Rosenbaum's prejudice in Bergman obituary

Bergman aside (we'll get to that later), Jonathan Rosenbaum's contrarian reaction to this filmmaker's legacy (article in NYT, August 4th) only demonstrates a selective memory, dishonest arguments, double standard principles and the poorest clichés on art cinema.

"Almost every statement in this rather shallow article could be challenged on the ground of irrelevance, biased vision,unfairness, questionable reasoning or sometimes even plain silliness. I am surprised that this comes from a critic of J. R.'s stature"
Jean-Pierre Coursodon (on a_film_by)

Let's just do that (for those who only skimmed through the article) :

1. Deception #1 : "Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages." (Anecdotale Fallacy)
   
   Sure, from a filmography of 62 films, only few made it to DVD yet, but that's more than most auteurs have (including Bresson or Dreyer with a smaller filmography, respectively 14 and 23). Who are we kidding?
   He corrects on a_film_by : "I agree that many Bergman films are out on DVD, even though it's obviously a much smaller fraction of the whole work than one finds with Dreyer and Bresson."
   Only 34 of his films are available on DVD at FNAC !
   _
2. Deception #2 : "His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson" (Unrepresentative Sample Fallacy)
   
   Does Jonathan Rosenbaum (JR) assume the American distribution market alone defines the worldwide relevance of an auteur? I considered JR as the less insular of American critics until now.
   _
3. Manipulation #1 : DVD availability and Academic syllabus (hic et nunc) are the absolute reference to measure the long term relevance of an artist in film history. (Appeal to Authority Fallacy)
   
   JR usually protests the contrary when defending his overlooked champions (Burnett, Tashlin, Tarr, Ivens in his book Essential Cinema). Not to mention the entire history of film criticism proven wrong time and again after a misguided disdain (La Règle du Jeu, Lola Montes, Welles, Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Nick Ray, Ozu, Kurosawa) or premature appraisal (Duvivier, Autan-Lara, Delannoy, Clément, Wyler, Stevens, Zinnemann...). Of course JR didn't forget that, so why even trying to push THAT argument to demonstrate anything about an auteur's stature?
   I can't comment on the presence of Bergman in Academia, especially not in the USA, but I doubt it's true worldwide, and there are probably other possible, practical explanations than a fall in disgrace. Persona, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers are often cited by film scholars and published in referencial books.
   Even if it was true, we could only regret that one filmmaker is forgotten. The idea to rejoice about certain films being left out of film studies is a sad thought, and a shame for the diversity of cinema culture as a whole. Why would an ecclectic critic like Rosenbaum use this argument to establish a false "common wisdom"?
   _
4. Simplification #1 : "Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard" (Unfair comparison)
   
   What JR disputes is that Bergman is "an uncontestable major figure in cinema" and he uses (greater) major figures to diminish his stature in comparison. But *if* he's inferior to these names (which is itself a whole aesthetical debate and certainly not a given), it doesn't mean that he's not part of these major figures. I can think of many mediocre films by these 3 masters that don't mesure up to Bergman's consistant oeuvre. Why even oppose masters against eachothers as if the unique quality of one excluded the other unique quality of the other.
   _
5. Manipulation #2 : "two master filmmakers [Dreyer and Bresson] widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday"
   
   Bergman has always had a "boring" label attached to his cinema, though maybe not by the same public. But JR uses references of various reliability, eras and demographics (DVD industry, obituaries, film buffs or Google) to assert Bergman's reputation, then he equates that directly to the critical pan of a specific time and place for Dreyer and Bresson as if there was a valid correlation to find in such a nebulous comparison.
   Fame v. Critical appreciation (= equivalency?) .
   We can clearly read between the lines that JR's actual grudge is not Bergman (whom he kindly aknowledges some talent), but the circumstances that have given Bergman the celebrity his favorites (Bresson and Dreyer) deserved. Well, Bergman is not responsible for the blindness and favoristism of critics at large and the audience throughout ages, no more than he should feel guilty about the decent fame his films earned (within the Art Film league, which is definitely smaller than the Mainstream league!).
   _
6. Truism #1 : Obituaries are unanimously respectful, admirative and complacent.
   
   An obituary is a boring job, you remind people who the person was and what achievements of theirs are left in History. Have the "socially aware adults" lost any sense of respect for someone's funeral memory? Bergman's thunder had to be shared with Antonioni already!
   It's not an opportunity to spit on someone's grave, for curtesy sake! Bergman only made 1 film in the last 10 years. JR believes mourning has lasted long enough (5 days) to begin right away with the free bashing. If the biased adoration had lasted months after his death, I could understand JR's impatience to balance with a dissenting view. Sure, every proclaimed master can and should be scrutinized and desacralized, no question about that, but each thing in its own time.
   It's not like if JR had only this one time soapbox-opportunity to seize, in order to restore the truth... he's got a weekly column for himself in the Chicago Reader (among other platforms). [EDIT: Rosenbaum corrected this assumption of mine on his blog]
   _
7. Manipulation #3 : "If you Google 'Ingmar Bergman' and 'great,' you get almost six million hits." (Appeal to Popularity Fallacy)
   
   Now JR gets his audience poll from an internet search engine, with a laughable query! (it doesn't even mean that the adjective "great" on these pages is associated to Bergman, or that these pages shine a positive light on him. One could think of "great failure/disappointment" for example...) How come someone could publish THAT in the New York Times???
   If you like silly populist statistics, here's IMDb top250 The Seventh Seal makes #81 (18,700 votes!) and Wild Strawberries #158 (10,460 votes), Dreyer (film with most votes : 6,600 votes) and Bresson (film with most votes : 2,000 votes) are nowhere to be found. What does it prove about their respective popularity among IMDb voters?
   _
8. Simplification #2 : Bergman circa 50ies reduced to superficial clichés only the shameless populist reviewers would dare to mention : sexiness, nudity, beautiful actresses. (Caricature)
   _
9. Manipulation #4 : Blaming Bergman for his imitator (Woody Allen) and his incidental/local fan base crowd (which is assumed unworthy). (Guilt by Association Fallacy).
   _
10. Deception # 3 : "Mr. Bergman’s star has faded" (Begging the Question Fallacy)
    
    Evidences produced were false or deceiving so how is that conclusive? It's not because you say it or wish it that it's a reality. Here are some surveys showing that not everybody has forgotten about Bergman yet... (I'm not suggesting these consensual/local/timely polls represent a solid foundation to determine someone's universal pertinence but apparently they contradict JR's sense of reality)
    - The 13th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)
    - Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
    - The Top 100 Directors #7 (They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? December 2006) 11 films ranked in the top1000 (for comparison : Dreyer #13, 5 films in top1000 / Bresson #16, 9 films in top1000)

There is an ongoing debate around the article at a_film_by where Jonathan Rosenbaum responds to certain accusations.

Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity also debunks some of JR's fallacies.

Jonathan Lapper at Cinema Styles does the same breaking down job to uncover the fallacies.

And Girish shares his reservations too.

There are probably many things to denote about Bergman's stylistic (arguable) achievements and content (arguable) value, but serious critics shouldn't have to resort to fallacies and other smoke screens to put a critical point across in the hope to confuse and persuade an ignorant readership. This is low standard criticism in my opinion (for whatever it's worth).

Next we'll look into the critical accusations...

Blind spots in film history

"It's been four years since this prophetic and poetic masterwork was made, and it's just arriving in Chicago. But I wonder if we're ready for it even now. For starters, what do we know about Joris Ivens? Although he's generally considered to be one of only a handful of great documentary filmmakers, history and politics have conspired to make most of his work unavailable and unknown in this country. I suppose some would argue that this was partly his fault -- because he had the bad taste to become a communist filmmaker and to work for much of his life in communist countries as opposed to the "free world". Unfortunately, the freedoms granted in our "free world" haven't yet included the opportunity to see most of Iven's work. He's made more than sixty films, including antifascist work, work supporting Indonesian independence (which led to the withdrawal of his Dutch passport), and work in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Prévert, Gérard Philipe, Lewis Milestone, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda (the last five worked with him on the 1967 sketch film Far From Vietnam). He died during the early summer of 1989, just before most of the communist world in the West collapsed.

A Word of advice to film artists who want to get ahead : don't move around too much. Film history often gets subsumed under national film history, so filmmakers who keep moving risk getting lost. And stay out of politics, since getting into them invariably puts you on either the winning side or the losing side. If you're on the losing side, many national film histories will write you out entirely; if you're on the winning side, chances are your film will date faster than last week's newspaper."

(About Joris Iven's A Tale of the Wind) Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, May 29, 1992. Also in Essential Cinema : On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004)

Deauville 2007 - Asian cinema festival

Deauville 2007 - Asian cinema festival
March 28 - April 1st 2007 official website

• Homage to Park Chan Wook (South Korea) 9 films - the "asian Gus Van Sant"
• Homage to James Lee (Malaysia) 5 films - almost the "asian Bresson", young promising chinese talent based in Malaysia.
• 3 documentaries on sports in North Korea, by Daniel GORDON (the only filmmaker allowed to export cinema outside N. Korea)

03-31-2007 : Michel Ciment on France Culture (REAL audio, French, online for a week)
Guests :
- Bruno Barde (Artistic director of the Deauville festival)
- Jean-Pierre Dionnet (Video editor for popular asian movies, who introduced Kitano, Miyazaki, Johnny To, Kim Ki-duk to the West)
- Pierre Rissient (critic, filmmaker, festival curator, discovered Eric Khoo, Lino Brocka, King Hu, and helped Lester James Peries, HHH, Edward Yang, Hong Sang-soo)

Here are my notes, rough transcript of the conversation (if you're interested in following the talk in French with the audio file)

• P. Rissient : in 1975 he restored for the Cannes Festival the director's cut of King HU's Touch of Zen (1973), which was a commercial and critical bomb. Brings Lino Brocka's Insiang (1976) in Cannes in 1978.
  Showed a film by LEE Han-sang to WANG Bing (West of Tracks) who said it was the most mandarin film he saw.
  James LEE (Things We Do When We Fall In Love) is part of a chinese trend of young cinema in Kuala-Lumpur, Malaysia, with HO Yuhang (Sanctuary) or TAN Chui Mui (Love Conquers All).
• J-P Dionnet : lots young Hong Kong filmmakers look now towards mainland China, a market opening to violent movies. Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam return from Hollywood to work in China. Hideo Nakata says he lost 5 years of his life in Hollywood. Friedkins said, upon watching Nakata's film, he's a master of fear, it's more frieghtening than The Exorcist, which used more grandilocant ways.
• J-P Dionnet : Odd inspiration of the new asian generation from the popular european cinema, maybe unacademic. Mamoru Oshii's favorite film is Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels (1961). PARK Chan-wook projected Chabrol's Le Boucher (1970) during shooting of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002). John WOO's slow-mo were inspired by Lelouch's Un Homme et Une Femme (1966), and the idea of trio protagonists is from Robert Enrico.
• P. Rissient : SHIN Sang-ok's lost film, Arch of Chastity, (restored for Cannes Classic 2007).
• B. Barde : Festival jury members, especially in France, aren't enthused by asian cinema in general, and need to be convinced, seduced more. While asian cinema is the most inventive today, succeeding in festivals around the world.
  Only 38 asian films officialy distributed in theatres in 2006 (5 % on a total 700 films distributed in France) = 1% of total audience.
• M. Ciment says French filmmakers are attracted by Asia. Benoit Jacquot filmed in India, Olivier Assayas in Hong Kong.
• J-P. Dionnet : cultural barrier between the West and Asia. We don't understand the mix of genres, the rhythm. Pang's Re-Cycle (at Cannes 2006) about the culture of abortion in China (for a male heir desired by families) dealt with the memory of these forgotten "lost" babies, while the West misinterpretated it as a pro-life film. The asian culture has its own aesthetical referents so should be explained to western audience.
• M. Ciment : The first and only asian film awarded a Palme D'Or in Cannes was Farewell My Concubine (1993). While Venice awarded Rashomon in 1951, and continues to celebrate asian cinema. French and European audience for asian films is not as wide as it should.
• P. Rissient : HHH (only popular success is City of Sadness because of the Golden Lion) and Tsai Ming-liang have a very small audience at home in Taiwan. Jia Zhang-ke only begins to be projected in China with a small audience. Auteurist cinema in Korea beguins to struggle (Hong Sang-soo, Im Song-soo, Im Kwon-taek). Im Kwon-taek's Seopyeonje sold 1 milion admissions in 1992 (record breaking before the new soar of Korean market). Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy in 2000 (700,000). Bong Joon-ho's The Host in 2006 (15 milion, record to date). Then Park Chan-wok I'm a Cyborg, but that's ok in 2007 makes 700,000 and is considered a bomb because his previous films made 3 or 4 milion admissions, because of a new culture of blockbuster in Korea. Korean auteurs struggle because actors refuse to work with non-bankable directors.
• J-P Dionnet : Kitano was despised in Japan until he received a Golden Lion in Venice, and could then make a career at home. Miike went from direct-to-video to theatre distribution thanks to his European fame. Kyioshi Kurosawa's films have more success in Europe than in Japan. The auteurist asian cinema in Japan, Taiwan or Korea is essentially supported by its European success.
• P. Rissient : Korean producers irrealistically want to mimic Hollywood big budget debauchery. Actors are overpaid.
• B. Barde : Dangerous economical inflation in Asian cinema. Kurosawa's last films were supported by USA or France production (Anatole Dauman, Serge Silberman). Asian distributors ask for excessive fees just because the film was selected in a major international festival in Europe. The major French distributors who know the market prices make a pass. The big films end up with small distributors that postpone distribution for years because they don't have the budget to market them appropriately. While the internet-savvy fans know very well how old is the movie. Fans can't maintain the original excitation so long. Fans wants the fresh movies.
• P. Rissient : international distributors for asian exports ignore the reality of the market prices and hold back releases because of high prices. Like for Hong Sang-soo's Woman on The Beach, still not distributed in France, despite the friendly support of Marin Karmitz (who distributed his last 3 films with success) who proposed to buy the film before its production, an offer too small was turned down. [Which explains why I still haven't seen this film, while usually Hong's film were released every year after Cannes] His new film will be in Cannes this year and will compete in theatres with the previous one. Hong Sang-soo is like Rohmer, needs a release with 2 years apart to let the audience wants for more.
• J-P Dionnet : Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), and the japanese new wave was supported by European funds. There should be a better cooperation between Asia and Europe or USA if it wasn't about absurd market prices and regulations/quotas, treaties, institutional disagreement to define the nationality of the production of a film. Korea wanted to sell Samsung and Hyundai to the USA, thus agreed to drop the cinema quotas (that protected national films).
• P. Rissient : KOFIC subsidies ($400,000), unchanged, didn't go up with the market boom so is not a significant help for production anymore.

DIGEST : Mars 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

Digital filmotheque of Alexandria

"Digitizing film ashes"

Following the recent debate around a universal cinema digital database started by 3 articles in the New York Times (March 18 2007) :

• Manohla Dargis : The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient)
• A. O . Scott : The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse
• Noah Robischon : Little Films on Little Screens (but Both Seem Set to Grow)

Later put into perspective with a reality check and some ethical questions :

• Dave Kehr
• Kristin Thompson : The Celestial Multiplex (thorough analysis)

"A screen is a screen is a screen" (Dargis)

From the consumer's POV, maybe, but from a critic I'd expect a little more subtlety in comparing a Kinetoscope, a theatre and an iPod...The miniaturization of the image causes obvious aesthetic issues that we can't just ignore because everybody else doesn't mind. If the audience only cares for stories, whatever size they come in, critics at least should defend the inherent properties of a projected image and the fine details on a panoramic screen.
I prefer to hear critics complain about how the frame composition of a widescreen movie was optimized to fit the 4/3 TV ratio. Do we want the film grammar to become iPod-complient with adjusted colors and extreme close ups to compensate the end-size loss?

There are 3 ways to look at the situation. The consumer, the producer and the historian perspectives. Each have their own desirs and limitations. They aren't quite compatible.

1. The average consumer wants access to fashionable movies, here and now, and doesn't care about copyright infringement or the way of living of its makers, cost of the digital-transfer, scarcity of the print, perenity of the source, authenticity of the version (director's cut, censorship, bootleg, betrayal of translation), profitability of the transaction. The consumer is not stubborn, if the download is not accessible it's easier to click on another title that could be seen now. There is too much choice, too little time and the unicity of films doesn't stand out to them. Movies are interchangeable commodities.
   Not everyone in the world wants to see every films ever made, even if they are available and free!
   
2. The producer (in a broad sense, including director, copyright holders and distributors, everyone with financial interest) follows the natural law of the market : demand and supply. Popularity makes profitability. They want to reach the masses, the mainstream taste and sell a product to the wider population even if it means adapting non-offensive material, P.C. cuts. They want to invest in what can pay back, and prefer to shelf an item that becomes too costly to maintain available to the public. They don't have a long term historical perspective, but the terms of their bank loans. Perennity of "out-dated" (non-marketable) sources is not their priority.
   
3. The historian (archive, scholars, festivals, critics, filmmakers, cinephiles) doesn't care about availabilty to the public, or profitability of any given title, but unlike everyone else, they care about the survival of films, undiscriminatively. And if we let films decay and get lost we'll never have a universal cinemathèque...

The priority here is not universal access to a miniaturized digital version of every movies, because that's not even what consumers ask for. Kristin Thompson explains very well how this utopia is not only unpractical, but also unreachable.
The priority is to save original prints! It's no time for arguments... film stocks' lives are limited and original colors fade away quickly.

Oddly enough Dargis and Scott both embrace the consumer perspective, in a blissful and naive technological utopia, without considering films that will never be digitzed. Instead of complaining about the poor distribution of foreign and older films on american theatre screens (ruled by Hollywood hegemony : 95% of projections!), critics in the New York Times apparently prefer to speculate on whatever might become available on iPods... as if it was a society column about new behaviors rather than their take on the fate of cinema.
Kristin Thompson checks the feasability of the operation assuming the Producer's perspective.

I'd like to ignore consumerism and capitalism for a moment, and recall the invaluable mission of Henri Langlois.
The idea of a Cinémathèque, that seems natural today, was born in total illegality. Thanksfully Langlois identified the only rightful priority before it was too late. Regardless for copyrights, legitimacy, maintenance or restoration costs, he went for the urgency and saved, stole, bribed, deceived, exchanged, bought on the black market everything he could. Many key treasures of cinema history would be unknown and forgotten for ever had he respected the rules and waited for funds or a commercial viability. The reason I mention Langlois is because the digital stage of film history brings up the same problems he once faced.
Clearly the idea of a universal cinematheque shall not be put in the hands of the market or copy right holders. Public availability is minor issue. I don't care if I can't watch all films I want, here and now, as long as I know the masters are all in a safe place and that they will make film prints or digital versions become accessible one day, to me or my children and their children.
The history of cinema is over 100 years old and it's about time its preservation should be taken into consideration on a global scale, as a worldwide heritage! We lost too many originals already.
Just like architectural sites meaningful to humanity are protected worldwide by international laws (UNESCO), we need an international consensus and uniformization of regulations, control and formats to ensure, facilitate and optimize the preservation of a maximum of films across the globe.

The superior ethical question is to protect the source material. Only afterward could you contemplate the wonders of making it available at the click of a mouse... And I don't care much which format the majority of consumers will choose to watch them on. We can't stop the progress of technology, and we can't control the (bad) habits of new generations. The critic is there to set an example not to encourage the latest ephemeral and silly trends. The VHS came and went, leaving us with the same problem of film masters unchanged.

• It's intolerable, in the face of art history, that studios have the final decision on keeping films on the shelf for ever.
• It's intolerable that countries who can't afford a decent restoration would let their archive perish.
• It's intolerable that films keep on dying every year despite the available technology to save them today.

What can be done about it?

The Air Is On Fire!

david K lynch

I visited the David Lynch exhibition yesterday at the Paris Fondation Cartier. Having seen some of his paintings online already, some of his photographs and most of his short films/animation, I wasn't as overwhelmed/surprised as I imagined. The scenography is rough and colossal (industrial scafolding structures) but there are only 4 rooms to cross, bathed in a semi-darkness, kinda half-night. Although some of the pieces are really impressive and worth a direct contact. Others require some explanations/guidance... You can imagine the typical Lynchian soundscape resonating in the speakers, especially certain paintings have their own sound with a pushbutton.

There are about 30 canvas, and some big ones, bigger than me. The hall they are installed in is a glassbox where the sun casts changing shadows on the painting surfaces. They are in tune with the work he did at the Art School (like the ones we see in his short films : Six Figures Getting Sick only more abstract/trash formally and more focused on sexual trauma and dreamwork). He refused to order them chronologically so it's impossible to make correlation with the evolution of his filmography... it's a shame.

With his return to the roots in INLAND EMPIRE, especially the scene towards the end, when Nikki/Grace shoots The Phantom in the face, that looks a lot like one of his large canvas titled "This Man Was Shot 0.9502 Seconds Ago" from 2004 (see e-Cahiers Feb. 2007, p. 28). I would love to see him develop this kind of experimental video-collage palimpsest in his future features, as well as playing around with non-representional sculptures like he did in The Grandmother or Eraserhead. That would create captivating atmospheres, and shake up the classicist establishment of movies.

Although among his hundreds of doodles (on post-it's, napkins, script pages, bills...) we can note the current obsession with a certain movie, either by the inclusion of names, words or special design refering to one of his film. Hey there is even one doodle with "Jonathan Rosenbaum" written on it! aint it cool? are they friends? ;)
There are also tel numbers, addresses, overheard lines, various notes incorporated under the drawing or decorated around. This guy never stops drawing everywhere he goes it seems, on any material, with any pen and with a free wheel inspiration. More than with his films, we could talk of the surrealist gameplay of automatic writing for his doodles (or canvas). "Automatic doodle". The shapes developped to fill the page with geometrical pattern carefuly avoid the usual conventions of classicism symetry, orthogonality, equilibrium, continuity. Rarely does he include ready-made recognizable shapes, sometimes diformed characters. It's a universe of texture and lighting vibration rather than a representation. It's fascinating to see his constant research for original creativity, something that doesn't look like something else, new shapes, new signs, a life of its own striking the imagination of the viewer (and Lynch himself too obviously) in unexpected ways. It's a kind of a Rorschach inkblot test Lynch imposes onto himself. Or maybe the tentative re-enactment of a nightmare peculiar atmosphere. His canvas too eschew formality, but melting a 3D amorphous character into the background of the same color. Meanwhile he likes to add letters and words as if to spell out each elements, each action, each moment.

He has blown up a few of his doodle in large serigraphies, which highlights a powerful design with the scale leap (harmonious abstract composition, simple colors, graphical dynamics). Lynch says they'd make amazing rugs and I agree, a huge thick "contemporean design" carpet or a mural Aubusson tapestry (like Cocteau used to do).

The mini drawing of a room materialized into a piece of set we can walk in is a cool experience. The carpet is made out of a handdrawn pattern and the walls with childlike paintings, even funky furniture with soft edges.

They also installed a small theatre, with black curtains and the 4th wall opened, where Lynch's experimental shorts and web animation are projected in loop. There I watched Out Younder, Six Figures Getting Sick, The Alphabet and The Grandmother.
So it's funny to stand there watching his films, surrounded by his photographic work on the walls. I really like the wall projected films in exhibitions, it adds a multimedia experience and also decontextualize the animated image. It's like watching a movie in a cinema while walking around the room, without sitting at the same place all the time.
They do that at the Cinémathèque exhibitions too. Last year they projected Renoir films on the walls (next to Auguste Renoir paintings), Almodovar clips on transluscent panes hanging from the ceiling (visible from both sides), and for the German Expressionism exhibition too, loops of silent scenes next to the wall sized posters. Films used to animate screen-walls create such an interactive theatrality within our environment.

The Photoshop doctoring of old pornographic photographs or recent nudes, dismembering their bodies into alien shapes, is among the most interesting researches. We can feel a distant influence of Max Ernst collages, Dali's soft bodies, and of course Bacon's carnal butchery. Which takes a disturbing dimension when fabricated from photos of real-life people, rather than from paintings.

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I Graduated But... (1929/Ozu)

Daigaku wa deta keredo / I graduated, but... (1929/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan)

10th B&W silent film made (Shochiku Kamata studio), 3rd surviving film (incomplete). Only 12 minutes remain from this feature length film, completed by intertitles. But it's not too difficult to follow the plot. Original screenplay by Hiroshi Shimizu, friend of Ozu. Filmed and released in the summer before the NY stock market crash (October 1929). The economic crisis is perceptible, young graduates struggle to find a job.

Tetsuo, the protagonist, is proud and turns down a receptionist job offer because it is not good enough for his level of qualification. When his mother visits him and his young wife, afraid to lose face, he lies about having found a great job. The japanese social status is identified through the work position held. It is primordial never to lose face in society. This distance between the fantasized role expected by the parents, the significant other, the neighbors, the colleagues... and a more modest reality is the root of many dramatical situations in japanese films. Saving appearances in the present is prioritized over the planning of a comfortable future. Thus extravagant expenses are made to impress visitors even if the family cannot afford it. Likewise the poor couple in The Only Son (1936), will sacrifice savings to honor the visiting mother.

Nevertheless he's happy to take out his mother for Tokyo sightseeings, but she's worried taking a day off from his new job would be impolite. So he's forced to live up to the condition of his lie, to wake up early and not spend time with his family like he'd want to.

After his mother left, he confesses to his wife through a visual cue, an interesting interplay between the silent image and the written intertitle. We see the cover of a "Sunday" newspaper, and the carton says "For me, everyday is like this". A discreet allusion, an euphemism, helping to communicate a shameful truth without the obligation of spelling it all out.

A wall-sized poster of Harold Lloyd's movie Speedy (1928/Ted Wild) takes a prominent place in the interior scenes, sometimes filling the entire background of a medium shot. I haven't seen this film, so I don't know what comparison we could thread from this citation. Although it's fascinating to see a contemporary foreign movie exposed this way, which is frequent in early Ozu silent films. The release of Speedy is only a few months earlier than I graduated, but...
We couldn't imagine this type of honor in today's cinema, with movies citing each other or showing the poster of last year's movie (except for intentional parodies), let alone the copyrights infringement and studio competition issues!

Ultimately, Tetsuo takes down his personal pride and lowers his expectations in order to find the smallest job at all costs, when he finds out the temporary job his wife has found to support the household was of a bar hostess, in a bar he visited with one of his student friend. We find this socially degrading situation in Brothers and Sisters of the Today Family (1941), where the unmarried daugther of a rich family is lectured by her older sister(-in-law?) about family humiliation. She's opposed to her project to take a job as a shop clerk, in the case she would face the humiliation to be served by her own relative.
The job of a bar hostess, who lights the cigarettes of customers, is also highly connoted sexualy.

Tetsuo comes back to the first company to accept the receptionist job. The moral lesson is well stated: His boss, who had a smirk and complicite looks with a colleague to emphasize the pressure in the first scene. Since Tetsuo has matured since their last interview, he concedes to give him a decent position in the company. It was only a test of modesty and submission to channel his young ego.

What Did the Lady Forget? (1937/Ozu)

Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka / What Did the Lady Forget? (1937/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan) ++

37th B&W film made (Shochiku studio), 19th surviving film. 2nd Talky fiction.

Opening Sequence : Camera onboard a car, looking into the reflection of the back of a chrome spherical headlight. The car is driving across the rich neighborhood of a Tokyo suburb (Kojimachi). An odd shot we see in The Lady and The Beard (1931) and Dragnet Girl (1933), or in Epstein's La Glace à trois faces (1927).

Wealthy wives are established as castrating dominators in the house, controlling their husbands' timetable and activities, sharing gossips on neighbors and concerned by fashion and beauty. In an hilarious scene, the older lady tells the others how she muffles her laughter to avoid aging lines around the eyes. This ravishing comedy departs from Ozu's usual filmography (student films, mafia films, family drama) with an upperclass setting and a world essentialy dominated by powerful women.

Komiya, the husband, is a respected doctor at the university, cheerful and relaxed. We meet him his eyes into a binocular, answering the phone without looking away, and comfirming abruptly to the caller his sterilty from what he sees. Whereas at home he's bland and submissive. He lies and hides away to pass the compulsary golf weekend imposed by his ruling wife, Tokio.

The arrival of their liberated niece from Osaka, Setsuko, will expose the contradictions of their sustained routine. Setsuko, 16 yold, came to Tokyo for its modern life, and feels sorry for what she finds in this backward household. She wears western clothes, drives, smokes, drinks sake, and goes to the Geisha house. The spoiled brat of a rich provincial family, but so cute and high-spirited. Unexpectedly, as open-minded as she may be, she lectures her uncle for his passive attitude, and begs him to take control of the house back like a real man, even suggesting to beat his wife!

"I drink upon occasion, sometimes upon no occasion." Don Quixote

Ozu films twice this citation written in big letters above the bar counter, in a slow Close Up shot revealing word after word. We also see this citation in the bar of the film The Munekata Sisters (1950).
There is a scene in a Kabuki theatre where we see the faces of the audience, but never the stage, only music and voices are heard off screen.
Again Ozu repeats the trick at the Geisha house, until he finally films the dance number of 2 geishas in a long uninterrupted take!

Many comical situations punctuate the little household until the secret is discovered. Notably another hilarious scene where Komiya is supposed to lecture the undisciplined niece, but was asking her a favor instead, as his wife enters and they fake the argument.
Finally, Komiya explains to the young girl that sometimes a man should take the "opposite approach" : to let the wife believe she's in control. And she automatically notices this gimmick in the behavior of her boyfriend because he seems to approve whatever she says too often. A great comedic treatment of a critique of the conversational phrases and the mundane etiquette, just like in Ohayo (1959).

The ending is beautiful! After telling her (admirative) friends she got slapped in the face, almost proud, Tokio is transformed, in love again, as if she had lost hope in the virility of her husband. Back home she's all sweet and treats her husband with a late coffee, even though he's afraid to be unable to sleep if he takes a cup. Precisely it's what she has in mind. And he understands her unspoken desire while she's away, with a smile on his face. In one ultimate stationary shot : the lights go down in the house, one by one. All excited he walks in circle, backlit in the bedroom. And his wife comes back with the coffee at the end of the corridor. Black. The End. Isn't it a more subtle and amusing allegory for marital sex than Hitchcock's train/tunnel or fireworks metaphors? ;)

(s) + (w) ++ (m) ++ (i) ++ (c) +

DIGEST : Fevrier 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, radio webcast, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

Painting and Cinema

On the French website of the Caen Ciné-Club, there is a great synopsis of the taxonomy developped by Gilles Deleuze in L'image-Mouvement (1983) / L'Image-Temps (1985).
Notably the analogy between the aesthetic schools of Cinema and Plastic Arts. The list order follows the chronology of cinema movements. Thus, the matching Art movements don't fall in their own chronological timeline.

It looks like "The Cristals of Time" is the category that corresponds best to the trend we considered as "Contemplative Cinema" at the Unspoken Cinema blogathon in January. And I'm reading this book at the moment and will return to the trend of contemplation in cinema, and continue to contribute to our collective blog.

CLASSIC CINEMA

1. Image-action <=> Art : Renaissance (CLASSIC) XVth c.
   Documentary - Social Film - Film Noir - Western
   David Wark Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Robert Flaherty, King Vidor, Akira Kurosawa
2. Image-situation <=> Art : Renaissance (CLASSIC) XVth c.
   Comedy - Burelesque - Western - Film Noir
   Charles Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Kenji Mizoguchi, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn
3. Soviet Montage <=> Art : Minimal Art (MODERN) 1960
   Serguei Mikhaïlovitch Eisenstein, Vsevolod Poudovkine, Alexandre Dovjenko, Dziga Vertov
4. Expressionism <=> Art : Expressionism (MODERN) 1900
   Friedrich W.Murnau, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Fritz Lang, Claude Chabrol, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino
5. Impressionism <=> Art : Impressionism (CLASSIC) 1880
   Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Abel Gance, René Clair, Jean Vigo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Grémillon
6. Abstract lyrism <=> Art : Abstract Expressionism (MODERN) 1930
   Jacques Tourneur, Joseph von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Philippe Garrel
7. Naturalism <=> Art : Realism-Naturalism (CLASSIC) 1850
   Erich von Stroheim, Luis Bunuel, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, David Lynch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Claude Brisseau
8. Image-action crisis <=> Art : Mannerism (CLASSIC) XVIth c.
   Alfred Hictchock, Marx brothers, Tex Avery, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Wong Kar-wai

MODERN CINEMA

1. Neorealism <=> Art : Color Field painting (MODERN) 1950
   Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, De Santis, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Yasujiro Ozu
2. Nouvelle Vague <=> Art : Art in situ (MODERN) 1960
   François Truffaut, Jean Eustache, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Arnaud Desplechin, Olivier Assayas, Pascal Bonitzer, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch
3. Resistance of the bodies <=> Art : Informal Art (MODERN) 1944
   John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Maurice Pialat, Patrice Chéreau, Chantal Akerman, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont
4. The cinema of the brain <=> Art : Abstract Geometry (MODERN) 1920
   Stanley Kubrick, Alain Resnais, André Téchiné, Benoît Jacquot, Nanni Moretti
5. Peaks of present/Sheets of past <=> Art : Romantism (CLASSIC) 1810
   Marcel Carné, Joseph Mankiewicz, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Clint Eastwood, Pedro Almodovar
6. The cristals of time <=> Art : Random Painting (MODERN) 1960
   Mirror - Theatre Stage - Ship - Large Rooms
   Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Alexandre Sokourov, Gus van Sant, Sofia Coppola
7. The powers of the false <=> Art : Baroque (CLASSIC) XVIth c.
   Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Lars von Trier, Raoul Ruiz
8. Thought and cinema <=> Art : Conceptual Art (MODERN) 1960
   Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Stan Brakhage

In an earlier post I had posted a correspondance between History of Arts and Psychiatry.

The Lady and the Beard (1931/Ozu)

Shukujo to hige / The Lady and the Beard (1931/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan) ++

19th silent film made at the Shochiku Kamata studio, shot in 8 days. 7th surviving film.

Comedy of manners confronting a poor misogynist bachelor, Kiichi, with 3 cute women : the street thug, the innocent low-class clerk and an aristocrat.

Kiichi is a Kendo champion, brave and honest, with a childish and asocial behavior, lives alone in a dirty appartment. His beard and repaired clothes ridiculize him in society. Ozu portrays here a stereotypical world opposing the ancient regime incarnated by the martial art tradition, kimono and facial hair, to the modern Japan of the westernized fashion, suits, office work. We can sense the inspiration of Chaplin humor in this negligent tramp causing etiquette troubles in public because he doesn't fit in.

The film opens at a Kendo tournament showing Kiichi hidden under his Kendo helmet, delaying the revelation of the face of the popular actor, Okada Tokihiko, and his notorious beard. During his domination of all opponents, only body language conveys the visual gags. His purely physical performance already identifies a peculiar personality, like Mifune Toshiro with his famous shoulder shake. It's an interesting establishing scene for a silent movie, where the audience cannot identify to the voice nor the face of the lead actor. And we have to contemplate the spectacle of this choreography of lookalike "puppets" battling together until we understand who is who.

In the street his confident saber skills help him to rescue a lone woman racketed by a street gang, conducted by a female thug. Invited at the fancy birthday party of an aristocrat heiress he scares away all the girls but leaves a strong impression with his traditional dance. Once convinced to shave his antic beard to become a modern gentleman, women will fall for him and he'll be embarassed by marriage proposals. The coincidence of three women from different social classes running after him creates a series of humorous misunderstandings. From unpleasant and clumsy he tries hard to seduce his chosen sweetheart.

Pure entertainment routine (one of the last ones) from Ozu's early period. The visual running gags are quite funny and staged with originality. Very amusing. There is an exterior travelling with the camera looking into a spherical chrome headlight of a driving car, which reflects the city streets, deformed. A shot Ozu used in other early films as well.

(s) 0 (w) + (m) ++ (i) ++ (c) +

Outlandish Dargis Empire

I'm a contrarian all year round on this blog, thus for the fun of participating in Jim Emerson's Contrarianism blogathon at Scanners, I'll make it an exercice de style. Following up on Andy Horbal's initiative to study the buzz generated by Manohla Dargis NYT review of INLAND EMPIRE, I've decided to take the aggressive detractor approach and give a detailed reader's feedback.
This is a gameplay of course, as Dargis is a great critic and my tentative analysis is pretentious. Nitpicky mode intentionally exaggerated. For the fun of being contrarian, at least let's not bash a little helpless reviewer, let's go for the best and see where it takes us. Why not? Keep in mind I'm not familiar with american TV culture and English is a second language, this should relativize my following remarks, but what any reader gets from a review says something about the writer. Moreover I happen to share Dargis opinion that INLAND EMPIRE is a masterpiece, and I have nothing but respect for her critiques.

I've read this article back in December and only saw the film last week. I had already a few objections back then when it was celebrated "the most significant piece of criticism she wrote for the NYT". Now reading it again, with hindsight of seeing the film, I'm able to qualify my troubled impressions.

Contradictions of my own contradictions are of course welcome and encouraged.

"The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch" by Manohla Dargis (NYT, Dec. 6 2006)

Dargis calls it "art", ranks it in her top10 of the year, people call her review her best job ever... Then I'd like to know what is an art review and how good can get criticism with great literary style.
I'm not siding with John Podhoretz and Andrew Sullivan who called her "pretentious" and "poser", on the contrary, I think she is too superficial and dilutes the density of Lynch works in a populist rhetoric meant to vulgarize "art", which obviously goes against her stated intention to place this movie above all.
Where is the critical reflexion about Lynch's world vision? Where is the aesthetic analysis other than qualifying actors and set furniture with colorful adjectives, and dropping as much pop culture references as possible? I don't know what was the bottom line for this review, and maybe the editor watered it down afterall.

paragraph 1 : lyrical intro, obligatory(?) filmography reminder.

• I wouldn't even mention the triviality of the "vine" metaphor, and the insisting cliché about Lynch's "creppy-creepy" persona if this article wasn't acclaimed as a model of criticism.

paragraph 2 : vague overall description of the atmosphere

• I wholeheartedly agree with the infamous A-bomb, INLAND EMPIRE is art. I wish Dargis had developped this angle and actually treated it as a work of art by giving up any reference to conventional filmmaking and conventional reviewing. Instead she produces a standard movie review with a plot rundown, nods to the actors, nods to the image, trivia, name-dropping...
• "Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate" : not so subtle wording.
• I'm not sure what to think of the Mad Magazine reference... is it really appropriate? Are we really in the same kind of humor there?
• I'll pass on the TV reference (Ralph Kramden) which I don't know, and the painting style (Edward Hopper) which is another recurring cliché associated with Lynch (will critics bring it up in every Lynch movie?).
• "I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits have to do with the weepy Polish woman" : useless bit of non-information. Some think that the stream-of-consciousness note-to-self creates an informal tone that feels like a confidence... I think this is more appropriate to the blog format, while in print we don't need all the speculations going through the critics head, just to fill space in a word-limited column. Or at least could be formulated in way to commit the reader's imagination instead of laying down straightforwardly key pieces of the puzzle and revealing an approximate link between them at the risk of spoiling the experience for readers who didn't see the film. I'm not against spoilers in general (thus the critic can develop a thorough analysis of every elements). But droping a spoiler without any critical point to make is just a mean space filler.
• "weepy" : The tone of the whole sentence is very light and almost mocking. I don't see why. I take offense to this pejorative qualifier, it gives the wrong impression to the reader who hasn't seen the film. We see the face of a woman in tears indeed, but nothing says her emotion is exagerated or faked (she weeps already when the TV show starts), in fact she might have serious troubles. Lynch films her in a very dignified way.
• "may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both" : oversimplifying generalisation. Is she saying that whores and lost girls are Lynch's auteur trademark or that he systematically mixes up prostitution and confusion when portraying women? I doubt either are insightful propositions. (see comment above about useless spoilers)

paragraph 3 : plot rundown, caricatural description of characters

• The Wizard of Oz reference was already a stretch for Mulholland Dr., it's dubious for INLAND EMPIRE.
• The "once upon a time" reference to fairytale is also out there.
• Although one thing is important there is to pay attention to how the film starts.
• Now, the derogatory terms to caricature the screen appearance of actors with funny words : "hilarious", "bulging eyes", "East European accent" was it really necessary? are they really representative of the scene or just a cheap shot at the most superficial details? Dargis seems to enjoy laughing at a freak show, while Lynch was installing the quirky calm of a possessive inescapable encounter.
  Why not talk about the gradual oppressive intrusion of this stranger in her intimate space. Or the awkward silences, the poses, the offbeat timing as if suspended in time. The time feels soft, actually making uncomfortable moments last longer, until it jumps to tomorrow, leaving the scene unfinished, as if it never happened...

paragraph 4 : Mulholland Dr. (tabloid-friendly) synopsis.

• There is more critical analysis of Mulholland Dr. in this single paragraph than in the full article for INLAND EMPIRE!
• "Mr. Lynch loves women, or at least their representations" : again, underdevelopped generalisations. I'd like to know more about this.
• Should the form of a review attempt to match the form of the film, or at least adapt the review formula to its narrative specifity?

paragraph 5 : see paragraph 3

• Continuation of the rough plot description in a very face-value, lineary way that might not be the best approach to a Lynch movie, or to a film called "art". There is this, there is that, one, two, three characters, this is what they do, that is what happens then... INLAND EMPIRE is not made to be summarized to fit in a conventional plot. If it's art, let's take liberties with the usual narration of a film review...
• More uncalled-for derogatory terms "foreign-accented visitor", "butched-up as a neo-greaser". Maybe it's hip for a journalist, but is that GREAT film criticism I wonder?
• "almost-unrecognizable" : star-gazing type of remark for the fanboys. How insightful is it to the film?
• "(...) kind of" : mysterious unfinished sentence to hint at more twists, although the reasons (of the interruption and of the secret) will not be developped here.
• Why mentionning the porn-name anecdote, the costumes... instead of installing the love triangle tension, the cursed film, the mannered spelled out inhibition, the upper-class cordial uppity, the naive clumsy lust...?

paragraph 6 : synospsis of the "film(s)-within-the-film"

• Why go for a pedestrian description that is no use to grasp the originality of this one-of-a-kind film, nor to get a sense of its mysterious atmosphere? Citing the various disconnected scenes for the sake of an inventory without helping the reader to assemble it all in a coherent impression of the film and without adding the insight necessary to begin to interpretate the story only makes the review more unintelligible and disparate than the film actually is. At least in the film the montage and the recurrent places give an intuitive understanding of the circumvolutions, which the review lacks.
• "Susan spends a lot of time in a sinister house" : I don't know how much Dargis appreciated the film and how much she wants to convince her readers that this art is a must see, but this kind of tired sentence doesn't shine the best light on what Lynch meant to do. It denotes that time is wasted, and that the house is repulsive instead of captivating.
• "chew the fat and their naughty lower lips" : I guess to find 2 phrases using the same verb in a row is great poetry (is it?) but why choosing to highlight the listless aspect of the scene instead of its latent sexual ambivalence (conflation of adultary with prostitution, sex slavery with sweet infatuation)?

paragraph 7 : set design description

• The prevalent role of places and the labyrintine architecture gives the film its structure indeed. But again, the pedestrian inventory, disconnected from the scenes described in the previous paragraph miss the connections that would give us an idea of what is going on and what Lynchian ideas are at work.
• "weepy" changed to a preferable "weeping" here.
• "money-for-sex transaction" : I find the phrase used there to kill the possibilities left opened by Lynch. The woman who is asked to undress appears to be a prostitute indeed, but the ambiguity of the scene relies precisely on the absence of money. Both characters' faces are blurred as if on a surveillance tape trial exhibit. The guy asks "Do you know what prostitutes do?", but this could be role playing within a married couple/adulterous lovers (theme of the film), and the importance of multiple interpretations are key. A review narrowing down the freedom goes against the film.

paragraph 8 : The only reflexive analytical paragraph so far.

"How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms — how, for instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky, B-movie office — is less important than what happens inside these spaces. In “Inland Empire,” the classic hero’s journey has been supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in
the splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai.” The spaces in “Inland Empire” function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds (Nikki’s, Susan’s, Mr. Lynch’s), sites of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born."

• "How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms is less important than what happens inside these spaces" : 1st insight engaging with the film purpose. Although instead of asking why the same actress appears in milieux that have nothing to do with each other (without explanatory narrative transitions), a better insight would be to note the way Lynch re-use the same actress to play different roles in the same film. The fact we can recognize Laura Dern each time doesn't mean we are expected to believe she is the same person. This is art. Let's think outside the box and forget about long lived narrative conventions. Lynch obviously introduces a shift of time and place, possibly fantasized by the character itself. So the pertinent question is not to make sense of the logistical link between each story but the mood they describe and how they resonate in relation to each other. For instance Lynch puts rabbit heads on the sitcom actors so we don't identify them, he blurs faces (because they are symbolic/archetypal scenes) to prevent the viewer to draw immediate conclusion about the persons themselves.

paragraph 9 : 2nd insight of the review.

"Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made. The theatricality of these entrances and exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates any sense that the film is unfolding with the usual linear logic. Like characters rushing in and out of the same hallway doors in a slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing position, yet, for long stretches, doesn’t seem as if she were going anywhere new. For the most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it’s truer to everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in this admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel superfluous. “Inland Empire” has the power of nightmares and at times the more prosaic letdown of self-indulgence."

• "Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made" : Well, I used to find it interesting before seeing the film, but actually only a few scenes function that way in the film (sitcom, small house at the end).
• The "20 min too much" comment feels quite petty, the kind of thing you say of some pretentious director who doesn't know what he's doing, not of a film you call "art".
• "prosaic letdown of self-indulgence" WTF does it mean? again, I'm afraid Dargis has issues with artistic vision that are too personal, too far away from traditional cinema. I can't tell if she actually admires this film.

paragraph 10 : banalities about Lynch and subconscious. Nod to photography

• The kind of useless press-kit info that is repeated in every review. I realized by reading other interviews that this concerned only the preparatory phase of the work, then ideas came together and he had a larger crew and an uninterrupted shooting schedule that was prepared in advance. It's fine to mention it, but to build the buzz of a film on geeky trivia doesn't elevate it to art territory.
• Seriously though, the surrealist gameplay of automatic writing doesn't quite correspond to the practicality of a film set. It implies to write mindlessly, beyond attention span, in order for subconscious word associations to surface without the conscience to register and filter it. Maybe some improvised scenes allowed to last 40 min could take an actor to act subconsciously. But these are rare occasions in the film with Laura Dern alone. Most of the scenes are fairly constructed and reworked in post-production.

paragraph 11 : Impressionistic conclusion

• "Inland Empire seemed funnier, more playful and somehow heartfelt" : something the lame director Bob Brooker in Mulholland Dr. could say.
• Somehow Dargis attempts to sympathize with readers disappointed on first viewing, by sharing a similar experience, and then promising a funnier second viewing. In principle I don't approve appeal to sympathy, especially when it relates to (re)viewing recommendations. A critic should leave the decision to buy a ticket or not to the reader. The consumation-driven rhetoric is for the marketing campaign.
• "It’s easy to get lost in a David Lynch film, but Ms. Dern and her amazing rubber-band mouth, which laughs like the sun and cries us a river, proves a magnificent guide." ain't it corny?
• "rubber-band mouth" : derogatory qualifier, and only refering to a couple of shots of Dern's distorted face.

Conclusion:

I don't see how this particular review is any different from any other one. It doesn't strike me as such a writing mastery (I'm French, I wouldn't know), nor does it feature the greatest filmic insights we've read in a long time. As for the film, I'd wonder if she liked it if she didn't call it art and put it in her year-end top. Lots of nitpicky notes, seemingly off-the-cuff, on details of minor importance and few demonstrations of the greatness of the film. From the review alone I would say she liked it but will move on quickly to the less artsy fare. These words don't shine with passion and adoration as we could expect it from a glorified art piece. But maybe Dargis just doesn't like art that much... ;)

Directors Lounge

For the 3rd time the Directors Lounge (8 - 18 february 2007) offers a place to showcase experimental videoartists from around the world, in the margin of the Berlin International Festival. Video installation, exhibitions, slideshow, animation, conference.

Organized by Marina Foxley (among others), don't miss her beautiful short films called Still Life, Errance and Scrap Metal (can be viewed online here and here with some of the other works).

Follow the news on the official program and the blog.

• Special screening : Chinese Independent Documentaries
  China Doc in coperation with Fanhall Studios, Beijing Curated by Marina Foxley and Zhu Rikun, founder of Fanhall Studios. This special focus comprises of several long features and short videos and illustrates the singularity and the richness of independent Chinese documentary in a concise manner.

DIGEST : Janvier 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, radio webcast, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan interview (Climates)

My notes on radio broadcast : L'avventura on France Culture with Laure Adler. (offline now)

FORMATION

• Inspired by Antonioni : L'Eclisse, L'Avventura, La Notte. (Not especially in Climates though).
• Formating experience when seeing at 16 yold Bergman's The Silence (1963). Then difficulty to track down more Bergman films (not available in Turkey).
• Autobiography by Roman Polanski was a transforming experience, that gave him an impulse to become filmmaker.
• Discovery of Antonioni, Bresson, Ozu, Bergman at the London Cinematheque.
• Quits film school after 2 years out of 4, to start making cinema. Learns filmmaking by staring in a short movie for a friend.

AUTEUR

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a totally independent auteur : screenwriter, producer, camera operator, editor, set designer, director of photography, actor. A filmmaker must learn how to do every trade in cinema not to be slave of standard technique and be able to create a sophisticated film [Bergman said the same thing]. Creativity starts where standard formula ends. He wants to be creative at every stage of the production.
• He was originaly photographer which helped him to understand the technique of cinema.
• Use of non-actors (his family) : he likes their spontaneity potential, their resource to give something fresh.

WORLD VISION

• Turkey : NBC is a Solitary person, not political bond with Turkey, no special connection with other turkish filmmakers Yilmaz Güney (Yol), so he has the feeling he could live in any country and do the same kind of cinema. Though, he doesn't want to live elsewhere.
• Iran : The image of Iran changed thanks to Kiarostami and iranian cinema. He thinks people in Iran are like in the movies.
• Likewise Turkey's art offer a new perspective to the world.
• Humanistic, meditative, contemplative cinema. Looking at the world through plan sequence. Lots to contemplate, to see in the film. Little dialogue and action.
• Lots of things happen between people and their relationship with nature. Perception of time, of seasons = cosmic influence on people's lives. Wind, wave in the sea, snow, sun beam... elements of nature remind man of being a tiny dot in the universe, which alters our relation to suffering.
• Off-centering of self, learning of self-identity. NBC likes his characters to lie, and that the audience be active to figure the smallest gesture that betrays this lie. In Hollywood cinema we usually believe everything the hero says, and he doesn't like that.

"I hate to explain, to insist, to convince : the audience shall guess. (...) I think the point of view of a film should be close to life. As if you observe a couple of strangers in a cafe, trying to figure their relationship, their problems." interview in Libération (01-17-2007)

"People who talk too much always bothered me. Most of is being said is hollow. (...) I never liked when feelings and reflexions are expressed through dialog. I prefer to make my characters say unsignificant things, while the underlaying subtext reveals their feelings and reflexions. I like to show everybody's real-life weaknesses, this superficial side of us." Interview in Les Inrockuptibles (01-16-2007)

FILMOGRAPHY

• Clouds of May (1999) was compared to Kiarostami by critics. Life of rural people, joy of contemplating nature.
• Uzak (2002) Istanbul under snow. Shot in NBC's own appartment. Watching Uzak is like watching a scientist experiment to observe humans like lab animals. Mamut: solitary and depressive afraid of being invaded by a stranger. Mutic game between the 2 men. Problems of vital space. Solitude, despair, delusion. Sounds of nature. Sounds interacts even image is still.

CLIMATES (2006)

• Couple fighting to figure if they will part or not. Played by real-life couple of the auteur.
• Ebru co-wrote the scenario, she was involved in the project at the beguining so him and her were meant to be in the film.
• Male POV : man is mean, indecise, violent, seductor and woman more innocent, fragile by contrast. Every man by instinct is interested by his friend's girlfriend. 10 commendments "thou shall not covet your neighbor's wife" = Men's competition (unsaid tendency): "I scored more (women) than you".
• The fact that at the ending the woman is to the East, in the snow, alone, helps the man to love her more because she needs security.
• HD is the future of cinema whether we like it or not, so better as well master it now. Freedom of images, corrected colors. He filmed some beautiful steadycam shots for Climates but he dropped them all on the editing table to only keep stationary shots, because they didn't feel right. Echo with the still photographer in him.

Another contribution to the "Contemplative Cinema" blogathon at Unspoken Cinema.

Gus Van Sant on Bela Tarr

Another contribution to the "Contemplative Cinema blogathon" at Unspoken Cinema.

My notes on Gus Van Sant's text "The camera is a machine", written for the 2001 Bela Tarr retrospective at the NYC MoMA. Published in French in Trafic #50 (summer 2004)

Upon viewing Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Gus Van Sant reconsiders the cinematographic grammar and the influence of History (industrial revolution age) on the birth of cinema.

The films of Bela Tarr follow one of many singular paths that Cinema could have adopted if the mainstream hadn't been formated by industrial necessities. His work shows a new genuine and fruitful orientation, a cinema radicaly new starting over at its point of departure. And this cinema could only be born outside our western culture.

Bela Tarr seems to be influenced by the stationary views of steam engine machines from the XIXth century. [Reference to the famous Lumière brothers' seminal film : L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)]

He learnt cinema from its origin as if Modernist Cinema never existed.

In Werckmeister Harmonies there is a 5 min long shot of a mob storming down a street to go burn down a hospital. A spectator asked Bela Tarr why this shot had to last so long and he replied sincerly :

• "because the street to cross was that long"

[Which is the same answer Tsai Ming-liang did about the length of the opening shot of The Wayward Cloud, where we watch two women cross an underground tunnel, end to end, in wide angle.]

Without the shortcuts and ellipsis of the conventional vocabulary that would tell us : "The crowd moves forward", instead with emphasis on the lyrism and poetry, by sharing ideas his long take says : "The protesters progress, grimacing, raising high up their torches, some marching in synchronized rhythm, some not, sometimes turning round and movnig around, and once arrived they had come a long way."

Bela Tarr's work has an organic and contemplative approach rather than truncated and contemporary. We couldn't find this manner of contemplating life in an ordinary modern film. His films are so much closezr to the daily life rhythms that it appears we witness the birth of a new cinema. Bela Tarr is one of the few filmmakers truly visionary.

Over There : documenting contemplation

2nd post for the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon at Unspoken Cinema.

Continuation from Là-bas (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France)

In February 2005, Chantal Akerman is asked to make a documentary on Israel. Taking position, shaping a vision is complicated. She's afraid to picture this difficult nation too lightly, to give an uneducated judgment of the conflict, to oversimplify politics at work. Not belonging to Israel is also a worry. She doesn't feel at home and she can't identify her peers either. These are the dilemmas Akerman contemplates hampered by the inhibition of her neurotic denial. Although reluctant to confront a caricatural banality of long-lived clichés, she installs a camera in her rented appartment nonetheless and lets it capture life through the windows.

The reflexion about the conception thus becomes part of the documentary itself, like a very personal meta-film, which turns out to be a creative justification on the impossibility to produce satisfying images. The limitations of cinema, as a regard, in descriptive explanations. What Akerman can't bring herself to say, the strict formality of her montage reveals it. This contemplative aesthetic takes a long pause to ponder, through the physicality of wait and silences (in place of intellectualized polemics), over the state of being in Israel, the resentment of exil, the uprooting of dispora. The ambivalent Jewish fate.

The cinematic space and the auteur's scope, in a symbiotic analogy, are both divided in four constructs layered in depth: Inside, Frontier, Outside, Away.

Her spontaneous, neurotic seclusion, takes a political dimension in the context of her own double exil. She's first exiled from motherland, Israel, because her family lives in Europe, and she's exiled again, as a foreigner, once in Tel Aviv because she can't pretend to be Israeli. A feeling of being elsewhere, always out of place.

She's a child of the second generation. Her mother bears the wounds of the death camps in her flesh, Chantal does in her subconscious. She says if she had been raised in Israel she would have ran around with the other kids in the street, but in Bruxelles, going out was forbidden and she watched the kids from her window. In this film, again, she assumes the childhood conditioning and watches from behind closed windows.

INSIDE (Exil) : Bunker-appartment, safe hideout, passive observation, centrality, immobility. She is in Tel Aviv, but the closed doors make her appartment an alien territory, away from Israel, which only shows out of the windows. A microcosm in truncated details, out of context. All screens pulled down on the windows create a camera obscura, the reality from outside filters in through the gaps. We're in Plato's myth of the cave : the silhouettes at the windows are the only reality she knows of Israel.

FRONTIER (Curtain) : Initial distanciation from her environment, ambiguity conceal/reveal, overframing. The large bay-window filling the screen, replaces the cinema screen, stands for a TV screen to display movies or the News. Relating her experience to the theatre audience.

OUTSIDE (Street) : Homeland, heartland, motherland, Tel Aviv, Israel. The first layer is the invisible street down below that emits a muffled ambient noise (sound without visual). The second layer across the void, is the facade of the building, replicating/mirroring her "inside", only as seen from outside, behind their walls and curtains (partial visual without sound). Each window is a TV screen to contemplate, with its own "soap opera" with recurrant characters.

AWAY (The world) : Ideal hope. Immense, global, invisible macrocosm, out of reach, impossible to grasp. Represented by 3 elements. The planes in the sky, going to another exil. The sea, open on all sides, the polar opposite of her cealed bunker. The phone line connecting to friendly voices, breaking the exil, folding space, canceling the distances.

* * *

Sous le ciel lumineux de son pays natal (2001/Franssou Prenant/France)
A companion film to Akerman's documentary would be a similar work by Franssou Prenant who tells her return to Beyrout in Lebbanon (on the other side of the Israeli border). She interviews her friends, off-screen, who stayed there and recall her memories from before the war, her impressions of the changes, against a handheld reportage through the streets.

La-bas (2006/Akerman)

This post is my contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon. Check Unspoken Cinema for all the updated contributions and the roundtable discussions with other participants.


Là-bas / Over There (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France) ***

The film starts and ends inside someone's empty living room, respecting the rules of dramatic unity (one space, one time, one action). A precautionary look at what's happening outside. The shots are always static and patiently pursued in long takes. If the framing is artisticaly composed, it lets however the audience's gaze wander around and select our own acumen. Little action animates this quiet scrutiny of the neighborhood, from various angles, through the straw-screens. A textured curtain of proximity and disconnection. Lacking any hint of a narrative subject, these silent images denounce the passivity and voyeurism of a cinema viewer, which strangely echos the filmmaker's own state of mind in Israel.

After a while, mundane noises announce a presence we'll never see. As we imagine her making coffee in the kitchen, eating fruits, walking around, typing on her laptop, Akerman invites us to share a slice of her dailylife and witness her self-imposed seclusion. Thus the camera isn't Akerman's own eye, but a supervisor planted next to her. It rolls, nonchalant, as she stays off-screen doing other things.
Her voiceover commentary will come later to incorporate her developping ideas. She talks about triviality (food, traveling, mood, work, family memories) in a diary fashion. It could be an essay film in-progress, observing itself being made. From the notes, to denial, to idle shooting, to making of, to meta-documentary, to film. All in one.

A phonecall in French, with her mother or a friend, explicits her situation : she's fine, a little tired, her stomach was sick, she has work to do. Another phonecall in Hebrew and English, with a local friend, says she'd rather stay home. Three interlaced idioms remind us the communication barrier in a foreign land. From this remote sanctuary, the phone links to the world, literaly, all the way to Belgium, and right outside in the city. It's her only human contact. Our only context to the film. And an opportunity for a diegetic monolog.

Shortage of food imposes a leap to the shops. Not the israeli salads! they made her sick... This upset stomach could be a psychosomatic symptom due to her resistance to go out, or a subconscious incompatibility. Everything seems to approve her self-imprisonment. Her vocal introspection shares with us the irony of these coincidences.

All the while the digital camera peeks views of the buildings across the narrow street of her only landscape, over-framed by the curtains. Her neighbors become the involuntary protagonists. Through recurring shots of extensive length, we get to familiarize with some of them appearing now and then at the windows. There is an old retired couple up there, watering the plants every day. Noises of cars driving in and out. An old lady smoking on a tiny balcony. Children shouting nearby. A group of people in the street.

We can only imagine the words of their conversation. We listen what we can't see off-screen, we see what we can't hear. Our senses are dissociated. The mind will reconstitute the puzzle of a larger reality. Our voyeurism projects a judgement on them as we profile their supposed personality. These shots unroll silently, patiently, waiting for something to show up, or not.

And the montage cuts from this window to that balcony, like if skipping channel on a TV. They are like small silent films, from a surveillance camera. The almost-real-time contemplation translates the apprehension of dailylife rhythm in this quarter. We are there. We live there.

The sun drags the shadows across the facade, from underexposed to overexposed. The intensity of daylight evolves and creates a new environment, more or less oppressive. Texture, color, depth constantly vary.

The images fabricate a de-facto narration, in the absence of a stated plot, because they contain their own fragmented stories, those of real-life people, an intimate microcosm. The scarcity of sightings makes the observation riveting and the wait rewarding. At the antipode of Rear Window, Akerman recreates a dramatic tension out of nothing (what's already there) with her frame.

Them on one side, and her on the other end, and us. The narrow field of the tele-lens, the minimalism of details, transcend the archetypal features of a neighborhood, so we can relate to this confrontation to the "Other" painted in universal tableaux.

On her exceptional visit to the beach, we can at last breath the open air. Same contemplative static shots observing from the distance the stroll in the sand of an orthodox family and tourists alike. Both the people and the filmmaker face the horizon. Over there. One always dreams of a hopeful elsewhere. The titular "Over There" that meant Israel from a european perspective, here, in turn, names the world beyond the sea : Europe, home, USA.

Just when she returns from the shop, she learns about a bomb attack on the beach, around the corner. Akerman is under shock in her appartment, and doesn't stigmatize the incident in spectacular pictures like the Israeli news. This bomb hides in words to us.

The phone rings again and she lies about her fear to appease her friends. The shot angles are the same routine but the atmosphere is more severe and the tone more serious. She notes her aunt Ruth in Bruxelles and her friend's mother in Tel Aviv both commited suicide around the same time. Why suicide in Israel just like everywhere else? Isn't it the promised Land?

The film is making itself in the camera magazine, overcoming her initial reticence. The intuition of the filmmaker succeeds where her intellect backpedalled.

continued in another post ...

Berlin Festival 2006 - Forum
(s) +++ (w) +++ (m) +++ (i) ++ (c) ++

TOP 2006

I'm reluctant to make my top this year because I don't have a favorite masterpiece... I feel I have yet to watch the best ones this year (Lynch, Tsai, Weerasethakul, Jia, Hong Sang-soo...).

I agree with Andy Horbal's blame of the list-mania, but I'd like to argue against "capsule summary" that simplify the opinion in few words as a year-end reminder. I'd rather post a bare list that functions as a mere barometer and can be compared with others. It shows how the year was perceived differently by critics, or how distribution was limited. A neutral assessment of the warmest recommendations.

Only 10 titles on my list got an official distribution in France, and most of the time a narrow exposition. Only 4 French films, truly original and inspired (one of them is made by a japanese director). 4 debut feature-length directors. 3 Documentaries.
But these are challenging films more interesting than the "commercial auteurs". I think they are exemplary formaly and thematically, to which I give more credit than the comfortable mannerism of older auteurs doing what they master within the safe codes of the genre. I think they deserve more support from critics and cinephiles, and should inspire future cinema to be more creative.

20 films, roughly in preferential order :

• Our Daily Bread (2005/Nikolaus Geyrhalter/Autriche) DOC
• Fantasma (2006/Lisandro Alonso/Argentine)
• Lights in the dusk (2006/Aki Kaurismäki/Finlande)
• Climates (2006/Nuri Bilge Ceylan/Turkey)
• Dans Paris (2006/Christophe Honoré/France)
• Drawing Restraint 9 (2005/Matthew Barney/USA)
• Ten Canoes (2006/Rolf de Heer/Peter/Australie)
• Juventude em Marcha / Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa/Portugal)
• Hamaca paraguaya (2006/Paz Encina/Paraguay) Debut
• La science des rêves (2006/Michel Gondry/France)
• Into Great Silence (2006/Gröning/Germany) DOC Debut
• Là-bas (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgique) DOC
• Sommer '04 (2006/Krohmer/Allemagne)
• Flandres (2006/Bruno Dumont/France)
• Un couple parfait (2005/Nobuhiro Suwa/France)
• 12h08 East of Bucarest (2006/Corneliu Porumboiu/Romanie) Debut
• Sangre (2006/amat Escalante/Mexique) Debut
• Zemastan / It's Winter (2006/Rafi Pitts/Iran)
• Sehnsucht (2006/Valeska Grisebach/Autriche)
• Drama/Mex (2006/Gerardo Naranjo/Mexique)

Special Mentions : Bamako (2006/Sissako/Mali); Volver (2006/Almodovar/Spain) ; Klimt (2006/Ruiz/France); Conversations with Other Women (2005/Canosa/UK); To Get To Heaven First You Have To Die (2006/Usmonov/Tadjikistan); Coeurs (2006/Resnais/France); Renaissance (2006/Volckman/France); La Tourneuse de pages (2006/Dercourt/France); Requiem (2006/Schmid/Germany); 4h30 (2005/Royston Tan/Singapour); Anche Libero va bene (2006/Stuart/Italy); La Raison du Plus Faible (2006/Belvaux/Belgium); Tristram Shandy (2005/Winterbottom/UK); Two Thirty 7 (2006/Thalluri/Australia); Paprika (2006/Kon/Japan); Bubble (2006/Soderbergh/USA)

On my list last year : Lazarescu; The Sun; L'Enfant; Three Times; Battle in Heaven; Manderlay...

Major unseen potential nominees : Inland Empire; Still Life + Dong; Syndromes and a Century; I Don't Want to Sleep Alone; Woman on the Beach; Iraq in Fragments; Oxhide; The Power of Nightmares; Rescue Dawn; White Diamond; The Boss of It All; Half Nelson...