The Auteurs

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.

Here’s a mantra that has served me well: “in Japan, the French New Wave is to cinema what Impressionism is to painting”. Except for Claude Chabrol, the other founding New Wave members—Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer—all became staples of the art house scene in Tokyo. This was due not only to the aesthetic impact of the movement on those filmmakers who would become the Japanese New Wave, but also to François Truffaut’s groundbreaking legwork, of coming regularly to Japan, up until 1983, to show his films, and to his relationship with critic and film specialist Koichi Yamada, who published a biography and memoir of time spent with the great director.

François Truffaut’s death shook the film community in Tokyo (in Domicile conjugal Truffaut had sealed the bond between him and Japan). Eric Rohmer’s passing away was commented upon by the specialized film press, while the daily papers, made up of business and media gossip titles, either listed key reminders of his career—including the Academy Award nomination for My Night at Maud’s screenplay—or simply acknowledged the fact.

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Related Films

My Night at Maud’s

Dir Eric Rohmer

1969 France

Yelena and Nikolay Renard's camera does not move once in Mama. There are no cuts within scenes. Not a single word is spoken. A man, absurdly obese, heads home, stopping once by a statue of a doe nuzzling a baby deer—to eat. At home, Mama waits, furious. Son arrives, she bathes and feeds him, making sure to rise, reach over and angrily tap a few grains of salt onto each bite of hard-boiled egg just before he shoves it in his mouth. The wide angle compositions, the duration and silence may conjure associative flashes back to Eastern European animation of the 60s and 70s or to Roy Andersson, only without the perfect palette gloss or overt humor. It's probably overreaching to suggest that, as a grotesque embodiment of maternal instincts gone awry, this man may stand in for a people nostalgic for state pampering. Regardless, this Russian feature, made for all of 8000 dollars, offers 71 minutes of oddly pleasurable discomfort—nowhere near as dark or challenging as, say, the work of Boris Mikhailov, but heading in that direction and stopping short, just this side of the truly dangerous.

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Related Films

Mama

Dir Nikolay Renard & Yelena Renard

2010 Russia

To the Sea

Dir Pedro González-Rubio

2009 Mexico

Vital Signs

Dir Sophie Deraspe

2009 Canada

Mundane History

Dir Anocha Suwichakornpong

2009 Thailand

The two disc set from Artificial Eye called "The Early Works of Eric Rohmer" features two of his Six Moral Tales, the shorts La boulangère de Monceau and La carriere de Suzanne. (In addition it contains Rohmer’s shorts Nadia á Paris and Charlotte et son steak, and his documentary on the Lumière brothers.) The Moral Tales, and much of the other miscellany, are handled quite well in the renowned domestic Criterion box set, so the picture I’d like to concentrate on from this set is Rohmer’s first feature (and his last for almost a decade) Le signe du lion, or The Sign of Leo. Rohmer’s known for his Four Seasons, his Comedies and Proverbs, and of course his Moral Tales. Le signe du lion, its title notwithstanding, would appear to be Rohmer’s sole Shaggy Dog Tale. Read More

Related Films

The Sign of Leo

Dir Eric Rohmer

1959 France

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.

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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

So the awards were presented at Sundance last night, and as Eugene Hernandez writes in his full report at indieWIRE, "Debra Granik's Winter's Bone led the US Dramatic Competition, taking both the grand jury prize and a special jury prize for screenwriting, while suspected player Blue Valentine was entirely shut out of the winners.... In the US Documentary Competition, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo led the winners, taking the grand jury prize." We've got a roundup on Restrepo here, and there's just enough time before heading off to Rotterdam to take a quick look at what the critics have been saying about Winter's Bone, whose next stop on the circuit is the Forum at the Berlinale. Read More

Related Films

Winter’s Bone

Dir Debra Granik

2009 United States

Restrepo

Dir Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington

2009 United States

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.

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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

Love Letters is the issue of Criticine that Alexis Tioseco was working on when he and Nika Bohinc were murdered last September. "One thing we knew, even on that first day of grief, was that Love Letters had to be completed," write Ben Slater and May Adadol Ingawanij. "As an editorial concept, it was such a pure distillation of all that Alexis had been doing up to that point in regards to his writing on Southeast Asian cinema. The bringing to light, the articulating of qualities overlooked, the explication of context - the understanding." The completed work is a profound tribute from a loving community. Read More

Related Films

Rapture

Dir Iván Zulueta

1980 Spain

Late Autumn

Dir Yasujiro Ozu

1960 Japan

Love Exposure

Dir Sion Sono

2008 Japan

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

Nothing too thrilling opening nationwide this week, so let's go local first and then overseas before running down the multiplex fare. Read More

Related Films

Visual Acoustics

Dir Eric Bricker

United States

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Dir Max Ophuls

1948 United States

Breathless

Dir Yang Ik-Joon

2008 South Korea

Movies I Would Have Seen At The Sundance Film Festival, With Bonus Feature Of Movies I Would Not Have Seen At The Sundance Film Festival, Had I Actually Gone To The Sundance Film Festival: Now that it no longer coincides with the Golden Globes, Sundance gives film bloggers some no doubt welcome time off from having to think about awards and such, which must be nice for those who actually go. For those who can't or don't actually go, it's a bit of a pickle, as all they are going to read about on other film blogs is this or that Sundance movie. I suppose I would have had to have gone and seen Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, but I don't know if I woulda liked it. As I get older, I tend more to enjoy films mit a plot. And this appears not to have much of one, just two interlaced accounts of a relationship, its beginning and end, imagine that. And a score from Grizzly Bear. What's with all these bands and such, and the names? Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, Animal Collective, Wolf Parade. Feh. The only one of the lot I got any use for is Wolf Eyes. I'd like to get a boom box so I can blast that band's collaboration with Smegma next time I'm on a film festival line and some clod says something like "I don't like films about bourgeois people."

Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter...where was I?

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Related Films

Blue Valentine

Dir Derek Cianfrance

2009 United States

Cyrus

Dir Jay Duplass & Mark Duplass

2010 United States

Buried

Dir Rodrigo Cortés

2010 Spain

The stark and gorgeous Japanese poster for Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Shutter Island eschews the one thing that has dominated the posters for the last four Scorsese features, and that’s the looming noggin of Leonardo DiCaprio. In anticipation of that film I thought I'd gather together some other foreign Scorsese posters, with the help of our friends at Posteritati.

Last year I wrote about Peter Strausfield’s superb woodcut designs for the Academy Cinema in London, but the holy grail for Strausfield collectors is his Mean Streets poster, one of which sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $11,400.

Mean Streets seems to have inspired more different designs than any of Scorsese’s films. Below we have two Italian and two Spanish-language posters (one Argentinian, not sure of the provenance of the one on the far right). Then one Czech and two Japanese Raging Bull posters, and three Polish posters: for Taxi Driver, New York, New York and an especially striking, and typically surreal, design for After Hours.

Related Films

Shutter Island

Dir Martin Scorsese

2010 United States

Mean Streets

Dir Martin Scorsese

1973 United States

"The 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) opened last night with the world premiere of South Korean director Park Chan-ok's Paju," reports Geoffrey Macnab for Screen. "The first Korean film to open the festival, Paju received a mixed response from the Rotterdam audience. A slow burning character drama with a complex narrative structure, it was not an obvious crowd pleaser although it was praised by some for its artistry." Read More

Related Films

Paju

Dir Park Chan-ok

2009 South Korea

Symbol

Dir Hitoshi Matsumoto

2009 Japan