Toronto Film Review

I’ll Be Your Mirror – 750,000 visitors in a square of light

2012-02-20T21:21:00.003-06:00

This is the first guest contribution by Dawn Saville. - D. D.

Performance art partisan Marina Abramović’s physical endurance, dedication and scope of vision are emblematic of her career. She once walked the length of the Great Wall of China over the span of three months in a performance piece that was eight years in the making. She is no stranger to public nudity, fasting, self-mutilation, blood, fire and tears. Famously known for carving a pentagram into her stomach before flagellating herself with a whip until her back bled, she also laid in the center of a burning five-pointed star (a symbol of communism of her native Yugoslavia) until she lost consciousness from lack of oxygen.

Forty years later Abramović is securing the immortality of this legendary career in Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, a documentary that has its Canadian premiere as it opens the Reel Artists Film Festival at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Shot over eleven months in seven countries and racking up 700 hours of footage The Artist is Present delves into Abramović’s beginnings as a performance artist in the early 1970s, through her collaborative work with lover and fellow artist, Ulay, and the explosion of her cult-status solo career. The film’s primary focus, though, is on her 2010 MoMA retrospective of the same name, whose centrepiece is her longest running and most physically and emotionally demanding solo piece to date. Museumgoers lined up for hours, sometimes camping out over night, for a chance to sit in a chair across from Abramović and stare silently into her eyes for as long as they wanted; this lasted 7.5 hours a day, six days a week, for three months. At one point in the film Abramović describes her role in the piece as “a mountain, a stillness, in the middle of hell.”

Indeed, Abramović’s beacon-like presence lends an arresting immediacy to the piece, set within the contemporary-world-in-overdrive (not to mention our collective, waning attention span) that is part of the power and appeal of The Artist is Present. There is something inherently meditative in the simplicity of sitting opposite someone and staring at them in silence. Abramović transforms into an oracle, a medium, a mirror, moving many patrons to tears as they look at their own reflection. As she turns the gaze on her audience, Abramović says “I am the mirror of their own self.”

MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach asserts in the film that “time is a weight on the performer’s shoulders” but it’s clearly a sacrifice Abramović willingly makes for her audience (and, in light the key connections Akers draws between Abramović’s early work and the MoMA show, it’s expected). During its run Abramović’s ribcage began to literally weigh on her internal organs, causing her a great deal of pain. When Biesenbach let’s her know that she can opt to end the piece early, it is no surprise that the ever-stoic Abramović refuses. Chris Lee of loveartnotpeople.com writes “in keeping with the piece’s engagement with issues of body and pain, space and time, Abramović began to take on an almost saintly aura.” In the weeks leading up the MoMA opening, we hear Abramović confirm “this is my cross I’m carrying”; fittingly, Biesenbach later concludes that part of Abramović’s goal is to “bring performer and public into the same state of consciousness.” The film definitely posits that Abramović artistic persona is like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world; what viewers think of these lofty statements will be interesting. Abramović is certainly not without her inconsistencies and this is what makes her human. When she accepts an award at the Florence Biennale three months before the MoMA show opens, Akers zooms in on her reading her current manifesto. One of its tenets: “an artist should not make themselves into an idol”; later Abramović tells us “if they idolise me, it’s a side-effect. It’s not the aim of the art, it’s a bi-product. I love bi-product.”

The Artist is Present had its world premiere at Sundance in January, winning the Grand Jury Prize. It also won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Berlinale on February 18, screened at the Big Sky Film Festival in Montana on February 17 and is slated for the True/False Film Festival in Columbia Missouri in March. Though it started as an independent, The Artist is Present is now owned by HBO and will be airing in the US in June. Akers states that it was nudity, in part, that dictated going with HBO, though the studio also got them to Sundance. In an interview with indiewire.com’s Bryce J. Renninger, Akers declares that ‘the goal was to make a film for as wide an audience as possible...for the uninitiated and not just the rarefied art world’; in the same interview, Marina speaks similarly about bringing performance art into the mainstream: ‘For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.’ In the film, Abramović refers to the “incredible responsibility” of introducing performance art to the masses and we see in a media clip that this pressure is very real; though for some she is the grand matriarch of her craft, she is still sometimes viewed as just ‘some Yugoslavian-born provocateur.” Abramović surely sees this as her chance to prove them wrong.

In a documentary with content so colossal, it seems conceivable to leave the form until last. Going beyond Abramović’s rock star stature, Akers does a fine job of capturing Abramović’s frank, eccentric and very witty character. Editor E. Donna Shepherd segues between shots and scenes with significance and more jarring transitions are subtly symbolic in their paradox. Nathan Halpern’s score is often intrusive and particularly heavy-handed in pushing more emotional scenes. As a first-time director, Akers is no innovator, stylistically, but there is some curiously evocative imagery throughout, especially when we see Abramović and her protégés training at her home. There is a balanced mix of past and present footage; the black and white stills and Super 8 from the 70s are beautiful in their trademark graininess, serving their purpose in counterpoint to Abramović’s current work while never being nostalgic. - Dawn Saville

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present opens the Reel Artists Film Festival on February 22nd (the artist, director and producers will be present) and has an encore screening the closing day of the festival, February 26th. The Reel Artists Film Festival is a Canadian Art Foundation Film Festival. candianart.ca/raff. The director, Matthew Akers, is part of a Free Filmmakers Panel on February 24th.

A Strange New Landscape (Remake/Remodel at the Toronto Underground Cinema)

2012-02-16T21:59:00.025-06:00

"The really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing conditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit." - G.K. Chesterton

Rob Ford, the current mayor of Toronto – which is a fairly liberal city – always seems to get into political confrontations for his right-wing policies. His chubby face, usually a deep red, always seems to be plastered on the local newspapers; Royson James at the Toronto Star always seems to be critiquing him. He is always up against, or ignoring, the city council. His anti-bike views are almost militant and his mismanagement of the TTC expansion is dumbfounding. His initial win over George Smitherman could be owed to the fact that his scream leading up to the elections, "that the gravy train is over," was the loudest. Also, Ford does not follow through with his promises, plays the undignified game of passing the blame and shows an overall disregard for democracy.

What else is going on politically in Canada this week? Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is dealing with a $16-billion deficit, which is rising, so there needs to be cuts in spending based off of Don Drummond’s Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative government finally passed a bill at the House of Commons to abolish gun registry. This means the RCMP will no longer have the information of what type of firearms registered gun owners possess. And the government is resurrecting controversial anti-terror measures, Bill S-7, a sort of privacy intrusion, which will act as an early warning system to prevent “terrorist acts”.

That Rob Ford and the different governmental levels continue to disappoint is no big surprise - it is an expected part of a wider sense of disappointment and distrust in the global democratic-capitalistic infrastructure. Though, as McGuinty responded, when presented with how badly the economy was after his eight-years in office, “We’re nowhere near as bad as Greece.”

In Slavoj Žižek’s Eurocentric critique of the capitalist system, Living in the End Times, the author prophesizes, "The global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point." In the book, a sort of Marxist' critique of modern society, Žižek brings up Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous scheme of the five stages of grief upon learning one has a terminal illness (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). He relates it to our responses to the apocalyptic zero-point, which for Žižek consists of four things: (1) the world wide ecological crisis, (2) imbalances within the economic system, (3) the biogenetic revolution, and (4) exploding social divisions and ruptures. And in terms of criticisms of the powers that be, “What is as a rule not questioned is the liberal-democratic framework itself.” As “It is the “democratic illusion,” the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as providing the only framework for all possible change, which prevents any radical transformation of capitalist relations.” As a solution Žižek suggest that we work towards a revised version communism.

***** In Toronto there are a lot of repertory cinemas and grass roots film series*. In terms of series there is Refocus Film Series at Double Double Land, Defending the Indefensible (hopefully this starts up again), and Blake Williams regularly has special screenings at his place. To add to this there is a relatively new series, which has been putting on double-bills, with the first film being the original and the following the remake, and this is Re-Make/Re-Model curated by John Semley**, Chief Editor for the Onion AV Club’s Toronto (who recently gave an interview about the series to Andrew Parker over at Dork Shelf). So far for Re-Make/Re-Model there have been two double-bills. The first screenings were two adaptations of Richard Stark's book The Hunter, John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Martin; along with Brian Helgeland's Payback (1999) starring Mel Gibson. And then there were the bird movies, Alfred Hitchcocks' The Birds (1963); along with James Nguyen's so-bad-it’s-good ecological catastrophe flick Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010). And for the third installment on Friday February 17th, starting at 7PM there is Rudolph Mate's film noir D.O.A. , along with Neveldine and Taylor's Crank starring Jason Statham. The host of the event will be film critic Adam Nayman (Cinema Scope, The Grid).

* At the Pleasure Dome there are two screenings that are of special interest coming up and they are the works of Barbara Sternberg and David Rimmer’s work on Saturday, February 18th at 4PM and the George Kuchar memorial screening Saturday, March 3rd starting at 7PM.

** Semley recently discussed his unique film-appreciating criteria:
"This kind of ties into Tasha and Keith’s answers, but I wish people would learn to appreciate honest-to-goodness middlebrow entertainment again. Somehow we’ve come to live in a pop-cultural landscape where Michael Bay’s Transformers 3 and Christopher Nolan’s Batman 3 (or Rise Of The Dark Knights, or whatever it’s called) are viewed as existing on opposite ends of a spectrum. But sometimes it feels like Nolan, and the Wachowskis, and all the other “brainy” blockbuster filmmakers, are the biggest charlatans of all—peddling ideologically overloaded, incoherent spectacles like they’re high art and propagating a virulent strain of enlightened philistinism. It gets exasperating. Meanwhile, the legitimately great genre spectacles of the past decade (Luc Besson’s Taken, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway—all films which reward more repeat viewings than any cape ’n’ cowl summer tentpole) get consigned to the remainder bins. Where are the exhilarating, original genre pictures? Where are the Prime Cuts and Charley Varricks and A Simple Plans? The closest we get are films like Drive or Machete, which are so caught up in their servile nostalgic boot-licking that they feel more aspirational than original. So I’d want my hypothetical genie to nudge pop culture just a little to the left, knock its on its back foot, and reorient how it views contemporary genre filmmaking. And I’d expect this theoretical genie would probably look a bit like Armond White. Or maybe Tim Olyphant."

*****How do the remakes in the Remake/Remodel series comment on the original films? To try to answer this question I want to use some ideas from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Modernist films were made at a particular context and time during film history: Boorman made art-like Hollywood films, Hitchcock continued to explore his obsessions and experimented with form, while D.O.A. is another crime thriller that would be labeled a film noir by the French. Overall, the period of film modernism was dominated by linear narrative development, themes pertaining to the postwar metropolis, and formal rigor. While the latter films are almost ahistorical as they aren’t connected to any kind of lineage.

Meanwhile, the only shared element of postmodern films appears to be the absence of coherent structure in narrative and editing style. But what these films attempt to espouse is a postmodern consciousness (and critique) of power relations. Jameson writes, “The fundamental ideological task of the new concept, however, must remain that of coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits (…) with the new forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of capitalism – the new global division of labor – in recent years.”

While in the chapter on Film: Nostalgia for the Present*, Jameson focuses on Philip K. Dick’s book, Time Out of Joint and how it evokes the Eisenhower era and beyond: “Of the great writers of the period, only Dick himself comes to mind as the virtual poet laureate of this material: of squabbling couples and marital dramas of petit bourgeois shopkeepers, neighborhoods, and afternoons in front of television, and all the rest.” What Payback, Birdemic and Crank tell us have less to do with movies but the times that they are made.

The differences between the originals and the remakes are like the difference between Herman Mellville and Thomas Pynchon. In Moby Dick, Melville puts forth a teleological worldview with Ishmael’s search for the great white whale. Every little detail in the story centers around this endpoint, such as the discussion of the different breeds of whale or what happens when two fishing boats meet up at sea. This introspective, idiosyncratic style seems totally distanced from something like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon’s Slothrop also embarks on a journey, but this time it is to prevent the world from being destroyed by a V-2 Rocket. Slothrop, instead of focusing on one thing, strays from his original missions and goes on a spree through Europe – waiting for the world to end in a movie theater.

* Jameson discusses at length two films: Something Wild (Demme) and Blue Velvet (Lynch) “The two 1986 movies, while scarcely pioneering a wholly new form (or mode of historicity), nonetheless seem, in their allegorical complexity, to mark the end of that and the now open space for something else,” says Jameson.

*****“The old world is dying away, and the new world is struggling to come forth: now is the time of the monsters.” – Antonio Gramsci

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have only been around for five years or so. Their directorial debut was with Crank (2006) followed by Crank: High Voltage, Gamer, and now the Marvel Comics superhero adaptation Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance starring Nicholas Cage, the sequel to Mark Steven Johnson's original Ghost Rider. They also wrote the screenplay for Pathology and Jonah Hex.

Just how their sleazy exploitation films have become so revered deserves further examination. To discuss their cult reputation - aside from the obvious merit of their work - one has to bring Steven Shaviro’s essay on Gamer from his book Post Cinematic Affect. First off, the film takes place in a world “some years from this exact moment” where everyone is focused on two simulated games: Society and Slayer. Society is a live version of The Sims where the gamers, through the use of nano-implants, control actual people. While Slayer is a live-action combat game similar to the ones shown in Punishment Park filmed in a style reminiscent of first-person shooters and Harun Farocki’s Images of War. The good guy Kable, played by Gerard Butler (300), has to fight his way to freedom to return to his wife and daughter. While Castle, the cyberpunk flip side to Mark Zukerberg’s nerd-turned-entrepreneur, played by Michael C. Hall (Dexter), tries to stop him.

Shaviro describes how Gamer’s strategy, “is not to offer a critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity.” And, “…there is something about the purity and extremity of Neveldine and Taylor’s cynicism that distinguishes it from the attitudes of Bruckheimer and Bay, who in contrast might be said to lack even the courage of their cynical (non-)convictions.”

There seems to be right now a roster of high adrenaline star American directors that are creating new forms of practice and characters with new social and mental habits in the science fiction, supernatural, horror and action genre. And what makes their films even more impressive is how their originality seeps through regardless of the financial risk involved within such a regulated industry. These directors are continuing in a tradition set up by Stephen Spielberg, Joe Dante, George A. Romero, Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven – perhaps even further back in film history to the classic science fiction films (This Island Earth), British horror films (like the ones by Terence Fisher) and the anarchic spirit of certain film noirs (Kiss Me Deadly). These contemporary star directors, along with Neveldine and Taylor, includes: J. J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan, Darren Aronofsky, Paul W.S. Anderson, Zack Snyder, Brad Bird and Matt Reeves. With foreigners including Quentin Dupieux and Gaspar Noé in France, Nicolas Winding Refn in Denmark, Joe Cornish and Ben Wheatly in the UK, Bong Joon-Ho and Kim Jee-Woon in Korea, Morten Tyldum in Norway, Nadav Lapid in Israel, and Vincenzo Natali in Canada.

What other star film is being released this season? Aside from Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance the only other film that comes to mind is Andrew Stanton's John Carter.

And If you come to Remake/Remodel I would recommend that you sneak in some beers. YOLO.

* While the “independent” directors that are making the most interesting films right now are Sean Durkin, Debra Granik, Marie Losier, James Gray, Jeff Nichols, Alex Ross Perry and the Saftie Brothers.

Wow, A Real Humdinger! (Recent Canadian Short Films)

2012-02-10T15:01:00.029-06:00

This is the last of three pieces on Canadian short films, with the two others being on The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar and La Ronde. Also check out the website Nous Sommes Les Filles, which recently did a feature on Sophie Goyette and her new film Le Futur Proche.
In the coming months at Toronto Film Review you can expect essays on the filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Mankiewicz, Brian De Palma, Sacha Guiltry, Stanley Kubrick, Judd Apatow, Clint Eastwood, John Boorman; reviews of books by Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Pierre Berthomieu; and comments about the French film journals Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif and Trafic. And anything else that pops up that I find to be interesting. – D.D.

There are certain cult films that stand out in Canadian English-language cinema: George McCowan’s Face-Off (1971), Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner (1978), Leon Marr’s Dancing in the Dark (1986), David Christensen’s Six Figures (2005), Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (2008), Lee Demarbre’s Smash Cut (2009), Jay Cheel’s Beauty Day (2011), Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun (2011), and Michael Dowse’s Goon (2011). And I would have to add to this list a recent discovery, Simon Ennis’ You Might as Well Live (2009)*. The film is like the hybrid child of Buffalo ‘66 and Observe and Report. It is the story of loser Robert Mutt (Josh Peace) who gets out of an asylum and then struggles to integrate himself back home. He wants to - no, needs to! - prove to the world that he is a real somebody! With Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Iguana), Stephen McHattie and others. You Might as Well Live is a local favorite; it was recently aired on City TV.

Simon Ennis’ last project was a short film called Up in Cottage Country, an update of the Franz Kafka short story about judicial procedures, In the Penal Colony. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film begins at an Ontario cottage, showing a married couple arguing on the dock. Co-writer Josh Peace plays the husband, George, and a sweet Liane Balaban plays the wife, Annie. George wants to yell at his unmannered brother, sister-in-law and nieces who are visiting. It’s funny to hear George complain because the misdeeds are so insignificant: “Three minute showers - max!” “Wet bathing suits on the couch!”

To relax he goes canoeing, with his pockets full of Voyager premium lager. On this trip he passes through a mysterious fog and a bilingual sign indicating he is no longer in Canadian waters. The absurdist humor begs to be compared with the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. I was reminded most strongly of A Serious Man with its memorable dream sequence where Larry sends his brother off in a boat to Canada.

When George gets off the boat and steps onto an island, he meets a Beckettian defunct military officer (a sinister Julian Richings). The officer is about to perform an execution using a carefully designed apparatus – with the different levels being the draftsman, harrow and bed – on an unsuspecting soldier. This rural military setting – perhaps a comment on the army training bases scattered throughout Canada - is similar to the setting of Denis Côté’s short film Les lignes enemies (2010). Even though there are some differences between the book and Up in Cottage Country - one imagines more a Lawrence of Arabia desert setting – the film is still able to translate and convey Kafka’s story and ideas about punishment, with the concluding moral being to, “Be just!” After George’s ordeal with the apparatus he returns to his wife, who asks, “Have you come to your senses?” Yes, he had come to his senses.

* Ennis’ other short films include: The Business of Suicide (03), The Waldo Cumberbund Story (05), and The Canadian Shield (07). He also edited Ron Mann’s Know Your Mushrooms (2008).

*****Next up is Rafal Sokolowski’s Three Mothers (2010)*, which he wrote and directed, featuring Kristin Booth, Camilia Scott, and Hannah Hogan. The cinematography by Cabot McNenly shifts from poetic to intense as it captures these women in moments of desperation and relief. Three Mothers is the story of, as the title suggest, three mothers: one who is giving birth to a newborn, a teenage mother who is debating abandoning her child, and another mother whose son is comatose, on life support. Like Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation it subtly deals with the psychological strains and difficulties of what it means to be a parent today. The subject broached by Three Mothers is how parents treat their children and why they do it. In the essay by film critic Brad Stevens on Phillipe Garrel, Childhood: Secret and Otherwise, Stevens refers to Pictures of a Childhood by Alice Miller who writes, “It actually is in the way the newborns have been treated that society makes the first of its many contributions toward equipping a person with destructive and self-destructive tendencies." In Three Mothers the medical institution and the violence it perpetrates towards the babies and mothers is only the start of the problem. As the real problem is the economic and social circumstances surrounding these people. In pointing to these conditions Three Mothers is a bold social critique.

* Sokolowski’s previous short film is Lightchasers (2007) and his production company is Blind Dog Films. There is also a great profile on him at YouNxt Blog.

*****In the Toronto world of experimental film*, only two newcomers come mind: Clint Enns and Blake Williams. Though I am sure there are others, these two are the ones that I am most familiar and enthusiastic about. I will be elaborating on the work of Williams**.

Wiliams is from Houston, Texas. He studied video and sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then completed graduate studies at the University of Toronto. Those people who are interested in experimental films would be most familiar with Williams’ Coorow-Latham Road, which played at Wavelengths 2011. Andréa Picard included it as an additional highlight of the year in Fast and Furious: The Best of 2011 in Avant-Garde Film. It is a twenty-minute silent drive in rural Australia from Coorow to Latham. And what makes it unique is that it was entirely shot on Google Street View.

Coorow alters the painterly landscape tradition for the digital age leaving on pixels behind. There is the impression of catching something new for the first time through a hallucinatory journey where the richness comes from paying attention to the small changes that are going on in the frame. Through Williams’ emphasis on the digital he differentiates himself from the older generation of Canadian experimental filmmakers like Philip Hoffman, who makes essay-films, and Donigan Cumming, who makes experimental documentaries. Coorow embarks on a poetic, formal, and structural elaboration of new forms of technology. It is about duration, mapping and how we relate to space – real and digital. To describe Coorow’s process Michael Sicinski at MUBI wrote, “For his part, Williams is able to reduce the older tropes of structural realism – duration, physical presence, the flat correspondence of time with space – to a desktop procedure.” Coorow is structural film for the digital age and the floating ride, with it’s 180° pan, is like the zoom in Michael Snow’s Wavelength or the breaking up of the frame in Chris Kennedy’s Tamalpais.

But how did Williams get to Coorow? And how does it relate to his other work? Williams MFA period work, the only work that is is available, goes back to 2009 . They are mostly shorts, usually under the ten minutes mark. To list them off in chronological order there is Hotel Video, The Storm, Ladybug Video, No Signal, Space-Ship, A Cold Compress, Depart, and Coorow Latham Road. And there are the art installations Pupils and Two Rainbows.

I find Hotel Video and The Storm to be the strongest of the early works; they are meditations on landscapes with a strong emphasis on long-takes and dislocating editing. They are filmed in a style that recalls James Benning and Ben Rivers. The other work is almost performative with their simple camera set-up and they show Williams’ interests in technology and illumination. Though key transition work is Depart as it synthesizes his filmic work and integrates it with digital alteration malleability anticipating Coorow.

* The groups responsible for the programming of experimental films in Toronto are Early Monthly Segments, Pleasure Dome, The Free Screen, Images Festival, The 8 Fest, LIFT, Wavelenghts, and in nearby Windsor there is Media City.

** Williams is also a passionate film-blogger, and you can find him at most TIFF Cinematheque retrospectives. His own blog is R, and G, and B. He also writes for Ion Cinema and BlogTO.

*****In the late sixties, who knew that the guy who made those weird short-films, Transfer, From the Drain and Stereo; would turn out to be one of Canada’s most acclaimed directors? David Cronenberg’s early work anticipates a lot of what would follow like The Brood, Videodrome and A Dangerous Method. These lurid low-budget horror films already show his interest in psychiatry, the mind/body schism, and power relations between men. This just goes to show how important the short-film form is in the fostering of Canadian filmmakers.

The directors of short-films discussed are the ones that make me the most excited about the future of Canadian cinema. If these diverse filmmakers have proved that they can work in the short-film format, with the minimum of resources, I am confident that with more they will be able to create new narratives, forms and images. These filmmakers are investing themselves, their time and money into these projects. Hopefully their films get programmed at film festivals, distributed, seen, and discussed.

At the present moment: Ennis is currently filming a new project in Ft. Worth, Texas. Sokolowski’s new short film Seventh Day is completed, it is a comedy about two Eastern European immigrants who drive a taxicab in Toronto. Williams' next project is a 3D remake of a famous structural film.

Who else do I find to be interesting? There is Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas – the duo that made the great Amy George – and they are, apparently, starting up a new project, which they will start filming soon. The Vancouver-based duo Ryan Flowers and Lisa Pham made a very strong first film, No Words Came Down; hopefully they make something else. Joe Ciaravino’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place should be seen by more people. There are the York university guys Igor Drljača, Luo Li (Rivers and My Father), Nicolás Pereda (Summer of Goliath). Ashley McKenzie is working on a new film When You Sleep about “a misfit young couple facing adult decisions while dealing with a rodent infestation in their slum apartment.” Antoine Bourges new mid-length feature East Hastings pharmacy is having its World Premiere at the Cinéma du Réel as part of the First Films Competition. It is, “The chronicle of a typical pharmacy of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, where most clients are on a treatment that requires taking daily doses of methadone witnessed by the pharmacist.” While Kazik Radwanski’s latest film is in post-production.

"Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself." (Robert Bresson at the Lightbox)

2012-02-07T12:42:00.021-06:00

Title: Notes on the Cinematographer
Author: Robert Bresson
Publisher: Green Integer
Pages: 140
Price: $8.95
*****"These words are more than notes from an experienced film-maker's diary. These words are scars, marks of suffering, they are gems."- J. M. G. Le Clézio

Who are the great filmmakers whose films and method evoke an ideal of what cinema can be? Who are the directors that made the films that have shaped the evolution of the seventh art - laying down its foundation? If I can try to answer these two question, usually with crossover between both answers, I would have to mention: Antonioni, Bergman, Brakhage, Bresson, Cassavetes, Chaplin, Dreyer, Edison, Eisenstein, Eustache, Ford, Flaherty, Garrel, Godard, Griffifth, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Keaton, Lang, Lumière brothers, McLaren, Mekas, Méliès, Mizoguchi, Murnau, Ozu, Ray, Renoir, Rossellini, Snow, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Vertov, Vigo and Welles. The fact that the TIFF Cinematheque regularly projects prints of their films, amongst a lot of other stuff, makes it such a valuable asset to the Toronto film community*.

The highly anticipated series, which has been in the works for a while, The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson consists of, as Senior Programmer James Quandt, refers to them, "one of film history's most legendary and influential bodies of work." Bresson's thirteen films will have scheduled projections from February 9th to March 30th, with two being introduced by Cinema Studies professors from the University of Toronto: Bart Testa on Un condamné à mort s'est échappé on February 9th and 12th, and Brian Price on Lancelot du Lac on February 20th. I am particularly looking forward to Bresson's early works like Les anges du péché, Les dames du Bois de Boulogne and Affaires publiques as well as Quatre nuits d'un rêveur and L'argent. This series will then go on a North American tour.

There is going to be a book launch for the new edition of the TIFF Cinematheque publication Robert Bresson (Revised), a revision of the 1998 book. For anyone that is unfamiliar with the book, I highly recommend it. I am especially fond of Quandt's introduction and the Raymond Durgnat essay. And To further cement Robert Bresson’s street cred, it also appears on John Waters’ bookshelf in Cindy Sherman's photographs of them in Place Space. Though there is also an essay by Michael Haneke, which I find a little surprising because don't I really see any comparison; instead I think Haneke to be more derivative of the renegade horror director, Wes Craven.

Bresson's films are usually austere and bleak, sparse and daunting. He is known as a modernist director, whose emphasis is that of medium specificity: "What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theater, the novel, painting capture with theirs". His particular brand of minimalism is described by András Bálint Kovács', in Screening Modernism, as metonymic minimalism, due to Bresson's usage of off-screen sounds as exposition. While Brian Price would remind us, in Neither God Nor Master, that Bresson's films are also political as their subject matter responded to a growing dissolution in France especially in the later, post-May 1968, films. What I find so captivating about Bresson's work can be best articulated by this Andrei Tarkosvky quote, from an interview between him and Michel Ciment: "Engels expressed a marvelous idea when he said a work of art soars to an even higher plane the profoundly buried - better still, hidden - the idea behind it is. And that's the course we chose to take. We forced ourselves to submerge the idea in the ambiance, in the characters, in the conflicts between different characters." The ideas of sacrifice and redemption hidden in Bresson's films through atmosphere, characters, sound, image, and editing (i.e. cinematography) makes his cinema one of the apogee of film art. Creating images in cinema like the spellbinding bumper car scene in Mouchette where toy-cars hit one another trapping this young little girl in a anarchy of collisions, which rivals with the night-time boating sequence in Strangers on a Train, as the most exciting visual complement to describe a character's situation. There is a brutal intensity mixed with an aesthetic exultation.

With this retrospective one can discover where much of cinema seems to have been spun-off from. The influence of Journal d'un curé de campagne, an adaptation of the George Bernanos novel, as well of Dostoevsky, is readily acknowledged by Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese on their Taxi Driver. You can see the Un condamné à mort s'est échappé influence on Don Siegel's Escape from Alcatraz. Anne Wiazemsky’s immortal performance in her debut role in Au hasard Balthazar, which she would carry around with her in her other films. As well Bresson's mark on Monte Hellman sixties and seventies output or on Jean-Marie Straub’s appropriation of the Bressonian model in Not Reconciled and in Moses und Aron. And for more vibrations of Bresson in contemporary cinema there is his religious influence (i.e. moments of transcendence) in the work of the Dardenne brothers, and the austere and marginal subjects of a Bruno Dumont. Even Stephen Spielberg picked up from Bresson like the Pickpocket homage in his recent, and fantastic, The Adventures of Tintin.

Asides from his films, Bresson is also known for one small little book: Notes on the Cinematographer, whose original French publication was in 1975. It consists of poetic musings sort-of like Kiarostami's Walking with the Wind. As well it is a revered director talking about his art and process similar to Ray's I was Interrupted. It is an intense little log-book full of his likings and his disliking, references to the Renaissance and Classicism, composers and Kabuki theater, the relationship between photography and reality, theater and cinema; Pascal, Debussy, Purcell, Baudelaire, a short film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo etc. The book is divided into two periods: 1950-1958 (which includes the subtitles: Human Models, On Looks, On True and False, On Music, On Automatism, On Poverty, Sight and Hearing, Gestures and Words, The Real, On Fragmentation, Exercises) and Further Notes: 1960-1974. For English readers there is the Green Integer edition, which has an introduction by J. M. G. Le Clézio and is translated in by Jonathan Griffin.

Who can forget the appearance of Notes on the Cinematographer in Godard’s Éloge de l'amour? When a woman picks it up and starts reciting lines as if it is a holy doctrine. Notes on the Cinematographer presents a high standard of criteria on how to judge films - Bresson’s and others.

* Though perhaps to the chagrin of smaller, local repertory cinemas who struggle in its shadow. Though, for this reason, I want to bring up that The Royal is opening Robert Guédiguian's The Snows of Kilimanjaro on February 16th, which looks promising.

*****Here are some excerpts of his Notes on the Cinematographer:

"The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows."

"Metteur en scène, director. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself."

"No Actors.
(No directing of actors.) No parts.
(No learning of parts.) No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors)."

"(1925?) The TALKIE opens its doors to theater which occupies the place and surrounds it with barbed wire."

"Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create."

"On the choice of models
His voice draws for me his mouth, his eyes, his face, makes for me his complete portrait, outer and inner, better than if he were in front of me. The best deciphering got by the ear alone."

“On two deaths and three births. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and the real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”

"To your models: " Don't think what you're saying, don't think what you're doing." And also: "Don't think about what you say, don't think about what you do.""

"One single mystery of persons and objects."

"Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle."

"No music as accompaniment, support or reinforcement. No music at all. "

"The Noises must become music."

"You shall call a fine film the one that gives you an exalted idea of cinematography."

"Your film - let people feel the soul and the heart there, but let it be made like a work of hands."

"Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness."

"In ***, a film that smacks of the theatre, this great English actor keeps fluffing to make us believe that he is inventing his lines as he goes along. His efforts to render himself more alive do just the opposite."

"A too-expected image (cliché) will never seem right, even if it is."

"A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view , a restricted space... Each thing exactly in its place: your only resources."

"The insensible bond, connecting your furthest apart and most different images, is your vision."

"Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way."

"Cinematography: new way of writing, therefore of feeling."

"In every art there is a diabolical principle which acts against it and tries to demolish it. Analogous principle is perhaps not altogether unfavorable to cinematography."

"Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual ideas."

"Model. "All face."”

"Someone who can work with the minimum can work with the most. One who can with the most cannot, inevitably, with the minimum."

"If, on the screen, the mechanism disappears and the phrases you have made them say, the gestures you have made them make, have become one with your models, with your film, with - then a miracle."

"Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden."

"CINEMA seeks immediate and definitive expression through mimicry, gestures, intonations of voice. This system inevitably excludes expression through contacts and exchanges of images and of sounds and the transformations that result from them."

"Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that "heart of the heart" which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy, or by drama."

"Nothing too much, nothing deficient."

"Music takes up all the room and gives no increased value to the image to which it is added."

"Draw the attention of the public (as we say that a chimney draws)."

"A small subject can provide the pretext for many profound combinations. Avoid subjects that are too vast or too remote, in which nothing warns you when you are going astray. Or else take from them only what can be mingled with your life and belongs to your experience."

"Of lighting: Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them."

"Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so."

"A single word, a single movement that is not right or is merely in the wrong place gets in the way of all the rest."

"Model. His pure essence."

"The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition."

"All those effects you can get from repetition (of an image, of a sound)."

"If a sound is the obligatory complement of an image, give preponderance either to the sound, or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill each other, as we say of colors."

"The sight of movement gives happiness: horse, athlete, bird."

"x demonstrates a great stupidity when he says that to touch the masses there is no need of art."

"A whole gaggle of critics making no distinction between CINEMA and cinematography. Opening an eye now and then to the actors' inadequate presence and performance, shutting it again at once. Obliged to like in a lump all that is projected on to the screens."

"No psychology (of the kind which discovers only what it can explain)."

"Economy: Make known that we are in the same place by repetition of the same noises and the same sonority."

"It is in its pure form that an art hits hard."

"Do not use the same models in two films. (1) One would not believe in them. (2) They would look at themselves in the first film as one looks at oneself in the mirror, would want people to see them as they wish to be seen, would impose a discipline on themselves, would grow disenchanted as they corrected themselves."

"See your film as a combination of lines and of volumes in movement apart from what it represents and signifies."

"Displaying everything condemns CINEMA to cliché, obliges it to display things as everyone is in the habit of seeing them. Failing which, they would appear false or sham."

"Shooting. You will not know till much later if your film is worth the mountain rage of efforts it is costing you."

"Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note."

"Cinematography films: emotional, not representational."

"Let the cause follow the effect, not accompany it or precede it."

"Several takes of the same thing, like a painter who does several pictures or drawings of the same subject and, each fresh time, progresses towards rightness."

"In the Greek Catholic liturgy:"Be attentive!""

"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."

"Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness."

"The people I pass in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées appear to me like marble figures moved forward by springs. But let their eyes meet mine, and at once these walking and gazing statues become human."

"Hollow idea of "art cinema," of "art films." Art films, the ones most devoid of it."

"To forge for oneself iron laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty."

"In X's eyes the cinema is a special industry; in Y' an enlarged theatre. Z sees the box office figures."

"The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade."

"In your passion for the true, people may see nothing but faddism."

"(1963) Left Rome abruptly, abandoned irrevocably the preparatory work for Genesis, to cut short idiotic discussions and desecrating obstruction. How strange it is that people can ask you to do what they themselves would certainly be prevented from doing, because they do not know what it is!"

"What economy!"

"Bach at the organ, admired by a pupil, answered: "It's a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment.""

"For want of truth, the public gets hooked on the false. Falconetti's way of casting her eyes to heaven, in Dreyer's film, used to draw tears."

"These horrible days - when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles - are part of my method of work."

"Precision of aim lays one open to hesitations. Debussy: "I've spent a week deciding on one chord rather than another."

"Oscars to actors whose body, face and voice do not seem to be theirs, do not produce any certainty that they belong to them."

"MASTERPIECES. The masterpieces of painting or sculpture, such as the Giaconda or the Venus of Milo, have so many reasons for being admired that they are admired for both the good and the bad ones. CINEMA masterpieces are often admired only for the bad ones."

"In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene."

"Cézanne: "A chaque touche, je risque ma vie."

"Let nothing be changed and all be different."

"DIVINATION - how can one not associate that name with the two sublime machines I use for my work? Camera and tape recorder carry me far away from the intelligence which complicates everything.

Top Ten Movies of 2011 (guest contributions and others)

2012-01-29T09:57:00.020-06:00

Here are some guest contributions of yearly film overviews, as well I have poached a few others from the internet - I hope nobody minds. I am a little unsure about the formatting of this piece, hopefully it is clear. If I missed anyone and you want me to include your own Top Ten to this list, make sure to email me at ddavidson@tiff.net. - D.D.

Chris Kennedy - Programmer : Early Monthly Segments - Director: 349 (for Sol LeWitt) (2011), Towards a Vanishing Point (2012)

Not a strict list of films that I saw this year, but I’m constantly thinking about what I’m looking at, reading or listening to in relationship to film, so I believe these count.

1. Mighty Hannibal –“The Right to Love You” – I measure the success of a film festival by what music I’m introduced to. This year, TIFF didn’t disappoint and the theme from House of Tolerance, a fantastic film in its own right, has been playing often in my mind and now on my turntable since I found it on the Hannibalism LP. Good, strong, funky soul.

2. Blinky Palermo and Franz Erhard Waltherat Dia:Beacon. Palermo’s paintings play so fantastically with light, from the summer sunlight bouncing off his acrylic & aluminum Coney Island paintings to the way his Stoffbilder stretched fabric “paintings” absorb light and create an inner translucence. I liked it so much I saw this show twice. In the next room were Walther’s sculptures, which require the viewer to perform the pieces—whether by wearing, wrapping or unrolling. Watching a six-person family wrap themselves up in one of Walther’s sculptures made me think more about art, the cinema and their relationship to shared experience than any other event this year.

3. Cassavettes retrospective at TIFF Lightbox. It was about time. I didn’t get to seem them all, unfortunately, but watching Women Under the Influence and Killing of a Chinese Bookie again, on the big screen this time, was fantastic. Love that 70s color palette and the super-taught emotions (and the cameo of the Source Family restaurant in Killing).

4. The Pettifogger by Lewis Klahr – It has taken me a while to really appreciate his work, but Lewis Klahr’s 65 minute The Pettifogger was the break-through for me. It unrolls itself with a beautiful, abstract pace in stunning HD—combining his signature collages with an equally striking soundtrack. After seeing it at Views from the Avant-Garde, I made it an inspired pop-art double-bill by hightailing it across Central Park to the Whitney to see Roy Lichtenstein’s only film project, the sublime Three Landscapes, which projected 35mm loops of an aquarium, a sunset and dot pattern zip-a-tones onto three large screens.

5. Media City – Windsor’s own experimental film festival, which I think is the best on the continent, had a great year. Always quality films, always good conversations. Highlights included Samantha Rebello’s Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances (which I like for the way its dark passages mirrored thought), Ute Aurand’s Three Portraits (which cracks open time in its portraits of nephews and nieces across the years—brilliantly revealing in its editing how our experience of loved ones contains our memories), Jeannette Muñoz’s Envios (16mm letters to friends which lovingly contain recognizable bits of the identity of the people she’s sending them to) and another lovely suite by Super 8 filmmaker Helga Fanderl.

6. Hotel Cartograph – Scott Stark. Jon Davies gave my film gang (Early Monthly Segments) an interesting challenge of putting together a program in response to his great gallery show, “To What Earth Does this Sweet Cold Belong?” at the Power Plant. I loved all the films we included in it (especially Sophie Michael’s short and sweet Untitled (Objects 3), but Scott Stark’s film was the show-stopper, made simply by pushing his film camera on a cart above the carpets of a couple ritzy hotels in early 80s San Francisco. A hilarious and beautiful film, like much of Stark’s work.

7. Porforio, Alejandro Landes. My favourite film at TIFF, hands-down, about a paraplegic plane hijacker, played by the man himself. Beautifully shot and wonderfully day-to-day. It was the first film I saw of the festival, so anything else good I saw was pure icing.

8. Sodom, Luther Price – Luther Price’s films are very difficult to see outside of his native Boston, so getting to see a Super 8 print of his classic Sodom at the Oberhausen Film Festival was a real pleasure. Price punched little glory holes in this found-footage film, taping in other pieces of footage over-top and creating a crazy visual collage, made more intense by him using one of the smallest formats imaginable.

9. The Clock – Christian Marclay. Forever solves the existential dilemma I have that whenever I see a clock in a movie, I look at my watch, breaking my suspension of disbelief when the numbers don’t match up. That alone puts it on my top ten. Plus the Ellsworth Kelly sculptures at the Museum in which I saw this piece (Boston MFA) were damn fine.

10. Never any End to Paris – Enrique Vila-Matas. Not a film either, but this book—a reminiscence in lecture form of the time the fictional author spent renting an apartment from Marguerite Dura (India Song-era) while he wrote his first novel—ate up my free time this holiday season and is the reason I didn’t see many movies or watch any DVDs these past few weeks. And I don’t regret it.

*****Andréa Picard on the best of the year at Indiewire, Fast and Furious: The Best of 2011 in Avant-Garde Film.
*****Blake Williams - Director: Coorow-Latham Road (2011)
1. L'Apollonide - Souvenirs de la maison close /2. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / 3. Crazy Horse / 4. The Future / 5. Margaret / 6. Moneyball / 7. The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr)/ 8. You Are Here / 9. A Separation / 10. The Return / 11. 4:44 Last Day on Earth / 12. Take Shelter / 13. Loutra/Baths / 14. River Rites (Ben Russell) / 15. The Silver Cliff / 16. Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) / 17. Seeking the Monkey King / 18. Black Mirror at the National Gallery (Mark Lewis) / 19. Amy George (Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas) / 20. Keyhole
*****Andrew Parker - Film Critic : Toronto Now, Criticize This!, Dork Shelf
1. Like Crazy / 2. The Tree of Life / 3. Meek's Cutoff / 4. The Artist / 5. Take Shelter / 6. Attack the Block / 7. Cafe de Flore / 8. Win Win / 9. Melancholia / 10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close / 11. The Adventures of Tintin / 12. The Descendants / 13. A Separation / 14. Mysteries of Lisbon / 15. Margaret / 16. Captain America: The First Avenger / 17. Beauty Day (Jay Cheel) / 18. Good Neighbours / 19. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / 20. The Trip / 21. The Guard / 22. Monsieur Lahzar / 23. Senna / 24. Source Code / 25. Terri
*****John Semley - Film Critic : The A.V. Club, The Walrus, Cinema Scope

Here's my top ten films of the year. I limited myself to stuff that was officially released, so a lot of the best films I saw at festivals (i.e. the actual best films of the year: Anatolia, This Is Not A Film, Twixt, Kill List, etc.) were left out, hopefully to appear on next year's inevitable list. These are in no particular order and I'm probably forgetting like 15 films.

- Meek's Cutoff (Reichart, USA): I've heard it called "Gerry on the prairie," but Reichart's conestoga wagon picture is possessive of a historical and cultural specificity and lacking all the empty profundity of Van Sant's film. Bruce Greenwood and Michelle Williams are both excellent.
- Hobo With A Shotgun (Eisner, Canada): Stellar splatter filmmaking, with a superb lead performance by Rutger Hauer. The best joke is seeing the Telefilm logo in the opening credits roll.
- I Saw The Devil (Kim, South Korea): I've never really cared much for Kim Ji-woon's previous features, but this one seems more than just show-y genre pastiche. Devil takes SK's predilection for revenge thrillers to the precipice. A gory, ghastly epic. Great to see Choi Min-sik back in the game as well.
- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Bird, USA): Likely the most fun I had at the movies in 2011. Bird's move from CGI to flesh-and-blood actors in CGI'd scenarios is seamless. Film finds a backdoor into re-igniting the Cold War, which along with Bird's elegantly competent of his action set-pieces, makes him the heir apparent to first-class journeyman like Martin Campbell, whose own Green Lantern was an absolute mess.
- Take Shelter (Nichols, USA): A brassy, first rate American indie in an uncommonly great year for American indies. Beyond its thoughtful considerations of mental illness and masculinity, Nichols has the balls to gun for the big, uncompromising ending (provided you read the ending as an actual literal Rapture and not just Chastain coming around to sharing Shannon's psychoses, which, even if its not a "correct" interpretation, seems the more interesting one).
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher, USA): Admittedly, this is for-hire hackwork. But Fincher's handling of the sleazy Scandinavian novel (which I'd had no contact with prior to seeing this film), at once somber and sensational while never feeling at odds with itself, further certifies him as master of tone. Nobody makes sifting through data more compelling. A nice complement to his masterpiece, Zodiac, in that it is the anti-Zodiac. Really liked Rooney Mara. Really hated the torture scene set to Enya's "Orinoco Flow" which, largely due to Daniel Craig's presence, felt like Bond by way of sub-Tarantino.
- Attenberg (Tsangari, Greece): If Yorgos Lanthimos (who produced and appears in Attenberg) is stoking some new wave of Greek absurdist-surrealist filmmaking, Attenberg seems to silly-walking its way to the head of the class. Less mannered and considerably warmer than Dogtooth or ALPS, Attenberg is one of those films that just keeps lingering months after you've seen it.
- Tree of Life (Malick, USA): By no means perfect, and probably my least favourite of Malick's films, Tree plain dwarfs anything (save, maybe, Mysteries of Lisbon) that hit cinemas this year in scale and ambition. I think it's much more than some hippy-dippy moving magic eye puzzle, and perhaps the clearest articulation of Malick's transcendentalist frame, but I won't get into that now.
- Another Earth (Cahill, USA): More than any other first feature this year (including the Durkin), Another Earth gave life to how wildly imaginative, and emotive, American indie cinema can be when it's working on a shoestring. This is why sci-fi as a genre exists.
- Attack The Block: Allow it.
*****Adam Nayman - Film Critic : The Grid, Cineaste, Cinema Scope
1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / 2. Mysteries of Lisbon / 3. The Tree of Life / 4. Attack the Block / 5. Meek's Cutoff / 6. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu / 7. Nostalgia for the Light / 8. House of Pleasures / 9. Extraordinary Stories / 10. A Separation
*****Adam Litovitz
1. Mysteries of Lisbon / 2. This is Not a Film / 3. The Turin Horse / 4. Cave of Forgotten Dreams / 5. Pina / 6. Carnage / 7. Putty Hill / 8. Road to Nowhere / 9. The Kid With a Bike / 10. We Were Here (David Weissman and Bill Weber)
*****Nicholas Little
A Dangerous Method / Another Earth / The Artist / Attack the Block / Beginners / Drive / The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Hugo / Like Crazy / Margin Call / Martha Marcy May Marlene / Meek's Cutoff / Melancholia / Moneyball / Rango / Shame / Take Shelter / Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy / The Tree of Life / Young Adult
*****Ron
1. 50/50 / 2. Like Crazy / 3. Farsan (Josef Fares, 2010) / 4. Ma part du gâteau (Cédric Klapisch, 2011) / 5. I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2009) / 6. Midnight in Paris / 7. Take Shelter / 8. The Guard /9. Another Year / 10. Incendies / 11. Of Gods and Men / 12. Snows of Kilimanjaro
*****Ryan Krahn
I consider films, short or feature-length, that have been first released this year. This includes festival releases and excludes films that were first released last year but received a wider release this year. For this reason, many 2011 list favourites, such as Meek’s Cutoff, Mysteries of Lisbon, Four Times, My Joy, Uncle Boonmee, et. al., can be found on my Best of 2010 list. As such, a few of the following will likely pop up on certain Best of 2012 lists.

1. Slow Action – Ben Rivers [UK]
There I was, on a September weekday afternoon, headphones on, lying on a beanbag chair on the ground of an art gallery a few doors from my house. It was just me, the projectionist, and Ben Rivers’ post-apocalyptic utopian/dystopian film. What a perfect way to be transported to the imagined futures of Lanzarote, Gunkanjima, Tuvalu, and Somerset. But in this imagined time the islands’ names are different (except for Somerset), as are their customs and histories. Two monotone narrators act as field guides to this ethnographic tour of 16mm-shot footage of post-tsunami wastelands, floating geometrical shapes, volcanic mountains, and mathematical linguistic rituals. On one island we are told

"Legend has it that four trunks, residue of four separate catastrophes in four great storms, washed up on four of the promontories on the same day. In each trunk there was a human baby and a single book. At the time of Grugg these were thought to be Leon Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Zitsko’s No Frontier. Every promontory believes itself at one time or another descended from one of the four babies."

Zitsko is an invention. As with everything else in this film, the line between fact and fiction, mathesis and poesis, technology and primitivism is blurred. TIFF’s Andréa Picard saw the imprint of Chris Marker here, but it was the seaside hallucinations captured in Le Clézio’s Le Procès-Verbal and Casare’s The Invention of Morel that were on my mind. This isn’t all that surprising considering that in an interview on (and in) Second Life, that world where the “sense of porousness between the real and the virtual” can be felt, Chris Marker mentions Casares’ book as a favourite. Whatever the inspiration, within the frame of 45 minutes Rivers presents a group of lifeworlds so rich that the possible references are endless.

Trying to figure out of what I just saw, I picked myself off of the ground, walked out of the screening room, and left my mark in the guestbook. There I noticed that the last person who had taken the same trip to the islands of Eleven, Hiva (The Society Islands), Kanzennashima, and Somerset had been Atom Egoyan.

2. Melancholia – Lars von Trier [Denmark]
The Cannes jury didn’t just pick the wrong film, they picked the diametric opposite of the right film. I wrote this the moment I left its first North American screening: Melancholia is the antithesis to Tree of Life. They chose transcendence over immanence, alterity over materiality. Both are epic, metaphysical films, but in Melancholia there is no third act where a greater purpose is given, no escape from the world into a teleologically-ordered cosmos. As if responding to Mallick’s prefatory “There are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace,” Dunst’s Justine proclaims that “Life is only earth, and not for long.”

Melancholia is foremost a film about depression. It is a film about bottling up or acting out against the stupidity of the world. Without that third act, it’s all inanity. In a scene that still haunts me regularly, Jack, played by Sutherland, refuses to accept this senselessness; he takes a final swing at taking control and restoring meaning. In a way, the planet Melancholia represents both the mathematical and dynamic sublime, but probably void of the pleasure Kant would suggest this evokes. Perhaps Justine’s smirk suggests that there is a certain lightness possible with its recognition. The thing is, the planet doesn’t symbolize our epistemic inability to comprehend the meaningful magnitude of nature nor the imminence of annihilation; it represents the ontological absence of any sense in such circumstances.

3. House of Tolerance– Betrand Bonello [France]
House of Tolerance is a sultry but genuinely moving drama about the working residents of an upscale Parisian brothel, l’Apollinade, at the turn of the century. Like Marie Antoinette before it, Bonello sets his period piece to a (more) contemporary score and embraces anachronisms. But where Coppola had precisely no point to make, Bonello’s film is about class and the power of privilege, and he isn’t content to leave the major statements to the costume designers. In this sense, I discerned strong hints of a personal favourite, Brisseau’s Secret Things. As for style, there’s plenty. Indeed, it was a pleasant surprise to find that House of Tolerance was the film that actually delivered the fantastique that Sleeping Beauty’s trailer promised. One particularly memorable scene of stylish but vile euro-horror includes the lead actress receiving a Glasgow smile, which also, when paired with the film’s use of split-screen cinematography, suggests the possible influence of DePalma’s The Black Dahlia. And on the topic of directors, the cast interestingly includes many of Bonello’s accomplished French director peers in acting roles, including Xavier Beauvois, Jacques Nolot, and Noémie Lvovsky.

4. Killer Joe – William Friedkin [USA]
Of all the Academy-award winning, name-instantly-recognizable directors, William Friedkin has got to be the most leftfield. Think Cruising. Think Bug. And of all his anti-blockbuster blockbusters, Killer Joe is probably my favourite. A perfectly-crafted, absolutely entertaining, deliciously pulpy film with a whole lotta punch (maybe one too many?). Matthew McConaughey plays the role he was born to play, a playboy cop-slash-hitman who swaggers into the company of a trailerpark sexpot (Juno Temple, who also starred in last year’s funnest film, Kaboom!), who wants him to free up her mom’s life insurance money. Things go Fargo bad pretty quick, but any inclination of predictability is handily written off once its batshit-crazy conclusion rolls around.

5. Martha Marcy May Marlene – Sean Durkin [USA]
You tell me about a new American indie, character-driven, buzzfilm set in a rural wilderness that evokes classic 1970s American indie, character-driven films set in rural wildernesses and I’m thinking a Sundance darling. That is, I’m thinking something altogether negligible like Winter’s Bone or White Lightnin’. Oh, and then you mention it’s starring one of the Olsens. Really? Well, hype and subsequent prejudices aside, Durkin’s first picture is actually a very strong one. And though every review of the film has already mentioned this, it bears repeating: Elizabeth Olson shines in the role of Martha. What we learn about Martha, a psychologically damaged and emotionally unavailable escapee from a cult, comes in spurts. We struggle to understand what Martha is thinking as she struggles to come to terms with the tension between the ideas that drew her to join the commune and her experience with the people she once thought she shared these ideas with. In the safety of her sister’s summer home, Martha naps, wanders around aimlessly, forgets important details, and questions the commonplace – evidence of the commune wielding its power at a distance. The sense of helplessness we are left with in the face of this invisible threat makes Martha Marcy May Marlene one of the most affective American psychological thrillers in a long time.

6. Dreileben – Christian Petzold, Christopher Hochhäusler, Dominik Graf [Germany]
Dreileben is a collection of three films with interweaving narratives. As such, they can be watched together, in any order, or independently. The strongest are the films by Petzold and Hochhäusler, two of the brightest stars of what is, in my opinion, currently the most interesting contemporary film movement, the Berlin School. The other is by Graf, a critic of the supposed coldness of these dffb graduates’ films. There is a considerable difference in the styles of each film, which make sense, with each film focusing on a different life, as the title suggests. But the most interesting facet of the project is the juxtaposition of the styles and stories, each detail at once both peripheral and significant. Taken together, this experiment in mereology does nothing less than invent a new spectatorship for the viewer.

7. Shame – Steve McQueen [UK]
Although McQueen switches the topic, by portraying a man struggling against his bodily desires once again, he achieves the same intimacy as he had in Hunger. And just as we felt pangs seeing Fassbender wither away, in Shame we are also drawn into understanding his attempts to organize the chaos around him through control and disaffiliation. McQueen establishes this empathy not by having us share his vice, not via eroticism, but by stripping Fassbender’s persona bare in such a way that we cannot help but see ourselves in his empty pursuits, in his cynicism, in his hedonic depression. We admit this response is fruitless, but we are still left wondering if the truly sick ones aren’t in fact those who need nothing but earnestness to get through the day.

8. Generation P – Victor Ginzburg [Russia]
Pelevin’s Generation "П" (published in English as Homo Zapiens) had been considered a novel too bizarre, too hallucinogenic, too full of references to be brought to the screen. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say how it stacks up as an adaptation, but I can say that the filmed version is a thoroughly enjoyable, frenetic joyride through Yeltsin-era ads, mob power, drugs, conspiratorial networks, capitalistic excess, and the confusion of post-Soviet values.

9. Michael – Markus Schleinzer [Austria]
Great cinema isn’t always easy to sit through. With respect to Schleinzer’s quiet character study, this is an understatement. Michael depends on casting two people, a pedophile and a kid. The entire tone of the film rides on this choice. It’s no surprise then that Schleinzer, the former casting man for the Austrian geniuses of discomfort, Haneke and Seidl, hits the mark. Although inspired by the appalling news stories of Austrian basement prisons, such as the Fritzl and Kampusch cases, Schleinzer surprisingly (and thankfully) never ventures into exploitative or unnecessarily shocking territory. But perhaps the restrained, mundane tone of the study makes it even more difficult to bear.

10. Jean-Baptiste Léonetti - Carré Blanc [France]
Carré Blanc is a gorgeous, piece of stark structure, crisp shots, and modernist architecture. This polished, organized environment may seem quaint as the image of a not-so-distant dystopia, which will likely be decidedly more postmodern and ‘flexible.’ But Léonetti does hit on something real when he illuminates throughout the film the complete marriage of neoliberal economics and neoconservative family values. Further, it is to his credit that, echoing Ballard, the villain here is not the typical dystopian authoritarian dictator, but the much more relevant business society and their army of middle-managers who invent tortuous life-or-death games for prospective employees to test their entrepreneurial creative spirit.

11. Prismatic Planes – Alex McCleod [Canada]
There is so much detail in Torontonian Alex McCleod’s virtual city. We float around above buildings like Oscar’s ghost in Enter the Void. Second Life on psychadelics. This world seems endless, the infrastructure programmed for miles. We dip down to explore further and suddenly the architecture transforms itself. Sudden zooms and spasms of digital corruption interrupt the consistency of the environment. Immersive, three-dimensional glitch art.

12. This is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb [Iran]
This is a difficult, DV “film” about film as a subversive art and an exploration of the limits of censorship. Panahi restlessly wanders around his home where he is under house arrest, worries aloud about his impending hearing, and creatively imagines how to get around the Iranian government’s ban on him making any more films. A few ideas he tries out are holding the camera up to his own film playing on a TV and running through ideas of scenes, replete with staging tape on the ground. Shortly after this ‘film’ was made, Panahi received word that he would be sent to jail for six years and be prevented from making films for twenty. Panahi’s co-director Mirtahmasb was arrested shortly thereafter in a sweep that detained five other Iranian filmmakers.

13. Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Rupert Wyatt [USA]
This was one of the most explicitly leftist films I’ve ever seen come out of Hollywood, coincidentally released during the London riots. The very premise of the film is that political subjectivity is borne out of a negation of the standing order. Echoing Lacan’s (quite Hegelian) thesis that ‘the word is the murder of the thing,’ Caesar’s political transformation begins when he utters his first word: ‘NO.’ Rejecting the immediate situation they find themselves in, these new revolutionary subjects revolt and hit three targets: the police, the businesses (Gen-Sys), and the prisons (the cages). At first, Caesar demands that the other apes resist violence and one wonders if the film will end with an anti-revolutionary liberal message, something along the lines of a pragmatic ‘protest can be valid, but violent riots never are.’ But when it comes to the oppressors (Jacobs, Dodge), his concern for revolutionary justice ultimately outweighs the impotence of pacifism. What we have here is Caesar as a Robespierre figure who refuses to apologize for the tyrant’s bloody robes. Caesar ends up putting his egalitarian love for all apes before his personal love of Will (cf. Engels on the family) or himself. And as I sat watching, listening to the audience cheer the apes, I wondered if the reaction would be the same when a boiling point has been reached with the human oppressed.

14. You’re Next – Adam Wingard [USA]
You’re Next is a first-rate, Scream-informed home invasion slasher with a strong female lead, a great score, and quite a few laughs throughout. Even more impressive in a genre that often paints by the numbers is the fact that this is a genuinely inventive and, for that reason, constantly tense film. Whatever your phobia, the antagonist couldn’t be made more personal than it is here. Oh, and you’ll have Dwight Tilley’s ‘Looking for the Magic’ stuck in your head for weeks.

15. Almayer’s Folly – Chantal Akerman [Belgium]
Akerman crafts a perfectly paced, loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel of the same name. The novel’s themes of colonialism and greed and its characters, including the fiercely anti-colonial Nina, are still present, but the story has now been set in jungles of mid-century Cambodia. Gorgeous shots of the Mekong river create an atmosphere that hints at Murnau’s Tabu. Wagner’s beautiful prelude to ‘Tristan and Isolde’ is used as the main theme but to very different effect than in Melancholia, a testament to the composition’s depth.

16. Drive – Nicolas Winding Refn [USA]
I have a problem remembering Refn’s films. I watched Pusher a few weeks ago and can tell you what it’s about but I don’t recall many scenes. Sometimes the entire narrative of a film will stick with you. For other films, it is strong sense of atmosphere that remains. For Drive, I find it’s the latter. People talked about the violence in this film but, a few months having passed, I honestly don’t remember much of that. What I do remember is Gosling sitting in a car expressionless. The details of why he’s there are fuzzy right now. But his cool stare is vivid. And it’s that combination of Two-Lane Blacktop's moody angst and the sleek blankness of a car commercial that will be with me for awhile.

17. That Summer – Philippe Garrel [France]
That Summer (aka A Burning Hot Summer) is a well-crafted drama about jealousy, infidelity, and the mercurial shifts in a relationship between being passionate for and bored with each other. While far from his best, this is Garrel’s most accessible film to date and longtime fans should still be pleased. Monica Bellucci plays the stunning actress Angèle, who feels years younger than her age, and Louis, as always, plays the troubled artist.

18. Seeking the Monkey King – Ken Jacobs [USA]
Experimental master Jacobs has made a career out of shooting immobile objects and editing them in such a way that an almost tangible depth emerges through constant movement rather than any reliance on 3-D glasses. In his latest work he continues this process, transforming a series close-ups on tin-foil into a magmatic apocalypse, which are made all the more ominous by J.G. Thirlwell’s score. The ostensible simplicity of the project is countered by jarring interruptions for the octogenarian’s wide-ranging advice, philosophical musings, and reflections on life.

19. The Skin I Live In – Pedro Almodovar [Spain]
It’s been 21 years since Almodovar teamed up with Bandaras, but he’s back just like where he left off in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, with another film about a mentally disturbed person kidnapping someone and hoping the Stockholm syndrome takes effect. Back are all the Almodovarian themes: gender, sexual confusion, psychological and physical imprisonment, and transformation. But this time it’s a comedy-thriller that recalls Franju’s Eyes without a Face. If you pay attention to detail – or if you’ve watched any other Almodovar film – the final twist can be sensed well before it is unveiled. The true surprise, however, is that despite being packed full of scenes so absurd and ideas so over-the-top that the story feels like it will inevitably veer off the rails, Almodovar holds the whole thing together until the end.

20. The Turin Horse – Bela Tarr [Hungary]
Like the works of Nietzsche, its inspiration, Tarr’s final film is both gruelling and life-affirming; moments sway between repetition and paroxysm. It always takes me a little while to focus my attention enough to tap into my Tarr zone and focus on his films’ rhythm. But once found, the experience can take on an almost meditative quality. And this film, about the base survival, is chiefly a reflection on the tempo of everyday life when stripped of all enjoyment and distraction.
*****James Quandt - Senior Programmer: TIFF Cinematheque - Author: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Robert Bresson : Revised

1. Eika Katappa and The Death of Maria Malibran (Werner Schroeter, 1969 and 1972)
2. The Clock (Christian Marclay) with special nod to Christoph Schlingensief.
3. Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)
4. This is not a film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) with a special mention to A Separation.
5. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
6. Play (Ruben Ostlund)
7. Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
8. Blood of my Blood (Joao Canijo)
9. Aita (Jose Maria de Orbe)
10. Porfirio (Alejandro Landes)
*****Canada's Top Ten - Features
- Nathan Morlando's Edwin Boyd
- Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz
- Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar
- Guy Maddin's Keyhole
- David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method
- Jason Eisener's Hobo With A Shotgun
- Ken Scott's Starbuck
- Guy Edoin's Marécages
- Jean-Marc Vallée's Café de flore
- Sébastien Pilote's Le Vendeur

Canada's Top Ten - Shorts
- Philippe Baylaucq's ORA
- Pedro Pires Hope
- Andrew Cividino' We Ate the Children Last
- Michelle Latimer's Choke
- Ian Harnarine's Doubles With Slight Pepper
- Ryan Flowers and Lisa Pham's No Words Came Down
- Ashley McKenzie's Rhonda's Party
- Igor Drljaca's The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar
- Sophie Goyette's La Ronde
- Arnaud Brisebois and Francis Leclerc's Trotteur
*****Brad Stevens - Film Critic : Sight & Sound - Author : Monte Hellman: His Life and Films, Abel Ferrara: Moral Vision

It seemed to me a rather disappointing year, probably because I have so far failed to catch up with several important films (only seen one of the titles on Michael’s list). Here’s my top ten:

1- Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
2- 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette)
3- Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)
4- You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen)
5- A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
6- The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
7- The Hunter (Rafi Pitts)
8- Cattivi Guagliuni (99 Posse video by Abel Ferrara)
9- The Conspirator (Robert Redford)
10- Burke and Hare (John Landis)
*****Cinema Scope Magazine
1. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
2. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr)
3. L’Apollonide—Souvenirs de la maison close (Bertrand Bonello)
4. Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler)
5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
6. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
7. Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
8. It’s the Earth Not the Moon (Gonçalo Tocha)
9. Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler)
10. Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Special Mentions:
4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara)
The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont)
Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)
Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
Policeman (Nadav Lapid)
Target (Alexander Zeldovich)
Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers)
*****Stéphane Delorme - Chief Editor: Cahiers du Cinema - Author : Francis Ford Coppola
1. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
2. Habemus Papam (Nanni Moretti)
3. La guerre est declaree (Valerie Donzelli)
4. Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)
5. Un ete brulant (Philippe Garrel)
6. Black Sawn (Darren Aronofsky)
7. L'Etrange Affaire Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
8. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
9. Propriete interdite (Helene Angel)
10. Les Contes de la nuit (Michel Ocelot)
*****Positif 2011 Covers
- Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
- L'exercice de l'État (Pierre Schöller, 2011)
- We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
- Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
- Claude Chabrol
- A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
- Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)
- Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Hark Tsui, 2010)
- True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2010)
- The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)
- Hereafter (Clint Eastwood, 2010)
*****Olivier Père - Artistic Director: Locarno Film Festival - Author: Jacques Demy
1 – Drive de Nicolas Winding Refn
2 – Melancholia de Lars von Trier
3 – The Tree of Life de Terrence Malick
4 – Essential Killing de Jerzy Skolimowski
5 – Black Swan de Darren Aronofsky
6 – A Dangerous Method de David Cronenberg
7 – La piel que habito de Pedro Almodóvar
8 – Super 8 de J.J. Abrams
9 – La Grotte des rêves perdus de Werner Herzog
10 – Dernière Séance de Laurent Achard

Grands cinéastes en grande forme:
- O somma luce de Jean-Marie Straub
- I Wish I Knew, histoires de Shanghai de Jia Zhang Ke
- Au-delà de Clint Eastwood
- Le Havre d’Aki Kaurismäki
- Le Cheval de Turin de Béla Tarr
- Le Vilain Petit Canard de Garri Bardine
- L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close de Bertrand Bonello
- Un été brûlant de Philippe Garrel
- Pater d’Alain Cavalier
- Le Gamin au vélo de Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne
- L’Etrange Affaire Angelica de Manoel de Oliveira
- Détective Dee : le mystère de la flamme fantôme de Tsui Hark
- Ha Ha Ha de Hong Sang-soo
- Oki’s Movie de Hong Sang-soo
- Les Aventures de Tintin – le secret de la licorne de Steven Spielberg
- Il était une fois en Anatolie de Nuri Bilge Ceylan
- Minuit à Paris de Woody Allen
- Ceci n’est pas un film de Jafar Panahi et Motjaba Mirtahmasb

Outsiders:
Sweetgrass de Lucien Castaing-Taylor et Illisa Barbash
Un amour de jeunesse de Mia Hansen-Løve
Morgen de Marian Crisan
Curling de Denis Côté
Père Noël Origines de Jalmari Helander
Attack the Block de Joe Cornish
La guerre est déclarée de Valérie Donzelli
Winter Vacation de Li Hongqi
Animal Kingdom de David Michôd
Sans identité de Jaume Collet-Serra
Mafrouza d’Emmanuelle Demoris
Sucker Punch de Zack Snyder
L’Autobiographie de Nicolae Ceaucescu d’Andrei Ujica
La Planète de singes : les origines de Rupert Wyatt
La BM du Seigneur de Jean-Charles Hue

Trois inédits qui ne le sont plus
Je veux seulement que vous m’aimiez de Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976)
The Terrorizers d’Edward Yang (1986)
Le Miroir de Jafar Panahi (1997)

Trois films sortis directement en DVD et Blu-ray
Triangle de Christopher Smith
Berlin Undead de Marvin Kren
Ivory Tower d’Adam Traynor

*****Serge Toubiana - Director General : Cinémathèque française
"There is a funny correspondence, I think, between Hugo and The Artist, two movies that look back to the past all the while use the most sophisticated digital and 3D technologies. Hugo and The Artist are not "heritage films" in the familiar sense, they are films that are alive and have rhythm that revive the silent era, in a way that is synchronous : the end of the 1920s. At the center there is the same question: what is the secret that has been lost? What is it, in the art of the silent film, and what hasn't been lost? The answers are multiple. But there is one thing that these two films have in common: la place du spectateur [the role of the spectator]. It is also and maybe foremost the filmgoing spectator that has changed, in the transition to the talkies. The technology suddenly dated the manufacturing process, stories and myths, that otherwise would have a giant impact on the public imagination of the entire world. The public otherwise primitive became an entity in self, separated from others, a being endowed by language. It is this evolution, this change, that is witnessed by Hugo and The Artist."
*****Edouard S. - Film Critic: Nightswimming
First off:
Drive by Nicolas Winding Refn
The Strange Case of Angelicaby Manoel de Oliveira
Meek's Cutoff by Kelly Reichardt'
Hors Satan by Bruno Dumont
Afterwards :
Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti
Pina by Wim Wenders
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu by Andrei Ujica
Somewhere by Sofia Coppola
L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close by Bertrand Bonello
Carancho by Pablo Trapero
Finally :
A Separation / The Skin I Live In / Un été brûlant / Pater / Santiago 73, Post Mortem / Hugo / The Ditch / Octobre à Paris / Cave of Forgotten Dreams / Winter's bone / Black Swan/ Le gamin à vélo / Hereafter
etc.
(+ The Terrorizers d'Edward Yang)

American Movies and the Politics of Idealism (Media Mondays at the JCC)

2012-01-24T18:14:00.008-06:00

I want to thank Adam Nayman for the shout-out in his piece on these classes in The Grid. - D.D.

You like the movies? And you want to hear and talk about them? You should check out the eight-part series by veteran critic Kevin Courrier (Critics At Large), Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. As part of the Media Mondays at the Miles Nadal JCC every Monday, except for February 20th and March 12th, from 7PM to 9PM, Courrier will be connecting the changing zeitgeist from the sixties onwards with the Hollywood films that best encapsulates them. From John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 all the way to Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. No American presidential era will be left unexamined. Like the great new Stephen King book 11/22/63, Courrier starts the course off with one of the turning points in American history - the death of John F. Kennedy. The shooting that happened in Dallas and its portrayal and discussion on network broadcasting will have a large impact on the population and culture and there will be a rippling effect throughout the following eras. News footage and video clips from the eras are examined and, for someone that was born in '88, these clips and background are revelatory. Even though the course is on American idealism there is still something quintessentially Canadian about them. Courrier's tone and demeanor is that of the infectious Canadian friendliness along with a modest authority and a well-researched intelligence. While Courrier's background in journalism and music brings a comprehensiveness as it allows him to bring up many other aspects of the culture. While there is also something personal about the series as this is his selection and he has lived through these times in both Oshawa and Toronto, Ontario. From the two classes that I have attended the lessons have been on par with other zeitgeist film critics like Siegfried Kracauer, Robin Wood and Jim Hoberman. Particular images from films are studied to see how they resonate with a wider culture of the time and the filmmakers that have receive the most focus, so far, are John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn. All of these classes are for the preparation for a book Courier is writing, which I am sure would be fantastic, but there is just so much more that you get through the classes. If you are in the area you should definitively check them out.

Vivre le cinéma! Long live Positif! (Cannes Critics Week at the Lightbox)

2012-01-18T20:53:00.011-06:00

"You like the movies: you also know that film is an art. It took fifty years for the professors to admit it; in another half-century students will be writing theses that attempt to reconstruct lost masterpieces. But whose fault was it that they disappeared? It is up to us to do something against the merchants of the mediocre." - Bernard Chardère

"It's in the darkness of the theater, again and always, where we will like to be." - Fabien Baumann

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Semaine de la Critique, Manager of Film Programmes Brad Deane, who was responsible for the great series Masks and Faces: The Films of John Cassavetes, organized 50 Years of Discoveries - Cannes Critics Week which will take place from January 18th to the 22nd at the Lightbox. Each critic will introduce one film of their choice that has premiered at the Cannes festival sidebar. Some noteworthy guests include Jonathan Rosenbaum (Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia) who will be introducing Anna Karina's Vivre ensemble (1973) Saturday, January 21st at 7PM, and Fabien Gaffez (Positif) who will be introducing Jean Eustache's Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966) and La Rosière de Pessac (1968) on Friday, January 20th at 6:30PM. As well there is going to be a Higher Learning panel, Film Criticism Today on Friday, January 20th from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm.

For their sixtieth anniversary, there have been a few changes at Positif. First off, Positif recently changed publishers from éditions Scope in Paris to Actes Sud and the Institut Lumière in Lyon. Along with the move they have also slightly altered the magazines formatting and layout; as well the magazine is finally in color! On the subject of the Cahiers-Positif film reviewing one-upmanship at the blog Nightswimming, Edouard S. writes, "The eighties saw Cahiers catching up with Positif and, finally, if Positif is continuing to lead the way, the tendency is that of equilibrium."

What can you find going through the new issues from six-hundred-and-seven to six-hundred-and-nine? The filmmakers that they interview include Almodovar, Sorrentino, von Trier, Refn, Miller, Dumont, Wiseman, Soderbergh, Schoeller, and Ceylan. There are interesting comments on films like how Valérie Donzelli's La guerre est déclarée is "one of the years best French films," or on the filming techniques in Crazy Horse, "On the other hand the camera never places the spectator in a judging or voyeuristic position, it is more one of an admiring accomplice." The Bloc Notes are fascinating as Pierre Eisenreich contrasts scuba-diving with the film-going experience, "the strange feelings, to immerse oneself, and the aesthetic beauty." Michel Ciment writes an erudite and moving memorial for Raúl Ruiz. Positif champions the great actresses Tilda Swinton, Kristen Wiig, and Jessica Chastain. And the books reviews are thorough and vivid. Since these issues three new ones have come out and the films featured on their covers are Shame, Take Shelder, and The Descendants.

What I like about Positif is that you hear about many films first through reading the magazine; where reading the articles creates a palpable desire to then go see the films. It's choices aren't snob and there is an energy and individuality to their writing as they use criticism not as a bases to write synopses but instead as a literary genre - something a lot of English writing disappointingly does not do. Positif is just more in depth, knowledgeable and generous compared to a lot of the film writing going on, especially in the journalistic sphere in Toronto, as characterized by idiots like Martin Morrow in The Grid. While La Maison de la Presse is still three months late (!!!) in getting the new issues (can someone fix this?) and Positif's lack of exposure, to say it quickly, severally isolates their line of inquiry in the world of English language film criticism. Positif continues to explore the contours of the future of cinema, even if sometimes it is at the risk of being out of sync with trends, and at the same time it continues to explore it's history (cf. Positif films) and thematic aspects of the seventh art. It is a benefit to contemporary cinema to have Positif around. People should come to the Lightbox to hear Fabien Gaffez talk.

Positif Films, since 1952. (two lists)

2012-01-17T22:38:00.005-06:00

For anyone interested in the French film magazine Positif, here are two of their lists that are worth highlighting for a better understanding of their approach to film history and their taste. - D.D.

The most striking films of the decade 2000-2009 (Positif, February 2010, N.588)
1. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
2. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2005)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2008)
4. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
5. We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)
5. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2007)
7. De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
7. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
7. Sarabande (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
7. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
11. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
11. Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2004)
13. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
13. Coeurs (Alain Resnais, 2006)
13. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)
13. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
13. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
13. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
13. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
20. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)
20. Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
20. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003)
20. Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
24. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2007)
24. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003)
24. Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2003)
24. The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

***** For the thirtieth anniversary of Positif in May, 1982 (N.254-255) the magazine polled its critics on "what were the films that have had the biggest impact on you," since in the inception of the magazine in Lyon, 1952.
1. 2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
2. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1957)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
4. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1962)
4. Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1961)
6. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
6. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
8. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
8. The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)
8. Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
8. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
13. The Searcher (John Ford, 1956)
13. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
13. The Traveling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, 1975)
16. Amacord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
16. L'Annee derniere a Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
16. Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)
19. Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)
19. Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960)
19. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
19. Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1953)
19. The Spider's Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1969)
19. A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1953)
25. Andrei Roublev (Andrei Tarkovski, 1966)
25. Casque d'or (Jacques Becker, 1952)
25. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
25. Written on the wind (Douglas Sirk, 1957)
25. Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1978)
25. Ma nuit chez Maud (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
25. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
25. Persona (Ingmar Bergman,1966)
25. Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)
25. The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
35. A bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
35. America, America (Elia Kazan, 1963)
35. Barry Lindon (Stanley Kubrick, 1976)
35. The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)
35. Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972)
35. Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955)
35. Deliverance (John Boorman, 1973)
35. Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
35. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
35. Fellini's Roma (Federico Fellini, 1971)
35. Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
35. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
35. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
35. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
35. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
35. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
35. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
52. The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1975)
52. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962)
52. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
52. Belle de jour (Luis Bunuel, 1966)
52. Le Carrose d'or (Jean Renoir, 1952)
52. Some like it hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
52. Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, 1960)
52. Fat City (John Huston, 1972)
52. Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)
52. Incompreso (Luigi Comencini, 1966)
52. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
52. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
52. The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)
52. La Maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1972)
52. The Go Between (Joseph Losey, 1971)
52. The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962)
52. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovski, 1974)
52. The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1975)
52. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
52. Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg, 1970)
52. The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)
52. Providence (Alain Resnais, 1976)
52. Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
52. Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Jacques Tati, 1953)
52. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

A Modern Day Kandinsky (On Jean-Marc Vallée's Café de flore)

2012-01-15T23:12:00.008-06:00

Café de flore (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2011)
**** (Masterpiece)
*****Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de flore, which recently played at the Lightbox with Vallée in attendance as part of Canada's Top Ten, is a blessing. When there are so many movies that come out already looking like standardized products, a work as original like Café de flore dispels of convention and in its rebirth leaves only essences and feelings behind. Café also proves the long-standing suspicion that Vallée is actually an auteur as he not only directs the film but he also wrote the screenplay and edited it – look carefully and you can spot him in a signature cameo. After the screening, Vallée mentioned that after completing The Young Victoria (2009), a film that he didn’t have total control over, he wanted to make something edgy. And edgy – hell, I would describe it as dangerous! - is what you get in Café as Vallée’s powerful imagination is on view.

Like the other great Québécois director Denis Côté (cf. 3 + 4 + 1), Vallée’s approach to form is similar to that of Modernist painters and, more precisely, to Wassily Kandinsky’s Impressionist-style paintings from his Munich period. The unlikely comparison offers striking similarities. What these two artists achieve is the creation of abstract visual expressions built from stylized forms that are imbued with symbolic meaning. When Vallée cuts the sound and all you see are figures presented in decisive moments showing unrestrained feeling alongside Doctor Rockit’s catchy track Café De Flore - the effect is that of ecstasy.

There is something free and lyrical to the rhythm and melody of Café that creates an unreal mood and a self-contained world. When Antoine (Kevin Parent) jumps into his swimming pool and some water lands on his daughter’s foot it seems to connote an unexplained spiritual connectedness between the two. Kandinsky was also interested in theosophy, the occult and religion as elaborated in his important essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Vallée’s concern with the spiritual bleeds throughout the entire film through representational and abstract forms, the casting and editing, colour and lighting, music and sound. Vallée seeks the essence beneath appearances, where the actions are drowned in style, in hope of sharing unbridled feelings, substance and life. - David Davidson

A New Start (Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere)

2012-01-04T15:20:00.020-06:00

Title: Road to Nowhere (2011)
Director: Monte Hellman
Studio: Monterey Video
Price: 26.95$
*****“To begin with a proposition: Monte Hellman and Abel Ferrara are the most important working American directors. And if anything could be said to link these two otherwise very different artists, it is surely their lack of neuroticism, their ability, in a culture dominated by the life-denying obsessions of consumerism, to unblinkingly confront the beast in its lair without being captivated by its insidious charm.” – Brad Stevens (Cahiers du cinema, N.648)

“They called them minor classics of anguish and despair.” – Leo (Stanley’s Girlfriend)

One of the biggest disappointments over the past year in the Toronto film scene is that Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere never received a first-run theatrical release or even a one-off screening. This sucks. He deserves better. It was the one film that I and a few others were most looking forward to seeing on the big screen. It has been fifty-three years since Hellman first started making films with Beast From Haunted Cave in 1959. Since then, he has made only ten films, which range from great to masterpieces including Ride in the Whirlwind (1965), The Shooting (1966), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Cockfighter (1974), and Iguana (1988). Many of his projects failed to get off of the ground, while others got compromised. This places him in the tradition of people like Orson Welles, who also faced similar difficulties. Hellman has been on hiatus from feature film-making since Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! that came out in 1989, meaning that audiences have been waiting twenty-one years for this new feature. And what came out in theaters instead? A lot of crap. For example, from this year, there is The Trip, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Transformers 3, Le Havre, Carnage, New Year’s Eve et cetera. Why an ambitious and fascinating movie like Road to Nowhere did not get distributed is beyond me. I heard Entertainment One was going to distribute the film, but that never materialized. Whatever. You can buy the DVD at the Bay Street Video. It will do.

Road to Nowhere is a puzzle film that is full of temporal leaps. It is hard to easily summarize, as you are not always sure whether you are watching events happen for the first time, or if the film crew is preparing a shot, or if the scene is only being acted, or if something is happening alongside all of this. But here goes, Road to Nowhere begins with a young woman Laurel Graham (played with finesse by Shannyn Sosasmon) leaving her partner after they murder a cop. The man then takes a plane and crashes it into a lake. This “true story” is the subject of the film the director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) and his script writer Stephen Gates (Rob Kolar) are going to adapt for their film Road to Nowhere. But, apparently, the rumor is, through the inquiry of a blogger Nathalie Post (Dominique Swain) and an insurance investigator Bruno Brotherton (Waylon Payne), the deaths are assumed to be a set up for insurance fraud.

Road to Nowhere has some great scenes, the acting is good, and the clothes people wear is really seventies. The Balsam Mountain Inn in North Carolina where the film is predominantly set has a quintessentially American feel, just like the desolate highways in Two-Lane. As well the Tom Russell song Road to Nowhere is just as moving, and central to the story, as the Kris Kristopherson song Me and Bobby McGee was to Two-Lane, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Road to Nowhere is also Hellman's ode to the films he loves, just like Scorsese’s Hugo is an ode to the early French silent cinema of Georges Méliès. In Road to Nowhere, in his hotel room Mitchell lies in his bed with Laurel very comfortably and watches movies, including The Lady Eve, Spirit of the Beehive (“A fucking masterpiece!”), and Bergman’s Seventh Seal (“It never so looked so good”). For attentive viewers, sitting on the TV stand is a copy of the Criterion Collection edition of Two-Lane Blacktop. And there is also a Contempt-like director cameo by Hellman as the cameraman while the crew is filming the flying plane. (corection: the cameraman is Josep Civit, not Hellman.)

There is also a focus on the behind the scenes activities that happens during the making of a movie. Like the nights out where people are passionately talking at a bar, the creative difficulties for the directors in orchestrating the crew, or enjoying the other pleasures of being out on the set. When Mitchell discusses his particular approach, it seems like it is coming right from Hellman as elaborated in the most recent interview book on him, Emmanuel Burdeau’s Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the Devil (Capricci). While some of the backstage stories shown of Mitchell filmmaking seems like they derive from Hellman’s own life as described in Brad Stevens’ essential Monte Hellman: His Life and Films (McFarland). This is personal filmmaking. Even to the extent that the residential scene in Los Angeles are even set in Hellman’s actual house – similar to what Cassavetes did in Love Streams. And Hellman’s dog Moxie is in it too!

Road to Nowhere is continuing Hellman’s 2000s work that started with Stanley’s Girlfriend, which was part of the omnibus Trapped Ashes from 2006. Stanley’s Girlfriend is a short fictionalized account of a young Stanley Kubrick and his friendship with Leo, a filmmaker of an exploitation horror flick The Strangler. There is Stanley (Tygh Runyan), a young Leo (Tahmoh Peniket), and an older Leo (John Saxon), with the femme fatale love interest Nina (Amelia Cooke).The references to Kubrick includes the mention of his “brilliant” racetrack movie, Stanley goes to New York to work on a WWI film (Paths of Glory), and there is footage of his work space full of photographs and props of the unrealized Napoleon project.

Though they don't have the typical Hellmanian scenes of people expressing themselves through gestures or people walking against a desolate landscape, what is unique to Stanley’s Girlfriend and Road to Nowhere is the casting of Tygh Runyan as a surrogate for Hellman. Because of his likeability, wit and intelligence Runyan is brilliant in these two films. Through Runyan’s youth, and that he is playing a director who is still early in his career, Hellman is able to directly speak out to the audience about his thoughts on his career, unrealized and dream projects (“I want to make a film that lasts twenty-four hours”), and broach contemporary cinema. It is almost like he is creating a parallel career to his own. When Mitchell is watching Leonardo DiCaprio on television, the shot expresses that Hollywood and Hellman are in two separate worlds.

But where was the turn for all of this? I think the key film in discussing Hellman’s late career is Better Watch Out!, as this direct-to-video horror film seems to anticipate his latest two projects. Especially as both Stanley’s Girlfriend and Road to Nowhere end on a note that owes to the grisly slashers of Sean Cunningham and Tobe Hooper. It is this return to the horror genre that seems important in discussing the late work of the directors that emerged out of the 1970s American New Wave. Which brings to mind the famous Bill Krohn quote, “If our [American] cinephilia is a religion, it’s of sublime terror and of alien worlds.” Similar to Francis Coppola’s Twixt, Wes Craven’s Scream 4, Joe Dante’s The Hole, and George Romero’s Survival of the Dead – it seems like horror is the last escape. When Mitchell snickers, “Well, I don’t believe in God”, the point is that even amidst the surrounding violence, you can still crack a joke and be serious. With all the injustices and corruption going on in the world, some self-lacerating humor can do us all some good. - David Davidson

Happy New Years! (TFR Top Ten of 2011)

2011-12-27T10:48:00.021-06:00

Instead of the typical Top Ten, each entry is organized through thematic categories: (1) the presentation of the unconscious mind through cinema by the world's best Québécois directors, (2) Hitchcockian French thrillers starring the great Guillaume Canet, (3) late works by masters of American cinema, (4) these short films are precursors of what is to come out of Canadian cinema, (5) hybrid films that take the luster of mainstream movies, inflicting them with a singular and vibrant sensability, (6) horror, action and the supernatural reigns supreme, (7) some might call these middle-brow but they are undeniably well crafted and complex, (8) funny, smart, personal and full of feeling, (9) formally invigorating world cinema, (10) social activism, political documentary and anarchist films has been pushed to the margins of experimental cinema - these have been the most challenging.
Following the Top Ten there are a few other lists: best new film books, favorite local film critics, upcoming series etc...
I hope you've enjoyed reading Toronto Film Review and that you keep checking it out in 2012 - there is a lot more film coverage and book reviews to come. A special thanks goes out to everyone who contributed and helped. And make sure to check out the twitter account, TOFilmReview. - D.D.

"You know what, my films resemble more and more what children make in their rooms, when they make little expositions with rocks and seashells: I see more and more clearly my films, and more so the next one, like expositions of little things that I want to share." - Lars von Trier

Top Ten of 2011

 1.       Café de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallée)
          Curling (Denis Côté)

 2.       Espion(s) (Nicolas Saada)
          Une vie meilleure (Cédric Kahn)

 3.       Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
          Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola)
          The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

 4.       The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar (Igor Drljača) 
          Coorow-Latham Road (Blake Williams)
          Up In Cottage Country (Simon Ennis)
          La Ronde (Sophie Goyette)
          Three Mothers (Rafal Sokolowski)

 5.       Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
          Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
          You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn)
          Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont) 
          Un été brûlant (Philippe Garrel)

 6.       Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)
          Scream 4 (Wes Craven)
          Le Gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
          The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (Bill Condon)
          Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
          Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
          Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

 7.       Restless (Gus Van Sant)
          The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)
          Pina (Wim Wenders)
          Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
          Shame (Steve McQueen)
          The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg)

 8.       Hall Pass (Bobby and Peter Farrelly)
          How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)
          Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
          Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)
          We Bought a Zoo (Cameron Crowe)
          The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

 9.       Ne change rien (Pedro Costa)
          To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
          The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
          Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)
          The Future (Miranda July)
          Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
          The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica)

 10.      Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs)
          The Forgotten Space (Allan Sekula and Noël Burch)
          Vapor Trail (Clark) (John Gianvito)
          This is not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi)
          Slow Action (Ben Rivers)
          We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray)
          Too Many Things (Donigan Cumming)

Best new and discovered film books and writing:

Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy by Saul Austerlitz (Chicago Review Press, 2010).
The Film Comedy Reader edited by Gregg Rickman (Limelight Editions, 2004).
Comment Woody Allen peut change votre vie by Éric Vartzbed (Éditions du Seuil, 2011).
Apichatpong Weerasethakul edited by James Quandt (Austrian Film Museum, 2009).
Splitting the Choir – The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming edited by Scott Birdwise (Canadian Film Institute, 2011).
Pencil, Ashes, Matches & Dust by Donigan Cumming (Editions J’ai VU, 2009).
Trammel up the Consequences by Robin Wood (Lightstruck Film & Media Book, 2011).
Monte Hellman - Sympathy for the devil by Emmanuel Burdeau (Capricci, 2011).
Monte Hellman: His Life and Films by Brad Stevens (McFarland & Company, 2003).
Masters of Cinema: Francis Ford Coppola by Stéphane Delorme (Phaidon, 2010); as well as his writing and direction of Cahiers du cinéma.
When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade by Dave Kehr (University Of Chicago Press, 2011); as well as Kehr's weekly DVD review column in The New York Times.
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris (Da Capo Press, 1968).
Films And Feelings by Raymond Durgnat (MIT Press, 1971).
BFI Modern Classics - WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Raymond Durgnat (BFI, 2008).
Joseph L. Mankiewicz et son double by Vincent Amiel (Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).
World Film Locations: Tokyo edited by Chris MaGee (Intellect Ltd, 2011).
Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Worst writing, books and publishers of the year :

BFI Modern Classics - Heat by Nick James (BFI, 2009); as well pretty much everything James writes in Sight & Sound.
A Short History Of Cahiers Du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton (Verso, 2011).
Anything by Wallflower Press.

Best North American Repertory:

Anthology Film Archives.

Favorite local film critics:

Adam Nayman: who writes for the Toronto alternative paper The Grid as well the more worthwhile Cineaste and Cinema Scope. His polemical pieces alongside his vocal position on certain kinds of filmmaking definitively elevates film criticism and the film critic to a higher plane. But more so then his writing, Adam's extracurricular activities like his classes at the Miles Nadal JCC have been one of the highlights of 2011. Who can forget the janitor cleaning the alleyway while the stragglers finished watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn or the ridiculously popular class on Woody Allen. More so then reading film criticism, the classes seemed like the next logical progression of it - the living incarnation. The classes are great as Adam's tone blends the informal and the academic and he illustrates the comments with film clips from a ripped DVD - everything seems to be light years ahead of the curriculum at the University of Ottawa. And going to The Pump and Shoeless Joe's after for pints with a group of people and friends is always a lot of fun. Adam's classes included New Wave Foreign Cinema Lectures In Nayman’s Terms and the two part series Love Em or Hate Em: Controversial Directors and MORE Controversial Directors. And Adam has a new class scheduled for the spring of 2012 at the JCC on Stanley Kubrick, with each class dedicated to a specific film. I know that I am speaking for more then myself when I say, we can't wait!
Andrew Parker: for his writing at Criticize This! and Dork Shelf as well as his programming series Defending the Indefensible at the Toronto Underground Cinema. If you were to have told me a year ago that the state of Toronto's weekly film criticism is in good shape and that the best writing could be found on website's with silly names like Criticize This! and Dork Shelf, I would have probably laughed at you. But lo and behold, I was wrong. Andrew is the kind of guy that still writes his reviews longhand with an old pen and notepad. And Andrew's weekly reviews, which run around the one-thousand word mark, of the majority of new releases provides the most thorough readings of what is playing on Toronto's screens. With a special attention to the films that can gain from this critical support like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Beauty Day. As well he seems to be ahead of most trends as he can tell you why movies like Like Crazy and Margaret are terrific and his opinions stand out as he can also say why most commercial drivel is bad.
Along with Andrew's series Defending the Indefensible, there is also John Semley's (A.V. Club Toronto) new series Remake/Remodel, both of which I recommend and that I look forward to starting up again in the new year. As well there is a new class that seems interesting as part of the Media Mondays at the JCC, Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism presented by Kevin Courrier which will be running from January 16th to March 26th each Mondays starting at 7:00PM - except for February 20th and March 12th. As well, like always, there is Early Monthly Segments and Pleasure Dome for your experimental film fix, and the monthly film-blogger pub nights for some camaraderie. And while I am shouting people out, might as well bring up the Cinema Scope Twitter account CinemaScopeMag, which is a lot of fun too.

Most anticipated films of 2012:

Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. As well Kazik Radwanski and Antoine Bourges from Medium Density Fibreboard Films (MDFF) should hopefully have their current projects finished in the new year - I look forward to catching these two on the festival circuit.

La Ronde and some recent Québécois films

2011-12-15T08:39:00.016-06:00

Congratulations to Igor Drljača and Sophie Goyette for their respective short-films The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar and La Ronde for making it onto Canada’s Top Ten short film selection for 2011. They will be screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of Programme B on Sunday, January 8 at 8:30PM, which I highly recommend going to.
I am also still writing a third review of a few other Canadian short-films: Simon Ennis' Up in Cottage Country, Rafal Sokolowski's Three Mothers and Blake Williams' Coorow-Latham Road. - D. D.

"More than a nouvelle vague, their cinema is perhaps foremost, and more importantly, a new cry. It is our job to know how to listen." - Helen Faradji

In her article Les cinéastes cinéphiles from the dossier on the Renouveau du cinéma Québécois in 24 images (N.152), Helen Faradji discuses Gilles Deleuze's concept of maniérisme to describe a group of feature-filmmakers that are revitalizing the Québécois cinematographic landscape. The filmmakers highlighted are Denis Côté, Maxime Giroux, Rafaël Ouellet, Myriam Verreault, Henry Bernadet, Xavier Dolan, and Stéphane Lafleur. Though I would also include Guy Édoin, Philippe Falardeau and, especially, Jean-Marc Vallée.

Faradji uses the term maniérisme to speak about a third state of the image, “when the root of the image is always still an image.” The term maniérisme, which is derived from the Italian expression bella maniera, is appropriate to label these filmmakers. Like Baroque painters, they reject the rule that art should be an imitation of nature. Deleuze further expands on this style in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque proposing that mannerism is about altering, twisting and folding visions of reality. This is something that these filmmakers also do as they meticulously set their scenes and place their camera - twisting and distorting reality for it to conform to their vision. The distinct character of this group of contemporary Québécois filmmakers can be traced to three attributes: mannerism as an operative function to capture reality while at the same time changing it, a keen awareness of contemporary cinema - what is good, and what they like - and unique funding opportunities (SODEC, NFB etc).

Though the films of these diverse filmmakers are different, Faradji highlights reoccurring commonalities:

“No sunny roads or alleyways with bystanders, but instead new locations (countrysides, suburbs, dumps, etc.) usually in dead mid-season. No idle chatter, stories that lead the viewer by the hand or didactic montages, but instead there is silences, contemplation, and narrative “holes” that force the viewer to focus his attention on the qui-vive […] While it first appeared a priori difficult to account for different approaches and tone of these filmmakers, their reunion under the banner of maniérisme, as well as their different use of formal elements, seems like the cement of their shared identity.”

I propose to put forward two up-and-coming Montreal short-film directors to Faradji’s cinéastes cinéphiles banner and they are Anne Émond and Sophie Goyette.

Émond’s short film Sophie Lavoie is exceptionally well-done in its minute social observations through indirect means as in a single-long take it explores the thoughts and feelings of a young woman (Catherine De Léan) as she is getting an STD test. It is about "modern love" as Émond describes it. While Émond also moved to full-length features as her Nuit #1 premiered in Canada First at TIFF 2011 and is being released in Montreal on December 16th. Nuit #1 is about a young woman who picks up a guy at a rave and then how she deals with the nights after effects. While there is also Goyette whose La Ronde I will be reviewing below. But to confirm these two and their generations passion for filmmaking here is a quote from an interview between Goyette and Sonia Sarfati from La Presse Suisse, “I adore writing, and directing is another form of writing. So I can’t really see myself giving my scripts to anybody else, just like I can’t see myself directing something somebody else wrote.” Émond and Goyette truly captures this new Québécois mannerism. They have a story to tell and a desire to share it through cinema.
*****Sophie Goyette’s fourth short-film, and longest to date at twenty-three minutes, La Ronde is a rural Québec drama set in Laval about these identical twins Ariane and Alex Valencourt whose father Michael, who was suffering from schizophrenia, recently attempted suicide. They now have to decide if they want to ‘pull the plug’ on their father who is being kept alive by life-support systems. The twenty-three-year-old Ariane (played brilliantly by Éliane Préfontaine) has a plane ticket and she is ready to leave, while Alex does not really wants to go, even though he only works at a late night diner. Similarly to Sean Durkin's Martha Macy May Marlene and Steve McQueen’s Shame, the film explores the breakup of a family and how it affects both siblings differently through how they deal with the solemnity of the grieving process.

La Ronde begins with an amazing circular shot of Ariane in her family home while she plays the piano. This sequence is similar to the opening of Catherine Martin's Trois temps après la mort d'Anna where a gifted violinist Anna performs a complex Beethoven concerto while her adoring mother Françoise looks on. You can tell that Ariane’ home has not been inhabited for a while, or at least has not taken care of, since it is messy and full of empty beer cans. The kitchen sink is full of dishes and for dinner Ariane makes a microwaveable dinners. There is a loneliness to the scene of her prodding the layer of plastic over the tray. Then Ariane walks through her father’s room where she listens to his voice on the answering machine and spells his deodorant. Ariane's grief is presented with an understated sensitivity. And then she is off into the night on her electric scooter.

Ariane used to be the local high school football coach and she catches on the school’s playing field a few of the boys drunk. The beer cans are littered around and the boys are stumbling and then one of them barfs. Ariane brings the sick boy back to his parent’s house. And in the conversation with the kid’s father, who thought that his son was staying at a friend’s place, the viewer learns about Ariane’s father and the reason for his hospitalization – a suicide attempt. This father and Michael were co-workers in a nearby industrial park, which is a major contributor to Laval’s economy.

Ariane then drives off to the top of a cliff, which looks down upon an industrial park. Where she stands a bit too close to the edge in is a close-up of her feet kicking little rocks off. She then decides to back away and drive off. Except that her scooter dies - it no longer works. All of this loss and stress has been building up in her and this is the breaking point. She has lost her parents and does not know what to do or where to go. In a vulnerable cry for help and protest Ariane yells out "câlisse".

And then, what does Ariane do? She kicks her helmet off the cliff à la Football kickoff and keeps moving onward into the night and forward in her journey.

Walking on the side of an off-beat road, Ariane gets picked up in a car by a mysterious man (is he a criminal on the run?). After driving for a while they run into a dead deer lying on the middle of the road. The man wants to drive on top of the deer but Ariane decides to get out of the car to pull it out of the way. This appreciation of life, of all different species, reflects the films Christianity, the dominant Québécois religion. This was hinted at earlier while they were driving and passed a a brightly lit cross.

While preventing this deer from being run over Ariane sees and hears something from off in the forest, which she decides to follow. In one of the most spellbinding sequences in the film Ariane follows this apparition. In a point-of-view shot through a dark grassy field with a path illuminated by a flashlight the soundtrack also shifts to the conversation between the brother Alex and a doctor discussing cutting off Michael's life support. When Ariane finally gets to what she has seen, it turns out to be a cow. The films mysticism and contrasts gives the impression that it is the father re-incarnated in the out-of-place farm animal. The texture of the scene feels very sci-fi supernatural or more concisely like Apichatpong’s oneiric Tropical Malady. As well this focus on animals seems like general trend in Québécois cinema as an owl played a large role in Halima Ouardiri’s Mokhtar as well Denis Côté’s new film Bestiaire (which is premiering at Sundance) is a documentary consisting solely of animals filmed in a Montreal zoo.

There is a beautiful exposition shot of a brick wall with statues of white doves flying to the light, and then Ariane makes her way to the family’s tombstone. She spends the night there and in the morning she scratches out with chalk Alex and her name. She then calls her brother and says, "Je suis ici avec tois," “I am here with you”. To end La Ronde, Ariane is able reconcile her demons and find solace - her views making a full circle.

David Davidson

*****Sophie Goyette’s other short films include En parallèle (2008), À l’État sauvage (2009) and Manèges (2009). As well she is currently completing a new short, Le futur proche, and writing her first full-length feature film. La Ronde had it’s world premiere at the Big World for Short Films program at the Locarno Film Festival 2011 and also played in TIFF Short Cuts Canada and in the Focus Section of Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema.

Ken Jacobs and Experimental Cinema (Toronto 2011)

2011-12-01T11:17:00.024-06:00

So far 2011 has been a good year for experimental film in Toronto. To list some of the highlights: In collaboration between The Free Screen and the Images Festival the Lightbox hosted a book launch, with two screenings, of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 with Kathy Geritz in attendance. Hot Docs programmed Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space. The CFMDC and the Cinémathèque Québecoise released the complete work of Joyce Wieland on DVD, a first, and there was also an accompanying screening at Jackman Hall. Andréa Picard’s Wavelengths program (see: Bart Testa’s coverage) curated Ben Rivers’ Slow Action at Gallery TPW. Early Monthly Segments¹ - a monthly experimental film series programmed by Scott Berry, Chris Kennedy and Kate MacKay - had an Owen Land memorial screening. The Pleasure Dome had the projection and book launch of Splitting the Choir; The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming, co-presented by Scott Birdwise. And to sidestep from these Toronto screenings, I went to New York for a week in October. Where I got to see Harun Farocki’s Images of War (at a Distance), which included Serious Games I–IV (2009–10). As well the Anthology Film Archives was having an Adolfas Mekas memorial retrospective where I got to see The Brig (1964).

Now to top off these screenings there were the Ken Jacobs' projections and performance in Mississauga² and Toronto on November 18th and 19th, which was part of the University of Toronto Arts Council 2011 "Speaker in the Arts" Series. Where Jacobs’ held a Nervous Magic Lantern performance and screened his 00's digital work, including his much anticipate Seeking the Monkey King, which recently played in Zuccotti Park in New York in conjunction with the Occupy Wall Street protests.

How to best describe one of Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern performances? It was to take place in the evening time on a Friday. I was surprised to see this university classroom - out in Mississauga! - so full with students. Nearing the 8PM start time the last minute stragglers were being rounded up by Jacobs who was helping them find a seat. The seating was arranged so that the chairs were centered and that the front rows had fewer chairs, so that the quantity progressed outwards with more chairs adding on to the edges. As well each row was higher then the previous one. It was kind-of like a pyramid of people facing forward. With the Nervous Magic Lantern set up at the center, back of the hall where Ken's long-time wife and collaborator Flo Jacobs was sitting.

The Magic Lantern is a pretty primitive device whose origins are the 18th century lamp image-projectors. Wikipedia describes how they operate as such,

"The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen."

The Nervous Magic Lantern has a rotating propeller that serves as a shutter over the lens, which gives the image a strobe-light effect. For Jacobs, the light source magnifies these various plastic slides that he changes sporadically over the hour-long performance. The light stops being projected between the slides and the room is in pitch-black³. I counted around twelve changes. These plastic slides, which the light passes through and are then projected onto the screen, are all different. They are hand-painted in a style that recalls the Abstract Expressionist - by that I mean colorful, formalist and non-representational - though one can always tease out specific images from them. As well these plastic slides are doubled and can be indented, bubbled, scratched and further manipulated. The pulsating image gives off a sense of three-dimensionality. While Jacobs can, and does, move the slides around to give the image a sense of motion - a form of motion that seems infinite as the objects always seem to be moving while never actually going anywhere. The image is being projected at the front of the classroom on a projection screen as well as the surrounding chalkboard and wall.

Michele Pierson writes about the genesis of the Nervous Magic Lantern performances in his Introduction: Ken Jacobs – A Half-Century of Cinema in the new Oxford University Press book Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (2011)⁴, which is edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur,

“From the mid-1960s, Jacobs became increasingly involved in the development of a variety of performance projects: shadow plays (THE BIG BLACKOUT OF ’65: Chapter One “Thirties Man” [1965]), multimedia light and sound shows (THE BIG BLACKOUT OF ’65: Chapter four “Evoking the Mystery” [1968]), and diverse types of projection-based performance (including, in the early 1970s, a marathon multiple projector film performance at the Bleecker Street Cinema. […] Sometime in the late 1960s he began using the term paracinema to describe these works. Some, like the shadows plays and, much later, Nervous Magic Lantern performances, create the conditions for a cinematic experience entirely without film, while others exploit the creative potential of projection to make film newly and strangely resonant. Jacobs’ conceptualization of paracinema as a kind of parallel cinema, running alongside the cinema everyone already knew, brilliantly foregrounded the extent to which the technological and material parameters of cinema could still be considered up for grabs […] Precursors for the Nervous Magic Lantern performance are not to be found, as they are for the Nervous System, in the analytical experiments of Eadweard J. Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, but in Thomas Wilfred’s colored light shows.”

Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern paracinema have a unique quality to them as you are watching something pass before you that is unlike anything that has shown before or will show again. Jacobs' describes them in the Rountable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking⁵ in October (N.137) as, “each time I do it, I improvise. I can’t repeat what I did a previous time,” which is removed from the definitive performances one can find on the DVD transfer Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise (with John Zorn and Ikue Mori) (2005). All the while there is also something about sharing the experience with others, being in the same room with Jacobs, the uniqueness of the score (Jacobs has different scores), physically being under the light that is projected onto the screen, and sharing in the improvisation on how Jacobs' spins the projected plastic sheet - that contributes to a palpable sense of anticipation and then awe.

At the performance there were a few introductions by three different professors, all brief and generous, and then Jacobs introduced the work. He discusses his studies with Hans Hofman who taught him how to better utilize the flatness of painting while being able to give it depth. His speech was evocative of Clement Greenberg’s essay Modernist Painting but transplanted Greenberg’s ideas towards image-projection instead of painting as Jacobs’ emphasis was on image self-criticism, focusing on what makes it medium-specific – it’s flatness – which removes it from the representational and literal while instead rendering it abstract.

One thing about Jacob's work that is interesting is how it mixes formalism with the personal and the social. An example of this is the use of sound in the Nervous Magic Lantern performance. The audio soundtrack is a recording of Jacobs going out and being on the New York City subway. What do you hear? There is the whizzing of the subway, footsteps, people chatting, singing, and music. It continues as such until near the end, where Ken leaves the subway, goes up stairs to his apartment and he chats with his wife Flo. She asks him if he brought up the mail? No, he didn’t. There was only one envelope – the punch line of the performance. The Subway station sounds, just like the neighborhood in Window or the references to New York in Blonde Cobra, give Jacobs’ work a particularly New York City, American quality. As well the conversation with Flo continues the interlacement of his wife and family within his work. The formal-aesthetic qualities come from the visuals created by the Nervous Magic Lantern (as described above). This hybrid of elements leads to interesting results.

^1. The Early Montly Segments will be closing up for the year on Monday December 12th with a screening of Jack Chambers’ Hart of London, to coincide with an exhibition of Chambers’ artwork at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
^2. The performance took place on the UTM campus, where in the Blackwood Gallery there was a looped projection of Daïchi Saïto's Never a Foot Too Far, Even, which was well worth checking out.
^3. The use of non-images has been consistent for Jacobs’, which started in his early work when he would not splice out the flameouts (the black frames at the end of film reels), “I kept them in my films for a number of reasons. I wanted to say, “This is film; this is the character of film. What I’m showing you are unedited rolls from a camera; I left the flash frames in: that was part of the statement. And now you can make it happen digitally, and it doesn’t connote anything. It doesn’t signify. It’s just an effect.” Jacobs’ also writes,

“But the marks of these older technologies mean something. They ring a bell, they do something. I studied decay, OK? My Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son is really about decay, among a lot of other things. It wasn’t about nostalgia, it was about asking, What is this old stuff? What is it made of? What is its character as a series of light impressions?”

^4. So what are the key Jacobs’ references? This new book Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (2011) - a word play on Jacobs’s Ontic Antics (2005) – is going to be important for all future Jacobs’ scholarship. Especially as Pierson’s introduction increases the knowledge surrounding Jacobs as his research includes a lot of unpublished material. As well there is the 1979 Lindley Hanlon interview with Ken Jacobs. And there is the catalogue Films The Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective, which is edited by David Schwartz and has contributions by Tom Gunning.
^5. The Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking included Flo and Ken Jacobs, Luis Recoder, Lynne Sachs, Mark Street, Malcolm Turvey and Federico Windhausen (who does a good job at guiding the conversation). In it Sachs’ brings up an interesting point, “I think one of the interesting directions that the digital world is taking us toward is a fetishism of decay […] The desire for decay is a nostalgia for the aura of the original and its physical transformation.”

*****Ken Jacobs’ Life and Career
Stan Brakhage’s book Film At Wit’s End¹ (1989) is one of the earliest published resources to describe Jacobs biographical information at length. Jacobs was born Jewish in 1933 in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York and his childhood was rough. When Jacobs was fifteen his public school got him an access card to the Museum of Modern Art where he could go see films like old classics and the French avant-garde. Jacobs has always had a leftist, anti-military attitude. But even so, he was forced into being drafted after high school where he served his time in the Coast Guard, which was a position that he was told is essentially defensive and “does nothing.” In 1956 his stint was over and Jacobs returned to New York. The living conditions in New York at the time for artists were miserable, Brakhage describes it as, ““Jungle” is not the term to describe it because there is no jungle so dirty as a lower east side apartment in the 1950s.” During this time Jacobs met Jerry Sims, who would be important to his artistic development, along with the journalist-photographer Weegee (The Naked City) and the artist Hans Hofmann, who was one of his teachers. Jacobs with Larry Gottheim would start a film department and teach at Harpur College, New York and St. John’s College in Queens. Since then Jacobs has kept teaching, making cinema, performing, and has had a family.

How best to talk about Jacobs work and career?
(1) There are the early, less polished works starting with Orchard Street (1955). This period includes Jacobs' collaborations with his friend of the time Jack Smith who acted in some of his films like Blonde Cobra (1959-63), which was made out of footage from Bob Fleischner’s Blonde Venus and The Cobra Woman. Brakhage refers to Blonde Cobra as "one of the masterpieces in the American cinema." There is something quintessentially beat about this period through its forming of a junk aesthetic. Pierson describes Jacobs and Smith’s collaboration as their “shared attraction to the marginal produced a collection of films more explicitly antagonistic to prevailing social values than anything the art world could accommodate.”

(2) Things would change once Jacobs' got his “lucky break” (as he puts it) and met his current wife Florence Karpf. The Jacobs had a falling-out with Smith after the arrest of Ken (theatre manager), Flo (ticket seller), and Jonas Mekas (programmer) over the premiere of Flaming Creatures (1963) at the New Bowery Theatre on St. Mark’s Place in March 1964. The work Jacobs created in the wake of this event, where he was in-and-out of court hearings, like Window (1964) and Nisan Ariana Window (1968) and Spaghetti Aza (1976) Jacobs describes as "chamber works"² and "pockets of sanity." The films are calm places to forget about the American army that was at war with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1955 to 1975. And there is a stronger impression of his own filming, instead of using found-footage, and that primarily consisted of his New York City surroundings and an engagement with his new family, which included his wife Flo and his newly-born children Nisi and Azazel.

(3) Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969) is the work that Jacobs is most readily known for along with Star Spangled to Death (1956-60/2001-04), which is “the greatest found-footage film” according to Jonas Mekas. In Tom, Tom Jacobs makes the viewer more conscious of film as a manipulative element that consists of celluloid through obvious filmic flips and turns. Brahkage describes it, “Ken’s Tom, Tom is probably an ultimate comedy. It takes a simple comedy that was cranked out in the dawn of the film industry and reaches all the way to the fullest possibilities of comedy that I have ever seen in one film.” While Pierson describes Tom, Tom as a structural film, to use P. Adams Sitney's term, “a new focus on and exploration of the structural features of the medium.” There are now at least two digital versions of it: A Tom, Tom Chaser (2002) and Return To The Scene of The Crime (2008). While Jacobs' Perfect Film (1985) continues his appropriation of old archive footage as he gathers material of news-reporters talking to witnesses and a police sergeant about the Malcolm X assassination in Harlem. Jacobs' comments on it,

“For the straight scoop we need the whole scoop, or no less than the clues entire and without rearrangement. O, for a Museum of Found Footage, or cable channel, library, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors."

Which brings us to Jacobs' digital work…

^1. The other filmmakers brought up in Film At Wit’s End along with Ken Jacobs include Jerome Hill, Marie Menken, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton, Maya Deren, Christopher MacLaine and Bruce Conner.
^2. “He [Jacobs] calls the films he began making with this camera in the year the Flaming Creatures trials took place – Window (1964), We Stole Away (1964), The Winter Footage (1964), Winter Sky (1964), and The Sky Socialist (1964-68) – chamber works. In his words: “Composers, I knew, would sometimes take their most personal thoughts and feelings and experimental ideas and work them out in chamber works rather than concert hall ideas.”” According to Michelle Pierson in Optic Antics.*****Digital technologies
Jacobs has been using digital technology since 1999, starting with Flo Rounds A Corner (1999). On the subject, “digital technologies were revolutionary and that they fundamentally changed filmmaking,” with came about through the rise of cheaper digital cameras and editing software like Final Cut Pro. This do it yourself software culminates for Jacobs in his recent six-part 3D Occupy Wall Street series, which is available on YouTube under his username Nervous Ken¹.

Malcolm Turvey’s recent article Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist from October (N.137) situates Jacobs in the realm of digital experimental cinema. Turvey sees Jacobs work as part of the distinct tradition of revelationism,

“and Jacobs is one of this tradtition’s most important and brilliant contemporary practitioners, extending it into the digital era […] What distinguishes revelationism is its embrace of both the cinema’s capacity to reproduce reality, as beloved by realist such as André Bazin and its ability to transform reality, as celebrated by modernist like Rudolf Arnheim.”

Turvey also looks at the ‘indexical’ quality of digital photography and cinema by arguing against Mary Ann Doane’s essay The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity as digital videos remnants are, “mechanically generated non-contact physical traces.”

^1. The nervousness of Jacobs’ account name in relation to the protests that he is filming might be a nervousness of social anxieties. Instead of the optical nervousness of his entitled performances that is derivative from,

““Cézanne’s nervousness” Picasso spoke of wasn’t nervousness at all but his efforts to put down the elusive contours of objects studied very closely as seen with two eyes […] What Cézanne’s apple means to me is that painting is being used less to tell us the facts about the apples than about what it is to see with two adjacent eyes reporting similar but conflicting and forever unfixable (on a flat plane: the canvas, the movie screen, the monitor surface) aspects of three-dimensional reality.”

From the Nicole Brenez contribution in Optic Antics.
*****Jacobs' 00’s digital work
On Saturday night, November 19th at University College (Room 140) St. George Campus there were the screenings of some of Jacobs' 00’s digital work: Capitalism: Slavery (2006), The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), Another Occupation (2011), and Seeking the Monkey King (2011). It was a throbbing lights series - not for persons afflicted with epilepsy - that uses Jacobs’ patented eternalism, “a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimensional motion-direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures.”

With Michael Moore-like titles Capitalism: Slavery and Capitalism: Child Labor, Jacobs uses the tools and techniques from his other work to offer a social critique in a series that is ostensibly more political then it has been in the past. There is a focus on infrascenic movement, to use Nicole Brenez’s term, where Jacobs “finds irrational, inconceivable movements that nonetheless form the objective material of human circulation.” It is insightful to bring up Brenez as she describes one thing useful in better understanding Jacobs, which is that he is “the creator of a theory [visual study] that is as important for its technical initiatives as for its textual and filmic manifestations.” Visual study being, “the study of an image using the very means of the image itself.” This study of an image through use of the image itself is what Jacobs accomplishes in these Capitalism films and in The Surging Sea of Humanity, which uses an old 19th century picture by B.W. Kilburn of a crowd of bowl-hat wearing industrialist flâneurs and then superimposes the picture on itself with some Tom, Tom manipulations. While in Another Occupation Jacobs’ takes archive footage of a Huckleberry Fin upstream journey into a military occupation and slave plantation. The video is interlaced with anti-military comments and has some Disorient Express (1996) footage alteration.

To finish it off there is Seeking the Monkey King, which consists of twelve pictures of crumpled gold and black aluminum foil with a digital strobe light effect. There is a slow momentum of the enlarging of the scale of the images. And with J.G.Thirlwell’s music the piece is especially haunting. Where through text Jacobs offers scathing political criticism of American president Barack Obama’s failings mixed with references to his own cinematic evolution from his teenager days seeing the French avant-garde at the MoMA (À nous la liberté) to the heyday of the underground film (Deren, Brakhage). As David Phelps writes about Seeking the Monkey King over at Mubi,

"As younger, American avant-garde masters—Dorsky, Klahr—pursue the veil of illusion, a sublime presence blind to history, Jacobs makes movies that work to break through the patina of beauty, only to reveal the ultimate illusions of movie-making, the third dimension of a figurative space and movement out of single, still images."

The works of Jacobs are spellbinding adventures of perception that continue to provide fresh experiences while still being able to comment about the state of American politics.

David Davidson

Going to Tokyo?

2011-11-17T07:04:00.009-06:00

If you live in Toronto and are interested in Japanese cinema make sure to check out the Shinsedai Cinema Festival, which is programmed by Chris Magee and Jasper Sharp. The festival will take place some time in July 2012 at the Revue Cinema. - D.D.

Title: World Film Locations: Tokyo
Editor: Chris Magee
Publisher: Intellect Ltd.
Pages: 128
Price: 18$
More a tour guide then pure film criticism, Intellect Books' new series World Film Locations - with ones on London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo - are a welcome introduction through the movies to the famous buildings and neighborhoods of these various cities. The books are divided into six separate sections dedicated to the different districts. All of them being preceded by a map of the city with numbered indicators locating where the scenes took place. Each entry includes a description of, and pictures from the scene. As well a current picture of the location that allows you to compare how it is presented in the film with how it looks now.

Chris Magee who edited the boook also writes a nice introduction and pieces on Tokyo March (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1929), a rare pre-war portrait of Tokyo; Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994), Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano 1999), Fear and Trembling (Alain Corneau, 2003), Confessions of a Dog (Gen Takahashi, 2006), and Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2006). I would also recommend Marc Saint-Cyr's piece on The Yakuza (Sydney Pollack, 1974). A lot of the contributors to the book also contributed to the other Intellect book Directory of World Cinema: Japan.

The essays in the book help contextualize the films within Tokyo's cultural and political history, within the genres of Japanese cinema, the restrictions of filming in the post-WWII era, the director Yasojiro Ozu, and anime. The essay's include Jon Jung's Tokyo: City of The Imagination, Eric Evans' Worst of Times/Best of Times: Post-War Tokyo in Film, Samuel Jamier's Tokyo Must Burn! The End of The World Through Anime Eyes, John Berra's Tokyo Stories: The Humanistic Cityscape of Yasujiro Ozu, Roberta Novielli's Strangers Among Us: A Cinematic View of Immigrants in Tokyo, Steven Sarrazin's Shinjuku: Dawn is West, and Reiko Tahara's Edo: Old Tokyo resurrected on film.The two page long entries are well researched and well written. While the choices of films are interesting as they include political works and documentaries. While also including some unexpected Tokyo films like those made by foreign directors to the city like Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955), Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga (1985), Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), and Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009).

The entries try to do justice to all of Central Tokyo's twenty-three wards, and beyond. But it just so happens that some of the wards are more cinematic then the others ; so they get more attention. And the contributions by locals and people that have visited the city give the book an insider-like quality. As if you are walking the backstreets of the city with your own personal guide. There are recommendations of where you can go for a drink or a meal (the famous La Jetée), what hotel to stay at, where to shop, and information about the subway stations. I would recommend World Film Locations: Tokyo, and all of the titles in the series, to any cinephile that will be traveling to these cities. - David Davidson

Igor Drljača's Sarajevo Memories

2011-11-08T09:23:00.012-06:00

This is the first of three reviews on new Canadian short films. – D. D.

Igor Drljača was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1983. He left the country on May 1st 1992 on a military plane due to the violence of the Bosnian war, like so many other families. He recalls the flight out of the country in a military plane that “was not a cool looking MIG I had imagined,” where everyone had to sit on the floor. He arrived in Canada in 1993 where he has since completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Film Production from York University. His short films include Rana (05), The Battery-Powered Duckling (06), Mobilni Snovi (08), On a Lonely Drive (09), Woman in Purple (10), The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar (11), and he is currently in post-production on another short film and his first feature-length film (hopefully completed by next year) which will be “about a man that’s now in Toronto but was involved in the Bosnian civil war so it deals with themes of immigration, themes of isolation, themes of trauma, war trauma especially. Sort of these universal elements that a lot of people in Toronto can relate to, a lot of refugees.” Much of the subject of Drljača work blends the personal with the political, mixing a child-like pleasantness with serious subjects and his approach to filmmaking blends the traditional with the avant-garde and documentary.

An exposition shot of a crater-ridden apartment complex in today’s post-war Sarajevo opens Woman in Purple. A young boy Mirza (a sorrowful Haris Begic) lives with his grandmother, who asks him a few questions as he is on his way out: Did you eat yet? How will you buy food later? Remember to visit your mother later. When will you be back home? One thing that sticks out in this scene is the long and heavy silences, as if these questions have been asked hundreds of times before. They also recall the trauma of the war when such things were of grave concern. During these moments of silence the only thing you can hear is the television that is turned on in the background.

Mirza goes to the park to watch some older boys play basketball. He is bored. There is nothing really for him to do. A local drug dealer approaches Mirza asking him to do a few rounds for him. The addresses that Mirza will need to go to are on a note that the dealer gives him. What Mirza will have to do consists of receiving cash and dropping off the packaged drugs (Marijuana? Cocaine?). Mirza goes with it, as he has done before, but this time he makes sure to get paid first. The day goes by smoothly - one of the clients even buys him a wrap - but similarly to the beginning of Cristian Mungiu’ 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) the suspicion that something might go awry has a looming presence. At the end of the day Mirza meets up with the dealer at the basketball courts where he makes a significant decision in regards to his future, he chooses not to continue doing jobs for the dealer. He does this by hitting the basketball that is in the dealers hand and starts playing all by himself on the opposite side of the court. The hitting of the ball is an act of social protest and an intense moment of everyday heroism worthy of the films of Mike Leigh. The film’s score which was full of natural street noises so far breaks out into a storm. The films end with Mirza sitting in a grassy cemetery, surrounded by the Sarajevo hills and mountains, watching a plane fly out of the city. In an astonishing reverse-shot you see that he is sitting beside his mother Hasanovic Sanela tombstone. She died in 1996.

The script of Woman in Purple is by Drljača and Hrvoje Župarić. Drljača in Woman in Purple uses a wide frame (2.35:1) and shoots in long shots as he follows Mirza walking in hand-held shots from behind the head. Mirza’s silence emphasizes the films visual storytelling qualities. The Sarajevo City Film Grant helped financed the film. A short note, the fact that Drljača is a Toronto resident and films in a different country has led some commenter’s to place him within the context of First Generation directors alongside Nicolás Pereda and Chris Chong Chan Fui. As Kazik Radwanski describes these First Generation filmmakers, “These temporary-residents play a role in Canadian cinema: their films maintain a connection to Toronto, while defining their own territories and landscapes.”
*****To contextualize Drljača’s short films within contemporary Sarejevo culture I am going to bring up the Serbian-American poet Charles Simić, from his recent article The Bright Side of the Balkans (The New York Review of Books Aug. 18th, 2011). In the articles Simić describes his experiences going to Sarajevo to attend an international poetry festival. He describes many things from his visit there. Like the recent arrest and trial of the general Ratko Mladić, who with Radovan Karadžić led the siege by the Serbian forces that caused extraordinary suffering, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Simić describes the city,

“Since a great deal of what had been blown up has been re-built, the city appeared to be thriving, and given the warm and sunny weather during my visit and the sight of many people strolling in the streets or sitting in cafes chatting amiably, everything that occurred here fifteen years ago seemed inconceivable.”

On the themes of their contemporary poetry, Simić notes that much of Bosnian poetry is about the war unlike the poetry of the Serbs and Croats. On the residing emotional and intellectual impact of the war, Simić notes,

“Two survivors of the Sarajevo siege described in a calm, matter-of-fact way what life was like without water and electricity and with constant fear that members of their family might die as they stepped into the streets.”

And in regards to the younger generation Simić writes,

“Still, two out of three of them [the young men and women], according to a poll I saw in the papers when I was there, want to leave because there will be nothing for them to do when they finish school. They no longer need visas to travel to other parts of Europe, but since neither they nor their parents have enough money, fleeing the country, as thousands of others had done in the past, is no longer a realistic option.”

*****The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar is a personal documentary on the ravages of the war that blends home video with achieves footage from Drljača nineties boyhood in Sarajevo. The film separates the footage and progresses the chronology through black inter-titles with the location, city and date. “It’s like an homage sort-of to my childhood,” which took about three years to make says Drljača. The Fuse recalls the found-footage documentary by Andrei Ujică, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010). And Andrew Parker in the Toronto Now writes about The Fuse, “Powerful first-person footage and youthful exuberance add up to a short that’s far better than the program [2 in Short Cuts Canada] it’s in.”

The Fuse opens with Igor as a little boy in his childhood apartment introducing himself and his family to the camera. It proceeds to footage of children standing around the Simon Bolivar bust in his school and then to shots of the students singing and dancing until the camera eventually finds itself on Igor pixilated in the middle of a crowd. Through a voice-over Drljača starts to recollect that week’s art assignment “to paint the arrival of spring,” but when he was painting “that large tree next to his cottage, that always blooms first” he ran out of pink-paint and it didn’t look right. He remembers this experience vividly,

“During our lunch break, Aco, who sits in the first row, said that he saw the teacher marking our paintings. He said that I received a C. But I had never received a C in art. I still hadn’t seen my mark, but I was getting more and more nervous. That night, I thought: Dear God, I’ve never asked for anything before. I am not sure whether to believe in you. Mom and Dad say that you don’t exist. Both of my grandmas say that you do exist. And if by chance you do exist, I’d like to ask you for one big favor. I don’t want to go back to school; I don’t want to see my grade. So if you are able to help me out in any way. I’d be forever grateful.”

Cut to a shot of a teacher on television reading off a message: “All schools in region: Sarajevo, Mostar, Doboj, Tuzla… are on strike.” And then the military trucks and tanks start to roam through the streets of Sarajevo. His family is watching the news of the outbreak of the Croatian War, March 3rd, 1992. The city is no longer safe and his family is no longer leaving their appartment. Footage of bullets going by close to his apartment window is especially frightening. It’s a strange feeling watching the unfolding of a war from the perspective of the residents and how they see it happening on television. There is one especially wrenching shot of a hurt little black dog with his limbs twitching. But still life goes on, the family celebrates Igor’s brothers Dado’s birthday. And also the kids find ways to have fun, “Along with the other children, I excitedly collected shrapnel and shell casings.”

Igor leaves Sarajevo with his mother and brother on May 1st 1992 on a military plane. The last shot of The Fuse is footage of a building burning (is it the school?) in bright red fire and dark black smoke. This is the last footage his father would have filmed and brought with him when he joined the rest of his family in Canada. “After we were able to reach him on the phone. He told me that a few days earlier, my school, Simon Bolivar, had burned down. At that moment I realized that I no longer had to worry about my mark in art,” Drljača says in voice-over narration. This child-like optimism and ability to move forward after trauma gives Drljača’s work an enduring quality. Drljača cinema is one of perseverance and that of being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. - David Davidson

On Donigan Cumming’s Karaoke (1998)

2011-11-02T09:47:00.010-05:00

In anticipation for the Pleasure Dome projection and book launch of Splitting the Choir; The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming, which includes Toronto's premiere of Too Many Things, on Saturday November 5th at 7PM at the CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave) ; here is a guest contribution by Canadian Film Institute programmer Scott Birdwise. – D.D.

EXCERPTED FROM
LIFE SUPPORT: THE DOCUMENTARY MEANS WITHOUT END OF DONIGAN CUMMING
In an introduction to a public screening of Karaoke in Toronto in 2008, experimental filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom posed a question to Donigan Cumming, “Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh.”¹ To my understanding, Hoolboom’s question, perhaps inadvertently, cuts to the very heart of the matter of the documentary example. A description of the video will help set up my explanation.

Karaoke opens with an extreme close-up study of an elderly man’s face: with his eyes closed, the man licks his lips; the camera jostles slightly, suggesting it is handheld; the image is almost imperceptibly in slow-motion. Given the man’s apparent age, his reclined posture suggesting infirmary, and the emphasis on his fragile bodily-being (his labored swallowing), it seems, for all intents and purposes, that he is quite sick and unconscious – perhaps even near death. Is this, as Cumming puts it, a “deathwatch?”

The oral component of the video is somewhat distorted: the audio track hisses, faint sounds, clicking and clacking in general proximity, are heard – is this the diegetic room sound recorded by Cumming’s camera’s built-in microphone? Perhaps. But while the sound first seems to correspond to the elderly man’s action, his lip-licking and swallowing possibly the source of the audio, it quickly becomes evident that the sound we hear is not necessarily coming from him, or even from the room, at all. The audio and the visual do not seem to be in synch; they may be from different temporalities, perhaps even different spaces entirely. It really is difficult to tell.²

While the handheld camera lingers over the elderly man’s face with a kind of special emphasis given to his oral region (his mouth), moving slightly back and forth and continually reframing as handheld shots do (a trope of observational cinema), a song emerges from the off-camera audio: a strange combination of Christian pop music and Inuktitut singing.³ The off-camera voices of two women, presumably of Inuit origin, join in with the music, singing along to the lyrics praising Christ, declaring his love and how they are blessed for partaking in it – as one line exclaims (with English subtitles) “How the message will be understood!” At one point early in the song, the recorded music cuts out: it is here, via this aural cue, that the viewer recognizes that the Inuit women’s voices heard are not part of the music recording; they seem, in fact, to belong to the same space as the old man (who, importantly, it seemed at first was singing but in fact was merely breathing). The women are singing along to the tape beside the old man in a kind of impromptu karaoke performance.

About half way through the three minute duration of Karaoke, the camera begins to deliberately and purposively scan its way over the horizontal plane of the old man’s body, arriving at his feet. As it turns out, the elderly man seems to indeed be listening to the karaoke performance with some measure of interest: he is tapping his foot in time with the song. This is the “punch-line” of the video, the moment of truth revealing that the opening half of the video is a kind of set-up, the necessary opening of the gag. As Cumming puts it, “In Karaoke, the horror of a deathwatch is pure illusion. The transgression is a set-up, which turns on the spectator when the camera gets down to the feet. Nelson [the elderly man] is not dead! He is tapping his toes!”⁴

From here, again in an almost imperceptible gesture, the tape in fact begins to repeat itself backwards, audio included. This switchover almost passes unnoticed – in fact, I would argue first-time viewers often miss it – as the camera lingers over the tapping foot only to return to the “grizzled face” of the elderly man, licking his lips and breathing, in slow motion. With this, the tape ends.⁵

If we consider Karaoke a kind of documentary, exhibiting its means without end, then we are forced to take seriously Hoolboom’s inquiry. Hoolboom again: “[Karaoke] is shot very close up, refusing the surroundings, the room, the context. Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh? Who is this man…?”⁶ Hoolboom’s query points to the foundational problematic of the documentary logic of example, which Karaoke exposes via my Agambenian reading of its strategies. The central problem: how is “a landscape of flesh,” that is, bare life, produced, and how is it overturned; or, rather, how is a form of life founded that does not fall back into the trappings of the citizen?

The elderly man framed by the extreme close-up of Cumming’s camera is presented to the viewer in a kind of extreme biological proximity at the expense of knowing who and where he, the would-be subject, is. The epistemological grounds of knowledge related to context and the like are refused for the ontological priority of the body: here he, or perhaps it, is. The elderly man is first and foremost an object of display and his being is reduced to maintaining his very existence: he breathes, he licks his lips – his life is stripped of context, it is bare life. As such, his position relative to the documentary logic of example is analogous to what Agamben considers the foundational gesture of Western politics and metaphysics: the inclusive exclusion of bare life. In this case, Cumming refuses the elderly man’s life-world by way of the close-up, framing and including him as bare life by excluding his environment. The elderly man is the environment, a “landscape of flesh.”

The elderly man’s existence, his existence as such, that Karaoke establishes at the outset and which seems to teeter on the brink between mere being (life) and non-being (death), or, even more to the point, the human (a speaking-being with subjectivity, desire, and history) and the inhuman (a mere “landscape of flesh”), finds an instructive parallel in what Agamben identifies as one of the paradigmatic figures of the twentieth century: the Musselmann. The Musselmann, for Agamben, is the exemplary figure of the concentration camp, whose total degradation and malnutrition has wasted away the speaking subject to the limit-figure of life and language at the brink of death and speechlessness.⁷ A kind of living dead – who/which is the site of confusion between the categories of life/death and human/inhuman as figured in the extreme biopolitical decisionism of the Nazi regime – the Musselmann is part of the administered process of the killing machine of the concentration camp, wherein the prisoner passes into the threshold of the Musselmann and thus does not die as a Jew or human being, but as mere biological existence, bare life. The Musselmann, then, is a (non)subject without context, history, personality, or desire; it is biology, possible motor skills, and the barest minimum of needs. This seems to be the transgressive status of that withered face in Karaoke: it is the death scene-and death seen, what Cumming calls “the horror of a deathwatch.” Or is it?

As argued above, the Musselmann comes into existence by way of the concentration camp. Agamben is quick to argue, however, that while the Nazi concentration camp is a historically specific phenomenon, it is nonetheless the hypostatized manifestation of a much more general logic. Agamben:

The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen […] If the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we will then have to admit to be facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have […] From this perspective, the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity.⁸

The camp can appear and manifest an otherwise latent state of exception anywhere, isolating bare life, zoe, from the qualified life of the citizen-subject, bios. The camp is mobile and can temporarily install itself in such spaces as airports, shopping centres, soccer fields, and even living rooms – it is the potential for a kind of sovereign violence that confounds the distinction between the oikos (the home) and the polis (the city, public space) where all public citizens are potentially private prisoners. In this way, the camp is what Agamben calls a “dislocating localization” that scrambles the co-ordinates of a seemingly determinate topos – a space and place – in order to suspend law and order and institute the “inscription of life” into the paradoxical order of sovereign violence.⁹

In Karaoke, Cumming’s camera, his frame, imposes a kind “dislocating localization” upon the profilmic space: the frame excludes “the surroundings, the room, the context,” rendering the elderly man as “this landscape of flesh,” bare life on the brink of death. As an object/subject held up by the documentary as an example, what Karaoke seems to present is the fact of the elderly man as such. However, is the man merely a “moving still,” that is, a being (moving) on the brink of death (still)? As we shall see, and as was suggested above, the “fact” of the elderly man – the “deathwatch” of bare life – is problematized by the same “violence” and power of the frame which presented it. Indeed, the frame, the logic of the camp as dislocating localization, becomes the very means by which Cumming repotentializes the world: the camp becomes the “constructed situation,” as the presence of fact gives way to the mediality of potentiality; as action falters the gesture appears. This is the gag of/in Karaoke.

The gag of Karaoke, of course, is that the seemingly unconscious subject-object, the ailing man as bare life, is revealed to be engaged with his milieu, tapping his foot as he enjoys the off-camera music. The movement of the frame thus establishes a kind of newly invigorated ontological context for the world in which the video takes place. The significance of the gesture of foot tapping is not that it has the priority of being the new fundamental reality or fact to which the video bears witness, but that, in Agamben’s words, it “defines a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.”¹⁰

If the camp is a mobile space of exception that organizes its own form of disorganization (a zone of indistinction between citizenship and the natural body), that realizes the nihilistic potential for sovereign violence at the heart of everyday law and order (a pure political violence), and that isolates bare life in the ruthless alienation of the human being from its form (by way of transforming experience into spectacle), the “constructed situation” takes this alienation and violence and turns it on its head in a liberatory gesture. It is the constructed situation which can take “this biopolitical body that is bare life” and transform it into “the site for the constitution and instalment of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.”¹¹

Following Debord and the Situationists, Agamben defines the constructed situation in the following way:

The situation is neither the becoming-art of life nor the becoming-life of art. We can comprehend its true nature only if we locate it historically in its proper place: that is, after the end and self-destruction of art, and after the passage of life through the trial of nihilism… [at] a point of indifference between life and art, where both undergo a decisive metamorphosis simultaneously. This point of indifference constitutes a politics that is finally adequate to its tasks. The Situationists counteract capitalism [and I would add the state of exception, the logic of the camp] – which “concretely and deliberately” organizes environments and events in order to depotentiate life – with a concrete, although opposite, project.¹²

The constructed situation mobilizes the “dislocating localization” of the frame and its intrusiveness, its manifestly interruptive nature in a given milieu (breaking the supposed unity of the moment for aesthetic reasons [a nice picture]), and makes of it an opportunity for experimentation in the zone of indistinction it opens between art and life. In this way, the constructed situation transforms life at the level of experience rather than representation or contemplation: life and theatre intersect to mutually transform and repotentiate one another. To put it another way, if the generalized state of exception and spectacle in which we live has already falsified experience and inclusively excluded life, then the constructed situation uses an apparent falsity – its constructedness – to highlight this very spectacle and fragmentation, and thereby put it to an alternative use, albeit one not directed toward a specific end.
Central to Agamben’s conception of the constructed situation is the gesture. Indeed, in explaining the constructed situation, Agamben argues that

Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis.¹³

Just as the constructed situation emerges from a “dislocating localization,” the gesture exhibits itself as a kind of action that, in exhibiting itself, suspends its commonplace function as a means to an end and becomes a means without end. For Agamben, as I outlined toward the end of the previous chapter, this is the very promise of cinema – the paradigm of (a potential) situation-constructing apparatus (and not necessarily a storytelling medium at all) – itself: to exhibit the very movement of humankind in a state of suspension freed from immediate ends, that is, to show in an immediate way the fundamental mediality of humanity. As Stephen Crocker states in his article “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben,”

What the late nineteenth century interest in gesture seems to promise, and what, Agamben argues, remains the promise of cinema since, is some understanding of the world’s movement exempted from all-purpose and displaying nothing more or less than the taking place of life in a ratio of time and movement. As such, cinema gives us the world in the form of a gesture. Cinema brackets out the significance of the event so that the pure act of its enunciation can come forward.¹⁴

The constructed situation as, with, and by the gesture does not operate on a representational so much as a kind of para-phenomenological level: whatever “understanding” it generates is not something one possesses, as a collection of facts to be decided on in sovereign fashion, but is rather something one does: it is an orientation, an attitude, of the political body opening to the world.

Cumming’s Karaoke is exemplary in its exhibition of the very gesture that Agamben identifies with the constructed situation. First, the video brackets out the context in its suspension of typical documentary markers of place, “refusing the surroundings, the room, the context.” What transpires is not a narrative or argument in any conventional sense; rather, a situation develops. The viewer is confronted with what seems to be the exhausted figure of bare life, of mere life, struggling to simply be. Is this the barest expression of an existential dilemma? Perhaps, but then, as the camera tracks to his tapping foot, the elderly man’s gesture opens up the question of the political. Neither a fact nor reducible to individual expression (as Hoolboom asks, “Who is this man?”), and not the expression of an autonomous, modernist aesthetic (the “aesthetic dimension” of dance), the gesture exhibits the mediality of the elderly man and the ultimate inseparability of his life (zoe: his breathing, his bare existence) from his being a singularity.¹⁵ “It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics.” ¹⁶

The gesture of tapping his foot to the music is an expression, an exhibition, of the elderly man’s “form-of-life.” This is crucial in understanding how Karaoke moves from the fact of a “landscape of flesh” to the potentiality of a subject and the inseparability of his being from his body: “this being that is only its bare existence and…this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it.”¹⁷ In this sense, it is the degree to which the subject of Karaoke evades being knowable “factually” or as a citizen-subject that he exists as a “form-of-life;” his life is connected to possibility: the elderly man’s political existence depends on his irreducibility to factual existence. The “horror of a deathwatch” as fact gives way to the “gag” of the gesture; bare life opens to what Agamben calls the “absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.”¹⁸ In the gag, the elderly man, Nelson Coombs, is thus not the documentary example of a victim, bare life, but an exception. He is an exception precisely because, in the apparently closed-in world of the frame, he is epistemically undetermined; a weak symbol in his potentiality; a “whatever-being” occupying the zone of indistinction between the example and the exception.

Furthermore, the reverse playback of the video deconstructs any pretences of non-mediated presence. Cumming makes Karaoke, the video, gesture itself, undoing its “action” by reversing it back to the beginning. Effectively, Karaoke splits itself in its doubling: it makes itself an example, a paradigm, beside itself. The reverse playback is another example of the ongoing and endless deferrals in the video, challenging any sovereign decision which would ground the political in a limited, instrumentalist frame. In this cinematic gesture of a means without end, Cumming makes the mediality of Karaoke immediate.¹⁹

Karaoke suspends the instrumental use of documentary: it never arrives at a definite conclusion, a clear cut end. In the video, being and appearance continually shift, as the “deathwatch” gives way to the punch-line of the gesture of the tapping foot, which in turn moves into an exhibition of the medial nature of the video as it plays back in reverse. The extreme close-up on the elderly man’s face which, while “violently” refusing context, would seem to privilege a kind of epistemology of proximity, yields no such thing. Rather, as the camera tracks, the video exhibits the “gag”: a gesture not circumscribed by the clichés of bare life and citizenship so naturalized by the documentary form. The close-up of Karaoke does not establish the presence of a citizen-subject but exhibits a “form-of-life” that is “not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality.”²⁰ As a means without end, Karaoke and its exhibited example are held up for free use, never exhausting their potentiality in appearing. In contrast to a specific meaning, mediality is the message: Karaoke redeems as the true vocation of both humanity and the documentary project the endless, repetitive and seemingly futile Sisyphean execution of a task without proper completion: an inoperative operability, a non-work: means without end.

Scott Birdwise

Endnotes
1. “We're going to watch a three minute movie you made ten years ago called Karaoke. It's shot very close up, refusing the surroundings, the room, the context. Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh? Who is this man, and why is the tape called Karaoke, (after all, he never utters a word, nor do you)?” http://www.mikehoolboom.com/writing/Books/Practical%20Dreamers%20launch.htm
2. Cumming interview with Hoolboom: “The tape starts with the cassette being loaded and a tight shot of Nelson’s head, as he licks his lips. The movement of his tongue is slightly accentuated in the edit with some slow motion.” (10) http://www.donigancumming.com/dcpdf/DCe-2006_Hoolboom.pdf
3. Cumming informs us that the singing is in Inuktitut in the Hoolboom interview. This opens up thinking about a provocative ethnographic intertext to read with Karaoke, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). For starters, both films partake in a kind of cross-cultural encounter; furthermore, music – and the apparatuses for playing recorded music – figures strongly in both. Also, in both films there is the problematic relationship of staging and re-enactment. Pursuing the specifics of this interesting comparison is, however, beyond the scope of this thesis.
4. Hoolboom interview, 10.
5. It should be noted that Karaoke, as part of the “Moving Stills” series, was originally shown in an art gallery context, in a room alongside the other videos in the series. Each video, projected at a large size, ran in a continuous loop, alternating between their respective soundtracks. This presentation format reinforces the formal repetition of the work that is arguably lost in a single channel, non-looped, screening.
6. Hoolboom interview, 10.
7. For his most sustained discussion of the Musselmann see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, chapter II, The Mussleman.
8. Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Camp?” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 41-42.
9. Ibid., 45.
10. Agamben, “Form-of-Life” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 4.
11. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 188.
12. Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 78-79.
13. Ibid., 80.
14. Stephen Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben,” 12 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574
15. Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 58.
16. Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 80.
17. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 188.
18. Ibid.,60.
19. Indeed, as Cumming makes clear in the interview with Hoolboom, the encounter itself was staged for his camera; that is, the performers in Karaoke had already listened to the song, sang, and tapped along. Cumming asked them to do it again, this time with his camera running. Thus, the repetition in/of the video replicates the founding repetition of the performance.
20. Ibid., 59.

Nick Ray at Cahiers du Cinema (circa 1950s)

2011-10-25T20:30:00.029-05:00

The TIFF Bell Lightbox is currently running a Nicholas Ray retrospective The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray as part of its Hollywood Classics series. The series is programmed by James Quandt, scheduled over two seasons and is centered on the recent restoration of We Can't Go Home Again*, which will be playing on Sunday October 30th at 4PM and will be introduced by Susan Ray. "Poetic, pessimistic, high-strung and humanist, Ray's films are set in a lonely place and on dangerous ground - the wounded psyches of often solitary nomads, strangers who keep looking for a home in a world to which they "have not been properly introduced,"" Quandt writes in the 180°. These screenings will offer Torontonians a glimpse into Ray's mesmerizing work. We Can't Go Home Again, which has recently been restored, and Susan's own Don't Expect Too Much, a companion-piece documentary on We Can't Go Home Again are the kind of films by Ray that Bill Krohn compares to flying saucers, "you catch glimpses of them or hear about them from people who've seen one." The rare prints and the fact that they are only shown once or twice give these Cinematheque screenings an aura-like quality.

Since the Godard line that "The Cinema is Nicholas Ray" is quoted ad nauseam (The Dreamers, the bulk of journalistic reviews) I thought that I would take the occasion to look at what else the Young Turks had to say about the auteur with whom most of them fell in love with when they first discovered They Live By Night at the Rendez-Vous de Biarritz in 1950. A great resource for their writing** is the anthology edited by Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema - The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (1985)***. In the book's section on American Cinema there is a dossier on Nicholas Ray which includes reviews by Jacques Rivette on The Lusty Men, Francois Truffaut on Johnny Guitar, Eric Rohmer on Rebel Without a Cause, Jean-Luc Godard on Hot Blood and Bitter Victory, and an interview from November 1958 between Charles Bitsch and Ray (one of the first American directors to be interviewed in the magazines, as the editorial staff had no real contact with the foreign trade press). Within these pages - beautifully translated and with foot-notes by Liz Heron and Tom Milne - you can find what made the French film critics at Cahiers du Cinema so exciting to read at the time - and I believe more importantly - retrospectively and currently.

So what were the films that Ray made in the '50s? There is Born to Be Bad and In a Lonely Place ('50); On Dangerous Ground, Flying Leathernecks and The Racket ('51); Macao and The Lusty Men ('52); Androcles and the Lion ('53); Johnny Guitar and a teleplay High Green Wall ('54); Run for Cover and Rebel Without a Cause ('55); Hot Blood and Bigger Than Life ('56); The True Story of Jesse James and Bitter Victory ('57); Wind Across the Everglades and Party Girl ('58). In terms of his contemporaries, Jacques Rivette in The State of the American Cinema (Cahiers N.54) writes, "At present the undoubted spearheads (...) of the age of the auteurs are Nicholas Ray, Richard Brooks, Anthony Mann and Robert Aldrich," while Truffaut places him in the "Wise, Dassin and Losey generation." Even more so then these other directors, Ray stood at the fore-front of this new generation of Hollywood film-makers that came on the scene after the war. He stood as a harbinger for the modernity that was to be felt in the world of cinema.

From De l'invention (Cahiers N.27), Rivette reflects the magazine's generosity in discussing Ray,

"Without any doubt, the most constant privilege of the masters is that of seeing everything, including the most simple mistakes, turn out to their advantage rather than diminishing their stature. If you are now surprised to see me give the benefit of this law to Nicholas Ray's latest film it means you are ill-prepared to appreciate a work which is disconcerting and asks for, not indulgence, but a little love."

From L'Amirable Certitude (Cahiers N.46), Truffaut writes,

"Nicholas Raymond Kienzle is somewhat, in fact very much, the passionate discovery of the 'young critics'. Nick Ray is an auteur in our sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself. For Ray's hero is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is not simply a child."****

And here is Truffaut at his more aggressive,

"You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch anymore films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."

In Ajax ou le Cid? (Cahiers N.59), first off Eric Rohmer discusess (see: deplores) the translation of Rebel Without a Cause into French La Fureur de Vivre [The Rage to Live], as well he reads Ray's "masterpiece" as "a genuine drama in five acts," which is a surprising look at the film and an ambitious one. Rohmer, who has always been more conservative than his peers (in terms of both taste and filming approaches), proves to be just as insightful and adventurous in his prose as the other writers,

"It is impossible to attach any convenient label to his [Ray's] position, as one can with John Huston. It isn't problems that interest him, in the manner of Brooks, but human beings. There is not a trace of the psychological complexities so dear to Mankiewicz. None of those instantly dazzling flashes of lyricism, as in Aldrich. His tempo is slow, his melody usually monochord, but its delineation is so precise, its progress so compulsive, that we cannot allow our attention to stray for a moment."

Jean-Luc will be Godard (where at this point in time, he thinks, that D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpant is "the most important novel of the twentieth century"), which means wildly ambitious. Here he is from Rien que le Cinema (Cahiers N.68),

"After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without a Cause, one cannot but feel that there is something which exists, only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anything else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen."

Though disappointed about Hot Blood he can still find some merits,

"In short, [Hot Blood] is a semi-successful film to the extent that Ray was semi-uninterested in it."

And on Bitter Victory from Au dela des etoiles (Cahiers N.79),

"It is no longer a question of either reality or fiction, or of one transcending the other. It is a question of something quite different. What? The stars, maybe, and the men who like to look at them and dream."

And on the acting,

"Bitter Victory is exceptionally well acted by Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton. With Et Dieu... Crea la Femme, this makes twice one can believe in a character created by Jurgens. As for Richard Burton, who has acquitted himself well enough in all his previous films, good or bad, when directed by Nicholas Ray he is absolutely sensational."*****

To conclude, here is Truffaut from the 1973 documentary I'm a Stranger Here Myself where he further explains this Cahiers obsession towards Ray,

"What attracted us was that there was something European about this man from Hollywood. European in what way? Perhaps in the frailty, vulnerability of his leading characters. His male characters weren't 'macho'. There was this great sensitivity, especially in dealing with affairs of the heart, which lent a sense of great reality. At a time when Hollywood movies were rarely personal or autobiographical, you always had the feeling that the love stories in Nicholas Ray's films were true stories."

*****

* Some new writing on We Can't Go Home Again appears in the latest issue of Cinema Scope (N.48), which includes a piece by Susan Ray, Out of the Box, (Susan also has a long autobiographical introduction in I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies), and Gabe Klinger, Nicholas Ray’s Film Maudit Restored. It's also worth highlighting here another overlooked Ray title, The Janitor (which is available on YouTube). Brad Stevens writes about the film,
"What fascinates me about this short is the way it clarifies the structure of Ray's last few films, which are full of clashes between superego and id figures (Walt and Cottonmouth in WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, Tommy and Rico in PARTY GIRL, Inuk and the trooper in THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, Leith and Brand in BITTER VICTORY, Christ and Barrabas in KING OF KINGS). Here, Ray plays both the id and the superego, suggesting just how personal this theme was to him."
** In addition to the selection of pieces in the book other Cahiers articles of note include Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on They Live By Night, Paul et Virginie se sont maries la nuit (Cahiers N.5), Truffaut on They Live By Night, Les Extremes me touchent (Cahiers N.21), Eric Rohmer on Bigger Than Life, Ou bien... ou bien (Cahiers N.69) and Venise 1957 (Cahiers N.75), Luc Moullet's Filmographie de Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.89), Fereydoun Hoveyda on Party Girl (Cahiers N.107), Jean Douchet and Jacques Joly Nouvelle Entretien avec Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.127), Bill Krohn on We Can't Go Home Again (Cahiers N.288), and part of Ray's late period script Mister, Mister with an introduction by Wim Wenders (Cahiers N.400).

*** Other good resources on Ray include Bernard Eisenschitz' peerless Nicholas Ray: An American Journey and Patrick McGilligan's new Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure Of An American Director.

**** This passage on hidden narratives is similarly brought up in the magazines contemporary writing, here Jean-Philippe Tesse from his review of J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Leve les yeux (Cahiers N.660),
"Abrams has been to able to reconcile his storyteller-recycler spirit all the while plunging into the childhood cinema experiences of reactivating it's magic. And, certainly, he does this by re-taking brilliantly the secret scenario of all of his films: the curring of the hero by the irruption of the supertural within his neighborhood."
***** Here is Stephane Delorme on contemporary actors from his review of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, Requiem pour un reve (Cahiers N.664),
"Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Natalie Portman plays in a sense her life: good comedian, appreciated, who never really craved the screen, child-star (Luc Besson's Leon) reduced to these roles of the princess in the Star Wars films without ever imposing herself (...) The troubling emotion comes from these effortless lost gazes and raised eyebrows of inquietude and concentration. As well we are on Natalie Portman's side, we want her to succeed. Aronofsky is the best American casting director."

On Content

2011-10-17T15:49:00.002-05:00

A new guest contribution by Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

Content: A Brief Statement
(or: “You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”)
I’m convinced that there isn’t a word more accurate than “bankrupt” to describe certain experiences I’ve had in the cinema. There have been films I have seen that as I watched them, I felt a certain suspicion. Not only was I not able to ignore this suspicion, it became the central element of the experience. I felt, almost from the outset, that there was a hollowness to what I was seeing and that beyond the surface of the image lay nothing at all. The images, although imaginative and aesthetically sound, carried with them no substance or presence of any content. In one such film, this was the intent of the director, and there is a story to illustrate why. This director, as was fairly common during the period, experimented with LSD under the supervision of his psychoanalyst (Cary Grant did this also, and praised it as a tool of self-realization). The experience this director had was one where the definition of all things fell away and he was left in a hellish landscape where nothing held any meaning whatsoever. The experience led him to the conclusion that since the definition of any object is always provided and constantly renewed by the viewer of the object, objective meaning, by the very nature of perception, is impossible. He found that this then freed up his ability to create images since he wasn’t bound by having to attempt to instill objective meaning. “The fire and the rose,” he said, “became one.” This is problematic, if only because it is the perfect definition of solipsism, but it brings me to the point of my statement. My point is this: Is there not an element of an experience that is common to all those who experience it? Take this essay as an example. As you experience it, my consciousness (or perhaps, more so, the consciousness of the essay, which may or may not be my own) and your consciousness are present. There is the presence of each independent of the other, but there is also some point at which they touch and overlap. As each person reads the essay, each of their experiences will differ; these experiences will not be necessarily definable, but necessarily existent. That perhaps is a definition of content – the overlapping of one consciousness with another where a personal experience can take place. The infusion of an object with consciousness relies to a great extent on the intentionality of the creator – if the intent is shallow, the results will likely seem shallow; alternately, if the intent is joyous, the results will likely seem joyous. So, as in the story of this director, if there is no intent, there is also likely no content. If there is no content, then the object will be hollow, and the experience of it will be likewise. If nothing is returned for the viewers’ investment of consciousness, bankruptcy results. It’s perhaps the most unforgivable form of thievery – a thievery not just of time, but, more importantly, of spirit.

Daniel Gallay

TIFF 2011 (October Editorial)

2011-10-12T17:02:00.046-05:00

Socializing at the festival
Well I had a fun at the festival this year. I saw a lot of cool movies – definitively a lot more then last year – partied with friends, and met some interesting film-types like Richard Porton (Cineaste), Matthew Freundlich (Exit Art), Marcus Pinn, Mark Peranson (Cinema Scope), Aaron Graham, Ryan Krahn and Olivier Père (Locarno) - hopefully some of you have started checking out my blog.
There were a lot – read, too many – late parties, some with open bars (who is even paying for these?), which led to some nasty hangovers the following mornings. And as people were commenting that the films included a surprisingly high amount of people getting punched in the face, an analogy was created that cinephilia is also a kind of sucker punch. After the knock-out daze during the festival of balancing films, work, socializing, sleep and chores, one really needs to slow things down and relax a little. Even so, I can’t wait for next years.

Festival Coverage
Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film is a look at what the Iranian filmmaker has been up to since he got arrested, been put on house-arrest and banned from filmmaking. It can be seen as his take on what Lumet did with Making Movies as it also deals with Panahi’s own filming approach as he examines his films. Seeing it at the festival in a small-hall packed with journalist made watching it be like being shared a secret message of something that is truly important to the film community. The sad thing about This Is Not a Film is that since its filming Panahi’s co-director Mojtaba Mir Tahmaseb – along with Nasser Saffarian, Hadi Afarideh, Mohsen Shahrnazdar, Marzieh Vafamehr, Katayoun Shahabi and now Marzieh Vafamehr – have been arrested by the Iranian authorities. It is frustrating adding on names to that list, especially as This Is Not a Film has an almost optimistic quality to it. It is a dangerous situation in Iran; my best wishes go out to all the political prisoners and their families. There is a petition one can sign over at the Cinémathèque Française website, hopefully it can help.
Restless is terrific! Gus van Sant continues his examination of youthful distress and alienation as he explores the serious subject of a young girl Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) dying of cancer. He also gives the material a lightness of touch. Some criticism of Restless that I’ve encountered is that the young girl has no symptoms, which I don’t think is fair as half the film takes place in a hospital (the first significant engagement with the institution for van Sant) and Annie does suffer and unexpectedly collapses, which is a very brutal scene to watch. As well some people did not like the Portland goth Enoch’s (played brilliantly by Henry Hopper) ghost friend Hiroshi, a WWII Japanese kamikaze pilot. Hiroshi adds the weight of history on to these kids shoulders (also hinted at by Annabel’s interest in Darwin). As Tony Judt brings up in his book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, “We think we have learned enough from the past to know that many of the old answers don’t work, and that may be true. But what the past can truly help us understand is the perennial complexity of the questions.”
Jeff who lives at home is a disappointment for anyone who was a big fan of Cyrus (as I was), though Jason Segel is good in it. I remember when Cyrus came out in France all of the French critics referred to Jonah Hill as that fat kid.
Bruno Dumont’s Outside Satan is near-sublime. It is just a shame that he came off as pretentious during the question-and-answer period (after my question about what the titled meant, Dumont responded in French, “I don’t know why I would have to explain the title of my own film”).
I really liked Un été brillant, though Monica Belluci is a little annoying in it - do we really need to hear from others how pretty she is? Compared to, say, Pedro Costa’s masterpiece Ne Change Rien that has no commentary on Jeanne Balibar singing; he lets the audience make up their own mind when it comes to the subject.
The Francis Coppola talk was inspiring. He was joking and singing. He seemed equally as interested in hearing from the audience as sharing his experiences from his career. One thing that he brought up that is interesting is how he is all for other directors being influenced by his films and that likewise they will inspire him. Which brings us to Twixt which resonates with Coppola’s recent collaboration with Vincent Gallo. Just as Promises Written in Water shows Gallo picking up certain elements from his work on Tetro - b/w cinematography, dance sequences, more dialogue - Twixt could equally have been called ‘Promises Written in Water’ as Coppola uses the guise of a Corman-like B horror film (with a William Castle use of special effects) to look at the sadness that goes along with the death of a child and in this case by a boating accident, which for Coppola resonates with the death of his own son Giancarlo who died that way at the age of twenty-two. As well Twixt expands on Coppola literary adaptations that includes the authors John Grisham, Mario Puzo, Bram Stoker, S.E. Hinton and now Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and a first edition copy of Walt Witman’s Leaves of Grass is also central to the story). While the entire cast is well-suited for their roles: a pudgy Val Kilmer, a paranoid Bruce Dern, a haunting Elle Fanning and a punk Alden Ehrenreich. The best review so far of Twixt is by Olivier Père over at his blog.
I saw Brian De Palma wheezing past me on the street – the legend.
The Cédric Kahn film Une vie meilleure is terrific. Guillaume Canet (Little White Lies) is great here as a wrong man, similar to the character he played in Nicolas Saada’s Spie(s). Yann (Canet) is a line-cook that wants to open a restaurant with his girlfriend Nadia (Leïla Bekhti) and after going through the process of filling the necessary forms and getting credit, things start to go wrong. His girlfriend moves to Canada to find work and then he stops hearing from her. Yann is stuck with her kid and he now has to deal with fatherhood and the mounting social pressures of the dept he is in. Like Hitchcock, Kahn is able to imbue his story with social realities while creating intense moments of suspense, intrigue and bravura filmmaking – this is one film to look out for.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s A Kid With a Bike is their Doug Lipman film. The action sequence are bustling with energy, you can’t keep this kid calm. And he is even more mobile once he gets back his red-and-chrome bike. Interesting use of music too.
Pina is able to use 3D technology in a brand new way that is unlike anything I have ever seen before. Watching the Pina Bausch dance collective put forth her pieces has a raw quality to them and the movement of the dancers horizontally and vertically in the frame gives the illusion of a puppet show. Michel Ciment’s interview with Wim Wenders in Positif is insightful in regards to what Wenders wanted to achieve.
After the financial disaster of Fear X that nearly bankrupted Nicolas Winding Refn with his new film Drive eight years later it seems like he is successfully transitioning himself to Los Angeles. In Drive he creates a more likeable guerrier silencieux and what makes the movie all the more impressive is that the director does not even have a driving license!
I wished I could have attended the Wavelength series but I was working – which really sucks. Especially as the wonderful Andréa Picard has now left the organization. We want you back Andréa!
The only three films that I am going to do a write-up for are from the Short Cuts Canada section, which are programmed by Alex Rogalski and Magali Simard, and they are Simon Ennis’ Up in Cottage Country, Igor Drljaca’s The Fuse: Or Hose I Burned Simon Bolivar and Sophie Goyette’s La Ronde.
What else to look out for? Two words: Alps and Goon.

*****Cinema Scope used their new online blog to cover most of the films at the festival, which is an ambitious feat as TIFF gets a lot of movies. They succeeded. So now at Scope Online you can find interesting and passionate capsules and reviews of the majority of films that are going to be hitting the screens in North American for the next few months. Kudos. Scope also has an interesting round table with Adam Nayman, John Semley, Mark Peranson, Robert Koehler and Jason Anderson, which was beautifully produced by the MDFF team of Kazik Radwanski and Dan Montgomery.

To better appreciate and understand some of the films that I saw I also liked going through old issues of le bon papier, Cahiers du Cinéma, finding reviews and interviews to correspond with the films.
Here is an extract of Jean-Philippe Tessé’s review of Le Gamin au vélo,

“To say it quickly, the Dardenne’s make a humanist-Christian cinema where the journey of a character, apprehended uniquely through their actions and gestures (it’s a person that is active, see hyper-active), ends with a redemptive climax, or at least with a moment of elevation – an escape.”

Or Stéphane Delorme on Gus Van Sant’s Restless,

“Why do we love a cinéaste? We cannot help but ask this question in front of the beautiful new film of Gus Van Sant. We won’t find the dazzle that, from Gerry to Last Days, in three films made the director from Portland the cinéaste the most important of his generation. But what we find is something no other director is offering today: assurance, confidence, the perseverance of one who makes his oeuvre depending on his desire and the challenges that he wants to, personally, find.”

Or Alexandre Sokourov from an interview in Cahiers (January 2011) on the most anticipated movies of the year,

“In my imagination, in terms of how I saw it, I don’t even know if I will succeed, what I wanted to do with my tetralogy (Moloch, Taurus, The Sun, Faust) is not a literary succession but a circle. Once the loop ties together, this circle would connect characters and moments that are historically very far apart.”

There is Cahiers but, like always, there is also Positif. Going through Positif’s March 2010 issue (N.589) I was able to better appreciate the aggressive genius of the warrior-filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn whose Valhalla Rising sits on that issues cover. The editorial that opens the magazine begins with Frank Kausch, “Taste classes people, said Bourdieu, and classes those that class.” On Valhalla Philippe Rouyer writes, “More so then Bronson, what Valhalla Rising invites then is what Kubrick called a non-verbal experience.” Pierre Eisenreich calls Refn “already a master of European cinema” and refers to Valhalla as his masterpiece (an assessment that I share) as he pits Refn against the other Danes who emerged in the mid-1990’s like Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Lone Scherfig. Other then the Refn-o-mania, Yann Tobin offers probably the most generous review of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe highlighting the fairy-tale elements and references in Egoyan’s films that transform contemporary experiences towards universal myth ; Tobin does this by comparing Amanda Seyfried’s character to Scheherazade from the Arabic folk-talk Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights). The issue also includes a Voix-off by Henri Langlois and a book review of Lorraine Mortimer’s Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev. Amongst everything else in the magazine…

*****French Film Blogs: Olivier Père has by far one the best French film blogs in terms of selection, insight, taste and frequency of updates with festival coverage and reviews of new films, DVDs and books. All of this makes his writing an interesting contrast and addition to Stéphane Delorme’s writing in Cahiers. In Père latest few posts he writes about Peckinpah, de Palma, Boorman, Refn in regards to their self-analysis when it comes to the excess and violence in their films. I would include Joseph H. Lewis and Robert Aldrich as directors in this tradition. For English readers, Père reviews Nadav Lapid’s Policeman in the latest issue of Scope. Jean-Michel Frodon’s blog is good. And so is Bertrand Tavernier’s DVD review site ; he seems almost like the French Dave Kehr as his post spin-off into a forum where he comments back to people. But the one blog that looms over all of them is the one by Serge Toubiana. The content of Toubiana's blog is mostly political as he brings to attention government censorship and political uncertainty in world cinema (Egypt, Iran) and how these difficulties affect certain filmmakers. As well Toubiana’s writing is personal as he writes obituaries for deceased film-types like actors, directors and film-critics. This makes it even more pleasant when Toubiana actually writes about films - the one thing that unites all cinephiles. His latest posts are on the films that he saw at the festival Lumière which are William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women (recently restored), The Artist and Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan. Toubiana continues in the lineage of Henri Langlois as the director general of the Cinémathèque Française and his writing expands on his old days as the editor at Cahiers. Even though the platform for his writing is only a blog, he seems to have a looming presence over French film-criticism. Toubiana and Ciment at Positif* seem to be advocating for a generosity and faith towards filmmakers, which is a much-needed antidote to the unnecessary aggression of a lot of English-language ‘serious’ film criticism. Which reminds me here is Jonathan Rosenbaum on some recent “Art” movies.

* For a good example of what Positif can do for a filmmaker I would refer you to Micheal Henry Wilson hot-off-the-press luscious book Scorsese on Scorsese. As well see Positif (N.607) as just when you think the critical community is over a certain director like, say, Paolo Sorrentino. As Film Comment, Cahiers and Cinema Scope all dismissed This Must Be The Place. What does Positif do? It champions him! You can always trust Positif to go against uniformity by finding something to like in a film that reflects a singular intelligence especially in opposition to the thoughtlessness of most commercial fare. As well Positif is auteurist and prides itself on continuing to champion certain filmmakers even if they are no longer à la vogue. Positif is really proving itself to be the real filmmaker magazine, maybe more so then Cahiers**.

** But to be fair to Cahiers their interviews surrounding The Tree of Life and Super 8 is incomparable to anything else that have been written about those films. One gets a clear sense of the process that went into the making of those films through the interviews with the multiple creative agents that contributed to it. As well their feature interviews with Lars von Trier, the New York independent directors and Micheal Cimino are impressive too.

*****New Film Writing: Some of my favorite Toronto film-critics have a few new pieces up: Andrew Parker has a piece on Café de Flore and Margaret for Criticize This!, Andrew Tracy writes about Drive for Reverse Shot and about the Masters of Cinema series in Cineaste, Adam Nayman writes about the Nick Ray retro in The Globe and Mail, James Quandt in the new 180° writes about Ray and Hitchcock and over at Mubi about Raul Ruiz , and Marc Saint-Cyr has a contribution on Tsai Ming-Liang in the latest CineAction. Brad Stevens recommended to me the site She Blogged by Night by Stacia and in particular an essay on the little known The Janitor by Nicholas Ray. Marcus Pinn’s contributes to a two-part overview of TIFF 2011 at The Pink Smoke. David Bordwell’s blog posts on VIFF are terrific, as to be expected. In Film Int. Murray Pomerance has an interview with Evans Frankenheimer – which is a nice addition to his new book on John Frankenheimer. I discovered Ted Hope's blog at indieWIRE who has some really interesting things to say on American independent film (he is also interviewed in the New York diy issue of Cahiers) – I recommend his hour-long Moguls Talk (“Making independent films is a crime.”). On that note, I have to say that I really look forward to seeing the two films that Hope produced that are going to be released soon: Martha Marcy May Marlene and Dark Horse.

Film Listings: There was Ben Rivers’ Slow-Action at Gallery TPW, with an accompanying essay by Michael Sicinski. The Pleasure Dome programmed Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins which will be on October 15th at 7PM and on the Monday the 17th the Early Montly Segments will be playing the works of Robert Banks and Suzanne Naughton – be there for 8PM. Susan Ray will be introducing We Can’t Go Home Again. And finally there is the Planet in Focus Festival that is going to have the Toronto premier of Werner Herzog’s and Dmitry Vasyukov’s Happy People: A Year in The Taiga, which will be playing on October 13th at 9:30PM at the ROM.

Film Books: Some new books that look interesting that we recently got into the TIFF.shop include Dear Cary (which David Thomson tears apart in the NYRoB), John Landis’ Monster Movies, Dudley Andrews' What Cinema Is!, TCM Classic Movie Trivia Book, Michael Moore’s Here Comes Trouble, Richard Lindsay-Hogg’s Luck and Circumstance, Murray Pomerance’s Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue, and John Sayle’s A Moment in the Sun.

***** I really need to thank Oded for his terrific review of Hmizu - Oded is by far my favorite volunteer at TIFF and it is always nice to see him in the first couple of rows at the Cinematheque screenings. And it was nice to hear that Saul Austerlitz and Gregg Rickman liked my Woody Allen blog-post, especially as I bring up both of their books in it. And over at the Dave Kehr forum the piece brought out some interesting observations on Allen that I think are worth highlighting:
Gregg Rickman,

“Allen may be mediocre but he’s been nothing if not ambitious, tackling several different European art modes, as well as various American genres, including the not-easy-to-make-work the musical. David, in terms of American film history he is certainly one of the most important figures in screen comedy, important not just on his own merits but as a) a star/director comic in the mode of Chaplin, Keaton, Lewis; b) a huge influence on many successors in film, tv, and stand-up; c) as the reinventor for the post-1960s age of the romantic comedy (I’ve seen ANNIE HALL given great credit for this).”

Jean-Pierre Coursodon,

“The early Allen movies were, yes, rough, and immensely funny. We’ll never see anything like them again, just like we’ll never see anything like the Marx Bros.again. In France back in the seventeenth century Moliere started with slapstick stuff, was enormously succesful (in those days’ terms) then moved on to more “serious” comedy. When he occasionally went back to “low” comedy critics were shocked. Allen seems to be aware of the fact that you can’t go back home again — the home of jokes jokes jokes of his early movies. He feels he has moved away from and beyond them, which is totally normal. I can’t think of any artist who doesn’t feel that way. You don’t even have to be an artist to turn your back to your past. But if you’r an artist, it’s inevitable.”

Brian Dauth,

“Jean-Pierre writes: “Allen’s art is essentially imitative and the distinction between borrowing, influence, parody, and plagiarism is so blurred in his case as to become meaningless.” There it was – Allen’s “certified copies” were just what they appeared to be. He had overcome the modernist imperative “to make it new,” thereby evading the modernist fallacy, and instead Allenized his inspirations (a great term). MATCH POINT is AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY with a different ending, and SCOOP is a satyr play version of MATCH POINT’s story. In these films (and others), Allen hollows out his material and pours his sensibility into it without trying to iron out wrinkles or inconsistencies. Unlike high modernism where one can (should) appreciate the deft blending of the artist’s influences/sources into a new, dazzling whole, Allen lets his sensibility casually rub shoulders with what he is riffing on. In SCOOP, he echoes/quotes NOTORIOUS by lifting plot elements and mixing himself in. In the same way, his character, Sid Waterman, is a 1950′s Catskill’s comedian dropped into London several decades later without any attempt to make the combination mesh. Allen has freed himself (and film) from the demand of modernism that the art object be made with such precision and clever quotation techniques that when the work is placed down on a hill in Tennessee or a street in London, it makes sense of the chaos. Allen’s way of making art encompasses both design and debris (to use John Hawkes’ formulation).”

What am I going to write about next? Some potential subjects for book-reviews include Bill Krohn’s Hitchcock at Work, David Campany’s The Cinematic and Robin Wood’s Trammel Up the Consequence. But I am pretty busy in October as I am going to New York with my girlfriend Arielle to celebrate our one year anniversary together so maybe you will have to wait until November to actually read those.

Have a good month,
David Davidson

Himizu Review

2011-10-05T12:26:00.006-05:00

This is the first guest contribution by Oded Aronson. - D.D.

Himizu (Shion Sono, 2011)
**** (Masterpiece)
Ruins lie everywhere. Dust and smashed objects litter the atmosphere. A teenager stands in the middle holding a gun to his own head. The wind gradually becomes louder and dissolves into the sound of a million voices of the dead crying for mercy. The boy shoots himself. Blood streams out of his head, leaving a long red trail. He lies in the field, no longer remembering who he is. Then he wakes up.

The boy’s name is Yuichi Sumida, and his family has been left without any means of income because of a tsunami that has all but demolished his hometown. His family’s business is a boat rental company, which has not had any profits at all since the tsunami. Yuichi’s father is a nasty, abusive harpy who storms home at midnight most of the time and proceeds to beat him up then complain that he never wanted a child. Yuichi’s mother has run away from her husband with her lover due to years of frustration and blood, so Yuichi is left to fend for himself.

His financial situation is so poor that eventually he is forced to leave school so that he can work at the boathouse in the vain hope that someone will rent a boat. One of his classmates, Keiko Chizawa, has had a crush on him for as long as she can remember, and searches for him. Keiko’s family also has their own troubles; her parents want to kill her so that they can collect insurance money, and are in the process of building their own guillotine. Keiko is forced to pass the guillotine every day and notice its development.

For the first two thirds of the story, there is frequent juxtaposition of dark humour and straight faced drama. The attitudes of the two main characters play a role in that juxtaposition. Yuichi has become so emotionally inured due to the beatings he receives from his father that he has retreated into a dark, nearly silent shell. He is almost completely unwilling to open himself up to anyone or anything. On the other hand, Keiko’s lifelong preparation for her upcoming death at the hands of her parents has somehow opened up wells of emotion in her, and she feels as though she has to cheer people up for as long as she lives. Keiko goes far beyond optimism into the realm of desperation, which then becomes so pronounced that it feels like optimism again.

The two clash, but Keiko tries to become friends with Yuichi despite his protestations. Eventually, they end up sharing most of their scenes to the extent that everybody thinks of them as friends. Although Yuichi remains sullen, her presence does seem to have some kind of positive effect on the people other than Yuichi. Keiko tries to revamp the boat house. As a result, it finally begins to have some business. Yuichi’s father comes home for the last time one night and suddenly things become even more complicated than before.

The last part of the movie is emotionally brutal. Not all people will enjoy the descent into darkness, but it is appropriate for the material, and leads to a powerful climax that will be a source of joy for anyone who is in love with the movies. I strongly recommend Himizu, the best of the 25 movies I watched at this year’s TIFF. - Oded Aronson

Le drôle Woody Allen (and Film Comedy Scholarship)

2011-09-29T09:18:00.050-05:00

For my parents Alysse Weinberg and Michael Davidson who first turned me towards film and who encouraged me to pursue it as an academic endeavor. – D.D.

Title: Comment Woody Allen peut change votre vie
Author: Éric Vartzbed
Publisher: Éditions du Seuil
Pages: 112
Price: 12 €
Title: Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy
Author: Saul Austerlitz
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Pages: 512
Price: $27.95
*****“Woody Allen’s comedy is art, as all good comedy is.” – Saul AusterlitzIntroduction
With over forty films to his name and a career that spans from 1965 to today, it is hard to pin down Woody Allen. He was born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, 1935, a shabby New York Jew with too much intelligence, wit and neuroses. His career trajectory goes from writing wisecracks for NBC, then Sid Caesar, getting expelled from NYU, performing stand-up, writing screenplays, becoming a film-director, writing short-fiction - and he still finds time to play the clarinet! His current wife is Soon-Yi Previn.

In his films, Allen’s characters are burdened by the accompanying neuroses of their privileged position. In his world, the people who have a belief in some kind of faith seem better off then their atheist counterparts. His protagonists give a whole new meaning to the Hitchcockian character-type of the man who knew too much. And like one of Hitchcock’s wrong men they are born into a godless world where things eventually go awry. Everything and anything can happen, ranging from murder to finding love. And what is most emphasized is the role chance plays in our lives. The films are funny too.

As a filmmaker he has worked with some of Hollywood’s best actors and actresses like Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts, Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, just to name a few. Everybody wants to work with him. The cast of his upcoming Rome-set film The Bob Decameron includes Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig and Allen himself (who will be returning in front of the camera). Allen is not the only talented one; he has worked with some of the best cinematographers out there such as Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond and Darius Khondji. He writes his own screenplays too.

“But what made Bergman great – and there were guys who were working the same side of the street but who were not great – was that he was show business, he was an entertainer,” according to Allen*, who like Bergman, is one a master entertainer-philosophers that have blessed the seventh art. Allen seamlessly blends pathos and comedy to magical results. For example, in his latest film Midnight in Paris – one of his most profitable films (eighty million dollars worldwide) – this middle-aged screenwriter (played by Owen Wilson) who wants to start writing serious literature is visiting Paris with his wife and her parents. At night he decides to wander off and mysteriously finds himself traveling back in time to the the 1920s and then to the belle époque. The lightness of touch, the ease of the actors, the magical mood all leads me to believe this is the high point of his late European period.

Allen has many supporters: Jean-Luc Godard** made a wonderful little documentary Meetin’ WA (1986), an interview between the two directors that Godard interrupts with jazzy inter-titles and film stills. And he has also starred in films by Paul Mazursky and Martin Ritt. Some smart people have written about him such as Robert Benayoun (Woody Allen, au-delà du language), John Baxter, Raymond Durgnat, Foster Hirsch, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Richard Brody, Jean-Michel Frodon and Richard Schickel ; while real life intellectuals like Marshal McLuhan and Susan Sontag have also appeared in his films. In regards to the man himself voicing his thoughts, there is the Stig Björkman and Eric Lax interview books.

Allen’s films begin like novels: there is always that black screen set to soothing jazz music, punctuated by the credits written in Allen’s signature Windsor font. The experience of watching the credits change is akin to flipping through the pages of a book***. This technique builds excitement for a new Allen adventure within the viewer. And then the film begins…

* Woody Allen by Kent Jones, which included an interview, in Film Comment (May/June 2011).

** Godard also cast Allen as King Lear in his Shakespeare adaptation. Though Allen, overall, is not really a Cahiers-filmmaker (see Olivier Assayas scathing remarks on Everyone says I love you or Jones on Celebrity). On the other hand, Allen seems to have found a home over at the more generous Positif with his two latest films making it onto their cover.

*** This literary analogy is only made stronger as Allen is the author of a vast collection of short stories that can be found in The New Yorker and collected in books like Mere Anarchy, The Insanity Defense and Getting Even. Allen also recently contributed to The Guardian a piece on his five favorite books (The Catcher in the Rye, Really the Blues, The World of SJ Perelman, Epitaph of a Small Winner, and Elia Kazan: A Biography), which show the influence books had on him as a person.

*****“One’s important encounters are the spice of life.” - Éric Vartzbed
How Can Woody Allen Change Your Life?
I first discovered Allen in my early university years. I was studying Psychology and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. On my summer off, I stumbled upon Annie Hall where in it Allen represented what is commonly known as an auteur: he was the star, director, and screenwriter of the film and it was clear that this Alvy Singer character was loosely autobiographical. That month I watched Annie Hall maybe five or six times, making sure to scribble down on a little notepad all of the cultural references that I was not being taught in university. Over the summer I tried to see all of his films, which coincided with a blossoming interest in cinema, where I was also discovering the films of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Since then I have gone to see all of Allen’s new films during their first-run releases, starting with Vickie Christina Barcelona (2008). I was also fortunate to go to Lyon, France that summer for some French language and culture classes. Where coincidently the Hangar Lumière (the birthplace of European cinema) was having an Allen retrospective. I didn’t need anything else…

The psychoanalyst Éric Vartzbed in his wonderful little French-language book Comment Woody Allen peut changer votre vie? talks about the way certain films seen at particular, and impressionable, times in ones life can influence someone personally, and that these small realizations and pleasures should be acknowledged and cherished. For Vartzbed, one of those occurrences happened to be when he saw Allen’s Another Woman*. Being a practitioner of psychology (at the Réseau Santé Valais) Vartzbed better understands the difficulty that Hope (Mia Farrow) is going through and the difficulty of confessing intimate and repressed thought. Allen in Another Woman and throughout his career proves to be a director of anxieties. Not only of presenting characters with anxieties but in how they can be debilitating in certain situations and what coping mechanism people come up with**. This is one of the subjects explored in the book, with particular characters from different films being used as case studies for the psychoanalyst to examine as he dissects the unconscious of Allen and his films through quoting other theorist like Sigmund Freud, Eric Fromm and Jacques Lacan.

Just as Allen has changed the lives of many people (Vartzbed’s, my own), Allen too was affected by the movies. The director? You’ve guessed it: Ingmar Bergman. Allen’s thoughts on Monika: “I came away reliving only the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed.” On The Naked Night, “Although the story was not totally focused, the work was directed with such immense talent that I sat forward for an hour and a half, my eyes bulging.” On Wild Strawberries, “I still recall my mouth dry and my heart pounding away from the first uncanny dream sequence to the last serene close-up.” On The Seventh Seal (“always my favorite”), “The flagellants, the burning of the witch (worthy of Carl Dreyer) and the finale, as Death dances off with all the doomed people to the nether lands is one of the most memorable shots in all movies.”***

* This first section of the book Comment Woody Allen a changé ma vie [How Woody Allen changed my life] is part self-analysis, while in the next section Comme Woody Allen peut changer votre vie [How Can Woody Allen change your life] Vartzbed tries to tease out life lessons and particular morals from the films themselves, and he is quite good at it.

** The role of the analyst in the films is also analyzed. Vartzbed sees complacency on their part where the session’s goal is no longer psychological progress but that of a routine, which would become a reoccurring gag for Allen. Like the wisecrack in Sleepers, “I haven’t seen my shrink for two-hundred years. If I had been going all of this time then I would almost be cured.”

*** From Woody Allen’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern.

*****On to the Book
Vartzbed prose is fun. It isn’t too academic, though it is smart and well written. Vartzbed knows how to translate cinematic gags and jokes onto the page; there are a lot of exclamation marks. The title of the book makes it seem like it is one of those goofy self-help books, which it isn’t. How Can Woody Allen change your life is a serious look at Allen’s films, who for Vartzbed, are in the same league as the work of the great European writers and philosophers like Marcel Proust, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince), Molière and Emil Cioran.

Vartzbed quotes Allen from an interview with Robert Benayoun from Positif (which can be found in the Grand Interview issue) on Manhattan, “It isn’t New York that I am attacking, it’s the root of evil. It’s not a film that is happy to say: “Clean Central Park.” It is a film that is saying: “Clean up your emotional lives, or else you will never be able to clean Central Park.” Another insightful quote from the interview is, “My hero Isaac Davis prefers to think of the time past then the terrible things that are ruining the city today, he misses the time when New York looked like how you see it in the old sepia photographs, when it was as simple and romantic as Gershwin’s music.”

Vartzbed sees Allen humor as a defensive-mechanism - a way to make the people around him happy - while the sources of frustration is not coming from the exterior but the interior. For Allen, “desire and counter-desire is the same thing,” like the Julia Roberts character in Everyone Says I Love You who, “seems to prefer the dream of a potential happiness then the “closure” that comes with it’s realization.” This self-defeating impulse goes quite well with the famous Annie Hall* quip, “I would never be a part of a club that will have someone like me as a member.”

Vatzbed sees Zelig as Allen’s most political film, “Allen describes the mimetic passion that is central to in all the totalitarian phenomenon.” As well on Allen’s politics, “In the Allen universe, politics as they are are placed onto the second-plane ; the point of view is psychological and existential.”**

Allen shows the gap between what people say and what they mean, “with his style, he expresses the essence of the human life: our condition of the denatured animal, exiled in a landscape of signs, lost into language.” There is too much justification of bad behavior through a mise-en-mots, like the ‘natural’ and ‘happy’ divorce at the beginning of Husbands and Wives. And there seems to be an emphasis for Allen on capturing the complexity and contradiction of human feelings*** like when Isacc is running to meet Tracy at the end of Manhattan. One would want the two to get-back together but there are so many factors against that from happening. Even so we are still cheering Allen on.

* Annie Hall’s original title is Anhedonia, which means the inability to experience pleasure.

** Which makes Allen different then a more left-wing actor-director like Albert Brooks whose most recent film Looking for Humor in the Middle East (2005) is very critical of America’s foreign policy, which might have caused the films minor distribution and reception. Brooks also has a new fictional novel about a futuristic dystopian society 2030.

*** The subject of emotional validity is important to Allen which he highlights, as well as the disparities of critical reception, in the Eric Lax interview book:
"But the criticism that can be made of any film can be refuted from another point of view and, in the critical community, often is. So I'm not really interested in these analyses and discussions because I feel they're all rationalizations to justify an emotional response to the work. Two critics can see the same film and write opposite reviews and both are completely correct in their reasoning. So what do you have? Two conflicting intelligent points of view. So when I show my film to two or three friends in my screening room before I put it out, I'd like to hear their emotional response and not their cerebral analysis."

*****Career Periods:
What’s Up, Tiger Lily (1966) – Love and Death (1975) /
Annie Hall (1977) – Husbands and Wives (1992) /
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) – Melinda and Melinda (2004) /
Match Point (2005) – Midnight in Paris (2011)

With over forty films to his credits it is hard to pin down Allen, but to make an attempt, one can see view his films in four distinct periods:
(1) The early funny ones: these films have a loose structure – the comparison to a stand-up sketch is frequently brought up - and include more physical comedic gags and non sequitur one-liners. This stage starts with What’s New Pussycat (1965 ; he wrote the original screenplay though didn’t direct the film) and What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966; a re-dubbing of a Japanese action film) and ends with Love and Death (1975). As Saul Auterlitz brings up in Another Fine Mess, “Nonethless, Allen’s yearning for gravity is hardly unfamiliar; we have already borne witness to similar ambitions from Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis and numerous others. To penetrate deeper into comedy one must grow more serious.” This brings us to Allen’s second period.

(2) The films of the first period were made away from Allen’s beloved Manhattan. So when Allen finally returned to make a movie in Manhattan, the results were astounding [cf. Annie Hall (1977)]. Through the help of his cinematographer Gordon Willis, Allen learnt to be a more stylistic and resourceful director, as well he learnt more about narrative cohesion from his editor Ralph Rosenblum. But drama then began to take precedence. The attempted suicide in Interiors (1978) through carbon monoxide poisoning created one of the most haunting images in Allen’s cinema. Who can forget Eve (Geraldine Page) turning the oven on high and sealing the cracks in the door with masking tape? With such a bold shift in tone Allen was detaching himself from his early ‘funny’ films. He was not going to continue to conform to expectations and simply make comedies, which would be the subject of Stardust Memories (1980). On a whole, this period is marked more by its dramas even though there are moments of humor in them. But even though some of the films were fluffier the overall tone is more pessimistic, which seems ingrained in the design of the films black-and-white cinematography - which Allen used more in this period then any of the others - that gives off a darker atmosphere. The mood is one of social oppression that recalls the anxieties of the post-WWII crime thrillers (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep). This period also coincides with Allen’s relationship with his wife Mia Farrow who they collaborated together in thirteen films. Starting with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and ended in January 1992 when she discovered sexually explicit photos of her adopted daughter Soon-Yi in Allen’s room. Their final film together is Husbands and Wives (1992). Farrow is now more concerned with humanitarian concerns, which was the subject of Alice.

(3) The end of the Farrow-Allen relationship brings us to Allen’s next period: “From comedic genius and New York icon to sleazeball and degenerate: Woody Allen’s fall was precipitous,” says Austerlitz. These post-Farrow films seem like a return to a more crowd-pleasing fare, even though they are pretty adventurous for Allen in terms of both content and form: starting with the noir Manhattan Murder Mysteries (1993), to a musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) to the last film in this period the bifurcated Melinda and Melinda (2004). In these films Allen is exploring his interest in the writing of creative fiction as well as his ideas pertaining to chance and faith. There is also the European jazz tour documentary Wild Man Blues (1997) by Barbara Kopple, which is a striking project as it anticipates Allen’s next period.

(4) The final period, which brings us to today: the death of Allen’s longtime producer Jean Doumanian led him to take European financing. This move expanded the scope of the Allenian universe to Barcelona (Vicky Christina Barcelona), to London (Match Point) and to Paris (Midnight in Paris). The tennis metaphor in Match Point of a ball hitting a net relates to faith because one can never possibly know whether the ball will go over it or not. This indelible image of a round neon-yellow tennis ball hitting a net and spinning upwards as it almost floats in mid-air plays an important role in this latest period as the uncertainty of fate will lace all of Allen’s next films. Moving onward Allen shows himself to be more interested in open-endings and capturing people in indecisive moments. Though even amidst all this chaos and contradictions some people can still find meaning and happiness, which is a thought worth cherishing.
*****“It is a cliché that clowns cry; it has rarely been admitted that they might also think.” – Gerald Mast
Film Comedy Scholarship
Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind (1979), for me, is the foundation of film comedy scholarship. It looks at the subject of film comedy beginning with the breed of clown that “translated comedy into cinematic terms” and tries to figure out what is the structure of film comedy in cinema, what are it’s roots, what is the goal of comedy, and who were the individuals that had the largest impact on it. While someone like Andrew Sarris was building upon James Agee’s The Golden Age of Comedy* (1949) when he compiled the comic section Make Way For The Clowns! in The American Cinema (1968), on the other hand, Mast’s pantheon is reserved for strictly comedians of the world that defined the seventh art in its formative years: Mack Sennet, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair and Jean Renoir.

One of Mast’s points is that, “There has been little attempt to draw comic films into this mainstream of twentieth-century artistic thought.” Mast places Film Comedy alongside New Comedy and Aristophanic Old Comedy as well with purely ‘cinematic’ forms by, for example, creating parallels between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Charlie Chaplin (e.g. the bowler hat, the comic business) or by comparing Renoir to Shakespeare. Arguing with and against people like Wylie Sypher, Elder Olson and Henri Bergson, Mast’s argues for film comedy to be discussed seriously and lays the foundation scholarship in discussing it at the birth of film as medium by emphasizing silent-films and the works created at the transition to the talkie and afterwards. As well, Mast’s adds, “And so this book is evaluative, not just descriptive. It begins with the intention of revealing serious thought in the comic film form. And it assumes that the best comedies (even the funniest comedies) are those which achieve something that is more than simply funny.”

The eight comic film plots and basic structures, according to Mast, that are central to Film Comedy are as follows:

(1) The young lovers finally wed despite the obstacles to their union, and the amorous conclusion grows directly and exclusively from amorous complications.
(2) The film’s structure can be an intentional parody or burlesque of some other film or genre of films, the parodic plot is deliberately contrived and artificial.
(3) The reductio ad absurdum where a simple human mistake or social question is magnified, reducing the action to chaos and the social question to absurdity.
(4) An investigation of the workings of a particular society – usually through multileveled plots – comparing the responses of one social group or class with those of another, contrasting people’s different responses to the same stimuli and similar responses to different stimuli.
(5) A structure unified by a central figure (pícaro) of the film’s action, also known as the comedian comedy, which is built around the comedians persona.
(6) The “riffing” or “improvised and anomalous gaggery” plot that takes an initial situation, an object and then runs off with a series of gags that revolve around this central situation where pace and motion become unifying principles in themselves.
(7) The central character either chooses to perform or is forced to accept a difficult task, often risking his life in the process within a “comic climate” (built signs that let the audience know that he is watching a comedy).
(8) The story of the central figure who eventually discovers an error he has been committing in the course of his life, also within a “comic climate.”

To expand on Mast’s study on film comedy there is Professor Emeritus from Harvard University Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) – or one can look towards James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges** (1987) for a similar study of screwball comedies. Though my examination will focus on Cavell who in Pursuits of Happiness takes a long hard look at seven films or as he calls them “spiritual parables”: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949), and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937). These Hollywood talkies made between 1934 and 1949, for Cavell, constitute a particular genre: the comedy of remarriage - an inheritor of the Shakespearean romantic comedy (The Winter’s Tale). Cavell describes this group of films as, “the principal group of Hollywood comedies after the advent of sound and therewith one definitive achievement in the history of the art of film.”

Here is Cavell explaining what exactly is at heart of this comedy of remarriage genre:

“[T]he achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs (…) [Which] applies only in contexts in which there is satisfaction enough, in which something like luxury and leisure, something beyond the bare necessities, is an issue (…) This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth; the people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily (…) It is as essential for the settings of our films to be such that we can expect the characters in them to take the time, and take the pains, to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another as it is essential for the settings and characters of classical tragedy to be such that we can expect high poetry from them (…) it will be a virtue of our heroes to be willing to suffer a certain indignity, as if what stands in the way of change, psychologically speaking, is a false dignity; or, socially speaking, as if the dignity of one part of society is the cause of the opposite part’s indignity, a sure sign of a disordered state of affairs (…) The conversations of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce.”

Cavell focuses on the heroine and places them in their historical-cultural-social context. This woman is a continuation of the feminism that is rooted in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and women gaining the right to vote back in 1920. As Cavell puts it,

“The genre it projected, on my interpretation, can be said to require the creation of a new woman, or the new creation of a woman, something I describe as a new creation of the human. If the genre is as definitive of sounds comedy as I take it to be, and if the feature of the creation of the woman is as definitive of the genre as I take it to be, then this phase of the history of cinema is bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women (…) Our films may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other.”

In his textual analysis Cavell provides examples of possible interpretations for the motivations of the characters behavior as well as the directors intentions and then decides on the choice that appears the most rational. The important philosophers for Cavell that he references are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And this radical juxtaposition of Immanuel Kant (philosophy) and Frank Capra (film) is part of Cavell’s uninhibited rejoice of Classical Hollywood films (à la Robert Warshow) mixed with his university context. Cavell articulates the reasons for why he writes*** and that, for him, “philosophy is to be understood, however else, aesthetically.” He provides other Depression-era fairy tale films that could have been examined as well he provides other contemporary ‘remarriage’ films like Starting Over, An Unmarried Woman and Kramer and Kramer. And to posit some more recent titles: Eyes Wide Shut, Hall Pass, and Certified Copy.

* The comedians highlighted by Sarris were W.C. Fields, Jerry Lewis, Harold Lloyd, The Marx Brothers and Mae West. Though as Gregg Rickman notes in the introduction to The Film Comedy Reader: “Agee also established a starring comedian’s talents and personality as the major factor by which to judge screen comedy,” and that there were “[s]ilent comedians dismissed by Agee, meanwhile, such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charley Chase, have taken years to find new partisans.”

** On this period James Harvey writes, “Nineteen thirty-four was the turning point, the year when it first began to seem as if the Hollywood movie had invented the romantic comedy. Suddenly in The Thin Man and It Happened One Night and The Gay Divorcee, in actors like Dunne and Lombard and Grant, Powell and Loy and Astaire – all the familiar, borrowed elements came together in combinations so new and fresh, so eclectic, and so intrinsically movielike that familiarity became revelation.”

*** Cavell, “one learns that without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s own experience.” He also uses really ordinary language to describe complex ideas by renowned philosophers.

*****Twenty-First Century Jokers
What are the well-researched and well-written film-comedy books of our time? Which ones are the most up-to-date and insightful? And which ones are the most likely to teach you about a comic-director or -star that one is unfamiliar with? Or make you re-appraise a personality originally viewed as fluff?

If The Comic Mind and Pursuits of Happiness (and/or Romantic Comedy in Hollywood) lay the foundation of film comedy as a field of study in book-form, then it is in The Film Comedy Reader and Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy that the subject as a whole is brought into the twenty-first century*.

One thing that The Film Comedy Reader (2006) edited by Gregg Rickman is interested in is “how ideas develop over time,” as it anthologizes essays about film-comedy from the beginning to the present day. Some examples include: James Agee’s Comedy’s Greatest Era and Buster Keaton's What Are the Six Ages of Comedy moving forward with Raymond Durgnat on Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing and Robin Wood on Gays and '90s Comedy. Rickman points out differences in the writing about film-comedy, “Some further background on the different schools of film theory which inflect our readings of cinema follows. To briefly summarize, a divide exist between those who define the comic film in terms of its narrative pattern, and those who define it in terms of its goal, the physical act of laughter,” which is worth considering.

Rickman personal entries are on Some Like It Hot ("Wilder's characters more often than not are con artists, manipulators of other people's emotions, usually through their skilled use of language."), Bamboozled ["That Bamboozled indulges in a "rhetoric of blame" (Edward Said's phrase) cannot be doubted. Yet Spike Lee can be thought of as a critic of blackface minstrelsy in line with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)."], The Producers [""Putting on a show" has been sufficient plot justification for many a great musical comedy and it may perhaps be in this particular subgenre (rather than as a satirist or performer) Brooks may ultimately best be remembered."] and Runaway Bride ("This reduction of a privileged moment in film history to a plot device, a gimmick, is just another reason It Happened One Night will still be debated a hundred years from now, while Runaway Bride will be little more than a footnote to its star's career.")

While Saul Austerlitz's book Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (2010) is one of the broadest in scope and up-to-date books on the subject. For Austerlitz the important film is Preston Sturge’s Sullivan’s Travels. To make comedies or to make dramas? Now that is the question. In the book Austerlitz posits thirty pantheon personalities that have been important to film comedy. From Chaplin to Judd Apatow by way of Laurel & Hardy and Katharine Hepburn and Jerry Lewis**, Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks and Richard Pryor, Steven Martin and Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller. As well there are one-hundred-and-five shorter entries on oddities, one-shots and newcomers: Nora Ephron, Jim Jarmusch, Robin Williams, the Farrelly’s, Whit Stillman, Paul Rudd, John Belushi, Jayne Mansfield, Mike Nichols, Tyler Perry et cetera.

What else does Austerlitz have to say on Allen (who receives a longer entry): Well that he sees Allen as a hybrid child between Bob Hope and Ingmar Bergman. On Allen’s early routines, “Allen was modeling himself after satirist Mort Sahl, but rather than Sahl’s didja-see-this-article shtick, Allen was punching above his intellectual weight, providing his own freewheeling annotations to Freud and Dostoyevsky.” And that with Annie Hall, “Allen created something entirely new: a somber comedy,” where “the humor, ultimately, is inseparable from the sentiment.”

Allen bridges the long-standing tradition of nonsense in film history that begins with the Marx Brothers (whose Duck Soup appears in a segment in Crimes and Misdemeanors) and passes through Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards and Robert Altman. Allen’s oeuvre has variations of all of Mast’s eight comic plot structures and his best characters reach Cavell’s criteria of, “the achievement of a new perspective on existence.” With each new film – a reliable Woody every year - the connections and links between the works are getting denser. As Allen creates continuity between the films and different career periods there is also an evolution and maturation where he places different emphasis on certain behavior and ideas. Where his work was once more parody and slapstick, it has evolved going into light-hearted jest, drama and philosophical exploration. Geographically going from the micro to the macro. Allen is creating his own Infinite Jest, to use a David Foster Wallace expression. The somber comedy*** that Allen popularized with Annie Hall has been the mise en abyme of his carreer and its influence on contemporary auteur film comedy (Apatow, Solondz) might just be his legacy. - David Davidson

* Though I should bring up here Laurence Maslon and Michael Cantor’s Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (2008) whose focus is more multi-disciplinary as it looks at comedy from the position of stand-up, talk-shows, Saturday Night Live, comedians, television series, and film. And to include an eccentricity in film comedy scholarship, I am going to suggest, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s catalogue for a series he programmed for the Viennale, The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S. (2009), which includes a long introduction (where he explains his selection criteria), eleven re-published essays, and capsules for fifty-five films from Owen Land’s On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmmund Freud in Wit and its relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Whole (1979) to John Waters’ Hairspray (1988).

** There was a time, I believe, when the cinephilic debates were over Jerry Lewis or Woody Allen. Just as, I imagine, there was a time that you have had to prefer Chaplin or Keaton. Whil now the directors you have to align yourself with are Todd Philips, Judd Apatow or the Farrelly’s. My response: I just don’t know why some people can’t just get a long. From the above list, the only director that I have a serious problems with is Todd Philips whose Old School I liked but I thought the Hangover is abysmal with its two-dimensional characters, racism and homophobia - I could not be bothered to go watch the sequel.

*** And two unlikely directors have recently pronounced their appreciation of Allen’s films: Monte Hellman and Francis Coppola.

September Editorial (TIFF 2011)

2011-09-04T19:11:00.039-05:00

For anyone who might not know this already, I recommend and order the books for the TIFF.Shop in the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Since moving to Toronto last summer from Ottawa to work at the Lightbox I managed to go from working at Concessions to Retail where I now do book-orders once a week.

What I made sure to have in the TIFF.Shop for Festival 2011:
The one new film publication that I cannot recommend enough is Dave Kehr's first collection of film criticism, When Movies Mattered (which I am always twisting peoples arms to buy). The book is a welcome companion piece to his New York Times Sunday DVD reviews (which are essential reads) as it gathers his Chicago Reader pieces from the 1970s and organizes them in a Sarris-like hierarchy ; it is a wonderful expansion of his taste and prose - this is going to be one book that will be well stocked for the festival. For anyone else interested in Kehr, he also writes the notes in Art of the Modern Movie Poster and he has a contribution on Alfred E. Green's Baby Face in the National Society of Film Critic's book The X List. I also tried to get as many other books by authors that contribute to the Dave Kehr forum: Gregg Rickman's The Science Fiction Film Reader (which includes a great piece by Bill Krohn on Joe Dante's Explorers, and one by Blake Lucas on the 1950s Universal-International Sci-Fi films ), D.K. Holm's Guy Maddin: Interviews and Film Soleil (film noir + sunlight), Brian Dauth's Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews, Jean Pierre Coursodon has a contribution in Arthur Penn: Interviews (his interview makes a nice contrast with Richard Schickel's in regards to how Americans and the French see film differently). Books by some non-regulars includes Kent Jones' Physical Evidence and his BMC volume on L'Argent - his appendix in the Vachel Lindsay book is also quite useful; Jonathan Lethem's contribution to the Deep Focus series with his book on They Live, Joseph McBride's books on Frank Capra, John Ford, Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles; and Scott Eyman on Cecil B. Demille and Louis B. Mayer.
There are books on actresses and actors including the Minnelli princess Leslie Caron's autobiography, Thank Heaven (which comes with a Serge Toubiana recommendation), and others on Burt Lancaster, Gary Grant and Warren Oates.
In the World Cinema section there is Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson's The Japanese Film (Richie also has books on Ozu and Kurosawa), one on Turkish cinema, and Directory of World Cinema: Japan (Intellect), which has contributions by Bob Turnbull and Marc Saint-Cyr. There is also the International Film Guide 2011, which I recommend to any film-festivaler.
In regards to Canadian Cinema, there is a new monograph on Bruce McDonald's Hard Core Logo in the Canadian Cinema series. As well anything by Zoë Druick, Jim Leach, William Beard, Chris Robinson, André Loiselle, Tom McSorley, Peter Harcourt, Seth Feldman, Jerry White and Kathryn Elder has my recommendation.
As someone who order books, a big find for me was discovering the gems stocked up at Da Capo Press which includes Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, William K. Everson's American Silent Film, Tom Milne's translation (it will do) of Godard on Godard, Peter Cowie on Coppola, Underground Film, and some rare books that I imagined were long out of print (e.g. Truffaut's The Films of Life, Bazin on Renoir, Perkins' Film as Film).
Phaidon has some beautiful books like Stanley Kubrick's collected photographs from his time at Life Magazine and Michael Henry Wilson's Eastwood on Eastwood. There are the books by the Austrian Film Museum so, like, James Quandt on Apichatpong Weerasethakul (in the store there is also Quandt's Ontario Cinematheque monograph on Kon Ichikawa) and one on James Benning. We have all of the Contemporary Film Directors series (Nicole Brenez on Abel Ferrara is quite good, which builds upon the Brad Stevens book) and the Masters of Cinema series (the books by Stéphane Delorme and Bill Krohn - one of the best American film critics, for my money - are very good ; Nicolas Saada also has some contributions in these).
There are all of Raymond Durgnat's published texts: Films and Feelings, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, A Long Hard Look at Psycho and his BFC volume on WR: Mysteries of the Organism. There are the books by Robin Wood like Sexual Politics, From Vietnam to Reagan, Rio Bravo, and, which I am proud of getting, his new novel Trammel up the Consequences, thanks to Gary McCallum for getting that to us. There is also the bulk of Jonathan Rosenbaum's writing, Manny Farber and some Molly Haskell too.
Taschen has some beautiful books like the Kubrick's Napoleon project, The Godfather Family Album and Dennis Hopper's collected photographs. (I wished I could have gotten the Pedro Almodovar: Archives).
There are some brand new publications like Patrick McGilligan on Nicholas Ray, Nat Segaloff on Arthur Penn, Marilyn Ann Moss on Raoul Walsh, John Baxter on Joseph von Sternberg, and Murray Pomerance (Family Affair) and R. Barton Palmer's book A Little Solitaire: John Frankenhimer and American Film.
Random books on directors include ones on Alice Guy-Blaché, Roy Ward Baker, François Truffaut (by Serge Toubiana and Antoine de Baecque), George Bataille, De Palma, Altman, Bresson, Cassavettes (by Ray Carney), Wes Craven, Guy Debord, Blake Edwards, Maya Deren, Eisenstein, Farocki, Vertov, Fuller (whose autobiography Third Face, Père recommends), Frampton, Argento, Makavejev, Keiller, Mekas, and cinematic fore-runners like Thomas Edison and Edward Muybridge. There are fiction and autobiographical books written by directors like Woody Allen, Tobe Hooper, John Boorman, Kenneth Anger, Albert Brooks, and Guillemo Del Torro.
I got whatever was available by Siegfried Kraucauer and Stanley Cavell. There is some theory too: Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism), Slavoj Žižek, Walter Benjamin, Rick Altman, Rudolf Arnheim, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Edward Said etc. Michel Chion is the film-sound guy. Jim Hillier book on Cahiers 1950s is good. Gerald Mast and Saul Austerlitz are quite authoritative on the subject of film comedy. There is Biskind's Raging Bull book on the 1970s counter-culture American cinema. And there are books by Robert Ray, Christopher Frayling, Kim Newman, Thomas Schatz, Thomas Elsaesser,Tag Gallagher (Ford, Rosselini), Robert Warshow, David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson. Michael Ondaatje's interview book with Walter Murch is also quite good.
Please don't mind the Nick James*, Nick Roddick or David Thomson books - they are crap.
There are production books, acting books (Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner), screenwritting (Syd Field), and screenplays (Vladimir Nabokov's original Lolita screenplay, and Shoah's with a foreword by Simone de Beauvoir).
For anyone looking for Caboose books edition of André Bazin's What is Cinema?, I would recommend going to Of Swallows books store (283 College St).
We do carry Film Comment, Cinema Scope and Cineaste but we are all sold out of the previous issues, though I believe the new issues should be out soon. For anyone looking for Sight & Sound, I would recommend the Chapters around the corner and for any frenchies that want Cahiers (whose latest issue, the feature is the New York DIY filmmakers) and Positif they are only sold at the Maison de Presse Internationale in Yorkville.
I tried to represent the Cinema Scope guys in the store with Richard Porton's book On Film Festivals (Mark Peranson's essay on the subject is quite insightful, and so is Robert Koehler's), Andrew Tracy has a contribution in Kazan Revisited and Adam Nayman interviews Micheal Winterbottom in the Interviews book with him.
As well there is some experimental-cinema books, Mike Hoolboom's Practical Dreamers and books by P. Adams Sitney and Scott MacDonald. And, there is Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction with contributions by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu. As well, on the subjects of film festivals, Piers Handling and Cameron Baily contribute to Take 100 and so does Olivier Père.
I am still new to book-ordering, and there are many publishers that I have yet to create accounts with, which might explain any omissions. But on the whole I think the selection is quite good. I hope that people come by and discover the pleasures of a good film book and insightful film criticism. And if you follow Toronto Film Review make sure to say hello.

* Even Kieron Corless who writes for Sight & Sound is skeptical of Nick James hyperbolic statements,

""Right now, British cinema is the best in Europe,” S&S editor Nick James recently proclaimed to a startled office."

*****Festival 11 Screenings : More TIFF films to go see (for my previous list check out my last editorial) include the new Bertrand Bonello, House of Tolerance (check out Marcus Pinn on Bonello’s The Pornographer). And Toubiana, as well as Cahiers, recommends the new Nanni Moretti. Make sure to support the Wavelength program at TIFF 2011, which will be playing Blake Williams’ Coorow-Latham Road (and he also has one of the best Toronto Film blogs R, and G, and B), Chris Kennedy’s 349 (for Sol LeWitt), and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Chevelle. Check out Igor Drljaca’s short-film The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar, one of the First Generation Toronto Directors, which will be playing in Programme 2 (Sunday September 11th at 8:45PM, Lightbox 3) as part of Short Cuts Canada. I hope to watch and review Twixt and Café de Flore. While Steam Whistle hosts Kieślowski in Posters, which sounds great, especially as they have one of the coolest bars in town - make sure to get your free sample ;-).

Aleksandra Mir’s video The Seduction of Galileo Galilei at Mercer Union was a lot of fun, it was cool to see the Mercer Union gang helping her create the tower of tires out in Stouffville (the essay in the pamphlet by Sarah Robayo Sheridan is a great introduction to Mir’s work). And, the new repertory The Projection Booth (see the link bar) out in the East end is a great addition to Toronto’s film scene.

Film Writing : The first online issue of Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu’s Lola is up ; so far I have only read Richard Porton’s great overview of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, but the rest looks terrific. There is the new Ray Durgnat website that is up and running. The new editions of Pardo Live is up, Robert Koehler has a great piece on L’Avventura in Sight & Sound, Andy (Toronto Now) has a few more Wes Craven posts, Louis Menand has a piece on Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, Kristin Thomson writes some more on 3D films, and John Semley has an oral history of Suspect Video. The TIFF 2011 catalogue is a well put together and since I only know one person who worked on it, José Teodoro, I want to shout him out for the good work. Good job everyone else!

Martin Morrow’s writing for The Grid irks me. How a guy like this got a job telling people about film is beyond me. Especially as The Grid has much better writers, like Jason Anderson and Adam Nayman, who seem confined to short capsules of less interesting films.

What to expect in September: I have been working on a Woody Allen post for the last month, I think that I will post it late in September after the festival hype is all over. It is cool that Emmanuelle Burdeau (Capprici) added me as a friend on Facebook, I am still planning on writing about his Judd Apattow book. And I think that I am still working on a Cassavetes post. I need to thank the Daniel Gallay who contributed a great piece on Joyce Wieland (who also has a film playing in Wavelengths), thanks a lot man! I would also like to thank Jon Davies for putting a link to my website in his blog-roll and to Marc Saint-Cyr who shouted me out over at his blog Subtitle Literate (his comments on Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room are also worth checking out).

In regards to my August Editorial, Andrew Tracy informed me that Scope has nothing against Cahiers and that what I highlighted were individual contributers comments that were non- generalizable. I think that he has a point.

Have a good month,
David Davidson

A Woman’s Work is Rarely Done (or Backwards in Heels)

2011-08-15T07:20:00.013-05:00

This is the second guest contribution from Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

For Andréa Picard

“And there will be poets like this! When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man – up till now abominable – will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871

I have had many experiences viewing films that have expanded my consciousness. The films of Paolo Gioli and Joseph Cornell come to mind, as do Welles, Warhol, Rivette, Antonioni, and, of course, Rossellini. These artists have all offered me tremendous experiences. The most important experiences I’ve yet had, however, have been through the work of women filmmakers. The films of Catherine Breillat, for example, have impacted me immensely. From her I learned, among other things, that feminism could be as faulty as chauvinism. By that I mean that within chauvinism, a woman must be a man’s version of a woman, but within feminism, a woman must often be a woman’s version of a man. (To this I’ll add that from her films I learned that the only thing I truly know about women is that I’m not one.) From that I understood that all things and all circumstances must be viewed with respect for their own individual content. This, I find, is achieved nowhere better than in the films of female directors.
Films with this approach that immediately come to mind are Glimpses of the Garden and Lights by Marie Menken. In these films there is a sensitive observation and respect for the inherent content of the subjects of these films, in this case a garden and lights. These things do not have their own consciousness, of course, but they are still accepted and respected by Menken if only because they exist. The presence that permeates these films can also be sensed, in relation to performers this time, in the films of Agnès Varda and Ida Lupino, particularly in the climactic scenes of the latter’s The Bigamist and The Hitchhiker. Chantal Akerman and Tacita Dean, too, take this approach to beautiful extremes with the huge, spiritual gulps of time and subject in their work. To elaborate on this further, however, I will touch on what I find to be one of the finest examples of this particular kind of filmmaking, the films of Joyce Wieland.

In her short work, such as Sailboat, Birds at Sunrise, or Rat Life and Diet in North America, there is a constant presence of acceptance. Even in Barbara’s Blindness, there seems to be an acceptance of the found film footage she is editing. In terms of acceptance itself, anyone who has experienced either side of true acceptance knows the courage the act takes. It calls for a steely nerve and a concrete, dignified sense of self. This authentic sense of acceptance is very present in her one feature length film, The Far Shore, although in this case with several other elements also at play. Too “normal” for the avant-garde and too “weird” for the mainstream, The Far Shore is a generally unknown and unseen film that easily stands beside her greatest accomplishments as an artist. Like her quilt works, it intelligently and subversively reclaims something dismissively relegated to the domain of the woman. In the case of the quilts, it is “woman’s work” and in the case of The Far Shore, it is the “woman’s film” – the melodrama. Within the structures of this genre, she speaks to the nature of the artist in Canada, the relationship between Anglophones and Francophones, but most importantly, the place of the Free Woman (in a mental and emotional sense, at least) in modern society. She does this in a number of ways – through abstraction and satire and through her tremendous compositions – but mainly through that very essential and fine edged acceptance. Most notably, it is visible in the performances, or more accurately said, the performers. This is due to a very intricate relationship that, I think, lies at the heart of these films. In The Far Shore (and in many of the other films mentioned here), there are often infinitesimally small gestures visible in the performers that are very affecting. They are of such consequence because they are not emanating from the performers within the artificial construct of the film, but from the person, the human, reacting to the artificial construct of the film. This is very complex, and would be regarded by less sensitive and perceptive artists as mistakes, whereas they are, in fact, triumphs. The main thing this approach accomplishes is that it renders the elements of the film as subjects rather than objects. This permits them dignity, autonomy and true vitality. These acts are not of forcing things into existence, but of being aware of what will exist and permitting it to by creating the proper conditions. It’s the reverse of the typically assumed direction; backward, like Ginger Rogers to Fred Astaire. It’s similar, too, to that tremendous, almost Franciscan effort that it takes to actually see the sky – to look up and allow the sky to exist and not have it blotted out by your assumptions. It’s a very selfless act, a sublimely passive one, and, I will say, an importantly feminine one.

I am, by no means, implying that only women are capable of this approach. The films of Rossellini in both film and television could easily be said to have these elements; as can works like Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop or certain works by Nathaniel Dorsky, like Summerwind. All people have these capacities within them -- like Lorca said, “Mi alma de niña y niño” (My soul is both male and female). Though, in my experience it seems that directors who are women can most wholly and organically accomplish this effect. Experiencing works like these that take such an independent mind have been extraordinary for me. This is in part because they are so delicate, and in part because they are so rare. Until Rimbaud’s statements on the female poet are true to a greater extent, however, the last word will come from one of these rare, courageous and important Free Women: “There should always be a giving to the senses and an enrichment of the soul.... It's a way to tell the truth but it's also a way to open vision, how to see.” (Joyce Wieland).

Daniel Gallay
*****Further Viewing: The CFMDC’s recently released box set of the complete works of Joyce Wieland is cause for celebration. It is available through the CFMDC.

Further Reading: Johanne Sloan’s recent Canadian Cinema monograph on Wieland’s The Far Shore is an invaluable resource for information on the film. Cinematheque Ontario’s monograph on Wieland is also an excellent source of information on the artist’s work in film. Both are available at the TIFF.Shop at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

August Editorial

2011-07-29T09:59:00.026-05:00

The long awaited issue of Positif, Les Grands Entretiens [The Important Interviews], was put onto the shelves at the Maison de la Presse International on July 15th (after I picked up my copy there was only one left, which was already shopworn). This special issue brings together many of the magazine’s interviews from the 1970s and 1980s, featuring ones with Michelangelo Antonioni, John Boorman, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Shôhei Imamura, Terrence Malick, Maurice Pialat, Claude Sautet, Dino Rosi, Andrei Tarkovski, Andrzej Wajda et al. In its editorial Yann Tobin highlights that since the emergence of Positif in 1952, the magazine has always prided itself on the length and quality of its interviews (it is no surprise then that a lot of them can also be found in the Conversations with Filmmakers series). For Positif and Cahiers du Cinéma these out-of-series issues, book publishing efforts and programming are positive ways that the magazines can increase their visibility and capitalize on their taste. These efforts serve to back up their views pertaining to the importance of these filmmakers. The interviews in Les Grands Entretiens are insightful. Here are some comments that I think are worth sharing:

“For Un chien andalou, I looked for a title that had nothing to do with the film. There was no dog, nor Andalusia.” - Luis Buñuel

“It’s not that the décor has a function; it is just that the décor is natural for these people.” – Michelangelo Antonioni

“When I first started I usually finished my scenes with a zoom to a close-up of a face, but I soon stoped as the effect was really mediocre. Which has led to the distancing that can be felt in my films.” – Hou Hsiao-Hsien

“I lean towards classicism, I like my pizzas solely with cheese.” – Woody Allen

*****On the subject of special issues, I want to bring up Cahiers’ anniversary issues: since its first issue on April 1st, 1951 the magazine has celebrated every 100 issues published. The first one on October 1959 (N.100) has a beautiful illustration on the cover by Jean Cocteau with the text ‘le 100 d’un poète.’ The issue has contributions from Jean Cocteau, Alexandre Astruc, Jacques Becker, Claude Chabrol and Ingmar Bergman. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze offers his own L’histoire des Cahiers that goes back to La Revue du Cinema, which was first published in 1929 but failed due to poor sales. Cahiers would retain the layout of La Revue but not its name. The other editors at that time were Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin, Jacques Bourgeois, Doniol-Valcroze; and there was also the Ciné-club Objectif 49. In his histoire Doniol-Valcroze describes the magazine as being a salient beginning of a serious study on cinema that progressed from Bazin’s La Stylistique de Robert Bresson, Éric Rohmer’s Vanité que la peinture, Jean Domarchi’s exposition on F.W. Murnau and specific issues dedicated to Jean Renoir (N.8) and Charlie Chaplin (N.17-18). But for Doniol-Valcroze, the turning point for Cahiers was François Truffaut’s Une certaine tendance du cinéma français, as he points out,

“I am not looking to flatter Truffaut, who is quite mocking, nor to suggest that his writings on the cinema are always set in stone. I am just stating objectively that the publication of this article marked the real starting point of what is now, for right or wrong, Cahiers du Cinéma.”

The next anniversary issue is Cahiers N.200-201, which has Henri Langlois on the cover, and in this issue, Action Cinemas thanks Cahiers for their passionate writing, and there are letters from Jean Renoir, Abel Gance, Pierre Kast, François Truffaut, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Claude Ollier, Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Rouch. Renoir writes,

“Cahiers did the right thing by me because they are Cahiers. I like them because I like cinema and it is hard to like one without liking the other.”

The magazine gets famous directors to put together these 100th anniversary issues; Jean-Luc Godard put the 300th issue together, Wim Wenders did the 400th, Martin Scorsese did the 500th issue, and Takeshi Kitano contributed a ciné-manga to the 600th issue. The 300th issue is a cryptic Godardian masterpiece that has a lot to say about cinema – past, present, and future – through a collage of images, text and juxtaposition. In his issue, Scorsese discusses the filmmakers of his generation (i.e. Brian de Palma, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Coppola), what it was like working with Robert De Niro, recounts his cinephilic youth (similar to his recent A Letter to Elia), talks about New York, mentions his fondness for English cinema (go figure), and interviews several filmmakers. Included is a series of Scorsese portraits by the great photographer Raymond Depardon.

Cahiers is now on its 669th issue and in a few years it will be celebrating its 700th. I hope the guest they choose to curate it will match up to its predecessors or even blow them out of the water. My nomination: Francis Ford Coppola. His new film Twixt will be premiering at TIFF 2011, it follows the story of a writer (Val Kilmer) who gets wrapped in a murder mystery in a gothic California town.

*****

“What is the most striking about this [striptease] scene is not its frank sexuality, which can be found in innumerable small budget films that play in the United State on cable and on video cassettes, but the pedantry of its mise-en-scène that utilize a venerable grammar of classical cinema to assure that the stupidest spectator understands (…) One must signal Verhoeven’s unique manifestation of aesthetic courage: Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon, the actresses that respectively play Nomi and Christal, are truly vulgar.” - Bill Krohn, from his Cahiers (N.498) review of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls.

*****On the subject of the Toronto-based film magazine Cinema Scope, I want to say that I don’t like how they put down Cahiers every chance they get (when the writers, at least the ones that I know, don’t even speak French) and that they never acknowledge the greatest of all film magazines, Positif (it is not even included in their links).
In the latest issue of Scope (N.47) Olaf Möller writes, “The reason for this critical neglect lies in the Nouvelle Vague’s Cahiers du Cinéma-front” and the University of Alberta professor Jerry White (one of the more recognizable Canadian film-writers along with William Beard) writes, “If there is any pedantry on display here [in Opening Bazin], it’s less in the spirit of the enterprise than in certain of the contributions, especially those of the French scholars.”

This snubbing of Cahiers even extends to humiliation as Kent Jones over at Project Cinephila ridicules the thought of taking M. Night Shyamalan, a director Cahiers has championed, seriously. This wouldn’t be bad, as everyone is entitled to their opinion, except that Jones’ background comes from writing at Cahiers – his pieces from this period can be found in Physical Evidence – which gives the impression that the magazine is now irrelevant, when it is everything but. Even Mark Peranson, the editor of Scope, has contributed a couple of pieces to Cahiers.

Cahiers and Positif are as relevant as ever when it comes to better understanding particular film, what is going on cinema and to understanding cultural differences in the reception of film. The omission of Positif from the majority of film discourse is a real shame as they offer one of the most generous and knowledgeable points of view and each new issue offers the most authoritative coverage of subjects spanning films, books, festivals, DVDs, guest contributions and so much more. Where else other than Positif can one find writing like Élise Domenach’s piece Honneur a la place critique Americaine!, Domenach writes,

“In the ‘end of cinema’ described by Jim Hoberman (Village Voice), criticism rediscovers itself in the role that was assigned to it by Rudolf Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer: registering the links between cinema and the zeitgeist.”

Meanwhile, Michel Ciment writes quite frankly about the aims of Positif and its connection to Cahiers in the latest issue (N.605-606),

“I’ve always thought that we were part of the same cinephilic combat. If we were to establish a list of directors that were championed in either magazine (and often the two championed the same names) in the last sixty years, then we would find ourselves faced with everything that has counted in world cinema during this period. And I hope not to be wrong…”

*****First off, and most importantly, I am sad to hear about the closing of the Technicolor factory in Mirabel. And the situation in Tehran for the filmmakers is getting worst and worst, which is tragic. Not everything on planet cinema is going fine…

July viewing experiences: It was great to see what Chris Kennedy (Tamalpais) has been working on. His new footage is of a glistening river surrounded by trees whose greens seem to be glowing, which is shot from a variety of perspective and in three different film stocks; Kate MacKay even has a cameo. The Jikagenzo!!! program by Tomonari Nishikawa was a well curated group of short films, as you can expect from Early Monthly Segments. Aliza Ma programmed a couple of Ernie Gehr films. And the 3D travelogue for Nova Scotia is brilliant as it gives the impression of floating over its waters and climbing over its mountain peaks: a movable Group of Seven?

The New Auteurs is shaping up to be one of the highlights of the TIFF Cinematheque’s programming and the beautiful and strange films of João Pedro Rodrigues was no exception. Everyone was comparing him to Pedro Almodóvar but, I think, he is closer to Christophe Honoré. Rodrigues’ Two Drifters was one of lucky few to make Olivier Père future of film list in Take 100. The other films on his list includes Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Adhen, Judd Apatow’s Funny People, Jan Bonny’s Counterparts, Quentin Dupieux’s Steak, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, Mia Hansen-Løve’s All is Forgiven, Raya Martin’s A Short Film About The Indio Nacional, Axelle Ropert’s The Wolberg Family, and Zach Snyder’s Watchmen. On the subject of Père, it is worth mentioning that the Locarno programming this year seems really good; I look forward to reading its coverage. Père is one of those unique writers that contributes to both Cahiers and Scope, though I much prefer the writing over at his blog where he gets to pick and choose what he wants to write about and to what length. I also want to eventually check out his Jacques Demy book.

Michael Bay is an auteur (See: either Brad Deane or the GQ piece). It needs to be said that so far one of the most compelling summer blockbusters is his Transformers: Dark of the Moon. On a purely surface level, Michael Bay creates these unforgettable images; like when Sentinel Prime shoots down and then sits on the Lincoln Memorial. The imagination. And in the film there is an undercurrent of the post-student anxieties of finding a job within a fantastical American society. Bay champions these very American ideals like individual courage, liberty and freedom. Like Tony Scott with his flailing camera filming those trains in Unstoppable and J. J. Abrams making his teenager zombie movie in Super 8 and now Bay with his G.I. Joes and Hasbro trucks in Transformers these three filmmakers demonstrates that some of the most passionate and innovative work is coming from these boys just playing with their filmmaking toys in their grown-up sandbox. There is even compelling human drama within the grand mechanical spectacle. These are the filmmakers to look out for when it comes to managing resources and technologies to create IMAX, 3D and UltraAVX catastrophic pyrotechnics.

I am dumbfounded so many people like the senior-friendly cliché-ridden audience-pandering food-sploitation The Trip. Michael Winterbottom has said in an interview about working with Steve Coogan on Tristram Shandy, "A lot of elements of our story are actually close to things he's done in real life." But my question is, who really cares if he's both dull and annoying?

“Imagination is what English cinema most cruelly lacks; in the cinema of that country, where stars look like their queen, everything is grey and ineffective, slow-witted and arduously painstaking. The British cinema is made of dullness and reflects a submissive life-style, where enthusiasms, warmth, and zest are nipped in the bud.
A film is a born loser just because it is English. Even a good script filmed by a good director and performed by good actors in England will most likely end up as a bad film. Why? This is the only mystery that English cinema has in store for us. – François Truffaut*****Film writing: In Cahiers (N. 668), Bill Krohn writes about Stuart Gordon while in the new issue (N.669) there is a special on Claudine Paquot and Super 8. In Positif, (N.604) Jean-Pierre Coursodon has a piece on Arthur Penn and in the new issue (N.605-606) the feature is on the late Claude Chabrol. Gavin Smith has a couple of pieces in the new Film Comment. Dave Kehr reviews some DVDs. Jean-Michel Frodon has a piece on Denis Côté. Micheal Sicinski has a piece on Nicolás Pereda over at the Museum of Moving Images. Girish has a couple of new posts. David Bordwell has an article on 3D Films. There are Helen Faradji’s weekly editorials over at 24 Images. And Michel Ciment contribution is the highlight of the International Film Guide 2011.

The line up for the Toronto International Film Festival 2011 has been unveiled and just browsing through the list the following names jumped out at me: David Cronenberg, Mathieu Demy (Jacques’s son), Cédric Khan, Todd Solondz, Alexander Payne, Nanni Moretti, the Duplass brothers, William Friedkin. I was recommended to check out Robert Lieberman’s Breakaway. And make sure to get your tickets for Wavelength early, as it is sure to sell out.

Over at Cannes, Edouard Waintrop will be replacing Frédéric Boyer as artistic director of the Directors Fortnight, which is frustrating as Stéphane Delorme explains in Cahiers that he was just getting a hang on things. What one bad year will do to you...

Here is some local coverage: there is Marc Saint-Cyr’s verdict of the Fellini exhibition for the Toronto Film Scene and he has a post on some Tarkovsky-inspired photographs. Andy writes about the master of suspense Wes Craven. James has a post on Robert Altman. Everyone’s favorite usher Dan Goodbaum made an online cooking show, whose tone blends Stan Brakhage with Julia Child. And I want to shout out Jake Wilson who has a link to Toronto Film Review over at his blog, great reviews man!

I’ve heard of some film books that seem interesting in particularly Stephane du Mesnildot’s Fantômes du cinéma japonais. There is Paul Vecchiali’s L'encinéclopédie : cinéastes français des années 1930 et leur œuvre, though, I am with Serge Bozon on this one, I would rather pick up Christophe Bier’s Dictionnaire des films français pornographiques et érotiques 16 et 35 mm. There is a new issue of De L'incidence Éditeur. And I cannot wait to check out Chris MaGee’s Tokyo contribution to the World Film Locations series.

*****August Listings: A movie everyone should go see is Jay Cheel’s Beauty Day which will be playing at the new repertory Projection Booth (1035 Gerrard St. East). Local film-critic Andrew Parker says that it is one of the best movies of the year and he has good taste. On a side note, Andy also has his first review up in Toronto Now on the mediocre Smurf movie. There is also James Quandt's series Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neorealism and some miscellaneous Cinematheque stuff. Miranda July will be in attendance to premiere The Future at The Royal courtesy of the Images Festival. The Toronto Film Society screenings sound really good too, I wish I could attend more of them. And I also want to see Attack the Block and Cowboys & Aliens.

***** It was cool that this month I had a chance to interview Adam Nayman (The Grid) on the subject of his great lecture series at the JCC (make sure to come to the last class on WA on the 8th). I wrote a bit about Canadian cinema: there was a Summer 2011 overview and a review of Peter Harcourt’s book on Jean Pierre Lefebvre. And I also wrote about the Phaidon book Magnum Cinema.

What you can expect from Toronto Film Review for the month of August? I am not quite sure, though I want write about Emmanuel Burdeau’s book on Judd Apatow and Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes. But, as always, I give myself room to get distracted and write about other things.

Have a good month,
David Davidson
*****Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
*** (A Must-See)
*****Beauty Day (Jay Cheel, 2011)
*** (A Must-See)
*****Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)
*** (A Must-See)
*****Caterpillar (Kōji Wakamatsu, 2010)
** (Worth Seeing)

Jean Pierre Lefebvre's video work (a book by Peter Harcourt)

2011-07-18T12:29:00.026-05:00

Title: Jean Pierre Lefebvre: Vidéaste*
Series: Canadian Directors**
Author: Peter Harcourt
Publisher: Toronto International Film Festival Group (2001)
Pages: 91
Price: $9.95
*****“Once we understand its conventions, it can inspire the human delight that we feel for the best of folk art.” – Peter Harcourt

It is topical to review a book on an important Canadian director after writing a post on contemporary Canadian cinema as a way to contextualize today's output alongside its heritage. Peter Harcourt writes that “the films of Jean Pierre Lefebvre helped consolidate a sense in Québec of an emerging national cinema.” And his career begins as a film-critic, like those New Wave guys, though, unlike them, he's still one with regular contributions to 24 images; his latest entry was on Serge Giguère (N. 151). Inspired by Gilles Groulx's Le chat dans le sac (1964), Lefebvre's first film Le révolutionnaire (1965) was one of the first landmarks of Québécois cinema. His National Film Board work is as innovative and beautiful as anything by Gilles Carle and Il ne faut pas mourir pour ca (1967) was the first Canadian film to premiere at Cannes. The Harcourt-Lefebvre book explores the L’Âge des images*** (1994-1995) series that was made after Le fabuleux voyage de l’ange (1991), which was aggressively rejected by the critics, and before his lastest effort the TV movie Le manuscrit érotique (2002). Pertaining to his influence, Piers Handling notes, “Many of the new generation of Anglophone filmmakers – among them Atom Egoyan, Jeremy Podeswa, Bill MacGillivray and Bruno Pacheco – have cited Lefebvre as a formative influence.”

Lefebvre’s examines his early film-going experiences in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Snapshots from Québec and discusses them with warmth and passion; the essay itself is divided into helpful sub-headings which themselves form a narrative: Chance and Neccesity, Candid Eye, Cinema Direct, Cinema Verite, Time/Money, Form/Content. Lefebvre speaks kindly of his mother who “judged films on only on criterion: the film was good if it made her laugh or cry.” After the NFB reign of propaganda and folkloric images, according to Lefebvre, “If the pot began to simmer in 1956, especially at the NFB, it was in 1958 that it boiled over with thirteen short films for the television series Candid Eye on the one hand, and the film Les Raquetteurs shot by Gilles Groulx in collaboration with Michel Brault and Marcel Carrière on the other." The most representative film of the cinema direct period is Gilles Groulx’s Golden Gloves (1961) and for cinéma vérité there is Pierre Perrault’s Pour la Suite du Monde (1963) and Claude Jutra’s A Tout Prendre (1964), according to Lefebvre.

Peter Harcourt’s The Music of Light: The Video Work of Jean Pierre Lefebvre is the centerpiece of the book and it is an analysis of the five episode series L’Âge des images; the episodes are Le Pornolithique, L’Écran invisible, Comment filmer Dieu, Mon chien n’est pas mort, and La Passion de l’innocence. Harcourt examines the genesis of Lefebvre aesthetic approach and its impact - “His films combine the formal authority of Michael Snow with the compassionate humanity of Jean Renoir” - and divides his work into three categories: the personal, the political, and the pastoral. Harcourt compares Lefebvre with Jean-Luc Godard as, at the time, they both had difficulty financing films, which result is a turn towards video, and L’Âge des images is contrasted with Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998). The comparison is apt though it might be pushing it as Lefebvre is not as epochal as Jean-Luc Godard, who is described by Raymond Bellour (Trafic) as, “It is through the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard that the history of cinema - understood as the history of the twentieth century – was forever divided.” And on Godard’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du Cinema, Antoine de Baecque writes, “Unrivalled in terms of its ambition, and aesthetically peerless, it is the culmination of our time.” It is worth mentioning here that the Godard lectures at the Conservatory of Cinematographic Art at Concordia University in the late 1970s, which Lefebvre brings up, are in the process of being put together in a book by the publisher Caboose in Montreal.

The videos in the L’Âge des images seem both narratively and thematically interconnected and the scope is as broad and diverse as an examination of the origins of cosmological time to the Clarence Thomas versus Anita Hill sexual harassment hearing (in the interview it is discusses how this came to be). There are appropirations of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s Babes in Toyland (1934) and intertextual references to the Group of Seven. L’Écran invisible is about potential and family, in Comment filmer Dieu Lefebvre interviews his cameraman Lionel Simmons, Mon chien n’est pas mort is about Lefebvre's family pup Kathy, and La Passion de l’innocence is described as being “full of longuers,” which are “quiet, slow moments of contemplation that invite participation by the audience.” In the special 100th issue of 24 Images one of the features got ten Québécois directors to expand on the one film that most marked them: Lefebvre answer is Umberto D. for its humanity in harsh circumstances, its focus on ordinary people, and its emphasis on regular gestures.

Some interesting comments from Lefebvre from the interview include: Lefebvre says that, “I’ve always loved wrestling,” which is strange as it is presented almost as one of the most nauseating activities imaginable in Le Pornolithique where, “I also tried to see things through the eyes of Sammy, my newborn baby." While the idea for La Passion de l’innocence came from what was not happening, "I was waiting to shoot a feature film, waiting and waiting and nothing was happening.”

Like all books on Canadian cinema, Lefebvre provides his own perspective on its necessity,

“Consider as well all the filmmakers who personify the concept of national cinema: Renoir, Ford, Hawks, Buñuel (three nations), Eisenstein, Mizoguchi, Kobayashi, Bergman, Lang, Wenders, Renais, Griffith, De Sica, Fellini … you will notice that not only do the stories they recount originate in their environment, but also the form through which they transmit those stories is a perfect amalgam of the specifics of that envinroment and the attendant emotion: the emotion of belonging to a corner of the world, a river bank, a mountain, a lake, an ocean, a season, another human being.”

The reoccurring complaint is there that “either the Canadian cinema would survive or it will become American.” Harcourt and Lefebvre, in short, argue for a stronger presence of experimental cinema against that of the entertainment ideology of Hollywood and this can viewed by the important role experimental film has in Canada from Café Ex in Ottawa to the Winnipeg Film Group to the Images Festival in Toronto to Media City in Windsor to Phil Hoffman's Film Farm and to Isuma Productions. Lefebvre says it best, “Beyond all doubt, the concept of a national creation, and a national cinema, is of great importance as it is linked to the nation of belonging, which is in turn linked to the instinct for survival.”

*****“Although Robin didn’t much care about the new cinemas that were emerging [in the 1960s] from, say, the previously invisible cultures of Latin America or Canada, the work he was doing on largely the Hollywood product was all part of the burgeoning excitement of the times…. But we continued to have our quarrels. I would get annoyed at some of the more pompous assertions he would make in CineAction!, especially if related to Canadian film.” - Peter Harcourt

This quote from the latest issue of CineAction (N.84) - whose feature is Robin Wood in Celebration, which includes pieces by William MacGillivray (whose Life Classes was important to Wood) and Olof Hedling - asserts a strong impulse to support a burgeoning and over-looked national cinema in opposition to Hollywood. Even though after reading the Lefebvre book one can get the impression that Harcourt feels that cinema both begins and ends with Lefebvre - he even has another book on Lefebvre (Canadian Film Institute, 1981) – my point is that the endeavor is honorable. I first discovered Harcourt as he was already a recognizable name (I remember seeing one of his books at the CFI office in Ottawa) and, what really caught my eye, is that he is the only Canadian brought up in Raymond Durgnat’s seminal text Films and Feelings. There is this sense of validation associated with seeing Canadians positively recognized in the international film community. Like how in the photographer Jeff Wall’s Rainfilled Suitcase (2001), which mounted light-box can be seen in its vivid glory at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the vintage yellow Tim Hortons coffee cup – Timmy’s being one of Canada’s most identifiable products – becomes a symbol of Canadiana within a nondescript scene. Spotting this detail, like noticing the Harcourt reference, is a pleasant recognition of seeing even just a small part of Canada within great work being discussed in a more international setting. The same applies to Timothy Barnard’s introduction to the new edition of André Bazin’s What is Cinema? where he discuses the peculiarities of reading and translating Bazin into French- and English-Canadian.

Not that people have an aversion to Canadian films, well, maybe they do. It is just that it is rarely discussed by the heavyweight film-critics. An example of a ‘heavyweight’ is Dave Kehr who on his indispensable blog contributors from around the world put in their two cents on his “weekly column on film history.” His background as discussed in the long-awaited When Movies Mattered is a post-Sarris focus on the transition from classical to post-classical Hollywood with an emphasis on “filmmakers who built on the past, who seemed dedicated not to trampling on the classical model but trying to reconfigure it,” like Cassavetes, Demme, Scorsese, Schrader and Brooks. It’s almost funny how the “uncharted territory” of his DVD reviews includes Swedish silent-films, the long unavailable work of Naruse Mikio and even in his new “Further Research” column in Film Comment – which features un-canonized directors like John H. Auer - there is hardly ever any references to Canadian cinema. On that note I would like to highlight some note-worthy Canadian DVDs that have recently come out: the Eclipse box set The Actuality Dramas of Allan King, Patricia Rozema’s I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, the long unavailable work of Joyce Wieland on a 5-DVD box set by CFMDC, and Daruma Pictures release of Midi Onodera’s video work.

Even as I write this I realize that maybe the lack of serious critical reflection has to do with both relevancy and quality of Canadian cinema. After attending all of the João Pedro Rodrigues films as part of the New Auteurs series at the TIFF Cinematheque and watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life; it is obvious that they are more formally invigorating and conversation worthy. In To Die Like a Man when Tonia (Fernandos Santos) goes off into the fairytale forest with her boyfriend and the two cross-dressers where they sit down – the screen becomes a roseate tableaux - and listen to Baby Dee’s Cavalry; the effect is hypnotizing. As Brad Deane puts it, it’s cinema. This is a long way away from watching an old tape and sitting on an uncomfortable chair with big clunky headphones at the Film Reference Library. Even Lefebvre writes about his work “What I’ve wanted to insist upon and to apply to my films… is the right to adopt a small scale, to make films that don’t claim to be absolute masterpieces.”

I guess what I am trying to advocate for, at least in my own writing, is a mediation between art-house, Hollywood and Canadian cinema. But my only concern is that I hope studies in it can become a marketable asset, as say, that of being an expert on Blake Edwards as is the friendly Sam Wasson who has two popular books on the subject and who recently came to the Lightbox to introduce Breakfast at Tiffany's. I want to eventually apply to do my Masters in Film Studies at the University of Toronto in the hopes, for now at least, to write about the renegade Québécois filmmaker Gilles Carles; as well, I would like to explore certain key Québécois films and their similarities with the work of Robert Altman; and, what exactly constitutes Québécois film language. I would hope that it would be a rich experience for both myself and for other people to hear and read about. – David Davidson

******Jean Pierre Lefebvre: Vidéaste is divided into the following sections: a preface by Handling; two articles by Lefebvre, the autobiographical Snapshots from Québec and The Concept of National Cinema. The centerpiece of the book is Harcourt’s essay The Music of Light: The Video Work of Jean Pierre Lefebvre on L'Âge des images and there is an interview with the director, his filmography and a selected bibliography.

**The Canadian Director series is part of the TIFF Cinematheque publications that includes books on Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Don Owen, Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and Allan King; as well, in a different series, books on Jack Chambers, Peter Mettler, and Joyce Wieland. While the Canadian Cinema series, which are extended textual analysis of key Canadian films, has books so far on A History of Violence, Le Déclin de l'empire américain, The Adjuster, A Married Couple, The Far Shore and My Winnipeg. These books are available at the TIFF.Shop.

***The Film Reference Library at the TIFF Bell Lightbox has L'Âge des images I, III, IV and V. Though the FRL will be closed for July and August, you can always set up an appointment with Eve to view their collection. The NFB Mediatheque has both of Lefebvre’s NFB films: Mon amie Pierrette (1967) and Jusqu’au Coeur (1968).

Canadian Cinema (Summer 2011)

2011-07-14T12:35:00.040-05:00

It's time to get patriotic over here at Toronto Film Review as I attempt to provide an overview of Canadian cinema – an idea sparked by reading Tom McSorley’s contribution in the International Film Guide 2011 – by grouping together the various elements that constitute it. The four different categories that will be explored are: the first-tier directors, which are the ones that have the most international recognition; the second-tier directors, which are accomplished filmmakers who have yet to cross the border; the directors of short-films; and Québécois cinema.

In Toronto, in anticipation for TIFF 2011 one cannot help but think of the projects that our directors are working on for possible nominees for the Opening Gala and Canada First! so from this ‘first-tier’ category those who have completed films or have ones in production include David Cronenberg, Deepa Mehta, Guy Maddin, Bruce McDonald and Don Shebib. Peter Mettler is editing a new film. Atom Egoyan is now preparing an opera. For the ‘second-tier’ directors, my point of reference is Adam Nayman’s piece in Montage where he discusses with some filmmakers their possible dream projects. The directors on this list include Carl Bessai, Kari Skoglang, Lynne Stopkewich, Ingrid Verninger, David Weaver, David Christensen and Jerry Cioccritti. I would also include here Sarah Polley, Ron Mann, Michael Dowse, Simon Ennis, Jason Eisener, John Greyson, Patricia Rozema, Philip Hoffman, Vincenzo Natali, Sook-Yin Lee, Charles Officer, and Lee Demarbre. Other note-worthy talents that have been highlighted in Cinema Scope include Bruce LaBruce, Daniel Cockburn and Isabelle Lavigne. Pertaining to short films (and some of the directors have gone on to features) there is the First Generation school, with directors from both Ryerson and York, which includes Kazik Radwanski, Nicolás Pereda (who currently has a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives), Chris Chong Chan Fui, Igor Drljaca, Shervin Kermani, and the Vancouver-based Antoine Bourges (who is completing his much-anticipated first full-length feature). These projects in waiting and the short-film directors getting ready for their first full-length feature just goes to show the bustling energy under the radar that should be ready to surface soon.

I don’t think people can talk about Québécois cinema without first acknowledging the important role Cinéma Beaubien plays in projecting their films as well that of the Cinémathèque québécoise; and there is also the Québécois film magazine 24 Images that continuously writes about and supports these filmmakers. In the new issue of 24 Images the feature is Renouveau du Cinema Québécois where they discuss the multifaceted subject of where their cinema is today and, though my attempt is not to convey its complexities here, I want to highlight Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan contribution (he did the feature on Québécois cinema in Cahiers) who writes about the different types of filmmakers. There is the “Québec’s New Wave” of the 1990s: Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Arto Paragamian and François Girard. The new auteurs of the 2000s: Denis Côté (who in the issue comments about his Director of Photography and Editor), Maxime Giroux (whose Jo pour Jonathan everyone’s talking about), Rafaël Ouellet, Stéphane Lafleur, Myriam Verreault and Henry Bernadet. While there are outsiders like Sophie Deraspe and Xavier Dolan who make “a cinema more artist.” While others still include Yves-Christian Fournier, Simon Galiero, Simon Lavoie, Simon Sauvé, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and Jacob Tierney. There are also the COOP Video de Montréal filmmakers like Bernard Émond, Catherine Martin and Robert Morin. There were some Québec short films that were brought to Toronto this summer that were part of the program Québéc Gold. It is worth restating that Donigan Cumming’s Too Many Things and Theodore Ushev’s Lipsett Diaries are both masterpieces. And after all of that if there is one Québécois director that I have missed and that I think is making some of the most fantastic films (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria) in the entire country it is Jean-Marc Vallée whose new film Café de flore I am especially looking forward to see. - David Davidson

Interview with Adam Nayman (On Love Em or Hate Em: MORE Controversial Directors)

2011-07-09T08:48:00.030-05:00

In anticipation of Adan Nayman’s newest series of classes Love Em or Hate Em: MORE Controversial Directors, I decided to take the opportunity to meet up with the guy to ask him a few questions. In this new series there will be lectures on Lars von Trier on Monday July 11th, Michael Haneke on Monday July 18th, Luis Buñuel on Monday July 25th and Woody Allen on August 8th. All of the classes start at 7PM and are at Miles Nadal JCC (750 Spadina Avenue). – D.D.

Toronto Film Review : So Adam why these particular directors?

Adam Nayman : The first course seemed to go well, and I felt that the idea of talking about challenging filmmakers was still appealing to me. So I asked around about some other directors who might fit into this class, and Lars von Trier's name kept coming up, plus he was in the news at the time because of what he said at Cannes. And then from there, I thought that it would be good to pick some filmmakers who were a little less famous than the ones I did last time: Verhoeven, Cronenberg and Polanski are all artists who moved from the margins to the mainstream (less so Catherine Breillat). Buñuel is of course famous but maybe not to a non cinephile audience. Michael Haneke is well known and his films are polarizing but he's someone who people might want to learn more about. As for Woody Allen, he's more mainstream but in some ways he's a guy who begs to be considered as a kind of European art-house auteur even though he's American. I think that the throughline between all four filmmakers is that there are elements of satire and absurdity in their work -- all expressed very differently of course.

TFR : Buñuel is the one director out of the four that I am least familiar with. I remember seeing his Las Hurdes at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal. I was just wondering how many of his 34 titles have you seen? Are they available on DVD? I know Criterion Collection has released a few of them. And have you gone over his autobiography My Last Sigh? I remember Jonathan Rosenbaum was telling us that in the editing process from French to English that the editor was conspicuously editing things out; I wonder what he actually removed?

AN : I can't speak to the differences in the translations. That's something that Jonathan Rosenbaum would know more about then I do. And there's no lack of critical writing on Buñuel, but one of the things I want to work against is the idea that he mellowed as he got older -- that his late pictures are the work of a less strident filmmaker. For me, films like The Phantom of Liberty, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire are still examples of an artist challenging himself and his audience, right to the end. As for whether I've seen all of his films; I can't count offhand, but probably not.

TFR : I think Woody Allen is just great! And I am especially fond of his latest films, did you know that both You will meet a tall dark stranger and Midnight in Paris made the cover of Positif, which is not an easy task. And it is interesting to note that Richard Brody, one of the biggest Woody Allen partisans along with Eric Lax, sees the Barbara Kopple documentary Wild Man Blues (1997) as the beginning of his late period. Allen also excels at fiction; there is a big database over at The New Yorker of his collected work; I particularly recommend Udder Madness. Which brings me to how I like that you bring up his fictional writing in your review of Midnight in Paris. One of my favorites of his short stories is Fabrizio’s: Criticism and Response from Side Effects. Have you read that one? It is about a high-minded restaurant critic who writes these elaborate criticism and responses about restaurant food profiles, and in the process undermines the jargon of analysis:

“I began my meal with an antipasto, which at first appeared aimless, but as I focused more on the anchovies the point of it became clearer. Was Spinelli [the chef at the restaurant in question; Fabrizio’s Villa Nova Restaurant] trying to say that all life was represented here in this antipasto, with the black olives an unbearable reminder of mortality? If so, where was the celery? Was the omission deliberate? At Jacobelli’s the antipasto consists solely of celery. But Jacobelli is an extremist. He wants to call our attention to the absurdity of life. Who can forget his scampi: four garlic-drenched shrimp arranged in a way that says more about our involvement in Vietnam than countless books on the subject?”

Anyways, what themes are you going to highlight in your WA class?

AN : Yes, I like that essay, among others in Side Effects. Like Polanski, Allen’s films are not overtly transgressive (although I rewatched Husbands and Wives last night and was shocked by how raw it was). He does not craft extreme images. The controversy stems from his private life and the possibility that his films -- especially the ones in the 1990s -- are autobiographical. Polanski used to deny that sort of thing, and Allen doesn't encourage it, but it seems plain. I feel like Allen makes movies as a form of therapy -- like Lars von Trier -- but he seems to get less out of it; he has the same hangups and phobias as he did forty years ago. If you want to put it positively, you can say he's consistent; if you want to be negative you can say he's redundant.

TFR : Once when you and Andrew Tracy were in the tiff.shop, he picked up Screening Modernism and was saying that since the book had a blurb from David Bordwell that it was reason enough to buy it. I bring this up because there are some critics that I hardly see make these kind of blurbs. For example, there is Dave Kehr, out of all of my DVDS his name is only on two of them: James Cameron’s Ghosts of the Abyss and Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All. Though his DVD reviews for the New York Times are great as well he highlights books sometimes on his personal website. I bring this up as I have noticed your name only once on a DVD and it is on the Canadian film Six Figures. Are you quoted on any other DVDs? What is it about supporting these quality under-exposed Canadian films that you like?

AN : I have been quoted before on DVD boxes, sure. and I even wrote the liner notes for Sergei Dvortsevoy's film Tulpan (2008). Pull quotes can be funny to be read, and I've had my name on films I'm not sure I'd stand by now -- like the 2001 Canadian drama Treed Murray -- but it's not really an important thing one way or the other. On the other hand, I think it's great when critics get to write liner notes or essays for DVD releases, like my friend Mark Peranson’s text for the Pedro Costa Letters from Fontainhas Criterion box set and Michael Koresky’s pieces on The Actuality Dramas of Allan King Eclipse box-set. It’s not the format that most people usually look for penetrating criticism but they can be a wonderful supplement to the features on the disc. I think that Kent Jones has written better DVD booklet notes than most critics have ever written good film reviews. And I would rather read a pull-quote blurb by Dave Kehr then an entire review by Peter Travers.

TFR : Michael Haneke. That guy is controversial. I was blown away the first time I discovered Cinema Scope. It was an issue dedicated to the Cannes Film Festival and there was only one sentence (!) dedicated to the Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon. What I got from that was the position that sometimes the movies that are the most interesting are not the ones getting the main prizes at film festivals. What are your thoughts on Haneke?

AN : What I think Mark was getting at there, in his inimitable style, is that Haneke is a little old to be an enfant terrible. Though he always was a little too old. The Seventh Continent and Funny Games were films made by a guy in his forties, even though they feel more adolescent and even a bit snotty. You would picture their maker as a punk like Gaspar Noé rather than an older Austrian intellectual. I think Haneke has had that paradoxical thing happen to him where the more acknowledged his talents have become by the critical establishment, the less certain kinds of anti-establishment critics want to go the bat for him. I would say that I think he's one of the more brilliant contemporary directors in terms of composition, pacing, sustaining tone and staging acts of violence. He’s a born film director. Even The White Ribbon, which I didn't really want to write about either, there's more filmmaking savvy than in 90% of whatever came out that year. But it's also very much of a piece with his old work, thematically, and if someone finds his style didactic, there's nothing in the new movie that's going to change their mind. If a critic like Mark, or anyone else, found the didactic qualities of his old films unforgiving back then there is nothing that’s going to change their mind.

TFR : Do you recommend any particular film books relating to the directors in this series? I really tried to get you the Director’s Cut book on von Trier.

AN : Linda Badley 's book on von Trier in the Contemporary Film Directors series is good. She does not mythologize the guy, partially because he does that already himself. It's incisive analysis without a ton of jargon. The book on Woody Allen in the Masters of Cinema series is atrocious; it feels like the copy-editor was so bored that he stopped catching errors by the end, and I am not a fan of film books that you can read in 8 minutes. One of my favourite pieces on Haneke is a very negative short take by Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot, who describes him as the kind of guy who could not watch someone enjoy a steak without mentioning the abattoir. At the other end though there is Robin Wood, who was one of Haneke’s best champions. I do like the Directors Cuts series, even if I didn't use it for this class; the Spielberg book in the series is good, it made me think that in possible future iterations of this class that I could maybe focus on supposedly uncontroversial directors. I'd point to Spielberg as someone who's actually sort of complicated.

TRF : On von Trier, do you take his films seriously or do you see a kind of snarky derision in them to both the characters and the stories? I saw some black humor in Antichrist which I liked even thoughhe was always putting his characters through the most unbearable situations where things could not have gotten worst.

AN : I think in summation that Lars is funny. I think that snarky is only half of it. And I think that it is rare that his films end up on the side of snark. It is a weapon in his arsenal, and he is so good at it that people think his films are only snarky and mean. Re-watching Breaking the Waves or Dogville or Antichrist, I think that it is superficial to dismiss them as essentially mean-spirited. One of the things that I have come to think about Lars is the characters in his films that get punished are the ones he feels closer, whereas Haneke like to pummel people he has contempt for. A film like Antichrist would be unbearable if the film took Willem Dafoe’s point of view, but it has the courage, or the craziness, or both to align itself with Charlotte Gainsbourg even in her worst moments. Von Trier identifies with her character and how incredibly infuriating it is for her to be told how to feel and how to think by someone that is condescendingly trying to help her.

TRF : You got a Masters in Film Studies at the University of Toronto, right? I want to eventually do my Masters there and I was wondering a bit about their program and what are your thoughts of it?

AN : I loved their one-year program, even though I do not consider myself to be an academic as I have and will continue to work as a film-critic. They have a great faculty there: Bart Testa, Rob King, Nicholas Sammond and Corin Columpar are all terrific. Any graduate or under-graduate student would be lucky to study with them, listen to them and be listened to by them. I don’t know if it is true of all graduate film programs, but U of T offered a lot of space for students to contribute and lead the discussion. For anyone who might be reading this from outside of Toronto, getting a film degree in a city where there are so many films to see is a good idea. Toronto is the kind of city where you can get a film education in class or in your spare time, and if you combine both things, you will be in good shape.

TFR : When Stéphane Delorme became the editor of Cahiers late in 2009, he asked himself, what is the point of a film magazine today? The answer was simple: movies make you speak. As someone interested in films, it is always interesting to hear what other people have to say. So there are tons of books to read. What I like about your classes is that they offer the information and perspective you can find in a book but there is a more human and communal quality to them as you are there engaging with people. There is something comforting about being in that JCC room with other like-minded individuals; kind of like the feeling of acceptance in Role Models with that nerdy teenager and Paul Rudd reuniting for the medieval role-playing combat. Anyways, where I was going, can you tell me about your method of putting the classes together?

AN : I love the idea that you compared my class to L.A.I.R.E. from Role Models. I can only hope that in one of my classes I can ask the probing question: "Who the fuck is Marvin Hamlisch?" I really do try to leave space for people to chat and contribute, though I don’t think I was too good at it in the first series of lectures on contemporary New Waves in World cinema, as there was just too much information to impart in two hours. I think people attending a class on polarizing directors are already coming with an opinion and in this cycle I will try and let people assert how they feel, too.

TRF : I’ve read your writing in The Grid (formely Eye Weekly), Cinema Scope, Cineaste and Reverse Shot. And I recently saw a couple of articles pop up at the Museum of Moving Images and Project: New Cinephilia (am I missing anything?); where you wrote about the Toronto classes that you give, can you elaborate on this segment:

“The challenge, as I see it, is to retain my critical voice without alienating the uninitiated. A drop-in course is very different from a university curriculum, and it’s better to err on the side of accessibility than elitism — to encourage cinephilia rather than assume it. It’s a fine line between consolidating one’s critical authority and talking down to an audience, and the adjustment of that tone is an ongoing process. Nobody likes to feel lectured to, even when they’re attending something explicitly billed as a lecture; my goal was to make my points and leave plenty of room for group discussion. At the same time, the idea of a total free-for-all cheapened the idea that I was facilitating some kind of relevant film education.”

AN : There should be balance. It's about the sweet spot between having authority and being accommodating. I would rather a self-described cinephile feel a little bored then a less experienced and curious newcomer be alienated.

TFR : I remember in the last series it seemed like a big issue for you was staying within the two-hours time spot. Its weird, the lectures were generally thorough, wouldn’t cut anything from them, but they generally went over the time limit. I know that you just got a teaching position at Ryerson giving a class on documentaries. Are you going to be stricter on the time limit in this series? And how do you think these classes will prepare you to be a professor in the classroom?

AN : Yeah, I felt bad that a couple of classes went over, though it felt good that people did not mind as the classes are rather informal. It’s not nice to feel like anyone’s eyes are on the clock. But if I'm slow people can tell me to hurry up!

TRF : On a final note, what do you hope people take from these classes?

AN : A sense that their twelve dollars are not wasted. Or a desire to learn more about the films and filmmakers discussed. I'm not trying to have the last word on anything; I like starting a discussion.

TRF : Kaz and Dan from MDFF films first told me about your New Waves class, which I am grateful for, and now you moved onward to two Controversial Directors and then there will be Stanley Kubrick series. I’ve met some cool people there like Marc Saint-Cyr, Natalie Killick, Kiva Reardon and James McNally. I know that we all look forward to this new series!