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.

HEARTBEATS is like Godard directing the kind of mad love music video the ‘80s were rife with (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Every Breath You Take,” “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” etc.) where the bouncy electronic pop doesn’t come close to obscuring the dark edge that underscores passionate love, and not just because the ‘80s revived ‘60s color blocking and Xavier Dolan rocks androgynous-to-feminine outfits and a  sweet Vanilla Ice bouffant (on account of aiming for a James Dean look but without the side length required). I’d be more hesitant to invoke Godard, who saturates the picture like a film school idol, if Dolan weren’t so fully formed; the closest young voice I can think of is Lena Dunham, but Dolan has a much firmer grasp on what he’s doing, at least once the opening’s hyperactive zoom settles down—less empty pretension and pointless experimentation than genuine voice.

But as much as I’m impressed with Dolan’s stylistic command, HEARTBEATS is a pretty lightweight affair. The plot is straight out of WILL AND GRACE—a straight girl and a gay boy fall for the same guy—though it’s not in service of sitcom hijinks, and it certainly doesn’t neuter its male lead the way a network censor in the ‘90s would (not that this is THE DREAMERS 2.0, either). Instead this stock scenario serves as a springboard to capture the experience of infatuation, the way you can’t get enough of someone’s smell or luxuriate in your totally casual closeness or overreact when your crush isn’t dedicating all his time to you. In general, HEARTBEATS is about the way infatuation causes you to build up a romantic experience in your mind. Hence the French title, IMAGINARY LOVES—I guess HEARTBEATS focus-grouped better.

There isn’t a lot to it, but Dolan nails the experience of infatuation: close-ups isolate our heroes with their angst, bold colors illustrate heightened senses, ellipticism floats us through the hazy days of puppy love. It’s MASCULIN FEMININ down to its impetuous, youthful absolutes ( “Fudge is seventeen times sweeter than cherry”), only where Jean-Pierre Léaud would respond to perceived slight by spouting off about the movies or philosophy or Mao, HEARTBEATS goes silent (except, that is, for its evocative collection of music from the capital-R Romanticism of Dalida’s cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” to a mournful Bach cello suite), because its heroes are so caught up in their romance that they have no other personality. The subject clouds our brains, keeping us from intellectually engaging beyond simple emotional reaction, but HEARTBEATS is an intoxicating experience nonetheless.

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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.

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.

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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The first scene of Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man.  The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier the night before his execution, beaming a greeting of filial affection to a former enemy.  We’re in a POW camp run under the auspices of the Japanese military, where Allied soldiers are half-subjected to, and half-ignored by an honor code that proposes self-disembowelment as the response, it appears, to just about any infraction.  In between the attempted seppuku and the smiling greeting, the adorable Tom Conti reflects poetically on the mutually assured idiocy of war, Ryuichi Sakamoto gets angry, and then gets healed while his fascinating and eventually ubiquitous score overplays but not so much that it bothers, and gorgeous burnt light provides a mystical hue to what is ultimately a nightmare that becomes a dream and then finally a reality the audience always wanted: reconciliation between people who were otherwise ready to kill each other.

But not before David Bowie saves the world.

This is probably the least actorly of Bowie’s screen appearances; his portrayal of callow/shallow and ultimately penitent youth is all the more resonant because he seems out of place in the movie: we know him to be something other than either the rigid Japanese or the sentimental English colonel; his off-screen status as chameleon works because he’s more like us than anyone else in the movie.  He wanders through a context in which violence is sexualised, men are murdered for loving each other, and everyone is fantasising about being somewhere else.  It’s probably the most erotic war movie ever made; it’s a perfect companion piece to the thematically similar ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’, whose British Colonel is the antecedent for Sakamoto’s character here: both men obsessed with honor over humanity, both undone at the last possible moment, both the points of deepest frustration for the audience.  The formal beauty of the compositions could overwhelm the point of the film: a kind of insider’s apology for, or at least critique of, his nation’s particular brand of nationalistic idiocy, which here is probably best summed up by the institutional nonsense of lying about killing.  Not far off my homeland’s own nonsense, nor that of the day I’m posting this, when a holiday is observed in the US, marking the arrival of a genocidal maniac who no doubt believed God and his queen had told him to love the natives by burning some of them alive.  Oshima and co-screenwriter Paul Mayersberg evoke Columbus and any number of other pioneers of the sacralising of violence, by having Conti’s character exclaim, ‘Damn your gods.  It’s your gods who have made you who you are,’ at the point where he realises that he is to be killed to preserve a sense of order that was psychotic to begin with.  And it’s in the confrontation of the madness of the scapegoat mechanism where ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ takes on the deepest core of the human tendency to spiral downward into mutually assured destruction.  Regret for the past is why men war with themselves today; an unthinking assumption that someone must be punished is why we kill each other; and the film locates such regret and assumptions in nothing more complex than the cruelty of boys who become men without changing.

But it neither labors nor over-philosophises its point; Oshima trusts us to get it – the first scene is so memorable precisely because it starts half way through where you’d expect.  We’re right there – in an attempted imposed ritual suicide; there’s no introduction, no preparation, no consolation for those of us who want our war films to pretend that war isn’t murder.

At the end, I’m left reflecting on three things (beyond the easy admiration for the remarkable career of producer Jeremy Thomas, who in the splendid interview series on the Criterion disc seems to prove that he hasn’t lost any thirst for making films that are both aesthetically compelling and politically humane): How childhood trauma can both cause us to dysfunction within adult relationships, but might also provoke us to live differently; to avoid the suffering we caused others, or was caused to us when we thought we didn’t know any better.  On the role of sexual repression as a foundation for violence; and how a well-placed kiss could end conflict between people.  And finally, as Thomas says, how certainty is often the enemy of peace, for in war, ‘we are victims of men who think they are right’.  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ sounds, at first glance, like a humorous title; but it’s not, and it could not just as easily have been ‘Happy 4th of July’.  It’s a film that begins with a man being forced to torture himself to death, and ends with the anunciation of what, for Rene Girard, perhaps the thinker most capable of explaining why scapegoating kills us all, would consider nothing less than the axis of history.  Along the way there’s blue light, Bowie’s blond locks, Conti’s smile, Takeshi’s ambivalence, Sakamoto’s rage.  And a war film that sometimes feels like science fiction, sometimes like romance, sometimes like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

TFT 101 / MP3 30.2mb / 1hr 3min / DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

2012: IMDB / on TFT: Oh 2012, What Is It About You That Makes Me Love You So? – 2012 – Raising Arizona Mashup

ANTICHRIST: IMDB / on TFT: Antichrist Poster Mashup / at The Belcourt

GAIA: IMDB / OFFICIAL SITE / on TFT: Film & Spirit: An Invitation

OPERATION SAVE THE FILM TALK

THE COOLER: The Demonizing (of) Armond White

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You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the The Film Talk neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that we often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it’s a pleasant surprise to see ‘Turning Green’, your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what’s wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

‘Turning Green’ was made four years ago – a runner up in the first season of ‘Project Greenlight’ – and is only now being released, with the absurdly misleading poster above.  To tell you the truth, it’s one of the strangest films I’ve seen – on the one hand trying to make a decent job of assessing Ireland’s paradox, or at least its paradox thirty years ago, when the film is set: the fecund literary culture and freedom narratives of Beckett, Joyce, and Heaney co-mingling with the obsessive puritanism enshrined by the State; on the other, it offers a series of cliches about ‘Oirishness’ – the angry priest, the aul fella who seems glued to the end of the bar, the visions of Mary turned into a kind of foreplay.  It doesn’t help that the movie seems unsure of its tone – is it a dramatic entertainment in the tradition of ‘The Quiet Man’, a comedy in the style of ‘Waking Ned’, or a gangster thriller that should have been re-titled ‘Mystic O’River’?  You get parts of all three here; with a shade or two of Tarantino, and a little Woody Allen neurotic cynicism in the voiceover.

Writer-directors John G Hoffman and Michael Aimette do enough to make this northern Irish writer laugh – sometimes; but also enough to make me feel condescended to, sometimes.  Ireland has been poor, sure; Ireland has been oppressive for some, absolutely; Ireland has a long string of little villages where everybody knows everybody else, of this there is no doubt.  But the lack of any empathetic characters in ‘Turning Green’ has the effect of suggesting there’s no reason to care; and for me, Ireland needs a vision of what we can be, rather than yet more dwelling on what’s wrong with us.

And yet, I found myself almost beguiled by the depiction of my home; and grateful that I wasn’t watching another ‘Troubles’ film or a ‘Ryan’s Daughter‘-style over-romanticisation – there’s a smart little film trying to escape from ‘Turning Green’, one in which the double standard of moral hypocrisy is the heart of the story.  It’s not a stretch to say that cultures that freak out over nudity while people are being killed in their name need a mirror; ‘Turning Green’ offers a very blunt one in an exchange of dialogue that, for me, was worth the weaknesses of the rest of the movie.  When an old man is having trouble describing the package he’s gone to pick up from the post office, the domineering priest in line behind our anti-hero James (played with appropriate detachment by Donal Gallery) huffs and puffs about how ridiculous it is to be wasting his time.  James responds with a line that one imagines was the writers’ intended motto for the whole film:

‘If these people aren’t bombing women and children or starving the homeless, they’re making small talk at the post office’.

Despite the fact that the film doesn’t hang together, glimpses of this coruscating raised eyebrow can be seen throughout; ‘Turning Green’ seems not be a complete work, but it has signs of moving in the right direction.  And it’s a better film than I’d make right now.  (For what it’s worth, ‘Turning Green’ pales in comparison to another film that carries similar themes – the far superior ‘Garage’, Lenny Abrahamson’s Tarkovskian/Rohmeresque film about an Irish petrol station attendant and the encroachment of the Celtic Tiger.)

Meantime, in other Irish news, ‘Prods and Pom-Poms‘, the lovely short documentary about Sandy Row cheerleaders will get its local TV debut for Northern Ireland viewers tomorrow night – you can see it on UTV at 10.35pm, Friday 6th November; and if you’re outside the reach of northern Irish television transmitters, DVDs are still available from its makers.

Just finished watching Gregg Helvey’s 2006 USC student documentary, ‘Overexposed’, about the arguably corrosive effect pornography has on men’s sexuality and it got me to thinking: what responsibility do we image makers have when it comes to portraying the erotic in our mediums?

In this Pinewood Dialogues interview Werner Herzog says something to the effect that “unless you know the heart’s of men you have no right to make a film” – is the same true for erotica?

When I was eleven or twelve I spent a lot of time on my own in the TV capital of Holland: Hilversum, (never mind why I was there – the fact was I was alone and spent much time living in an artist’s studio).  Being at that age I was sexually curious and my only pictorial companion in those matters was a book on ‘Renaissance Masters Drawings of the Female Nude’.  This of course was very exciting and perhaps explains my fascination, extending into my teen years, with very curvy women.  I felt at the time that the images in this book had immense power over me, (as mentioned in ‘Overexposed’ men’s response to sexual imagery includes ‘drive’, something apparently not found in most women).  As an adult now planning to have children I can’t help but be concerned by the infinite amount of pornographic content available on the web for free.

So I ask: how is pornography affecting both men and women’s sexuality in the ‘post rise of the internet’ generation?  And what responsibilities do the makers of erotic images have?

Overexposed touches on these matters only slightly, but it is a short film, and a student one to boot, so it can be forgiven for not giving a deep analysis.

It does offer one way forward though for film makers: at the end of the doc we have a non-sexual scene of intimacy between a couple – will this type of thing – intimacy presented in a postive, and glamorous way, be a possible way forward away from the current crass, limiting and destructive portrayal of sex in our society?

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UPDATE May 7th, 2009:  If you’re interested in seeing ‘Overexposed’ please send an email to: info@overexposedthemovie.com to request a copy for free, (plus shipping cost)