Distant Voices, Still Lives (dir. Terence Davies) is a musical, of sorts - a very peculiar one - that takes place in Liverpool during the forties and the fifties and it is also one of the most moving films I've seen in a while. Before you click yourself away from here (a musical!), let me tell you this is not the run-of-the-mill chirpy romance in which music provides a sense of comfort and escapism. Distant Voices, Still Lives has collected the saddest music in the world - this is music of nostalgia and commemoration. Or no, this is a film in which even the most cheerful little melody is transformed into a hymn about memories and losses.
When you think about family tale you think about epic narratives with many characters and where one generation's fate is contrasted with another generation's. Davies' approach is different. He skips the grand scope and opts for something altogether more impressionistic and fractured. The material of the movie is taken from the director's own life. In the first section, the theme is fear. There is the fear that a violent partiarch evokes and there is the war-time fear. The second part mostly takes place in pubs. Family members gather and sing, thinking about their pasts, but also doubting their future lives.
Colors are mostly toned down to hushed sepias, and I must say this does not strike me as a cheap effect. The fluid camera-work is structured around space so that time also is fluid, we see a hallway, the camera moves, and suddenly we are thrown ten years ahead. Films about memories abound. Actually showing how we remember things - in the sense where memory sometimes blurs with imagination - is a much rarer achievement, and Davies' film operates so well because it is not pretentious; instead of being engrossed in knotty mental paradoxes and warps, the film reminds us of how memories are also emotions.
The film centers on activities that are rarely expressive in the normal sense (where a character's typical behavior is revealed or established in a couple of quick scenes). Instead, Davies lets us see the daily activities of the family members. A woman washes a window, a group gathers on a porch and a small celebration takes place in a pub. There are weddings and funerals, life goes on. But Davies also shows how the ordinary is broken up and torn apart: like few other movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives conjures up a sense of terror and violence that have a horrendous explosive force. (Some of the scenes have a nightmarish quality and in some of them, inexplicable uncanniness is intermingled with something perfectly ordinary - look at that scene with "uncle Ted"!)
Every frame of this film felt real - I mean, it's quite surprising that it does, given how fond the director is of family portrait-styled images. Not in the sense of factual correspondence, but in the sense that this is a work of engagement; the characters are not treated with contempt or with a shallow need of generalization.The film shows lives coming together and drifting apart, and through all this, there is the music, the singing - I've never experienced singing that is at the same time so mundane and so heartbreaking. There is no hint of contrived cynicism in how the music shapes the film. Distant Voices, Still Lives contains an affection for life itself that never falters.
I'vegotonewordtosaytoyou, or three: WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!
torsdag 30 maj 2013
torsdag 23 maj 2013
Few of Us (1996)
Let's be honest. This film tried my patience.
That's a psychological remark, and it says nothing about whether Few of Us (dir. Sharunas Bartas) was a good film.
What happens when you take away almost every element of what is usually considered a fiction movie? In the best case, you are immersed and you develop a new form of attention. In the worst case, the film gets so static that it stops to mean anything. In the case of Few of Us, I'm not quite sure what category it falls into. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by it, nor can I say that the film was pretentious and dull.
If you like film by Bela Tarr, this might be your cup of tea.
Bartas works with grand landscapes, but these landscapes are never beautiful in a traditional national geographics-sense. The film takes place, I think, in Siberia. What little there is of human interaction, it is left mysterious. A young woman arrives in a helicopter. She arrives in a small village in the woods. It is not clear what the purpose of her visit is. We see her sitting in a room, smoking, with an elderly man. We also see her at a party. There is music. And then there's a fight, a knife, and violence. The woman leaves. She has a lover, it turns out.
The film contains almost no linguistic exchange. We see glances, faces, how people feel the presence of one another in a room.
Then there are images of nature where human beings and animals are almost swallowed up by the incomprehensibly vast landscape. The camera is static, and often it requires some attention to perceive any movement at all in the frames. You don't quite get the feeling of Herzogian themes (nature is unruly and grim) but nature seems completely autonomous from humans. Humans are small, nature is majestic. The composition of the frames, movement and non-movement, never compels the viewer to indulge in nature. There is nothing to indulge in. The only way I can depict the approach of Bartas is to say that the camera lingers so that we notice every aspect of the terrain, the lighting, the shapes, the tiny, tiny hints of movement.
The people the young woman meet are poor. Several times, I worried that Bartas exoticizes them, turning them into mute, harried creatures whom it is impossible to understand. One example where I got this feeling is in the mid part of the film, where we see an extreme close-up of the elderly man's face. The eyes blink. But we see no expressions. I don't sense any Levinasian gesture in that picture. The only thing I see is the man's face transforming into a landscape, just as incomprehensibly vast as the Siberian woods and mountains. But what kind of perspective is this, what kind of approach, what kind of attitude?
Few of Us may be taciturn (except for the sound of hooting birds, splashing water and galloping horses, even a few moments of non-diegetic music - sound is used impressively!) but my problem with it was that it never lets me in - I have no issue with the pace or the static camera, but what kind of world does Bartas want to invite us into? Even depicting the atmosphere of the film is difficult.
So called "contemplative movies" have been accused of exemplifying a general flight from the political - the world is stripped down, cleansed of the kind of tensions that everyday life is filled with. Generally, I find this charge quite ridiculous, but in the case of Few of Us, this argument actually started spinning in my mind. So far, non-conclusively.
I visited Jakobstad a few years ago. There, of all places, I bought a copy of Corridor, another film by Bartas. I haven't watched it yet, but now I feel quite up to it.
That's a psychological remark, and it says nothing about whether Few of Us (dir. Sharunas Bartas) was a good film.
What happens when you take away almost every element of what is usually considered a fiction movie? In the best case, you are immersed and you develop a new form of attention. In the worst case, the film gets so static that it stops to mean anything. In the case of Few of Us, I'm not quite sure what category it falls into. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by it, nor can I say that the film was pretentious and dull.
If you like film by Bela Tarr, this might be your cup of tea.
Bartas works with grand landscapes, but these landscapes are never beautiful in a traditional national geographics-sense. The film takes place, I think, in Siberia. What little there is of human interaction, it is left mysterious. A young woman arrives in a helicopter. She arrives in a small village in the woods. It is not clear what the purpose of her visit is. We see her sitting in a room, smoking, with an elderly man. We also see her at a party. There is music. And then there's a fight, a knife, and violence. The woman leaves. She has a lover, it turns out.
The film contains almost no linguistic exchange. We see glances, faces, how people feel the presence of one another in a room.
Then there are images of nature where human beings and animals are almost swallowed up by the incomprehensibly vast landscape. The camera is static, and often it requires some attention to perceive any movement at all in the frames. You don't quite get the feeling of Herzogian themes (nature is unruly and grim) but nature seems completely autonomous from humans. Humans are small, nature is majestic. The composition of the frames, movement and non-movement, never compels the viewer to indulge in nature. There is nothing to indulge in. The only way I can depict the approach of Bartas is to say that the camera lingers so that we notice every aspect of the terrain, the lighting, the shapes, the tiny, tiny hints of movement.
The people the young woman meet are poor. Several times, I worried that Bartas exoticizes them, turning them into mute, harried creatures whom it is impossible to understand. One example where I got this feeling is in the mid part of the film, where we see an extreme close-up of the elderly man's face. The eyes blink. But we see no expressions. I don't sense any Levinasian gesture in that picture. The only thing I see is the man's face transforming into a landscape, just as incomprehensibly vast as the Siberian woods and mountains. But what kind of perspective is this, what kind of approach, what kind of attitude?
Few of Us may be taciturn (except for the sound of hooting birds, splashing water and galloping horses, even a few moments of non-diegetic music - sound is used impressively!) but my problem with it was that it never lets me in - I have no issue with the pace or the static camera, but what kind of world does Bartas want to invite us into? Even depicting the atmosphere of the film is difficult.
So called "contemplative movies" have been accused of exemplifying a general flight from the political - the world is stripped down, cleansed of the kind of tensions that everyday life is filled with. Generally, I find this charge quite ridiculous, but in the case of Few of Us, this argument actually started spinning in my mind. So far, non-conclusively.
I visited Jakobstad a few years ago. There, of all places, I bought a copy of Corridor, another film by Bartas. I haven't watched it yet, but now I feel quite up to it.
The Sundowners (1960)
Fred Zinnermann's The Sundowners is the perfect Sunday afternoon movie: a cozy film opting for character development rather than a winding story. However, you have to stomach a bunch of Americans emulating Australian dialects - this is a Hollywood production set in the vast lands of Australia. The film explores the clash between nomadic forms of life and the urge to settle down. This clash takes place within a family. Paddy is a sheep drover and his wife Ida would like nothing more than to buy a farm and lead a quiet life there. The son is on Ida's side. Paddy tries to take on the role of authoritative Patriarch, but all along, we know that his heart his not in it. Paddy takes a job as a sheep-shearer and in lengthy, fine-looking scenes the film explores the details of everyday life. When they have earned a little money, Paddy spends it on booze and gambling. The son starts to race a horse so that they earn enough to buy the farm. The merit of the film is that it never leaves this sense of the ordinary but at the same time it shows a type of dramatic conflict that is never really articulated. I am never completely sure what Paddy's nomadic desire is all about and the film captures well the kind of stunted conversations family members often have where serious matters are dealt-with with off-hand gestures so as to reduce the tense, but the tense is still there, it just moves to another level. It focuses on the tensions of family life without leaning on the big Revelation or the big Fight. Instead, it shows a sort of quiet affection between the characters in a way I think is quite unusual in this type of Hollywood setting.
Well, I don't know - I really liked this movie. It's beautifully filmed and it doesn't try to be more than it is: a story about what one considers important. What is more, Robert Mitchum is great as the unruly wanderer. His acting rarely falls into stereotypes. His character all along has a sort of tenderness that he also tries to repress, trying to convince himself that he is the ragged wanderer. In other movies, much of the material of The Sundowners would turn into schmaltz. But here, even the sheep-shearing contest turns into an existential journey with Mitchum sweating like a pig.
But OK OK maybe I was seduced by the film in problematic ways. I does romanticize Australian outback life a great deal (even though it also shows its hardships). But I couldn't resist the drastic shifts the film is toying with: a jolly seen is turned into unsettling ones. Some reviewers complain that the film is too haphazard and that too much random stuff is going on. Well, that is precisely what I liked! (At the same time I know that some of the things that takes place happen too quickly, and I know that if I were to show the film to one of my friends, with whom I always have deep disagreements about movies, would exclaim: BUT THEY ARE SO STUPID! Well, sometimes people are.)
Well, I don't know - I really liked this movie. It's beautifully filmed and it doesn't try to be more than it is: a story about what one considers important. What is more, Robert Mitchum is great as the unruly wanderer. His acting rarely falls into stereotypes. His character all along has a sort of tenderness that he also tries to repress, trying to convince himself that he is the ragged wanderer. In other movies, much of the material of The Sundowners would turn into schmaltz. But here, even the sheep-shearing contest turns into an existential journey with Mitchum sweating like a pig.
But OK OK maybe I was seduced by the film in problematic ways. I does romanticize Australian outback life a great deal (even though it also shows its hardships). But I couldn't resist the drastic shifts the film is toying with: a jolly seen is turned into unsettling ones. Some reviewers complain that the film is too haphazard and that too much random stuff is going on. Well, that is precisely what I liked! (At the same time I know that some of the things that takes place happen too quickly, and I know that if I were to show the film to one of my friends, with whom I always have deep disagreements about movies, would exclaim: BUT THEY ARE SO STUPID! Well, sometimes people are.)
tisdag 21 maj 2013
Ivan the Terrible (1944)
It's hard to tell whether the first part of Ivan the Terrible (dir. Eisenstein) is to be considered as a Stalinist propaganda film or whether it provides a critical account of power. And the interesting question is, of course, what this kind of judgment could be based on, what kind of judgment one is making when one says "this is a propaganda film rather than ..." Apparently, the Soviet élite enjoyed it. Regardless of what the answer is, Ivan the Terrible is a film full of cinematic pomp. It starts off with the coronation of Ivan - he is to become the all-powerful Tsar. Interestingly, it takes a good while before we even see Ivan's face. Instead, we see all the glory of the ceremony: the clothes, the attributes of power. But it becomes clear that Ivan's power is challenged by the rich boyars who, when Ivan is lying on his death bed after a battle, immediately start plotting about the follower. It seems as if this type of plotting makes Ivan the leader he is (we see this pattern twice): he rises from his death bed and makes some drastic changes in the administration; traitors are kicked out and men of the people are hired. Ivan is a dramatic and paranoid man. Eisenstein always films Ivan as if he is an entirely different creature than the rest, his pointed beard and dramatic posturing underlining the Tsar as performativity dependent on external attributes but also as some kind of strange inner power. And the ornate costumes! I have rarely seen a movie where so much focus lays on the costumes (Jarman's Wittgenstein comes to mind); in some scenes, the extreme costumes take up entire rooms, making the people within them almost disappear.What is more, don't forget to admire the eerie and artificial-looking set design - brilliant (for example - look at how the doors are often so small that the characters look like giants). The viewer is thrown into a messy world where angles and Eisenstein's play with distance create an unnerving claustrophobic space.
söndag 19 maj 2013
My Dinner with Andre (1981)
I can't really explain it, but I had really high expectations about Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre. It's not really that I'm a great fan of Malle (I have seen only two or three movies of his) but I've read somewhere that My Dinner with Andre is a masterpiece in the genre of films where conversations drive the film forward. Well, even though this is by no means a bad films, it's not a particularly good one either, except for a couple of scenes. The film reminded me about another film in which existential problems are discussed in a very obvious, even blunt way - Richard Linklater's Waking Life. The problem with both films is that their attempt to excavate the mind through conversation never succeeds in actually putting into display any of the tension that real conversations contain. I might have been more forgiving, had the writing of the script been more developed or whether there hadn't been such moments of almost embarrassingly affront clashes of Two Life Principles. And what is more, intellectual-sounding discussions about the meaning of art.
Almost the entire movie is set within an upscale N.Y. restaurant. Two friends are talking about the big questions of life. One is a experimental theater director and the other is an actor. The two men are very different. For the first half of the film, the director muses about art, spontaneity, mysticism and what not. He has been traveling and tells his friend one story after another about what he has experienced. Obviously, he is self-indulgent (I am not sure whether this is the film's perspective). The other guy hums and nods and looks at his friends with a weary smile. It turns out he has a more practical point of view. He wants to enjoy ordinary life, the comfort of his partner and an electric blanket. For the director, this is not what life is about. Life is about Presence. Well, you know, those peculiar moments.
What I liked about the movie was its simplicity and quietness. It starts on a street outside the restaurant and it ends with a few quick frames of a taxi. In the restaurant, the camera looms over the two friends, sometimes filming them so that one of them is seen through a mirror (the best scenes involve a strange waiter who throws condescending glances at the two patrons). The film tries to create the sense of real time - that everything takes place in one unbroken temporal chunk. This works pretty well, even though the whole thing is unnecessarily underlined at the very end (when the director wants us to feel that we, like the two characters, have forgotten all about time). Ebert, whose reviews I always enjoy reading, wrote that My Dinner with André is devoid of clichés. When it comes to style, I would agree with him, at least partially. But I felt that the role of conversation was not that original after all and constantly felt that the result of what might have been a long and winding writing or improvisation process was cramped, rather than the spontaneous flow of back-and-forth that conversation usually is (and I get the sense that the team wants to catch hold of that kind of flow) - that Malle and his actors tried so hard to get to the core of things that the existential relevance was lost on the way, at least in many segments of the film. One example that made me sigh was the Wally, the actor who cherishes the small joys of ordinary life is also presented as a man who elevates science - in contrast with his friend the director who throws himself into life's deep crevices without concern for how he will be brought back. Plain reason vs. Transcendence. My reaction: yawn. But then again, the intentionally rambling aspect of the conversation might be taken in another way than as intellectually unsatisfying: two friends who are too much in love with talk and who get lost in each other's stories or their own goofy existentialism. (My question: who is it that annoys me, the film or the characters?)
I want to make this clear: the major problem I had was not that My Dinner with Andre was a slice of life film that turned out too stagey. Stagey can be good (I think about the version of Uncle Vanya I watched a while ago and how much I enjoyed its fine treatment of theater-as-film-as-theater). Yes it had the mood but it was so full of itself! (For a comparison: another movie with a great mood (a sort of tenderness) and which had some flaws in that direction but worked much, much better: Smoke)
As a matter of fact, I'm a bit mad at myself for not liking this film more. I will watch it again sometimes, and maybe I will realize I my initial judgment was too harsh?
Almost the entire movie is set within an upscale N.Y. restaurant. Two friends are talking about the big questions of life. One is a experimental theater director and the other is an actor. The two men are very different. For the first half of the film, the director muses about art, spontaneity, mysticism and what not. He has been traveling and tells his friend one story after another about what he has experienced. Obviously, he is self-indulgent (I am not sure whether this is the film's perspective). The other guy hums and nods and looks at his friends with a weary smile. It turns out he has a more practical point of view. He wants to enjoy ordinary life, the comfort of his partner and an electric blanket. For the director, this is not what life is about. Life is about Presence. Well, you know, those peculiar moments.
What I liked about the movie was its simplicity and quietness. It starts on a street outside the restaurant and it ends with a few quick frames of a taxi. In the restaurant, the camera looms over the two friends, sometimes filming them so that one of them is seen through a mirror (the best scenes involve a strange waiter who throws condescending glances at the two patrons). The film tries to create the sense of real time - that everything takes place in one unbroken temporal chunk. This works pretty well, even though the whole thing is unnecessarily underlined at the very end (when the director wants us to feel that we, like the two characters, have forgotten all about time). Ebert, whose reviews I always enjoy reading, wrote that My Dinner with André is devoid of clichés. When it comes to style, I would agree with him, at least partially. But I felt that the role of conversation was not that original after all and constantly felt that the result of what might have been a long and winding writing or improvisation process was cramped, rather than the spontaneous flow of back-and-forth that conversation usually is (and I get the sense that the team wants to catch hold of that kind of flow) - that Malle and his actors tried so hard to get to the core of things that the existential relevance was lost on the way, at least in many segments of the film. One example that made me sigh was the Wally, the actor who cherishes the small joys of ordinary life is also presented as a man who elevates science - in contrast with his friend the director who throws himself into life's deep crevices without concern for how he will be brought back. Plain reason vs. Transcendence. My reaction: yawn. But then again, the intentionally rambling aspect of the conversation might be taken in another way than as intellectually unsatisfying: two friends who are too much in love with talk and who get lost in each other's stories or their own goofy existentialism. (My question: who is it that annoys me, the film or the characters?)
I want to make this clear: the major problem I had was not that My Dinner with Andre was a slice of life film that turned out too stagey. Stagey can be good (I think about the version of Uncle Vanya I watched a while ago and how much I enjoyed its fine treatment of theater-as-film-as-theater). Yes it had the mood but it was so full of itself! (For a comparison: another movie with a great mood (a sort of tenderness) and which had some flaws in that direction but worked much, much better: Smoke)
As a matter of fact, I'm a bit mad at myself for not liking this film more. I will watch it again sometimes, and maybe I will realize I my initial judgment was too harsh?
lördag 18 maj 2013
Double Indemnity (1944)
Dames with shady intentions and gullible gentlemen - even though this is a blueprint of most film noir movies, Double Indemnity is a classic that set the standard for the genre (in good and bad ways): it's elegant, atmospheric and it creates that peculiar and haunting mystique that L.A. has in these movies (driving around in cars always plays an important role) - even nature always looks artificial, bathing in white light or sinister shadows. And, of course, Raymond Chandler's writing ("I'm rotten to the heart...") provided a hard-boiled edge. Wilder is a master director and Barbara Stanwyck is not bad as the femme fatale. The title refers to a technicality in the insurance company business and it is for sure not the plot that keeps Double Indemnity interesting (even though it has its good suspense moments where you are anxious to see what will happen next). The weakest aspect of it may be the, as I saw it, very typical use of flashbacks. But maybe I say this because I have watched too many crime movies from the same era in which a dire male voice belonging to a man who slopes in a chair in some office presents his present situation and how his destiny was shaped. When you think about it - how many film noir movies have you seen which are narrated by the alluring dame?
The story: Insurance company man gets involved in a murder plot: by a cover-up, money will be paid by the insurance company. It's a dame, of course, that makes him complicit in a crime. The film suggests that people are driven by sex, money or professional honor. But as some reviewers have pointed out: the mystery of the film is that these characters do not seem interested in what on the surface drives them. I think that is correct and it opens up an interesting tangle of questions: how should the coldness of the two main characters be understood? One possibility would be to interpret the film on a par with Cronenberg's Crash, as a film about boredom and excitement and thrill as flight. Everything, eventually, will go to hell. This is a world of doom and gloom (if you look for one example of fatalism in film noir, this is a good bet). Once again, I cannot resist to make a comment about the misogyny in many noir movies: the guy is a victim of the circumstances and his own drives, while the women will turn their own lives into hell by trying to manipulate others: the temptress will be destroyed, perhaps, like in this film, with the sordid farewell by a man who holds a gun: "goodbye, baby". But the woman's destiny is only an aspect of the male protagonist's grandiose path towards final destruction (one reviewer snarls - I don't know whether it is a joke - that at least women get to enjoy seeing other women who has a lot of power for a little while). This is the formula: one manipulates, the other is being manipulated. We've seen it before: the dame acts innocent, performs the role of the little girl in need of a male protector, while she is as a matter of fact pursuing her own agenda. Or could another possibility be that the femme fatale and her counterpart, the clueless male victim of her seduction, be interpreted as a dark story about heterosexuality as a game the logic of which is the dynamic of a surface and a secret that is all the time hinted at and glossed over only to re-appear in more fatal and dangerous ways. I don't know to what extent this makes better sense of Wilder's film, but I think this casts some light on heterosexuality. And if one continues on that line of thought, the attempt to reveal a fundamental set of primary drives (the woman's and the man's) is bound to fail (a very different perspective is to ask what is going on when a person is giving in to a temptation).
Interestingly, there is also something else going on beyond the conventional crime story. One interpretation of the film is that the ending scene reveals the deep love between the insurance company man and his boss who has been trying to solve the mystery. Sadly, this dimension is not explored that much.
The story: Insurance company man gets involved in a murder plot: by a cover-up, money will be paid by the insurance company. It's a dame, of course, that makes him complicit in a crime. The film suggests that people are driven by sex, money or professional honor. But as some reviewers have pointed out: the mystery of the film is that these characters do not seem interested in what on the surface drives them. I think that is correct and it opens up an interesting tangle of questions: how should the coldness of the two main characters be understood? One possibility would be to interpret the film on a par with Cronenberg's Crash, as a film about boredom and excitement and thrill as flight. Everything, eventually, will go to hell. This is a world of doom and gloom (if you look for one example of fatalism in film noir, this is a good bet). Once again, I cannot resist to make a comment about the misogyny in many noir movies: the guy is a victim of the circumstances and his own drives, while the women will turn their own lives into hell by trying to manipulate others: the temptress will be destroyed, perhaps, like in this film, with the sordid farewell by a man who holds a gun: "goodbye, baby". But the woman's destiny is only an aspect of the male protagonist's grandiose path towards final destruction (one reviewer snarls - I don't know whether it is a joke - that at least women get to enjoy seeing other women who has a lot of power for a little while). This is the formula: one manipulates, the other is being manipulated. We've seen it before: the dame acts innocent, performs the role of the little girl in need of a male protector, while she is as a matter of fact pursuing her own agenda. Or could another possibility be that the femme fatale and her counterpart, the clueless male victim of her seduction, be interpreted as a dark story about heterosexuality as a game the logic of which is the dynamic of a surface and a secret that is all the time hinted at and glossed over only to re-appear in more fatal and dangerous ways. I don't know to what extent this makes better sense of Wilder's film, but I think this casts some light on heterosexuality. And if one continues on that line of thought, the attempt to reveal a fundamental set of primary drives (the woman's and the man's) is bound to fail (a very different perspective is to ask what is going on when a person is giving in to a temptation).
Interestingly, there is also something else going on beyond the conventional crime story. One interpretation of the film is that the ending scene reveals the deep love between the insurance company man and his boss who has been trying to solve the mystery. Sadly, this dimension is not explored that much.
söndag 12 maj 2013
Duck Soup (1933)
I am quite ashamed of the fact that I have never seen a Marx brothers movie before - until now. My reason is perhaps that when I was a kid I used to hang out with my neighbors who spend idle and endless afternoons with extremely boring old comedies from the silent movie era. So - I wasn't particularly thrilled about watching Duck Soup (which is not even a silent film). Perhaps this is because of my low expectations, but I am surprised about how much I enjoyed it. Even though most of the gags were not that funny, I liked the anarchic joy of messing stuff up - there was a kind of vitality about it all which had perhaps little to do with making particular points about politics or war. The story seems quite hard to spend many words on (I must say the satire of seriousness in politics works quite well), but what caught my attention was Duck Soup's approach to comedy as an inspired and rambling form of deconstruction - it all falls apart, in a good and edifying way.
Good-Bye, Dragon Inn (2003)
Ming-liang Tsai is known for his slow and aesthetically driven movies. I must admit that Good-bye, Dragon Inn was exhausting at times, but in the end, it is clearly a movie I would encourage you to watch; as in other movies in which there is no narrative to speak of, no clear center of a story that goes from a to b, you are really forced to watch as the images are not defined in the sense that it is self-evident what you should be paying attention to. Nonetheless, I was not able to suppress the question: what purpose does this extreme slowness (Tarkovsky's movies pale in comparison) serve? How is it connected with the themes of the film? The setting is a movie theater. It becomes clear that this cinema is about to close its doors. We see a woman working in the cinema, which seems almost deserted. The static camera (tilted at a strange angle) follows her routines: heating a snack, walking down a corridor etc.. The cinema is still showing movies, but only a couple of people show up. It's raining outside, and the rain is leaking into the roof. Sometimes, all you can here is the gentle sound of the rain. Good-bye Dragon Inn patiently sits down besides or behind the neck of these last movie-goers (one of whom seems more interested in flirting with men, another pair crying while watching the movie). I am not sure whether this is a wistful homage to a dying social institution, or whether the cinema is portrayed as a place that is bound to die out. Maybe the answer is: both.
Only a very few lines are spoken in the film. Ming-liang Tsai strips down cinema to its bare bones, at the same time he is showing patrons in a huge non-crowded room looking at bustling scenes on a screen - they are in fact watching a sword-fighting movie. This juxtaposition between film as engrossing viewing pleasure, as a flight, as a place for lonely contemplation, as diversion and as attention works pretty well, and I never thought that the result gets too self-conscious (we are not watching a Godard movie) but the risk is there. The eerie beauty of the film is rooted in everyday things, but at the same time the whole place is somehow cut off from reality (the entire film takes place within the cinema theater). I don't know whether I have seen any film in which the place of movie-watching is as nakedly exposed as in this film, where desperation intermingles with sadness and loneliness - and nostalgia (Aki Kaurismäki would perhaps like this stylized movie about the pleasure and strangeness of cinema).
So how does this work? I mean, the odds are small against a film that has no story, where the camera remains static and where we now next to nothing about the people we see. It still works. It's wrong to say Good-bye Dragon Inn is more style than content, but it is impossible not to mention its colors and its grasp of movement (even if these movements themselves remain at a snail's pace). If you've watched films by Wong Kar-Wai you know what I'm talking about (their cinematic sensibilities are somewhat similar).
Did I mention this is a funny movie? You might not believe it, but somehow, it is. If you've experience the dreadful company of popcorn-munching movie-goers, maybe you will get the kinds of jokes the film quietly deals in.
Only a very few lines are spoken in the film. Ming-liang Tsai strips down cinema to its bare bones, at the same time he is showing patrons in a huge non-crowded room looking at bustling scenes on a screen - they are in fact watching a sword-fighting movie. This juxtaposition between film as engrossing viewing pleasure, as a flight, as a place for lonely contemplation, as diversion and as attention works pretty well, and I never thought that the result gets too self-conscious (we are not watching a Godard movie) but the risk is there. The eerie beauty of the film is rooted in everyday things, but at the same time the whole place is somehow cut off from reality (the entire film takes place within the cinema theater). I don't know whether I have seen any film in which the place of movie-watching is as nakedly exposed as in this film, where desperation intermingles with sadness and loneliness - and nostalgia (Aki Kaurismäki would perhaps like this stylized movie about the pleasure and strangeness of cinema).
So how does this work? I mean, the odds are small against a film that has no story, where the camera remains static and where we now next to nothing about the people we see. It still works. It's wrong to say Good-bye Dragon Inn is more style than content, but it is impossible not to mention its colors and its grasp of movement (even if these movements themselves remain at a snail's pace). If you've watched films by Wong Kar-Wai you know what I'm talking about (their cinematic sensibilities are somewhat similar).
Did I mention this is a funny movie? You might not believe it, but somehow, it is. If you've experience the dreadful company of popcorn-munching movie-goers, maybe you will get the kinds of jokes the film quietly deals in.
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath is an extremely important film and if there was one director who could pull off an adaptation of Steinbeck's novel onto the big screen, it was John Ford - a director not particularly famous for his leftist sympathies. This film, however, has its heart to the left. It's hard to imagine this film project would have been realized ten years afterwards; even though some aspects of the book are toned down, the film's message and vision is still uncompromising in its outcry against dispossession of the poor - The Grapes of Wrath is one of the very few American movies that in an unsentimental way tackles issues about social justice and capitalism. What can I say, it was a harsh world then and it's a harsh world now - Ford's movie has a lot of things to say and reveal about our world and the economic system that human relations are intermingling with and that structures people's lives.
The story is simple and merciless. Tom Joad is on a parole from prison (he has killed a man in a drunken fight) but when he arrives home, the village seems deserted. Instead, he finds the local preacher, or the man who used to be a preacher. We learn that the family has been chased away from their land by the banks and the big landowners. They are going to California to pick oranges and the film follows the Joads' from camp to camp, increasingly pessimistic about their future. Everybody is looking for a job, and this is something that is both a result of and a means for capitalist manipulations.
Directors like John Ford may be known for their films about independent, self-made man. The American dream, harsh but true. The Grapes of Wrath is a story teaching us about fragility and an overwhelming system. The America that comes to life here is not the land of freedom and fantasy and endless exploration: its a land that has a history of violence, where borders are staked out again and again, and where land = property. Ford does not portray evil capitalists, but he shows how society is torn up with people representing different roles and where many institutions have a shady place (such as the police and the state authorities). He focuses on people who are dependent on each other (in good and bad ways), people who succumb and who try to survive in a society that pushes them away, or invites them only in order to throw them out again. What's the answer? Instead of the run-of-the-mill sentimental individualism, The Grape of Wrath invites us to think about collective action and political and defiant organization. The film ends with a - OK it is too overwrought and calculating - political speech that makes the message pretty clear.
I should also mention the role of landscapes in the film. They are not reduced to a beautiful backdrop, a beautiful scenery on which to relax the eye in an otherwise tough story. Ford conjures up a world, a world of both promise and horror, violence and solidarity. The style is direct, but it also contains a form of subdued poetic side, and it is the poetry that speaks both of sadness and of rage.
The story is simple and merciless. Tom Joad is on a parole from prison (he has killed a man in a drunken fight) but when he arrives home, the village seems deserted. Instead, he finds the local preacher, or the man who used to be a preacher. We learn that the family has been chased away from their land by the banks and the big landowners. They are going to California to pick oranges and the film follows the Joads' from camp to camp, increasingly pessimistic about their future. Everybody is looking for a job, and this is something that is both a result of and a means for capitalist manipulations.
Directors like John Ford may be known for their films about independent, self-made man. The American dream, harsh but true. The Grapes of Wrath is a story teaching us about fragility and an overwhelming system. The America that comes to life here is not the land of freedom and fantasy and endless exploration: its a land that has a history of violence, where borders are staked out again and again, and where land = property. Ford does not portray evil capitalists, but he shows how society is torn up with people representing different roles and where many institutions have a shady place (such as the police and the state authorities). He focuses on people who are dependent on each other (in good and bad ways), people who succumb and who try to survive in a society that pushes them away, or invites them only in order to throw them out again. What's the answer? Instead of the run-of-the-mill sentimental individualism, The Grape of Wrath invites us to think about collective action and political and defiant organization. The film ends with a - OK it is too overwrought and calculating - political speech that makes the message pretty clear.
I should also mention the role of landscapes in the film. They are not reduced to a beautiful backdrop, a beautiful scenery on which to relax the eye in an otherwise tough story. Ford conjures up a world, a world of both promise and horror, violence and solidarity. The style is direct, but it also contains a form of subdued poetic side, and it is the poetry that speaks both of sadness and of rage.
tisdag 7 maj 2013
Hævnen (2010)
What drives people to revenge? This seems to be the central question of Susanne Bier's recent film Hævnen (In a Better World). Even though serious moral questions are placed at the core, this is not a completely satisfying film (would I have liked it better as a novel? Maybe.). Two conflicts play out, one in Denmark, and one in a refugee camp (in Darfur?) and the point seems to be to shed some light on violence, how violence is sparked or how it could be rejected. Bier refrains from providing one overarching idea. Instead, one could say that she tests our reactions (I am inspired by this reading of the film.) A prominent temptation is to present moral problems as given questions to which universal answers are to be provided: "is it right to....?" Well, is it or is it not? When these type of questions are set up, one starts to imagine a situation as comprising a bunch of facts. Then the task is to churn out the optimal solution in accordance with a principle or a standard. Moral problems then seem identical with problems in engineering, it's just that principles mess things up with their fact-value fuzziness. (If you read moral philosophy, you are bound to bump into this understanding of what moral problems are.)
In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.
In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.
The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).
In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.
In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.
The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).
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