I’ve started and stopped this review so many times it’s like I’m practicing Kegels while peeing. Fitting, too, considering my subject, a fictionalized documentary (think THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES) about its own crew searching for inspiration to film the outright fiction of its last act after a dead financier imperils the project, all of us—me, director Miguel Gomes, the fictional characters played by a fire warden and a hockey player he finds in central Portugal—spinning our wheels until we discover how to adapt to our obstacles and get on with our lives, or art, which are so inextricable in OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST that you wonder if Gomes’ creation myth is as fabricated as the naturalism he so carefully cultivates in the editing bay, like a homeless-looking actor’s spectacularly disheveled coif. Whatever the factual truth, the film’s as dry as sandstone and just as porous, sparking less in the regional portrait of its ostensible documentary or the 35 SHOTS OF RUM-style family drama of its film-within-the-film than in the twilight between, a self-conscious odyssey into the frustrating transcendence of creating art.

While nobody ever so much as blinks onscreen lest that be interpreted as a big ole wink, the cast—comprised of the working crew from Gomes on down to his casting director and the residents and tourists floating about the summer music festival they’ve chosen to film, all playing themselves and some playing other characters—sprouts two breakout stars. The first is Sónia Bandeira, the aforementioned fire warden who spends her days dancing and singing and patiently searching for something that may or may not be on her horizon until, at the very moment Gomes spots his own spark, she becomes our lead, Tania, a young girl falling for her cousin, a cute young hockey player cast as her bandmate/romantic hero, while inching away from her widower father, played by a producer. It’s such a delirious film that the meet-cute occurs between the actors, Sónia and Fabio, in this double-exposed montage, while the first kiss, in a moment much more stylized, the screen blinded by sunlight like the hazy memory of nostalgia, takes place between their characters, Tania and Helder. Playing herself playing her character, Sónia gives the CITIZEN KANE of self-conscious performance, constantly breaking character before she can pull it together to begin a scene—or maybe she’s just laughing. The film grooves on the ambiguity: When she looks toward us with tears in her eyes, it’s a moving climax, but it’s nothing compared to when she bursts into laughter a second later, her face still wet with eyedrops.

The other star is sound technician Vasco Pimentel, whose work offscreen compiling the most detailed and vital soundtrack since COUNTRY STRONG is just as compelling as his work onscreen playing the clueless sound guy recording phantom noises that pop up here and there, most notably—aside from the brilliant credits sequence, a comic final argument that captures the entire film—in an eerie bit where two of the crew members use their shadows to turn a far-off pylon into a grotesque face while we hear the disembodied chanting of the winds in the hazy blue of twilight. If you listen close you can hear Herzog directing Popol Vuh: “Weirder!”

You’d think a film that spends most of its time documenting its own creation would lend itself to guidepost exposition, but Gomes plays it close, letting the film lure us down its murky paths. From the seemingly meandering longueurs of the first hour to the equally aimless melodrama of the second, OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST is a full portrait of the artistic process. Adaptation is everywhere, from the intertwined oral legends of the townspeople to the music they make, and the layered structure glances at the cosmic with all the pretension of a chicken. It’s all a game to Gomes, his life and his art. All it takes to turn one into the other is perspective. That or a fortuitous metaphor about peeing.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

The Film Talk’s magnificent JumboChat5000 operating system, which also coughs up my lottery numbers, recently flagged up a months-old post by my comrade Tony Youngblood about cinema anima.

I’m curious about that label, but since I haven’t seen all the films Tony describes I’m happy to take his word that it fits. And in any case, this topic is the argument that never stops: One of its many sub-squabbles broke out again last week in the New York Times Magazine over SOLARIS, and I await Tony’s views on that with interest.

But arguments are inevitable, since films like Carlos Reygadas’ BATTLE IN HEAVEN and SILENT LIGHT, two films that Tony mentions, are confrontational experiences. Being contemplative and ineffable doesn’t rule out being intensely manipulative at the same time, and Reygadas is nothing if not a provocateur.

BATTLE IN HEAVEN sets up its audience manipulation right from the off. You will have heard that the film starts with an uncensored slow-motion blowjob, but it’s one in which the camera, advancing at snail’s pace, ends up sliding in between fellatrix and fellatee. This involves a noticeable shift of balance by performer Anapola Mushkadiz, who opens her eyes to find the audience regarding her from a range of about one inch and cries two teardrops the color of her mascara. Well yes, hello there. Reygadas is well aware that contemplation and voyeurism operate on similar principles.

Whenever BATTLE IN HEAVEN sets up a long static shot, the results are far from calming. Instead it seems as if holy terror is rolling in on a storm front. Which indeed it is, at least in the heart of the guilt-ridden and tormented Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), a man blown so entirely off-course by the state of his conscience that he ends up undergoing an ascension of his own in the Basilica Of Our Lady Of Guadalupe. Reygadas marks this with a sequence in which church bells undergo their protracted start-up procedures and then ring silently, impotently, in torrential rain, one of the most jarring images of alienation from the divine you could wish to see.

SILENT LIGHT launches itself even further off the ledge, surveying not just the hearts of men but the work of God as well. Reygadas cuts the audience adrift, presenting it with small aesthetic cubes of still-life in an environment so loaded with unfamiliarity and distance from the man-made that it might as well be a fictional dimension. The film provides acres of challenging space for the viewer’s mind to experiment on, to reason with, to suppose and decide – always supposing you don’t decide to go for coffee instead.

There is another art form that can do this by design: poetry. SILENT LIGHT may well be the closest thing to a stanza of written poetry that a moving image could possibly conjure up. Unfortunately, Reygadas then said this while promoting the film:

I hate the idea that film is actually telling a story! The great part of film is to make you feel, not by the narrative. For example, the first shot of my film is cinematic. The light itself is beautiful. In literature, that does not exist.

Which is problematic on so many levels that I ended up giving SILENT LIGHT shorter shrift in print than it deserves. If he means that films act not just on your brain but on other organs lower down, then most certainly yes. But if he believes that you don’t get beautiful light in literature then I think he’s barking up the wrong tree, and has obliquely disproved his own argument.

While we’re about it, let me throw in a candidate for cinema anima whose films approach from a totally different direction. Brillante Mendoza employs non-professional actors, long takes, yawning silences, natural rhythms and moral dilemmas, but veers so far from static contemplation that the rain, sewage and tears of his native Manila get into your pores. Energized by the life force of roughly twenty million souls, his films are mood-heavy enough to break your heart, while also charged with enough anima to get it going again.

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Tim Hayes is a freelance writer based in the UK, who covers technology, the arts, and several points in-between. You can find him on Twitter, via LinkedIn, or at www.timhayes.eu.

It might be imperial to claim Abbas Kiarostami’s best film is his first outside Iran, not in Farsi, and starring an international star—in other words, the one that’s most European—but I have no guilt, because in my universe it’s true: CERTIFIED COPY is the most intellectually and emotionally stirring film I’ve seen since INLAND EMPIRE, waking long dormant oxygen tanks and then exploding them like Apollo 13 before successfully landing this bird somewhere, somehow, in some plane of existence. It’s a distillation of his decades-long projects—investigating the camera as a medium of truth and society as a medium of men—and a sly expansion of them, bridging the gap between Koker and Marienbad without so much as a wink. I can’t imagine you’re waiting for my endorsement, but I had a powerful experience going into the film blind and I’d hate to steal that from you, so I won’t so much as tiptoe past the trailhead—with William Shimell as James Miller as Kiarostami surrogate and Juliette Binoche as the world’s worst audience member—but I have to examine some of the film’s profound meanings, and that demands some discussion.

For all its mystery—and the film pointedly acknowledges the great unknowable beyond by keeping at least one secret, when a waitress whispers something to Binoche at the literally central moment and then says audibly, for you and me to hear, “But mum’s the word. They don’t need to know,” and I have a theory about that, by the way—CERTIFIED COPY tells the basic story: two people together. But that’s a phoneme to the film’s ineffable sound, structuralism to its post-. It’s not about the discrete people so much as their universes colliding, their individual rhythms, values, and languages coming together in ways that don’t always overlap (but sometimes surprisingly do), producing a wake of coincident realities fighting for supremacy and building to the beautiful melancholy of Kiarostami via Binoche: “If we were a bit more tolerant of each other’s weaknesses, we’d be less alone.”

Kiarostami’s trick is efficiency. Every line interrogates one of the film’s intertwined theses—reproduction doesn’t necessarily leave authenticity behind, value is born of perception, can’t we all just get along?—and every moment has at least two things demanding your attention, lending this discreet, complete objet d’art an immortality appropriate to the multiscreen age. Often what you’re watching is not what you’re hearing. Other times you’re watching one thing through a window and another reflected off it, as in the hypnotic tracking shot of the drive through Tuscany. Still further you’re negotiating the distance between a character’s words and her expression. Poring over every moment may prompt a higher understanding of the film’s meanings—or, more likely, nirvana—but going along for the ride is hardly worthless itself: these are ideas we already know. It’s child philosophy. After all, the certified copy isn’t linked to biological reproduction just in James Miller’s opening lecture. I’m splitting hairs, but the film makes a joke out of translation being a copy, and the title in its original form, COPIE CONFORME, is spoken only once—when Binoche calls her son “la copie conforme de son pere,” the spitting image of his father—and it refers to that child-philosopher who states the obvious.

It need hardly be said that the film is gorgeous, set in historic, rural Italy, obsessed with European art, and starring the luminous Binoche. The performances are necessarily disorienting, Binoche an exposed nerve incapable of disguise and Shimell aloof until he isn’t, cold and unfeeling and then pissy and uncaring, but not for no reason. The sound design involves us in the world—another distraction from what’s going on—and feeds the film’s polymathic appetites, as in one moment where some guy is shouting at his wife until they turn and we realize he was shouting into a phone, an obvious if extraneous example of the power of perception. It’s cerebral but not alienating, and there are a couple of emotional surprises that’ll blow your house down and rebuild with debris.

As the only detractor I’ve heard of is Peter Becker—and only allegedly—there isn’t much pushback to push back against, but I do find the VOYAGE IN ITALY comparisons disheartening, and not just because HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is a closer match not only in subject but in style. Marriage is the specific door poked and prodded by CERTIFIED COPY, but it’s applicable to any great meeting of minds, and doubly for groups of minds. It is a film about international culture clash, after all. Marriage is just the medium.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Jett here:  I’m excited to introduce a new contributor to the site – Tim Hayes.  Tim’s a freelance writer based in the UK, who earns his living writing about business, science, art, and other topics in a land where, according to legend, the work of the journalist is respected and rewarded.

He writes about films too.  You can find him at www.timhayes.eu, Linkedin and on Twitter at twitter.com/pistolerosa.

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The trick to being a good troublemaker is to lob your brick and then vanish, so it’s entirely fitting that Richard Stanley had made his two recognized feature films by 1993 and has found other fish to fry ever since. Stuck as we are in a drought of troublemaking directors, that’s a shame. But it does leave his authentic piece of brilliance to stand in splendid isolation.

HARDWARE isn’t it. That movie has its admirers, and the filmmakers work wonders to create dystopia in sets that look about as big as a closet, but the very British late-1980s flavor of civilized anarchy has curdled a bit and drags like an anchor. Kudos to William Hootkins for delving so deep into sleazebaggery as a voyeuristic pervert that his sweat runs off the screen and pools on your carpet, but he and the other supporting cast wouldn’t be out of place in BBC’s The Young Ones. The tone of the UK comic 2000 AD is pretty clear too, even before the lawyers got into an argument over the story’s origins.

What does work, and well enough to signpost Stanley’s great gift, is the not-very-sub-text. Stuck in a land of sterilization and birth control, restless artist Jill, played by Stacey Travis as a ballsy flame-haired Final Girl, builds a surrogate child out of black market junk and gets an uncontrollable killobot for her troubles. The sequence where she builds the machine is a great piece of montage, with the beast watching the endless violence on television while Jill gifts him a body and paints it with the Stars And Stripes. Weaned on war crimes and punk rock, the kid duly goes after his mom with a phallic drill bit very close to the one last seen heading for a tender area of Julie Christie in DEMON SEED. Close, but no cigar.

But DUST DEVIL is the real deal. The best kind of horror film, in that it’s a sprawling, political, metaphysical fable cooked up by a production team clearly half out of their minds, it throws any hint of self-parody out of the window and delves deep into psycho-geography instead. Technically it’s about a shape-shifting hitch-hiking serial killer, played by Robert Burke in an outfit owing a debt to both Sergio Leone and Stanley’s old comrades in Fields of the Nephilim, who murders young women and then does very unpleasant things to them afterward. But the film is really about its setting, the Namibia/South Africa border in the early 1990s, where some strange and powerful magic is stirring. Sorcery envelops everyone, but especially the rootless and significantly-named Wendy, played by a convincingly frazzled Chelsea Field. As unsettled and paranoid as any white South African of the time, Wendy falls into the arms of her particularly lost boy in a suicidal swoon, the two of them dancing to Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man while the earth shifts under them.

The second-best thing about DUST DEVIL is this whole social dimension that Stanley frets away at patiently while the serial killer has his fun. Only Clive Barker, another fine troublemaker, has this knack in this genre to the same extent. (And Barker’s last film as director before he too tired of the struggle, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, post-dates DUST DEVIL by only a few years and shares a producer and a composer. They make a fine double bill.) DUST DEVIL’s feeling for the land of its birth, for desert and ruin and isolation, is right up there with WITCHFINDER GENERAL‘s empathy for English evergreens. It shows a whole country swimming up through the last throes of a nightmare and apparently calling up a demon in the process, with everyone caught at the moment that the fever breaks.

The best thing about DUST DEVIL is two of those people, the shaman Joe played by John Matshikiza and the cop Ben played by Zakes Mokae; two actors not demeaned in the slightest by the film’s wild mix of social witchcraft, playing two characters long since battered into shreds. The social document of these two South African performers playing out this story, both of them as freighted with past experiences as the characters they portray and both now gone, is not short of power. Mokae’s voice sounds like creaking shelves of history books. DUST DEVIL’s delirium finally crests when poor tormented Ben gets an inkling that he just might be a character in someone else’s film. Hypnotized by a vision of his wife as the Black Madonna, he lurches sideways out of his own movie in a flurry of sprocket holes. Free at last.

Tough to top that. And barring the disastrous miseries of Stanley’s attempt to film THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU, he hasn’t tried. Instead he turned that same eye for montage and illusion to documentaries, and if ever there was a convincing argument that the best documentarians are anthropologists, Richard Stanley is it. All his documentaries are worth the effort, but inevitably the humdinger is SECRET GLORY, a wild old girl of a doc taking in Nazism, mountains of crystal in the Tyrolean Alps, and the Holy Grail being carved out of a meteorite. Made in 2000 it fits neatly into the millennial vibe of the moment, while also looking askance at Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and backwards towards Illuminatus!. Watched today, it also looks as if Stanley preempted the folks now thought to be reinvigorating the documentary form by a decade or so.

And he’s still out there somewhere, although for now it looks like the man’s puckish glee in getting behind the camera has displaced his analytical eye. Maybe Dr Moreau has to take the blame for that. But go and find SEA OF PERDITION anyway, to see what a self-aware director can do when at play in a nine minute short, and how a Martian temple and some shape-shifting SOLARIS-style manifestations can be created down one end of a beach in Iceland if a filmmaker has the nerve for it. Watch it for its female astronaut (niftily named Sly Delta Honey, a sign for any Lucius Shepard readers that this particular wanderer probably isn’t exactly in the land of the living either), stumbling around to John Barry’s music from MOONRAKER. Take the opportunity to see a fish-man space traveller saunter off to the strains of Paul Williams singing We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be from BUGSY MALONE. More troublemaking like this, please.

So,  the 83rd annual Academy Awards happened. I think. The effort to revitalize the franchise for the “young and hip” demographic failed miserably. Twitter was abuzz with grand pronouncements of “most boring Oscars ever.” The historically-inaccurate THE KING’S SPEECH robbed the historically-inaccurate THE SOCIAL NETWORK of all the highest honors. The most entertaining part of the night came from the Auto Tune the News team doing an unintentional musicals mashup. Yes, the best part of a show all about movies was a web video. Speaking of web videos, James Franco iPhoned his opening entrance and posted it on his Twitter a few moments later.

Check out the video. Pretty cool seeing it from the host’s side, don’t you think? But sadly, his videos tweets became less interesting as the night progressed, culminating in a hand massage courtesy of Anne Hathaway.

Last week, the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville announced their new series for March and April: VISIONS OF THE SOUTH. And holy expl@t!ve, I’ve never been more excited about a film series! The show culminates in a rare screening of Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 silent film BODY AND SOUL, featuring the first appearance of legendary actor Paul Robeson. Micheaux was one of America’s first black directors and THE first independent filmmaker of any ethnicity. He was raised in Metropolis, Illnois only 40 minutes away from my home town in western Kentucky. Sadly, Metropolis celebrates a fictitious super hero (Superman by way of a giant statue and yearly festival) while they have completely forgotten their real national treasure.

I could gush full blog about every film in the VISIONS OF THE SOUTH series. Do yourself a favor and go check out the lineup. The series kicks off Friday, March 11th with Elia Kazan’s WILD RIVER.

Allow me one more tangent before my main review of KABOOM. Last night I saw ENTER THE VOID at the Belcourt with the censored reel restored. One day is not distance enough to formulate an opinion on the film’s merits; but rest assured, it is a film like no other. The film is shot in first person through the eyes of a young American drug dealer living in Tokyo. At times, I literally felt like I was in his head. It was not a pleasant place to be.

Is the film too long? Too indulgent? Maybe. No matter your opinion, you have to admire the craft and skill of the camera team who used the camera cranes and other rigs to remarkable effect. The same could be said for the visual effects team whose effects blend in (for the most part) so well that it’s hard to tell what is real. ENTER THE VOID is a crowning technical achievement, the APOCALYPSE NOW of drug movies. It will be discussed for years to come.

Gregg Araki’s KABOOM exists in a universe not too distant from ENTER THE VOID. Whereas EtV is a day-glo trip about young people destroying themselves in order to find solace, KABOOM is a day-glo trip about young people trying to have a good time and getting destroyed in the process. Actually, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what it’s about. There’s the bisexual lead Smith who sexes his way through a campus mystery involving a cult of animal-masked creepy people. There are also mind controlling witches, sage-like sexpots, and secret agent hippies. The film sheds a level of credulity every reel or so, and I get the sense that we’re supposed to revel in the camp. I attended with friends who are diehard Araki fans, and they all had a ball. I’ve only seen one of his films — THE DOOM GENERATION — and since that viewing was when the VHS edition was a new release, you’ll forgive me for my spotty remembrance.

The bright spot is the arresting young actress Haley Bennett, who I am convinced is going to be a huge star. There, I’m calling it now. She steals ever scene she is in.

The movie was shot on video, which is certainly no strike against it in of itself; but the look is so garishly post-processed and color-amped that I couldn’t stand to look at the screen for more than a few moments at a time. That is an apt-metaphor for every other aspect of the picture.

I know what you’re going to say. ENTER THE VOID is also garishly post-processed. True. But whereas the color-timer on ENTER THE VOID can be likened to Van Gogh, the timer on KABOOM painted the white-ribbon-winning landscape at the state fair.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed Gregg Araki to be in his early twenties instead of his early fifties. I say this because the film is full of all those young filmmaker urges that must be sowed before adulthood. There’s the standard “we don’t know it’s a dream until he wakes up” sequence, the one-dimensional college stereotypes, and the “cut from something gory to a close-up of food being sliced that looks like something gory.” The only thing missing is a “wake up and turn the alarm off” opening. But Gregg is no first-timer. I have to accept that these techniques are all intentional. What that intention is, I have no idea.

And then there’s the ending. I still haven’t figured out if it is intended to be a Donnie Darko “awwwww shit” moment or an irreverent thumb at the audience for taking everything so seriously. If latter, epic fail. I stopped taking things seriously after the first 15 minutes. The final shot was less a “WTF?!” and more an “Ummmm. . . okaaaaay.” If you’re already an Araki fan, you’ll probably be perfectly satisfied with KABOOM. If not, wait for the VHS release.

Tony Youngblood is a film and music snob and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

Here it is – a review of that Apple Store you have to pay to get into, TRON: LEGACY, plus the laugh out loud tragedy of the year TRUE GRIT.  All that and our thoughts on the Films of the Year.

Running time: 54 minutes and 49 seconds – 26mb mp3

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Gareth’s Films of the Year:

DVD’s of The Year:  THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER / BBS Box Set / FANTASIA

Interesting But Not Great: GET HIM TO THE GREEK / SPLICE / KICK-ASS / CYRUS / TOY STORY 3 / KNIGHT AND DAY / THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT / IRON MAN 2 / VINCERE / THE ECLIPSE / MEGAMIND / THE SOCIAL NETWORK / WASTE LAND / THE AMERICAN / SOLITARY MAN / THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES / FISH TANK / EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP / BROOKLYN’S FINEST / RED RIDING TRILOGY / THE GHOST WRITER / THE KING’S SPEECH

Documentaries to Seek Out:  FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE / RAW FAITH / THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS

What to Avoid:  ROBIN HOOD / THE A-TEAM / SALT / PRINCE OF PERSIA / HOT TUB TIME MACHINE / UNSTOPPABLE / EAT PRAY LOVE / CLASH OF THE TITANS / ALICE IN WONDERLAND / THE WOLFMAN / EDGE OF DARKNESS

Just Outside the Top Ten:  BLACK SWAN / NEVER LET ME GO / TRON: LEGACY / WALL STREET 2: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS / MONSTERS / WINTER’S BONE / 127 HOURS / I’M STILL HERE / SEX AND THE CITY 2 / LEAVES OF GRASS / THE OTHER GUYS

Top Ten Films of the Year:  CARLOS / HEREAFTER / THE BOOK OF ELI / LOURDES / AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE / ENTER THE VOID / HOWL / I AM LOVE / INCEPTION / SHUTTER ISLAND

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Jett’s Films of the Year:

No. 5:  THAT EVENING SUN / No. 4: LOURDES / No. 3: NEVER LET ME GO / No. 2: I AM LOVE

and No. 1 – the most extraordinary new film I’ve seen in the four years we’ve been doing The Film Talk:

ENTER THE VOID

(Our Interview with ENTER THE VOID star Nathaniel Brown)

]]> http://thefilmtalk.com/blog/tron-legacy-true-grit-podcast-review/feed/ 6 http://thefilmtalk.com/blog/social-network-podcast-review-enter-void-david-nadelberg-mortified/ http://thefilmtalk.com/blog/social-network-podcast-review-enter-void-david-nadelberg-mortified/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:08:51 +0000 Jett Loe http://thefilmtalk.com/?p=10697

On this week’s podcast Gareth and Jett discuss in-depth the film THE SOCIAL NETWORK and the extraordinary new work ENTER THE VOID as well as interview David Nadelberg of MORTIFIED

Running time: 55 minutes – 26.5mb mp3

THE SOCIAL NETWORK / ENTER THE VOID / David Nadelberg Interviewed on MORTIFIED / MORTFIED on Kickstarter / MORTIFIED previously on TFT: Get Mortified – Or How You Too Can Tell People You’re a Film Producer

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Has any canonized auteur been met with such furious confusion as Jean-Luc Godard? Even well-studied Godardians disagree on his meanings and periods and politics. Which means there’s no way I’m going to “get” everything on my first viewing, so anxiety-free I finally completed Godard’s New Wave output. I haven’t seen them all in order (Made in USA and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her are absent because Criterion released them last fall), but I once skipped way ahead—seeing King Lear, after reading the play, no less—and it was like a final exam in a language I didn’t know. So back to the late ‘60s: Masculin féminin, La chinoise, and Week End.In Masculin féminin, horniness incarnate (Jean-Pierre Léaud) dates a rising pop star (Chantal Goya) in a mid-‘60s consumerist paradise. (Sidenote: I can’t believe I failed to mention I’m Not There’s debt to Godard, but an early scene from Masculin féminin is explicitly repurposed in Haynes’ film; better late than never.) Interesting that Masculin féminin returns to black-and-white after such a vibrant venture into color as Pierrot le fou, but I suspect it’s both a dialectic thing (masculine/feminine, black/white, me/other) and an exposure of such dichotomies as whole spectra full of values.

Anyway, it’s more of a piece with Godard’s late ‘60s films than the b/w Band of Outsiders era, with France portrayed as an oppressive colonial power whose citizens are distracted by American capitalism. In fact, the Marshall Plan was born about the same time as the protagonists of Masculin féminin (and La chinoise). The kids here—Léaud adorably smooth-faced and hypersincere, Goya in a state of constant anticipation afforded only the very young or the very entitled (or both)—are more than happy to talk about the problems with the world, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their dual profit motives: sex and things. In an intertitle Godard calls them the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Trade Marx for Jobs (or Baudrillard) and you’ve got the iYouth of the 21st century. Much of Godard’s hysteria has been dismissed by history—for one, nonviolence has achieved however gradually relative social equality in the West—but it’s nevertheless impossible to imagine a millennial expression of political power on par with what the French or American students were up to in ’68. Maybe that’s because the world isn’t so physical any more. The young do engage in political expression en masse—galvanizing in response to the Bush era, overwhelmingly embracing gay rights—just not with such violence.

Around ’67, Godard’s desperation to break with classical cinema—not giving himself enough credit for Pierrot le fou or 2 or 3 Things, I suppose—begat La chinoise, at once his most artificial and intimate film from this period. Artificial:  1.  The action is broken up by improvised interview segments where Godard or cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who cameos with his camera à la Contempt) interrogates the characters.  2.  Most of the film is confined to a single set, white walls covered in primary colored leftish philosophical rhetoric. 3.  The camera is either stock still, confronting every monologue, however absurd, or vacillating on a preordained track from speaker to audience as the residents rant about Maoism. I can’t speak for what Godard thought he was making (though a riveting train ride, one reprieve from our Maoist prison, suggests La chinoise is no endorsement), but what I saw was a group of children expressing their rebellion in typically dramatic fashion, which in this case, with the proper education and proclivities, means violent extremism. (Sounds like the upcoming Chris Morris feature Four Lions.)

The way Godard portrays France, a rightist state where violent outbursts regularly occur (a woman shoots her philandering husband outside a coffee shop, the patrons finish their meals), suggests any communist sympathies are more reactionary than reasoned. Which is why I say La chinoise strikes me as unprecedentedly intimate. These kids are based on real life intellectual Maoists at a fancy school where nothing is required of them other than to think, and as sympathetic as Godard is to their ideals, he presents them honestly: they’re on summer vacation (which is to say their rebellion has an end-date) living in an apartment owned by one of their parents; they clearly don’t absorb the impact of their violence, even intellectually; they spend their time indoctrinating each other, putting on crude plays about adult ideas and dismissing individual liberty in the name of revolution. They reinforce rather than challenge their beliefs. That’s why the train scene is so pivotal. It’s the sustained counterargument the film has been lacking, and it’s at once more economical and persuasive than the previous hour of Maoism had been, like Socrates catching Bernard-Henri Lévy on the toilet. La chinoise isn’t Maoist propaganda; it’s a man revolted by the status quo searching for answers.

That’s my favorite thing about early Godard: He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. His filmmaking changes so much because he’s figuring things out like the rest of us. Week End doesn’t know what the world needs, but it does know what (Godard thinks) the world is: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Our heroes are two adulterers plotting to kill each other just as soon as they can get to the girl’s dying father and make off with his inheritance. Complications ensue in Buñuelian fashion—in fact, Week End looks like outtakes from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or The Phantom of Liberty; by the end I was sure Coutard must have shot those films, but alas—and the couple find themselves walking, hitchhiking, and carjacking their way across a Beckett-ian wasteland to their inheritance. Did I mention they know they’re in a film?

The claim to fame is a ten-minute tracking shot through a nightmarish traffic jam, and indeed it’s a sardonic delight. Not as witty as Buñuel’s best, but as raw an expression of modernist frustration as the cinema has known. Our ears are full of car horns for practically the whole shot, our reward for enduring a screaming child in the scene previous , and the rest of the film is a cavalcade of horror. This is the 20th century, Godard screams, but he’s drowned out by the wails of a woman crying for her Hermès handbag as a fiery victim falls from a wreck. An intertitle in La chinoise calls it “a film in the process of being made,” but Week End is “a film adrift in the cosmos,” one open-ended, the other found whole. La chinoise is a question. Week End is an absolute. Eventually someone gets to the point: “Nowhere do I see the sweet humanity and equable moderation that ought to be the foundation of the social treaty.” Nowhere? Sounds like you’re seeing what you want to see.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. is the antibiopic. Who is Bob Dylan? We get six answers, one for each phase in the artist’s life, each “Dylan” played by a different person with a different name, all metaphysically connected. What is Dylan’s life story? It’s America, a freewheelin’ carnival loosely pasted together, impasto textures only roughly adhering to the papier-mâché component. So why is Dylan important? Who said he was? I’m Not There. isn’t about Bob Dylan.

It’s all there in the first scene, a fluid pan through grainy black-and-white: We the audience/camera/Dylan are ushered onstage beneath an American flag to perform for a screaming audience. Cut to title sequence, the semiotic hand of our creator overlapping words like he’s learning to speak: he describes himself, it gets more complicated, and finally he’s at the only truth he can safely say: I – I he – I’m he – I’m her – not her – not here. – I’m not there. That period, repeated in the cast credits (which also overlap: “cate bale.”), is the mark of a gavel, sentencing the sentence to a lie detector; “I’m not there.” is useless as information but accurate as truth.

Haynes literally autopsies Dylan in the post-title sequence to signify deconstruction, previewing his metaphorical storytelling and suggesting a postmodern sensibility that runs deeper than just fracturing a person into six. You can state truth in sentences, since language is artificial, but if you really want to interpret the world, you have to accept that truth is evasive, names are imperfect, and your questions are irrelevant anyway. “Who is Bob Dylan?” has as many answers and contradictions as the question “What is I’m Not There. about?” The giveaway is our playful introduction to Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark, an actor who rose to prominence playing beloved folk protest singer Jack Rollins (Christian Bale’s character; both are “really” playing Dylan), who struggles, as artists do, against commercial cooption: on the set within the set, Clark points to a billboard with the name “Jack Rollins” and the face of Heath Ledger done up as Bob Dylan/Robbie Clark. He declares, “It’s not about me, any more, it’s all about him,” gesturing to his own image, but it’s really Bale, but it’s really Rollins, but it’s really Dylan, but it’s really Ledger. I’m not there / I contain multitudes.

Here Dylan literally does, born out of a sophisticated melting pot of 20th century American culture. Not just his six analogues and the identities they assume (which include Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, and Billy the Kid) but the people he’s described as: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, not to mention, notably, us the audience. Which forces us to confront the subject of the title. Over a montage Charlotte Gainsbourg (playing a version of Dylan’s first wife) reads some of Rimbaud’s poetry, charmingly translating as she reads: “It is wrong to say, ‘I think.’ One should say, ‘I am thought.’ ‘I’ is someone else.” I is us. We am America.

We am also an audience of art consumers, so naturally Haynes delivers a film dripping with art, primarily that which flees the literal: Dylan, Rimbaud, Guthrie, Joan Baez (and Dylan’s other pseudonymous love interests, Sara Lownds and Edie Sedgwick), the Beatles, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, beatnik jazz, stream of consciousness, abstract expressionism, costume. Haynes borrows from Bergman and/or Desplechin and memorably quotes Pennebaker’s Dylan doc Dont Look Back and Fellini’s 8 ½. The Cate Blanchett sequences owe royalties to Richard Lester, and the Richard Gere portion lives in Robert Downey, Sr.’s Greaser’s Palace, just offscreen. It’s a restless film, abandoning one sequence to try out documentary, or launch an extended music video, or repeat that snippet of the film-within-the-film: first it’s just a normal scene, then we realize it’s an act, and finally we see it on television.

Television’s a recurring harbinger of alarm in the film, because it delivers images of America’s unpleasant realities directly to the living room, thereby fomenting a national reckoning. Midcentury America had to face the fact that it wasn’t America. It still isn’t America; “I’m not there.” But the story of America is one of increasingly fulfilling its promises of equality and freedom. As the title suggests, I’m Not There. is perhaps ultimately about liberation, hence our national mythology of individualism and reinvention.  One notable moment of liberation in the film occurs while the TV blares Nixon’s “peace with honor” speech, because why should our words be beholden to reality? Order, whether by labels or expectation or prison or history or status quo or marriage or knowledge, is overthrown at every turn, every atom in the picture constantly seeking entropy, with one notable, ironic exception that finds its own freedom in submission, while representing The Establishment of Establishments.

I’ve told you nothing about what happens (at one point a whale swallows a child) or what it’s like (a puzzle with none of the right pieces) or what it’s about (evolution) or how it’s about it (colorfully, with self-conscious irony), and even less about Bob Dylan, whose themes and techniques pervade the picture. Well, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe, if’n you don’t know by now. The usual suspects—the performances, the relationship of the film to Dylan’s life or mythology—are irrelevant, tools in service of the many meanings ambitiously woven through this singular pastiche. But fear not, Dylanttantes: if I can say one thing with certainty, it’s this: I’m Not There. is not about Bob Dylan.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

TFT 105 / 35 mb MP3 / 72 minutes /

SPECIAL GUESTS: GLENN KENNY / ARMOND WHITE

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

OPERATION SAVE THE FILM TALK

AVATAR / JAMES CAMERON / SILENT RUNNING / 3D / ROBERT ZEMECKIS / WALL-E USED CARS / XENOGENESIS / SUMMER HOURS / A SERIOUS MAN / STAR TREK / THIS IS IT / CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE / NEVELDINE AND TAYLOR / NEXT DAY AIR / PRECIOUS / LEE DANIELS / BELOVED