Criticism and Context; Jia Zhangke

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Movie Mutations project is that it brought together a number of film critics of a certain generation who were geographically dispersed across multiple continents and yet shared a lot of common ground in terms of taste. The films and filmmakers they treasured and championed were often equally (if not more) dispersed in terms of nationality and culture, and yet there was often significant agreement among these critics about their worth. When I first read Movie Mutations, I remember thinking: Does lack of knowledge of context — social, historical, cultural, economic, political, artistic — pose no barriers to the appreciation of a filmmaker’s work as it travels around the world?

My own position on this is simple: Contextual knowledge is not a prerequisite for appreciating cinema, but it definitely can, whenever available, contribute to a deeper and wider understanding of both the film at hand and its place within multiple larger structures — social, historical, political, etc. In other words, I’m rarely nervous about expressing praise for a film I like, no matter its global source, simply because I lack the contextual knowledge to appreciate it fully. The fact that it appealed to me for certain reasons is enough for the moment. But there’s a part of me that continues to be curious — for new knowledge and insight, both contextual and critical, that might revise, rethink, or even just elaborate, in ways large and small, my appreciation.

Case in point: I’ve enthusiastically followed the films of Jia Zhangke for almost a dozen years now but a fascinating piece in a recent issue of New Left Review — “Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke” by Zhang Xudong — deepens my view of his films by situating them in certain revealing particularities of background. (The piece is available online for a fee.)

Zhang describes how ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were responsible for breaking Chinese cinema into the global culture market. They rejected the studio-bound socialist-realist tradition that preceded them, and instead chose to evoke a mythologized past with a visual reliance on “sweeping, dehistoricized landscapes”:

The elevated style of these films, reifying what they depicted into something ‘timeless’, seemed distant from the concrete experience of their own times, and failed to represent or recount the ongoing, epic social transformation of the country itself in the era of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms […]

Where the Fifth Generation sutured together a mythological whole—embodied by vast, empty shots of a pristine, ahistorical landscape, from Shaanxi’s loess plateau in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) to the icy mountain ranges of Tibet—the Sixth was eager to portray the shabby, formless texture of everyday life in county-level towns, where socialist underdevelopment meets the onslaught of marketization.

Specifically, Jia’s films, Zhang tells us, portray a very particular kind of place: they are set in xiancheng, or county-level cities. There are over 2400 such cities in China, but they are extremely under-represented in film and literature. Zhang writes:

To focus on xiancheng is, whether consciously or not, to zoom in on the underbelly of China’s socialist modernity and its Reform Era. Nominally part of ‘urban China’, xiancheng stands apart from the fantasy of a pristine and authentic, custom-bound rural world […] On the other hand, xiancheng is decidedly not a metropolitan area: if anything, it offers the opposite of urban sophistication, white-collar jobs and access to national cultural and political power […]

In terms of material or symbolic capital, then, xiancheng is proletarian China par excellence. In terms of urban forms and their visual representation, xiancheng is usually found to be shapeless and unattractive. […]

In other words, this is the in-between, generic area where the daily reality of contemporary China is laid bare. With no clear-cut boundaries or sharp distinctions between rural and urban, between industrial and agricultural, between high and low cultures, xiancheng becomes a meeting place for all kinds of forces and currents, whether contemporary or anachronistic.

Jia’s “hometown trilogy” (Xiaowu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures) marked the ‘discovery’ of xiancheng in Chinese cinema, Jia even referring to himself as a “cinematic migrant labourer”. After being so closely identified with this milieu, he tried to move beyond it in the setting of The World. Zhang comments:

But this setting [of The World] is in fact a xiancheng within the nation’s capital, at once a migrant labourer’s village and a xiancheng imagining of a globalized world. Indeed the ultimate irony of the film is aimed not at the Disney-style theme park, but at Beijing or even China itself: a giant xiancheng, whose concrete, contradictory realities co-exist with a virtual, mirage-like unity.

Finally, he makes this ironic observation about the reception of Jia’s work:

The idea that Jia’s films are representations of working-class life that only high-cultural audiences can understand, or that they constitute laments about urban demolition funded by the demolishers—24 City, for example, was funded by the very developers behind the project featured in the film—are ironies not lost even on Jia’s supporters.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum has long advocated for the crucial place that information occupies in film-critical writing. His book on Kiarostami, co-written with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, is a good example — as is so much of his other work — of this element of critical practice. Iranian politics, history, poetry, and cultural tradition are all summoned to the task of helping to explicate Kiarostami’s work.

Another example that comes to mind is Andrew Horton’s book on the films of Theo Angelopoulos, which attempts to draw upon centuries of Greek history and culture, Byzantine iconography and ceremony, Greek music hall traditions, and shadow puppet theatre to help sketch a broad context for the director’s art.

I’m wondering: Are there other examples of books, essays or even documentaries that perform this film-critical work of helping to provide any kind of context to better appreciate certain films or filmmakers? I’d love to hear any recommendations.

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Some recent reading:

-- A lovely joint piece by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, "Secret and Impossible," available in both Spanish and English, at Cine Transit.

-- The new issue of the journal Experimental Conversations contains a terrific essay by Fergus Daly called "Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?". David Hudson handily rounds up the issue for us. David also collects links to pieces on David Cronenberg on the occasion of his NYC retrospective. Also: Jim Emerson's 12-minute video essay, "Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg".

-- A fantasy double features piece at MUBI penned by several writers.

-- Matt Zoller Seitz's "Vertigoed: A Press Play Mashup Contest" has almost 100 participants including Catherine Grant, Jason Mittell and Kevin Lee. The contest required them to take the same Bernard Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in a memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.

-- The Village Voice lays off J. Hoberman: David Hudson has a post that collects links. Hoberman's "year in film"; and in the NYT, he talks about the Village Voice and film culture.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Bresson's Affaires Publiques. Also: Ignatiy on Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

-- Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum discuss Bresson and Godard. Also: Kent has an essay on Jean-Pierre Gorin's films on the occasion of the new Criterion/Eclipse box set.

-- With this post on Diary of a Hitman (1991), Zach Campbell launches a new series of pieces at MUBI.

-- David Bordwell on the expressive use of hands and hand gestures and why they are comparatively rare in cinema today. Also: his post "Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed".

-- This Onion story is pretty funny: "Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is".

-- The Academy sounds an alarm about the fragility of digital production media.

-- The Senses of Cinema 2011 World Poll.

-- A brilliant video montage set to Lionel Richie's "Hello". For a "key" to where the clips are drawn from, see this post.

-- At Moving Image Source: Patrick Keiller on "landscape cinema and the problem of dwelling"; and a group of essays by several critics on films in the "First Look" program at the Museum of the Moving Image.

-- Several links via Adrian: Claude Chabrol on adapting La Ceremonie; A great interview with Bob Dylan by John Elderfield; "What If": movies imagined for another time and place"; The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest; Anne Bilson in the Guardian: "Why restyle Great Women of History as cockamamie feminist role models?". Related: Laura Flanders on The Iron Lady at Truthout.

-- Ben Sachs in the Chicago Reader on Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which can be viewed online.

-- An epic essay and music mix by Trevor Link, "Pop Utopianism: A Manifesto"/"We Need to Talk About K-Pop: A Mix"; and, via Trevor, a discovery of Cinefiles, a large and valuable database.

-- Olivier Père will be curating a complete Otto Preminger retrospective at the Locarno film festival this summer.

-- At The Guardian: a piece on the birth of UK film criticism, 100 years ago.

-- At the MUBI Notebook: "The Lost Pasolini Interview"; "The Posters of Robert Bresson"; and Dan Sallitt's defense of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty.

-- Rowena Santos Aquino on filmmaker Kim Ki-duk.

-- Via the Film Doctor's blog: At Filmmaker magazine, "6 Filmmakers Talk About Documentary Films in the Digital Age"; a story on the "found-footage horror movie" at The Atlantic; an interview with Frederick Wiseman at Filmmaker; and at Observatory, "Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration".

-- At Little White Lies: Yusef Sayed on F.J. Ossang; Hong Sang-soo; and Philippe Grandrieux.

-- The current issue of the Director's Guild of America Quarterly includes pieces on Michael Mann and Leo McCarey.

-- Time magazine proclaims Godard's Histore(s) du Cinéma "the DVD of the year".

-- An interview with Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard at the Film Comment blog.

-- Completely unrelated to cinema (or is it?): I finally know the difference between dork, geek, dweeb and nerd.

pic: Jia's Still Life (2006).

Film: The Critics' Choice

It’s rare to find a coffee-table book about cinema that is truly of value to both the casual reader and the serious cinema-lover. One of them is French New Wave (1999), edited by Jean Douchet. I’ve just discovered another: Film: The Critics’ Choice (2001), edited by Geoff Andrew, with a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci (Billboard Books, 2001). It’s out of print, but used copies are going for under a dollar at Amazon.

The book has a simple, clean structure that invites browsing. There are ten sections, each written by a different critic. Each critic takes on about 15 films. Every film gets 2 pages, one of which is devoted to a mini-essay and the other to a large still photograph.

The sections include “The Silent Era” (David Bordwell); “America: The Studio Years” (David Thomson); “America: Years of Change” (Philip French); “America: The Modern Era” (Amy Taubin and Kent Jones); “Europe: The Golden Age” (Gilbert Adair); “Europe: The New Waves” (Jonathan Rosenbaum); “British Cinema” (Peter Wollen); “Europe: A New Fin de siècle”; “International Cinema” (Tony Rayns); and a final section on animation (Paul Wells).

The essays are unusually insightful, especially given that they are working within the constraints of the coffee-table book format, and some of the film choices are pleasantly startling in their unlikeliness. There’s lots to savor here, but let me limit the scope of this post by reproducing, as a tribute, some passages by the recently deceased Gilbert Adair.

Adair on Fritz Lang’s M (1931):

Here is a curiosity: The sinister prominence with which the letter “M,” one tailor-made for the branding iron, figures in Fritz Lang’s filmography. His best known, although far from finest, film was Metropolis (1927), whose heroine’s name was Maria. His most celebrated creation, the protagonist of two silents and one late sound feature, was the verminously arachnoid mastermind Dr. Mabuse. Three of his most memorable Hollywood productions were Man Hunt (1941), Ministry of Fear (1944), and, long the favorite of cultishly minded Langians, Moonfleet (1955). (A whimsical case can even be made that the title of another work from the American period, The Woman in the Window, 1944, contained two inverted Ms.) Lang himself made a moving valedictory appearance in 1963 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.

On Julia Solntseva and her 1970 film The Enchanted Desna:

Solntseva was the widow of Alexander Dovzhenko, a great filmmaker and a matchless celebrant of the Soviet Eden, whose loyal helpmate she had been throughout his life. When he died in 1956, she proceeded to film, one after the other, his handful of unrealized scripts almost as if they had been bequeathed to her, as if she were executing his deathbed request; and when there were no more left to film, she simply downed tools and retired.

If ever a film were a poem, it is The Enchanted Desna. A pantheistically phosphorescent hymn to nature as equally to the gleaming tractors and plows which were destined to transform it (and a personal favorite, intriguingly, of Jean-Luc Godard), it must be, at just 81 minutes, the briefest of cinematic works to ever have been shot in the 70mm wide-screen process [...] The visual motifs that we have to come to associate with Dovzhenko's cinema--the skies so low-hung we feel the characters will have to hunker down on all fours to crawl beneath them, the cornfields waving goodbye in unison (Dovzhenko himself once said that his was "a cinema of farewells")--are just as present in The Enchanted Desna.

On Manoel de Oliveira's first feature, Aniki-Bobó (1942):

...whose mystifying title is a Portuguese variant on "eeny-meeny-meiny-mo," it is a film about, and to some degree for, children. Set in Oporto, the director's native city, its slight plot centres upon the rivalry--for the affection of the local stunner--of a pair of matching mop-haired tots, one of whom, a blond cherub who might have stepped down from a Tiepolo altarpiece, is unjustly accused of having shoved the other onto a railroad track. [...]

What makes Aniki-Bobó unique, though, is its blatant theatricality, a word scarcely ever used to describe children's films. As witness the endearingly actorish performances which Oliveira coaxes from his diminutive performers, his film is unequivocally a melodrama. And even if its loose and deceptively artless shooting style (it was filmed wholly on location) seems to anticipate the revolutionary strategies of neorealism, the result is less reminiscent of De Sica's work, say, than of Pagnol's Marseillais trilogy, Marius, Fanny and Cesar (1931, 1932, 1936), by virtue of both the dockside setting and the tiny if nevertheless eternal triangle so solemnly, so touchingly played out before it. Like Pagnol's own films, what Aniki-Bobó offers is a persuasive illustration and defense of cinema as open-air theater.

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Any suggestions of good coffee-table books on cinema--books that might contain something of interest for both the casual film buff and the more serious film-lover or film critic? I'd love to hear them.

I know that publishers such as Taschen and Phaidon have produced a number of cinema books in this format, although I know only a few of them. I recently picked up a couple of volumes in Phaidon's recently released budget series--on Hitchcock and Kubrick (both by Bill Krohn) and Lynch (by Theirry Jousse)--and they look interesting and insightful.

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Some links:

-- Sight & Sound has made available a great little trove of Gilbert Adair's writings online. David Hudson's post at MUBI collects a number of pieces on Adair.

-- Adrian has a tribute to Adair at Filmkrant. And here's a wonderful text that is a critical 'duet': Adrian and Cristina Álvarez López's two-part, dual-language essay on Philippe Garrel at Cine Transit.

-- At Moving Image Source, critics, writers and artists share their highlights of 2011: part one; and part two.

-- As usual, plenty of recently posted, wonderfully engaging reading at Jonathan Rosenbaum's place on subjects as diverse as middlebrow cinema, Errol Morris, Iranian politics, black cinema, and Samuel Fuller.

-- Polls for best films of the year: Indiewire's round-up; and Film Comment's best released films and best unreleased films of the year. Also: Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten of the year; Andréa Picard's choices for best experimental films of the year; and Reverse Shot's best films of the year. Finally: Michael Z. Newman's "Faves, 2011."

-- The new issue of Cineaste has several web-exclusive pieces but is particularly worth picking up for a fascinating symposium (not online) on "the prospects of political cinema today" featuring such figures as John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, John Sayles, Pere Portabella and John Hughes.

-- A new DVD release that seems to have slipped under the radar: Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, available for the first time with English subtitles. The translation is by Deleuze scholar Charles Stivale. (via Jason LaRiviere)

-- A wonderful close analysis of the prologue to Melancholia by Manohla Dargis.

-- The new issue of Senses of Cinema includes articles by Jacques Rivette and Murray Pomerance, and a roundup of the Toronto film festival by Darren Hughes. Also: the new issue of La Furia Umana is just out; it includes this Luc Moullet piece on Eric Rohmer in conjunction with MUBI.

-- Film Studies for Free's "Favorite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011".

-- The new issue of Film-Philosophy includes essays by Steven Shaviro and Rowena Santos Aquino, and a review of a recent collection of writings by Alain Badiou on cinema.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky puts up a post collecting 22 capsule reviews he wrote this year for the Chicago film weekly Cine-File.

-- Ben Sachs, at Chicago Reader, on his best films of the year.

-- At Moving Image Source: Chris Fujiwara on "The contradictions of Cuba in the work of Nicolás Guillén Landrián"; Bilge Ebiri on the use of language in Malick's The New World; and an excerpt from Jordan's Mintzer's recent book on James Gray in which Gray is interviewed about The Yards.

-- Charlie Kaufman's next project is ... a musical about online film criticism??

-- At Artforum: Tony Pipolo on Robert Bresson; and on Jean-Marie Straub.

-- Links to several recent articles by film scholar David Rodowick (srcoll down). Also via his page: the archives for Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

-- "Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell," at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A restoration and revival of the films of French comedian Pierre Étaix.

-- Zach Campbell on some "recent commercial cinema." Also: Zach is now on Twitter.

-- Kent Jones on the documentaries of Vittorio de Seta.

-- Gilberto Perez on Alexander Dovzhenko in Film Quarterly.

-- The Anthology Film Archives just concluded the fascinating retrospective "Anarchism on Film" curated by Cineaste editor Richard Porton.

-- B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo's complete "Vertigo Variations".

-- Jonathan Romney on the recent DVD releases of films by Miklos Jansco.

-- In The Guardian: "Friedrich Kittler and the rise of the machine."

-- Via Adrian: Writings on Indian cinema at Projectorhead magazine and Silhouette.

-- The new issue of the journal World Picture.

-- At eFilmCritic: "2011 Whores of the Year."

-- At The Nation: "The Making of the 99%" by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich.

Links to Recent Reading

-- RIP, Ken Russell. Any personal favorites by this filmmaker? I've seen just a small fraction of his work.

-- Joan's Digest, a new feminist film quarterly edited by Miriam Bale. Also: Bale interviews Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method at Moving Image Source.

-- At MUBI, translated by Ted Fendt: "Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet."

-- At Cine-Tourist, a collection of framegrabs of about 20 hand-drawn maps from films.

-- Image-posts: "The Striped Shirt in Cinema" (Cynthia Lugo) and "The Scarves of Grey Gardens" (Srikanth Srinivasan).

-- At Occupied Territories, Trevor Link's Tumblr page: "Depression, Melancholia and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure"; and a conversation about Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea.

-- How I wish I could catch this Edward Yang retrospective currently playing in NYC: David Hudson gathers links to pieces on Yang's films.

-- (via Andrew Klevan) Yakuza Graveyard is an interesting image-filled Tumblr page featuring posts such as this collection of images of teapots in Ozu's films.

-- The Film Quarterly site is featuring several web-exclusive pieces.

-- via Catherine Grant, a video: "The Cinema According to Luc" [Moullet]. Also: Catherine posts links to sample chapters from over 50 new Palgrave Macmillan/BFI film books.

-- At Serge Daney in English: some postcards Daney sent to actor Melvil Popuad.

-- At Press Play: "Pictures of Loss," a personal series of pieces by Peter Tonguette on grief and mourning in film.

-- An article on gender inequality in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera.

-- This new book by Jordan Mintzer, Conversations with James Gray, looks wonderful.

-- Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman discuss Melancholia and J. Edgar.

-- An interesting re-take on Francois Truffaut by Richard Combs in the new Film Comment.

-- David Phelps on "The silent cinema of [UC Davis] Chancellor Katehi's slow walk of shame".

-- Olive Films is releasing a number of classic Hollywood titles on DVD in 2012.

-- "The End of an Era Arrives as Digital Technology Displaces 35mm Film in Cinema Projection"

-- Great news: BFI is putting out a 4-DVD box of Ozu's silent "student comedies".

-- I notice that Straub-Huillet's Moses and Aaron is being released on DVD by New Yorker Video in a couple of weeks. Is New Yorker back in business? If so, great news.

Cinephile Business: Streaming, Lists

Thanks to Jaime Christley — who has just fired up a new blog called thefilmsaurus — I recently discovered Hulu Plus. It’s been common knowledge for a while that Hulu features hundreds of Criterion titles that you can stream to your TV. But I’ve also learned that:

(1) Several terrific films not yet put out by Criterion on DVD are available for streaming there, for example: Bitter Rice, Remorques, a half-dozen Naruse films, Welles’ The Immortal Story, etc.

(2) Even better: a large number of titles are streaming in HD.

A quick scan reveals that Japanese cinema is particularly abundant. There are a dozen films by Mizoguchi (most on HD) including The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, The Life of Oharu, Utamaro and his Five Women, and The 47 Ronin; 17 by Ozu (more than half on HD); 9 by Oshima (nearly all on HD); and over a dozen by Naruse. Suzuki, Imamura, Shimizu and Teshigahara are also represented. And Kurosawa is the most generously available of all, with around 25 titles.

All of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” are on HD, as are three great Bressons (Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette, A Man Escaped), ditto Buñuel (Simon of the Desert, The Exterminating Angel, Viridiana) and Ophuls (Le Plaisir, La Ronde, Lola Montes).

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Of late, I’ve been confining new DVD purchases to non-region-1 titles. Recent acquisitions in that department include: A Man Vanishes (Imamura, 1967), Before the Revolution (Bertolucci, 1964), Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008), Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes, 2008), Deep End (Skolimowski, 1970), The Hunter (Pitts, 2010), On Tour (Amalric, 2010), The Banishment (Zviagintsev, 2007), Red Psalm (Jansco, 1972), I for India (Suri, 2005), Up the Junction (Collinson, 1968), De bruit et de fureur (Brisseau, 1988), and vol. 1 of the new Humphrey Jennings collection.

I won't be traveling to and from India this winter, so I'm hoping to have time on my hands to make my way through most of these over the holidays.

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In Tim Palmer’s recent and interesting book Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, there is an appendix devoted to a list, prepared by the great French film critic Alain Bergala, of “The 156 Films You Must Have Seen.” It was created as a guide for entering students of the French film school La Fémis. Each filmmaker (with just a couple of exceptions) is represented by only one work.

Bergala writes that these are neither “best” films nor his favorite films; instead he believes them to be the most productive for a contemporary beginner. As with all lists, he reminds us that it is highly contingent and unstable, a starting point for debate and multiplication.

I’m linking to the list at Google Books; the last page of the list is missing, so I’m recording below the films on that absent page:

André Téchiné Wild Reeds (1994)
Jacques Tourneur Cat People (1942)
François Truffaut Stolen Kisses (Baisers Volés, 1968)
Tsui Hark Once upon a Time in China (1991)
Johan van der Keuken De Platte Jungle (1978)
Agnès Varda Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1984)
Paul Vecchiali Drugstore Romance (Corps à coeur, 1979)
Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
King Vidor Duel in the Sun (1946)
Jean Vigo L'Atalante (1934)
Luchino Visconti The Leopard (1963)
Raoul Walsh High Sierra (1941)
Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Wim Wenders Kings of the Road (1976)
Billy Wilder Kiss Me Stupid (1964)
William Wyler The Children's Hour (1962)
Valerio Zurlini Family Portrait (1962)

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Your thoughts on streaming films or on Alain Bergala's list above? I'd love to hear them.

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A few links:

-- There's one film and filmmaker on Bergala's list that I'd never heard of: Paul Vecchiali's Drugstore Romance (Corps à coeur, 1979). I notice a Vecchiali box set on sale at Amazon France but alas, without subtitles.

-- Two interviews with Chantal Akerman on her new film Almayer's Folly: by Darren Hughes at MUBI; and Michael Guillen at Fandor.

-- At Catherine Grant's place: A recently updated list of open access film e-books.

-- Caboose has a new project called "Planetary Projection" in which film projectionists around the world are invited to describe their work.

-- (via Cinetrix) Sergey Levchin's account at Senses of Cinema, "I Was a Captive Audience at the 57th Flaherty Seminar."

-- At his blog Journey by Frame, Trevor Link has been running a series of posts on Joe Swanberg's movies.

-- Cynthia Lugo on color and Derek Jarman's book Chroma.

-- James Benning's Landscape Suicide and American Dreams (lost and found) are now on DVD thanks to the Edition Filmmuseum.

-- I just learned that J. Hoberman and Yvette Biro have their own websites.

pic: Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

A few impressions from Toronto

Here are notes on a handful of films from Toronto. If you have any thoughts on these films or filmmakers, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

THAT SUMMER (Un été brûlant) (Philippe Garrel, France). Ten minutes in, and I find this film, like other Garrel, deeply, unaccountably moving. It’s not the characters, their desires and dilemmas — it’s too early to know what they are just yet. It’s what always gets me about Garrel: his “regard,” his own special deep and intent way of looking. His look is concentrated, still, un-ironic, Romantic, full-hearted. The ordinary, everyday reality of human beings — their faces, movements, gestures, or even just each person’s special immobility — is not just captured but inexplicably and miraculously heightened by this special, Garrelian look. He monumentalizes with his look the most obvious things we take for granted in real life — but he does so without hyperbolizing them. In this film, he focuses on a small number of characters who are lovers and friends, but each time he introduces a new character or when a new person enters the frame, my heartbeat instinctively quickens as if an entirely new and fascinating ‘landscape’ had just come into view. This is how acutely he is able to sharpen the viewer’s attentions — surely some kind of perceptual feat.

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium). The Greek verb “kineo,” to set in motion, is often claimed to be the root of the word “cinema.” I responded to this film with a primal force because it’s about ceaseless movement. Running, pedaling, chasing, being chased, climbing, falling, ducking, darting, hurrying: the film is a virtual catalogue of these (and other) dramatically urgent forms of movement. There’s a great moment when the kid shows off his prowess on his bike by stopping it and balancing himself to a point of complete stillness for an instant. It’s a quietly humorous moment — an apotheosis — because it tells us that movement is the natural state; it is stillness that must be achieved with the special application of skill.

CRAZY HORSE (Frederick Wiseman, USA). Wiseman’s documentary on the famous Paris strip-tease club left me ambivalent. I loved all the behind-the-scenes stuff: long meetings about creative decisions and club management; bits of rehearsals; auditions; interviews with employees; and the minute-to-minute technical problem-solving in preparation for the shows. Some of the most telling moments expose the “branding anxiety” of the nightclub: it no longer wants to be seen as catering to “Japanese tourists” and wants respect, admiration, and prestige for its “refined art”. It’s great to witness this middlebrow quandary hover over the conversations and decision-making. What disappointed me were the long, repetitive, and relatively unreflective presentations of the dance numbers themselves. There’s a devastating moment in a backstage meeting when the director of the show proposes a restructuring of the stage management staff in order to specialize them, to highlight and take advantage of the special uniqueness of each employee. In the same breath he points out how different the stagehands (almost all men) are from the girls in the show, “les filles,” who are all interchangeable. The critique couldn’t be clearer — but by lavishing long and fascinated attention on the numbers, the film doesn’t further this critique in any way, and in fact only ends up endorsing and failing to question this gendered division of labor. It strikes me as a confused film: clear-eyed and critical in its backstage documentation; and wide-eyed about the abstract, formalist qualities of the strip-tease performances themselves.

HOUSE OF TOLERANCE (L'Apollonide) (Bertrand Bonello, France). This drama about the last days of a French brothel at the turn of the 20th century provides a corrective to some of my issues with the Wiseman film. The prostitutes are imaginatively individuated but — and here’s the film’s true radicality — this individuation is not performed through character development or psychology. In fact, despite spending a full two hours with them, we hardly get any sense of their “inner lives,” their psychological motivations, or their backstories. Instead, these women register as pure presence, as bodies and faces shot frequently in close-up, without the illusionistic need to outfit them with “rich” characterological detail. Some of my favorite scenes in the film are anthropological in nature: the group ritual of the trip to the gynecologist’s office to be examined for disease; and the initiation of a newcomer into the daily regimen — what time the women retire, when they awake, what duties they perform, what protocol must be honored with their clients, and so on.

AZHAGARSAMY’S HORSE (Sureendran, India). Here’s an interesting phenomenon: a festival film is almost always a film of some ambition, a film that in some way seeks a certain regard from the audience. Even the horror or exploitation works that show at TIFF aspire to some level of “art” — or at least to some level of special-ness or cult-ness. In the midst of such films, the Tamil rural comedy Azhagarsamy’s Horse is a “termite” surprise: it’s rude, crude, sentimental, vulgar, broad, joyous — and, I believe, completely unaspirational. Now, I’m not claiming this is a great film — but it’s qualitatively different from most of the films that surround it at the festival, and thus a blast of fresh air. The film also contained the most memorable and shocking image of the festival: the closeup of the rear end of a horse as it squeezes out a large, cylindrical “pooh stick,” which is then immediately caught mid-air by a village charlatan, stirred up with water, and sprinkled on the faithful believers in the village square as an all-promising healing elixir from the gods. Wow! A savagely satirical moment that is played not preciously or with any self-congratulation but casually, unfussily, in passing.

* * *

A few links:

-- A wonderful collection of tributes to Raul Ruiz at The Notebook, by Luc Moullet, James Quandt, Catherine Grant, Joe McElhaney, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Gonzalo Maza, and others.

-- Miguel Marías on 120 essential films of the 1920s. At Miradas de Cine.

-- David Cairns at Shadowplay on Mark Cousins' The Story of Film, a new 15-episode TV series.

-- Thom Andersen in the new Cinema Scope: "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay".

-- Dave Kehr and Dennis Lim on the latest DVD box set from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938.

-- The indefatigable Catherine Grant helpfully collects links to Maya Deren studies; and to work on sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

-- The latest issue of La Furia Umana includes a round-table on the "post-cinematic" with Steven Shaviro, Therese Grisham, Nicholas Rombes and Julie Leyda; an essay by Joe McElhaney on Terrence Malick; and much more.

-- Adam Nayman's terrific piece in Reverse Shot enriches my appreciation and makes me realize that I may have underrated Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.

pic: Azhagarsamy's Horse.

TIFF 2011: The Round-Up

Best-of-Fest:

This is not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, Iran)

Three Big Personal Favorites:

The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
Dreileben ("Three Lives" -- three feature films, by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler; Germany)
That Summer (Philippe Garrel, France)

Strong Films:

Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia)
House of Tolerance ("L'Apollonide") (Bertrand Bonello, France)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, USA)
The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA)

Solid, Fascinating:

Life without Principle (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina)
Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
Invasion (Hugo Santiago, Argentina, 1969)

Good But With Reservations:

Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)

Most Fun:

Azhagarsamy's Horse (Suseendran, India)

Not Good At All:

Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, Poland/France)

I Regret Not Being Able To Schedule:

Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, France)
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, USA)
Edwin Parker (Tacita Dean, UK)
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Love, France)

* * *

I would hazard a guess that most cinephiles who are not students or scholars of film generally tend to be either suspicious of "film theory" or indifferent to it. But to be a serious film-lover, I would contend, is also to be interested, consciously or unconsciously, in however "non-academic" or intuitive a manner, in certain basic questions of film theory.

Nearly all of the writing thus far on This is not a Film has concentrated on its political context and production circumstances — already legend — and the courageous gesture the film represents. This is entirely appropriate, but the film also holds enormous potential for future analysis by film critics as a work of meta-cinema that asks fundamental questions like: What is the difference between a screenplay and a film? (Once upon a time, in the nouvelle vague era, an answer to this question was simply: “mise en scène.”) Is the “director” of a film always a single, unified, human person? In a film, can the role of the director “move around,” in non-human form, attaching at one moment to the unexpected gesture or movement of a nonprofessional actor, at another moment to a striking setting or piece of decor that takes over a shot or scene and “rules” it?

Panahi and the film take up such questions, sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly. In a wonderful pedagogical move, he plays excerpts from DVDs of three previous films (The Mirror, Crimson Gold, and The Circle) to show us supporting evidence for his arguments. This is not a Film also stands as part of the wonderful tradition in Iranian cinema that is relentlessly curious about the relationship between fiction and documentary. The film ostensibly unfolds on a single day but was apparently shot over four days. Look carefully for the time stamp on the bottom right corner of Panahi’s television screen: it offers clues to the discontinuity of shooting and the degree of constructedness of this film.

Lest I might have unintentionally given the impression that it is a dry and ‘academic’ treatise, let me quickly add that this is a very funny, surprising, and deeply moving film — but no less philosophical because of these virtues.

* * *

Dreileben is a collection of three feature films made for German TV, and was shown at the festival in one continuous screening with a brief ten-minute break. It’s a fascinating experiment born of an epistolary exchange between three filmmakers — Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Dominik Graf, the former two being affiliated with the “Berlin School” — that lasted two years and was published in the German film magazine Revolver. The topics of conversation included film aesthetics, film genre, and issues of national identity. The correspondence is downloadable on pdf as part of the “press book” for the film here.

The three films share a single plot event: a murderer in custody is brought to a hospital to visit his dying foster mother, and uses the opportunity to escape. They weave separate stories around this event, often at its peripheries, occasionally moving to its center.

The Petzold film, Beats Being Dead, employs a mise en scène that is so absurdly clean that it strikes me as humorous. The film has a detached and sardonic tone, and it’s impossible not to read its protagonist — a privileged white kid who dates an emotionally volatile Bosnian working-class girl — in a critical fashion. The film’s surprise ending was decried by some as “cheap” — but it makes eminent sense by the time the final film of the collection (One Minute of Darkness by Hochhäusler) winds its way to the (same) ending. The climactic event registers first as generic move, then as social inevitability. The endings of the two films together ask the questions: Are murderers born, or are they made? Does violence always already exist in society? To what extent is it a consequence of processes set in motion by society and the State?

The Hochhäusler film (to my mind the strongest of the three) finds an equivalence between a cop losing his hearing and a hypersensitive, mentally disturbed murderer. This is a film about heightened, concentrated sense perceptions that puts the characters — and us — in a strange and uncanny awareness of the surrounding natural world. The crack of a twig, the chaotic swarm of an anthill, the crawl of a colored bug on a leaf, the smear of an animal’s blood on a man’s face — all of these register with uncomfortable vividness, their impact enhanced by the electronic soundtrack of hums, whirs and whines that is forever reminding us of the hearing loss of the protagonist. A strongly sensuous film.

The third feature of the collection — Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around — is the odd one out that fits loosely into this triptych, which is why I have little to say about it. Perhaps its virtues will become more apparent when I revisit the films: I notice they’re already on DVD in Germany.

* * *

Coming soon: capsule impressions of the other TIFF films.

Thoughts or questions or ideas on any of the festival films? Please feel free to share them here.

* * *

A few links:

-- Adrian Martin on The Tree of Life at the FIPRESCI site. Also: Adrian is the organizer of the "World Cinema Now" conference in Melbourne; it kicks off next week.

-- Catherine Grant posts some wonderful videos of V.F. Perkins speaking.

-- The dauntingly prolific Michael Sicinski's coverage of TIFF at: Cargo; his site The Academic Hack; and at MUBI. (He was also part of the exhaustive and invaluable Cinema Scope dispatches from the festival.)

-- David Hudson has an 80th birthday post for Jean-Claude Carrière. Also: David has launched a new feature at The Notebook called Daily Briefing.

-- Michael Z. Newman has a post about the process of collaborating with Elana Levine to write their new book Legitimating Television.

-- Mark Fisher on "The Privatisation of Stress" at New Left Project.

-- Arena Supplement on the films of Jean Rollin.

TIFF 2011

The TIFF lottery gods were uncommonly kind to me this year: I got nearly all my picks for the film festival. Here's what I'm seeing:

Dreileben ("Three Lives" -- three feature films, by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler; Germany)
Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France)
The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
This is not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia)
That Summer (Philippe Garrel, France)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki, Finland)
The Cardboard Village (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, USA)
Life without Principle (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello, France)
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA)
Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, Poland/France)
Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
Azhagarasamy's Horse (Suseendran, India)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
The Student (Santiago Mitre, Argentina)
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina)
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, Australia)

Films I wanted to see but was unable to schedule: The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK); Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, USA); Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, USA); We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK); Invasion (Hugo Santiago, Argentina, 1969); Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, Philppines); Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey); Faust (Alexander Sokurov, Russia); Low Life (Nicolas Klotz/Elizaeth Perceval); and Mushrooms (Vimukta Jayasundara, Sri Lanka). And my Wavelengths (avant-garde) schedule is still uncertain.

Here is a link to all the programmes at the festival. Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

A few links:

-- For the next couple of weeks, during TIFF, Cinema Scope Online will be putting up new pieces each day.

-- Catherine Grant's post at Filmanalytical presents, with explanatory text, her latest video essay: on "the haptic" in film.

-- Good news: Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again has just been picked up for distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted his essay on the film. Also at Jonathan's: an essay on Raymond Durgnat on the occasion of the launch of a new website devoted to Durgnat's writings. Right now there are links to a small number of pieces, and I hope the site will accumulate many more as time goes by. Finally: an interview with Jonathan by Michael Guillen titled "Positioning Cinephilia" in the journal Film International (not, alas, available to read online).

-- Jim Emerson helpfully (as always) gathers together the various strands of the recent "chaos cinema" debate.

-- Interested in browsing an eclectic set of links-filled posts? Visit Cinetrix.

-- Ignatiy V. on Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai's Don't Go Breaking My Heart.

-- Steven Shaviro: "What is the Post-Cinematic?"

-- (via Chris Fujiwara) A brief interview with Frederick Wiseman, "Finding a sharper focus on reality through literary criticism."

-- German cinema: I finally caught up with Maren Ade's Everyone Else, surely among cinema's great microscopic examinations of a relationship. The three-feature Dreileben is the film I'm most looking forward to at Toronto; here is a 2007 interview with one of its directors, Christoph Hochhäusler, who also helps run the film blog Revolver. Michael Sicinski's appetizing review of The City Below is here; I hope the film gets distributed in the US. I can't wait to see it.

pic: Dreileben - One Minute of Darkness.

"A Ghost at Noon" by Adrian Martin

Raúl Ruiz died this week. Adrian Martin has written a personal, moving and illuminating tribute to him -- a 2,500-word piece that I'm posting below. Please also see Catherine Grant's large post of links on Ruiz's work at Film Studies for Free. Your thoughts on Ruiz's films -- and your favorites among his work? Please feel free to share them in the comments. -- Girish.

* * *

A GHOST AT NOON

"I try to remember that disparity exists. And that is a good way to remember death. Then death becomes something completely other than accommodating or resigning oneself to dying, something other than melancholia. On the contrary, it becomes a ‘working tool’."
- Raúl Ruiz, 1987

In the magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon (2011) – which is not, in fact, Raúl Ruiz’s final film (he subsequently shot La noche de enfrente in Chile), even if it is, happily, one of his most internationally successful – there is a scene in which the mysterious priest of the saga (superbly played by Adriano Luz) enters a private room in which we see, neatly arranged, the traces of all his other, previous identities. They are more than just disguises or costumes; they are his other selves. Ruiz’s camera makes a slow, elegant pan around this small, confined space of intrigue, coming to rest on the diminutive Father Dinis, simply reflecting, absorbing all these signs of the labyrinthine fiction of suffering and woe to which he has been a party, both player and puppet. It’s the kind of moment that – as in every great film – you don’t necessarily really see or take in on a first viewing, or even fifth viewing; but it’s there, waiting for you to catch up with it at last.

Another of the best Ruiz films, in my devoted opinion, is Three Lives and Only One Death (1996). It is among the many he made that reflect (in so many allegorical and metaphorical ways) on mortality. The movie seems to mark a somber limit: after living so many parallel lives, so many second chances, so many imaginary identities – each one spinning out its own world or universe – the main character (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers, as we discover, that the proliferating game comes to halt with the full stop of the mortal sentence: there is only one death and, beyond that, nothing (I believe Ruiz remained an atheist his entire life). But, in the immediate wake of the announcement of the director’s own passing at the age of 70, someone on Facebook turned this title around in a pleasing, triumphant way: one death, but so many lives.

And Ruiz did indeed lead so many lives, progressively as well as simultaneously. An astonishingly prolific artist who was unafraid to grab any production opportunity, no matter how small (“Give me ten thousand dollars or ten million dollars”, he once joked, “nothing in-between”), his career went through many phases. Although some commentators (including passionate supporters) tended to reduce every one of his works to the same ‘Ruizian’ wash of zany angles, coloured filters and narrative illogicalities – how he must have grown weary of that appellation, as Welles grew tired of Wellesian or Antonioni of Antonioniesque! – there are important differences, in scale, medium, strategy and level of achievement, between his very diverse productions. (He also disliked, by the way, the inevitable Frenchification of his Chilean first name into ‘Raoul’ – something I wish the New York Times and many French commentators had gotten up to speed with by now.)

I won’t attempt a synoptic sweep of his full career here – that will require a hefty book or three. Some highpoints that come immediately to mind, however: the first films made in Chile, 1960-1973, full of treasures unknown to many of us, such as No One Said Anything (1971) and Socialist Realism (1973) – what a blast, three years ago, to see in Valdivia the discovered and restored (by Ruiz himself, with a mouth-music sound accompaniment) inaugural short, La Maleta (The Suitcase, 1963). The wayward-lurching Los Tres Tristes Tigres (1968), a hyper-realist bourgeois drama already way out the other side of Cassavetes, Dogme and Mumblecore combined – arch-surrealist Ado Kyrou knew the spark of genius straight away when he saw that one, just as Serge Daney would, four or five years later, when Raúl and his wife, director-editor Valeria Sarmiento, had hastily relocated in France in exile from the dire political situation in Chile.

This begins the period via which most of us encountered Ruiz in the English-speaking world, usually belatedly: from Suspended Vocation (1977) and Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) through to The Roof of the Whale (1981) and City of Pirates (1983) – an extraordinary run of dazzling, neo-baroque explosions, many emanating from the B movie-type conditions of television commission. Ruiz took his working-method inspiration on these projects from Edgar Ulmer or Buñuel in Mexico; the speed and improvisational gifts he evolved there meant, many years later, that he could sustain the elaborate mise en scène of Mysteries of Lisbon over an entire six episodes – something the HBO/Canal+ crowd cannot quite do.

Some of Ruiz’s champions tend to stall around here, fixating on these works and the apotheosis of their wild techniques in Treasure Island (1985) or Life is a Dream (1986). But Ruiz, far from exhausted, had a long way to go yet. The Blind Owl (1987), an adaptation of a classic Iranian modernist novel by Sadegh Hedayat, is among the summits of his career, as is the too-little-seen series Manoel on the Island of Marvels (1985), which crept out, unannounced but subtitled, at midnights on Australian television in the ‘90s. Dark at Noon (1992) looked like a turn into the ‘genre mainstream’ (horror-mystery), but when that didn’t pan out, Ruiz – as always – continued on with his low- or no-budget works, and essayistic videos like Mirror of Tunisia (1993) in collaboration with Abdelwahab Meddeb.

The long-nurtured partnership with Portuguese producer/entrepreneur Paulo Branco led to another kind of upswing in the mid ‘90s, with glamorous stars inside the labyrinthine plots of Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and, later, That Day (2003). The film that really made the difference for Ruiz, film-industry wise, in the 21st Century was Time Regained (1999) – and whoever first had the crazy idea to get him to helm this classic of French literature must be eternally thanked. This gave Ruiz the ability to keep lavish, high-profile projects (the ten million dollar ones), like the underrated Klimt (2006), going.

The works kept flowing forth, on all levels – the English language productions (genre turf, again) of Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010), as well as the advanced hermetics of free experiments such as Love Torn in Dream (2000) with its multiple, arithmetically arranged, interconnecting plots across different historical times and spaces, or the heady Lost Domain (2005), or La maison Nucingen (2008). He worked in gallery installation and in theatre, a real multimedia guy, giving rise to pure experiments with actors and language like Agathopedia (2008) – every kind of actor loved Ruiz – and the tribute-in-process Responso: Homage to Huub Bals (2004), which had a special poignancy for its Rotterdam audience.

Ruiz was so often ahead of the curve: we hear a lot about mind-games and puzzle-films these days, as if Christopher Nolan is doing something new and innovative, but the real mind-games were laid out by Ruiz in Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982), The Comedy of Innocence (2001) and Three Lives and Only One Death. And then – once more obscured in the West – the return to Chile as both its Prodigal Son and Revered Master (national pride over him is more than palpable there): starting with the TV Dante (1992) and going right through Días de campo (2004) and two elaborate TV series (La recta provincia [2007] and Litoral [2008]), ending with the yet-unseen La noche de enfrente – and, in between, the groundbreaking long-form ‘digital essay’, between documentary and fiction, of the Chilean Rhapsody (2002-3), a marvel of exploration and inquisition.

Like every filmmaker, Ruiz always had many projects. He seemed to work on the principle once well described by Joseph Losey: have five films on the go, and you’ll get to make the sixth. And, because Ruiz wrote assiduously most days of his young-adult and adult life, deft writing without much need for redrafting, these were not mere sketches; he had a well-developed script in his drawer for most of them. But he almost never expressed regret for this or that unmade baby; as he once proclaimed, “it’s stupid to make only one at a time: you have to create a dozen or twenty in one” – so traces of phantom projects managed to find their way into every crevice, every opportunity.

Ruiz was a gifted teacher of filmmaking; several of his features, including The Golden Boat (1990) and Vertigo of the Blank Page (2003) emerged from ultra-low-budget classroom exercises. He always believed, pedagogically, in the rigorous union of doing and reflecting, in serene, morning/afternoon alternation; theory and practice were never split apart for him, although he would always add that, in his own work, he was able to carry out only a fraction of the experiments he conceived. Experimentation was, indeed, his watchword: in the last years of his life at University of Aberdeen in Scotland, he speculated about the possibility of marrying cinema theory with neuroscience via experiments on the brain and its strange force-field ‘aura’; this followed on from his interests in all things mathematical and scientific. He was a mind-bogglingly well-read person (while scoffing at the academic pedantry of precise bibliographic citation – he once tossed me a rare manuscript by someone who had crossed his path, saying: “If I need to refer to it, well, I know you’ve got it”) – and only Valeria could have the faintest clue, now, of all the rare and obscure texts he acquired (he was an avid antique book collector) and pored over in his lifetime.

The importance of Ruiz as a theorist of film has, I believe, been criminally underrated and overlooked. In many essays throughout his life (such as those given to Positif), in the brilliant Poetics of Cinema book series for Dis Voir (alas, now unfinished), and especially in his manifesto-like “The Six Functions of the Shot”, Ruiz probed, with infinite care and patience, the mysteries and possibilities of every linkage and liaison in cinema: cuts, camera movements, sounds, gestures, shadows, narrative and non-narrative events … And no less important, on this level, were his more obviously creative pieces (film, play and radio scripts, novels, the ‘notes for actors’ that he provided on all his later projects, and the literally hundreds of in-depth interviews he gave in many languages): Ruiz never ceased elaborating, teasing out, refining and extending his often extraordinary (and only seemingly whimsical) ideas. His life was one continuous ‘thought experiment’, as the logicians say.

I feel honoured and privileged to have known Raúl a little, between his visit to Australia in 1993 and his death. He was a marvellous, generous, endlessly hospitable guy (as all who ever visited his home in Belleville will testify), and his lifelong relationship with Valeria was something wondrous to behold. His mischievous sense of fun and laughter, once you had his trust, was truly infectious. Hanging out with him was always a delight, and brought unexpected revelations at every turn in the road, or in the conversation: from his sudden confession to me that “the great secret to good filmmaking is this: you must always cook for your cast and crew!”, to the reluctant admission that the reason he doesn’t figure much in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books (and he absolutely should) is that he and the philosopher once got into a raging fistfight after a hot intellectual disagreement.

A rarity among filmmakers, Raúl actually liked critics, and encouraged their creative drive (as with Benoît Peeters and Pascal Bonitzer) – although he was also sensitive to their capacity for fickleness, and easily hurt when he felt he had been unceremoniously ‘dumped’ by them (“dumped for Kiarostami!”, he once privately opined). Partly because of this, he developed, at least from the ‘80s on, a droll sense of cultural fashion: “Every five years, I am embraced for being a player of games”, he drily told me, “and then, for the next five years, I am castigated as being unserious and irrelevant. Then we start over again”. Ruiz knew how to bide his time, ride the waves, and stick to what mattered to him: serious playfulness, playful seriousness. Nobody in cinema worked that dialectic better than him.

But if I had to pick one anecdote (among so many) that best characterised the warmth and genuinely democratic, open spirit of Raúl, it would be from his International Rotterdam Film Festival retrospective of 2004, when I was standing next to him in a crowded foyer. Suddenly, he spotted and waved to a distant guy; they approached each other, warmly embraced, briefly chatted and parted ways in the throng. Who was he (I asked), an actor, a producer from one of his films? No: “He projected my films here in Rotterdam twenty years ago”. For Raúl, a good projectionist was just as important, just as valuable as anyone who contributed to his work, no less than a Malkovich or a Deneuve, a Jorge Arriagada (composer) or a Sacha Vierney (cinematographer). What a memory he had – and what a profoundly ethical sense, right where it most matters, in everyday life, and in the lived history of that everyday.

I first met Raúl when he was 52 years old – which is the age I am about to reach now. (I am instantly reminded of the beautiful sentence in Poetics of Cinema to the effect that his “astonishment” at Hollywood’s bizarre rules of storytelling “is as young today as I was then” when he first encountered them in a scriptwriting manual of the 1950s.) At that time, he was starting to feel an anxiety that I can only fully relate to at this point: a sense that his life’s work had been scattered, much of it lost, and out of his control or reach. He was looking for someone who could be both an archivist and a booking agent for his work in all media. There was a desperation in his voice and his eyes when he spoke about this – and that was an uncharacteristic symptom coming from this always elegant, controlled, outwardly modest man (“chaste”, he would say with a smile).

Mercifully, the coming history of technology turned to his assistance: on DVD – which I believe Raúl came to regard as his archive – so many works, unseen for decades, have come back: The Territory (1981), Point de fuite (1984), key shorts … and with a brisk trade in less legal restorations downloadable on-line. There remains so much more to cover and explore in Ruiz’s œuvre; most accounts barely scrape the tip of the iceberg.

In the whole time I knew him, and also frequently in his writings, Raúl would return to a peculiarly Chilean experience that fascinated him, the phenomenon of the ‘noonday ghost’. He would retell this typical, iterative tale with the utmost conviction and sincerity: walking in a Chilean street, he would see an old friend from 40 years ago. They would speak of banalities: the traffic light not working, the rising price of milk, the hole in the nearby bridge. Then they would saunter apart – with Raúl realising, some minutes later, that his friend had been dead for some long time already. This is the noonday ghost, Raúl explained: nothing like the Gothic ghost of shadows who avenges wrongs, returns the repressed or haunts the living with a malign force. The noonday ghost looks just like you or me, in the bright daylight, and is just as boring. This ghost is a figure for the other key dialectic in Ruiz’s cinema: the interplay of mystery and ministry, as he described it – sublime things that inevitably become dead ordinary, and ordinary things that become suddenly, strangely sublime.

I hope to bump into Raúl Ruiz, ghost at noon, someday in the street, or in a crowded cinema foyer. He will once again be walking calmly, hands clasped behind his back. And he will be saying, as he so often did, and will again: “Dying is no big thing”.

© Adrian Martin, 20 August 2011

LOLA

Adrian Martin and I are excited to announce the launch of our new Internet film journal LOLA.

We've worked steadily on the journal for the last several months. We owe enormous thanks to our webmaster, the filmmaker Bill Mousoulis, for his invaluable help; and to all the authors who were so wonderfully generous and patient during the entire process.

Here is the table of contents for the debut issue; the theme of the issue is "Histories."

Let me provide links below to the fifteen pieces in the issue, along with a brief excerpt from each:

-- Joe McElhaney, "Contemporary Cinema?": "I was born in 1957, the year Charles Chaplin made A King in New York. Chaplin was 68, allowing A King in New York to be seen as the film of not only ‘a free man’ (as Roberto Rossellini famously put it) but an old one […] [M]y relationship to contemporary cinema can be dominated by a passion for aging filmmakers, the older the better: Rohmer (deceased, but just barely), Resnais, Rivette. And who older (and perhaps better) than Oliveira?"

-- William D. Routt, "Innuendo 1.5": "Lubitsch’s offensive characters - named Moritz or Sally or Meyer - were not unlike the characters performed by some rappers today. They were composed of all the stereotypical traits that made Germans, even German Jews, uneasy. Sally Pinkus and his kind were in-your-face Jews, a combination of shmendrik and schlemihl [...]: lecherous, stupid, greedy, vulgar, sneaky, cunning, ill-mannered, klutzy, flamboyant. In Lubitsch’s films these awful characters triumphed: they got the girls and the money - just what anti-Semites, then and now, are afraid of. That was the joke."

-- Andrew Klevan, "Expressing the In-Between": [On the character played by Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby] "Susan’s fluidity and flexibility of movement shows a capacity for indefinite behaviour, an elegant erasing of boundaries (erected by stiffer bodies and stuffy institutions). The mythical forest is ideal, but she turns everywhere into an in-between place, where a lack of conventional determinations and destinations arouse indeterminacy. Maybe this is because, as she repeatedly tells us, she was born, not on the top, nor at the foot, but on the ‘side of a hill’."

-- Luc Moullet, "Ah Yes! Griffith was a Marxist!": "The film is also the first masterpiece of militant cinema. Eisenstein dreamed of adapting Capital, but Griffith had already done it twenty years before with this film. While we often think of the Southern conservative of The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith is here, paradoxically, very close to Karl Marx."

-- Richard Porton, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism: Anarchist Realism and Critical Quandaries": "Makavejev’s playful, allusive film, an apt case study for testing the capabilities of a robustly contextualist criticism, cries out for what, following Clifford Geertz, social scientists (as well as a recent generation of literary critics) refer to as ‘thick description’. For resourceful critics, WR is also the perfect vehicle for flights of essayistic fancy. Raymond Durgnat, a famously digressive critic himself, compared Makavejev’s magnum opus to an ‘adventure playground’."

-- Shigehiko Hasumi, "Fiction and the 'Unrepresentable': All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film": "Stated briefly, my hypothesis is that the medium of film has not yet truly incorporated sound as an essential component of its composition. This statement applies generally to all types of film, whether produced for entertainment or for artistic ends, irrespective of the form in which they have been consumed throughout the history of the medium stretching back over one hundred years. Another way of expressing this hypothesis is to say that the so-called talkie is in fact no more than a variant of the silent film."

-- Sylvia Lawson, "Out of the Mid-Century: History, Memory and Cinema": "Watching cinema, we’re always watching history. It could be the history of the present, or else history as it was unfolding in the time of the film’s production. If it’s a period-piece, the history isn’t so much in what’s illustrated as in the way of looking at the story. Those genteel costume dramas produced by the renascent Australian industry in the ‘70s had nothing to do with (for example) girls’ boarding schools in 1900. The history they tell us is the history of ideas about what a national cinema should be doing. There was an aspiration in there, a straining toward European art-cinema, and a lot of cultural anxiety."

-- Stephen Goddard, "'So, Did You See Me?': Testimony, Memory and Re-Making Film History": "In 1997, my mother engaged in a process of remembering, narrating and reconsidering her histories when her video testimony was recorded by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. […] Some families are able to gather around a family photo album, to hear the stories that surround the images of parents and relatives in earlier times. My parents did not have any photographs from their days before war. My mother’s prisoner number clothing tag is the earliest remaining image representing her identity. As an antidote to the lost images of her formative days, and as a way of representing the events that were never recorded, the stories and anecdotes from her Shoah testimonial have now become the soundtrack to a lost ‘home movie’."

-- Darren Tofts, "In My Time of Dying: The Premature Death of a Film Classic": "What do we conclude from the jaundiced history of The Song Remains the Same? It is clear that, rather than some hideous chimera that should never have been made, the film and the story of its making is, in fact, archetypal filmmaking. The history of cinema is the history of overcoming circumstance. From a cybernetic point of view, the final film that is eventually screened is not a successful culmination of shooting, editing and post-production schedule. It is a measure of the degree to which entropy or error has been avoided or at the very least minimised during the entire production process."

-- Adrian Martin, "Dinosaurs, Babies and the Sound of Music": "It is important to remember this in the discussion of cinema: we must follow the music. Because, of all the arts, music – no matter how deeply rooted it is in the history and tradition of its country of origin – is the most stateless, the most nomadic and migratory. Wherever it lands, it takes root: becoming an intimate part of one’s experience, one’s history. Music’s destiny is always to be appropriated, but not in the sophisticated, knowing, tortuous way the visual arts, at least since the ‘60s, have violently appropriated images, wrenching them from their context and brazenly advertising the thematics of that displacement. Music simply carries..."

-- Justine Grace, "The Streets: Breaking out of the Black Box/White Cube in Rotterdam": "For Carels, a guiding principle in compiling the XL programme was the relationship between a work of art, or film, and its site; the idea that locations outside the traditional exhibition space of the white cube/black box could provide an illuminating exhibition framework that enhanced the meaning of the work and the experience of the viewer."

-- Nicole Brenez, "F.J. Ossang: The Grand Insurrectionary Style": "Instead of showing the chase or the race, Ossang films the world that produces such velocity, plunging into the substance of colours and the experience of sensations. Whatever the story may be, it springs from a love of words: not so much the dialogue but the formulation, the insert, the slogan, the point – giving rise to the monumental handwriting that so characterises his work. But, most of all, Ossang’s cinema involves bringing back epic gestures to popular visual culture, tearing things apart until they become inconceivably beautiful."

-- James Guida, "Stuck in the Mud: The Visions of Lucrecia Martel": "Martel’s characters flit in and out of harm’s shadow as a matter of course. The interest is not in danger as shock value, but in its regular promise and proximity, in the sights and sounds that surround its unfolding."

-- David Phelps, "Think But This ... 36 vues du Pic St-Loup": "Rivette, like Louis Feuillade, frames spaces as stages, even outside: the movie exists only within the world its characters have created. Characters enter the frame as they would enter a doorway on-stage to join a scene; if they are not in frame, they are ghosts, with no relevance to the scene at all except as ghosts, and when the audience is not seen in the rehearsal/performances, it may as well not exist."

-- Elena Gorfinkel, "At the End of Cinema, This Thing Called Film": "Light cannot contain film, but spills out, through film and beyond it. If film spilling entails loss – the nightmare of film preservationists’ Sisyphean struggle against the ravages of time on an unfathomable body of unknown films – light spilling invokes an expanded arena of diffusion and admixture..."

I should also mention that Adrian's been very busy: he also guest-edited the new issue of Screening The Past.

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I'm curious to know from readers (if they wish): Are there certain topic areas within cinema that you think might be in particular need of critical/scholarly exploration for future essays or issues? In other words, I'm wondering: Are there specific topics on which you might particularly be interested to read critical/scholarly writing about cinema? Thank you!