Gaspard Nectoux
is a newer film critic at Cahiers du
Cinéma. He started writing at Cahiers
almost three years ago with his first pieces in the April 2013 issue. But to be
honest he’s still somewhat marginal at the magazine: He’s still only included
in the masthead under ‘Ont collaboré à ce
numéro’ and has not yet joined their ‘Comité
de rédaction’. He typically doesn’t contribute to the ‘Événements’ nor does he write the Cahier Critique for the major Cahiers films, but instead, with some
variation, is consigned to write a few capsule reviews in their ‘Notes sur d’autres films’ section.
It’s probable that an average reader could even regularly read the magazine
without ever noticing him. He hasn’t written too many Cahier Critiques, doesn’t
cover the major film festivals, and hasn’t really done any interviews. Also
many of the films that he does write
about are typically third-tier art or mainstream films, which most cinephiles
would hardly bother to see. One might even suspect that he’s relegated to these
bad objects due to the fact that nobody wants to see or write about them.
But what makes
Gaspard Nectoux so interesting, then? Well there’s a few reasons: If the Cahiers line can be pretty strict, with
an unshakable affirmation in what’s right and wrong, this homogeneity can sometimes
be reflected in its writing: The Cahiers
maxim, with some variation, for the same championed directors. So new critics
joining the magazine can copy-and-paste certain unquestionable ideas and can easily
fit in. So what Nectoux does then becomes more
interesting as his short critiques become sites of experimentation to tests
certain ideas of how certain cinéastes engages with mise en scène through these
particular films. As well, since these aren’t the A-list films that he’s
writing about, it gives him the breathing room to open the magazine towards new
directors that haven’t been previously mentioned in the magazine (though
usually it’s somewhat ambivalently). So Gaspard Nectoux, within the Cahiers team, provides a different way see and a different way to think about cinema.
There are three
key concepts in understanding Gaspard Nectoux’s approach to cinema: le réel, l’enjeu and mise en scène. Reality, the stakes, and how
it’s represented on the screen by these cinéastes. Three simple enough concepts
but which are loaded with meaning and possibilities. What exactly is the réel and how to capture it with a
camera? What are the stakes of capturing, framing and manipulating it in the
organization of a film? If the réel is
the reality of the world then documentaries in general, and perhaps
documentary-fiction hybrids, would have a more privilege access to it. It’s
that of a Bazinien realism where in the process of representing the world its spiritual
qualities also comes across.
It all begins
with the réel for Nectoux. What is
the reality that the film wants articulate? So the films that he tends to focus
on are those that are based in a réel:
documentaries on personal and social issues, historical and contemporary
events. As well, what’s the relation between fiction films and real world
events? And then, what stakes does the director have in expressing it, what
intervention is he bringing to it, how do they represent their own point of view?
And then how is it represented in the mise
en scène? How does the making of the film effect its end result? Nectoux is
asking himself all of these questions whenever he writes a critique.
So far Nectoux’s
has written fourteen Cahier Critiques: Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, Mitra Farahani’s Fifi hurle de joie, Matt Porterfield’s I Used to Be Darker, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, Paul Vecchiali’s Nuits blanches sur la
jetée, Wang Bing’s A la folie, Fellipe Barbosa’s Casa Grande, Alante Kavaite’s Summer, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Amos Gitai’s Le Dernier Jour d’Yitzak Rabin, and
Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then.
(Up to March 2016)
Some of these
are important: A critique of Soderberg’s last film as Nectoux is just starting
to write. Matt Porterfield’s introduction to the magazine. A take-down of the generally
well-liked Timbuktu. Vecchiali is a
major renewed French director for Cahiers.
Summer would go on to be in the Cahiers top ten of that year. Shyamalan
returns in Cahiers’ good books with this
review of The Visit. It’s almost
like a rite of passage to write a critique of a Hong Sang-soo film at Cahiers. And so on…
Nectoux was able
to contribute to two Top Ten Films of the Year lists. For 2014: P’tit Quinquin, Adieu au langage, Maps to
the Stars, Under the Skin, Nymphomaniac, La La Chambre bleue, Love is Strange, Our
Sunhi, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, and Mille soleils. For 2015: Cemetary
of Splendour, The Smell of Us, Mia Madre, Jauja, Arabian Nights, Journey to the
Shore, L'Ombre des femmes, Mad Max: Fury Road, A La folie, and Cosmos.
Nectoux’s special
interests are on the side of the réel,
documentary, and contemporary world cinema. His pantheon directors include Wang
Bing, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz and Tsai
Ming-liang. He’s building on the Cahiers
tradition and filiation most explicitly with Godard, who he regularly brings
up, and critics such as Daney and Bergala, who he references, but perhaps
through his sarcasm and outlier qualities to Luc Moullet (see: Truffaut’s letters
to Moullet for how he was first viewed at the magazine). Some of Nectoux’s
other interests include: American DIY, Brazilian and Israeli films, French and
queer cinema, and some popular American films. He has even written about some
Canadian directors like Nicolás Pereda, Bruce LaBruce and Guy Maddin (hopefully
this is a trend that they keep up).
Nectoux is
creating and bringing forth new Cahiers
arguments into the magazine. For example: Timbuktu
was not able to capture the urgent réel
that was the catalyst for Sissako’s project or how Malick is unable reach the
visual débordement of a Godard. They
might sound minor repeated here but in the extended and more developed ways
they are brought into Cahiers they
start to grow roots and become part of the ground that the magazine stands on.
Nectoux seems to easily create and puts out there these Cahiers arguments and many of them would come to anticipate the
magazine’s upcoming features and debates.
Nectoux is still
regularly writing at Cahiers, while
other new critics have come and gone, and he seems to be somewhat growing in
stature as he has created a distinct position for himself there. With Nectoux
there are new directors that are appearing in the magazine, and with that new
perspectives on cinema: sometimes these are older directors who are reappearing
after a long hiatus (LaBruce, Gitaï) or new younger directors appearing for the
first time in the magazine.
The tone of
Nectoux’s critiques attempts to bridge a generosity with a criticalness (which
usually ends up taking precedence). There are many well-regarded commercial and
critical films that Nectoux takes-down with great ease. It’s the Cahiers mantra that ‘il faut haïr pour pouvoir aimer’, which
gives him more authority to when he does like
a film. The contrapuntal note critiques (a positive and negative one)
offers a thesis-antithesis-synthesis models of his many ideas. There is a
sophisticated use of the French language in his critiques, which includes
sophisticated long sentences, reflexive questions, bracketing and plays on
words. As well, he’s explicitly aligning himself with the current Cahiers tradition, cross-referencing a
lot of texts, and building on many arguments, but testing their hypothesis on
the concrete films that he’s critiquing. And they're shorter, sarcastic critiques
in the Notes section, which gives
them the quality of being fun and faster to read (similar to a lot of film
writing that appears on Twitter). Plot
synopsis tends to fade to the background as Nectoux focuses more on the ideas engaged with in the films. By
focusing to on critiques (especially the notes), instead of say the journal or
interviews, he’s highlighting the worthiness of film criticism to his project. And by writing on so many different
cinéastes, an average of three note critiques in each issue, he’s also
spreading out his position and perspective at the magazine. Nectoux just pops
up at places, unexpectedly, and he reveals something new.
There are certain
assumptions needed to best understand Nectoux’s work: Film criticism as an advocacy for a certain type of cinema.
How to discuss the world, and help certain cinéastes which are doing this
successfully today. An emphasis on film festival as a nodal point for
contemporary trends in cinema (Nectoux writes a lot on Venise and Berlin
films), but to not take them at face value and to be able to question and
criticize them, to spark a debate.
On the more
obscure or underground films, Nectoux provides a brief history of them and why
they would be of interest to cinephiles. He’s interested in discovering
something new. And in all of these he demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of
film, and especially, of an obscure film history. He also writes about some
more commercial fare, which make for fun viewing of these films, even if
they’re good or bad, he brings attention to something that might have been
overlooked, to just be familiar with what’s being made today, and a perspective
on it. By mostly writing ambivalent reviews, against publicity, and smaller art
films, Nectoux is able to instill a reliability and authority in his character.
Just these smaller critiques, which are partly ephemeral in nature, now have a
lasting memorable position. Nectoux is opening up a new space at Cahiers where some of its best writing
is now at its fringe.
The following
are abridged selections of most of Nectoux’s texts at Cahiers since joining the magazine in 2013 up to January 2016. It’s
meant to be more than just a Leonard Maltin guide of capsule reviews of films,
but a unique thought onto how to understand cinema over the last few years
through, and by, an introduction to some of the smaller, best and worst films.
Interesting takes on familiar films you’ve might have seen. Just one sentence,
to a few of them, to the entire thing. I hope it is of interest. – D.D.
***
Cahiers (April 2013, N.688): Jeunes
cinéastes français on n'est pas morts!
Notes
Critique: Steven Soderbergh’s Side
Effects
“We’ve often
reproached the limits of Soderbergh’s end
of career gesture: elegant and inventive but lacking a magnitude… Without
ever totally leaving this comfort zone he lets the film overflow nicely, Side Effects is working in the shadow
of a paranoid American cinema (in the style of De Palma, that of voyeurism),
taking the story towards the rhythm of reversals and tangents, each part of the
film puts into doubt what we think we’ve just seen… Soderbergh finely composes
with doubt and uncertainty, replaying the ambiguity of deception and intrigue
through the minor audacity of his mise en scène: indeterminate angles, a play
on the focus, deceitful editing which disguises the reality of the situations
by omitting a part of the space… Soderbergh offers, moderato, his own version of a baroque
of the genre.”
Notes
Critique: Kim Ki-duk’s Pietà
“Cahiers has already evoked after Venise
how terrible Pietà is, which was
awarded the Golden Lion, especially against The Master and Spring
Breakers, which culminates the grotesque trajectory of Kim Ki-duk of the
last ten years. He’s been slowly abandoning any sensibility of the world to
lock his cinema in an aesthetic of shock with the obsession of winning prizes
as his only perspective… To get closer to the misery doesn’t evidently signify
going further, just as a repetitive miming of horror to that of showing it.
Entirely lost in a crass complacency the réel is completely lost. The cinema of
Kim Ki-duk doesn’t actually see nor does it produce anything: redemption will have
to wait.”
Notes
Critique: Amélie van Elmbt’s La Tête la
première
“To follow its
story necessitates a tender and attentive mise en scène, which La Tête la première rarely produces.
It’s too safe, mechanical and systematic, neutralizing even the charm and
naturalness of its actors, making everything forced.”
***
Cahiers (May 2013, N.689): Cannes
Notes
Critique: Pablo Stoll Ward’s 3,
Chronique d'une famille singulière
“Locking the drama into a schema without
enriching the mise en scène nor giving the actors any liberty, Stoll encloses
his subjects in a mechanics of the scenario instead of patiently observing.”
Notes
Critique: Ann Hui’s A Simple Life
“In the mode of
a minor academic film, filled with a nostalgia for the heyday of the Hong Kong
new wave, the 25th film by Ann Hui, is a bow towards this old auteur
cinema whose ancestry is British, and particularly to its actors Deanie Ip and
Andy Lau… A Simple Life definitively marks the success of a
justice in tone, but the limits of its soft ambition, safe without any risks,
confides it towards the inoffensive.”
***
Cahiers (July-August 2013, N.691): L’amour
des acteurs
Notes
Critique: Nicolás Pereda’s Greatest Hits
“The Mexican
concept film of the month, Greatest Hits,
falls into the category of films in two times. It’s a winded attempt of Jean
Eustache’s masterpiece Une sale histoire
which Nicolás Pereda holds its ambiguous structure without attaining its
finesse… From this pseudo-reflexive path there isn’t much. Since if the stakes
for Eustache, it was otherwise more precise, to consistently attempt to find a
truth in each part, regardless if the story was told by a regular person or
professional actor. For Pereda, the ostentatious project is the distance with the
réel, accomplishing the total opposite: a laborious game of falseness on every
stage: vain intentions and end result.”
Notes
Critique: Roman Coppola’s A Glimpse
Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
“For those
who’ve seen CQ, Roman Coppola’s 2001
first film, a cinephilic comedy which goes towards pastiche, would know the
success and failures of the second, in its variations on California, pop and
the erotic… There’s the same desire to talk about, through a disguised
auto-portrait, his doubts regarding his singularity as a creator and his heavy
place within his clan… It’s not by chance that the final scene, when the
director sees his proper reflection in the image, the reflex isn’t to finally
look at himself, but to turn off the camera.”
Notes
Critique: Zal Batmanglij’s The East
“What Batmanglij
is searching for, like in his intriguing first film Sound of My Voice, where a couple attempted to infiltrate a bizarre
cult, it’s more so to show belief than a dialectic, membership more so than
introspection. All of the project relies on a scenario that’s overly thought
and overly written, full of demonstrative sequence that are miraculous, meant
to surprise the characters and the spectator at the same time… He should have,
to sustain his theme, a mise en scène more confident, less vague, less
indecisive.”
***
Cahiers (September 2013, N.692): Éloge de
la comédie
Cahiers
Critique: Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the
Candelabra
“Behind the Candelabra puts an end to a remitted period in
Steven Soderbergh’s career – which begins with the second half of Che, where the apparition of the Red
Camera pushes Soderbergh to start carrying the apparatus himself, which gets
him to re-think his role in his cinema as the cinematographer… All of the
following films pursues this tendency, technically and formally: small stories,
petit realism, a slick minimal
aesthetic. All of this risks the boredom in front of these double failures of
substance and intervals between projects… And slowly style itself becomes the
subject of the director, deploying it in a splendid way in the universe
aggressively decorated of Liberace, like the spectacle scenes in Vegas to the
over-decorated palaces of the stars… Behind these luxuries camouflages the
truths behind the people, behind the candelabra of the title, evolve these two
men, uncertain in their roles, which are in act for each other, partners,
parents and lovers… Liberace and his artist, just like the escorts in The Girlfriend Experience, Magic Mike and its male strippers, Side Effects and its manipulator, met en scène these spectacle bodies,
ambiguous since their doubles, deceiving others and themselves… It’s this leap
into the abyss, of Liberace finding love in death, that has been lacking in
Soderbergh’s fin de carrière, this
abandonment of the concrete (to stop worrying about efficiency!) to better see
the force of sentiments, like with Alain Guiraudie, who filmed the strangers by
the lake without ever loosing their personalities. All it takes is a little
confidence in oneself and your subject, to stop looking, and to really touch.”
Notes
Critique: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The
Dance of Reality
“At what moment
does the poetic shakes toward the picturesque?... Certainly when we stop
filming the famous instant of rapprochement of two realities that are far from
each other (Reverdy, Breton, Godard) to linger only on the contemplation of a
decorative result… But there’s no idea of a mise en scène that stands out… Even
though the Chilien at once was the cinéaste of concrete poetic irruption, one must only have to re-watch Fando y Lis, El Topo or La Montagne Sacrer to be convinced
about this, and that the Jodoroskien fantastique is never only the grotestque
images but also their upsurge, sustained by a mise en scène… The promised dance
had hardly started.”
Notes
Critique: Edgar Wright’s The World’s End
“The only trait
of Edgar Wright’s cinema (which in general isn’t that interesting) holds onto
his dispositif which is deliberately programmatic. Like for Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim, everything is announced
since the first, like the development of the intrigue to all of the character
details… A laughing denunciation of a normative capitalism? It’s difficult to
imagine a polemic that’s more politically correct, especially at the heart of a
film whose mise en scène, in its scale and budget are so unnecessarily
overstuffed, that its aims remain without a doubt less caustic then financially,
no?”
Notes
Critique: Davide Manuli’s The Legend of
Kaspar Hauser
“Let’s admit
Davide Manuli accomplishes at least one thing: to unite in only one film the integral of all of the worst trends of contemporary auteur cinema and even
of inventing some new ones. That’s still quite the feat… The auto-celebration
of such a malignant work, where the only trace of an attention towards its
subject (and therefore interest for the spectator) is that of the stunning
androgynous body of Silvia Calderoni.”
***
Cahiers (October 2013, N.693): Kechiche
en question
Cahiers
Critique: Mitra Farahani’s Fifi hurle de
joie
“Farahadi became
familiar for his less than singular approach, routine-like in its form, but indecisive in its positioning… In this documentary on the Iranien artist Bahman
Mohassess (now exiled in Rome), each one equally perceives the opportunity that
the other one is offering: for him, to place one last time in the present his
desire of creation, by way of the cinéaste; for her, to inscribe finally the overwhelming that she’s always filmed from far and putting it at the heart of
her documentary…”
Notes
Critique: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s This
Is the End
“Exit burlesque,
enter the cult of the vain: it’s the focus on a setting in American comedy
under the Judd Apatow-influence, at once confirmed and displaced in This is The End… The film marks the
commercial surpassing of Apatow by his ex-actors (it did better than This is 40)… It remains to see, outside
of commands, if these thirty-year olds would invent a form that’s less
ephemeral than the film-sketch or the auto-parody.”
Notes
Critique: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The Young
and Prodigious Spivet
“We thought that
Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn’t fall lower than with Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009), and, good news, we we’re right. The
bad news: he didn’t go much higher with The
Young and Prodigious Spivet, a false regain of form which the grand title
of film announces its Amélie-esque color… The ode to the grandeur of the West
is doubled with a critique, which is as severe as it is clumsy, which takes the
values of science against that of violent weapons (what engagement!). Total
hypocrisy of a project that searches for a rudeness of the cowboy but calls
against a Winchester for a sugary ogre.”
Notes
Critique: Luc Besson’s The Family
“The injunction
to tears of The Lady wasn’t able to
stick, and its laughter that’s Luc Besson is aiming for with Malavita, which
allows him with the same gesture to fold on the principal phantasm of his
cinema: to inscribe an American imagination onto the French territory… Do we
still need to be shocked by the contempt with which Besson films all, the
world, the rural, the women, cinema itself?”
DVD Review:
Pierre Perrault’s La bête lumineuse
“Like an answer
to the heavy tank which is Leviathan,
the DVD release of La bête lumineuse
permits us to be reminded what is really an immersion into a territory (like
always for Pierre Perrault, French Canada) and by extension, a good
ethnographic film… At no moment is there the creation of a distance to deform
the réel . The mise en scène of Perrault, fifteen years after his île-aux-Coudres trilogy, has never been so clear.”
***
Cahiers (December 2013, N.695): Top Ten
Films of 2013
Notes
Critique: Clio Barnard’s The Selfish
Giant
“English
countryside. An ambient fog. Two little mischievous kids kill their time by
working at night as scrap-metal collectors. There are multiple ways to approach
this story: the social-naturalist angle, of the Ken Loach school, from his
period Kes, to show the poverty of
the families and their difficulty at school; the angle of the marvelous,
inspired by the Oscar Wilde fable which gives the film its title, to show the
strange relation between the kids and the junkyard owner, half-crook,
half-father substitute; or a documentary angle, like of on the Bradford
community in Yorkshire, where Clio Barnard had explored in her first
full-length feature, The Arbor
(2010), the origins of its local dramaturgist Andrea Dunbar, which Alan Clarke
had adapter her Ruta, Sue and Bob Too in
1987… But The Selfish Giant decides
on choosing all of these options at once, which inevitable consequence,
neutralizes each approach on only engaging with them partially… It’s again the
too-fullness of good intentions, here, that makes reluctant the gaze, which is
otherwise sophisticated, of this cinéaste on the children of Bradford.”
Notes Critique:
Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours
“At the
intersection of Chris Marker and Walter Benjamin (and his study on the
passages), the New Yorker Jem Cohen constructs since the beginning of the
eighties an oeuvre quasi-invisible but precious, of film-essays, journals and
installations, documenting minutely the hidden face of America, that of the
cities and suburbs asphyxiated by
mass culture (Lost Boo Found, 1996, Chain, 2004) or that of the artistic
and political underground of the East (the Occupy Wall Street Movement of
2011)… This leads to its nonchalant rhythm (almost too much: Cohen is better in
short formats), with the aim – all the while achieved – is to reveal the
richness of the city, and of those who inhabit it through a dialectic of gazes,
that of the cinéaste, that of the spectator, and those of its two main
characters.”
Notes
Critique: Katell Quillévéré’s Suzanne
“In an opposite
manner to the many feminine figures that run through the young French cinema
this year, from La bataille de Solférino
to Les Rencontres d'après minuit,
the Suzanne of Katell Quillévéré, like the heroine of Poison Violent in 2010, only traverses intimate turmoils… The real
breath exists though, through instants, in the acting moments the most
intimate, like when the couple or two sisters are on screen: The direction of
the couple scenes remain the
principal force (the principle desire?) of the cinéaste since her early short
films À bras le corps, from 1995…
But the articulation between the intimate and romanesque ambition still remains to
be found… The Suzanne that this film wants to echo, is that of Pialat, that of À nos amours, which thirty years ago found her proper
liberty as an admirable young women, and stunned, in a gesture of cinema that
wasn’t so moderated.”
***
Cahiers (January 2014, N.696): Le vent se
lève
Cahiers
Critique: Matt Porterfield’s I Used to
Be Darker
“Of Matt
Porterfield’s three films, I Used to be
Darker is certainly his most discrete, far from the do it yourself naturalism of Hamilton
(filmed in 2001, released in 2006, and still undistributed in France) or
the approach ‘true/false’ sometimes fetishistic of Putty Hill (2010)… It’s also his most fine and the most touching,
attempting to explore through the trajectory of its four main characters the
obscure sentiment evoked by the title, which was pulled from a Bill Callahan
folk song (‘I used to be darker/then I
got light/then I got dark again’) – between relief, and melancholy of
things of the past, and retreat before what’s about to happen, the unknown…
Each character is wandering in their own way, floating through their own wandering, and through floating around, many scenes talk about this
hesitation: figures framed within hallways, passing through doors, by
staircases, but to go where?... The scenes of the performances. It’s there,
too, that the presence of the cinéaste (his desire) is felt the most. The
camera distances itself from the bodies, stops moving, a duration installs,
without ever Porterfield’s attentive gaze loosing itself and that the dispositif
itself becomes that which plays… The film reveals itself to be an elegy to that
of creation, where the character-artist are the most solid… Abby in a pool
would finally be able to murmur and anxiously wish just before the scene ends,
she’ll find her own performance in the hors
champs: it would be the return to the réel,
the reconciliation with her parents over the phone, and leaving. The gaze of
Porterfield, without effects, without forcing, without a romanesque also (it’s
the limit of his gesture, almost too respectful) but delicately and with
precision, he would film his characters up to the point of recovering, and
after the crisis, their fears, their solitude, becomes again – for a at least a
short period – luminous.”
Notes Critique:
Spike Lee’s Oldboy
“Where does the
impression that the film works despite itself?... Maybe due to Spike Lee’s
baroque methods – who has for many times even parasited his own cinema –
deploys here advisably, in a busy narrative that substitutes for the transgressive
taste system that moved everything forward with Park Chan-wook… While, he oscillates for a while now on perforated classics, safe documentaries and
exercises in style (the undistributed and interesting Red Hook Summer, in 2012, falls into this category), the career of
Spike Lee achieves a minor success with Old
Boy, too weak certainly for the public of the original.”
Notes
Critique: James Ponsoldt’s The
Spectacular Now
“Nothing is more
irritating than a calibrated American independent cinema, kilometers away from
the truly free shooters (Shane Carruth, Andrew Bujalski, Matt Porterfield, to
only cite those with films coming out this year)… The film eludes that which it
aims towards (almost nothing on the alcoholism of the protagonist), and never on
the screen do we even see the shadow of a teenager that would have a place
close to the less docile kids from
the films of Larry Clark or Gregg Araki.”
***
Cahiers (February 2014, N.697)
Notes
Critique: Yann Le Quellec’s Le Quepa sur
la vilni!
“An ode to
liberty, unbridled, evoking, though usually not as just, that of Luc Moullet's
burlesque alpines (by chance, that of Parpaillon)…
The occasion to compare two gestures of the cinéaste, is to verify that the
energy of the bodies never liberate themselves better then through the rhythm
of desire.”
Notes
Critique: Nicole Garcia’s Un beau
dimanche
“The habit with
Nicole Garcie: to go through the romanesque (more psychological than lyrical)
to arrive at the political, via the social… That of suspended time causes
problems, that it installs in instants through the obscurity of the family
house, before becoming chocked up in the choice of télé-filmic style (from the
naturalist image to the folk score, all has been seen and heard elsewhere)… The
shadow of Visconti appears for a second, but it’s on Klapisch which it tends to
land.”
***
Cahiers (March 2014, N.698): La parole
aux étudiants
***
Cahiers (April 2014, N.699): Alain
Resnais
Cahiers
Critique: Andrew Bujalski’s Computer
Chess
“In Austin, a
year ago, Andrew Bujalski explained to Cahiers
his fascination for the discarded, the aside, and the out-moded. We knew his three
first films, rohmerien and lo-fi, where everyone, in fact, seemed, out-of-step,
but we remained astonished by his evolution (the too-much?) of Computer Chess,
so resolved to distance himself from the family of American independents. Out
of phase at all costs… So what do we see, then, in Bujalski’s first film to come
out in France?.. Everything suffering from a vain cry and vintage maniérisme
if the film stopped there, content to be the status of a seductive ‘strange
object’. But the too-much (visual, comic and speculative) sculpts a film that’s
profoundly dislocated, more humain and uncertain than it looks… The director
has often cited as an influence the film by the photographer William Eggleston, Stranded in Canton (a favorite of
Harmony Korine, in the period of Trash
Humpers), an exploration all in close-ups and of jump-cuts in a now lost madness, which was
shot in the South of the United States. To import in a fiction the
documentary gaze of Eggleston, usually absorbed by the energy of his own
subjects, is not without consequence: the hotel of Computer Chess, slowly, furthers from the Altmanian model to plunge
itself in the Kubrickian interior of madness… It is the details of problems of the
game which Bujalski’s camera films: the stammering of language, awkward
silences, and suden hesitations… At the hour where his ex-compatriots of SXSW
responds to the calls from the mainstream (Joe Swanberg, Lena Dunham, Greta
Gerwig, now are all televised), and where the ancient lost characters of mumblecore, now in their
thirties, finally find their calling, Bujalski’s gaze takes on the choice
of the margins, and he does this by filming humour mixed with anxieties mixed
together in all of its variations. The risk: for himself to remain stranded, lost, in the game sometimes
intoxicated of prevented obsessions.”
Notes
Critique: Bruce LaBruce’s Gerontophilia
“That what
Bruce LaBruce shows which is the most unbelievable in Gerontophilia isn’t the central couple but the total absolute lack
of scandal that surrounds it… So few cinéastes had even dreamt of such a point
of equality, and even better, an equality out-of-the-norm, perhaps maybe John
Waters (who is more bantering) or Adolpho Arrietta (who is more subterranean)…
Remember that Bruce LaBruce, a real sentimentalist and false provocateur, had
seen and had filmed others, the terrified encounters of Hustler White (1996),
henceforth passing for the innocence of a cinema which has turned towards the
romance between zombies (Otto, 2008), see the romance between zombies and
coked-out aliens (in the gay porno L.A Zombie, 2010)… Too much of the marginal kills the marginal, the Canadian cinéaste finally tries a style
and a story comme il faut (consequence:
it’s sometimes awkward), but he finds new forms for his desires: equality to
start off with, and then devoration… To say too much, without doing enough, he
wouldn’t have seen that the fight was already won for the margins for Bruce LaBruce, there where love exists, he films without any irony.”
Note
Critique: Wang Bing’s Les Trois Soeurs
du Yunnan
“There’s a
fascinating shot of an encounter in the corner of an alley where his capture
captures a minuscule figure of a young girl running away from his view, she’s
as much interested as scared, then he follows her home, a room engulfed in
shadows where she reunited with her two sisters… In front of his subject and
their voices (Fengming) or with them as their working (L’Argent du charbon, L’homme sans nom), the gaze is always double
for Wang Bing, interrogative and benevolent… If the film, here, testifies still
in details a ‘masterfulness’ (a Pierre Perrault term) of the quotidian work
and labor, the presence of the cinéaste has never been more felt, benevolent, full
of love, the only gaze on these little girls that are as voluble as the parents
are (pre)occupied… The characters are that of the rejected-from-society, which is also his own. His moral, of this monumental
film project, is to match the high moral of these little girls today, remains
the same, essential and beautiful. Regardless of the scale: to film the silence
to not abandom those that have been overlooked.”
DVD Review:
Andrew Bujalski box-set
“All of Bujalski
is there in the formidable inaugural scene in his cinema: a tipsy student
enters what must be a tattoo shop (we only see its four walls), and engages in
a conversation that has no point, nor start, nor end (Bujalski ends the scene
early), with a tattoo artist that’s trying to reason with her… Bujalski was a
student at Harvard under Chantal Akerman: his cinema of casual rooms is quite intimate, in the practice of the Do It Yourself before anything else (light
productions, friends/actors, 16mm), but it’s the rohmerian separation between
a felt desire and that which is expressed, in the name of an awkwardness
against that of a moral, which each film expresses… From the sentimental
explorations of Funny Ha Ha (2002),
to the new temptations of Mutual
Appreciation (2005) to the relations to work finally engaged with in Beeswax (2009), Bujalski has revealed
to the American indie scene of the 2000 years a new figure, less prolific than
the slacker, where hiding behind these
false smiles and knee-jerk humor there is an indecision of anxiety and solitude – that
which enriched the characters in the films of Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz or the
Duplass brothers, and that today we are refinding, entering its adult age, in
the roles of Greta Gerwig in the films of Noah Baumbach.”
***
Cahiers (June 2014, N.701): Maps to the
Stars
Notes
Critique: Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin
Ice
“Since his
beginnings ten years ago, after having written for other auteurs of the sixth
generation (1965-1975), Diao Yinan had started to film the changing of rhythm of China… Does the
world turn the same way or not as it is represented by the law (Uniform)? Or when we return to our
homes alone or accompanied (Night Train)?...
Black Coal, Thin Ice is his most
successful and the most open of his films, and it offers seductive readings (which
is, perhaps, why it won the Golden Bear)… Could the progression of the story
resemble diagnostic images of a too quick entrance into a sick modernity?
Possibly, but Dio Yinan, not a director of a thesis, looks less to a broken country
then its citizens in the face (this leads to why possibly
it was a box-office success in China)… Diao captures something which was only
starting to blossom in the films by Jia Zhang-ke: the impossible management of phantasms in a
isolating society… And through this angle, the chronicle of Black Coal, Thin Ice, which is itself a phantasm of the film noir, really takes on its veritable political meaning. That
of an absurd fable where the emptiness of the spaces that are traversed find
their echo in a existential no man’s land, that of Orson Welles’ The Trial, in
an derisory explosion.”
Note
Critique: Vicent Mariette’s Tristesse
Club
“The tepidity of the writing, which progresses
with the most shameless figures and most despised in French cinema, is the
major problem of this comedy where two brothers discover their sister…
Mariette, we knew this since her short-films (where brilliantly appeared Noemie
Lvovsky, Nicolas Maury, Esteban), establishes better her cinema through the focus on the actors than that of the frame. This attention to the actors’ work
saves in extremis the mise en scène, some laughs, but it isn’t enough to anchor the
film on these performances… What to enthousiastically do with characters that
are so narrow, like the role of the false ingénue that plays Ludivine Sagnier
for the how many-th time since the last fifteen years?”
***
Cahiers (July/August 2014, N.702): De La Lumière!
Événement
Essay: Le lac et le desert, propos de
Fabrice Aragno
“Where does the
light in Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema come from, that which is captured in his
(small) digital cameras for his last two (grand) films, and why don’t they
resemble any others?... We are subjugated to a plasticity of the image that we
feel is ephemeral, trivial and though we feel is more anchored in the réel than that of other films with the
‘amateur’ apparatuses… To talk about the light in Godard’s last films comes
back to talking about pleasure – that of watching them, and that of inventing
them… One must look back four films, to the period after Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998), a moment of forced reinvention due to
the technical changes going on… to Éloge
de l'amour (2001), which was filmed by Julien Hirsch, and Notre musique (2004), with its
melancholic light… And to actually know how, one had to go and meet Fabrice
Aragno – not fully the cinematographer, nor sound engineer, nor lighter, but
all of these things at once, and one of Godard’s closest partners since Notre musique, where he worked
specifically on its last section, by the lake. Aragno describes the
collaboration, ‘Godard doesn’t tell me
what to do, the opposite actually, what he says is: ‘when you are lost, try.’’
From Film Socialisme, the search for
a contrasted image, dynamic, pushes towards the multiplication of cameras,
before and during the filmmaking. A Sony for the scenes in Martin’s garage, and
different others for the rest: randomly, a Canon 5D, an Archos, a Samsung NV24,
a Panasonic Snapshot… The quality isn’t what’s important (‘These cameras aren’t good, from a ‘professional’ perspective’), but
what’s important is in the discovered palette of the material… Where the light
sensitivity of digital has interested certain technophile cineastes, it’s its
new picturality that Godard and Aragno are pursuing. They then compare the Sony
to watercolors (‘even though it might
seem optimistic to say this, because its images are quite pale’) and the 5D
to charcoal (‘little of depth of field,
we trace tight shots, create something distinct’). For each shot the cinéaste chooses the right camera and matter… ‘While we’re filming, the principal shot is framed by Godard with the
5D,’ but other cameras are tried with in different angles, ‘while we’re working for each take, we tell
ourselves: ‘Oh, why, don’t we try this…’ … There are six cameras that are
credited in the credits, each one with their imperfection that’s brought into
the matter itself of the film, but without it being a provocation: ‘we do not function with an already-defined
idea, as if we were searching for the absolute malfunction.’… ‘The cinéaste edits all by himself… he
composes the film like Histoire(s),
with his small older analogue system, which permits him to amplify the colors,
reinventing accidents, moving the connecting cord to create further glitches in
the image,’ and after that
transferring it to HD for Aragno to make some final touches on the color
correction… More so than the films that are signed by Julien Hirsch, it’s
through these films today that the cinéaste seems to prolong the plastic
experimentation of Histoire(s), with
the post-production accentuating the pictoriality that’s found in the
technique… And there are just as many shots that were filmed by Godard, ‘for a contrast and the matter’… It’s
this tendency for improvisation that Godard has been able to re-find through
the digital. He enjoys, ‘just filming,
with a Fuji or mini-Sony that he always has in his pocket, hours and hours of
images of his dog Roxy, in each season, over four years.’ Godard, is the cinéaste of notebooks, notes, and sketches to materialize the non-thought. This gesture is close to that of Jonas
Mekas, who has filmed for a long time these instances of beauty, or of a
Terrence Malick, rediscovering the lightness in very complex set-ups… But the
thing is the light for Godard, more so than the beauty
of Mekas or Malick, dares to create ruptures, failure and banalities. And
through this he finds a true hybrid richness when the work on the light
becomes a real montage. Fabrice Aragno, “What’s
so beautiful is that it’s not just aerial shots. There’s a side earth-to-earth,
there needs to have a trivial side to it.’… The position of Godard, that of
the old painter who has refound an innocence, which he has been searching for for
a while, and which he now occupies, shows the difficulty to access this method.
We don’t imagine too many young directors risking to film so many images that
attempt to create a new language, as Genet said, to paraphrase, ‘In the desert, one must go search.’ In
the name of matter, let’s hope that this plentiful ‘desert’ does not remain the iconoclasm of one inventor and his
ally.”
***
Cahiers (September 2014, N.703): P'tit
Quinquin
Notes
Critiques: Christophe Honoré’s Métamorphoses
“With Metamorphoses did Christophe Honoré
want to rub his cinema with that of Straub and Huillet?... The interesting idea
of a scenographer without a future, it’s a first in the trajectory of the
director and rarety in French cinema. It deserves the comparison but the film
quickly evades towards the gadget. It’s that Honoré
is a cinéaste of the apparition
and not of the incarnation, less interested by the search for an archaic wind
in these anonymous bodies (a mise en scène project) than the usage of iconic
images as a value to add to his stories (project of seduction)… Without an
incarnation produced by a mise en scène, without a jeu proposed by his actors, Honoré finds himself in face of the
contemporary without knowing what to do… One needs a gaze less slick than Honoré
for him to now redo his gaze on his contemporary, that of Les rencontres d'après minuit, Mange tes morts or Mercuriales for better examples of pretty apparitions, that are
more lived.”
Notes
Critique: Denis Gheerbrant’s On a grèvé
“What Denis
Gheerbrant’s camera (always) films, is what the other cameras don’t (usually)
film. Not for the internet, nor for television, nor for cinema, nor fiction or
nothing…”
Note
Critiques: Santiago Loza’s La Paz
***
Cahiers (October 2014, N.704)
Cahiers
Critique: Frederick Wiseman’s National
Gallery
“We’d be wrong
to think of National Gallery, the
second Frederick Wiseman film of the year, as a simple variation of a
‘pacifying milieu’ of the exhaustive At
Berkeley… When in the
middle of the film a restorer presents the discovery of a detail under the Portrait de Frédéric Rihel à cheval by
Rembrandt, a trace that is nearly invisible – which can barely be filmed – of a portrait under the portrait, of a
possibility that was erased, it’s his proper gesture that Wiseman refinds. The
project has a beauty: instead of a guided tour, it is precisely this invisible
portraits that the film is aiming for… The social question is displaced towards the
margins, and through that (or because of it?) its expression: it’s through this
complexity, through the silence that it takes to build a utopia (Boxing Gym, for example, before the
student sit-ins or the discreet gardener in At Berkeley)… Filming here the lives of these paitings, it’s really
ours that he’s interrogating.”
Notes
Critique: Mike Cahill's I Origin
“The scenario of
I Origins is as incredible as the
film is unwatchable – it’s too attached to its easy stylistic effects to see
how beautiful the subject was and how it didn’t need anything else, like the
scientific-philosophical speculation (type Gattaca)
or an impossible dimension (type Birth)… It’s that I Origins isn’t necessarily bad, and is close enough to a popular
success or a good b-film… In fact, it’s at Sundance this year that the film
found a mini-success. Though to know what the film has to say to France today,
we can't really tell.”
Notes
Critique: Woody Allen’s Magic in the
Moonlight
“In the last
Allenien decade of films – post-cards, where Magic in the Moonlight is the one that’s the most romantic. We find
the twenties period, a Sternbergien Berlin, a British magician that a friend
invites to the south of France to demask a so-called psychic, of course,
American, young and pretty… The film is petrified. The story isn’t made with
emotion, but with didacticism. So, there’s the thesis (‘Nothing exists, of
course’ so says the broken-record Colin Firth), anti-thesis (but Emma Stone is
so charming under this light), and the synthesis (she might have been wrong,
but there’s real magic: love…)… In his interview book with Stig Björkman, Allen explains that the difference between
comedy and tragedy isn't wrapped up in the writing, but the rhymtn of the game
(more speed = more laughts). He doesn’t say anything about surprises, as
perhaps it’s something that’s beyond him… An idea without a realization. Is it
only a chance that the best scenes are those where everything works? There was a
time when Woody Allen actually believed in the spectacle.”
Notes
Critique: Alejandro Fernández Almendras’ Tuer
un homme
“First off
because we aren’t given room to breathe. This is Alejandro Fernández Almendra
project for his third film... Why after Tuer
un homme, when we realize how much of the dangerous climate of the story is
fake, we realize how Chile’s crime-rate is actually one of the lowest in South
America.”
***
Cahiers (November 2015, N.705): Quand le
cinéma était psychédelique
Notes
Critique: Antoine d’Agata’s Atlas
“In an interview
to coincide with the programming of the film on Arte, in December 2013, he
admitted to ‘deliberating evacuating all autobiography and anecdotal
references’ in the recorded dialogues, to priviledge an ‘essential’ form. But
it’s exactly this essential that here becomes the problem: the subjects, are
here completely lost to its formalism… The cinema that really films the margins
(that of Pedro Costa, that of Wang Bing) never makes the economy of the biographical
or the anecdotal, which gives a story to the bodies, but also the material of
the frame. This is exactly what is lost on the photographer Agata: a too
pretty image, is first off just an image. And what would have been fair here,
would be to point the camera to himself, to change the subject to that of the collective,
and to recognize that the film isn’t a responsible exploration of sexuel
exploitation, but the intimate journal of a client isolated in his phantasms,
not in itself a bad subject after all, but in condition that it is fully
interrogated.”
Notes
Critique: Marianne Tardieu’s Qui vive
“Qui vive has the merit, no harmless for
a first feature, to search to undermine the typical representation of the
French suburbs… But if the film is able to avoid some pratfalls, it remains
prisoner of its intention. Its social determinism only contributes to a
mechanical scenario not the least univocal, and the characters remain
paper-like figures, without any passion, nor desire… Qui vive has a clear and just idea of what not to do, but remains
far from the other troubling visions produced about the suburbs this year, from
Bird People to Mercuriales.”
Journal
Article: Guy Gilles, Absences répétées
“What though
never happened in regards to Guy Gilles is that he never had an influence on
French cinema. There hasn’t been any real influence or trace of his, and even
today we don’t have any distinct images of the cinéaste, perhaps firstly
because he never tried to leave one… to see a Guy Gilles film, is like to
surprise someone who’se lost in their own thoughts. And his strongest gesture,
the cinéaste finally produces it when he films in front of him, when his camera
takes trips, and he stops fetichising the montage to document what takes place
in the present, to place it in a continuity of life instead of to close the
work within thought… By the end of the seventies, the cinema of Guy Gilles
speaks, his voice is enriched by the voice of others, seducing less, but more
graceful due to this gesture.”
***
Cahiers (December 2014, N.706): Best of
2014
Cahiers
Critique: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu
“Tombouctou,
April 2012. Enters the village independentist Tuaregs of the MLNA and suddenly,
Ansar Dine islamist, they decide to impose Sharia law in the north of Mali. After
the release of a video of a stoning that got leaked on the internet,
Abderrahmane Sissako decides to film: One must take charge cinematographically of
this bouleversement… But actually at
the beginning, the film is the total opposite: a leson in the form of the
over-written fable, precisely atemporel, putting in parallel the taking of a
community and the march towards the death of a Tuareg oppressor… At the hour of
the urgency of Silvered Water, Syria
Self-Portrait, the choice of such an allegory can disappoint, due to the
fact the fiction deserves so much more… How come reality is always so powerful
and can be reduced to such a used axim: poetry, it’s better than oppression?... Significatively Timbuktu lacks this
gesture of going back-and-forth that the in
situ of his earlier films had: to return to the same characters five, ten,
fifteen times to record the passing of time, and indulging the false trails,
the tangents, the richness of fiction… The dream-film of Tombouctou had only
been sketched. That of its bouleversement still needs to be made.”
Journal Article:
on Amazon online screening service.
***
Cahiers (January 2015, N.707): Larry
Clark, Forever Young
Notes
Critique: Fatih Akin’s The Cut
“Behinds the
unsavable The Cut, there’s a story
that’s more audacious that the German director with Turkish origins Fatih Akin
dreamt of filming in Istanbul, with a team of actors and locals, around the
assassination by an ultranationalist of the journalist Hrant Dink, the author
of numerous articles on the Armenien genocide. That would be a film that would
force the country to look at itself in the face. This would be the actual inverse
of what the cinéaste actually made, recoiling in front of the difficulties of
this first historical-poetic territory, here the course of a villager facing
deportation after trying to find his lost daughter, an ocean further and ten
years later. Programmatic, without passion, the result oscilates between a weak
history lesson on the genocide (a failure, since the radical Turks that the film is
aimed towards have already condemned the film) and an empty romanesque fresco (the film’s good move is being endowed by
Mardik Martin, an old Scorsesien screenwriter of Raging Bull; there isn’t Kazan
or Lean but instead only the odor of the bottom of their drawers). Nothing,
here, will change the slightest thing.”
Notes
Critique: Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up
Philip
“The leap into
the abyss of The Color Wheel, is
what this new film by Alex Ross Perry doesn’t risk exactly, and whose character
of the title, comes off like a double for the cinéaste (Philip Lewis Friedman,
a brilliant young author with two novels under his belt) who also negates.
What’s at stake here is more to assure himself the status of ‘great American
auteur’, which becomes forcibly a demonstration, that of Philip on the screen,
with his cynism and meanness, fascinating at first before due to his affective
limits becomes the one of the film. We can like an un-sympathetic character,
there they are in Woody Allen’s Husbands
and Wives (on of Perry’s favorite films), but Philip is never permitted to
go into madness as Woody Allen the actor does, or like Seymour Cassel at the
end of the living room scene in Faces,
which is almost copied in a way and replayed here. It is actually when
Philip is doubtful, where he’s saying his caustic replies, that the film
actually touches its subject: what kind of life does one lead when they spend
all of their time creating? What time is there to breathe, love? There are two
occasions that Perry detaches himself from his character to focus on the point
of view of his ex, then on his mentor, as if to whisper to him: ‘Listen up, Philip’, listen and watch how
others live their lives, they, have their little victories without ever locking
themselves up. The idea is beautiful, and the scenes with his ex, played by
Elisabeth Moss, in a register less sped-up, opens the film to a fragility that
allows for an emotion.”
Notes
Critique: Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s Mon amie
Victoria
“From a singular
adventure to an isolated adventure there is only one step: the process of
Jean-Paul Civeyrac in French cinema is always in between these two, since his
films seem sometimes to exist outside of the world, just like his characters,
at once loyal, to a late bressonien spleen, and too weak to feel to bring us to
places like as do Garrel or Brisseau.”
Notes
Critique: Stéphane Demoustier’s Terre
battue
“We can feel
sometimes the few desires, which are sometimes even intriguing, that animates Terre battue: the complicated relation
father-son, that of middle-of-the-road and fondness for mediocrity, and that of the
province made up entirely of parking-lots, warehouses, and doubtful
architecture… How come the film never arrives to communicate these ideas, and
instead, remains at the level of the télé-film, or at least that of a cinema
whose only servicing the minimum? It’s that the mise en scène takes place too
quickly, so there’s Olivier Gourmet who grumbles and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
whose squealing like she does everywhere, and where the crucial scenes are sped
up as if nobody was even looking at what was happening in front of the camera
(even the important tennis match scene is filmed with even more boredom than
the match). The last act, which folds back onto a news item, shakes the film
into the worst possible Dardenne rip-off (who are producers on the film).”
Journal
Article: Le festival Entrevues de Belforts
***
Cahiers (February 2015, N.708): Issue
Charlie Hebdo
Notes
Critique: Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank
“The worry that Frank is only a short-film inflated into
a feature, with its gadget side of
its synopsis (the singer of an underground group who lives permanently with a
giant paper mache head on top of his own), quickly disssissipates in front of
this project, which is more rare (even though its uneven) in its mise en scène:
to not show a path towards success but towards failure, to not show genius
musiciens but minor ones, and to not show the perfect alchemy of ideas, bodies
and instruments, but instead the opposite that of showing the incapacity
towards agreement (in this way, the film is the anti-Whiplash). It’s a shame then that Lenny Abrahamson’s mise en scène
only takes a few steps towards the madness of its pitch and, just like Spike
Jonze’s Her, the film interrogates
the relations between weak humans and semi-virtual figure, here this smiling
and scary mask that hides for two thirds of the film the face of Michael
Fassbender (it supposes).”
Notes
Critique: Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry
Hearts
“At the last
Venise festival, Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher both received an acting award
for Hungry Hearts which, holds, in
fact, three films that aren’t necessarily successful, but are held together by
what takes place between them… The
film spends too much time on the central anxiesties, which are sometimes ridiculous,
and disappoints with its ending. But the momentum of the cinéaste doesn’t
muffle the confused sentiments of the protagonist, and the folie on the screen (in every sense of the term) feels good, even
though it’s shaky, unsuccessful or just ressembles an exercise in style. We’ve
seen so many films that depend too heavily on their scripts that it’s good, for
once, to see one rely excessively on its mise en scène.”
Notes
Critique: Keren Yedaya’s Loin de mon
père
“We all know
that the road to hell is paved in good intentions. Loin de mon père seems really far away during its 1:35mins of its
projection, which mechanically pursues in humiliation, rape, blows, which is
supposed to deal with the relation of the psychology and sexuality
of a father and his twenty-year-old daughter. Keren Yedaya has always defended
a vigorous feminism, in Mon Tresor (2004,
against prostitution) and even the less successful Jaffa (2009, against fathers), but her sensibility towards incest
here passes in a mode à la Austrian,
that renders the spectator powerless and then assumes a repetition, as if it
needed consequetively four so miserable scenes for the spectator to tell
themselves: ‘Oh yeah, that’s it, now I get it.”… Not four, not one, none are
evidently necessarily to understand in
fact. By filming this distance which passes the seriousness of the posture for
the seriousness of the enterprise, but never truly renders the measure of the
horror, it eventually ruins itself in the aberration of its mise en scène… We
end well by telling ourseves, ‘What horror…’, but we have stopped talking about
the réel , but only of the film.”
Journal
Article: Memoire vive
“There are
images that are signed by Jean-Luc Godard, revealed by Serge Le Péron, in his
film Serge Daney: le cinéma et le monde
(2012)… They are rushes from an interview that was filmed about the critic in
Rolle, December 3rd, 1988, six month after the Cannes presentation
of the first two episodes of Histoire(s)
du cinéma… In front of Daney, the cinéaste talks about his conception of
history like a montage, recalling that the life of Rimbaud had the same length as
that of Petain, or that the richness of science has to do with that of literature… In front of Godard, the critic
discusses the urgency of the project: this is the last time that an individual
could ‘cover the whole territory’ of
the history of cinema, having experienced half of it… From all of this footage,
there remains a few minutes in episode 2A of Histoire(s), a partial re-transcription by Daney in Libération in
the December 26th, 1988 issue, and another by Alain Bergala in the Cahiers of May 1997 (N.513). But the
rushes also say a story… This film also tells a story, that which could not
have been re-transcribed, this time of the critics that wanted to talk about
the world that kept turning, this desire to fix that which continues: history
and the works. In the episode 2A of Histoire(s)
there are two bars that mask the top and bottom of the image: Godard’s face
is now gone, and so is a television, and the masking disallows to see how
nightfall has fallen. This was done to frame the shot around Daney, which
Godard edited to create an echo with extracts and titles. The critic then
dialogues with Jerry Lewis, Anita Ekberg and Carax. When he presents for the first
time the montages 2A and 2B in New York in January 1994, Daney has been dead
for almost two years. To re-watch theses rushes, is the occasion to verify if
cinema priviledges still the accumulated
memory as described by Daney, or if Godard said around then, that it
privileges a story.”
Cinéma
Retrouvé Critique: Paul Vecchiali’s Nuits blanches sur la
jetée
“Vecchialien,
even really Vecchialien, Nuits blanches
sur la jetée is undeniably less on the side of the ‘white night’, as others have adapted it (Visconti admirably, Bresson superbly), then
by its side ‘by the wharf’…. Rarely has Vecchiali so clairely circumscribed
and especially concentrated his cinema (as he concentrates different
Dostoievski figures in his hero, of the name Fedor). Rarely has he so nakedly
put in place his system. The back-and-forth of the réel and of the game, of the
possible and the illusion, all is visible on this wharf, by the activity there…
If he keeps the construction from the story, and some of its dialogue along
with his, Vecchiali still takes something from the story to create something personal,
priviledging the surreal. First off,
for the encounter, it goes even further than did Bresson and Visconti. The
character of Natcha, revealed by the light, exists only at night, invisible in
the shadows when the dreamer wakes, and then is just ordinary… All of
Vecchiali’s cinema is replayed in this small space, it starts again from zero
with each new sunrise.”
***
Cahiers (March 2015, N.709): Inherent
Vice
Cahier
Critique: Wang Bing’s A la folie
“Up to date,
Wang Bing has only filmed the outcasts of China in the singular: the widow of
Fengming, the man without a name or the three sisters of Yunnan from last year,
who ended up focusing on the young Yingying, when her family left her by the
dock as they went to the city. It’s the first time in this scale for a film
that he shows them between each other, and discovers a tenderness that responds
to his own. A la folie, a film about
an incarceration, a mid-way between Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Dostoevsky’s Carnets de la maison morte, and perhaps before that an answer to
last half hour of Trois Soeurs du Yunnan,
and to the shots of Yingying in front of the montains, nothing and nobody
beside her, except for the one who is filming. Here, the perspectives are full:
broken bodies, non-stop silhouette, a crowd that’s running, activity and noise.
The flm takes place in a psychiatric asylum of Yunnan on the stage for men
and in the courses that take place in its interior court. Wang Bing and his
cinematographer Liu Xianhui, filmed for three months, from January to
April 2013… Here one must ask the question that necessarily is posed in front
of this subject: is filming these sick, like this man who thinks he’s been
attacked by invisible insects, would be like making a film behind its subjects?
If the scenes only lasted ten seconds, the answer would be yes, and the
aesthetic of the film would only be that of the repeated shock. But the cinema
of Wang Bing exists in its duration. A scene regives its magistral impact
twenty minutes after it started: at the dusk of night, we follow Ma Jian, a
young patient, when suddenly, he gets naked, and starts running. The camera follows
him. We doubt. Is the person who is filming, in this instant, rejoicing in this event that
accelerates the pulse of the film, which pushes its images to the limit, to the
night, the blurry? There are a number of cinéaste that would stop there, once
they got their shot. But Wang Bing
continues until the patient returns to the cameraman: ‘God, you’re sweating too!’.
If the shot lasts, risks mockery, and permits itself to be multiple things (we
are then explained that Ma Jian’s mother sent her to get her shoes), it’s to
arrive to the point where the shot also belongs to that who is filming… A la folie reveals itself to be a love
film, where the empathy on the screen overflows that of the gaze. An amour fou, as the title indicates, where
the caress becomes a mix, then the disparition, like in the last shot of the
body thrown into obscurity. This tenderness, between the cause and the nevertheless,
is the limit-point of Wang Bing’s cinema, that where he can no longer film
because there is too much, and to remain would be complacent. But in the
course, his gesture is pushed to its extreme, instead of a monumentality what is
won, there is the touch.”
Notes
Critique: Tim Burton’s Big Eyes
“After his
little regain of form in the vain of nostalgia in 2012 (the retrospective at
the Cinémathèque, the vintage adaptation of Dark Shadows, and the remake of Frankenweenie), Tim Burton persists in his reprisal and/or
pastiche, with a new Ed Wood: a bio
on Margaret Keane, a doubtful artist but an indisputable idiosyncratic, who’se
husband has secretly appropriated the ownership of her sixties paintings. But
unlike his return to the b-filmmaker, his lack of resources here (no
synthetic images, no carnival colors, even no Johnny Depp) leads to his
most disincarnated work for the cinéaste. The stakes though are there, and it
would have been more interesting to take the character by their weaknesses: the
silence of the couple in front of the usurpation, the discrete entrance of the
Jehovah witnesses, or see the contestable quality of the work - that the critique of
Ed Wood which it really proposed -
while here there exists only two scenes, its best, led by Terence Stamp who
reveals the whole film… And to look at his future projects (that of a new Alice, a Beetlejuice 2), the confounding failure of Big Eyes seems to really show a resignation of Tim Burton to
re-play his best titles, now without anything keeping him in check.”
Notes
Critique: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A
Spell To Ward Off The Darkness
“For his second
full length feature after Two Years at
Sea, the English artist Ben Rivers joins the American Ben Russell, an
auteur of several films made under the seducing banner of psychedelic ethnography. What form does this seducing promise of
the réel and its loss take in A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness? Like
in the earlier films of Rivers, we’re always floating around a character that
we don’t know much about, but which we slowly start to know more about in this
remote community in Estonia, through these forest trips in Finland, and a heavy
metal concert scene. The subject of the film denies itself through its cryptic
research into the communion of others, nature, and then music, but the
veritable instant of psychedelia never truly occurs, as if trapped by the
formalism of a gesture that pretands to be indifferent to what it films. The
camera glides on-top of its subjects, creates images that are too sleak, it
mimes a fall but never risks the unexpected.We can admire this cold beauty, but
we remain at the doors of the darkness that is promised, just like in front of
other films by the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (like Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, for
example): the immersion aims for a dispositif that is falsely abstract, where its
this front of the false that we are usually seeing. It lacks the fragility,
obsession, failures, that are more tangible in the trips otherwise psychedelic of Brakhage, Snow or Raymonde Carasco
and Regis Hebraud.”
Notes
Critique: Noaz Deshe’s White Shadow
“On paper, it’s
an important project: to place in front the horror of the situation of the
Albinos in Tanzania, persecuted and assassinated in the North, and constrained
to deplacement to avoid the illegal organ trafficking… Because the meaning is
pre-existing in almost each shot, all of the ambiguity, all breathing room, all
shattering is killed instantly, the mise en scène can’t remedy this and lacks
inspiration by trying to make up for it by a clumsy stylishness, between an
Adidas commercial and a social issue clip.”
***
Cahiers (April 2015, N.710): Anti-Manuel:
Comment écrire un scénario
Notes
Critique: Brigitte Sy’s L’Astragale
“Second full
length feature by Briggite Sy, after Les
Mains Libres, L’Astragale also treats the prison system, this time from an
exterior perspective, of the difficulty of being outside, outside of its walls,
but still sometimes outside of society… To reconstitute, is to choose what has
happened between the periods, that which disappears and that which remains.
Fifty years after the real event and the novel that Albertine Sarrazin had written
in 1964, before his unexpected death, the scenario of Brigitte Sy and Serge Le Péron takes the volition to approach as close as they can the true story, to
align the silhouetes of the film with historical photographs which are shown in
the credits. It’s with this regret that instead of going overboard with
passion, we find the story stalling with details that should be
inconsequential: stilted acting, picturesque decors, or the fact that Lelia
Bekhti is ten years older than model. There’s no worst enemi than a sensible
gaze and a prudent script.
Notes
Critique: Barry Levinson’s The Humbling
“It’s like Birdman, but the version gold-plated,
the film has a foot in the imagination of a libiduous decorative tragedy, with
the scenes of the tribalism with chinese shadows, and a cheap humor with
a forcibly dramatic program. Just as coarse as Inarritu (on the subject of
theater), but also as sophomoric as a Barry Levinson (that’s what it is!), the
film advances through the regime of the sitcom gag of the old age and constructs
a reflexivity that is just as tired, through psychiatrist sessions via Skype…
You grind your teeth in front of this: the spectator of The Humbling is an emberassed spectator, in front of what can only be
called, in one word, a disaster.”
Notes
Critique: Ryan Gosling’s Lost River
“To watch Lost River, is like watching an
anti-trailer, a recalling-trailer
that would recall all that was produced outside of Hollywood by American
auteurs from the last ten years, the tendancy Southern Gothic, swamps and ghost
towns, and it says: ‘you’re going to see what you’ve already seen’. A dose of
Malick, some Jeff Nichols, Harmony Korine, part Beasts of Southern Wild or Blue
Ruin. The first film by Ryan Gosling, Lost
River, puts on the desire of really wanting to be part of the club… The
sentiment in front of your eyes is that of an unsaveable film, a collage that’s not
joyous nor a total monster, which comes from the spectacle of itself, it’s too
rushed to impress.”
Notes
Critique: Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat
on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
“Thirty-seven
fixed long-takes, the procession of numb bodies that have bizarre white makeup,
played slowly in series of absurd instants, stupid deaths, pathetic exchanges
and cruel gags, in decors and under a pale light. The little theatre of Roy
Andersson, always cynical and half-alive, keeps playing the same note as that
from his two previous films in his ‘existence trilogy’, Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007). It’s that which assure us that humanity is
really ugly, and he confirms this in his films by chasing out any breathing
room to prove the otherwise. There’s nothing more vain than this phantasm of
absolute control, that of these empty images that aspire to painting… To
understand what others see in Pigeon, it’s
good to return to a Renoir père
phrase on the weakening works of his time: ‘Artworks
in frocks will always stun.’ For sure, that of Roy Andersson, will always ensnare.”
***
Cahiers (May 2015, N.711): Cannes 2015
Cahier
Critique: Fellipe Barbosa’s Casa Grande
“What’s a film
made in one’s house when it’s more than just a home movie for your own little circle? Kleber Mendonca Filho answered
this last year with Neighboring Sounds,
where his neighborhood stood strong against the anxiety that was arriving in
the deepest of night, barking, guards and explosions. Less of a metteur en scène, more so auteur of characters, Fellipe Barbose answers today with Casa Grande, where his house crumbles,
then, it becomes the anxiety that is born, but where the characters remain
strong, or by looking elsewhere if they have to… The success of the film is to
know how to muddle its direction. All of the deplacements are under the sign of
desire, Jean passes the master bedroom to that of the domestic to seduce her,
then from the house to the street to punctuate his direction in an unexpected
way… Barbosa doesn’t construct this irruption of the réel with images that
would stop the film, but with tangents where he gets lost… To leave one’s home
takes time, but the best home movies are
those that take to the street.”
Notes
Critique: David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn
“To the
question, ‘What to do with Al Pacino today?’, the answer of Manglehorn by David Gordon Green is
similar to that of Barry Levinson’s The
Humbling from last month. The great two films of 2013, Prince Avalanche and Joe is far, and all that remains is
well used: the metaphor for happiness launched by a mime right out of Blow Up, the terrible gags with their
generic pit-falls, the over-acting which accompanies the monologues by the
pancakes, and the emotions that are revealed are not surprising especially as
they are accompanied by some unexpected songs… All of the recognizable marks of
the folk auteur are there but they’re held together by clichés, a sad
auto-recycling of his better days, forced as if the film wanted to fit a
lighter skin which isn’t its own. It brings a frown and disappoints our
expectation, the spectator of Manglehorn
is an incredulous spectator, leaving the cinema with the question that he was
starting to forget: ‘What to do with David Gordon Green today?’”
Notes
Critique: Masa Sawada’s Parole de
kamikaze
“It’s a short
film that takes its time, as if it was conscious of being an impossible film,
and that it needed to make us conscious of this. It’s a film on a Japonese
Kamikaze who is supposed to talk about death, as there’s someone on the screen…
Parole de kamikaze doesn’t rush its
subject as he’s searching for a truth that’s there in the details, just as for
Lanzmann or Rithy Panh. It’s even the inverse: the film offers the luxury of
remainding in silence, for time to play out, to see the unflexible ideas of
this 90 year old loyalist… That which resists to its parole, that which knots the variations of the dispositive, is the precious
subject of the film, the soul of man, maybe: that of a mixture of absurdity and
horror that haunts him since the last years of the war, that of his first
reaction to a suicide plane (‘So here is
my coffin!’) and the memory a friend officer that he signed to death with
the order of a mission.”
Journal
Article: Off the Air
“A series of
incomprehensible flux images roll infront of our eyes, without a commentary,
without any references, with only a one-word title for direction (Food, Animals, Body…) and under enflamed
music, we are allowed to be transported towards abandonment, in a free fall of
visions that are thrown to our eyes. What matters, is that we don’t understand
what we see… The result is a hallucinating bastion of a anti-commercial, even though
it play on Adult Swim at 4AM in the morning, is a zone of avant-garde visuals
of some of the most enthousiastic of the 2010 years… On top of the psychedelia,
we could place the series into three stories: that of the film of the montage,
tendance Amerika d’Al Razutis (1972-1983), and its flux of consciousnous of
some of the lost images of America of the 19th century. That of the
‘alternative’ television, since Dave Hughes, the creator of Off the Air started out at MTV in the
nineties when the chanel cultivated a taste for the hors-format. And that of
veejaying: It’s in the improvising in the montage concerts by Adult Swim, in
2009, that Dave Hughes elaborated the form clipesque of the serie… But the
formalism of Off the Air isn’t
intransitive: it’s a veritable elegy to the world, and the million of gazes
upon it before being lost on the web, which is a parelel enterprise… It’s not
more or less a montagealternative to datamoshing that Off the Air invents, recreating the slow-motion, for three minutes,
with music by Dan Deacon, through a chase which destroys its respective space
to invent a third, living and plastic, surpassing the imperatives of a montage interdit to an improbable datamoshing necessary. The space
discovers something new. The state of the spectator is unknown. It’s the quiet
victory of a psychedelic gaze, at four o’clock in the morning, on American
television.”
***
Cahiers (June 2015, N.712): Miguel Gomes’
Arabian Nights
Notes
Critique: Tsui Hark’s The Taking of
Tiger Mountain
“With Tsui Hark,
visual invention takes the form of a progressive taking off from the réel. The films start in a sort of
grotesque realism, then shakes it off towards a madness of a imaginary that
reconfigures the models (think of Zu
Warriors from the Magic Mountain, of the classic battle at the beginning up
to the final combat outside of time and space with evil personified). In The Taking of Tiger Mountain, latest
Tsui Hark to arrive on our French screens on the sly, it’s one of the eight
‘model operas’ of the cultural revolution that the intrigue takes its heroine
story of a battalion of the Red Amer delivering the mountains fron a
outside-of-the-law gang. If the film embarases with these plot points that are
deep down nationalist, and if the beautiful frenze of Detective Dee is replaced by a heavy cartoon quality of its side
‘war film’, the taking off from the réel
is well towards what’s appreciated today. Without achieving the hallucinatory
spacial re-articulation of his best films, Tsui Hark’s mise en scène runs dry all
of the possibility of a series of scenes that’s in service of the 3D: a duel
with a tiger (which isn’t hidden) in the trees, a scene of defense in a village
à la Seven Samurai (in the snow more
so then in the rain), or a final assault in a synthetic avalanche… The
end-title conclusion isn’t only a marvel of visual invention that Tsui Hark is
offering us but his intact and precious though: instead of this moralizing
legend, he prefers this extravagant action.”
Notes
Critique: Anna Muylaert’s Une Seconde
mere
“Brasilien
cinema and class struggle: the sequel. After Casa grande last month, Une
seconde mere reproduces the terrain ‘rich house + worker revolution =
problem’, by putting forward the arrival, in an upper-class family in Sao Paul,
the ambitious daughter of the cleaning staff, who has come to the city to
study… It holds one attention by a series of scenes where the young woman, just
as maniputalive as insolent, is offered the master bedroom, books, paintings,
and reconfigures all of the stakes of the house (she’s the one who wins the
university contest, and not the family’s daughter)… The revolution will take
place in the details; and the promise of insolence reduced.”
Book Review:
Philippe Roger’s Lumière d'été de Jean
Grémillon
“One of the
first accomplishments of the book is exposing the returning motifs of the film
all the while preserving its meandering nature and secret form… The inner réel, the secret of Jean Grémillon’s oeuvre, approaches a magical réel.”
Cinéma
Retrouvé (Orson Welles dossier): Welles,
toujours plusieurs
“Was Orson
Welles the most abstract iconoclastic actor?... Whether it is when he’s
listening to others or when he’s talking, Welles seems to always be escaping
the present moment, turned towards an indistinct point, over or beyond the
film, in a sort of personal hallucination. When he returns to his peers, Welles
is in two modes, that of the seduction/hypnotism or of anger/madness… You can’t
believe that Welles is a pure technician, adapting each scene to its limit,
blind to the proper beauty. It’s the inverse: Welles takes the word aside, by
multiplying their possibility, the tones, rhythm, angles, and when he films, he
tries to rediscover their meaning.”
***
Cahiers (July/August 2015, N.713): Érotisme
(encore)
Cahiers Critique:
Alante Kavaite’s Summer
“One must maybe,
to justly render the surprising beauty of Summer
better than its generic French title (in Lithuania it’s called Sangaile, based on the name of its
heroine), address the film by its ending, and by the sentiment with which it
leaves us as we leave the theater. This is after about an already stuning first
hour of a certain right of passage story in the register of Monika, where a solitary adolescent
meets and falls in love with a young women of her town, the film then takes a
detour. The relationship ends, which we were expecting, but it’s to better the
film to re-start it’s secret scenario, it’s hidden idea: the desire of Sangaile
to become a pilot. We have seen, films about adolescent that passed through
physical activity as a metaphor for their discovery of their body; but aviation
isn’t here an aside of love, it’s essentially what the film is aiming towards
in secret… This is no longer Bergman’s territory, but Gremillon’s: the sky is
hers.”
Notes
Critique: Andrei Konchalovsky’s Les
Nuits blanches du facteur
“Somewhere in
the deepest of Poutine’s Rusia, so tells us Andrei Konchalovsky, there’s
postmans that knock off their work through several villages at once, while
still being regular guys, with a bored love, disappointing finances, and a sigh
every morning in front of their sandles that lie by the side of their bed
(this, the films met en place with a
precision, which is surely why it won the Silver Lion at Venise)… Les Nuits blanches du facteur is a
routine film on routine. What it does the best is its end credits, when the
amater actors finally breaks from their roles and are presented to the camera
laughing, embarrassed, tired, therefore taking to life, but for too little and
too late. When it comes to weak stories, what’s better is always the littlest
amount of the reel.”
Notes
Critique: Peter Greenaway’s Que viva
Eisenstein !
“Peter Greenaway
has such a spirit of contradiction, that not only does he make a film on one of
the greatest directors of the silent era, but who does not even talk about
cinema, and also never shuts up, which is saying a lot… Que Viva Eisenstein! remains a sort of loud encyclopedia, which
tries to say all that it can about its cineaste Eisenstein and puts into
dialogue all of the Logorrheic of his turmoil of Sergeui, the man… Greenaway
seems to fabricate these courses for himself, only… Like La Ronde de nuit in 2007, Greenaway touches when he starts to
laugh.”
Notes
Critique: Amos Gitaï’s Tsili
“One of the rare
Amos Gitaï film to arrive on French screens in the last ten years, Tsili only confirms the free-fall of
its auteur. It’s not so much his solemn authority that plomps the film (that
would be enough), but it’s form that follows a series of concepts that are not
fully elaborated… Where the book by Aharon Appelfeld said his proper experience
of pursuit in a forest, the film by Amos Gitaï retranscribe his own: wandering
in festivals pursuing only one idea.”
Journal:
Sense8, ca suffit!
“Sometimes a
grating disaster, it is still traversed by a beautiful idea (like the last few
Wachoskis)… It explores the prominent theme for the Wachoski’s, a rudimentary
variation on emancipation.”
***
Cahiers (September 2015, N.714): Le vide
politique du cinéma français
Notes
Critique: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look
of Silence
“The film The Look of Silence wanted to show
their madness, but more so it was taken over, the falseness of a desire for the
spectacular made him omit, first off, the direct reason for the murders… Like
an answer The Look of Silence seems
to wants to correct this… but the result is just as problematic. First off
because the whole is still filmed under the regime of the spectacular in its pathetic
form (the shots of Ani’s senile father, naked and delirous, can’t be
distinguished who filmed them). Especially a direct consequence, again the
bastards are left with positive representations… It isn’t the difficulty of
living with these stories that stupefy, but that the film is satisfied with
these emotions instead of by justice – what’s trying to be said instead is
through the shot-revershot of silent gazes, surely when their edited in a way
that’s so disperse, visibly without a Montage
interdit auspiciously. It’s hard to delve into such a subject, when all
that matters is the spectacle, spectacle, spectacle.”
Notes
Critique: Lionel Baier’s La Vanité
“Those that say
regularity mean a return of ideas. Those that say return of ideas mean
variations. La Vanité is an answer
to Low Cost (2010).”
***
Cahiers (October 2015, N.715): Paul
Verhoeven
Cahiers
Critique, M Night Shyamalan’s The Visit
“Is The Visit a minor film? Surely, but
minor sometimes signals a breath of fresh air, and without a doubt through the
vision of the Shyamalan’s film for Blumhouse, the production company of
micro-budget b-films, it allowed to find an inspiration which was once lost…
Shyamalan reactivates even in some moments that which was the beautiful project
of his cinema of the 2000 years: creating incomprehension, that which can’t be
grasped, the unstable, to plunge the characters and the spectator, and to show
these possible encounters with the unwkown… That which Shyamalan constructs
which is the best are these scenes of simple stakes like whether to open a door
or not… The Visit doesn’t have the grandness
of Lady in the Water or The Village, but it’s still telling
stories to overcome being scared… It’s been too long that Shyamalan hasn’t been
this funny… That the film ends (closing its circle)
with such an attention to its charcters, and therefore also its spectators that
has followed him, going against the Blumhouse sequel style, is only one of its
successes. Like during his best days, Shyamalan belivies in the fiction. We
could return him the favor, and start to believe again in Shyamalan.”
Notes
Critique: Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel’s Le
Chant d’une ile
“When all of the
critics can’t find anything else to say about the ultra-manipulative The Look of Silence, instead we should
really champion the gesture of Le Chant
d’une ile, a film that is less slick, less calibrated, which doesn’t tell
its spectator what to think, which makes its politics more combatative… Less a
documentary on the work of creation, it is instead a portrait of a community in
face of disparearing. At the same time, in his territory, Pedro Costa was doing
the exact same thing in the Fountainhas neighborhood in Lisbon, even though Le Chant d’une ile has more the quality
of a filmed journal… This is what a shared
cinema finally looks like, taking care of those that are being filmed, like
also the spectator, where the other is always the subject, and never the
object.”
***
Cahiers (Novembre 2015, N.716): Nanni
Moretti
Cahiers
Critique, Terrence Malick’s Knight of
Cups
“One must now
use gloves to talk about Terrence Malick. Who could have imagined before The Tree of Life, before the discovery
of the fragmentations created by Emmanuel Lubezki who is become more and more
co-author of the images, that three years later we would approach Malick,
curiously of course but with a reticence, anxious after seeing the enthouiastic
momentum becoming these empty shells in To
The Wonder?... Malick keeps the cap of a downward-looking intimatist, who
is almost autistic, and risks loosing the spectator in his formel pursuits. We
know the danger of this: the last two films shot by Lubezki, Gravity and Birdman, exulted this ‘virtuosity’ trait (with its dangerous
prolongment: ‘masterfulness’), to the limit of the over-full for Cuaron,
towards the frank brutishness for Inarittu… Knight of Cups holds up better than To The Wonder… The direction of the film is quite impressive… even
though we can still prefer the penetrating clarity of the last films by
Apichatpong and Pedro Costa, where present and past, the world and the
between-world co-exist without an edit, by the sole power of the word and
light… It’s impossible to not be fascinated by this montage which has become a
hemorrhage, like as if not being weighed down by weights going through a unique
speed flux: but all advances in the film as if it was on the same train,
without ever stopping for nothing… The pitfall of the last Malicks has a name:
purety. The film lacks a resistance that would drop the house of cards… To
believe in the possibilities of a Adieu
au langage, this film is over-budgeted which doesn’t authorize itself ever
to ruin itself. When in a scene Christian Bale approaches his face towards a
television screen to watch a race, this scene recalls Ferrara: but where are
the register of images that Lubezki and
Malick could use or retrieve?... Knight
of Cups provides its own ghost but it lacks one essential thing: impurity.”
Notes Critique:
Pablo Larraín’s El Club
“For his newest
film returns to a swanky low, and masks poorly the little it even has to say…
Exit the ambitious political gaze, get ready for a simple metaphor.”
Notes
Critique: Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below
“One Floor Below, don’t doubt it, would
please those that like the ordinariness of Romanian cinema… Radu Muntean, a
discret piller of the Romanian school, is pretty good when he describes the
ordinary gestures of the characters who finds himself taking the innocent
perversion, but it finishes, like for the character, on an empty gaze… And we
leave with the certitude that the recipe of the Romanian school, in their
nakedness, are finally inneficient.”
Journal
Article: Lav Diaz, après la tempete
“Just a few
years ago, when we were searching to watch films by Lav Diaz, there was murmur
on the internet that one must contact the cineaste directly. There was an
address that circulated with the promise, for 90 dollars, to receive from the
Philippines signed burnt DVDs, which would be sent by the hands of the auteur.
The invisibility had for a long time constructed a mystery around Lav Diaz, but
this aura of inacisibility is not entirely strange to the project of the films,
themselves difficult to embrace the gaze. Lav Diaz is really far from the canon
of Philipino melodrama of those by his contemporaries as seen in France as seen
in the films of Brillante Mendoza or Raya Martin. His cinema is both minimalist
(in its mise en scene) and collosal (in its ambition), it is both a political
fiction and a work on the country, a critical reflection on the country and on
cinema… At the beginning of the 2000s, he’s the neighbor of some of the great
markers of the period, with In Vanda’s
Room by Pedro Costa or West of
Tracks by Wang Bing… That which resists in each film, is the history of the
Philippines, who itself has a troubled history, that of four centuries of
colonization, occupation dictatorship, corruption. Duration for Lav Diaz, on
top of what it can do discursively and in terms of the documentary gaze, seems
to stretch as it retracts, that the traumatism of the country is never fully
achieved… We’ve compared the cinema of Lav Diaz to that of Pedro Costa and Wang
Big, but he has more to deal with the stretched temporality, of the deep wounds
of the cinema of Tsai Ming-Liang, where time is embalmed.”
***
Cahiers (Decembre 2015. N.717): End of
2015
Cahiers
Critique: Amos Gitai’s Le Dernier Jour
d’Yitzak Rabin (‘Que les choses
soient claires’)
“Finished for a
November 4th Isreal release, to commemorate the 20 years after the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the new film of Amos Gitai is luckily not a
ceremonial film… Le Dernier Jour
d’Yitzak Rabin returns to, and it’s its first surprise, to what Gitai does
the best since his beginning: a certain art of insistence, a manner of
returning scene after scene to the same idea, or even the same location, or
even the same point in time, and to go around it physically (the major motif of
the travelling) or dialectically (by confronting the analyses), just to make
sure nothing is overlooked… What’s at stake is
to add more. That the answers find numerous answers. That everything is
layed out several times… The insistence can be laborious, but the
disequilibrium is also stunning… It’s a veritable dialectical madness that the
montage reveals itself slowly: and it is that which finally holds the project
together, its form, and its spectator.”
Notes
Critique: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The
Forbidden Room
“The idea of The Forbidden Room is an old and
beautiful one of the cinema: what would happen if characters started to dream
in other films then their own?... Guy Maddin is at his most fetichistic (and
that’s saying something), and expects from the spectator that he’s on board.
Everything has to do with style, special effects, and one-liners that are pretty
brilliant; everything comes together in this Frankenstein-like film, at the
same time fascinating and awkward, and a little hard to totally love, just like
all monsters. The structure is over-active, and we wouldn’t reproach a stitched
together film of lacking in consistency. But the force of his gaze when it’s
tied together (like in My Winnipeg,
where it was autobiographical) adds more than just within the register of a
post-surrealist game.”
Notes
Critique: Vincent Dieutre’s Orlando
Ferito
“To enter Vicent
Dieutre ‘intimite journal’ films is always complex. Are we necessarily invited?
Orlando Ferito counts as one of the
most successful of the director, due to there being many points of entry.”
Notes
Critique: Roberto Minervini’s The Other
Side
“It’s not
without saying that The Other Side disappoints
those who liked its gesture… Minervini, who takes a major inspiration from
Pedro Costa, wants to say the most disturbing things about America… But his
mise en scène, allusive and invasive, relegates each moment of weakness to
voyeurism… And then because each scene is reduced to a sommet of disgust,
nobody escapes this project for the better… To film when one’s heart’s not in
it, it’s maybe the first sign that you’re doing it wrong.”
Journal
Article: Mikio Naruse’s Yearning
(1964)
“We know that
Mikio Naruse brings together many terrible moments in his cinema; irremediable
fissures, there there in all of his films from the silent to his last
TohoScope… But there’s also, up the fissure, before it, these thrilling moments
of happiness… All of the film takes place to deny this happiness. And it’s in
this intimite game, through what’s not brought up, that Naruse construct that
which shakes up; by that which shakes up these intimate emotions, and by this
product which the cinema boils.”
DVD Reviews: Coffret
Shôhei Imamura
“Japan in the
sixties… Shôhei Imamura, employed by Nitkkatsu since 1954, stops making
concessions. Pigs and Battleships
(1961), The Insect Woman (1963), The Pornographers (1966): these three
titles are being restored by Elephant Films and were made by Imamura when he
was distancing himself from the studio, as he’s going further with each films
towards vulgarity, like his stylized representations of the poor, crime rings,
the relation of the occupant and the general history of his country, which is
much further from the general concensus… In the agitation of the sixties,
Imamura is the one with his nose to ground, searching for new insects to
celebrate.”
For Cinema Scope
issue number sixty-six a beautiful still from Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six graces its cover. In its annual, though perhaps begrudgingly,
tradition of organizing a top ten list with its contributors (to be eligible
they must have contributed to each of its quarterly issues) the elected
titles combined tend to offer a representative survey of the major films and
the new cinematographic trends of that previous year. Perhaps to celebrate this new
issue, and with the pass of the half-way mark of the 2010 decade, it’s as good a
time as any to look back and reflect on these lists, going as far back as 2010. These lists for the 2015 to 2010 years appear in the issues number sixty-six, sixty-two, fifty-eight, fifty-four, fifty and forty-six.
This would provide a broader view of the cinematographic preferences of the
magazine, the directors that they feature, their average age, and the countries that
they’re from – essentially what constitute the creators of the most exciting films of this period. 
