The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 18, 2010 - 10:14 e - 1 Comment
1. Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000)
2. In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2001)
3. La libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001)
4. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
5. 13 Lakes (James Benning, 2004)
6. Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004)
7. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
8. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006)
9. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003)
10. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Honourable mentions: Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006); The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005); In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007); L’intrus (Claire Denis, 2004); Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005); Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006). See also the critics choices in The Decade in Review.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:18 e - Be first to Comment!
Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov (2002)
The last great master, in the Viscontian sense of European cinema. And one of the great digital artists, endowing digital with a Proustian impact. His films raise issues about preservation (of History, Art) and memory. I could equally well cite his magnificent film The Sun.
Black Book by Paul Verhoeven (2006)
Verhoeven makes at least one great film every ten years: after Flesh+Blood in the ‘80s and Showgirls in the ‘90s, and now, in the first decade of the new century, Black Book. He’s like a latter-day Robert Aldrich, an anachronistic monster still in fighting form.
Death Proof by Quentin Tarantino (2007)
Tarantino’s best film to date (although Inglourious Basterds is a delectable popularisation of his more experimental vein), Death Proof remains the most radical and original American film of recent years, even and especially in relation to Tarantino’s previous films, which I have never found completely convincing.
The Brown Bunny by Vincent Gallo (2003)
A meteoric and sublime film.
Our Beloved Month of August by Miguel Gomes (2008)
A tremendous film of cosmic dimensions, one that deals with a multitude of subjects and tells many stories but is about only one thing: life. It recalls the hedonistic masterpieces of Jean Renoir, to whom Miguel Gomes, after Jacques Rozier and a few others, is the new heir apparent. Gomes succeeds in making a highly structured film, whose mise en scène can encompass the unexpected, the accidental, and the simply human. According to Gomes and his crew, when making the film, everything that could go wrong, did so: casting problems, lack of funding, backing that disappeared… The actual shoot took place in two phases. In 2006, Gomes set off with a minimal crew and a 16mm camera to start filming in the heart of the Portuguese mountains. It soon became clear that nothing was working out as planned and shooting was halted, due to lack of money. Filming, under rather more normal conditions, resumed a year later when financing finally arrived. This two-step experience of shooting and scripting is finally revealed in Our Beloved Month of August: a documentary about a region and its inhabitants, a melodrama (in the strict sense of the term, thus, in song) about family histories and impossible love, and the comic section of the film within the film. The result is magnificent, enhanced both by the adventures of its making and Gomes’ artistic approach, with a very subtle and gradual slippage from documentary to fiction. The shooting of the film becomes a collective adventure, taking on the feel of what the director calls a “communist film.”
Birdsong by Albert Serra (2008)
With two official films (but God knows what else he’s hiding from us), Honor de cavalleria (2006) and Birdsong, Albert Serra has established himself as the finest cinematic discovery of the new century’s first decade, because his work is so completely unpredictable, sassy, and inspiring. Serra reinvents, solely through the force of his inspiration and determination, not a new way of making films, but the oldest, the most appropriate, the freest.
In Vanda’s Room (2000) by Pedro Costa
Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s fourth feature In Vanda’s Room, right from its earliest screenings, has become a kind of manifesto of modern, contemporary cinema, a truly “clandestine” masterpiece, at times intimidating in its formal magnificence, and yet also tangible proof of the urgency and power still possible in a form of cinema that is free, uncompromising, political and poetic. Cinema is all about encounters. Pedro Costa set himself up with a DV camera in Fontaihanas, a slum in the Lisbon suburbs, spending months filming Vanda, her sister Zita and a few others who are living in a state of almost total destitution and poverty. Vanda spends most of her time taking drugs, arguing with her sister, working in a paltry part-time job. The film has little to do with documentary, damning reportage or ethnological recording. The maniacal framing, compositions, the camera’s relentless fixity, bear witness to both a concern for absolute stylisation and total attention to the slightest accidents of reality. In Vanda’s Room is a work of art in which life burst into every shot. A punk heir apparent to Straub and Ozu, a bridge between a silent cinema aesthetic and the possibilities offered by digital in terms of light and running time, Costa is filming not so much despair as the resistance of a small community, forgotten by all, that survives in a kind of self-sufficiency, amidst getting high, dealing and prostration. Enclosed in a tiny room with his heroin-hungry heroine, Costa rediscovers the raw energy of early cinema, and revives the evocative power of a recording art. Blocs of images and time, Costa’s films do not seek to illuminate destitution, but rather to glorify the pride and rebellion of the have-nots, through an intensified realism and observation that opens up magical perspectives, close to voodoo trance.
The Host (2006) by Bong Joon-ho
As Memories of Murder intimated, The Host confirms that Bong Joon-ho as the best Korean filmmaker of his generation, and a story-teller of genius, able to reconcile in a single film the narrative and visual qualities of the work of William Friedkin, Sergio Leone and Steven Spielberg: political satire, monster movie, family melodrama, disaster film, in complete control of all these ingredients. The young Korean director succeeds in making the kind of popular, intelligent, moving, personal and spectacular film that Hollywood or Cinecittà might have produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In addition to The Host, I’ve liked a number of other science-fiction films of recent years Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, Frank Darabond’s The Mist, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen. But none of them achieves the emotional impact of The Host.
Los Muertos by Lisandro Alonso (2004)
A filmmaking approach that is pure recording of the world to take us into what is both an almost hallucinatory viewing experience and a metaphysical reflection on humanity. The youngest and wildest of the great modern filmmakers.
L’Anglaise et le Duc (2001) + Triple Agent (2005) + Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (2007) by Eric Rohmer
Over the past decade Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) has made a perfect trilogy of period films, in contrast to the subtle explorations of French society, its modalities, youth and language that he undertook in previous decades. The moral tales, the comedies and proverbs, the tales of four seasons, all are ethnological journeys through contemporary France.
With these three historical masterpieces, Rohmer turns to the past—although he enjoys getting all the linguistic and historical details right for the periods concerned—but these films are also demonstration of some of his theories about film in general and his own films. For Rohmer, classicism is modernity. He proves this with L’Anglaise et le Duc, a film that combines a story of counter-revolution with an aesthetic drawn from the great masters of silent cinema, (Murnau, Griffith) along with the use of digital and composited sets. Like Pedro Costa, Rohmer does not use digital for its manageability (it was Rohmer, who, before all the others, had worked out how to film so nimbly on 16mm) but for its fixity. Digital does not add extra naturalism, but instead an additional pictoriality. Rohmer is a compositional director, and the values of his shots recalls those of silent cinema and painting. With Triple Agent, Rohmer comes close to two directors he always admired but whose influence was not obvious in his own films: Hitchcock, and above all, Lang. This story about a couple and espionage, love and lies, combines history and conjugal suspense with a relentless sense of tragedy, and a darkness unusual in this filmmaker. This stupendous film turned out to be one of the director’s rare commercial and critical flops. Following two very dark films, the luminous Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is final proof of Rohmer’s modernity—even when he’s making a scrupulous adaptation of one of the longest novels in French literature, Honoré d’Urfé’s l’Astrée, a pastoral romance published in the 18th century and set in an imaginary 17th century Gaul. The film’s eroticism and sensuality, the glorification of the beauty of youthful flesh have nothing salacious about them but once again underscore the pictorial qualities of a filmmaker who has been too long associated with wordiness and filmed dialogue.
I could of course add other major films to this list, already published in Cahiers du Cinéma, such as Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses secrètes, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Terrence Malick’s The New World, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou … It would be redundant to point out that thanks to the creative ebullience of new directors from all over the world, the magnificent perseverance of the great masters (Oliveira, Chabrol, Im Kwon-taek, Straub-Huillet) and the self-destruction of the false values so widely promulgated at the end of the 20th century, this new century’s first decade has given me greater cinephilic pleasure than the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Olivier Père is artistic director of the Locarno International Film Festival.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:17 e - Be first to Comment!
If the films were classified in order of preference, In Vanda’s Room would occupy first place. It’s by chance that Costa’s film tops a chronological ordering: of the ten cited, it is undoubtedly the only one whose importance can be immediately measured against the scale of cinema history. In Vanda’s Room launched a new epoch, imposed a new barometer against which subsequent films would be measured, whether or not they chose to be. Saying so is not assuming that there is but one history of the cinema, a linear, unequivocal understanding of the art and its possibilities. On the contrary, the history of art is an anachronic tissue made of leaps, survivals, retakes (or reappearances), and the contemporaneity of several evolutions, which are sometimes contradictory. But if one must invent and imagine a history, then certain films distinguish themselves by their critical strength, in the double sense of “crisis” and “decision.” Within the dark light of In Vanda’s Room, all of the cinema from the ‘00s appears to be in crisis, divided between the repetition ad nauseam of old industrial and/or auteurist formulas, and the chance, that Costa indicates, of a path toward a new beginning.
This new beginning is paradoxical. It’s a return to the origin, but not a tabula rasa. The invention of a new primitivism, of a new elementary simplicity, without denying the legacy of a century of cinema and the arts. On the contrary, this history has blended in the very matter of the image, it survives like a ghost, it illuminates from afar like an original constellation—in opposition to quotation, detours, and other malicious and morbid games from the two previous decades. More than a return to the origin, it’s a return of the origin, of its native power.
Certainly the advent of digital filmmaking would have hastened this new beginning, making manifest the image’s plastic and material information, permitting new practices, upsetting the economy of films. There also, Costa is first to fully use digital shooting in order to reinvent, from a sumptuous poverty, a chronicle in small scale (In Vanda’s Room), and in epic scale (Colossal Youth, which like Où gît votre sourire enfoui? would have figured on the list if space was not needed for others).
Three other filmmakers displayed this impulse.
Jean-Claude Rousseau: His last and most beautiful film shot in Super 8, La Vallée close, was released in 2000, as if to pass the baton to Costa and to DV; eight years and numerous films later, De son appartement regains, in miniature and DV, the cosmological music of La Vallée close.
In Honor de cavalleria (2006), Albert Serra saves the honour of an epic tradition by cupping together Sancho’s earth and Quixote’s sky; burlesque and mystical, darkness and digital blow-outs.
Pierre Creton, finally, the least known of the three. FID Marseille was the first festival to show his films, and they showed them all. (While most festivals have merely maintained a cultural routine of international auteurism, FID was one of the rare ones, during the decade, to lead the way, to ask not what is current, but what is contemporary—as Agamben means it: “the real contemporary is one who does not perfectly coincide with its time, nor adheres to its pretentions, and defines himself, in this sense, as atemporal.) Rarely straying from his native Normandy, making his films alone, in DV, with the help of a few friends, Creton films what is closest at hand (his house, his neighbourhood, the peasants with whom he works, flowers, animals), finding in that which is furthest away (the cruelty of Bataille, Blanchot’s exhaustion, time lost and regained). In L’heure du Berger (2008), methods of waiting, of capturing the most minimal of events, are interwoven within mise en scènes ritualized through intimacy and friendship. As in Rousseau, an elemental eroticism governs the films, attracts and draws closer certain shots, the images and sounds, scattered, with open volumes and infinite resonances. A cinema of intimacy, but counterculture to today’s diary film, for which DV has opened the floodgates: objects of narcissism, navel-gazing, the “small affair,” as Deleuze used to say. The intimate, in Creton’s films, is never acquired: it only has worth because of what haunts it, and what makes and unmakes it.
The Brown Bunny, Death Proof, RR (2008): An American trilogy of the elementary, three films that rub up against the archaic and the modern to the point of creating sparks, alighting the final reels of celluloid.
Tropical Malady (2004): An origin regained of the tale and of belief.
The Sun (2005): Some of the most beautiful films of the decade were born of an ephemeral meeting: that of the digital and the photographic. Stemming from this anachronism, Sokurov changed the image of history.
Quei loro incontri (2006): “Only he who perceives in what is most modern and most recent, the signs or signature of archaism can be contemporary…In this sense, being contemporary signifies returning to a present where we’ve never been.” (Giorgio Agamben). In 2010, three years following the death of Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub remains the most contemporary of filmmakers.
Cyril Neyrat lives and films in Rome, teaches in Geneva, and writes in various places. He used to write for Cahiers du Cinéma and was the editor of Vertigo.
Translated by Andréa Picard.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:17 e - Be first to Comment!
The best science-fiction film of the ‘00s is Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008)—the next great science-fiction film of that decade is Silent Light (2007). The interesting thing is that both are set in Mexico. But Silent Light is about aliens in an alien world, and Sleep Dealer is about humans in a post-human world. Rivera, a Peruvian-born digital-media artist who is currently based in NY, not only attempts to imagine the terminal point for a form of humanity that the neo-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri designated as “the multitude” (the workers of our globalized, post-industrial moment), but it also processes science-fiction cinema in the neoliberal period—which, as David Harvey points out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, began in the mid ‘70s and is alive and (not so) well today. Sleep Dealer is kind of a small-budget remix of big-budget space/future spectacles. The appropriators have been appropriated.
To fully appreciate Sleep Dealer’s processing/remixing/appropriation, we must open it up and, one by one, examine the films in its complicated but brilliantly built system.
Sleep Dealer begins with Star Wars (1977)—the first major science-fiction film of the neoliberal movement. Like George Lucas’ film, Sleep Dealer is about a country boy, Memo, whose family and village are destroyed by the dark forces of empire. The young man leaves the village and enters a bigger city, Tijuana, on the Mexican/American border. But whereas Luke Skywalker becomes a fighter pilot for the rebels against empire, Memo becomes a post-industrial worker for an empire that has resolved not only the problem of cheap labour but also immigration—a Mexican can work in the US without physically being in the US.
The city segment of Sleep Dealer processes three big chunks of Blade Runner (1982): urbanism in the post-national moment (no army, just policing); corporate power that’s glorified by glass towers; and the status of memory in a world that is completely commodified. Soon after settling in the city, Memo meets Luz, a woman who’s the reverse of Blade Runner’s Rachel—in Rachel’s case, it becomes more and more clear that her memories aren’t real; in Luz’s, her memories are less and less real because she sells them on the Web. And it’s not so much the selling of her memories that is diminishing their substance (or truth, or aura), but that the market forces pressure her to invent memories that are desirable, that will attract buyers.
The darkest suggestion in Blade Runner—that the corporation is manufacturing police officers—becomes the core concern in RoboCop (1987), the next film in Sleep Dealer’s system. In RoboCop, however, a tension still persists between the privatization of policing and its traditional role as a public service; in Sleep Dealer this tension has been completely resolved by the collapse of policing and military power into one function: the protection of contracts, property, and the interests of the global elite.
The least expected film in Sleep Dealer’s system is WALL*E (2008). This strangeness stems from the fact that Rivera didn’t see WALL*E, which was completed in the same year, before making his own film. Yet, the robots in both films are similar, perhaps attributable to something like Walter Benjamin’s correspondence—they are expressions of the same cultural pressures or environment. Above all, what the robots have in common is a soul—one from within, WALL*E; the other, from without, Sleep Dealer. Memo ensouls his robot, which works at a construction site in a big US city, but in the end his robot is very much like WALL*E, who works in a deserted US city. This element links the films to one of Hegel’s most celebrated assertions: only by labour, by building a human world, does the slave gain self-recognition—a soul.
The last important film in Sleep Dealer is The Matrix (1999). This film shapes its heart, and that heart is revolution. But the revolution in The Matrix is essentially empty. The humans are fighting for the right to live not as happy batteries but to live in depressing caves and to eat horrible food—meaning, they are fighting for their dignity. The revolution in Sleep Dealer is not for an idea (being human and free) but for actual resources—water, food, land. There’s lots of fantasy in Sleep Dealer, but it never loses its connection with the hard facts of life.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:16 e - 1 Comment
It’s not often that one would write about a film while it’s still in the middle of its first screening. But as it turns out, one of my favourite movies of this decade—a movie that’s also one of my favourites of the ‘90s, ‘80s, and ‘70s—offers no other choice. I’m speaking of Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movie 12/17/72. It’s a film from his seminal Yellow Movies series. And it’s a film that, over 37 years into Act I, crystallizes so much of what is vital in recent cinema.
The film is a single rectangle of cheap white flat interior latex paint inside a black matte frame on paper. And from the moment of its creation, the film began to “screen” and has run continually ever since, describing, with ever increasing clarity, a trajectory of yellowing and decay.
The film, along with 20 or so others from the series, was first shown in 1973 at the Millennium Film Workshop in New York—a single evening screening, modestly attended. But it wasn’t until the 2005 Lyon Biennale that the films would again be made available for public reception. Soon thereafter, the films were shown again at Daniel Buchholz in Cologne and Greene Naftali in New York. At last, in this decade, the films were received by a broad audience.
One can argue that the cinema of the iterative began with Ozu. We could look at any number of earlier reference moments, but a favourite has always been the grandfather clock shot in Late Spring (1949). And for Ozu such moments arose naturally, an outcropping of both his Shintoism and his embrace of a certain quintessential Japanese-ness. Such ideas would then be taken up by the Italian neorealists, although in their case as an affect system, as a way of re-invigorating theatrical approaches with aspirations towards verisimilitude. And later came a more visceral strain of Conceptualists—Henry Flynt, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and others including Conrad—who sought a more physical, sensory engagement. And from this school there arose arrayed approaches to implied duration. A transformative experience for me was the discovery of the recording Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume 1: Day of Niagara (1965)—a flooring performance by The Theater of Eternal Music, a group comprised of Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise, and John Cale.
Many works of this period could be seen as engagements with time, as pieces with distinctly marked points A and B. (Think: Young’s The Black Record, with its clean-cut time-stamping, as an especially pronounced example.) And while many such works asked us to imagine engagements with duration, I’m not aware of any work that defines a true longue durée with the force and assuredness of Yellow Movie 12/17/72. As a wide-open field, it’s an act of supreme generosity, bestowing a trust of imagination upon its audience. And in its nod towards perpetuity, as a work that cannot be fully consumed by any individual in any single lifetime, it speaks to the humility of pondering something larger than ourselves.
One of the most vital cinematic strains of the last decade has been that of filmmakers with the ability to train their vision (and their hearing) with hyper-selectivity of image. We can think of such filmmakers as Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sharon Lockhart, and Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, or the continuing work of Jean-Marie Straub and James Benning’s four-decade practice of “listening and seeing.” And it would miss the point to think in terms of movements. Because movements are simply acts of time. They define periods. But in our experience with the Everyday and in our helplessness against an ever-increasing bombardment of imagery, engagements with the quietude of pure time extend beyond aesthetics. They become acts of health. And they become acts of urgency. This is a duration. And we’re in it for the long haul.
Now certainly there is much more at work in Yellow Movie 12/17/72 (and in the work of the aforementioned filmmakers) than simple engagements with the Observational. In Conrad’s case we could speak of medium-specificity/materialism/Institutional Critique/economics/comedy/etc. And the power of the work is that it speaks to each with equal focus. Much in the way that Jack Goldstein’s MGM (1975) describes the unrelenting domestic hegemony of American industrial entertainment production, Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies describe a vital and still unrelenting resistance.
C.W. Winter is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:16 e - Be first to Comment!
One of the most important filmic events of the decade was Wang Bing’s monumental West of the Tracks, which changed the way we look at documentary, social reality, and Chinese cinema. From December 1999 to the spring of 2001, Wang and his sound engineer Lin Xudong stayed at their own expense in the Ti Xie industrial district in Shenyang (Liaoning Province) to document the slow death of an industrial complex that had been a temple of China’s triumphant advance toward industrialization. As the factories are closing and the workers laid off, Rainbow Row, a working-class neighbourhood, is being slated for demolition and its residents forcibly displaced. To complete the film, Wang had to break free of his promising career as an award-winning television documentarian, learn how to spend time within a given architectural and social space, and eventually find his way to the international production/exhibition/ distribution circuit. West of the Tracks received completion funds from the Hubert Bals Foundation, was shown by about every significant film festival, and was even blown up to 35mm and released theatrically by the French distributor MK2.
Going beyond the tropes of the Sixth Generation, West of the Tracks nevertheless defines the apex of a trend that developed in the post-Tiananmen ‘90s: independent art films produced in China which received praise abroad but were shown neither theatrically nor on television in their home country. However, due to the proliferation of illegal DVDs and the use of the internet, West of the Tracks has had an immense influence upon Chinese filmmakers. Wang Bing helped redefine the use of small, portable digital cameras in an epic context, especially through his reinvention of the tracking shot: simply walking about while carrying his camera. An intimate extension of the body of the filmmaker, the camera keeps him offscreen, but tantalizingly close to the frame. At the same time, Jia Zhangke, the second most influential Chinese indie filmmaker, was writing essays to champion DV as a way of liberating Chinese cinema—at the time, digital works were not subject to the three-tier censoring system of the Film Bureau (the situation is currently in flux)—and started producing the work of young filmmakers.
West of the Tracks takes its time, for the message it delivers is grave: not only is the “orthodox” socialist mode of development, based on heavy industry, obsolete, but the new groups in power are actively betraying those who built socialism in the first place. Building “New China” has been replaced by the politics of chaiqian (demolish and move), and young filmmakers followed suit to document the ruins which emerged in its wake. Wang Bing’s post-socialist heroes are the workers who keep going to a derelict factory where there is no money to pay them, or the residents of Rainbow Row stoically clinging to their dwellings after water and electricity have been shut off. Jia’s protagonists are kids pursuing their Unknown Pleasures (2002) while factories in their small town are closing; displaced workers who help demolish the soon-to-be-flooded cities of the Three Gorges area in Still Life and Dong (2006); and airplane engine builders who witness the crumbling of their dreams in 24 City (2008).
Even in fiction, filmmakers show real ruins, which in turn echo the dislocation of post-socialist lives. Shooting out of Sichuan, Ying Liang and Peng Shan go deeper and deeper in exploring the interaction between real estate/corporate greed and the destruction of the social and ecological environment in Taking Father Home (2005), The Other Half (2006), and Good Cats (2008). Emily Tang goes from a melancholy meditation on empty university dorms after Tiananmen Square in Conjugation (2001) to a sharp mise en scène of the uprooting of young women in Perfect Life (2008). And it’s no accident that the beacon of a new queer culture, Cui Zi’en, would spend months documenting the efforts of a school for migrant children to survive on a construction site in We are the… of Communism (2007). From the cinematic representation of ruins, new groups of filmmakers are emerging—beyond the numerous documentaries chronicling the effects of chaiqian on specific neighbourhoods, women and gay filmmakers as well are asserting their voices, not only helping to salvage scrap from the rubble but opening new perspectives as they do so.
Bérénice Reynaud teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, where she is also co-curator for the Film/Video Series at REDCAT.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:15 e - Be first to Comment!
Every contender for a “best-of” list should be seen more than once. First impressions aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. And if you care about accuracy and fairness, films not commercially distributed should be given as much consideration as widely available ones. As I was unable to view all of my “contenders” multiple times, I can’t pronounce ten best. So I offer here some of the most accomplished, original and enjoyable films of the ‘00s, eight of which I saw twice.
I doubt Sam Green’s short documentary Lot 63, Grave C (2006), about the forgotten victim of a notorious murder, could have been more hard-hitting at feature length. Focusing on archival material and a kind-hearted cemetery caretaker, Green expertly structures minimal material to craft a lament for Meredith Hunter, the young man who was murdered on camera at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969.
Pat O’Neill conducts a multi-layered orchestra of images with a decades-old optical printer in Horizontal Boundaries (2008); his unsurpassed mastery of labour-intensive pre-digital effects is tempered by his wonderful sense of cinematic humour, often played out through sound/image relationships. With Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), Peter Tscherkassky has created an electrifying experience and a challenge to cinema itself. Employing a simple light source, found footage and no camera he reveals multiple competing actions from a Sergio Leone western, creating new collisions and meanings between dueling men and machines.
Unlike their more strenuously monumental brethren, subtle, intimate films with lifelike pacing and common themes leave me thankful and energized, rather than traumatized and exhausted. Chronicling the daily life and personal struggles of a family of sheepherders, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan (2008) has the most striking “choreographed” long takes I’ve seen in ages. Play Pause (2007) by Sadie Benning brings alive the everyday in an urban neighbourhood with the barest of elements; her dual-screen montage of simple drawings feels like a private masterpiece.
The ever-so-common theme of love seems to have risen from the dead. Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) exemplifies the self-doubts of artists—and that much-abused adage “burning with desire”—without the trappings of most biopics, those bombastic life stories on fast forward. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s recreation of his parents’ first meeting, Syndromes and a Century, the two-part structure eloquently embodies young love and the fantasies we call memory. In Laida Lertxundi’s Footnotes to a House of Love (2007), the compositions of lovers in the sun and a desert house suggest the edge between film’s off- and onscreen space, appropriately tantalizing.
When filmmakers’ inventive works derive from personal experience, the generosity of emotional honesty and risk can help a viewer let down their own guard. Jeanne Liotta’s years-long 16mm meditation on the night skies Observando el cielo (2007) gives us a minimal yet vast space to have our own existential experience. Water, skin, and a red umbrella make your heart sink in Leighton Pierce’s Viscera (2005), his ephemeral meditation on a loved one’s absence. Phil Solomon’s Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007) evokes a quiet and solitary experience of contemplating death, miraculously enough with the “cutaways” of a violent video game.
Not only is Persepolis (2007) by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud one of the most accomplished recent animation films, but Satrapi’s story of growing up under one of the world’s most repressive and misogynist regimes is also one of film’s most affecting portraits of a family’s conflicts, sorrows and devotion. Another great animation of the decade is Martha Colburn’s subversive, experimental Cosmetic Emergency (2008).
I mostly prefer formally inventive and/or patient films that leave my consciousness intact while I watch them, but I also love a good escape. Unrivaled as a nail-biting thriller, The Orphanage (2007) by Juan Antonio Bayona also has one of the most convincing depictions of parents coping with the loss of a child, and of the child-mother bond. (Why must there be a Hollywood remake of this perfect film?) Other superb fiction films from the last decade are Whale Rider (2002), Mysterious Skin, Eugène Green’s Le pont des Arts (both 2004), The Host, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Science of Sleep (all 2006), The Edge of Heaven, Lust, Caution, Eastern Promises, and There Will Be Blood (all 2007).
Jennifer Reeves is a New York-based filmmaker. Her films include The Time We Killed and When It Was Blue (2008).
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:14 e - Be first to Comment!
Seven hundred words aren’t many to fillet the best from a decade, especially when you’d like to use some of them to discuss how archival DVD releases are helping to demolish the institution of film criticism. Maybe we can get to that topic in a future issue, but for now—best crack on.
In September 2004 I curated a program of three shorts for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons & Tigers series, comprising Hirabayashi Isamu’s Textism, Kim Gok and Kim Sun’s Light and Class, and Chen Jieren’s Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph. I gave the program the overall title Deaths and Transfigurations, less to invoke Richard Strauss than to suggest that all three films share an interest in redefining mortality. For example, Chen’s indelible film (originally intended for a gallery installation but screened conventionally in Vancouver) dramatizes a public execution in Qing Dynasty China in which the naked victim is first smeared with anaesthetizing opium tincture and then slowly hacked to death, apparently experiencing something akin to ecstasy. The photograph of the original event provoked an essay by Georges Bataille, and has lately been taken up and falsified in the repellent 2008 horror movie Martyrs—a Franco-Canadian co-production which is, incidentally, a flea on the mercifully thick hide of Pasolini’s Salò (1975) and one of the more contemptible recent examples of French intellectual posturing.
I’d be happy to pick any of the three great films in the Deaths and Transfigurations program as a “Best of the Decade” but I’ve opted for Hirabayashi’s Textism, bearing in mind that whatever’s left of the 700 words could easily go to describing it in all its complex intensity, never mind getting to grips with what it does or how it does it. The film comprises three chapters, titled Text 01, Text 02, and Text 03. In all three, the texts in question appear as bilingual captions (Japanese and English) over the images and are also heard on the soundtrack, spoken (in English) in three different “voices” created by a computer speech-simulation program of the kind used by the blind. The first sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking’s speech-synthesizer; none of them sounds at all like Kubrick’s HAL, although the notion of a machine having an identity is germane.
The three texts are radically different from each other. The first is a ruminative confession from an elderly academic; these turn out to be his last words. The second is a piece of corporate flam from a sinister property developer, the Okuma Group, congratulating a purchaser on investing in an as-yet-unbuilt apartment in an unusual tower-block to be called Sky Bear Shinkiba. The third is a voice from the grave: a first-person report on what survives in the period of limbo between physical death and cremation. I can’t describe the images that accompany these texts without spoiling the film’s element of surprise, but I can say that the texts come from the conceptual space marked out by Hollis Frampton in the (nostalgia) (1971) voiceovers and Alfred Leslie in his use of texts by the late Frank O’Hara in Birth of a Nation 1965 (2008) and many other films. I doubt, though, that Hirabayashi is aware of any precedents in what P. Adams Sitney used to call the New American Cinema, and anyway both his texts and the way he deploys them (sometimes drifting slightly out of sync with the spoken versions, to curiously poignant effect) are heroically original, not to say unique in their dry wit.
I can’t claim that Hirabayashi reinvents film language in the way that Liu Jiayin did in Oxhide (2005), but what he achieves in 11 minutes is absolutely comparable with what Borges did with the short-fiction form. The film’s concision and its seemingly limitless poetic allusiveness match an encyclopaedic range of reference, a Joycean ability to inhabit different voices and a philosophical ear for the interconnectedness of the sacred and the profane. All this, plus the gutsiness of a Sam Fuller movie. Of course it’s the best of the decade, no contest.
Textism is released on the Japanese DVD openArt short film selection #2: Heart on the Epic Records label, serial number ESBW1825. The disc also contains Andrea Arnold’s Wasp and five other films.
Tony Rayns was awarded the Foreign Ministry of Japan’s Commendation in 2008 for services to Japanese cinema.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:14 e - Be first to Comment!
Hong Sang-soo’s most recent film, Like You Know It All (2009), begins with a filmmaker arriving at a film festival in Korea, where he’s supposed to serve on the jury. Hong’s basic plots are usually triggered by his memories, and so some people call him a Proustian director, while others prefer Rohmerian, due to his portrayal of talkative relationships between unmarried people. And because he’s so Proustian and Rohmerian, people say he’s a French director, but I’ve never met anyone who’s struck me as so Korean (although I always think Koreans are always tremendously Korean, while Canadians aren’t all that Canadian).
At the beginning of the last decade I arrived in Pusan to serve on the film festival’s jury. Hong Sang-soo was also there. What I didn’t know is that I was entering a Hong Sang-soo movie. We smoked, ate fish, and drank soju like in his movies and, in the end, gave an award to Jealousy Is My Middle Name (2002), a film made by Park Chan-ok, a female former student and assistant of Hong’s; the film’s most unlikeable character is closely based on him. At the time, I didn’t know that, but two years later I did and, again in Pusan, while drinking in a restaurant and playing rock-paper-scissors with Hong and some of his friends, I asked about Park Chan-ok. Hong exploded in anger. “She should be more daring and have a life!” he yelled. I replied (everybody was a little drunk, I confess), “But she was daring enough to make a film about you!” Hong’s friends died laughing.
I’ve never had a serious conversation with the man since. Now that ten years have passed, and I am almost completely out of the film-festival circuit, those Pusan memories strike me as a remarkable experience. In the new century, South Korean cinema emerged onto the international stage, and Hong was one of the names that proved that the phenomenon was greater than a few films’ massive domestic box-office success. Somehow in the margins of the Korean wave exists this absolutely unique filmmaker whose films and daily life are so hard to separate. “I make films about myself, because that is the only subject I know about,” says director Kim in Like You Know It All. “I don’t make films that look pretty.” But Hong is not in the business of documentaries, not even in the twilight zone where it overlaps with fiction. Even if his films are absolutely accurate about social and psychological issues, and no one has portrayed modern South Korea and its contradictions in such a realistic way, the true source beyond them is more than personal experience—a sort of mathematical imagination, constructing plots based on the idea of the double, the ghost, the other side.
Hong is the king of number two: two men for a women (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 2000), two women for a man (Woman on the Beach, 2006), two chapters in a male-female relation (Turning Gate, 2002), two films in one (Tale of Cinema, 2005), two filmmakers (Like You Know It All), two countries (Night and Day, 2008), two everything. In his films, almost every character, location, plot twist, and love affair have an alternative. Being true, being honest—as I recall hearing Hong’s angry speeches about cinema—is the only thing that matters to him, but at the same time, the truth is never there: it’s a phantom. The secret of his filmmaking is staying true to the false: that’s why his characters chase truth like a mirage that’s always changing place and shape. That formal device is what makes his films so similar, yet so fresh and so free. Hong’s tales of male hysteria and female madness—those sad-funny stories where everybody cheats on themselves—is an organic labyrinth where all paths cross and destiny can go all ways at each crossroads, though the same sense of loss and frustration lies at the end of every path. And there’s no way out of this nightmare because the world is not a Platonic Avatar but a Hong Sang-soo film.
Quintín is a former critic and festival director, now based in a more or less Hong-style beach resort in Argentina.
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The Decade In Review - by cscope - March 16, 2010 - 19:13 e - Be first to Comment!
A decade of remembering (or, Avant que j’oublie) Literally. Or the fear of forgetting. From Godard’s elegiac Éloge de l’amour (an anguished apologia for the ramshackle installation to come—another of the decade’s most memorable moments strewn amid the ruins of abandoned thought), perhaps the most poignant and prescient statement of the ‘00s (one plus one), not only for cinema and celluloid (like the unworldly, threatened, twilight beauty of Tacita Dean’s Kodak [2006]) but for Western civilization as it once was, culture and humanity writ large; a 40-year sequel to Pierrot le fou (1965), where ideas and words flout, flounder, flourish, flirt, with the windshield wipers still pathologically ticking back and forth, as the sea draws us in with the crashing of Courbet’s waves harbouring “le naufrage d’un sourire”, a shipwreck, or a ruin. What will youth bring, this Juventude em marcha? Les jeunes, Gilbert Jeune, tickets déjeuner, etc…the idea of starvation stuck to the window of a restaurant as an image of Simone Weil, solemn and resigned fills the screen. It’s an odyssey for Edgar (Degas, and all the others), who may or may not arrive at a joyless happiness (as predicted by Max Ophüls) when the quest of an origin is necessarily the origin itself. Memory. A lesson from Bergson, Godard, or Straub. “There can be no resistance without memory and humanism”: Peter Watkins’s gritty, muddy Brechtian costume bath La Commune (Paris, 1871); Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s final, breathtaking collaboration of resistance in the midst of collaboration in L’itinéraire de Jean Bricard (2008), with memorial plaques resting amid tall grasses, like the rain-soaked commemoration fountains in Éloge’s already bygone Paris, or the numerous civil rights and labour movement markers masquerading officiously across the US in Profit motive and the whispering wind (2007).
And love? Three Times. The sheen and shimmer of Shu Qi’s turquoise pant leg, the lacquered, cloistered world of a turn-of-century brothel glimmering by candlelight and the epileptic fits of a bisexual goth singer, whose past lives amount to a “creature that exists because of the memories of others,” like the wild cat in Apichatpong’s quietly brazen Tropical Malady. More love. As in Syndromes and a Century, where family memories form the basis of something magical, nearing myth and make-believe. Oxhide I and II (reality TV with no trace of TV, depicting the real-time handmaking of leather satchels and green-onion infused dumplings) is the family saga one hopes to see live on for an eternity and a day. There was love as memory in Le genou d’Artemide (2007), and the triumph of love everlasting in Le streghe, femmes entre elle (2009), Irène (2009), and Les plages d’Agnès (2008); the pain and tumult of it all in Je rentre à la maison (2001), L’Anglaise et le duc, Ne touchez pas la hache (2007), Everyone Else, Millennium Mambo (2001) (the kids are not okay) and Café Lumière (the kids are okay).
Through brittle, embattled transition and contemporary wreckage (Still Life; 24 City; Alexandra, 2007; Lazarescu), drugs, decay and demolition (In Vanda’s Room, Colossal Youth, Police, Adjective), environmental sublimation (care of James Benning, Peter Hutton, and Lisandro Alonso), memory returns to the fore over and over again. A jigsaw of remembrance of time past, of time collapse, ellipses, fissures, of soot-dusted haze (Platform; La captive, 2000; Les amants réguliers, 2005; Los muertos, Gerry, 2002; The Headless Woman, 2008; Eccentricities of a Blond-Hair Girl, 2009) that, in many instances, reminded us why Eglantine left Perceval. Rohmer, of course, always knew why.
Where once decried for its slight, simplicity, “le bleu du ciel,” which gave Anna Karina’s Marianne an extra spring in her carefree step, at last receives its ode now that the “time of sayings” is long over (“c’est fini le temps des phrases”). Words are no longer words; they float in limbo, somewhere between meaning, SMSes and silence—the latter a call to the wild of tradition (say, more Pickpocket than Matrix). To hearken back to the elemental, to the sky and sea, to the expanding, bottomless abyss that concludes Jacques Nolot’s wrenching, writhing, and naked Avant que j’oublie (2007), a black sphere that contains life, death and everything in between, and swallows up the screen like a conflagration of extinction. It was a decade of requiems, for love, memory, the cinema (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and the cruel ordinariness of time’s passing.
Andréa Picard is programmer at TIFF Cinematheque, curator of Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a regular contributor to Cinema Scope.
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