Nachtschichten (2010)

I once saw a documentary about Copenhagen at night. Maybe I've seen a similar one depicting the activities of Stockholm after dark. I remember I thought these films catered too generously to our expectations of what a film about the urban night should be like. Last week, I headed to Anthology film center to see whether Ivette Löcker's Night shifts, which follows some Berliners at night, would be any better than the similarly-themed films. It was. Maybe it says something about Löcker as a film maker, that she has the skill to make a seamless combination of images, sounds and music that conjures up those peculiar feelings of being awake late at night. Maybe its her finding interesting people to talk to, so that these people talk about just anything. Two social workers drive around looking for homeless people in need of shelter. A helicopter driver floats above the city, looking for shady activities on the ground. A grafitti tagger goes through town, leaving his traces. A security guard walks around with a fluffy dog. A guy talks about loneliness and how his life lacks meaning. A homeless persons looks for places to spend the night. A dj talks about her father, among other things. Löcke keeps things simple. There are few instances of embarrassing "poetic" generalizations about Urban Night, fear and freedom (yet there are a few, and they are out of place, I think). Instead, Löcker has a good eye for how to make wintry Berlin visible, how to turn snow, cold weather and darkness into unique situation. A good feel for atmospheres. In other words - she is a gifted documentarist and I hope we will hear more from her soon.

The Last Life in the Universe (2003)

I had read some reviews of Pen-Ek Ratanuang's films & decided I should grab the opportunity to go see a screening of The Last Life in the Universe in MoMa. To be honest, I didn't like the film very much, even though several scenes were executed in a funny and eerie way. I cannot stop thinking that the style of the film is very self-conscious. Even though the director tries not to be too explicit, I find the images lacking in depth. I also find the musical score oppresingly predictable in combination with the clinical frames. Yes, the camera sometimes moves in interesting, surprising ways when we do not really expect any movement, but this does not change my impression that the film is too much an effort to be stylish, to be aesthetic. As if this were not enough, the humor in the film was, in my opinion, obtuse. Or maybe it was a creepy guy guffawing in the right and wrong places, always too loudly, that made me think so. Well, maybe I just don't think it is very funny to see somebody trying to hang himself and oops, the doorbell rings, gotta open. The story, dealing with the way people get close to each other in ways over which they have no control, has its merit. A Japanese librarian living in a spotless apartment in Bangkok tries to kill himself. Once, a few more times. His yazuka brother comes to visit and ... there will be blood. Between the suicide attempts, the librarian spots a beautiful girl reading a Japanese children's book. As he is getting ready to jump off a bridge, the beautiful girl spots him. She moves towards him, only to be hit by a car. The girl dies, and that is when the librarian meets her sister. This is only a part of the story, but it is this, rather than the scenes depicting violence, that drives the film. These two people have no common language. They speak what they can: the Japanese man knows a few words in Thai, the girl is learning Japanese. Mostly, they speak broken English. As atrocities have taken place in the guy's apartment, he ends up staying with the girl in her ramshackle residence by the sea. They are friends, perhaps something more. The film treads carefully in revealing the sexual tension between the two. Sometimes this is done elegantly, sometimes not. At times I feel that communication difficulties are handled too carelessly, by the film's piling one difficulty on top of another. It is good to see that the film is also politically conscious and only at rare moments does it fall prey to gender stereotypes. This is a film worth seeing, the cinematography is stunning at times, but for me, it was too aestheticized.

The Kid with the Bike (2010)

Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne's new film is a gem. The Kid with a Bike stays true to the style the brothers have developed throughout their careers, but it still brings in a new sense of hope. As in most of the Dardenne films, moral questions are dealt with in a down-to-earth, yet unflinching way. Unlike most European contemporary indie directors, the Dardennes have no interest in mystification, in keeping things alluringly vague. In some sense, the cards are on the table, there is no "subtext", whatever the hell that would mean. The situation the Dardennes take an interest in are always somehow open-ended. But they rarely conjure up a sense of ambiguity.
 
In the first scene, we see a kid trying to make a telephone call. A bunch of adults do their best to convince him to hang up, that there will be no reply. But the kid is stubborn. That call has to be made. From the first minute onwards, every scene bristles with urgency. The kid runs around, the camera sticks closely to his movements. Early on, we understand that the kid lives in a foster home, and that he wants to get in touch with his father. By accident, the boy meets a woman, Samantha, who he adopts as his parent. The main themes of the film, relations between parents and children, responsibility for a child, is treated with the Dardenne's signature style: no hint of sentimentality, an understanding uf human beings as active. Their characters are often fighting against stifling surroundings, battling impossible situation, sometimes foolishly, sometimes rashly. The point is how the Dardennes manage to create very acute portraits of human life. Where most film directors focus on Big Decisions that have severe consequences and a painful background, the Dardenees more often set for the small-big situation in which people just act, in which things are constantly happening, in which people get disappointed, jaded, or in which their trust is expressed or in which trust is felt as a burden. During some moments, I was worried that the film gave a too romantic interpretation of Samantha. But in the end, I would not say that this is a film about Women being Responsible. Gender plays a very minor role in the relationship of Samantha and the boy. Or that is what I think.

One more thing about the way the Dardennes dodge sentimentality. In their earlier work, music has often been completely lacking. Here, we here a short snippet of Beethoven (I think) now and then. But it is only a snippet. Instead of tugging at the viewer's supposed heartstrings, this is more like a signal of an ending of a segment. A form of punctuation.

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?