alien invasion film, it’s solid, but certainly not fresh. The aliens are minimal and actually look pretty cool with their emerald-glowing teeth and opaque fur. I could also discern its socio-political value (though, again, not something I’m exactly familiar with), which gives it points for ‘saying something’. But really, it’s a predictable, structurally by-numbers film with only sketchily drawn characters and a groovy soundtrack. Cornish avoids all opportunities to let his film become necessarily unhinged, and his determination to end the film on that smile is too schematically set-up.

 
 
La Dolce Vita [1960, Federico Fellini] (7.5)

Fellini peaked early. None of the other nearly-dozen features I’ve seen have been quite as affecting. Assembling its episodes from tabloid headlines and rampant paparazzi culture from his youth, one gets the impression that he packed all of the best ingredients into one entrée, many of them (the flying Jesus and giant sea monster bookends, in particular) the most fantastical and colorful details of any of his films I’ve seen. Detailing the lifestyle of a man whose desire for glamour and hedonism conflicts with the impulse to settle down that is embedded in his (and his fiancée’s) DNA, it spells the conflicted hollowness and euphoria inherent in the life of the rich and famous, which ultimately leads them, as well as those who yearn for such a lifestyle, into insatiable unhappiness.
 
 
Paisan [1946, Roberto Rossellini] (5.7)

It was tempting to mark this as ‘Inc.’ because the print was so chopped up and many subtitles were missing, but in the end I think I got enough of it to know that it is just a set of shorts films in which some work much better than others. The portrayal of the Americans was unexpectedly multi-faceted, refusing to play them as excessively villainous or mindless (though the thick Southern accents didn’t help with that). Not sure if the fact that the Americans couldn’t remember what certain Italian characters looked like the day after spending isolated bonding time together was weak storytelling or a sly neurological racism worked into their character traits.
 
 
You Are Here [2010, Daniel Cockburn] (7.2; down from 7.7)

Handles many ideas that I’m currently grappling with, with enough DIY aesthetics, games and tests, and Wavelength references to leave me smirking the whole way through. The anecdotal structure is successful purely because the anecdotes are so provocative, and while they all deal with greater ideas of consciousness and self credited to John Searle, Cockburn positions them, returns to them so that it also becomes a dissection of the perceptive and cognitive components of movie-watching (most explicit in the film’s most chilling scene about an inventor who develops an computer eye for blind people, and then switched the programming so that everyone with the eye can only see what he sees). It is perhaps too precocious for its own good, not to mention that the compelling pedagogy of some of its sequences can cross a line into pedantically schooling the viewer, but it is undeniably inventive in its own resistance of conventional cinema logic or form, and holds itself together surprisingly well.
 
 

 
 
An Angel at My Table [1990, Jane Campion] (6.9)

I’m not quite sure why I respond so well to Campion’s deceptively conventional brand of (auto)biographical nostalgia, nor her episodic structures, which would normally leave me snoozing through their rambling, shapeless, sepia-toned running times (see: Terence Davies). There is an edge to her direction, with slightly off-timed line deliveries and lingering angles positioned at awkward heights, that makes it just, for lack of a better word, amateur enough to leave me hooked. She has a brand of quirk that isn’t manufactured, doesn’t care if it finds an audience, like she just needs an outlet and this is it. I thought this was Campion’s autobiopic until I learned it was Janet Frames (Janet as a pseudonym for Jane, poetry instead of filmmaking…not too crazy), which is as much in debt to the vibrancy and detail of Campion’s assemblage as it is to the similarity of her name to her subject’s.
 
 
Love Streams [1984, John Cassavetes] (6.4)

The one film by Cassavetes where the overwhelming positive is the filmmaking (i.e., photography, montage, lighting) rather than his usual excellence in script and direction. Viewed as the last ‘true’ film before he bastardized Big Trouble and then died an early death, it almost reads as a frankensteined greatest hits of scenes and characters from his earlier films: Sarah is clearly a resurrection of Mabel, while her relationship with Jack could be how Minnie and Seymour Moskowitz turned out after a decade or so of romance. Also, pretty sure Robert’s house was the same as the one used in Faces? Anyway, key characters are trying to convey love – a term that Cassavetes breaks his back over in an effort to abstract it further than it’s ever been – and have yet to negotiate for themselves the difference between tenderness and silliness, suggesting that while there really may not be a clearly-defined distinction between the two, it is downright toxic to display both forms simultaneously; in equal measure, they cancel each other out. The last reel of this film is a masterpiece, and a devastating final page in his oeuvre. It’s too bad that the rest of the film, while enthralling in spurts, suffers from some severe tonal imbalances, as well as some of the most self-consciously ‘heavy’ performances I’ve ever seen.
 
 
West Side Story [1961, Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise] (4.8)

Romeo and Juliet-ish take on mid-century race issues in NYC is about as gentrified as Giuliani’s Times Square. I hate that the Puerto Ricans are mostly white people in ‘brown face’, speaking in a faux-Latin accent that would get any white person’s ass justifiably kicked were it actually spoken in New York; I hate that after every musical number all of the characters pause, and then burst into cheers and high-fives to congratulate each other on the awesome choreography they just pulled off ‘spontaneously’ (I know this is kind of a signature of Broadway, but still); and I hate those god-awful songs that are not even the least bit catchy (except for maybe I Feel Pretty, and why God why do I have to have that song stuck in my head?). Loved the prolonged overture and opening with just ambient sound effects, and those sets sure are colorful. The one audacious stroke in the whole project was allowing the film to end without any of these hollow, irrational people getting to change. It ends when things are most dire and depressed, but, unlike the infinitely more incendiary Do the Right Thing (which does more or less the same thing), it feels entirely manipulative and unearned.

 
 
Fellini’s Casanova [1976, Federico Fellini] (5.0)

An occasional visual stunner that mostly permeates in my memory as an interminably obnoxious act of sadism toward the audience. Not in the torture porn sense of sadism, but in the kind such as approximating a fascinating film but with enough of an err toward crap that it causes a unique sort of spasm in the cerebral cortex. Casting Donald Sutherland was a true masterstroke, as he embodies everything that is right and wrong with this film in just one of his sweaty pelvic trusts.
 
 
Shampoo [1975, Hal Ashby] (7.3)

Will need to re-watch, but about an hour in I realized that I was in a bit of a subtle trance state, just watching these people do not much other than each other. Then came the euphoria of the election night parties, and that strobe light, and it was the most banal kind of bliss I’ve experienced in some time. The ending is affecting, but felt a tad too calculated.
 
 
Minnie and Moskowitz [1971, John Cassavetes] (6.3)

Cassavetes’ way of allowing scenes to ramble looooong past what any studio director would be allowed, or allow himself, is married to a funky kind of ellipsis in the first half that nearly left my mouth agape. I spent the first half hour trying to detect whether the projectionist had mixed reels (and I’m still not convinced that they weren’t out of order; the opening credits get cut short and then resume about 15 minutes later – anyone? intentional?) and finally succumbed to the ride. These people are insane, under the influence if you will, and I had so much pleasure watching their tirades linger on the screen before getting cut off, sometimes mid-sentence, only to return an hour later (maybe), that I didn’t really notice that they’re actually pretty thinly sketched. The second half gets considerably more straight forward as we focus on Minnie and Moskowitz – I guess this was to be expected – and I realized that I was probably supposed to care for these people a lot more than I actually did.
 
 
From Here to Eternity [1953, Fred Zinnemann] (6.1)

Perhaps it didn’t know what to do with itself tonally, but I thought that was one of the more compelling things about it. Why was a romance triangle built with Deborah Kerr if she is going to almost completely disappear in the film’s second half? Why shift from an endearing and selfless act of revenge in an alley into a full scale Pearl Harbor war picture? Who cares? It made the hammy elements of each detour at least formally tolerable.

   

I Confess [1953, Alfred Hitchcock] (6.2)

Would fit nicely into an essay on Hitchcock’s fluidity of guilt, not to mention his Catholic upbringing – this being the most overt confrontation with it.  It’s almost certainly his most literally spiritual film, but it slides toward the back of the pack in terms of visceral spirituality.  Predictable and questionably directed, it nonetheless presents a compelling moral dilemma that gets surprisingly tense in its latter stages.  I was hoping for the ‘The End’ to appear as Father Logan exited the courthouse after hearing his verdict, but was instead provided a citation for Kinski’s Aguirre performance.

 

Too Late Blues [1961, John Cassavetes] (6.0)

A film about spontaneity as much as it is about pride, chauvinism, and selling out, which is perhaps obvious in reference to a Cassavetes film, but I think this is both the first film of his to really incorporate it as an essential element (at least, I didn’t think Shadows was really concerned with it), as well as the most ambivalent toward it. Every key moment for protagonist John ‘Ghost’ Wakefield happens at a moment that seems to spring from nowhere, signalling actions that go against his believed-established morals and ideals – his treatment of Jess during the bar brawl carrying the most consequences.  His commitment to jazz and making more populist career moves is the conflict that ultimately wipes him out, prompting the loss of his girl, his friends, and his music. Much better for me in retrospect, so I’ll probably like it much more next time.

 

Mikey and Nicky [1976, Elaine May] (5.9)

The shot-reverse-shot patterns really irritated me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a hack doing her best Cassavetes impression, going so far as to cover it up by casting the man himself for the lead.  I don’t like to put too much stock in gendered voices, but this film was trying really hard to not come off as feminine.  The climax is brutal and unforgettable, but the evolution up to that moment – an intimate relationship between two males – needed someone who’d lived such experiences to tell them with any amount of breadth.

 

The Dirty Dozen [1967, Robert Aldrich] (3.9)

I was afraid that a film about twelve prisoners deployed on a confidential and urgent mission would play out like this.  Aside from the absurdity of the premise, you’ve got your token nutcase, screwball, and wise one, plus some fillers since it’s too difficult to make that many memorable characters without trying too hard. Ends in a loud, vulgar finale that holds up worse now than it probably did a few years ago now that Inglourious Basterds showed essentially the same thing, but with more grandeur, catharsis, and fun.

 
Pyaasa [1957, Guru Dutt] (Inc.)

‘Inc.’ because the promised screening format was 35mm, and what they were actually showing was a digital projection of what looked like a VHS bootleg (now that I look up screen captures to see how close in quality what they screened is to internet versions – and the quality is quite comparable – I’m also noticing that their aspect ratio (it was shown at 4:3) may have been off (the online version looks something like 1.66:1)). The bad quality isn’t the problem itself, but more that I was too enraged for the first half of the film to focus on anything else. I hate to carp on technical displays for a film of this stature (though, the only time I’ve ever written anything about perhaps my favorite film ever, Play Time, was to complain about how the Harvard Film Archive projected it from the Criterion DVD instead of a film print), it really prevented me from connecting with the film. This is based on expectations, of course, as I’m pretty sure that if I’d sat down in my living room to watch the same crappy version, I wouldn’t have been fuming, and therefore probably would have been fine as usual. What I did get, though, is that this film has beautiful music (looking for the soundtrack now), and it is beautifully photographed (from what I could gather), and that I’m not sure if Vijay’s transformation into a didactic Christ-figure, turning the end of the film into a sermon, will ever sit well with me. Here’s to a better screening scenario next time.

 
 

 
A Child is Waiting [1963, John Cassavetes] (5.5)

Similar to David Lynch with The Elephant Man, Cassavetes briefly went Hollywood early in his career for a very ‘un-him’ tearjerker, both coincidentally centered around life-crippling disabilities. This would really make a good companion to The Miracle Worker, as they are both about a woman’s struggles to discipline a disabled child, only in the Penn film the disability is physical, where for Cassavetes’ it is mental. The cognition required to properly integrate into society, and to abide its rules, is inherent in our DNA, and I was anticipating how the script would approach the little hiccup that lead to all of the subjects in this case being ill-equipped for such integration. The resolution, apparently, is to get frustrated and give up, which is significantly less compelling than watching Annie Sullivan whip Helen Keller around a room for reels at a time. Cassavetes’ talent for actors comes through in the Thanksgiving ‘play’, as the Down Syndrome-afflicted kids give believably stilted line deliveries that had prior-to-then been naturalistic, which I’d assumed was a given since they probably weren’t completely aware that they were even acting. Plenty of lush B&W photography to glaze over the excessively cloying bits (i.e. most of it), but I’m pretty sure that this was really just a vehicle to build to a gratuitous scene of Judy Garland tearfully singing ‘See the Snow Fly’ at a piano to/with a chorus of out-of-tune children.

Pretty slack, unfortunately. Excluding the longest end credits in recent memory, this barely cracks the 50-minute mark, and it’s essentially just your everyday Winnie the Pooh story drawn out to (barely) feature length. The post modern text play is fun, but bogs further into the educational moralizing typical of the Pooh franchise, tacking on an elementary lesson in semantics. I’m all for kids getting served some life lessons with their entertainment, but I felt too old for this material. Also, since I did grow up on the short episodes (my dad would either wake me up at 7am to watch them, or set the VCR to record them for me), I found the variances in the voices, however slight, and despite not having seen any Pooh material in two decades, more than unsettling – Eeyore especially. Not to mention that I never really understood until now that Winnie the Pooh is actually a complete moron – gluttony at its worst, until he makes the ‘choice’ to return Eeyore’s tail instead of eating some honey, although he could have very easily done both at the same time.

Life is too short to not waste time doing this. This should be regular for a while, starting now, but retroactive to a few days ago, when I started posting them on Google+, where I’ll continue to post them, too. Here are those:

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Rosemary’s Baby [1968, Roman Polanski] (8.4) – I somehow managed not only to avoid this for 25 years, but also to isolate myself from it enough to believe that it was some sort of The Exorcist competitor for gore and shock value, when it’s really a way more elegant study of paranoia that keeps the darkest matter offscreen. I was hoping that the reality of Rosemary’s fears would remain ambiguous (as a movie-watcher, of course I think her neighbors and doctors could possibly end up as satanic witches given their behavior, but that they actually are moves everything into the supernatural, distinguishing a bit of the severity of Rosemary’s condition – she wasn’t crazy after all, but actually quite justified). A lot of Lynch-isms in here, too (the Castevets have to be the source for the grandparents in Mulholland Dr. that lead to Betty/Diane’s ultimate fate; the final scene in the secret room evoked Blue Velvet‘s climax in Dorothy’s apartment; not to mention the ominous train noises).
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I Don’t Want to Be a Man [1918, Ernst Lubitsch] (5.6) – damn is Ossi an irritating brat. I like the way, over time, the gender politics becoming increasingly fickle – going from offensive and belittling representations of female daintiness (Ossi ‘doesn’t want to be a man’ because, well gee, smokin’ cigars, drinkin’ champagne, and gettin’ yer toes stepped on are tough work!) to her empowering, if still short-sighted triumphs over her ambiguously gay guardian (aside: were hetero males in early-twentieth century Germany really that touchy-feely? I mean, they could hardly keep their mouths off each other). Points for being such a prescient representation of drag, even if it’s all never as funny as it tries to be.
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Il Posto [1961, Ermanno Olmi] (8.7) – a few days ago I made a blanket statement against pretty much all of Italian cinema – excepting Antonioni, of course – but I clearly forgot about the neo-realists, somehow. The push-and-pull of ecstatic human emotions and the de-humanizing machine that is the workforce are balanced with a style that is somehow true to the ‘realist’ label but still expressive and occasionally abstract. Antonietta is one of the most alluring banal female characters I’ve seen; every moment she’s not on the screen in the second half of the film, I miss her.

“For Flaherty, what is important about Nanook hunting a seal is his relationship with the animal, the real extent of his wait. The length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true subject. In the film, this episode is thus composed in only one shot. Can anyone deny that it is much more moving as a result than montage of attractions would have been?”¹
– André Bazin

As cinema continues to finalize its transition from a medium composed of celluloid grain into one composed of digital pixels, it is important to take a closer look at some differences between these two means of producing a moving image. As D.N. Rodowick notes in a chronological outline of this transition, cinema has been under the influence of digital technology since digital image processing and synthesis was introduced in the 1980s², though this development merely allowed for special effects work to be done on films shot on celluloid. The real game-changing shift comes not only with post-production digital editing advancements, but also with the advent and ubiquity of digital capturing devices. ‘Films’ are being shot on hour-long digital tapes or with cameras rigged up to hard drives rather than 11-minute-capacity reels housing a thousand feet of celluloid. But for digital filmmaking to take possession of its “area of competence,” as Greenberg would say, it must determine and utilize that which is exclusive to itself as a medium.³ Of all that is unique to this new medium of cinema, I cannot see a more significant trait than its drastically extended allowance in shot length.

Additionally, if one wishes to look at just how varied our perception of the cinematic image is by this development, one would find a strong model in the genre of ‘structural’ filmmaking. P. Adams Sitney, who first named and outlined the characteristics of the genre, defines this avant-garde niche as one “wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.”⁴ With a film that is about shape, and the deconstruction and minimizing of that shape, the work acts as an exposé of the formal paradigms that construct the narrative cinema. Michael Snow’s canonical structural film Wavelength is practically the example of this commentary. In “Toward Snow,” Annette Michelson’s seminal piece on Wavelength, she outlines the film’s deconstruction of narrative form. She writes, “The film is the projection of a grand reduction; its ‘plot’ is the tracing of spatiotemporal données, its ‘action’ the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness.”⁵ She then adds, “Voiding the film of the metaphoric proclivity of montage, Snow created a grand metaphor for narrative form.” Given that he has taken on digital recording methods with some of his recent moving image work, there is not a more appropriate artist than Michael Snow to look at the shifts in perception that have been born from digital filmmaking’s extended long takes.

Snow’s 2002 video piece Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) is a worthy candidate for this examination, both for its formal make-up (it is a single, static shot that lasts for 62 minutes), and for its primary subject (a pair of windows), which has a striking resemblance to the aesthetics of Wavelength. Throughout Solar Breath’s running time, the drapes hanging on the viewer’s side of the windows dangle, whip, and react to the wind that flows in and out of the space through one of the windows that has been left open. Though this window is open, there is still a screen that stops the drape from exiting the space. The drape, therefore, smacks lazily against the screen as the wind attempts to suck the undulating fabric out of our space and into the outdoors. On a small number of occasions, the drape will blow forward far enough to give the viewer a glimpse of the outside, where a solar panel sits on a table in the lawn, soaking in the sun, generating the energy that is potentially allowing the video camera to operate and record that which we are seeing. While all of this takes place – seemingly in real time without any breaks in the action – non-diegetic sound of someone eating fills the soundtrack.

That Solar Breath is a single shot of a set of windows steers it directly into dialogue with Wavelength (never mind that they were both made by Michael Snow). While Solar Breath genuinely has the appearance of being a single shot, Wavelength is very much a different story. In his original statement written for the release of the film, Snow purports Wavelength to be “a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field,”⁶ even though the material nature of celluloid, as well as the jumpy visual appearance, reveals this to not be the case. Michelson skimps around this claim, hazily mentioning the disruptions in the zoom in her description of it, saying that it is “by no means absolutely steady, but proceeding in a slight visible stammer.”(“Toward Snow,” 174) Shot with various stocks of 16mm film – some expired, some current – the film is very much a collection of reels. Not that it is any big secret that Wavelength was not actually done in a single take (the film goes from day to night and back to day in the course of 45 minutes). The reality of the matter is that Wavelength, a film made in 1967, couldn’t have been done in a single, 45-minute take even if Snow had wanted to; no reels of film, neither in 1967 nor now, support shots that are even half that length. The illusion that what we are seeing is continuous is an intuitive connection between our awareness of the limitations of the medium, and our detection of the intentions of the filmmaker to overcome these limitations.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who coincidentally published his article “Observations on the Long Take” in the same year of Wavelength’s premiere, likens the long take to that of our own present perception:

“Reality seen and heard as it happens is always in the present tense. The long take, the schematic and primordial element of cinema, is thus in the present tense. Cinema therefore ‘reproduces the present’.”⁷

If the lingering shot is the present of a particular, subjective observer, it remains a reproduction of the present until it is finished, whereby it becomes the past, allowing for interpretation. Pasolini’s theory develops to posit that a shot’s meaning can only be given value once it is finished; like with human life, the possibilities of relations and meanings and developments is endless, “chaotic,” until it is over. This reveals Wavelength to be an anomaly of sorts. When its shots end, they are each followed by a brand new shot that begins in almost exactly the same place, with almost exactly the same perspective of exactly the same room as when the previous shot ended. While Pasolini sees montage as the construction of an objective viewpoint – the selection of the best of every possible subjective perspective to present objectivity devoid of the present – Wavelength exists as a montage that retains its subjectivity and its illusion of the present.

Bazin’s opinion on long takes differs from Pasolini’s in that it promotes long takes in order to retain the objectivity, rather than the subjectivity, ingrained in the single, unedited shot. He speaks of three different types of editing, and “All three have a common feature, which is the very definition of editing and montage: they create meaning which is not objectively contained in the images and which derives solely from placing these images in relation to one another.”(“Evolution of Film Language,” 88-89) In Bazin’s essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”⁸ he details how a photograph, captured on emulsion, presents the photographed subject in the present. The photo is objective proof of the subject’s existence. Similarly, a motion picture film presents the change of the subject objectively. This change in the subjects exists as it was captured, regardless of image distortion. The objectivity of this change is interrupted, though, with montage, which introduces the subjectivity of the editor, inviting interpretation and meaning that was not invoked in the original shot. Going back to Bazin’s thoughts on Nanook’s hunt, the duration of his wait is presented in its actual temporal form; the wait that we experience in watching the hunt is identical to the duration that Nanook experienced at the original moment of filming. It is, thus, made present again in the viewer. Any cuts or edits in this shot would extinguish its validity as an objective document of the duration of Nanook’s wait.

There are comparable problems with this theory, again, when it is matched up with Wavelength. Because the shape of the structural film is the subject of the work, it is the zoom that should be considered the subject of Snow’s film (as opposed to the walls of the loft, any of the human performers, or the photograph of the waves). Going by Bazin’s ideas, then, the film is a document of the change of the zoom, and the duration of that change. The duration of the camera zoom at the heart of the film is fixed at 45 minutes once the starting point (the back of the loft), end point (the photograph), and the zoom speed are determined, all of which is set in the first moments of the first reel. The camera’s projected zoom is intermittently broken up by cuts, but, again, each shot progresses in the same direction at the same speed. Repeating one of Michelson’s key thoughts, “[Wavelength’s] ‘action’ is the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness,”(“Toward Snow,” 175) the film presents only one consciousness. The fact that the zoom is broken up into many parts is inconsequential to the duration because all of the shots are intra-subjective, giving the illusion of a continuous trek. Wavelength successfully functions as a document of the duration of a 45-minute zoom through a loft because of this approximate continuity among its successive shots. The objective duration of the zoom would be the same as one shot as it is as several.

That Wavelength represents a single journey despite being composed of several shots is a result of the viewer’s intuition of the mode (celluloid) in which it was captured. This is a cognitively formulated suspension of disbelief, but as Rodowick details, it is also an inevitable awareness that is inherent in, and shapes the way that we perceive, every creative medium:

“A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal. Moreover, these elements may vary, individually and in combination with one another, such that a medium may be defined without a presumption that any integral identity or an essence unites these elements into a whole or resolves them into a unique substance.”⁹

Thus, in McLuhan-ist fashion, the potential of the recording medium is a very important factor in its interpretation, in large part because we know what something can and cannot do, and therefore are more open to compensations. This is why the emergence of a medium such as video provokes new grounds for the perception of the extended long take. With video, several-hours-long shots are possible.

A sample of some of the structural filmmakers who have taken the plunge into digital capturing methods, other than Michael Snow, includes Ernie Gehr, Jonas Mekas, and, most recently, James Benning with his 2009 film Ruhr. Benning makes for an interesting model at this point, because a majority of his films are founded on durational concerns that he explores in long, static shots. Ruhr is Benning’s first ‘film’ not captured or exhibited on celluloid in thirty-two years of filmmaking, and contains the longest shot of his career, coming in at 60 minutes. Mark Peranson described this shot in his review of the film in the Winter 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine¹⁰:

“Relieved of the necessity of changing camera rolls, Benning goes all out with a mesmerizing shot of a coke-processing tower in Schwelgern, where every ten minutes water pours down onto the base and creates a billowing pillar of steam leaking through the steel-latticed structure and into the atmosphere; the tower looks that it is on fire. As it repeats, surrounded by clouds it itself creates, the image takes on a psychedelic quality, with each billowing blossoming into differing colours, a function of both the material being processed as well as the changing quality of light.”

As a continuous documentation of the repeating cycles of the steam from the tower, and of the daylight’s shift into the darker tones of the evening, this kind of shot is unique to the technology of video capturing. No form of celluloid could present the entire duration of this event.

A peculiar anecdote in the same review reveals another facet of video, and at the same time calls into question its indexicality. Near the end of his description of Ruhr’s concluding shot, Peranson reports, “the shot grew dark faster than time allows – Benning condensed 90 minutes to 60, in effect speeding up the sunset”(“Ruhr,” 57) (*Note – According to an interview with Benning, the shot was actually narrowed down to 60 minutes from a 120- minute shot¹¹). In this off-hand factoid, the credibility of the documentary value of the shot virtually vanishes. The shot, which is perceived to be a particular duration in the film, is revealed to have been twice as long in the original captured moment. First of all, it is important to note that there are two methods in which Benning could have eliminated that hour of running time. Either he sped up the video to play at 200% its captured speed, or he cut out a chunk from somewhere in the middle, and joined the remaining fragments through very slow dissolves and color correction. In the aforementioned interview with Benning, he reveals the latter method to have indeed been the case, but it is the potentiality of both options that questions and complicates the ways that we perceive video and its indexical value for duration and change.

To capture, and then playback, a document of a subject’s change in a manner which can be deemed to be indexical, there is a responsibility placed on the coordination of frame rates in the production and post-production development of the shot. In the analogical medium of celluloid, options for deviating from this coordination have always been slim, and have only gotten more strictly defined since the end of the silent era. Presently, 16mm and 35mm films are almost universally shot at 24 frames per second; with super 8mm, one has the added option of 18 frames per second, and the silent era saw a range of complicated frames rates, some of which, such as 17 frames per second, are awkward prime numbers that are practically incompatible with any of today’s projectors. While many of these frame rates were used for slow motion or fast motion techniques, the options for projecting a film at a frame rate that is different from that which it was captured, while still retaining an illusion of being ‘real-life’ speed, are nil (anything less than a 10% speed change will be imperceptible to most eyes). Even so, a film projected at a faster or slower frame rate than which it was shot is still, materially, unaltered.

Video, on the other hand, has a wide and complicated array of potential digital speed alterations. In editing suites such as Avid and Final Cut Pro, video can be sped up or slowed down by as little as .01%. Changes in video speeds will result in one of two distortions in the frame counts: in progressive video, frames will intermittently be dropped so that the final running time corresponds to the calculated manipulation, and in interlaced video, two frames will weave themselves together in order to compensate for the lost or gained time. In Europe, where the PAL video standard calls for frame rates of 25 frames per second instead of 24, films are telecined with a 4% speed-up to compensate for the difference, yielding very slight, though imperceptible fast-forward in practically every video available in the continent. The reality of this type of speed-up, though, originates in the post-production process: a film shot on either celluloid or video is subject to this manner of durational manipulation.

In contrast, the potentiality of the technique of ‘seamless splicing’ (i.e. Benning’s method of halving the duration of his shot of the coke tower) is rooted in the moment of capture. In the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope¹², Benning recalls the circumstances for another shot used in Ruhr in which seamless splicing was also used:

“I began filming…in a wooded area adjacent to the Düsseldorf International Airport. There was no wind. It was absolutely still, not one leaf was moving. The high definition captured every tiny twig…I found the frame and pushed the start button filling two SxS cards with one take – a 114-minute shot. During that time 40 planes landed. The frame remained absolutely still, no registration movement, no dancing grain…I wasn’t sure this stillness would be acceptable, but then a plane passed through the frame providing momentary movement. Ten seconds later a wind vortex produced by the passing plane sang though the frame and disturbed one loose branch hanging from a nearby tree… When the next plane landed it started all over again…When I looked at the footage on my computer that night I realized I had recorded an action that would have been impossible to capture on film.”

In the film, this shot lasts roughly seventeen minutes, in which 4 of the 40 captured planes are seen landing. Just like in the coke tower scene, any jumps in time that Benning added in post-production are imperceptible. What we see in the film dictates that there are approximately 4 minutes between the landing of the first plane and the landing of the second; however, it is anyone’s guess as to how much time actually passed between the original landings of these two planes, or even if there were other planes that landed in between them. What we are aware of while watching this shot, though, is the potentiality that Benning recorded a large stretch of uninterrupted footage, and is presenting the viewer with his most ideal representation of this event.

This boundless, uninterrupted palette of moments likens the editing process to the more subjective, ‘hands-on’ artistic medium of painting. Rodowick quotes Thomas Elsaesser’s “Beyond Distance”, in which Elsaesser writes, “…the digital image should be regarded as an expressive, rather than reproductive medium, with both the software and the ‘effects’ it produces bearing the imprint and signature of the creator”. Rodowick adds, “The image becomes not only more painterly but also more imaginative.¹³” This is such a monumental quality for video to have, not only because it validates its place among more traditional fine art media, but because it gives it an edge against celluloid as a tool for artists’ and filmmakers’ creative and subjective freedom. When a shot is captured on celluloid, the potentiality of missed moments – via reel changes – comes into play. Therefore, because there are moments in the entire duration of the captured event that are ineligible for inclusion in the final presentation, the viewer cannot be confident that the filmmaker was allowed to curate the duration down to his most desired selection. This is akin to denying a painter access to certain viewing angles of his model, or the use of particular, appropriate brushes.

Michael Snow’s Solar Breath, thus, both suffers and reaps rewards from video capture’s potentialities. As a presentation of a long, continuous shot of wind playing and fighting with the window drapes, the indexicality of the duration of this event is dubious from the moment it is clear that it was captured in video. We see three or four instances in which the drapes blow forward to reveal the outdoors, but the intervals in which these, or any change, occur is shrouded in doubt and cannot be assumed to be an accurate representation of the real duration (this, of course, disregards situations in which an artist may explicitly state his faithfulness to the captured material in the editing process, which itself is a rare circumstance that cannot be read into the long-term interpretation or perception of the work).

On the other hand, Solar Breath’s capture method instills a subjectivity and creative freedom into the work via this same slight-of-hand potentiality. Like Benning’s hour-long coke tower shot, or his fifteen minutes of overhead planes and rustling twigs, Snow’s film is viewed with the possibility that the bit that we are seeing is only a fragment of the entire capture. Solar Breath isn’t randomly 62 minutes long; it is that length because Snow didn’t want it to be any longer or shorter. The piece presents the moments from the original shoot that Snow deemed to be worthwhile; the distance between the first and the second glimpses into the outdoors is what it is because Snow didn’t feel the need to shorten it (or even lengthen it). The potential for greater authorial control in the duration grants what is seen more weight as an expression of Snow’s tastes and intuitive sense of temporal composition. It is not just the work of nature, but a collaboration between Snow and nature.

Recalling Bazin’s ideas on the ontology of the photographed image, he likened it to a mummification of the model, and he saw film as the mummification of change in the model. Furthermore, these media were proof that the model and its changes existed, unaffected by the image’s distortions in focus, discoloration, or incorrect aspect ratios. As Bruce Elder explained in his dissection of Michael Snow’s film Presents,¹⁴ an image is not indexical when there is distortion, and this is detailed in the opening minutes of Presents when the squished image of a naked woman becomes completely unrecognizable as a representation of a human being. Likewise, then, any distortion of time in a moving image should be seen to diminish the image’s indexicality of the model’s change. This is the most liberating feature of video as a documentary medium. In the takeover of photography in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Bazin purported that “Photography is thus manifestly the most important event in the history of the visual arts. Both deliverance and fulfillment, it enabled Western painting to rid itself once and for all of its obsession with realism and to rediscover its aesthetic autonomy.”(“Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 10) Likewise, video’s inability to objectively present a durational event allows the medium to jump right into its own autonomy: the unquestionable faith that the image and its duration represent the artist’s uncensored intuitive vision.

Citations

1. André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 91.
2. D. N. Rodowick, “The Incredible Shrinking Medium,” The Virtual Life of Film.
   Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 7.
3. Clement Greenberg, “Modernism,” Clement Greenberg – The Collected Essays and
   Criticism: Volume 4 – Modernism with a Vengeance (1957-1969), The University
   of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, UK, 1993: pg. 86.
4. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture, no. 47 (Summer, 1969), pg. 327.
5. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow: Part 1,” Artforum, 5:10 (June, 1967), pp. 175-76.
6. Michael Snow, “A Statement on Wavelength for the Experimental Film Festival of
   Knokke-le-Zoute,” Film Culture, no. 46, (Autumn, 1967), pg. 1.
7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take,” October, Vol. 13 (Summer,
   1980), pp. 4-6.
8. André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 3-10.
9. D. N. Rodowick, “An Ethics of Time,” The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University
   Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 85.
10. Mark Peranson, “Ruhr,” Cinema Scope, Issue 41 (Winter, 2010), pg. 57.
11. James Benning, Interview with Michael Guillen, “Darkest Americana & Elsewhere:
    Ruhr: A Few Questions For James Benning,” Twitchfilm, March 2, 2010,
    link.
12. James Benning, “Knit & Purl,” Cinema Scope, Issue 40 (Fall, 2009), pg. 39.
13. D. N. Rodowick, “Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism,” The Virtual Life of Film.
    Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 106.
14. Bruce Elder, “On the Concepts of Presence and Absence in Michael Snow’s
    Presents,” in Wees, William C. and Michael Dorland, eds. Words and Moving
    Images. Mediatexte, Montreal, QC, 1984: pp. 34-51.

I’ve linked respective titles to my reviews hosted over at Ioncinema.
The comments are also being tweeted (@Astrostic)

Masterpieces
–
 
 
Best
Melancholia (Lars von Trier) – You don’t need controversy to make a great film, and this one is stellar. This film is not about an apocalypse, but rejecting preciousness to achieve real happiness; it was such a good idea to screen it after The Tree of Life, since this is essentially an antidote for that film’s gloss.
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello) – This got me closer to tears than any other film in the festival; stunningly beautiful, more later.
 
 
Other Standouts
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) – There are just so many ideas swimming around in it; it’s still shapeshifting in my head, maybe some of the cult stuff is a tad overblown, but still.
Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn) – Beautiful filmmaking da da da a bit shallow da da da doesn’t matter still amazing da da da what everyone else says da da da…
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev) – Why wasn’t this in Competition?! Slow-building, meandering, poignant, and a worthwhile progression of Zvyagintsev’s style, in my opinion.
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo) – One of the more emotionally resonant films I’ve seen from Hong; no structural gimmicks, just sweet coincidences. (‘Coincidences’ in film’s language not mine) ‘Logical paths created from chaos’ is kind of a pet theme of mine – it just makes most things better. Then again, that theme is present in many of Hong’s films I’ve seen, so maybe it’s just more ‘same old same old’. Whatever, it’s really good. (5 days later: Okay, I already thought this was great, but hearing that it has a Groundhog Day structure is news to me; my opinion of it will almost certainly be going up next time)
 
 
Quite Good
This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi) – Had this continued on as a Brechtian makeshift construction of Panahi’s rejected screenplay, I think it would’ve been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still potent; had to chuckle at seeing a DVD of Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried on Panahi’s shelf. I don’t think that was staged.
Play (Ruben Östlund) – Sententious, yet pleasingly provocative & brilliantly directed film about class, manipulation, and theft; perhaps just a bit too Code Unknown.
The Prize (Paula Markovitch) – Incredibly strong debut; palpable tension watching a second grader try desperately to lead a normal life within her mom’s protective lies.
The Silver Cliff (Karim Aïnouz) – I guess it’s a Martel kind of day! Replace killing the dog in Headless Woman with getting dumped out-of-the-blue and you’ve got another bewildered woman, aimlessly trolling a life that used to be familiar; haunting, and some beautiful light texture.
The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) – Loved where it was going until he meets Wex; proceedings typically Dardenne; that’s never bad, but also not as exciting anymore.
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) – Of the recent brigade of sparse, realist South American films, this one excels as a charismatic portrait of a man – and nation’s – immobility. Also, if you must have post-film didactic text, have your protagonist sing it aloud, as his film does.
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont) – Dumont is back in the mode of his first two features; austerity is often grueling, but it does pick up significantly once its point finally emerges in the second half. Also, it includes his best sex scene by a mile; the girl came out of her mouth! (not really, but kind of, actually)
Goodbye (Mohammad Rasoulof) – Resonates quite at bit due to current events that are its raison d’être, but I was too drowsy to say if it stands on its own (‘Stands on its own’, meaning, if it is as breathtaking with the politics unknown or forgotten, as exceptional filmmaking. This is likely). Anyway, this was my first Rasoulof film; hope to see more (past and future).
This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino) – Color me surprised, but this was not only watchable, but constantly amusing, absurd, and funny; Penn is ridiculous. It made me want to watch Stop Making Sense again; the Talking Heads music video-esque bit here is as good as any individual moment in the Demme doc. (Actually, I take back that comment, as I just remembered four Stop Making Sense scenes that beat it. Still good, though) I’m still surprised that Penn didn’t annoy the living shit out of me; it might be an ‘up is down’ case.
>Hard Labor (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra) – I almost fell asleep in the 1st half, but then the audaciously strange 2nd half left me wide-eyed, heart racing, covered in goosebumps. I can’t say I ‘got it,’ though. Maybe it’s some kind of critique of lower class labor conditions, but that kind of goes out the window when ‘it’ appears.
 
 
Good
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) – Auto-pilot Pedro that had all of the ideas I thought it would from reading its short synopsis: good ones, but no risks.
My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco) – Eva Ionesco should have played the mother’s role, and that’s the only time Ionesco is preferred to Huppert, ever. It’s Ionesco’s autobiography of her childhood, posing in her mother’s erotic photos; lush and conventional, with some sharp dialogue.
Heat Wave (Jean-Jacques Jauffret) – Well, the subtitles cut out at about 70% of the way through and never came back on; However, if anyone can tell me what the mother’s diagnosis is, I think I could form a reaction. What I do know, though, is that it is a perfectly 50-50 genetic hybrid between the Dardenne’s concerns and Amores Perros, as raised by Adrienn Pal.
Mushrooms (Vimukthi Jayasundara) – Jayasundara evokes Antonioni and Jia’s alien urban landscapes with beautiful photography and eerie moods, mixed in with bizarre forest mystics pulled from Weerasethakul. I’ll need another look to sort through extreme narrative ellipses that led to a detached viewing experience, but in general I was hypnotized.
Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold) – All of these were mostly enjoyable, but feel like three minor films tied together schematically. This one felt like a TV movie, but I thought the same about Jerichow. It’s the one where I most actively cared about what was happening.
The Island (Kamen Kalev) – one of the worst films I’ve seen this year…until the awesome final 45 minutes that came completely out of nowhere. Imagine you’re watching something rancid… say you’re an hour into Who Can Kill A Child?, when all-of-a-sudden, an hour in, it turns into the first half of Network. I’d written off Kalev for good, and now feel a need to see it again, in case the first half miraculously works somehow. It seems like part of the movie may be intentionally self-destructive ala Adaptation, only it idiotically put the bad part at the beginning.
Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhäusler) – Half of this was very good, but it was intercut with a side plot that I couldn’t engage with, and had a kind of horror element that felt forced.
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh) – What the hell is this movie about? I don’t know, but I sure enjoyed watching it not tell me; many scenes are quite haunting.
Poliss (Maïwenn) – Extremely well-made police drama, riveting for the entire length, though it seemed more like a TV pilot than a focused film; the love scenes drag a bit.
Habemus Papam (Nanni Moretti) – Great when realist comedy shows Vatican as the absurd ritual that it is, but not-so-great when it’s just plain silly. Stirring ending.
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) – Shifts from a ho-hum drug trade drama into a stylish, unconventional drug trade drama, yet still remains a drug trade drama.
Sauna On Moon (Zou Peng) – Yesterday was ‘Jia’ day, after Jayasundara evoked Still Life, Peng makes sexed-up Platform/The World amalgam that only works in spurts; but when it does, it dazzles (much like Jia).
Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher) – Nice enough little realist coming-of-age-and-religion movie; kinda slight, though; it frequently reminded me of Martel’s Holy Girl.
Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me (Dominik Graf) – Probably the most detached of the trilogy from the escapee plot, and had the most auteurist sensibility, but I couldn’t care less about the central dramatic element.
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) – An approximate quote from the film: “if you are too good, you won’t succeed.” That about sums it up. Precious and universal to the point of saying nil, it’s basically National Geographic with scrapings of a plot. Ellipses give needed abstraction, but not nearly enough. Obviously, Tree of Life will be proclaimed by many to be this generation’s 2001; the difference: Kubrick choked me up with a robot, where Malick left me cold with a human family. Worth noting that this is the first of Malick’s films that I don’t think is great.
Michael (Markus Schleinzer) – I’m not sure it does much with its premise beyond building up layers of irony, but it’s entirely watchable, which itself is a tad unsettling.
 
 
‘Okay’
Breathing (Karl Markovics) – The protagonist of this movie kind of looks like me; I’m struggling to say anything else. In…and out…
Tatsumi (Eric Khoo) – I’ve no interest or knowledge in gekiga, manga, anime, etc. This seemed to be a decent enough treatment of the material, but it’s formally tired, and never impressive.
Iris in Bloom (Valérie Mréjen & Bertrand Schefer) – Generic French, intellectual coming-of-ager, in which a teen and an older photographer muse about love & art. It’s ‘not for me.’
Restless (Gus Van Sant) – A death trilogy add-on, as made for to appeal strictly to teens; sweet-natured, but ultimately inoffensive and minor.
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) – I’ve only seen this and Three Monkeys, so I’m by no means familiar with Ceylan. I see his appeal, but I haven’t been able to enjoy him yet. If/when I do, I have a feeling I’ll come back to Anatolia and see it as something truly special. Everything looks amazing, and the rigorous way that every scene is drawn out (especially the night search) is exciting in theory. However, it was a bad film to see at 10pm of a five-film day; I think the narrative and drama are neglected, and it felt pretentious at the time. There is no reason why this couldn’t have been a gripping film and a beautiful, contemplative one. The story is quite solid, just hidden in murk. [Update Sept. 2011: nevermind everything I said. I saw this again while actually being awake and it is a near-masterpiece]
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier) – Less stylized than Reprise, but also extracts the non-depressive bits; I don’t care about depressed druggies relapsing.
Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler) – Resists any (needed) dramatic element for elliptical themes that intrigue only sporadically; basically, it’s Claire Denis sans a soul.
Unforgivable (André Téchiné) – Overlong; one trifle after another, and pretty much all of its charms are in the middle third; the outcome for the little dog: unforgivable.
Guilty of Romance (Sion Sono) – Sono says his film reflects the way he sees women, with “fascination and fear.” He forgot to add “sluts” & “garbage.” He sure can make a movie, though. If he ever makes something not trying to provoke the ire of an entire gender (or two), I might love it.
The Slut (Hagar Ben Asher) – Acted and shot well enough, but it goes exactly where you’d expect it to, & takes 0 risks getting there (aside from nudity).
The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius) – People seemed to love this somehow; it’s a pretty by-numbers treatment of the idea; watch Singin’ in the Rain instead. My rating (4.3) maybe should to be a tad lower, but I’ve got to give a shout-out to the aspect ratio.
The Fairy (Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, & Bruno Romy) – Funny only when it’s not trying to be (almost never), but it’s much more often chuckleless inventive; These guys don’t need to make more films…they’re all the same schtick.
The Giants (Bouli Lanners) – They awarded this the Directors’ Fortnight top prize for (quoting from memory) “exposing the evils that face the world today.” ‘Evil’ being weed, an abusive, retarded older brother, & Down syndrome.
Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) – Art history 101 that’s explicitly exploring the familiar idea that we can only love an unfamiliar past; the acting is repellent.
Beloved (Christophe Honoré) – So the Closing film is just as good as the Opening one; this has one of most absurd threesomes ever, even considering pornos.
 
 
Difficult to Defend
Volcano (Rúnar Rúnarsson)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) – This is just an arthouse Problem Child; hopefully it will get parents to talk to their kids about the danger of having stupid parents.
Code Blue (Urszula Antoniak) – If you live alone, like minimal interior design, and have no friends, you must also be socially retarded and sexually perverted.
The Silence of Joan (Philippe Ramos) – Given how often this story has been done in cinema, why was this made? Oh, so Amalric can cameo as a priest.
Magic Trip (Alex Gibney & Alison Ellwood)
 
 
Plain Jane Bad
The Other Side of Sleep (Rebecca Daly) – Pseudo-contemplative, utterly disposable hackery that stole two hours from my side of sleep.
On the Plank (Leïla Kilani) – How a movie about girls swindling iPhones could be this impossible to understand makes me think it may be avant-garde gold. While watching it though, I contemplated the missed opportunity in making Arirang the closing night film instead of Beloved. Too bad.
Footnote (Joseph Cedar) – Oh for god’s sake. I’ll avoid the obvious titular joke and just mention that I really hate Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Pater (Alain Cavalier) – Esoteric beyond repair; Cavalier’s narcissism is mediocre.
 
 
Awful
The Hunter (Bakur Bakuradze) – This movie can go ahead and die. Tedious, austere, and shapeless – all for the sake of being an ‘art’ film.
The Source (Radu Miheileanu) – Life is filled with simple pleasures, and one of them is knowing that I will never have to see this movie ever again.
Arirang (Kim Ki-duk)– Maybe this can be defended in some esoteric Buddhist way or something, but this is a DVD extra feature I would turn off after 5 minutes.