The Auteurs

Surprises big and small have peppered Rotterdam as they will any film festival, but who could have guessed that Madame Butterfly, the new 30 minute short work by Tsai Ming-liang (whose feature Face is also in the festival), would be made up of 3 shots, 2 very long takes, all shot handheld on a digital camera by the filmmaker himself?

The first sequence follows actress Pearlly Chua around a Kuala Lumpur bus depot as she tries to leave the city after a trip to visit her lover, getting more sick and more frustrated as she both fails to leave and he fails to come through for her.  Named after Puccini, this is actually an unlikely homage (perhaps) to that great antsy scene in Jackie Brown where Pam Grier wanders aimlessly through an L.A. mall.  Madame Butterfly also explores its banal public space, following Chua up and down 3 floors with its grubby little camera to watch her try to buy tickets with not enough money, call her unresponsive lover, quaff lots of water and cough quite a bit (guaranteeing, despite outward appearance, this is a Tsai movie afterall), and, in the insert short that breaks up the verité long take, she phantasmagorically finds a hair of her lover in a steamed bun.

  Read More

Deep inside Olaf Möller’s After Victory program is Fighting Soldiers (1939), the kind of wartime soldiers-on-the-front documentary that might not get a second glance if it was American.  But it’s not; it’s Japanese, directed by Fumio Kamei, and as such it reveals moving images of Japanese soldiers that are shocking precisely because they are so ordinary.  This may too be why Kamei eventually fell afoul with the authorities, as Fighting Soldiers is also a rich document of the interstitial life of the soldiers, the morning drills, the marches and mechanized troop movements, the cleaning, sleeping, reading letters, sitting around.  Despite the title, these soldiers don’t fight, they live and work, and Kamei, assisted by camerawork both lyrical and material, often utilizing long takes and direct sound, by Miki Shigeru (who was shooting films for Kenji Mizoguchi during this same time), pays a respectful and moving homage to the regular life of the Japanese soldier in China.  Apparently regularity lacks the honor and depreciates the image of the Japanese warriors, but an aside about how while soldiers sleep they here the braying of the company’s donkeys, the several long takes, looking like a Griffith silent, of a presumably reenacted day in the life of a battle HQ (endless documents and orders, people rushing in and outside), a sentry’s out of focus silhouette with the night’s moon in sharp focus, a long take of morning’s roll call—all images are as fresh and humanizing as if they were taken today.  It is that rare thing we search for in cinema, a document and a work of art in one.

A far more cryptic and aggressive look at a near contemporaneous time in Japanese history is Kiju Yoshida’s Coup d'état (1973), the last film the director made before taking a 13 year break from the cinema.  Centered around the revolutionary activities surrounding author Kita Ikki in the 1930s, which included multiple assassinations and attacks on political and business leaders by several conflicted and confused military, ex-military, and civilian groups, Yoshida’s film takes an abstract and theatrical (perhaps Noh) approach to the turmoil by eliminating most major events.  The film focuses instead on the inscrutable inner attitude and external strategy of Ikki, and humanizes this cryptic element through the melodramatic tortured conscience of a young army officer torn between (or stuck in the grey zone between) the revolt movement and national duty.  In its abstraction Coup d'état reveals the complete strangeness ingrained in the pre-war revolutionary ideologies that called Japanese to pay ultimate respect and homage to their country and its leadership by radically and violently attacking it.  The film’s very short distance from political unrest and student movements in Japan in the late 1960s finds very topical relevancy, as Yoshida strips away the specificities of the historical era to capture on a knife’s edge the hope, dejection, and complete anguish of Japanese who wish to change so much.

Related Films

Coup d'état

Dir Yoshishige Yoshida

1973 Japan

Kill them with kindness—a rare approach and quality for political cinema, usually so bristling and over-eager. Amir Muhammad’s Malaysian Gods takes an instructive and benign attitude.  The video traces the outskirts of Malaysia’s tumultuous politics in the late 90s and early 00s, dense with demonstrations and police action, with an emphasis on the role Malaysian Tamils have had in the country.  But the video does this all with a chuckling humor through playful explanative title cards (assuming most are deficient in their knowledge of the situation in Malaysia), and more thoroughly by inverting a principle and well-tired documentary convention.  Rather than interviewing historically important people in generic talking-heads settings, abstract and without context, Muhammad shot his video at locations with rich history and featuring what might be called historically relevant people.  That is, normal people, those who live, or work, or were passing through these places now, not necessarily then.  Geographical past is then momentarily united to the personal—and perhaps unrelated—present.  Though we learn the events, we never are quite told of the politics at stake, and thereby the specifics of Malaysian Gods is not partisan ideology, but rather its interest in documenting everyday people in the everyday places that have informed their country’s political unrest.

You could measure how many movies are being projected digitally here at IFFR—once I even spied the UI of Apple’s DVD player on screen before a movie started—by the degree to which my pulse jumped when I saw Woman on Fire Looks for Water begin with the telltales speckles on the screen, the image trembling slightly, all signs indicating something physical and real was being projected.  But the longer lasting pleasure came when this additional texture was added to a particularly beautiful and sensitive film, one of the finds of the festival.

  Read More

Related Films

Woman on Fire Looks for Water

Dir Woo Ming Jin

2009 Malaysia

Malaysian Gods

Dir Amir Muhammad

2009 Malaysia

Along with An Affair at Akitsu, time was also the subject of David Gatten’s terrific new film, commissioned by Mark McElhatten for a shop window themed program of experimental shorts in honor of filmmaker Mark LaPore. So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come begins with a quote from Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk that notes, essentially, how whatever objects we are aware of, there have existed infinitely more in the past, and that whatever we see in the light there exists much more in the darkness.  From this quote what follows is a visual record and appreciation of “The Red Shop,” a small store in Colorado that appears to sell antiques—old stamps, knives, watches, and similar objects.  We see a limited set of goods held in praise for their past-ness, and in their individualness, and their positioning as unique and historical significants, we can see the limitation which Browne speaks of.  Suddenly not just all antiques but indeed all items in a shop window, all items of commerce, all items shown as having meaning and value open up behind them an unbearably large and dark void of all things these objects are not, that they fail to speak to, and that we’ll never know.

From such meditations on the material world, a move to the synthetic—back to the digital, as a great number of films at Rotterdam seem to be doing—might have seemed a relief, if that synthetic world wasn’t Billy Roisz’s ocular blitzkrieg tour-de-force Close Your Eyes.  Inspired by Henri Michaux’s records of his experiments with mescaline, Roisz’ video is a rhythmic, patterned series of colored and black and white animated segments of pristine digital artificating and other forms of video distortion captured, dissected, and re-framed as the kind of sensory nightmare parents in the 50s probably thought would beset their children if they sat too close to the radiation of the TV.  Its aesthetic is difficult to describe, but in a festival where most of the experimental shorts seen were meditative even in their activity (the musician Machinefabriek, who composed music to go with a series of  films by Jim Jennings, talked about bringing out the “hypnotic” undercurrents in Jennings’ “hectic” films), it was thrilling to see something as aggressive as Roisz’s video, which dares you not to close your eyes against its vision, but to close your eyes to see more like it.

After seeing Kiju Yoshida’s debut film Good for Nothing (1960), we can add the filmmaker’s name to the rare list of studio directors whose first films signal immediate, restless talent, vision fully formed, grasp of cinematic tools and expressions already mature.  While other Japanese New Wavers were trying to capture a youth audience through filming flighty takes on the too young and too irresponsible, Yoshida aims squarely at the malaise of post-college new adults and the newfound prospect of becoming a tired salaryman in your twenties.  Or salarywoman—because as tightly hued as Yoshida’s picture is of lean, exasperated men fidgeting for meaning in their impassive apathy, Good for Nothing devotes just as much time to its female heroine—out of her 20s but wants to be no simple lover, housewife, or member of society, and is just as beset with a need for fulfillment and meaning.  With an ending that directly references both 400 Blows and Breathless but makes them its own, Yoshida’s energetic weariness, his precision with actors and sympathy for each one’s self-imposed social predicament makes Good for Nothing not just a successful debut, but a refreshingly sober and exact drama of crooks, the death of youth, and defunct love.

Sunday began with a fresh start, literally, with a lovely, and, most importantly, English subtitled print of Jacques Rozier’s debut feature Adieu Philippine (1962).  Along with Luc Moullet (whose Land of Madness is also at the festival) but to an even greater degree due to the significantly fewer films he has directed, Rozier is one of the great lost members of the French New Wave.  Masterpiece after masterpiece and the man still can’t catch a break; the last fictional feature of his I’ve seen is one of the great surreal works of cinema, Maine-Océan (1986), and I’ve yet to meet anyone who has seen, let alone heard of his only other feature since then, Fifi Martingale (2001).  His debut film is, as a friend once described, “vanilla New Wave,” and strikes me as what a film would be like if the nouvelle vague was an actual genre of movies.  In other words, Adieu Philippine is a “regular” film, not aspiring to showiness, cleverness, presumption or pomposity, but dedicated to youth, spontaneity, and the unfilmed between moments of life, all done in such a way to suggest all this is normal in cinema, which it most assuredly is not.  Above all there is the Rozier touch, which is a talent for supreme fluidity of film movement, of a natural nonchalance as the story slowly weaves in a direction seemingly untouched by a filmmaker and directed instead by life.  Such a gracious movement, so surprising and touching as we see where the world takes the film, makes Rozier’s films, regardless of subject or age, always a fresh discovery. Read More

Related Films

Adieu Philippine

Dir Jacques Rozier

1962 France

Good-for-Nothing

Dir Yoshishige Yoshida

1960

The Affair at Akitsu

Dir Yoshishige Yoshida

1962 Japan

A single 8mm shot lasting  a mere 3 minutes, Winde’s Bliss bursts out of the screen as the simplest and most modest film at Rotterdam, but perhaps is also the one that speaks for and about all other movies here.  The shot describes the gentle ripple of light and a flower’s shadow against a sheet of paper pinned to the wall, the paper covered in director Jaap Pieter’s notes on a series of video fragments he was watching.  In this simple setup we see cinematographic plans and schematics, if not a script, at one with (or perhaps shown up by!) the ephemeral happenstance of photographed life, light and shadow.  Attention to content drifts in perfect flux between deciphering the stoic notes on some unseen movie and the momentary silhouetted shapes and half-shapes across its face.  Ultimately—and perhaps where the effortless, unpretentious beauty of the film shines so strongly—the two are inseparable, script and aesthetics, content and light.

Walkway is the first Ken Jacobs video I’ve seen where the filmmaker’s termite-like quest to pull out and (re-) invigorate the manifold details in a given amount of film footage—often creating a stroboscopic 3-D effect as part of a mission to see through or around a piece of film—has sourced not an old stereopticon picture or a scrap of a silent film, but rather is from an original digital photograph by Jacobs.  It is, as the title says, of a walkway, a wooden boardwalk, flanked by leafy foliage that travels down the center of the frame before curving out of sight.  Like some age-old philosophical adage, in Walkway the path is always pursued but the end is never reached—no amount of Jacobs’ clever, jittery digital 3-Dification of the plentiful landscape and details of the photograph ever lets us see what’s around the corner, though they do expand, animate, roil, and otherwise make the path as endlessly malleable as the end destination is but imaginable.  Why go anywhere when all the fun can be had right here?  My favorite moment in this beautiful overload and overpursuit of a subject—Jacobs’ most endearing quality in his works like this—is an early close-up on a weed growing previously unnoticed in the center of the path.  Once Jacobs brings our attention to it, he also magically brings it to a plastic, embalmed kind of life, using his cyclopean strobe effect to trick our eyes into seeing this blade of grass as something with 3 dimensions, frozen in time momentarily as a sculpture rather than a photograph.

Single photographs get a different kind of life in Stephanie Barber’s Dwarfs the Sea, where still images of supposedly deceased sailors are presented to the camera, being placed one atop of another while a vaguely computerized female voice describes these men in precise but generalized details—he was a joker, they had a great friendship, I found him without empathy, etc.  Melville and Conrad would have loved Barber’s paean to the richness of character but supremely allegorical aspect of sailor personalities, and similarly Ford would see some of his Stagecoach in how a confined vehicle placed in the wilderness brings out the types of society, at once specific and universal.  A touching, human idea, presented just as it should be: simply.

Three films stood out from the Exercises in Film shorts program here at Rotterdam, each doing its busy best to crowd out and clutter the space cleared by Yoshida’s magnificent use of the wide frame in The 18 Roughs Who Stirred Up a Storm.  Tomonari Nichikawa’s hyperactive but oddly becalming flurrying montage of leaves and branches in stark black and white, Lumphini 2552, was a standout but I had already seen in Toronto, and which Michael Sicinski wrote about here.  New to me was when color came splashing in—though the correct term would actually be corroding and infecting—via Emmanuel Lefrant’s Parties visible et invisible d’un ensemble sous tension, where footage the filmmaker took of Africa in 2003 is optically printed on top of blank stock left buried in the earth to age and mold.  The result is barely recognizable even as photographed material, flickering colors play like out like inkstamps as positive and negative versions of the original footage and the underground stock merge and separate as layers on the final film.  Lefrant’s memories of his trip are thereby forever obscured, with the original value of his footage as records, recollections, and representations have been lost to the material fragility (and creative investigation) of film.

  Read More

So much collapse had filled the day—the flattened space and digital collage of Benning’s pixels, especially the exquisite, ink-drawing look of Ruhr’s 3rd shot of latticed leaves and branches; Brooks’s unendingly re-forming shapes and Ghost Alebgra’s drowsy mash-up of a Nature and History Channel nocturnal hybrid—that discovering the simplicity and factuality of Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II was palatably exciting, even if the film’s form and subject—the real time creation, cooking, and eating of 73 dumplings—sounds fit for pure formal exactitude.  A further description may exacerbate that possibility: in 130 minutes Liu cuts only 8 times, with each cut pivoting 45 degrees around the table (side, corner, side, corner) where the cooking takes place, altering the height or cant but otherwise paying strict adherence to the intimate geometric circle the camera draws.  But Oxhide II rides high on process, on the pleasure one takes in seeing things assembled, made, slowly come to together; parts fitted, vague shapes formed, function revealed.  A direct descendent may in fact be the no less communal nor less pleasurable seminal pseudo-real time doc by Eustache and Barjol on the slaughtering of a pig, Le couchon.

Using video and long lenses, the material subject of Oxhide II is less emphasized than the flat gestalt of the experience of cooking with Liu’s family, as indeed it is her mother, father, and the filmmaker herself who star as the dumpling makers and eaters.  The overall effect of the ingredients, their mixing, and the dinner table talk (which is more instructive than conversational) express character not through plot or dramatic dialog—the dramatic undercurrent of the video is maintained by rare dolops of discussion about the family's failing business—but through the sum total of gestures over time.  We get acquainted with the barely dramatized family almost entirely through watching how each family member cooks (or in Liu’s inexperienced case, tries to).  Faces are rare in the film, and so we take what we can get, which is a surprising amount, from the simple actions of kneading the dough, the filling of dumplings.  Remarkably, the digital look of Oxhide II removes the concreteness of the food, the table, the bodies—while you may be hungry upon leaving the theater (I sure was), it certainly isn’t the kind of movie where you can magically smell what’s on screen.  Video simply lacks the material there-ness of film, and Liu’s rigorous one-woman tour-de-force (acting, editing, shooting, directing, writing) compares better to Picasso’s flat, muddier looking cubism than to Ozu’s superficially similar cubic construction of celluloid 3-D space.  Despite being so strictly formalized, Oxhide II, like each shot of Ruhr, congeals forcefully into a poignant gestalt: a direct, honest, miniature epic on the totality of a meal with the Lius. Read More

Related Films

The Eighteen Who Stirred up a Storm

Dir Yoshishige Yoshida

1963 Japan

Oxhide II

Dir Liu Jia-yin

2009 China

9:30am may seem to early to watch James Benning’s first digital feature, Ruhr, but no amount of jet-lag or early morning grogginess can dispel the immediate, intuitively pleasurable sensory assault of the ones-and-zeros that open the film, an image of infinite mysteries between its curves and its lines, its modulation of greys, and the question of where the magic wind comes from.  It's the image that is quoted at the beginning of Matthew Flanagan’s terrific piece on Ruhr from last week, and immediately introduces the key themes of Benning’s documentary on the industrial Ruhr valley: absent workers and populace; barren industrial landscape; flux and flow of anonymous mechanized movement into and out of the frame; digital flatness that makes that movement and its relationship to real space and recorded time tenuous; and a great deal beyond this than the morning can register (read Matthew’s article here for a more in-depth look).

I mentioned force of impact when talking about Heng Yang’s use of video in Sun Spots to practically entomb his characters against a flat pictorial landscape, and Benning’s video, made up of 6 takes—tunnel, factory, forest outside of an airport, mosque, suburban road—which are relatively short compared to the hour-long 7^th and final image of steam billowing and receding from a smoke stack as the sun slowly sets, is just as physically arresting to watch for similar reasons.  Video may remove tactility and perhaps even weight from an image, but what it enhances is a totality, one that favors the long-take and the long shot.  Before the festival has barely begun the bar has been set astoundingly high for the way a movie’s content can be completely and dramatically changed when a filmmaker chooses to investigate and challenge the medium they are shooting in.  Shooting on digital is no simple technical or economic decision, it is video’s aesthetics and not its resolution or price that will assist a filmmaker and his or her vision.

  Read More

David Cairns:
The Forgotten: Slow Poison
The Forgotten: Death by Light
The Forgotten: The Phantom of Puberty
The Forgotten: The New Medium

Adam Cook
Abandoned Spaces: An Interview with Jeon Soo-il

Adrian Curry:
Movie Posters of the Year
Movie Poster of the Week: "Teorema"
Movie Poster of the Week: An Interview with "Funny Games" Poster Designer Akiko Stehrenberger
Movie Poster of the Week: "Robocop"
Movie Poster of the Week: "Shutter Island"

Daniel Kasman:
The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2009, Part III
Avatarcraft
Video Sundays: The Rhythm of the Night
The Art of the Trailer: "From Paris with Love"
Rotterdam 2010: Asian Excitement
Rotterdam 2010: Textures of the Morning

Glenn Kenny:
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Boom!" (Joseph Losey, 1968)
Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—8 January 2010
Tuesday Morning Foreign Blu-ray disc Report: "The Iron Petticoat" (Ralph Thomas, 1956)
Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—15 January 2010
Tuesday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Martin Scorsese: Courts-Metrages & Documentaires"
Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—22 January 2010
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Ishtar" (Elaine May, 1987)
Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—29 January 2010

Gabe Klinger:
The Best of the Decade...One Hundred Years Ago (First Installment)

Ryland Walker Knight:
Images of the Decade: Images
Images of the Decade: Words
Peeking Around Corners: Writing "A Letter to Uncle Boonmee" With Joe

Matthew Flanagan:
The Act of Seeing, Synthetically: James Benning's "Ruhr" (2009, USA)

David Phelps:
Two Train Top Heists

Stephen Sarrazin:
勝手にしやがれ #2: 10 Films Writing a Decade

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky:
What was Eric Rohmer?

Kurt Walker:
Abandoned Spaces: An Interview with Jeon Soo-il

I saw in the news the other day that China is producing the second most scientific research the world right now.  As a source of national pride and a new cadre and class of workers, I wonder why these scientists aren't the subject of more films, if at least in the crypto-thriller model of Rivette's Secret défense.  I don't much travel the festival circuit, but I assume the genre of feckless, barely employed, malaise-ing youth such as those featured in Heng Yang's second feature Sun Spots are a convention well past its expiration date, and perhaps relevancy.  Yet few films so precisely and deliberately, almost stubbornly and most certainly stunningly frame their youthful clichés in as stoic and minimal a grandeur as Yang's epic digital theater.  Actors and objects are mostly stuck in Sun Spots' foreground, with the world, flat and looming, nearly overpowering the three-dimensional aspect, minute in comparison, of the motorcycles, alcohol bottles and listless limbs that populate the video’s stage.

Yet with such a look, the film seems to have little to say; Sun Spots' youths are mopey and detached from the landscapes that imposingly pin them physically to the ground in front of us, but we get little sense of, say, the society of the kids, as Hou develops in the petty downtime of Goodbye South, Goodbye, or the local and historical context of Jia's superficially similarly pictorial Still Life.  The minimalism on display seems potentially a sly parody of a stultified setting and one-note everything, as Michael Sicinski has mentioned about the director's previous film, and the nihilist ending if not supports then at least suggests such a reading.  Yang's tack is purposefully provincial and mundane—the backdrops are less pedantic-document like Jia and have more an everyday, barrier-like sweep, giving a sense that anyone stuck in the town would inevitably end up emptily pondering the surroundings.  The characters’ willingness to contemplate, or perhaps more accurately, the actor’s direction to silently step in front of and look at  this small town for extended, single master-shot durations brings a welcome, if vague metaphysics to the video. But that doesn't necessarily excuse the tired small criminality of the lead boy, or the patently superficial incommunicativeness its lovers' spat.  The secrets of interiority, growing ever more cryptic as art cinema has moved from Rossellini's drama of the 50s to Antonioni's of the 60s, has hidden any sense of character, of psychology, even of social behavior behind the mask of the insolent, thick-headed ruffian youth, always presumably a portrait of the times.  But drained of this texture, this context, who's to care about them, or the awesomeness that surrounds their unliving lives?

If Sun Spots is cutting-edge contemporary Asian art house, pushing the master-shot school of the 80s and 90s across global reaches, getting closer to the likes of de Oliveira and Costa, Park Chan-ok's second feature, Paju, which opened the festival, is caught in a previous era of amorphous interior states, psychological repression, and formal ambiguity, staples of modernist cinema subsumed into serious mainstream drama.  The comparison was refreshing; Park's story of nestled flashbacks has a sustained note of expectant, cryptic melancholy that lends her modest melodrama an alluring, strange shadowside.  One man has three distinct but traumatically intertwined relationships with women over the years, yet Paju's story is focalized through several of its characters view points, aligning, finally in the movie’s second half, with the youngest girl.  She, unlike the other characters in Park's uneasy, switchback melodrama of buried emotional currents, has to grow up as she deals with the continual tragic outcomes of the narrative.  Pelted with odd story details—including an early stop at a small town Christian community, and a later focal point around urban development protest activism—deploying horrifying events with a shrugging nonchalance that tries to repress its shudder at narrative contrivances, and constantly fading to black to move around in time as the story’s characters register what's going on but fail to reflect on it, Paju's classically and classily low-key modernist storytelling counterbalances perfectly against Sun Spots' stultified content and force-of-impact style.

Related Films

Sun Spots

Dir Heng Yang

2009 China

Paju

Dir Park Chan-ok

2009 South Korea

Related Films

From Paris with Love

Dir Pierre Morel

2010 France

Related Films

Beau travail

Dir Claire Denis

1999 France

Le garçu

Dir Maurice Pialat

1995 France

One of the things James Cameron, one of the last American action-materialists in cinema, does well, and particularly so in Avatar, is marry elements of fantasy to elements of science-fiction.  The "avatar" concept literalizes this trait of the filmmaker's body of work.  In the film, humans lay in tanning bed-like virtual reality interfaces in order to control organic bodies partially grown from the user's DNA.  That's the science.  The fantasy is that the organic bodies they somehow project senses and temporary consciousness into are that of the indigenous humanoid race that inhabits an alien planet.  While the gist of the plot concerns a Marine avatar-user being converted over from the ideology of his corporate overlords—who are on the planet to ravage a natural resource—to the ideology of the tribal naturals, this $250 million picture is more directly conceptualized around the projection of its protagonist—and in turn the audience—from a science-fiction film into a fantasy world.

If the trailers for Avatar smacked of a movie that looked like a video game cut scene—with its hyper-intensive use of computer-generated expositional imagery one only sees in cinema in rare world-creating extravaganzas like Star Wars—the shock of the movie isn't just the extent of Cameron's vision of the alien planet, but that that vision is explained in the movie as an immersive virtual experience.  Mirroring the hackneyed capitalist-tech vs. tribal-environmental battles of ideology and violence that permeates the film's textual themes, Avatar's visual experience is equally about a militaristic science-fiction movie (calling back to Aliens) being subsumed by a computer-plastic fantasy (a progression Titanic hinted at).  The battles in the film, though obviously for the most part computer generated, affects the characteristics of this meta-and-textual conflict as the metal ships attempt to move, burn, and otherwise destroy the  World of Warcraft-style environment of simulated fantasy.  This fantasy is simulated on multiple planes as well: the indigenous life is viewed as liberal projection and conjecture by the corporate-military leaders; it is a mental-sensational fantasy of the avatar-users; it is entirely computer generated for the creation of Avatar; and finally it is a programmatic simulation of a capital vs. nature action-melodrama on the part of Cameron.

Which leaves us with perhaps the most self-reflexive blockbuster in history, though this does not equate to the most self-aware.  Hailed before even seen as a film (actually a video) which will change the way films are made or films are watched or whatever, the strongest current of energy eminating from Avatar is how the video both allegorically and metonymically stages its own existence as a movie in the  real world.  I hope that whoever it was who said that films are intrinsically allegories of their own productions has lived to see the age of the CGI blockbuster, wherein Avatar’s profound absence of exterior relevant subject matter turns its focus inward, exploring the very nature of the movie's self for over two and a half hours at the cost of untold hundreds of millions of dollars.  That the end is an escape from the material world into the fantastic, the plastic, the virtual—is this the supposed future of American films?

Related Films

Avatar

Dir James Cameron

2009 United States

With 2009 rounding to a close, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we thought we’d shake things up a bit. Last year we polled the contributors to The Notebook to find some general consensus on what movies everyone liked. For our 2nd Annual Writer’s Poll, we’re doing things differently.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2009—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2009 to create a unique double feature. Some writers chose their favorites of 2009, some chose out-of-the-way gems, others made some pretty strange connections—and some frankly just want to create a kerfuffle. All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2009 fantasy double-feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some of 2009's most interesting films into double features with movies of the past?

The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers' Poll: Part I | Part II | Part III

***

Zach Campbell:

Public Enemies (Michael Mann, USA) + Hollywood or Bust (Frank Tashlin, 1956)

Through a coincidence that has proved handy for this survey, I watched these on the same day in July—Mann’s in commercial release, Tashlin’s (unfortunately) on an old VHS dub, letterboxed.  Of course they’re worlds apart, tonally.  But Mann and Tashlin, for all their monumental differences, are in a few key respects comparable figures to the Hollywood of their time.  Both in their era are not-always-respected “auteurs” doing work that anyone with eyes & ears can see is a thing apart from other work of their time and place—yet, it is crucial to that time and place.  And they’re both filming projects, over and over, that are dumber than they are.  This is because—I would speculate—they comprehend the idiot savantism of Hollywood, but also use that as a point of departure, not arrival.  Both films indicate something about what might be worth paying attention to, in Hollywood cinema, as both system and as ground against which an individual can react.  And animals figure importantly into both as connective elements—be they “blackbirds” or Great Danes.

  Read More