Author name: Blake Williams

In one corner, this could be the most realistic war film ever made; not only realistic in the sense that it can often pass as actual, filmed documentation of battles and wartime, but also that it is showing the situation objectively, and from enough of a distance that all hints of the filmmaker’s intentions remain ambiguous even after it is over. Typical of Mr. Jancsó, the film is shot in very long, elaborately choreographed shots in which the camera circles and maneuvers its way in and around the characters and the action. This can beautify the war in some sections, but leave it stern and brutal in others, depending on how intrusive the camera actually is. At times, the camera, fairly close up, is transitioning from object to object, person to person, so seamlessly and well-choreographed, that it feels too rehearsed, or even too logical. These rare but well-dispersed sequences are the lone circumstance in which Jancsó takes control of the action and his audience, and guides the viewer through precisely what he wants us to see. The camera is usually backed away enough to decide for oneself what, in this busy and chaotic assemblage of violence and backstabbing, to focus on, not dissimilar to the tension and freedom granted from a deep focus conversation.

Regarding the viewer’s attempts of ‘siding’ with someone in the film, there isn’t really a protagonist in which to sympathize; one is able to sympathize with whichever side of the conflict he chooses, and pickin’s are slim, as the title of the film spoils: you have your Communist Reds or your Tsarist Whites. I couldn’t care either way, which brings me to the other corner of the film’s realism: why depict an historical event, that actually happened, and present it as it is here, in glorified realism? Where does that leave the viewer who has no association with the film’s politics? Since the film is based on events that took place just before the 1920s, it is in the realm of possibility that the events here could have been filmed, documented in motion pictures; this is a trait that his The Round-Up does not have since it was set in the early 19th century, before film or any other means of moving pictures were developed. Round-Up entertained the audience’s potential lack of an entry to the material by incorporating a humanist plot to which anyone could relate. Here, though, it comes across as purely a showcase for Jancsó’s skill at directing excessively garnished action sequences; an empty-headed blockbuster. A drawn-out, recreated battle between Reds and Whites is just as banal and pedestrian as your everyday battle of good vs. evil, and is not enough to make this a worthwhile exploration of an important historical event.

This was the only color film by Jancsó in Cinematheque’s series of four early films by the Hungarian filmmaker, as well as the only film shot in the academy ratio, rather than 2.35:1 widescreen, a more appropriate and less oppressive aspect ratio for his mise en scène. Perhaps I developed too much of an appreciation for his usage of the anamorphic scope, but he didn’t seem to adjust his compositional approach to the narrower frame, and therefore much of the action feels cropped here. Anyway, the film tracks a collective of Hungarian civilians who are participating in a protest or revolt, or perhaps they are reenacting a protest or revolt; it is difficult to decipher if this film is set in its 1890 setting or if it takes place in the present. There are some surreal moments early on, such as when a woman is shot in her hand, and the bloody wound miraculously becomes a red ribbon, or when a man is seemingly shot dead, but then stands right back up and continues his participation in the protest. These moments make the rest of the film fairly ambiguous in terms of its adherence to reality or its reliance on fantasy. Characters are shot (by guns), and it is unclear if they are really wounded or dead or not. The wounds, like bullet holes or cuts from knives, have obviously fake blood, and yet it is unclear if it is fake blood in the character’s universe, or just low-budget filmmaking. Some might praise this confusion of reality and fiction, but it is maddening in this film because it doesn’t make a difference either way. If it is a reenactment or if it is just a filmed account of the revolt, it’s still the same film. So why is it so irritating, then, if it doesn’t matter? Because this ‘revolt’ is a massive bore, and the viewer has no reason to care about any characters, nor the collective of people. If one doesn’t have an adequate knowledge of the Hungarian revolution from the mid-19th century, this film will do little to educate or give insight. The characters are also singing and dancing through much of the film. My sensitivity to musicals seems to be increasing, after my issues with Terrence Davies’ early films of family sing-alongs, and now with these anarchist folk songs that similarly mean nothing to me. 87 minutes rarely passes so slowly.

The relative plotlessness of Silence and Cry, which carries over and progresses still in The Red and The White and Red Psalm, seems more like an evolution of style than the conscious decision that I perceived it to be, as The Round-Up is both the earliest and the most plot-driven film of the four in this retrospective. Not quite Jancsó’s break-through film, it’s not difficult to see why he made it so big after this. It isn’t as spatially and compositionally beautiful as Silence and Cry, but the action of the film is so much more engaging (the word ‘engaging’ is very much relative to the rest of Jancsó’s work that I’ve seen, as there is still not much going on here). The plot, which might have been partially borrowed for Hillcoat’s The Proposition, begins with the head of an army trying to weed out the worst of his lot of men who participated in guerilla violence. One man, who killed three men, is told that if he can find another man in the lot who killed more men than he did, then he will be pardoned. The film tracks his search, and recreates the forts in which these men were held captive, including dark cages where men would be stored without light or contact with the other prisoners. The army proves to be quite corrupt, of course, and takes every chance they can to abuse their power. The film shows the injustices toward a large group of men, and has emotional success because it follows a couple of select men and develops their characters and situations, a trait I thought was detrimentally absent in his next couple of films.

The film’s cinematography, which as I mentioned is not as striking here as it was in Silence and Cry, opts for shorter takes, but focuses more on patterns than the follow-up film’s study on depth and placement in space. In particular, line-ups of soldiers and prisoners, especially when they are in motion, create a kind of Op art effect on the screen, much in the way a field of cotton can be so dazzling when one drives by in a car, as the repetitious order of everything looks so artificial in nature, and is so exact that subtle patterns appear. Watching the army march is wonderful, especially to focus on the light that comes through between each men’s legs. Against the back-drop of the Hungarian planes, rolling hills, and intermittent forests (whose trees are similarly ordered), Jancsó draws inevitable comparisons between the men’s behavior and the peace and freedom of nature.

Jancsó’s films have a motif of men shooting men in their backs as they are walking away from a conversation or meeting. It’s an obvious but effective metaphor for how Jancsó believes power is handled when it is obtained by corrupt men.

Part of a mini-retrospective on Miklós Jancsó at the Cinematheque Ontario this weekend, Silence and Cry is the first of four films in the series, presumably his most significant four, which showed last night as part of a double feature. The films aren’t being shown chronologically, as they followed up this film with The Round-Up, made one year previous to this one. I suppose there is either a thematic or temporal reason for their arrangement which is, as of right now, unknown to me; thus, I won’t really say much more right now about the four films as a quadrilogy, or any other relation, except that they were all made my Miklós Jancsó in the span of six years.

The main hype about Jancsó is his camera work, specifically his long, languid takes. They aren’t Béla Tarr long, or even close to it; nor are they as monodirectional. Where Tarr will generally set his camera in a path that continues to progress into new territory, Jancsó roams a plane through and through, ritualistically, until its three-dimensionality is certain. While one often identifies the activity on-screen as being in the top or bottom, left or right of the frame, such ‘x and y’ graphing is not nearly adequate for these compositions; a ‘z’ is most definitely required. A figure in the top left corner of the frame isn’t in the top left corner of the frame, but is one hundred yards ahead and a few meters to the left. In staging these scenes, often framing scores of extras and characters, in their entirety, and capturing it all so thoroughly between each cut, the events depicted in the film gain a remarkable air of realism, as if some scenes are documenting the actual revolution.

As much as the film realistically portrays these historical events and the people and spaces surrounding it, it also cryptically eavesdrops on a few characters’ personal lives, muddily portraying a love triangle between István, our protagonist, and the two ladies on the farm who are poisoning a man and older woman, one of the ladies’ mother. The film is relaxed and meandering, mostly attributed to the camera and its drifting motions. Regardless of the drama brought in by our three ‘leads,’ the camera is the true star of this film, using the 2.35:1 format efficiently and deliberately; this film’s compositions just wouldn’t work in the typically more desirable academy ratio. The space, time, and mannerisms of the people captured in the lensing are much more telling of Jancsó as an artist than any expository theatrics could be.

As a film about a large group of characters trapped in a single room in a mansion, Buñuel’s mise en scène here has just as much opportunity as his symbols and ideals. Locking the characters into a single room (and the size of the room isn’t exactly adequate for the dozen+ guests) the camera is also isolated in the room, and, therefore, also the viewer. Or… not exactly. A fatal flaw in Buñuel’s découpage of Exterminating Angel is that the viewer is not confined to the room like all of the guests. The camera, on a few occasions, is propped in the adjacent dining room, looking in at the prisoners, as if to mock them. And later, the film takes us outside the actual mansion, to see, and spend a bit of time with, the public, press, and security, who are aware that there are many people in the mansion, and that they have been there for a very long time. This kills me, because it eliminates one of my favorite ideas from the former half of the film, which is that the outside world could be just as psychologically ‘off’ and physically trapped as they are; or better yet, that the world has reached a full-blown apocalypse. Sure, this is probably just not what Sr. Buñuel had in mind. He wants to poke fun at the bourgeois, at societal conventions, and religion. And all of these themes are presented very, very well in this film. But, oh, how it could have been so much more!

Releasing the viewer into the dining room does nothing positive for this film. In Stalker, Tarkovsky blows your mind by thrusting you into The Room that our three protagonist’s cop out on entering. Sitting in the Room, for who knows how many minutes, with the water leaking in around the camera, is as close to a religious experience as an unreligious viewer can get. Thus, placing the camera, the viewer, in this space that the characters are unable to enter gives the viewer a sense of power, and also a bit of knowledge and perspective that the characters will not have; a kind of dramatic irony of space. In Angel, looking in from the dining room at these characters, who may as well be looking in to a literal fourth wall, we have a sense of power over these characters, and we have that perspective, too. But there is no revelation or satisfaction that comes from this hierarchy of control, because the viewer isn’t the one who is willing himself into ‘the outside,’ the one overcoming this psychological, environmental, spatial crisis; it’s Buñuel. We are able to escape the room because his camera says we can. Once we are allowed outside of the mansion, too, the confinements of space no longer matter, and are no longer interesting. We become purely spectators to this crisis instead of participants. There’s a ton of enjoyment in this as a spectator, but the game was so much more fun when it was more than that.

Lola Montes is a spectacle film and not too much more, but what it does it does very well. The opening of the film, coinciding with the opening of the circus, is glorious, ambitious, and dazzling. Deep reds and blues and sparkling jewels are everywhere; rows of performers juggle in synchronization, the music is blaring, and the beautiful Lola is paraded out, stoic and iconic, all while the camera whirls and twirls in and around everything. It’s a brilliant introduction, but a fatal one, as nothing in the film comes close to satisfying what these first few minutes set up. That is not to say that the grandeur is not sustained; every moment of the circus that plays out throughout the film is equally dazzling and entertaining, but the lack of progression is irksome, mainly because, as the meat of the story progresses in intermittent flashbacks, the substance of Ophuls’ vision wears thinner and thinner, until it is completely transparent, leaving only the trumpets, lights, and the show as its contribution.

There are occasional bits that work, though. Lola’s relationship with her mother is well established, and provided rare insight into the isolating fame and stunted growth that defined her developing years. Lola, despite being in her late teens, still desires to share a cabin with her mother, who would secretly rather share her cabin with a man. Lola goes off to sleep in the dormitory with the other kiddies, and is teased for bursting into tears, knowing now that her happiness is not her mother’s sole passion. And later, the arbitrary satisfaction of Lola’s love is brilliantly shown as her lover hires an artist to paint a portrait of Lola. He takes great care to select the slowest, more meticulous painter, and encourages his mistakes and redos so that Lola will be obligated to stick around (or that he will have a reason to keep her around).

Lola is courted by four men (four of supposedly over a dozen lovers from her life, if her circus master and current hubby are to be believed) throughout the film, one for each season. This roundabout coverage of the course of a year, and drama and seemingly imminent doom of her brush with death at the end make this film seem like it is a complete account of Lola’s life. We’ve seen her spring, summer, autumn, and winter flings, her adolescence, her exploitation, and her general lifelessness (which is only interrupted in the film’s best scene in which she interrupts a performance to stomp through and over a party to approach her lover’s wife). The long, flowing line of men and boys paying to touch or kiss Lola is disturbingly endless, turning her into a kind of family-friendly whore. It’s a satisfying ending to a dry, engaging, and busy film about a woman who doesn’t deserve one.

It is a coincidence, or perhaps an occasion of synchronicity, that I should watch this film the night before Pages Bookstore would call to inform me that the new Caboose translation of André Bazin’s ‘What is Cinema?’ had arrived and that my copy was ready for pick-up. Bazin’s ideals on the photographic documentation of realism, and the mummification involved in the photographer’s intent to preserve reality, are well-presented in Guerín’s Train of Shadows, a study on representation, reality vs. fiction, old vs. new, the lit and the unlit, and the ghosts of film’s past. Guerín structures his film around an actual incident involving a man named Gerald Fleury, who disappeared in a lake near the village Le Thuit while he was seeking out a shot with very specific lighting for his film. The opening of Train shows about twenty minutes of aged, hand-held family documentation, not dissimilar to modern family home videos shot on consumer camcorders. The film is in terrible condition, and is dazzling, but dizzying and difficult to watch because of the spastic patterns of spots and general deterioration that has consumed the film; it could easily pass as a black & white Brakhage or Breer film. I was concerned in the latter half of this look at Fleury’s footage that Train of Shadows would just be this, as it goes on for so long. My fears were alleviated, though, as the film shifted to a long segment in which Guerín himself photographs stunning glimpses of natural and dynamic instances of light and shadows found in and around the Fleury estate.

The film exhibits Guerín’s gift for sound design, and his ability to locate almost supernaturally alluring instances shadows, lights, and compositions of objects and spaces in nature. Both of these traits have amassed a good deal of attention in his recent In the City of Sylvia. More than these technical signatures, though, Train of Shadows focuses on what seems to be Guerín’s key interest in his films: the subjectivity and complexity of the gaze. While Sylvia is primarily interested in a more feminist approach to the gaze, asking the viewer to be critical of the male and the artist’s obsessive gaze on women, Train takes more of an interest in a neutral gaze, and takes more interest in the viewer’s own gaze, and one’s interest in the gaze of the subject. While I was lulled into Guerín’s extended study of light and reflections that made up the center episode of Train, the film once again abandons its form, and becomes an obsessive investigation of the finer details of the Fleury film showed in the previous episode. The sound design really kicks in here, with luscious clicks and clacks of a machine speeding up, rewinding, and tabbing back and forth, frame by frame, through the Fleury film.

The Fleury film becomes a different entity during the analysis of the frames. When it is first seen, it carries the precious nostalgia commonly associated with old film stock and family footage. Here, though, under the microscope, it has the staginess of fiction. At one point, Guerín juxtaposes two different shots into split screens to create an illusion of the same space and time in the composition of the frame, similar to the flattening of space in Sylvia at the cafe, such as when a woman in the background might seem to be having a discussion with a person several meters in front of her, who in reality is not listening to the woman at all. In this portion of Train, a shot of a woman in a carriage who, at the last moment before riding off, flashes a suggestive glance at something, which, when followed by a separate shot of a man also looking at something, gives the illusion that they are looking at each other. This is basic film editing, picked apart right before our eyes, but it has a meticulous graduation that makes it seems as if we are witnessing the very discovery of the power of editing.

The structure of a French housemom’s life of chores structures Akerman’s monstrous structural film, the shortest two-hundred minute film I think I will ever see. Jeanne Dielman, a middle-aged, single mother, leads an improbably stereotypical life, the demolition of which is one of Feminism’s primary raisons d’être. The monotony and ritualism of it all is exhausting, but also mesmerizing and seductive. The ability to endure living such a life is heavily reliant on the flow state of consciousness, and Akerman’s masterful technique of luring her audience into the same flow state that Dielman is participating in is the main reason why the film flies by so easily; it’s cinematic hypnosis. Jeanne Dielman can dedicate twenty minutes to trying to make a decent cup of coffee, or knead her meatloaf to perfection, and I’m right there with her. I struggled between wanting to look at her face and wanting to keep my eyes on whichever chore she was currently doing, especially the meatloaf. It was the same experience as watching a scene in which a character receives a massage: total relaxation. There were a couple of moments where the camera would cut and relocate mid-chore, often to a less desirable angle on the action. This was slightly frustrating for me, having recently sat through 13 Lakes, because I theorize that the camera was moved when a reel ended. Akerman’s camera is never in motion in this film, and she will often sit it in place for the duration that Akerman is in a room, and switch to the next room she enters the moment she exits. When something takes too long, though, like the bravura coffee-making, the reel change is accompanied by an angle change, too. I assumed that this is to make the cut less distracting. This is minor, though, and my mild irritation can be attributed to the fact that Akerman was able to make so many instances of ultimate mundanity so riveting.

The ‘ending’ comes out of nowhere, and is a huge point for discussion, as it changes one’s interpretation of the film so drastically (not Sixth Sense drastic, fortunately, but still). The film certainly doesn’t need it; however, the closing shot of Jeanne at the dining table certainly benefitted, and her euphoric expression of exhaustion had me smirking until the credits finally show up. It made me think of Daniel Plainview’s already iconic ‘I’m finished’ line, as Dielman might have been waiting for years to finally do what she did. Is she so depleted, sitting at the table, because she has now completely gone off the deep end, or has she just relieved herself of a lifetime of pent up tension and frustration toward the conventional female lifestyle that she has effectively just destroyed for herself? The ominous, alien flicker that has penetrated her home for the duration of the film seems to finally hit her at this point; it’s a strange and incredibly intrusive luminance, but had become just another routine thing that is always there and accepted as such.

The film is lightly littered with sly references and commonalities to like-minded avant garde shorts from the 1970s, like Martha Rosler’s angry and cynical Semiotics of the Kitchen and Standish Lawder’s beautiful and pessimistic Necrology. The former damns the woman’s place in the kitchen, as a young lady shows off her knowledge of the tools of the kitchen, alphabetically, so to make the lesson more accessible to the next generation of girls. Rosler presumably hates women like Jeanne more than anything, someone who knows, rhythmically, the ins and outs of a kitchen. A brief shot of Jeanne drifting down an escalator while she is out running errands equates her life to one of the swarm of working class New Yorkers descending to their doom in Necrology. Jeanne is healthy, relatively young, has a luscious head of red hair, and is superficially happy; but, like the cast of Lawder’s film, she is dead already.

This is Aditya Assarat’s feature film debut, and is a shining reminder that not every Thai filmmaker is innately gifted. Showing that he has a lot of developing to do before joining big shots like Weerasethakul, Ratanaruang, and Sasanatieng, Wonderful Town threatens to undo whatever progress that Weerasethakul has made in his fight to loosen the government’s censorship of Thai film and art, as Assarat has made a film as insubstantial and inoffensive, to westerners and easterners alike, as he possibly could. The plot conveniently avoids even modest representations of sexuality by crafting characters who seem too sheltered to even know that sex exists. Also, for being set in post-tsunami Pakua Pak, Thailand, the film blatantly avoids any religious questions raised by nature’s killing of tens of thousands of people, which would have strengthened the film’s relevance, but upped it’s chances of a no-no from the Thai film board. The tsunami is actually 100% in the background of the film, having as much to do with the narrative as Hurricane Katrina had to do with the events taking place in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (aside: recently and inexplicably just announced to be released to DVD by the Criterion Collection). For a filmmaker actually ready to embrace how a devastating environmental shift can affect the residents’ characters, one need only look at Jia Zhang-ke’s recent features. Imagine if Jia made a film set in a town just flooded for the Three Gorges Dam, you know, like Still Life, but that the only thing that happens in the film is a man and a woman meet each other while swimming in the flooded town, and then proceed to flirt for an hour and a half. Let alone the ignorance of the film’s most interesting environmental tidbit, the film wouldn’t be any good even if it was just set in a tsunami-less Pakua Pak, either. The main conflict of the film is that Ton and Na, who have fallen in love (despite each other’s flatlined personalities; a match made in heaven, I suppose), aren’t aloud to embrace each other’s love to their hearts’ desires because of Na’s prejudiced brother who doesn’t like outsiders. Yawn. Na can’t even force herself to hug Ton while she is working in her shift as a maid at a hotel because she’s afraid someone will see and gossip. I have no reason to believe that Ton should be crazy about Na; she is not only obnoxiously shy and hopelessly conservative.

The film’s one successful moment occurs near the end when Ton makes an emotional phone call to his father. His father had abandoned him long ago because of Ton’s interest in being a musician. Ton informs his father on the other end of the phone that he’s quit his music, before bursting into tears. It’s touching, but then the film abruptly shifts back to it’s lame plot, which wastes no time in getting worse and more manipulative by throwing in a sudden and unbelievable moment of PG-rated violence. It’s unexpected, but also unnecessary. After enduring the introspective-American-drama-inspired score for the film’s duration, Assarat makes it bluntly obviously that his goal was to make a weepy, the only possible explanation for the artificial importance placed on the tsunami.

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2004 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

1. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. 13 Lakes (James Benning)
3. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar)
4. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
5. Ten Skies (James Benning)
6. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
8. The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)
9. Birth (Jonathan Glazer)
10. Le pont des Arts (Eugène Green)

 
Other 2004 films I’ve seen

• Closer (Mike Nichols)
• Collateral (Michael Mann)
• Crash (Paul Haggis)
• Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder)
• An Estranged Paradise (Yang Fudong)
• Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz)
• Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore)
• 50 First Dates (Peter Segal)
• Finding Neverland (Marc Forster)
• Garden State (Zach Braff)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Head-On (Fatih Akin)
• The Girl (Lucrecia Martel)
• Hotel Rwanda (Terry George)
• I ♥ Huckabees (David O. Russell)
• I, Robot (Alex Proyas)
• The Incredibles (Brad Bird)
• The Intruder (Claire Denis)
• Jersey Girl (Kevin Smith)
• Keane (Lodge Kerrigan)
• Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino)
• Kinsey (Bill Condon)
• Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow)
• The Ladykillers (Joel & Ethan Coen)
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)
• Los (James Benning)
• Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso)
• Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston)
• Mean Creek (Jacob Aaron Estes)
• Mean Girls (Mark Waters)
• Meet the Fockers (Jay Roach)
• Melinda and Melinda (Woody Allen)
• Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood)
• Miracle (Gavin O’Connor)
• Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembène)
• The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles)
• Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
• Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess)
• 9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom)
• Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard)
• Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh)
• Palindromes (Todd Solondz)
• The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)
• Primer (Shane Carruth)
• Saved! (Brian Dannelly)
• The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar)
• Secret Window (David Koepp)
• Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright)
• Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson & Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon)
• Sideways (Alexander Payne)
• Spanglish (James L. Brooks)
• Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi)
• Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock)
• The Terminal (Steven Spielberg)
• Twist of Faith (Kirby Dick)
• Vera Drake (Mike Leigh)
• A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
• The Village (M. Night Shyamalan)
• Wilby Wonderful (Daniel MacIver)
• Wild Side (Sébastien Lifshitz)
• Woman is the Future of Man (Hong Sang-soo)
• The Woodsman (Nicole Kassell)
• The World (Jia Zhangke)