My Joy (2010)

Cinema Village is a tiny arthouse cinema theater in East Village. One thing that amazes me about cinema culture in NYC is that it is actually - somehow - possible to show a film for an audience of seven people. I knew nothing about My Joy. Afterwards, I am happy that I didn't read reviews beforehand, because this is really one of those open-.ended films that you have to try to understand on your own before you hear somebody else's opinion about the film as a whole. I think I know what the main gist of the film is aimed at, but trying to connect the different scenes on a more detailed level is challenging, as this is a far from linear affair. The storytelling in My Joy breaks with many conventions in cinema (for example the way we expect a film to follow a certain set of characters in a "logical" way). A few times, I saw something of Claire Denis' associative, image-focused style here. But where Denis' films keep my thought and my imagination in a firm grip, I sometimes feel that My joy tries too hard, and that it thereby, interestingly, become too simple. Many scenes/segments are powerful, but few of them manage to deepen the main subject. What is the main subject? Well - borders and corruption seems to be the theme running through many of the scenes, and also providing the film with a sense of political anger and outrage. Still - the problem I had with the film, especially after having had some time to mull it over, is that it makes its viewer take on a very general form of pessimistic thinking. "The world ... humanity ... the state - rotten, all of it, all of it!" Thereby, some of the urgency of the scenes get lost in this general atmosphere of fuck-it-all. From a cinematic point of view, the film has many qualities, not only in terms of editing technique but also its cinematography, executed by the guy who shot The Death of Lazarescu. The harshness of the pictures augments the very cruel nature of the content. The film has potential. I look forward to keeping up with what Sergei Loznitsa will do next.

Driller killer (1979)

Spectacle theater in Brooklyn specializes in obscure film. I went there one day to watch an early Ferrara movie, Driller Killer. If you know anything about Ferrara, you know he is not the kind of director that makes heartwarming films about finding one's way in life. Ferrara delves into the flip side of things. I hesitate to call Drille Killer a psychodrama, but let's say it's a vivid & trashy elaboration of a mind that reacts to the chealpness of society. The reason I went to see it was not only the fact that Ferrara directed it. I was also interested in the artsy/run-down NYC late seventies setting of the film. There's plenty of that, I can tell you. Ferrara's NYC is not Woody Allen's NYC. Driller Killer is all about squalid apartments, dirty back streets and a sense of city-as-nightmare. Maybe you are not surprised to hear the main character is a tussle-haired artist whose genius the world has not yet acknowledged. One thing is for certain: this is looooow culture and all the fun that can sometimes imply. To contextualize the film: it is one of those films that started the whole 80's discussion about "video violence".

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2010)

In my excavation of NYC alternative cinema culture, I try to visit as many different theaters as I can. I read about The Black Power Mixtapes and decided to go watch it at IFC center, a very intimate movie theater downtown on Manhattan, Greenwich village/West village. It was extremely eerie to sit down with a handful of other people to see a film in which dry Swedish journalists comment on the black power movemet.The film is very entertaining to watch; the collage style works to perfection, and so does the combination of images and music (use of a song by The Roots was a good move). It is also very interesting to see the black power movement interpreted from an unconventional angle. I guess that it must have striked American viewers as even more unconventional, me being fairly acquainted with the genre of politically critical Swedish journalism from the late sixties, early seventies, including its eerie mix of Enlightenment project and political debate.

The title of the film indicates that this is not intended as a comprehensive account of the black power movement. Indeed, the film is very fragmented, and does not give any systematic context in terms of how racism in the sixties differs or is similar to racism in contemporary USA. Neither do we get any firm idea as to the development of the black power movement, radicalization and internal differences. What is very strikingly showed, however, is the quite radical differences within the movement as to those who proclaimed anti-violence and those, for whom violence was not a very straightforward question. In one of the brilliant scenes of the film, an interviewer talks to Angela Davis, who is arrested for supposedly having had something to with the killings of a few police officers. The Swedish interviewer asks in a characteristically dry & well-meaning voice, whether Angel Davis is for or against violence. Davis gets quite angry, and tries to explain in what ways this question expresses a mind-boggling naivite. Davis presence exudes dignity, frustration but also a forceful need to get her words across, to express herself as clearly as she can. It is a stunning moment of getting to hear an earnest person speaking her mind in a very serious way. It's one of those scenes that if you've seen it, you'll never forget it.

More than anything else, The Black Power mixtape gives a complex picture of violence in a turbulent time. Not only does it delives snapshots of the black power movement, it also shows archive material in which Swedish tv journalists try to convey the reality of black ghettos. In one scene, we see a Swedsih tourist bus worming its way up to Harlem. The tourist guide talks to the tourists about how dangerous the area is (anno 1970), that drug dealing is a common view and that people are taking "fixar eller vad det nu heter". Later in the movie, it becomes clear that Swedish media of that time was blamed by American media houses for being anti-American and presenting a dark and negative image of the US and A.

Even though this film lacks certain things that would have made it better (more context), it is a brilliant way to approach a historical movement that has bearings for how contemporary racism is to be understood.

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.