Friday, October 16, 2015

Them Festival Blues (and Greys) or: Like Going to the Bathroom After a Large Meal


O viveret Democritus!
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


Off work for a bit. Got my neck adjusted today. First time since 2011. Better write something. So: so many factors. As in all things. Very shortly after The Calgary International Film Festival concluded I got brain-sick. Bad. A very heavy, grey thing. An interminable suspension in the grey, heavy present. Again. Beneath brick-heavy tidal pressure. Again. So many factors. Best not to anatomize. I am working this out elsewhere - another project, recently hatched. It is important to note, of course, that Chantal Akerman took her own life shortly after the festival concluded. This may have been the final straw. (Or perhaps I have no business whatsoever parsing straws.) Akerman meant so much to me as an artist and a human being. She was invested in play, seriously, serious play, in the manner of (and not the manner of) Derrida, and she has done far more for me than he. She routinely allowed me to invest in commitment to a kind of work that would, you know, keep me alive, keep me on my toes, keep me fresh and plasticine and escape-artist-flexible in the face of cultural concretion and the deadening illusion of alienation. I see Akerman as perhaps the one artist who best drew us a map out of modernist alienation. Alienation. That was where her art started, of course, and perhaps (I don’t presume to know) where her life ended. This is more than just another bipolar suicide (parallel to the one I have been flirting with in my mind since I was very young). And I had been binging on cinema. After a holiday in London, England and Ottawa, Ontario. A holiday of superhuman stimulation and perilous excitation. The twenty-six movies in rapid succession. Whilst working full time. There is this addict business. And the business of having spent so much of my life at the brink, where it progressively got more slippery, where I could not longer gain a purchase. I have no business going there. But life brings us there. We bring us there. Whatever. I get there. And so shall do. End of story. Equilibrium is itself pretty motherfucking slippery. We are all on a ride. What of the movies? Movies: savers and destroyers of lives? Narcotic distractions from the daily grind? Sure. All of the above. The church. The cinema remains my church. I am a sick man. I need my church. We get better there. That’s why we have churches. Honest to goodness churches and their doubles. To get better. And I carry the meter there with me. The nerve meter. The critical reflexes. The taste machine. So I want to write about some movies. The festival. The movie festival. I saw twenty-six. I intend to riff on a bit about the ten that most pleased me. And I am going to list them in reverse order of preference. Because it pleases me. First: let’s do some preliminary accounting. Of the first ten movies I saw, four prominently featured pigs. Honest to goodness hogs. The Lobster, Funny Bunny, Into the Forest, and August Winds. They all had pigs. Pigs are trapped. Fenced in. In The Lobster, people are presumably trapped inside pigs. There is nothing more absurd than a domesticated animal. And pigs, built to eat and sleep in shit - craven, filthy, known to go “hog wild” - are not exactly domesticated. And of course man is a domesticated animal. Though not exactly domesticated. It is all absurd. It was a lesson I recently learned from Borowczyk. We continue being taught this lesson. Movies with pigs will never be movies about glamor. And glamor is not life. Life is eating and sleeping in shit. I want more life, less glamor. Well, I want a little glamor. Tuned just right. It’s complicated. Aesthetics are a drug (aesthetics, as the Marxists say, are anesthetic). Glamor is a drug. And we go to the church to get well. So I do indeed want to be opiated a bit by aesthetics (big time) and glamor (a little bit). Get well? Without medicine? A lot of movies seemed to be mucking about with aspect ratio. The Jia especially. But the very impressive Krisha also. This is aesthetics as slap in the face. Self-reflexive. Estrangement of the suspended disbeliever. I like it and I don’t like it. It proved to be a major problem in Krisha. It was a wonderful, wonderful choice in the pretty goddamn wonderful Jia. I will be discussing those two. Cannes. Always at The Calgary International Film Festival the most palatable films from Cannes (and a couple surprises) show up. What was I hoping for? I was hoping for The Assassin, Cemetery of Splendour, and In the Shadow of Women. I got none of them. We got the Godard and the Dumont last year (jackpot!), so this year did not bode so well upon a cursory assessment of the lineup. What did we get? It would seem obvious. We got the Palme d’Or (Dheepan), the Grand Prix (Son of Saul) and the Jury Prize (The Lobster). We got the sublime Jia (Mountains May Depart). I do not hate any of these movies. I am in one sense or another ready to claim a fondness for each of them (though I am only barely fond of Son of Saul). I will riff on The Lobster and Mountains May Depart at greater length, as they are especially special. Dheepan. Jacques Audiard is at all times a commendable technical director and a canny caster of unknowns (and, you know, stars for that matter, though you can’t say there are any here). I can find little to complain about regarding Dheepan as a thing with which to spend an affable period of time. I would not have given it the Palme d’Or. I would have given it the honorary Clint Eastwood Award for Reactionary Inclusivity. It is kind of a spiritual cousin to Gran Torino, except that the Clint Eastwood justice-dispenser and the ethnic Other are united within one figure, the lead, as rendered by the totally wonderful (and sublimely laid-back) Jesuthasan Antonythasan. This is another out-of-nowhere fellow (like Tahar Rahim in Un prophète (2009)) who serves as a riveting locus of focus in a not-overly-belaboured sea of dramatic machinations. It is not accurate to call these guys non-actors. They are actors. Pupative movie actors who belong at the heart of an old-fashioned, professional movie spectacle (though, in this case, one deeply invested in not getting, until the final showdown, too “spectacular”). Obviously Audiard had the fortune to make a film about refugees in Europe (Sri Lankan, though, rather than Syrian) at a time that would be conducive to his finally winning a big, prestigious, international film award. It is a movie that will appeal to a great many people for whom the cinema is not a church, and they can presumably be counted upon to forget it pretty quickly. Son of Saul is engineered to win awards. It would seem a sure bet that László Nemes had a speech prepared. It’s a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque theme park ride called The Final Solution. Not much depth of field. Not much field. You find yourself looking away from the horror and staring at the guy positioned in front of you on the ride. Obviously the Dardenne brothers formal recipe has replaced the Rossellini as the de facto serious Euro-film (and beyond) template. Pretty much everybody who is anybody knows this. And it is certainly novel to come at the death camps in this manner. The tracking shots (Nemes has done his time setting them up for the master, Béla Tarr) are the meat of the matter. This is over-the-shoulder track as cosmogony. The 1.33/1 Academy Ratio frame is a brilliant choice. I cannot say enough about the sound design. It is really dense and supremely worked-out. But you know what? I don’t think Nemes can direct crowds. He mostly doesn’t let us see them, but when we do I just am not buying it for some reason. Everything is so calibrated and precise that the cattle pen of human monstrosity doesn’t come off. And the story is the exact story that an “important” Hollywood movie would tell. As a narrative, this thing would sit well alongside Edward Zwick’s Defiance (2008), which is about the meanest thing I can imagine myself saying about such a movie. I was impressed, I was unimpressed, which is maybe irritating, but doesn’t quite account for how irritated I was by Son of Saul (though impressed (or not entirely unimpressed)). Of course, the mandate of the Calgary International Film Festival is not necessarily built around dropping Cannes goodies in our lap. Is there a mandate? What is the mandate? I say there is a mandate, and that mandate is built around The Discovery Award. The Discovery Award is the award the festival gives to the best (which now means most popular) debut. This means our festival brings in a lot of movies by people about whose art and the merits thereof we know essentially nothing. One gambles a lot at The Calgary International Film Festival. It paid off for me this year. Two of the highlights were Discovery nominees about which nobody I know knew a goddamn thing. August Winds and, my oh my, Fig Fruit and the Wasps. I will be riffing on those. Naturally. What else? We got two films about addiction. Which is to say documentaries that relate in some way to addiction. We got one last year. At least I saw one last year. It was great. I forget its name, suggesting I should not stop writing on this stupid blog. (Perhaps the blog, above all else, is a memory tool, like a diary, or maybe a spouse.) The two this year were important to me also. Hurt was especially special. Guess what? I intend to riff on it. The other one was Finders Keepers. This thing is a real crowd-pleaser. People are gonna love it, because in one sense we are cruel redeemers of schadenfreude, and in another we are easily manipulated and sentimental little shills (neither of these things are bad in themselves, don’t be ashamed). The story goes like this: down-on-his-luck rich-kid-gone-astray drug addict John Wood loses the contents of a storage locker he has been unable or unwilling to keep up payments for. In the locker is the leg he had amputated after the plane crash that killed his dad. The leg is in a cooker. Like, you know, for BBQ. His actual severed leg. Shannon Whisnant acquires the contents of the locker during auction, and upon discovering the gnarly severed limb decides that he will have people pay (children at a discount!) to come see the leg and the cooker. An attraction. Of the Southern United States variety. A battle ensues, lasting many years, for rightful title to the now-seriously-dessicated leg. It all culminates in the form of a verdict on (I shit you not) the Judge Joe Brown show. This is a very American movie with a lot of gutbucket, belly-laugh American I-cannot-fucking-believe-this details. But you know what? Judge Brown not only gives John Wood his (fucking disgusting) leg back (though John has to pay Mr. Whisnat some money), he also, seeing that the poor man is in a bad way, sends him to rehab. So the syrupy pathos the film has been periodically milking comes on full-fathom-five with the sudden realization that we have navigated our way into an improbably powerful recovery narrative. This insane, comic, tragic, fucking gnarled business with the (gnarled) leg sets in motion a whole cause-and-effect confluence that delivers the sick and humbled Mr. John Wood on the path to grace and salvation (at least in this world), and the giant, blundering, huckster Mr. Whisnat to total psychospiritual bankruptcy and good-old-fashion southern-fried hubris. This is some Flannery O’Connor shit. What else? Okay. Let’s close this ambling preamble out. First: One Floor Below. I’m gonna forget for a moment that there was no reason for this movie to be shot in Scope. This is a new pet peeve of mine. If you are gonna shoot your movie in Scope, I am going to be picky. I am going to be spending more time than is useful thinking about whether or not you needed to do this. That aside: the Romanian New Wave has finely tapped directly into the spirit (if not an actual source text) or Georges Simenon (and in so doing Mr. Chabrol and Mr. Tavernier). The lead: Teodor Corban. Total everyman, total gravitas. I love these Romanian films for the way they deal so bemusedly in bureaucracy, post-communist institutionality, and authority flouting. I learn the same thing via films from these Eastern European nations about communism and post-communism that I learn from Iranian films (like the festival-screened Taxi, which dares to invoke Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), and which is all about face - the face, that is, Panahi wants to show the world (he spends the majority of the movie seeming utterly pleased w/ himself)), which is basically that implicit under the surface of even the most repressive State Apparatus is the fact that people are basically going to do whatever the hell they please, even if it becomes a needlessly complicated hassle. (When all is said and done, cultural and political authority are also ultimately about face.) I think I am getting around to the end of the festival. How did the festival end? It ended, in what seemed in advance to be absolute divine scheduling intervention. Miike. Yakuza Apocalypse. My last film of the 2015 Calgary International Film Festival. This movie is 100% engineered so people can have fun. But you know what? After my nervous-system slamming vacation, my twenty-five previous movies in just over a week, and my full-time fucking job, “fun” really wasn’t something I should have considered to be in the offing. I would have preferred to trance-out on a two hour shot of a tree in the wind or waves rolling unto the shore. Not that Yakuza Apocalypse isn’t impressive. Extremely fun. Pretty exhausting. Some Miike films are brilliant. There is, however, a difference between brilliant and just basically finding, over and over, ridiculous ways to be hilarious that have not quite hitherto been discovered. And I was not really able to find anything funny. Maybe funny in theory. I was heading, unbeknownst, for a hard crash. Like a great deal of Japanese comedy, Yakuza Apocalypse feels like it has been built around a brainstorming session that got way out of hand. Lots of laughs, often inspires awe based simply on the fact it pulls off stuff that would be funny in a brainstorming session (cannabis?) but that any sane person would not believe possible to pull off. It is definitely his stupidest and most blithely unnecessary movie (that I have seen) since the aggressively stupid and unnecessary (and fun) Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). But you know what? Art is glorious and totally unnecessary. Before I close. Before I close I am going to mention the worst movie. One of the very worst movies I have ever seen at a festival. I am going to say nothing more about Chad Archibald’s heinous genre plopper Bite other than that if you were to theoretically tell me that it fits into the dubious “so bad it’s good” category, I would theoretically hate your guts. That’s it. I’m gonna write a bit about ten movies. Done gonna riff. Okay? Ready?





10. Experimenter   


The Almereyda. Michael Almereyda is in his mid-fifties. The guy who made Another Girl Another Planet (1992) on Fisher Price Pixelvision is going to be sixty in the blink of an eye. God have mercy on our souls. Mr. Almereyda is a hero of mine. I love him. He hasn’t been making a lot of feature narrative movies. The last perfect one was the Hamlet (2000) with Ethan Hawke in what we Canadians like to call a toque. There was Happy Here and Now (2002), the New Orleans rhythm and blues VR movie. Now that is a strange movie. Recently the return to Shakespeare. Cymbeline (2014). Okay, now that is an absolutely fucking bonkers movie. An unbelievable amount of brain power is thrown at concepts and their enactment in the bizarre Cymbeline. As such, as one might expect, and appropriate to the source text, we are hit with total genius and utterly embarrassing ridiculousness in equal measure. Experimenter is a near-perfect little confection of what is ultimately admirably low ambition. It doesn’t exactly lay it all out there to be scoffed at. I dare you to find substantive fault with it. Okay. Some will scoff at it. Some may even call it, ugh, twee. They may also compare it to bad community theatre. So what? Even good community theatre is bad community theatre, and we need community theatre. Doesn’t community theatre tell us something about community? Experimenter tells the story of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard). Or part of the story. The public part. And the private part inside the public part. No real origin story. If you made it to junior high then some teacher has presumably told you about Milgram’s most famous experiment. He had people believing they were following a scientist’s directives to electrocute a dude in an adjoining room even though nobody was actually being electrocuted. The test subjects kept on believing themselves to be electrocuting somebody, because they were so instructed by an authority figure, well beyond the point where the voltage levels they believed themselves to be dealing in were way crazy high. Is this sleight of hand? Is the film about sleight of hand, so-called magic? Yes, peripherally. But all movies are. The experiment suggests (and Milgram pleads po-faced that he wasn’t sure they would prove this at all) that people are willing to follow orders to the point of monstrosity. Hence, then, perhaps the insanity of the Holocaust, for example, was a kind of workaday insanity. Business as usual for we human beings. So the movie is chilling? The study is chilling. We are aware of the study and its implications. Readers of this blog have been to junior high. The movie is not chilling. Experimenter maintains something of the same tone as Peter Sarsgaard's performance: clear-eyed and forlorn with an edge of bemusement. It’s even a bit jaunty. It is possible to know the whole sordid truth about people and still enjoy being a pithily sardonic li’l sprite in their company. Is the movie pithy? Maybe a little. Sarsgaard definitely can be. Inside the movie is the story of Milgram’s seducing of, and eventual cultivation of a basically workable marriage to Sasha (Winona Ryder (I love you Winona Ryder)), whence offspring (more humans!) are produced. I thought of Hitchcok’s Spellbound a bunch, and not just because of the rear projection (although, yes, also because of the rear projection). Why? Because there is a love story, a complicated and ultimately satisfying (for everybody) pas de deux built on psychosexual tumult and increasingly few illusions whatsoever about the messy parts of things. Also: just, you know, the human sciences. You will also be reminded of Kinsey. Obviously. If you have seen Kinsey (2004). The last such biopic of which I remember being this fond. They share more than Peter Sarsgaard in common. A troubled yet curiously pleased investigator, investigating the venal business of people being people. I picked up on two moments that struck me as total genius. It involves the one-way mirror. Or the two-way mirror. (I just Googled it - the one-way mirror and the two-way mirror are the same thing.) When the not-actually-electrocution experiments are occurring, Milgram watches them through the window that is a mirror on the other side, cop-style. Sasha of course gets filled in. She even asks for a jolt of current. She’s a game dame. There are two moments, however, where I remember Winona Ryder having an uncomfortable moment with the glass. Brilliant. Fucking spooky.                     





9. Krisha 


This is a feature narrative movie. The third movie about (relating to) addiction. But not, of course, a documentary. And a debut feature. Presumably a contender for the aforementioned Discovery Award. It starts with a shout-out to Altman’s 3 Women (1977). There are also shades of his Images (1972) in the early going. Promising. But it’s more than that. This thing really comes on like gangbusters. My jaw was pretty much on the floor pretty quick and stayed there for the duration of the first act. There is a de-naturing going on. A de-naturalization. We are thrown into the queasy fray of the ol’ family reunion. This is an uncomfortable and strange environment as rendered by director Trey Edward Shults. This is expressionism. How so? In the sense that the film enters this overloaded domestic hellscape in the company of Krisha (Krisha Fairchild … yes … Krisha) who is clearly very, very uncomfortable. Her debased psychic condition and raw-nerved trembling are immediately ours as well. We are in a home. Lots of bustling people. In middle America. But it feels like some nightmarish carnival in another world. Not a pleasant world. At all. Some American artists are good at looking at regular American life as though it had never been looked at before. I thought of Jon Jost and Rob Tregenza. It is also partially scored early on with some insane contrapuntal nightmare music. There is a presiding filter of dis-ease. We pretty quickly come to realize that Krisha has been rocked pretty hard by life. She is barely able to hold herself together. Facing her family so obviously torments her in the worst way. Oh, she’s missing part of a finger. Life has been hard on Krisha. She is coping poorly. She is only here so she can connect with her son. She has not seen her son in many years. Her son cannot look her in the eyes. One senses that he is totally praying for her to just plain evaporate. From the bottom of his hurt heart. Krisha is an alcoholic. Tentatively recovering. But she picks up a drink. And the drink takes a drink. Hark! The bottle is empty. Act two. It’s brief. Mr. Shults gets Krisha drunk and then … he jumps from 1.85/1 to Scope. Drunk-o-cam! She moves through the house with a brief, syrupy ease, accompanied by a smooth jazz swing. There is a problem with the switch to Scope, besides the fact that it is clearly gimmicky. The movie was projected in such a way that the Scope was letterboxed, instead of having the image cleanly expand horizontally. So instead of getting more when Krisha gets drunk, which is presumably the intention, we get less. I know the world used to seem bigger and better for a little bit when I got loaded. Krisha has found some tranquility. It does not last long. She drunkenly drops the turkey (and all of its attendant fluids) on the floor, slow-mo. Suddenly Krisha, the prodigal pariah, is the focus of immoderate, scolding attention. Everybody converges on her to shame her. She totally falls apart. She goes to bed on a couch. She wakes up and realizes it was not a dream. Oh shit. Ohhhhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiit. The morning after. Guess what? 1.33/1 Academy ratio. So yeah. We’re doing all the ratios. We are basically in a shame melodrama now. And the shame is fucking thick. As a recovering alcoholic I can steadfastly attest to how much this movie resembles these actual dreams I have where I pick up a drink, get wasted, and fuck me life up totally and completely in front of the enraged and/or aghast people who love me. I thought of Fassbinder. I thought, especially, of Volker Spengler in In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978). Krisha Fairchild has me convinced that she is actually a woman, but in the same way a transexual might perform his or her way into a gender, Krisha (played by Krisha) is helplessly and hopelessly trying to play her way into Krisha. She is met with disgust. Total, unfeeling, unthinking disgust. But you know what? She disgusts herself. We bring this shit upon ourselves. Close to home. Way, way close. I am afraid what will happen, even sober, if I start to rave the way Krisha raves, drunk … and then coming down. Oh, and Krisha reminds me, even more than myself, of a close relative. A relative about whom we worry. So, yeah: family reunions, as ever, are fucking odious.        





8. Hurt


I, Curmudgeon (2004) was the last Alan Zweig I saw. The only other one I had seen before that was Vinyl (2000). I, Curmudgeon was just like Vinyl except that it was about curmudgeons instead of record collectors (though they are very often the same thing). Hurt is a significant advance in every respect, both for Mr. Zweig and for the documentary form, especially the Canadian documentary. We are Canadians. We are documentary people. Our national cinema, pathetic little outlier though we are, going way back to the degree zero, is all about them documentaries and them animated shorts. That is what we are known for. We have John Grierson to thank for the legacy of the Canadian documentary. You know what’s funny about John Grierson? Dude’s not Canadian. Scotsman. Alan Zweig? Jew. Grumpy. Stout. But he can tell a joke. Hurt, however, is compassionate (though the subject, Steve Fonyo, is maddeningly frustrating), dead serious, and totally important. It also has a complicated and extremely compelling relationship with discourses on documentary practices. The primary question: what is the role of the filmmaker in terms of the ethics of investment (and even participation (or insistent non-participation)) in the lives he or she records? Zweig is not a vérité guy, or a direct cinema guy, or an Allan King-style “actuality drama” guy, or whatever you want to call it. However, he is coming way closer here than he has in those two earlier docs. Those movies were made up almost entirely of talking heads. Including Alan’s. Talking to himself. And his camera. In the mirror. Back before the ubiquity of the selfie. He was literally an untucked and hiked-up shirt away from staring at his own navel. Mr. Zweig has gotten further outside of himself in Hurt, but has made the exceedingly wise decision (which is who he is, he couldn’t help but make it, nor should he) not to attempt (what filmmaker actually can?) to remove himself from the equation. (He may get way outside himself in a bunch of other movies, I don’t know, I believe I have only seen those two I already mentioned.) Steve Fonyo. Oh Christ. So this is one of the two documentaries I saw at the festival, in addition to the aforementioned Finders Keepers, that relate to an addict who happens to have had a leg amputated. Steve Fonyo contracted bone cancer as a boy and had to have a leg amputated. Quite a blow. But at one point he appeared to have made the most of it. Like Terry Fox before him, Fonyo went on the road, running to make money for cancer research. The run was called "Journey for Lives” and it made Steve a national hero. However, one of my parents tells me that back then a lot of people already knew that Steve was one messed-up cat. One way or another, he was given the Order of Canada. That’s a pretty bid deal. Then the slide. Dude slid. Slid like a motherfucker. Slid into debauch and ignominy. Off the fucking rails. Enter Alan Zweig. A few decades later. Alan paid intermittent visits to Steve over a relatively short period of time and filmed these encounters. Steve was not in good shape. His life was a disaster. We watch it get worse in a kind of time-lapse. Every time Alan comes calling, things appear even worse. Steve had his Order of Canada revoked many years ago. It appears to still sting. And Steve is totally and completely incapable of seeing his part in this. There is a powerful scene where the filmmakers take Steve to a beach that was named after him. Steve pouts and swears and doesn’t want to see the beach. You go see the beach. I’m gonna go sit in the car. I sympathized a little with him there, as I would sympathize with a child who was nonetheless irritating the heck out of me. Drugs, crime, and poverty. Plus kamikaze decision-making in general. We watch him make bad, bad decisions. Again and again. Alan watches. Alan chimes in occasionally. He talks to Steve. He talks to Steve’s girlfriend. Can this continue? Can this go on? There are many ways in which Alan stands back. This is best demonstrated in a crazy-amazing scene in which Steve gets into a ridiculous physical altercation with his girlfriend's nefarious ex. We watch. Alan watches. Alan stands back. And films. But at other times Alan asks a lot of questions. These are often questions that almost plead. But you can only say so much to someone who refuses to hear. Alan makes a radical decision. A deeply uncommon decision for this kind of movie. He finally gets Steve a little help. He sets up an appointment with Vancouver addiction guru Gabor Maté. Mr. Maté is a national treasure. He is one of my very favourite Canadians. Right up there with Nardwuar the Human Serviette and Peaches. Zweig makes the interesting choice of not identifying Mr. Maté. He lets the man speak (and hear) for himself. What is the crux of Mr. Maté’s message? He asks Steve if he is a victims. Steve is grateful. Yes, exactly. Finally somebody gets it. You are not a victim, counters Mr. Maté. You are produced by your circumstances, by and unsatisfiable need that will never be alleviated by anything outside of yourself, and you have never, despite protestations to the contrary, been a happy person. I suspect that Steve is mostly angry about having the Order of Canada taken away from him because he believes himself unworthy. Not only of the Order of Canada. Like so many addicts, Steve will put up a big front, will carry on and build himself up, because deep down he is convinced that he is just plain unworthy. It is easy to turn your life to shit when you are convinced that this is what you deserve. All fans of Canadian-TV-comedy-institution The Trailer Park Boys should see Hurt, just so they have a clearer sense of what it is really like to be getting paralytically high and stealing car parts way out on the Canadian margins. A day or two after I saw the film I was taking the escalator up to the theatres at Eu Claire Market and Alan Zweig was coming down the opposite escalator. “Hey Alan,” I enthused, “I loved your movie.” He looked at me in such a bewildered manner that I found myself wondering if this was the first time a Canadian documentarian had ever been recognized in a shopping complex.           





7. Mountains May Depart


You will gain no traction with me by attempting to reckon with the character and concerns of contemporary cinema without going headlong into a reckoning with Jia. Jia Zhangke. He is our #1 man(darin) on the ground. He is in China. Mainland. At the heart of the heart of the New New World. He is there gleaning for art and truth. He is not in the war-of-blockbuster-attrition business that is the Chinese film industry’s raison d’etre. There are a hell of a lot of people in China. That’s a lots of asses (attached to wallets) to put in seats. Increasing disposable income. Increasing production of big, brash motion pictures. Jia also makes big movies. Little big movies. He makes movies I need. I crave the new ones, be they documentary, fiction, or hybrid. I have had the luxury of seeing a bunch up on the big screen where they belong, which is a luxury available to exceedingly few of his countrymen. Truth? Yes. But beauty. The form and tone. We are talking about an artist. A master of form and tone, who happens to be working in a fresh way and with clarity about a world that the authorities have done their best for a very long time to prevent us from seeing at all. China is a dissident-manufacturing behemoth. You don’t get to make art there without becoming a dissident. You become a dissident just by telling the truth. Or the wrong lie. Jia’s last feature was A Touch of Sin (2013). I was one of the few who was pretty seriously disappointed. Why? Formally it struck me as lazy. Tonally it struck me as kind of blah. I think the fact that he was clearly making some concessions to the asses-in-seats mandate that is always going to dog the expensive art of feature-narrative-movie making (not in and of itself necessarily always a bad thing), caused Jia to kinda not fully invest himself. It is wrong to say think. I can only say I suspect. He is more profound when he is less obvious. A Touch of Sin, particularly toward the end, started to really hit on the obvious. The poetic, sure, but obvious about it, dig? It was not remotely terrible. Just a disappointment. To me. And who the hell am I? Mountains May Depart is just so completely not formally lazy that I cannot presume to do its fastidious construction justice. We are used to the three act structure. Here we have essentially three movies. The literary equivalent would be a book containing three novellas about characters (and characters connected to those characters) at three different disparate points over the course of their lives. And they are three different movies, told in different ways, working in different registers. Remember the talk of aspect ratios? Yes, all three of the predominant aspect ratios are employed, one for each section, with increasingly widening horizontality. The first movie is absolutely stunning. 1.33/1 Academy ratio. I love Jia working in Academy. These frames are exquisite. He sculpts action in real time magnificently, and uses the frame with total wisdom. His cutting is like perfect silken arrangements. The film begins in 1999 with a group of young Chinese dancing pretty ecstatically to the tune of The Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West.” Let’s call it foreshadowing. We arrive into the midst of a love triangle. Jia’s ever-present perhaps-muse Zhao Tao is the female lead. She is torn between the wealthy, arrogant, and bitterly insecure character played by Zhang Yi on the one hand, and the benevolent, kindly, and generally kinda humble character played by Liang Jin Dong, who essentially works for the Zhang Yi character, on the other. While Liang Jin Dong is clearly the better fit, Zhao Tao opts for Zhang Yi for reasons related above all to money and security, and the fact that he will presumably be able to offer same for any prospective offspring. There is a standoff. The moment where Liang Jin Dong slaps Zhang Yi is so skillfully shot and cut that I shuddered. A terrible, decisive moment, decisively rendered. The second section leaps forward to 2014 and the 1.85/1 ratio. We are in another movie. The tone is more elegiac. It is a sad movie. Adult sad. Earned sad. Zhang Yi’s character has left Zhao Tao’s character and taken their young son with him. (The movie perhaps overplays its hand having materialistic father name his son Dollar.) We also meet up with Liang Jin Dong’s character. He is sick. Dying, even. All those years in the mines take their toll. This is an old, pervasive story conjoined to industrial modernization. But heartbreak. Heartbreak takes its toll, too. But this is heartache brought to us by progress, no? Everybody is off in search of happiness-by-way-of-progress and a whole hell of a lot of people have to be ground to dust. Dollar comes for one last visit to see his mother. This is one of the saddest and most deftly understated sequences in all of Jia. The final section (in Scope) takes place in Australia in 2025. Be careful what you wish for. A great many people have “gone west” and not liked what they found. And so it goes. Father (Zhang Yi) and Dollar, now a young man, live in a minimalist mini-mansion, the type somebody might live in in an HBO series or a Michael Mann movie. But in Australia. Here we find Dollar and Daddy totally at odds. They don’t even speak the same language anymore. Literally. A level of disconnection and dislocation and no-fucking-real-intimacy-whatsoever has taken root in a way that weirdly invoked for me the (mostly quite terrible) films of Atom Egoyan (apparently one of those played at the festival! I believe it won the Audience Choice Award! Yikes!). Many complain about the actors in section three. Especially Zijian Dong, who plays Dollar. This young man was supposed to have been raised in the west, right? So how come he can barely speak English? And he can no longer speak Mandarin at all? What gives? The nature of the performances strikes me as a metaphor for dislocation and confusion, foregrounding the significant gulf between the Chinese and the Western experience of the world, whilst also foregrounding just how anchored we are to our origins, no matter how vigorously we try to liberate ourselves. It’s not actually something I had to “get over.” It actually worked for me in a deeper place. In a place where I feel people. It doesn’t look like Dollar will every see his mother again. We end with her, swaying to “Go West” in a post-industrial greyscale purgatory. Her swaying reminds me of Kim Hye-ja in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009). Alas, these poor, wearied mothers, barely propped up by the music.               





6. The Lobster


So basically I am telling you that I like The Lobster a little more than Mountains May Depart. What is wrong with me? Lots. Lots is wrong with lots of us. The Lobster will be loved by many. For a very, very long time. This thing is here to stay. This should in no way be taken to denigrate Mountains. But The Lobster. I love The Lobster. I have given myself to it in this kind of wretched, sodden, consummate capitulation. And God bless me, sir. I don’t get the impression that critics are particularly won over by Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film. People really don’t care. I mean people do not care about critics. Rotten Tomatoes. There are people who take that stuff seriously. I don’t take those people seriously. In fact, you will never even convince me that critics care about critics. Not for the most part. This totally whacked-out and endearing parable, with its delectable screenplay and fastidious direction, enters my life at the exact right moment. It has helped demystify for me the crisis of coupling in which I currently find myself (crisis? oh please). The takeaway is that the insidious directive to hook up and the militant assertion of lone-wolf status are equally harebrained. There is laughter, here, and the upending of the stakes. I want to emphasize the screenplay. It is busily brilliant. So many ideas, gags, slips, and reversals. This is a movie that is thinking and scurrying and laying waste. David is our, ahem, hero. He is rendered by a flaccid, paunchy, schmo-version Colin Farrell. David is shortsighted and has just been cuckolded by his wife. She and her goddamned wandering shortsighted eyes. Yes, they are both shortsighted. This is important. Being cuckolded is an issue in The Lobster’s alternative universe. You see, people who are single have an issue. The issue is that they are not allowed to be single. And one isn’t exactly given much of a post breakup grace period. Single people, it turns out, are routinely rounded up and dumped at an altogether-pretty-nice hotel where they are forced to couple-up with another single person (they are on the clock) or risk being transformed into the animal of their choice. WTF, right? Exactly. David has decided he wants to be, if he has to be, a lobster. They are blue-blooded “like aristocrats,” they live a long time, and David likes the water. Everything at the hotel is zany, uncomfortable, bluntforce comedy. Blood is shed. A lot of blood is self-shed. Autobleeding. Lanthimos likes this sort of thing. Have you seen Dogtooth (2009)? Remember the bit about shortsightedness? Right. The things is that in the world of The Lobster, people can only hook up with somebody with whom they share in common a defining characteristic. Isn’t that ridiculous? Yes. This is also ridiculous. But you know what? We ourselves hook up stupidly, for stupid reasons. We do this all the time. As though it were a fucking competition. To save his soon-to-be-lobster ass, David hooks up with a sociopathic woman who feels nothing. David pretends to feel nothing. This works for a while. Until she kills his dog. His dog also happens to be his onetime-unfortunately-single brother. Oh boy. David escapes (conveniently) into the woods. In the woods he finds a group of single-people drop-out insurrectionists ruthlessly run by the humourless Léa Seydoux. God, Léa Seydoux is always a drag. Bless her heart. These people mean business. They are not only single, they are rabidly anti-coupling. Those that are not rabidly anti-coupling have to pretend to be. Just like David had to pretend to be a guy with no feelings. And obviously he falls in love. With a shortsighted woman. Rachel Weisz. IMDB says her character’s name is “Short Sighted Woman.” Léa Seydoux’s Leader of the Neuters (my appellation) finds out. You know what she does? I’m not going to tell you. It’s grim. It’s merciless. It’s funny. Be a couple? Don’t be a couple? We are totally fucked. Either way: fucked. Great screenplay. And Lanthimos is a crafty, very smart director. He sets things up and lets them fall into place. Sequences, scenes, and shots repeatedly avoid telling you what they are doing at the outset. We are being led by the collar into all kinds of little surprises. Obviously this film will appeal most to single people and the people who identify with their previously single selves far more than the mutants that they have become by virtue of hitching their gear to someone else’s wagon. I’m single, baby. I’m Walt fucking Whitman. Alone in my urban crawlspace, connected to absolutely everything. But you know what? You never know ....





5. August Winds


August Winds is the debut feature film by erstwhile documentarian Gabriel Mascaro. Despite the fact that August Winds is consequently not Mr. Mascaro’s first movie, it was nonetheless a Discovery Award nominee. There is a strong ethnographic bent to August Winds. I love the right kind of ethnography done the right kind of way. The movie revolves around a small coastal community in Brazil. For much of the film we are essentially hanging out there, picking up on little details of day to day life, ensconced in the seasonal fluctuations of the weather and the tides. The tides become central. This is the first truly exceptional fictional movie I have seen where the filmmakers have made a commitment to look at what rising sea levels mean on the ground. There is an ecological investment here. The weather is also important, hence the titular “winds.” Mr. Mascaro even himself shows up as some mysterious interloper who comes to the community with his rig to record the wind and other ambient sounds. This speaks to me. Deep down I believe I am the kind of fellow who goes to the movies to dig on stuff like ambient sound more than I go there for narratives (though this might not be immediately clear to readers of this blog). This is conducive to the medicinal opiation of which I am so fond. Sound is a tonic. The ears are always so much more free than the eyes, all the better to build sensory landscapes from the ground up. All the better to wander off unhindered into dreamy inchoate incandescence. The movie is dominated by non-actors. Any reader of my blog knows of my predilection for well-utilized non-actors. Those who have not been trained, especially if they have also not been bombarded to excess with movie stimuli (as most of the “performers” in August Winds have presumably not been), are less likely to have assimilated endless cliche modalities as part of their working repertoire. Drama will never trump life. This is the cinema, after all, not the theatre. Our way into the world of August Winds is Shirley. Shirley is rendered by Dandara de Morais, the only “performer” in the movie who has any previous acting experience (she appeared in a single episode of a Brazilian television program called Young Hearts). Shirley has come from the big city to tend to her grandmother. She knows the place. She is half insider, half outsider. Her fondness for sunbathing nude, slathered in Coca-Cola, whilst listening to punk rock seems particularly outsiderish in this world she currently (and presumably temporarily) inhabits. She drives a tractor with a flatbed from a coconut plantation to the place where the coconuts are unloaded. She has a boyfriend named Jeison whom she will occasionally fuck on a mountain of coconuts, pulled off to the side of the road. She is a carnal woman. She is a compelling woman. She is a woman at once of the city and of the land, of the sea. This is not a hurried community, nor is the movie hurried. We spend a lot of time basically hanging out. This is definitely an approach to people and places that I can get behind. And so have traditionally done. I was reminded at times of the cinema of Filipino master Lav Diaz. But whereas Diaz makes films that are traditionally many, many hours long (all the better to immerse us in a sense of being in a slow-moving place in time), August Winds runs slightly less than eighty minutes. We are still in a slow-moving place. It’s just that we are made to feel the time only moderately. Then comes the skull. Not long after comes a corpse. When the bones  and bodies enter the picture, August Winds locks into focus. Forensic questions come up when we find a skull. Whose skull is this? How long has this skull been out in the world independent of  a living body upon which to be sentiently perched? Then the corpse. A corpse is a reminder that we are a bundle of bones, and that between the time we are a living person and the time that we are a bundle of bones, we go through a messy process of decay - a process that may happen after we are dead, but which is just absolutely and fundamentally a process related to organic life. What are all of our collective bones but a kind of library? They are what everybody who is not incinerated leaves behind. But what if there is no one around to take notice of our bones? August Winds ends with a wall being built around a cemetery to protect it from rising sea waters. First we turned on the planet, and then the planet turned on us. This is a nice poetic encapsulation. In fairly short order, my friends, there will be nothing on earth with a consciousness as elevated as our own to take notice of the fact that we once were. August Winds may not have a lot of meat on its bones, but I hope that I have made it clear that the bones themselves are what matter.





4. Sea Fog


Leading in to my discussion of Mountains May Depart, I mentioned that the Chinese film industry has spent the bulk of our young century engineering ways to dominate the Asian film market by producing wildly expensive movie spectacles that tow the company line and attempt to please as many people as possible so as to bring in serious box office. Hollywood, obviously, has established the template. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the Koreans continue their entrenched, all-bets-are-off campaign to make the best mass-entertainment in the world. And certainly the Asian markets establish their tenacity in the regards. Korea is not just producing big movies for Korea. They are producing big movies for Asia. They are doing a commendable job of it. Korean filmmakers benefit from a freedom to dabble in sin, sexual politics, naked cruelty, debauch, and subversive agitation that the Chinese do not possess. Censorship and good taste are a serious hindrance for the Chinese in terms of their being able to make the kinds of films upon which adult human beings might be interested in getting off. Enter Sea Fog. Sea Fog is expertly honed, and deeply politically problematic, mass-entertainment. It is a real coup. The director is Shim Sung-bo. Shim was a co-writer on Bong Joon-ho’s already-a-classic Memories of Murder (2003). That movie is a personal favourite in terms of subversive Korean mass-entertainments. Bong Joon-ho has gone on to make increasingly-large and widely-seen movies, culminating in Snowpiercer (2013), an honest-to-goodness English-language super-spectacle filled to the brim with a whole bunch of white folks, some pretty goddamn famous. Apparently Bong doesn’t forget the people who helped to get him to where he is today. Here he is co-writing the debut feature of his Memories co-writer, an undertaking which on the face of it would appear to be below his current station. Like Memories, Sea Fog is calibrated to entertain, which is not to say that it will not piss people off or turn them off. Some people. People being people. This stuff is not built to go down easy. It is violent, blunt, and eager to remind us how rotten we can be. One way to suggest what Sea Fog is doing would be to ask you to imagine a film produced in something of the style and with the production values of a contemporary Hollywood movie, but with the devil-may-care no-bones-about-it chutzpah of the more subversive testosterone-infused New Hollywood movies on the 1970s (think Friedkin and maybe Cimino). It is also, of course, very Korean. And super timely. This is maybe the best peril-at-sea spectacle ever. A little bit of Steamboat Bill Jr., some of that Greengrass pirate-movie shtick, and, of course, spectres of Ahab and William Bligh. The added element is the hot-button issue of China-to-Korea human trafficking. Kim Yoon-seok plays Cheol-joo, the epically insidious captain of the Jeonjinho, a fishing vessel that has seen better days. Cheol-joo, hard up for cash, conscripts his ship and his crewmen into a gambit to smuggle a passel of desperate Chinese migrants into Korea. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Park Yoochun plays Dong-sik, a kindly crewman (and a kid basically), who is unable to countenance the inhuman cruelty that begins to overtake his captain and fellow crewman in the wake of a number of fairly catastrophic complications. That the whole thing is based loosely on real events is extremely chilling. But this is obviously a movie. Big time. Proudly so. This is a movie intoxicated by the possibility of movies. That this is a debut feature is almost sort of baffling. It reeks of old-fashioned seen-it-all professionalism. Taking all this into account, you will probably not be surprised to hear that Sea Fog inveigles itself of something not unlike a love story. Indeed, Dong-sik falls for Hong-Mea (played by Han Ye-ri), a young woman who finds herself amidst the human cargo. When everything goes horribly wrong, Dong-sik hides Hong-mae in the engine room, protecting her from the ever-overhanging threat of sexual violence and certain death. This is a ruthlessly nasty movie. The violence is matter-of-fact and … ruthless. There were people near me in the theatre who were clearly (and audibly) having a bit of a problem with that. By and large, however, the people of Planet Earth have spoken, and they have voted for violence. It has become something of a lingua franca for us. This is not cartoonish violence, being as it is too close to that which exists in our world every day. However, the violence here is disproportionately theatricalized. It would be perhaps reasonable to call the violence orgiastic. Or close. I might be giving you the wrong idea. God, people love their screen violence orgiastic. Still: this is, to risk getting repetitive, violence grounded in our experience of real violence, and this is where the discomfort of some of the folks in my vicinity was stemming from. Though these are nightmares we encounter in the movies, they are also the nightmares we encounter in the news. Unfortunately, of course, we are each of us somewhat complicit in these nightmares. Dong-sik’s heroism is admirable, and there is no mass-entertainment-style movie without it, but it is inarguably also married to a kind of always-eventually-fatal naiveté. His fellow crewman are not so much monsters as products of their circumstances. The same could be said of Captain Cheol-joo, if not for the fact that circumstance transfigure him into a truly mythic beast. He is one of those captains. Long after he has sealed his own doom, Cheol-joo rages against the dying of the light until he, of course, is forced to go down as absurdly as possible with the ship, his little private apocalypse mirroring so many larger ones already well in the works.       





3. Fig Fruit and the Wasps


The second really spectacular film about which I knew next to nothing, following August Winds, and the second one to floor me. It really, totally, holy shit floored me. It’s rare that one of these unheard of international dispatches enters my life and illuminates the interiors so … luminously. Magnificent. Truly magnificent. This is one of the most special things about taking chances at festivals (and the Calgary International Film Festival is admirable in its routinely encouraging us to take such chances (though I may occasionally grumble when I see the lineup)). We get to see things very few will see, that we will presumably never get to see again ourselves, and we get to see them projected on screens up at which we gaze in wonder. Always better than a TV or a monitor. It was Godard who reminded us that we look up at movies and look down at TV. How below-the-radar is Fig Fruit and the Wasps? It doesn’t even have an IMDB entry. How’s that for indie cred? This is the debut feature of M.S. Prakash Babu. It is not the kind of movie one follows. It is the kind of movie one gets inside and lives in, like a warm coat, for a brief time. It is the kind of movie inside which one luxuriates. Shot in Scope. I’ve been grumbling about Scope. This is kinda my new thing. Even when I am not grumbling about Scope in my written ruminations, I am often grumbling about Scope in the echo chamber of my skull. Fig Fruit and the Wasp needed to be shot in Scope. It is the only film I saw at the festival about which I can absolutely say 100% this is the case. It earns is lavish wide frames. We are talking about a place the same way we were talking about a place in regard to August Winds. Fig Fruit finds us in the company of two individuals, a female documentary filmmaker (Bhavani Prakash) and her cameraman (Ranjit Bhaskaran), who visit a removed outpost (this time in Southern India) where they (and we) primarily just hang out. The movie is composed primarily of long takes, shot from a distance, of people suspended in landscapes. I suspect that the two leads were cast because they each have a face and a manner that suggests something more than wisdom or certainly intelligence. They suggest an ineluctable sense of having lived. These people have seen more than their age might suggest they have. They are not anxious to do much of anything other than inhabit the world with their bodies and all their attention. They are forlorn observers, long since having outgrown the youthful indignity of being prone to surprise. There is an ennui in this. There is a sapience as well. Sapience, as elaborated upon in Eugène Green’s recent La Sapienza (2014), being all about the kind of knowledge (not necessarily quantitative) that is useful for those in search of something like genuine wisdom. So yes, wisdom. Here wisdom is something that is worn on the person, like an expression or a piece of ornate jewelry, more than it is something the person demonstrates. The documentarian and her cameraman, who have developed the kind of relationship that doesn’t require them to say much of anything to one another, have come to this outpost as part of a project whereby they intend to explore how different kinds of music and different kinds of musical instruments (right down to the shape of the instruments) emerge from different regions. What they do not do in the movie is make much headway in terms of gleaning much information that would serve them in this endeavour. (A villager, improbably, reminds the cameraman that Adorno got there first.) Rather, they merely inhabit the region. The mysterious hereness of a here. As do we. That is what we have entered this movie in order to do. To be, with the full weight of what is meant by “to be,” in a here that would to us have otherwise been an elsewhere. International cinema has always been bequeathing this gift unto us. It is art. It is also a kind of circumscribed, modulated travel. I love movies like Fig Fruit and the Wasp that have few ancillary interests beyond dropping us off somewhere we have never been to primarily look, listen, listen to our listening (as Heidegger would have us do), and feel our feelings along with the humming of our distanced thoughts. The idea here, however, is that a specific region will pick up different frequencies of universal spirit than will other regions, hence the different forms of music that emerge from different places. It is spirit. Geist. There is spirit and music coming out of a place. To be in a place is to always be in proximity to a particular variation of intensive cosmic elements. Spiritual elements, hence musical ones. The onus is on us. To be. Here. Any here. But to really be here. I was compelled to go see Fig Fruit because the festival program compared it to works by Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu, and Robert Bresson. Great. Bresson is my God. Those other two guys are great. I love them. Well, no. This is all very misleading. If you want a sense of what M.S. Prakash Babu is doing with form and tone, you would be better off looking at the bits in Antonioni or in Nuri Bilge Ceylan (I thought especially of the wonderful Uzak (2002)) where not much of anything is going on. People call this stuff “slow cinema.” I don’t really want to be the “slow cinema” guy. Nonetheless: long live “slow cinema”!





2. The Forbidden Room


Ah, dreary, windy Winnipeg’s finest export: the inimitable Guy Maddin. You love Guy Maddin. Obviously. I know I am always ready to hand my grey neural spheres over to him so that he can prod at them with his malevolent screwdrivers and such. The Forbidden Room is a brain (and attendant networks), fit to be endlessly prodded. And guess what? There is honest to goodness neurosurgery in The Forbidden Room. What would you expect? Udo Kier plays a bunch of characters, one of whom is this crazed guy who cannot leave the behinds of ladies alone (Udo? oh please). Increasingly invasive brain surgery is employed to alleviate him of his compulsion to reach out and touch someone. Each increasingly invasive surgery is more debilitating than the last. But the asses. Oh, unceasing, profligate asses with your siren songs. It is a musical number. It is called “The Final Derrier.” With music by Sparks. Are you beginning to get the picture? You have not even fucking begun to begin to get the picture. Does something come after postmodernity? If anything does then Maddin does. I have previously called Maddin cinema’s greatest DJ. He continues to prove me right. I also remember suggesting that the experience of watching Miike’s Izo was like being a needle constantly jumping back and forth between phonograph grooves. Well, Maddin is the master. Samples, sampling, total multivalence, and that jumping back and forth, pinwheel, between phonograph grooves. The way his movies have been edited since the immortal Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)(still his best), it were as though he were bent on amphetamines and trying haphazardly to land each short on a blurry aircraft carrier. The DJ thing really started with his masterful short film The Heart of the World (2000). Cinema: Year Y2K. That was when the montage went into overdrive. He has not come back to earth. Earth? What earth? Whatever comes after postmodernity does not exactly happen on earth. I am beginning to think that he has started to speed things up to such an extent so that he can pull off some Hadron Collider shit and start to bi-locate like in Pynchon’s Against the Day. I would call The Forbidden Room high concept, except you really need to pluralize concept. The temptation in describing it is to start a whole bunch of places at once. I am already kind of doing that, aren’t I? A couple basic concepts: 1) Maddin wanted to film little movies based on films that have been lost - as have been the bulk of silent films, seeing as back in the day nobody could see a future in this stuff - and he took a bunch of names of such films and quasi-free-associatively started making little movies based (sort of) on lost movies; 2) Maddin found himself invited to make little movies (or movie-happenings) at the Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal, and large groups of spectators converged in these places to watched him shoot some of the fragments that would be incorporated into The Forbidden Room, with some pretty game movie faces such as those belonging to Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, and Maria de Medeiros; 3) Related to the previous two undertakings (and The Forbidden Room), Mr. Maddin has embarked on an experimental journey to bring all of this madness together on a complicated, immersive website to be called Seances (I am assuming that a lot of stuff that is in The Forbidden Room will also be reworked into the universe of Seances). What Maddin has ultimately concocted here is concentric movie-world asteroid belts through which the audience is trafficked in something entirely unlike a straight line. So basically there are a lot of movies inside this movie, revolving around no central body. They are all emphatically Guy Maddin movies. Though George Toles is no longer writing scripts for Maddin, we are still basically getting George Toles. Praise the Lord. We also get Maddin’s new collaborator, co-director Evan Johnson. It seems that Johnson’s primary job is to build the world of the surface of the movie in postproduction. He takes the shot footage and digitally reworks it in such a way that is all suffused with the patina of different kinds of film-film worlds going to pot. We are getting something like the decaying film stock of Decasia (2002) built exclusively with a digital toolbox. There is some real entropy at work here, and the sense that, with no central body, the movies we are watching are sliding out of orbit. Submarine movies, woodsmen rescuing damsels from wolfmen movies, virgins fed to volcanoes movies, Indonesian vampire movies, crime movies, a movie about a guy who forgets his wife’s birthday and so gives her all of his stuff and says he got her duplicates but when she asks where the original stuff is the world caves in. There are a lot of movies here. They are diverting. They are fun. Some of it is pretty close to sketch comedy territory. But the cinematic machinery in place is the stuff of pure demonic magik-with-a-k. So bring on Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton. I want more!            





1. Love


Love, otherwise known as Love 3D. You may be excused if you think I am putting this at the top of my list to be needlessly contrarian or provocative. I am not. I can see how you might think that this is something I might do. Not because I might do something like this, but rather because I am canny enough to see how I may be perceived, incorrectly, to be the kind of person who might do something like this. I am not immoderately political about what I like. I know what I like is good. I know what I say is cogent and well-reasoned (if sometimes slightly scattershot in execution). I also fully expect to meet opposition in regards to the efficacy of these two assertions. That’s how it goes. I believe that there were critics who liked Gaspar Noé after his first two films. I get the impression that they have almost uniformly washed their hands of him at this point. Sure, he was asking for it. Does that make it just? Not in this case, no. I do notice, however, that I often come into contact with intelligent artists, working in all the various domains, most of them fairly young, for whom Noé’s work means a lot. (I will also mention that my sister once told me he was the worst person she ever met.) I was somewhat ambivalent about Enter the Void (2009). Ambivalent is not the right word. I greatly admired the filmmaking. This guy is an absolutely peerless visual artist. I hated, hated, hated the concept. This dunderheaded, embarrassingly literal-minded idea about reincarnation as explored in the Tibetan Book of the Dead made me blush it was so stupid. That’s some ludicrous Christopher Nolan shit (ouch!). It also struck me that some of the criticism about the way he deals with sordid things is apt. He cheapens the sordid in Enter the Void, which I don’t believe he did in Irreversible (2002). I really loved Irreversible. A woman at a party almost slit my throat because I said I love Irreversible. And Love. Love is almost completely not sordid (unless you are a total prude). Almost. There is the abrasive 3D cum shot, after all. There is the POV from inside the vagina as it is pounded. Two extremely sordid moments. Almost there because they unfortunately have to be there. I am prepared to accept them and move on. The movie was famous in its way from the word go. 3D sex. Unsimulated sex. Graphic sex. 3D porn. Let me make this extremely clear: this is an erotic movie, not a pornographic one. A lot of these tableau reminded me of Catholic paintings. If the walls of Italian churches featured hardcore sex, I can assure you it would look a lot like this movie (though there would doubtlessly be more Renaissance-appropriate clothes on the floors beside the beds). And nothing meant to excite or titillate for the mere sake of exciting or titillating could conceivably move a person, touch a person, or make a person as sad as I was made by Love. And the sex is utterly glorious. Some people have complained that the sex is unremarkable. Not enough fancy positions and stuff. Some people have claimed that you can get this stuff online. I have a pretty good working knowledge of what you can get online. You can absolutely not get anything like Love (especially as seen 3D in a movie theatre) online. And you want fancy sex calisthenics? The film is about how sex and love haunt us, and I’m a meat and potatoes guy for the most part, so I was happy that we were dealing with the exact kinds of sex I can remember myself having had. I have become something of a monk, vaguely chaste, mostly alone, remembering. Sex is primarily for me something I remember. I am coming clean. Is this making you queasy? I apologize. And romantic love primarily exists in my life as something that is abstract or theoretical except, of course, when its real-life (my real life) iterations are haunting me, driving me mad, totally threatening to upend me. I have to remember the most important thing about romantic love: when mortal beings find one another, the most fundamental underlying reality is that we are dealing in some serious fucking impermanence. We meet up with the people we love. This is the first step in letting them go. Noé is famous for making films that are unpleasant. The implication often seems to be that only a sick person could enjoy them. Right. Show me a person who is not a set of symptoms. Still, there is something deeply unpleasant about Love. Our protagonist (Karl Glusman, playing a character with the Beckett-invoking name of Murphy) is extremely unlikeable. Early on it the movie I was troubled a bit, convinced it would be easier to like Love if the main character were not so objectionable. But then it would tell us men less of the truth about ourselves. If we grieve the past embrace, if the best sex we ever had haunts us and threatens to destroy us, it is because we are selfish. And we are. We are selfish in the face of God's gifts. As for the sex (God's best gift?): I can find almost nothing profane about it. It is intimate and real for the most part. There is serenity. There is also drunk sex, sad sex, and angry sex. A litany of our personal sex experiences is always going to parallel a difficult litany of moods, instabilities, failings, yearnings, embarrassments, and feelings that are often too much to entirely feel. We spend a lot of time fucking the pain away. And when the fucking is over? I don’t know about you, but both Murphy and I have had to spend a lot of time grieving. So pretty much all of the sex in Love is remembered sex, sex from the past. The power of 3D, however, is that it brings us right into the sex in a haptic and immersive way. When we remember sex, of course, we are remembering it, whether we give into this or not, with our whole bodies. The sex scenes in Love (oh my, there are so many) bring us headlong into a past present. The 3D immersion is amniotic. We are inside an act, inside a room, inside the past, but Noé’s great gift here is to make everything exceedingly present - very here, very now. An act in a narcotic bubble, suspended there. This is why Murphy is in such grief. He can feel a living in the past from which he is endlessly jostled by the insistent intrusion of reality. He has lost his love (her name, oh boy, is Electra) who is dead or had might as well be. If you love properly you will grieve. If you grieve properly you will let go. Murphy cannot let go. Sigh. I’ve traditionally had a hell of a time of it myself.


Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Cowberry, Year Zero




God, you’re beautiful!
- Orlando the Magician

The Cowberry Filmflam zygote never went away. It has been sitting here under glass waiting for me and whichever of you out there might join me here to intervene in its development – the experiment it constitutes. Of course the blog began as an exercise to help keep my craft honed, to comment on the image culture (which I believed somebody would eventually pay me something like a living wage to do), and especially to eat up time during my first period of fledgling sobriety, when I was living in California, and did not have full-time employment. This was between 2009 and 2010, when most of the material here was synthesized in my desert lab. My last entry, some time later, was offered-up almost exactly two years ago, focused on love and the work of Philippe Garrel. Its fatalism made it perhaps an ideal endpoint. But hark! New beginnings! They seize us from time to time. I think all my future writing on cinema will in one way or another focus on love and desire. Desire is the simplest of all concepts, even if deploying it the way I must risks rendering me a vitalist, a tag from the discursive embarrassment of which Deleuze and Guattari were careful to concept-sculpt themselves free. I am not a philosopher. I have perhaps no audience. Far less, for me, is at stake. Love. Love seemed recently like the most complicated concept of all, until I realized it was not a single concept, but a category of concepts that play out. Here we find ourselves at the new beginning. Love was simple at the end of 2012. And it was a death sentence. I see love and reside in love differently in the glorious borrowed time, pure “gravy,” pace sober Raymond Carver, in which I now find myself. This is an ode to new beginnings, written at the end of the first full sober year (my first since 2010) of a life. And this new beginning has seized me. I am child of it. The confluence of forces, not a deity, I shall henceforth, as a Spinozist, refer to as God, gave all of this to me. I earned nothing. I was owed nothing. The gift I have received (the primary evidence of which was the cessation in November of 2013, inexplicable and unexpected, of the baffling compulsion to fend off the present-at-hand by drinking myself to death (or whatever-the-fuck-else it took)), was a senseless and perfect gift that has left me here with hope and faith, concepts to which I had hitherto paid only lip service. And I can now reside in a way that is effortless. This new world to which I have been granted unfettered access is opened to me by virtue of the deployment of a number of spiritual principals, all streaming out from the openings afforded by the first, which is acceptance. As a student of Nietzsche it was never going to be natural for me to arrive at acceptance. Affirmation, sure, but acceptance? It all comes down to the fact that I can still act my forces without being beholden to the necessity of favorable outcomes, and whilst affirming powerful forces which would hitherto have displeased me greatly. Respectful wonder has become the antidote to displeasure. And there is still displeasure of a sort. I believe it is time for the adults amongst us to shed the judge and begin to admit that even the things that appall us the most on the sociopolitical or psychosexual spectrums are matters of taste above all else. Every judgment is a declaration of taste and should be understood as such. This blog will continue to be a catalogue of impressions and preferences. Which brings us to this. What I am writer-hatching right now. I want to write about the cinema of 2014, as is the thing to do as the digits spins over into the new calendar calibration. Everybody does it. It is fun. (I have already made my Top Twenty Films of 2014 list available elsewhere.) The great critic Raymond Durgnat  put it perfectly: “A ten best list is so obviously an idiotic proposition that there’s no harm in playing the game.” If we are going to measure durations in relationship to cultural production, why not pick a calendar date and go by years? Who gets hurt? So this ungainly effusion of impressions is indeed going to end with brief (?) extemporization on the ten films that made this particular aesthete with his predisposed preferential peccadilloes most swoon during the year. The year. What a fucking year! I was transformed, or rather reborn, granted. But this journey was decorously amplified by a profuse offering of cinematographic glories laid out like a trail of seraphic breadcrumbs. My two favorite films, Stray Dogs and Camille Claudel 1915, are absolutely on my list of Twenty Favorite Films Since Fucking Edison. The Cowberry International Film Festival, for which I took time off from the homeless shelter where I work full time, was the best I have ever attended (four of my Top Ten screened there, and I see A LOT of movies), after last year’s worst-lineup-ever. It is amusing: this, the best CIFF I have ever attended, began less than auspiciously with a screening of the unspeakably risible shot-in-Alberta The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (by the unparalleled-in-risibility Jean-Pierre Jeunet), in two dimensions as opposed to the three for which it was intended, at the lush Jubilee Auditorium; it was preceded by a confrontational cowboy comedian who yelled at the audience for not finding him amusing, whilst trying, and repeatedly failing, to do tricks with a rope, followed by a number of monotone-fawning deer-in-the-headlights uncharismatic politicians. For times like these one can only be greatly relieved to have left ones Winchester at home, lest one find oneself in the clink in extremis. But tremendous riches were forthcoming. When I found out, weeks earlier, that I was going to get to see the Godard, I nearly wept – any misgivings about turning my will and my life over to God were finally put to rest. Clearly, after all the receipts were to be collected and parsed, this was going to be my years. Just how good a year was it? Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Winter Sleep didn’t even make my Top Twenty. Can you even begin to conceive the profusion this indicates? About Boyhood, clearly the most discussed-by-the-cognoscenti-and-basically-everyone-else movie of the year: it is a curious almost-conceptual-art beast, and perilously close to something of a missed opportunity. So much was made of its elasticity and exploration of what it is like to live in time. I found too often that it was tonally discombobulated (by virtue, doubtlessly, of its unwieldy scope, its love-comes-in-spurts production, and the fact that it was made by Richard Linklater, who generally has a pretty cavalier attitude to form and tone, admittedly often winningly), irksomely beholden to linearity (in contravention of this exploration-of-the-autonomy-of-moments the film is purported to present), and eager to hit every obvious peripheral-avenue get-it-out-of-the-way cliché of growing up messy. There are the people, however, who make it sing. Ellar Coltrane’s embodiment of a becoming in its gauntening faciality and the druggy-isolated adolescent moving-to-the-outside-as-to-the-inside ego-effloresce is obviously remarkable. But what Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are doing, or rather finding, is so much more satiating and nutritious. Seeing Dad find himself as a human being as Ethan Hawke finds himself as a one-who-embodies is one of the most edifying gifts cinema has given me this year. And it is a gift that takes twelve years to wrap. There is one other film not in my Top Ten (but in my Top Twenty) upon which I would very much like to comment: Birdman. My relationship with it is very much personal and the film has raised the ire of people I respect, causing my to feel that a few words must be expended. That Monte Hellman and Nick Pinkerton don’t like it is sufficient food for thought. But that my best friend, Paul Solomon, hates it is significant. It was he who first, in measured respect, implored me to see it, before that measured respect morphed into outright hostility. That he loves technological innovation André Bazin-style but hates ego and hates Michael Keaton (the two of them doubtlessly for similar reasons) may just explain the whole thing. I need to defend it because its particular delineation of a kind of ego-plus-ego-suffused-id-as-equals-psychosis formula speaks to me and my experience (and because no other mainstream films are deploying what can only be the conscious influence of late-period Resnais). This may be the great film about the version of myself who no longer exists. The performer, the dilettante, the exasperated and exasperating crazy person who wanted to be as big as Beyoncé and could or would brook no absence of adulation without going into apocalyptic tailspin. The holy monster. When I had my first psychotic collapse in 2008 I very much believed that the world was converging on me in celebrity exultation and that I was possessed of superpowers. I was bringing plains out of the sky with my wristwatch and bringing skyscrapers down with my mind. Camera crews and government agencies were in hot pursuit. I was, in short, Michael Keaton’s Riggan in my synecdoche Manhattan. Regrettably there were sequels. I am no longer that person. He is dead or something like it. And Birdman moves me. Greatly. The last shot, however, made me fiercely upset (as did the similar last shots of 2011’s Take Shelter, a film I despised) until I had some time to sit on it, and it too became moving. The last big question related to my experience of cinema in 2014: how can I love Henri Bergson so much but so unequivocally abhor Interstellar, the secular-humanist Left Behind, and its library of time? Worthy of exploration. You will excuse me if I refrain from exploring it. Much better to luxuriate in the ten films stacked below, in my personal library of time. (And as for libraries of time: the one shown us by James Benning was far-better-shown than the one shown us by Frederick Wiseman.)



10. La danza de la realidad 


A new Jodorowsky, in defiance of all reasonable expectations. But this! Nobody saw anything like this coming, even though it seems so obvious. I am no faddish germinal mystic, so don't go there. La danza de la realidad is the real deal, by pretty much any standard I could imagine myself imposing, although it should be noted that “good taste” is not a standard I can imagine myself imposing. If everything comes down to love and desire, then it should come as no surprise that Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky’s debut feature, holds a very special place for me in the whole history of these things being broadly encapsulated, as Fando y Lis doesn’t really have any pressing ancillary interests, subject-wise, and because it is a superlative work of art. I love the films Jodorowsky has made between Fando y Lis and La danza de la realidad, but they are admittedly pretty silly as well as being attractive to what strikes me as a kind of idiot. If Jodorowsky came to cinema with a set of devises picked up in France (from André Breton and company, from Marcel Marceau and company), with La danza he has finally tapped into the Latin American literary and cinematic traditions that are his birthright. This is, above all, a movie about publicly private history in the Latin American tradition, with its magical spells and its celebration of a small, heroic politics of resistance (often secular martyrdom). Finally there is the tenderness. So much of what was great in cinema this year was about tenderness. Here Jodorowsky is showing tenderness for his father (played by his own son, Brontis), forgiving him and living his pain (the State-Beyond-Nation was the real Father all along, and the blood-father was ultimately a brother-in-hurt), as well as tenderness for himself (the most beautiful moments finding Jodorowsky himself showing up to comfort the boy playing him as a child). I saw Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992) for the first time this year. It is no small thing that I find Jodorowsky’s to be far the greater movie. I guess La danza is a little clunky, as earnest things often are. But so, so touching. And (gasp) sweet.    


9. Les salauds


You have to be an extremely accomplished artist for something as amazing as Les salauds to come off minor, but there you have it. And Claire Denis is more than accomplished. Generally, during the years since S'en fout la mort (1990), she strikes me as having been the best thing going in cinema in terms of singular-masterpieces-unsurpassaed-by-contempraries regularity, and I am not alone. Les salauds, as many have said, seems to be her ode to film noir. In a way, yes. It certainly has the best film noir title in cinema since her Trouble Every Day, my favorite of hers and one of my favorite films ever, which was more of a Val Lewton horror movie (about love and desire, bien sûr) than it was a noir. Whatever. If Boyhood and La danza de la realidad were formally and tonally kinda all-over-the-map, Denis is, as far as I am aware, the most svelte impressionist working in any medium. Her montage is peerless. Hitchcock and Bresson territory, but her own thing. It bears repeating: peerless. Les salauds is, like so many of her films, fixated on a dialogic relationship between tenderness and cruelty (cruelty in Denis usually involving violence, extreme or not, and once again, here, troublingly, as in Trouble Every Day, violence visited to horrific effect upon the vagina). Characters in her movies often offer tenderness and cruelty in a single gesture or set of gestures (there is a love scene here between Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni that is tender, barely contained, and monstrous, like the best sex; it is one of the best scenes of coupling I have seen). The majority of the tenderness here comes, of course, from the rendering. Denis and her cinematographer Agnès Godard feather dust light and bodies (here working with digital for the first time). They are the most haptic team in cinema. They are a team. You add in the music of Stuart Staples and Tindersticks and you arrive at the holy trinity of contemporary cinema. The one thing that is new here, as far as recent Denis is concerned, is the outright frontal interrogation of patriarchy, an interrogation which is even itself tender. Denis is not totally hostile towards patriarchy. Part of its mandate, after all, is to protect wives, children, family. The object of desire, however, does not get off so lucky. There is the shame and disillusion after the orgasm. When patriarchy has been carried off into libidinous depths by chasing its passions down the rabbit hole, only to reemerge into light of day having blown its load, the stained other, as reminder of the depths, must be eradicated, renounced, made to bear the burden of responsibility. Women and black men have been those traditionally victimized by the power-politics of desire in Denis. Here it all comes down on women and Vincent Lindon. But Denis doesn’t traffic in victims. These are some strong, dignified motherfucking people!



8. Welcome to New York


If Abel Ferrara didn’t exist, cinema would have had to invent Abel Ferrara, and so it is with Welcome to New York, whose name invokes for us the city up into the gutters of which the Gods of Cinema couldn’t help but puke him. It is a true wonder that anybody so profaned by substances and general lasciviousness manages to get movies financed and then actually, bafflingly, shows up occasionally on the set to conduct proceedings. His debauched DVD commentaries are amongst the most hilarious and horrifying treasures on the market, and you may get fall-on-your-face fucked-up just from contact. But here he is. This is the guy who brought us The Blackout (1997) and New Rose Hotel (1998); one of the great, and probably the most underappreciated, back-to-back grand slams in the history of American cinema. With Welcome to New York he is firing a slightly different weapon of similar caliber. This is the more well-loved Ferrara of corrupted New York power and debauch, and he hasn’t done that particular schtick better, accompanied as he is by lumbering, ursine interloper Gérard Depardieu, no stranger himself to torment and excess. This is a movie about a long party and the concomitant fall-out. It is about late capitalism on the brink, and the orgy of consumption required to sustain (and maybe justify) it. If you don’t need sociopolitical insight in your life, however, you will be afforded plenty of opportunity in the early going to ogle the ample T&A and wonderful stuff such as men of stature licking champagne and ice-cream off doubtlessly-expensive strumpets. With Ferrara’s best films you always feel like parts are missing and that somebody at some point, drunk, left the screenplay in the back of a cab, which sometimes happens here in the final third, and which always adds to the sense of excitement, because he makes not knowing where you are or where you are going delightful. But there is some meat, here, on the narrative bone. Welcome to New York, detailing as it does Gérard Depardieu’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn stand-in Devereaux’s fall from well-accoutremented grace after he sexually assaults an unsuspecting black hotel cleaning lady during another grunting moment of grumpy sexual pique, leads to a pretty wonderful Paul Greengrass movie about Gérard Depardieu (or Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Devereaux or whatever) getting arrested in New York, and terminates in a dyspeptic Bergmanesque domestic kammerspiel (with Jacqueline Bisset as Liv Ullmann as Hillary Clinton), which is at one point interrupted by a glaringly on-point soliloquy betwixt towers of shimmering glass. This is our world. So if any of this appeals to you, and if, like myself, sickening stuff does not sicken you in the least, you will relish this gem. I was especially happy to see our beloved mayor present when the movie was projected as part of the Cowberry International Film Festival’s Headliners series! One qualifier: although Ferrara did make two movies this year, I am pretty happy I only saw one, as I am pretty sure I can handle only one.


 7. P'tit Quinquin
 

Bruno Dumont shows up here for the first of two times. He is one of our finest concocters of cinema-stuffs, and these two movies are both superior to any he has hitherto executed. Quinquin is a movie that winks at those of us who know his pre-2013-14 best, 1999’s Humanité (famously causing a horrified movie community to plotz when David Cronenberg’s jury gave it a couple awards at Cannes), and are aware of what a Dumont crime-type-movie set in the region of Northern France near Calais, from where Dumont himself hails, is supposed to devastate us like. Again we have the … “cognitively challenged” hayseed police detective (here impossibly odd non-actor actor-genius Bernard Pruvost, whose destabilizing array of ticks and haughty insouciance will have him burrowed in my mind for life, especially if he never appears, as he likely will not, in another movie), investigating (if you can call it that) horrific crimes of a serial nature (this time revolving around murdered folks apparently stuffed up the asses of cows). In this case, however, we are immediately thrust into something hilarious which is too deeply piercing, too straight-facedly reverent, to be farce … but is hilarious. It’s a comedy. A comedy miniseries for French TV. Which I can still not wrap my head around, having seen it projected in a large theater with the ol’ Scope ratio of 2.35/1. I cannot currently imagine it being watched any other way. Well, I suppose I can. I simply do not care to, as the prospect saddens me. Dumont does the grand comic set-piece, the throwaway gag, and the giggly refrain like an old pro. This is not the film of a serious-as-fuck philosopher-turned-moviemaker (Dumont is, after all, a genuine philosopher-turned-moviemaker) slumming in the land of suspect conviviality, but rather what seems on the face of it, if you were not privy to context, the grand statement of a comedy legend – a Jacques Tati, if you will, for our times. If this is a curveball, it is a curveball thrown by somebody who has been secretly studying the pitch his whole life. Quinquin is huge. It is a really big movie. Long, yes, but full. So it is like TV in that sense. But better than TV. It is a movie about something like a community-in-search-of-community. Watching it is like getting to know the ins and outs of a place and its people with all the boring stuff removed, as if all you get is the heightened sense of discovery and the growing sense of where exactly you stand in relationship to what, geographically. Quinquin himself, and his devilish army of miscreant, shit-disturbing friends, are all boys (plus one little girl, a real heartbreaker). Watching P’tit Quinquin is like being a little boy on a mischievous adventure somewhere old that shines new. You are discovering, upending, getting your coveralls good and messy. If I ever make, in some parallel reality, a movie, I now have a better idea how that might look: I want to make it big, I want to make it funny, obviously I want non-actors, and I want to make it in the communities near my deceased grandparents’ farm.   


6. Ida

 
We are now into goosebump territory. Only one of the remaining films didn’t give me goosebumps (which is the next one, Computer Chess, pretty much a pure brain-movie). Usually goosebumps involve something that hits an emotional pressure-point, is suddenly and unexpectedly profound (and profound for being profound in the way it is profound), or simply moves me with its grace. Not a lot of movies give me goosebumps just by virtue of sheer beauty. Ida gave me sheer-beauty goosebumps. I think. Sheer beauty is often, it should be noted, actually a kind of profundity. It is the image. But that is deceptive. It is not just the frame and the mise-en-scène. Lots to be said about the frame. Much has already been said. Black and white, 1.33/1 Academy Ratio, and lots of empty (?) space above the actors. Incredible, unprecedented use of the frame. And let’s not go saying that the beauty of the movie is in the montage. It is not. It is in the shot. I have gone in hopes of retroactively chasing the dragon of the high I got in the theater watching Ida by looking at stills from the movie, however, and the stills just don’t cut it. Then what is it? It is the image + movement + duration, of course. It is the splendor of the shot. Units of being-becoming. There is a kind of pure, unadulterated Lumière-school movie-pleasure available to viewers of Ida. The narrative context is important, but only so important. This is basically a movie about a young woman named Anna raised in a Polish convent after WWII who, before she can become a nun, is sent to connect with her aunt Wanda, a caustic seen-it-all one-time-Stalinworld-state-prosecutor, whilst consequently connecting with her (surprise!) Jewish roots (Holocaust!). Yup. This could have been a very awful, very typical “important” Easter European arthouse snore-fest. But just because the arguably hackneyed (and certainly loaded) subject matter might have been poorly handled does not invalidate its incorporation into the Idaverse. Because God and thus a certain kind of forgiveness are necessary, the serenity of the film is part of a powerful lesson as regards how to operate in this world, dwarfed as we are (like the characters in the frame) by the mystery and enormity of unseen God-work. Having written that last sentence, I think (or rather am certain) I love Ida even more. Not merely, it would seem, sheer beauty. Profundity! I always recognize you eventually!


5. Computer Chess

 
I could have seen Computer Chess at the 2013 Cowberry Underground Film Festival, which would have landed it at number two or three (or four?) on the 2013 Best Of list, but I was working nights back then and had to beg off. So fucking shoot me. Now I seen it. It gets to be included here because the requirements (which I have not yet specified) are this: the movie had to be made in the last year or two, basically, I had to see it this year, one way or another, and it had to play for the first time on a screen in some movie theater somewhere anytime during 2014. We need rules, lest anarchy. Computer Chess is a high-concept gambit that besieges its sedentary concept wildly from all angles with an array of crepuscular arrows. It has thousands of agents digging different tunnels out of the concept at the same time. What this movie is nominally doing is obvious. How it is about to go on doing it in the next couple minutes, or even seconds, when you are first watching, is impossible to read. What is it nominally doing? Computer Chess is a faux-documentary-until-it-isn’t-anymore about a couple groups of computer programmers facing their respective programs off against one another in a computer chess tournament. It takes place in a non-descript Anywhere U.S.A. hotel, generally in the non-descript conference room, where the tournament goes down, takes place at the beginning of the 1980s, and is shot in black and white (except when it occasionally isn’t) on the grade of analogue video that would have been available during the not-so-far-gone era it depicts. It’s a hell of a concept, but this a movie that is, thankfully, way more than pure concept, as I hope I have already made decorously clear. It is a lo-fi movie (indie rock parlance being entirely appropriate here), written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, one of the purported fathers of “mumblecore” (he also studied under Chantal Akerman!). Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002) was the first film I remember receiving the mumblecore tag. Mumblecore films were (are?) a category of films made by people in their twenties that featured lots of people in their twenties, usually unlucky in love, talking a great deal, often, apparently (or so it was purported),  not quite audibly. “Mumblecore” is a mean and stupid pejorative that I actually kinda love (but if mumbling is the quintessence of mumblecore, does that mean Themroc (1973) was mumblecore? I thought it was “post-’68”!). Funny Ha Ha was great. Shit, I was in my twenties, unlucky in love, and couldn’t shut the fuck up. Every subsequent Bujalski film leading up to Computer Chess did the exact same thing to diminishing returns, Woody Allen-style. But! Computer Chess! Somebody I read compared Computer Chess to the work of conspiracy-science berserkoid faceless-Groucho-Marx-masked guru (and maybe my hero) Thomas Pynchon. It’s apt. Because: entropy. Even when our computer toys were slow, heavy, refrigerator-sized, obdurate cocksuckers, they were a machinery of chaos, destratification, and communication-breakdown. Hence all the movies inside this premise-heavy movie. Everything in Computer Chess is spinning out of orbit into disorder, from the personal (everyone still unlucky in love) to the cosmic. Yeah, like us. Forever. Never gets old.



4. The Immigrant

 
The fact that there were three films better than The Immigrant this year is simply fucking insane! But let’s not vamp. Not everybody is going to unreservedly fawn over The Immigrant. I respect many in this world who have seen it already and emphatically do not. Is it something they are missing? Is it, as I want to believe, some sad-making cynicism they bring to the table? It is clearly the film amongst my ten that the most people have seen. It is also the film amongst them that most demands to be seen by more people, as it is unequivocally engineered for everybody who goes to good mainstream movies. Some decades ago we would have called The Immigrant a Hollywood movie. And it would have been. A big studio would have bankrolled it, everybody would have seen it, and it would have won a passel of awards. (Admittedly it would never have ended up this naked, pure, and heartshredding.) It is crazy-making to me that we live in a world in which James Gray’s latest would have to be considered an indie. Shudder. But nostalgia is for a dotage the specifics regarding the arrival of which, and whether that ever happens, is up to us. I am happy to have this thing now. Beyond that, I would suggest that if any big American movie with stars in it made this year belongs to no specific historical moment (approaches, then, a quantum universality), it is The Immigrant. It does feels vaguely, if you ask me, from the past, and not just because it is a period piece (we are swimming in those – most of them belonging, insistently, to our calcified now). The fact remains that it is completely possible that they never quite made movies for mass audiences (even if only theoretical ones) that were this amazing. On the surface it has the historical, dressed-to-the-nines operatic magnificence of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984). But opera is the key influence, not Leone. What The Immigrant offers at its heart is the stuff of Hollywood melodrama, because it is a Hollywood melodrama, as they don’t exactly make them anymore: a painful delineation of the way desire is corrupted and deformed by the social. Displaced Europeans used to make them after the war. Douglas Sirk made all the best ones that weren’t Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948). Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a bunch in Germany later, partially in tribute to Sirk, setting many of them in the past (usually not my favorite of his, mind you), and it is maybe those films with which The Immigrant has the most in common (though it surpasses any of the historical Fassbinders save Veronika Voss (1982) and, of course, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which essentially has no equivalents of any kind). The opening of The Immigrant also invokes the beginning of Kafka’s Amerika, with the shit-show arrival in New York of the hapless immigrant aboard a ship. The film welcomes us to New York in the early 1920s by showing us what its protagonist also gets to see: The Statue of Liberty, with her back turned. When Ewa Cybulska, played by the awe-inspiring Marion Cotillard, who can apparently speak Polish, later becomes part of a coterie of women paraded on stage by impresario Bruno Weiss to audience members there to chose which one they want to pay Bruno money to fuck, dressed as exotic exemplars from around the world, she is first dolled-up as a mute Lady Liberty herself, her makeup running with the tears. At first I thought that Joaquin Phoenix as Bruno was the movie’s weak spot, until it dawned on me that Bruno himself is not comfortable being himself, and is not comfortable doing what he is doing (pimps, like whores, do what they do to survive). Bruno is in actual discomfort. I now see it as Bruno, not Phoenix, failing to play the part well. Things are further complicated (to devastating effect) by Jeremy Renner’s Orlando the Magician, the brother Bruno hates, who shows up as a potential savior, but turns out to be the most awful menace in history. When I first saw the film, the moment where Orlando picks innocent Ewa out of the audience, sidles up to her and gushes into here ear “God, you’re beautiful,” I got them goosebumps good. Upon watching the movie in the same theater a second time, knowing how desire is being hijacked here, knowing that this is the apex of a kind of entrapment to which the movie pitilessly subjects Ewa, I got them goosebumps tenfold.


3. Adieu au langage

 
JLG 3D. A movie whose mere existence, then, pretty much assured its inclusion in this countdown-to-what-end? Adieu could have featured shots of a man posed on the toilet like Rodin’s The Thinker accompanied by a soundtrack of exaggerated cartoon flatulence, and still made it here … oh wait … that happens … twice. Alas. I may have previously averred that Claire Denis is our A #1 impressionist. Not exactly true. Unfortunately for her, Godard is still alive. Extremely, dauntingly alive. The last Godard film I saw on the big screen during its original run (three times in three days, if I recall correctly) was Éloge de l'amour (2001). Adieu is, for me, the best Godard since Éloge de l'amour, halfway through which he dove off into the deep end of digitality, because of its similar advancement in terms of the visual field (though this one dwarfs that one, obviously) and because of its similar return to a pretty sober-distilled entanglement with human coupling. I am pretty certain it was Colin MacCabe who first got us in to the habit of calling Godard a kind of poet. Which is true. Every artists is a kind of poet. And every poet had his brushstrokes. And every brushstroke is a living musicality. That’s impressionism for you. But Godard does use language the way a poet uses language, attempting to say things that cannot quite be said, as simply as possible. And you have to keep saying a lot of stuff, taking a lot of stabs, coming at it from all angles, to get there. Hence what Godard does with language, the thing to which he will never be done saying goodbye, even when he is done being extremely, dauntingly alive, his work still sounding and showing. As is well known at this point, everything that comes out of a character’s mouth (are their “characters” in Godard anymore?), or is delivered by voiceover, in Godard, has, over time, become entirely made up of text that has been taken from elsewhere. Academia is a lonely, drudgery-machine sometimes, and many a dedicated academe from here to eternity will spend the remainder of his or her life locked in the catacombs tracking every citation. Which might be pleasurable, occasionally (I remember how giddy my friend Clifford was when we were young and he realized mid-scene that Alpha 60 was cribbing from Borges). Why does Godard do this? He is not just a poet. He is a kind of curator-poet (or has become one, slowly). Let’s leave it at this: Godard is a profundity machine, taking in and expelling profundity at a perilously accelerated rate. That is how he comes at things. As said before, what he ends up coming at in Adieu are couples. Two couples. And a dog. Godard and his partner (they are a couple) Anne-Marie Miéville’s dog, Roxy Miéville. You show a couple struggling, as they all are (a couple is a potential solution to a problem that itself becomes a problem for which there is no solution), and then you show a dog. Something profound becomes evident. Codependency makes a couple unhealthy and unhappy. Codependency makes a dog happy (the voice-over tells us, quoting somebody, that a dog is the only creature that loves you more than it loves itself). But the film shows us something other than what it tells us. It shows the ecstasy of the dog on its own, Switzerland-style. Godard is telling us, more succinctly, if poetically, than I recall having ever been told: your happiness is up to you and God. When I told my sister that the movie was about how it’s hard to be a couple and easy to be a dog, she said something hilarious, pretending that what I had said was supposed to be Godard-style complex-profound: “so what your saying,” she pretended to try to figure out, “is that it’s hard to be two dogs?” Also important to remember: getting to see what Godard does with the simple magic of three visual dimensions and the two cameras required to achieve them is a perfectly good reason to justify having stuck it out to experience 2014.


2. Camille Claudel 1915


The second movie by Bruno Dumont included here. And love. Here it is, that category of concepts. Love, concept one: love loved before God. At the skirt of this love shall all other loves get prostrate. No other love shall prevail if this primary love falters. Not long ago when I was looking for the perfect axiom that would encapsulate the love-and-desire question, one happened to lightning-bolt me seemingly out of nowhere: desire is the transcendental, love is supplication followed by surrender. Desire is the transcendental, sure. Foucault was kind of going there, in a way that was not very useful to me, but Deleuze and Guattari were certainly going there in a way that big time was. I already addressed the trap of vitalism; the kind of viltalism that says things like: all things are merely desire coursing. Deleuze and Guattari were too sophisticated to be allowed to say anything like that. Deleuze and Guattari couldn’t find room to postulate a desire that existed before the social got enmeshed with it. I have no problem doing that. That’s my deal. I’ll go right back to Heraclitus and call his “flux” my “desire.” Aristotle told us that love makes the world go ‘round. I don’t agree. I think desire makes the world go ‘round. Desire is all coursings. Human desire is fundamentally about senses and feelings and drives and their coursings. Love is a category of concepts related to comportment surrounding human desire and the mechanics of its application (how it is directed, cultivated, sacrificed). Love of God is about how we comport our desire in relation to the whole of creation opened up before us. Supplication or surrender, or supplication followed by surrender, are about reaching out to the forces that prevail over us, essentially praying, and then finally surrendering to all of creation creating creation however it sees fit, creating us and with us as it thereby sees fit. Before Camille Claudel 1915 there were two great movies about this love, movies that were almost exclusively about this particular facet of spirituality: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) and, far more so, Robert Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962). The supplication of Joan of Arc, praying to God from a place of social imprisonment, followed by her surrender, in the form of ecstatic acceptance of God’s will despite extraordinary anguish and physical pain. Bresson’s film is, to me, vastly the superior of the two. Bresson offers sober meditation, serenity, and elegant austerity where Dryer gave us psychosexual pyrotechnics and unbridled intensity. The power of the Dreyer is almost all transposed upon the face of actress Maria Falconetti, invoking, as she does, the ecstasy of Saint Teresa as much as she does the historical Joan. Falconetti’s eyes are the epitome of God-love. Part of what is so radical about the movie, especially for 1928, is that Joan’s love of God is very much married to a kind of eruptive sexuality. The eyes are ablaze with it, her writhing subsumed by it. Dumont has found in Camille Claudel, the sculptor turned asylum inmate, his personal Joan. Like Bresson’s, Dumont’s vision is austere, measured, close to the historical record (less so, of course, than the Bresson, which pulled the dialogue from the court transcripts), and reduced to an elemental elegance. However, in the pleading, anguished eyes of Juliette Binoche, Dumont presents us with some of the cinema’s greatest images of supplication. Juliette Binoche praying in Camille Claudel 1915, an image of which is used for the poster and much of the movie’s promotional material, is of a power that is simply tectonic. Whether there is any God there at all, or a God capable of altering course by virtue of the power of a prayer, is immaterial and part of the point. Each moment Camille begs in desperation to be released from our world of social prisons, in this case the very real asylum to which she has been relegated by virtue of behavior (or mere existence as Rodin’s lover and possibly his better as an artist) disruptive to the phallogocentric self-regard of patriarchy, is ultimately a moment where a submission occurs, a surrender, the threshold of an acceptance. Supplication, then, to be followed by surrender. If the asylum = a prison = the social = our earthbound world, the film brings us to accept the world of prisons also, as must Camille. The other great love the film explicates is that demonstrated by the caretakers. The nuns who care for the mentally disabled patients (rendered, controversially, by people with real disabilities, as are the nuns their by real nurses) demonstrate another, very social love, one embodied by sacrifice and not-always-gentle rituals of care. Ultimately Camille and her trying-his-best-to-remain-pious brother Paul have to surrender to Camille’s imprisonment. The movie itself stands at the threshold of an acceptance. As soon as acceptance starts to take hold, the movie finds a zone of serenity that has been pooling … and tapers off … instead of exactly ending. Camille will never be free. We will never be free. It is okay. Nothing like a burning at the stake intervenes here as a final test. Dumont has been saying in interviews for quite some time that the cinema must take the place of religion, replicating what religion has to offer without being bound to what has died. I see how he has been trying to do that since the beginning. Hadewijch (2009) was the commencement of a new resilience in this regard. With Camille Claudel 1915 he has brought us to the church for which we have been in search.


1. Stray Dogs


With Stray Dogs, Tsai Ming-liang has given me one of the greatest gifts of my life, and it is the kind of gift I have long lived for. I have long admired him. I always look forward to seeing his work. I was not expecting him to nearly destroy my world with something almost unspeakably magnificent. If you were to ask me in the late 1990s which of the two then-very-chic main movers of the Taiwanese film renaissance would make my favorite film of 2014, between Tsai and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, I would have gambled on Hou in a heartbeat. I would have been wrong. When Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) floored me the way it did, saying goodbye to the 20th Century as beautifully as it did, that was already a pretty great gift. That is the kind of gift I live for: the surpassing by an extraordinary measure of expectations that were already highish. Goodbye, Dragon Inn aside, I was certainly not expecting Tsai to provide me with the most powerful motion picture experience I have ever had in a commercial movie theater (!). That’s a hell of a gift. I think Stray Dogs, first off, may be the movie, for me, that finally, once and for all, closes the gulf between East and West. The movie, situated in Taipei, is the first Asian film that resolutely strikes me as being about the exact world I live in, over here in Western Canada. Which is a big deal, though maybe it merely signifies that I have been blocked, deluded, projecting otherness shit on Asia, and not really paying attention. But Tsai hasn’t closed the gulf. Late capitalism, dislocation, and alienation have. Alienation is the primary agent of modernism in the arts, I guess, and is old hat. What Tsai is showing us about dislocation is right now. This is the era of dislocation. Social dislocation, ontological dislocation, spiritual dislocation. Tsai presents all of these things in a special language of formal dislocation. The movie spends a lot of time with the social before it explodes into the ontology and spirituality of dislocation. The gulf between East and West has been replaced by a tragic gulf between each of us, and ultimately between the self and itself. I think we all know this. But we haven’t quite seen it. Not so stark. Not like this. Stray Dogs is nominally a story about a father (Tsai’s go-to, Lee Kang-sheng) and his two children squatting in a gutted, abandoned building and surviving in utter indignity. There is a mural. It serves as a gnomic pictorial elsewhere. There is no ground in this world. There are nowheres, in no way linked. I don’t even feel like this movie takes place in anything it any longer makes sense to call a “city.” The squat might as well be a space station. A woman enters the picture. She is played by multiple women. I could not find my feet in Stray Dogs. I felt like I was nowhere. The humor is so without hope it makes you want to cry (but how useless, here, to cry). But is funny. There is an absurd scene of sexual displacement in which Lee devours the cabbage head of a doll with whom he miserably cavorts. It’s savage and silly and kinda exasperating. I was nowhere. Then these final two shots. Two long takes of extraordinary length, the first of which was the most powerful thing I had ever seen in a commercial movie theater until … the cut. The cut between the second last shot and the last shot. Nothing like what happened to me at that moment has ever quite happened to me. It is the most hopeless and beautiful thing maybe ever. It was very cold in the Plaza Theatre where Calgary Cinematheque projected the movie. I felt like I was in an abandoned space station nowhere, exposed to the elements. I walked to me car, sober and soaring. I have not felt so high after a movie since watching the VHS of Je vous salue, Marie (1985) on a shitty tube at my friend Ryan’s in Ottawa under the influence of psilocybin more than a decade ago. If there was any doubt before the screening that 2014 was the greatest year of my life, the doubt had been resolutely dispelled. Such it was. The greatest year. A gift. Gravy. Amo, amas, amat.

Ever,
JPW