Gerry (2002)

I saw that one of my favorite movies - Gerry (dir.: van Sandt) - was to be screened in a museum in Queens. I have never been in Queens before. Complyingly, I boarded the train. As I was a bit late, and confused about the adress of the place, I could be seen running through an industrial-looking area in Queens. I never run. The only exception is obscure Russian sci-fi movies about the apocalypse. I made it to the oddly placed museum. I've seen this film maybe five or six time. That doesn't make the seventh time one bid predictable. A few people walked out after a few minutes. Bad for them. It's hard to say what Gerry is about.  The plot can be summed up in two sentences. Two guys head out for a little wilderness hike. They get lost. That's it. So what in the world makes an exciting film out of this rather dull scenario? The film strips the medium of film to its bare bones. Two charactes. A few lines of dialogue. An outdoors location. Two beautiful pieces of music (by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt - this is one of the few movies in which use of his music seem legitimate, and not trite). We don't know much about the characters, who are both called Jerry.´It's fair to say that this is more of a Beckettian story than it is a realist one. Just look at one of the scenes, in which one of the characters is "rock marooned", stranded on a steep stone, onto which he has somehow scrambled. This scene is both humorous and absurd, and it's possible not to think of Mr B. The film is Gus van Sandts ode to Hungarian director Bela Tarr (if you haven't watched any of his movies, do it now). That influence is obvious in the sweeping, slooooooow cinematography.

The camera patiently tracks the movements of the two characters, sometimes in extreme close-ups, so that we see only two bobbing heads, stern jaws, and at other times, in long shots, so that the two friends are almost swallowed up by nature. Some people would perhaps argue that the camera work here is to mannered. For my part, I think van Sandt has created a beautiful film in which short scenes are intermingled with longer ones. The cinematrography is all about rhytm here, it sometimes contrasts with the rhytm of the bodies, sometimes goes along with it - sometimes in a shaky, hand-held way, and sometimes in a firm, static way.

What I had managed to forget from the last time seeing this movie is the music that is not Pärt. In some scenes, especially in one towards the end, van Sandt has added an ambient sound score as an embellishment of the already hallucinatory-feeling fateful journey of the two trekkers.

Is this yet another one of those man-against-nature schticks? Even though the relation to nature is cliché, nature never inhabits a familiar role. One of the contrasts in the film is that between the chatty (= the presence of speech, interrupted with mubling and coughs) scenes and the segments in which the only thing we see is a heap of sand, a mountain, or the sky. The movement in nature (dust, wind, rumbling thunder, lack of movement: also surreal images of eerie speed, the ever-changing light on the mountains) is strikingly set apart from the initially brisk demenour of the hikers. Towards the end of the film, these two have been reduced to slow-moving, exhausted, frail bodies. A strange-haunting aspect of the movie is related to the way the scenery changes: somebody pointed out that this renders the film with a certain SF-quality (Stalker, anyone) and I tend to agree. Sometimes, the beautiful-harsh landscapes in the film take on much more of imaginary meaning than physical environment.



But where is the film itself going? The hikers never find what they are looking for at the end of their trail. They intend to go back but are lost. It's just that I don't think we are left with a message about finding through not finding, growing stronger through loss, or any thing to that effect.


From the very little dialogue there is we gain almost no sense of conventional revelations about the history of the relationship. Instead, the dialogue is nonsensical (we simply don't know what they are talking about) or it concerns finding a route, finding water, moving on. If the dialogue would have been treated just a little bit more heavy-handedly, I would see this as a much too pretentious film. Here, instead, van Sandt opts for the playful.

Let's also say this. Where many less gifted directors would have chosen to depict the story of - you already know this - male loyalty & I'll-fight-for-you-bro, Gerry is a far cry from your typical bromance. Instead of the friendship described as something black-and-white, the image we've seen a thousand times - LOYALTY VS. BETRAYAL (NEVER betray a BROTHER), the relation between the two characters is treated with a much broader palette of emotions, a different logic. (I know some opt for the interpretation that there are not two characters in the movie, but one - I can see why somebody would say that, because yes, there is a sense of that towards the end, but - maybe I tend to think of that idea as a bit phony)

For all its smallness and seeming lack of ambition, Gerry, to me, is ingenious because it never hints at a hidden sense of meaning, the slow nature of the film is never fetishized.

The end of the film is elusive. Honestly, I don't know what to do make of it. Do you?

I wake up screaming (1941)

I wake up screaming might not be the best-known noir film from the forties. I understand why. The writer did not do a glorious job. But the cinematographer and the set designer made this film into one helluva entertaining thing. We have a dame that men are attracted to. She's the waitress-turned-model, dining out in high society, trying to create a name for herself. -- She ends up dead. A VERY corrupt gang of NYPD officers - one of them more than the others - have strong hunches about the girl's promoter. After all - the girl was about to travel to Hollywood, leaving her promoter behind. We have: murder mystery. And then: love story. The girl's sister and the promoter has had a thing for each other, which now gets to bloom, especially since they are both on the run from the claws of the NYPD. - The revelation of the mystery is totally dumb, but that didn't surprise me. This film, again with a theme revolving around sexualized violence against women, is an early example of what would develop into classical noir. Prepare yourselves for pulp. Best of all - great title.

Northless (2009)

Everything is huge in New York. Some things aren't. Late Sunday night: a movie theater for alternative cinema, four people in the audience. A shame, because Northless is not a bad film. As a matter of fact, it covers an interesting and important themes: illegal immigration from Mexico to USA. Rigoberto Perezcano has a kindred soul in Aki Kaurismäki. They both employ a very conscious aesthetic along with a dry sense of humor. Northless is also obviously a political film. A young man is bent on crossing the border. Time after time, the American authorities catch him, and send him back. The young man is stranded in Tijuana, where he works in a grocery store, where he befriends the middle-aged owner. I was a bit unhappy about how the film attempted to connect several story lines, but never quite making it. It's a story about a person who doesn't really know what he wants in love - and people around him who has been cheated and disappointed. But the social realism of crossing borders, fatal events taking place in these border crossing attempts - remains a strength in the film. And the film doesn't always stick with sordid realism: rather, Perezcano has an eye for the absurdity of borders, territory. Most of all, he has an understanding for the clash of disillusion and stubborn hope. The young man is presented without compromise, as somebody who has a strong feel for what he must do, but who is still deeply confused about his relation to other people and what it is that makes him try, over and over again, to cross the American border. Aesthetically, it works with few means, without trying too hard or becoming overly conscious about "making a slow movie". It's a film that uses silence in a very nice way, evoking awkward moments and heavy, intentional gazes. 

Phantom Lady (1944)

I went to the NYPD-festival at Film Forum, one of NYC's best small venues for cinema. Film forum is a small, friendly place that shows an interesting range of films, abeit some crappy ones too (don't get me started). Anyway: Phantom lady is the kind of sleazy film noir working with dark atmospheres and cuddly romance. A lightweight formula: yes. Entertaining: absolutely. As the film starts, we are informed that the protagonist, an engineer, has had a rough day. He's at a bar, looking all haggard. He has tickets to a show, and decides to ask a lady in a funny hat whether she'd like to join him for the show. Off they go. The man knows nothing about the mysterious lady. The man comes home, and finds his wife - dead. Strangled. As the NYPD officers question him, he thinks he has an obvious alibi. But it turns out nobody saw the mysterious woman, and so he is found guilty for murder. The man's co-worker, secretly in love with him, starts to look into the case.... As funny it is to watch this movie, afterwards, I was thinking about how violence against women are often recurring in these movies, but the circumstances around it, jealousy, hatered, rage - is often touched on with very light streaks, dodging or hinting at the darkness at hand. But I guess that remains one of the aspects of the noir genre: some things are resolved, mysteries are no longer mysteries, while the deepest root to doom & gloom are never quite brought to the surface. All in all, Robert Siodmak made a beautiful noir picture, elegant, with witty dialogue. A lot of details in the film bear a stint of surrealism. In one scene, a lengthy jazz number is performed in a dingy space. The drummer, A MYSTERY MAN, bangs awhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6248144908294922985ay at his set, for several minutes, while the camera deliriosly follows the movements. In another scene, in a court setting, the camera tracks from the central events to the curious and blasé audience; a loud sneezing makes the gravely decision comnpletely inaudible.
What you have to live with if you intend to watch this film is that the story is utterly nonsensical. As a New Yorker reviewer complains, this movies lacks reason. But who needs reason anyway?

Waking life (2001)

A friend recommended me Waking life. We watched it together on one of those quiet, hot afternoons. A week later, the film is still on my mind. Not so much its swirling reasoning about society, waking life and dreaming life, as its style and atmosphere. Waking life precedes films such as Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir. These are all films that use animation in a personal, imaginative way. Waking life was first filmed in the normal way, then the filmed bits were animated. The result is rather stunning to watch. On the level of ideas, I wasnt as convinced. Often, I found myself wondering whether I should take something as a hint of subtle ironiy, or if the crudeness of the conversations is accidental.Conversations are the backbone of the film. There's not much else going on. People talk, basically, about the meaning of existence, why we live, what it is to be alive to reality. And, in the later part of the film, what it is to find oneself stuck in a series of dream states, unable to wake up. Of course, we are encouraged to understand "dreaming" as something we indulge in not only in sleep but also during most of our waking lives. I do understand that Linklater wanted to challenge the way most films are, and make something different, something more intellectual, at the same time centered on everyday life. It's just that sometimes there is a stiffness and pretentiousness about how these people talk, that make the intellectualness turn into exactly that.
Robert C Solomon, philosopher (whom I am not a big fan of) is said to appear In the film. I didn't recognize him at the time but well, there he is, talking big words about Existentialism.
Still - this is an original film.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010)

New York has many art house cinemas. I tried Film Forum in central Manhattan, and was extremely impressed with the documentary I saw, Over your cities grass will grow. The mere fact that a slow film like this gets several screeenings every days for many weeks is just mindblowing, if you come from a country like Finland, where this would perhaps be broadcasted on TV (maybe it will) - but in a real cinema? Never. Interestingly, I hadn't even heard about the artist, Anselm Kiefer, whose work is on display in this film. But make no mistake, this is not a portrait of Kiefer the artist. It is not so easy to explain what this is - a meditation on art as work/labor, perhaps. What you see here is the locations in southern France Kiefer uses for his art. He has built tunnels and mazes, huge installations, rooms, cities. In the first section of the film, the camera slowly traces some of these locations. Ligeti's music is used in several places of the film, and the effect is stunning. The film also follows Kiefer and his assistents in their daily toil with making art. But this is not the images you usually think of when hearing the word art. What you see here bears a closer resemblance to a noisy industrial or building site. From Ligeti's dissonant music we are transported to the sounds of scraping, breaking glass, hammering, noisy bulldozers and cranes, riveting. The transition from music to sound does not seem forced at all. There are also a few snippets of interviews. But these are quirky and even funny, as is true also for some of the moments at the art locations. I had no problem with not getting a wider picture of how Kiefer conceives his art. Instead of him telling us, the film shows us what it is like to spend many, many hours on a specific art project. And herein lies the originality of the film. In most film, we get an elevated image of art as Work, I mean, as Things in Museums. Here, instead, art is work, labor, fixing, commanding, correcting, shouting. I think Sophie Fienne, the director of this film, made a few very wise choices when she edited the material. The result could have been annoyingly Contemplative, perhaps presenting a romantic picture of Art as Craft. But we never end up here. Besides showing an interesting dimension of art, Over your cities grass will grow is an achingly beautiful film. This is the beauty of soil, broken glass, coarse materials, dust. I can't really decide whether I like these quieter moments better than the funny, nonsensical ones (e.g. most of the interviews, look out for the Heidegger lecture / spotting a dozing cat in the midst of this very noisy art work). Don't miss out on this film.

Alien (1979)

Not having seen Alien for perhaps 15 years, I was thrilled to see how visually stunning it is. Clearly, it was made under the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: elegant/intricate camera movements, long takes, visionary sets. The vision of technology might appear old-fashioned (lots of buttons, blinking lights, the odd rackets), but it rarely elicits laughter. I can't say I am worried about the technical details of the sets/the story. What matters is that the places the film explores, a battered and grimy-looking space ship, evoke just the right associations and feelings (of unease and disorientation, mostly). During countless moments, the camera tracks the movements of characters walking through the space ship's quirky locations. Sometimes, there are no character to follow, just empty space(s) and perhaps the dreadful whirring or almost-audible humming of machines. Alien has a fairly traditional soundtrack (slightly experimental classical music) but it is the details of the environmental sounds I like best. What is more, the film often builds suspension from silence. It is a cliché to talk about the sense of claustrophobia of course, but here that word is actually in place. More than a few traditional action movie storytelling devices is put to use (crackled communication; counting down for hurried take-offs, alluring chases etc.). Somehow these familiar cinematic routes are a good counterpart to the quieter moments.

The monsters we assume hide somewhere abourd the ship we have only a slight knowledge about; we don't know exactly what kind of creatures these are, we just know that they all look very different and perhaps that they can do unimaginable things, like bursting through a man's stomach. We don't know their origin, and we don't know much about their reactions either.  One could perhaps compare these creatures to the bugs Cronenberg takes such a liking to: the alien life form that has some strange and unknown connection to humanity, revealing some surprising aspects of human behavior. This is to say that it is not the aliens themselves that are of interest in Alien, but rather, it is the way humans react to them, are fascinated by them. It might not be that far-fetched to say that Alien has some connections to the string of eco-critical sci-fi movies produced in the seventies (some of which I have written about on the blog quite recently). The crew on Nostromo, a commercial ship, are workers, not adventurers. We know there is an official mission (to ship metals to Earth). But as a weird signal is heard, they land on a planet inhabitad by a desolated ship, in which there are tons of eggs. You know the rest of the story. What keeps haunting the viewer is that the circumstances of the mission and the detour are not really evident. Is brining the aliens to Earth in fact the real mission?

The film is marred by a bunch of silly-ish moments (the lengthy chasing a cat) and a very annoyingly stereotypical characters, the Emotional Woman (maybe the intention is to pay homage to the brilliant B-movies of the 50's, I don't know). Beyond that, Alien is what sci-fi should be; food for imagination, food for associations.

Il Posto (1961)

Something about Il posto reminds me of another great true-to-life film, A taste of honey, one of the best Brittish kitchen sink dramas ever made; heartfelt, but quite sad; realistic, but with a perspective of its own. Switch the kitchen sink to a version of neorealism and you have an idea about what Il posto is like. This is a film that has a very limited story. I don't mean limited in a negative way, it's just simple. A young man with ever-widening eyes looks for a job to support his family (mother and brothers). After going through a ridiculous application process (where he, among other things, is expected to answer yes or no to questions such as whether he is repulsed by the opposite sex). In the end, he is hired, but not for the job he has applied for. He is more of an errand boy than the clerk he hoped to become. During the application process, he has met a girl he quickly befriended. The girl got a job at the same place, but in another department. They don't see much of each other, which breaks his heart. His job is dreary, he is not entrusted with anything important, there are many dull routines. Like Antonioni and Tati, Ermanno Olmi meticiously captures the impersonal environment of the modern city. Many brilliant shots observe long corridor, waiting rooms and streets that all look the same. People gobble up in a dreary-looking corporate lunch room. Toward the end of the film, our young hero attends a dance organized by the workers' club. In a very naked and desolate-looking room, his gaze wanders around (he is waiting for the girl) as an elderly couple invites him to sit with them.

Olmi doesn't conjure up dystopian views on the work and routines. Rather than revolutionary Spirit, the film exudes patience and quiet humour. Il posto is documentary-like, it doesn't preach, it doesn't deliver a simple story about What Work is Like in Modernity. My applause for that! It is the little things that give away the boy's increasing sense of disillusion and disappointment (the girl he rarely meets, the monotonous job); mostly, the boy's expressive eyes constitute the emotional power plant of the film. Very little has to be said. All characters are developed without attempts at creating (stereo-)types. The dialogue revolves around the activities in which the characters take part. No attempt is made to characterize the characters' emotions through dramatic dialogue. The film's close attention to the relation between characters and surrounding bear a resemblance to Bresson. In yet another great scene, the boy and the girl strolls around in a fancy part of the town. They decide to drop in at a café, as that seems to be the kind of thing that adults do. In a very unsure and hesitating manner, they both do their best to emulate the behavior of grown-ups. One could say that one of the main themes of the film, evoked in a witty and ingenious way, is the transformation from youth to adulthood, and the role of work in this process. The biggest merit of the film is to depict things that are normally taken for granted as a natural progress in a young person's life and in society in general. Olmi makes us look at the world of work from a distance, through the boy's quizzical eyes. Olmi's film is deceivingly simple - the truth is it is one of the best films about work I've seen in a long time. 

Barfly (1987)

The affable drunk is a staple in film and on TV. Sometimes it works really well (I wouldn't mind sitting through an Absolutely fabulous-marathon right now!). Barfly - I don't know. In many ways, this film is just what I expected it to be. Henry is an unremitting drunk (the screenplay was written by a certain Mr. Bukowski). We learn that it takes more to be constantly drinking than ...  So, Henry's got some talent for drinking. Usually, he hangs out at the local coctail dive (showering in piss-coloured light). Sometimes he just feels an irresistable need to fight the bartender. Naturally, he's popular among the ladies. He takes a liking to a local character named Wanda, and she takes a liking to him. They are the perfect couple, sharing the unabiding joy of a glass of Scoth (or 15). We also learn that Henry has some hidden literary talents (which, of course, also makes him popular with the ladies). The main point of the film seems to be to show us the bohemian who detests the Straight life of the common Joe. Because, you know, Henry wants to live and he cannot live in "a golden cage". You get the point / I get the point. Barfly obviously has some charm (especially the depiction of the local dive exudes some genuine warmth) but most of the time, I cannot stop feeling this film is just ridiculously romanticizing "the Bohemian". But hell, I'd rather watch Barfly than Into the Wild. At least, this is a cheery film almost without traces of sentimentality. Plus: I like Mickey Rourke.
Convincing performances of drunkenness is remains of the toughest challenges on film - Rourke might be one-dimensional, but he's pretty good at that.

Smoke (1995)

Smoke (dir. Wayne Wang) was one of my favorite films as a teenager. I have vivid memories of Auggie's Brooklynite cigar store and the people that cross his path, even though perhaps ten years have passed since I saw this film. Re-watching it, I was a little nervous it wouldnt have aged well. In fact, with the exception of a few instances of pretentious & forced dialogue, it still strikes me as a good, slow-paced film about how human relationships unwind in the most unexpected ways. The scruffy surroundings of New York, Harvey Keitel's robust presence and low-key conversations make for a decent film that revolves around the magic twists and turns of ordinary life. One could argue that this film is more about atmosphere than content and sure, that's right. One could also argue that some human difficulties are sugarcoated with sweeping gestures in the direction of "humanity", and heck, if I'd been watching the film in a more unsympathetic mood, I would have said something like that. It's the quiet moments where nothing really happens (people hang out in Auggie's store) that save this film from what would otherwise have been a big complaint: dramatized vagueness. And believe it or not, Tom Waits' music remains gorgeously timed. --- But if you watch this film, turn it off before the closing credits, my god, what a song. I also found the ending re-enactment of a story told in words completely superfluous. After finishing the film, I wonder what it is exactly that makes the feeling of the 90's loom so heavily over Smoke. Lots of low-key, episodic and loose-ended films were quite successful at that time.