What Issue Was It? (En Couverture at Nightswimming)

In the early eighties at the French film magazine Positif they ran a series entitled “le cinéma et nous,” which was initiated in a convivial spirit to get some of the magazines writers to answer two questions: What is the value for you of seeing a good movie? and, what exactly do you expect to take in from seeking out films, and seeing them at movie theaters? With one of the goals of this petit jeux to share with the reader what animates the individual writers and to better articulate the spirit of the magazine, Positif.

Well the writers jumped onto the challenge, usually with two- or three-pages-long responses, where they described with depth and breath what first turned them towards movies and how they feel about them at the time when they wrote the pieces. The questions are so fundamental, yet simple, that when one thinks of them, there is just so much that comes to mind, and the problem seems to be picking where exactly does one start. So to avoid banal repetition, with each new le cinéma et nous pieces the answers become all the more different, rendering the questions all the more complex.

The first le cinéma et nous was in March ’81 issue (N.240) and included contributions to it by Robert Benayoun, Emmanuel Carrère, and Paul-Louis Thirard. In their respective pieces Benayoun writes, “What do I expect from cinema? Not that this answer is exhaustive, but I want it to enlighten, for it to bring forth something new in myself. It's vital that its imagery be both stimulant and exalting.” Carrère writes, “I don’t know any better words to describe the cinema then those by Cocteau, who was amazed by its power to show, “death at work.” And Thirard writes, “The cinema brought forward my first political conscience. For many years, I saw no contradiction between my taste for engaged, militant films, [...] where eroticism and revolution were on the same plane.”

In the following le cinéma et nous in the May ’81 issue of Positif (N.242), Françoise Audé describes her youth at ciné-clubs, “Seeing a film at a film-club, was for me, the occasion of a nocturnal outing and an encounter with people. It was also now indistinguishable of a prolonged discussion where I started to feel the political tensions between the attendants. The cinema then is thus associated in my emotional memory to the euphoria of the Liberation – everything is possible – and to the idea of liberty and to the idea of engagement.” And Gérard Legrand on film-criticism, “Even though it's more ambitious when writing about cinema compared to other arts, I have never lost hope that it could enrich the mind, that it can be a beautiful criticism instead of only the sterile criticism of pointing out faults, like said François-René de Chateaubriand, and I would add how Jean Massin reclaimed it, the criticism should be that of a “embouchures” [mouth of a bay] over the criticism of “sources”[spring water].”

The next le cinéma et nous was in the June ’81 issue of Positif (N.243), where in it Alain Masson addresses the viewer's passivity while watching movies, “What do we go do at the cinema? First off, and essentially, nothing. When the guards of humanism blamed the movies of being lazy distractions, they were more on point then the zealots of modernity who blew wind about a “active spectator”." While for Petr Král, “The fever that I get from the images of a film are, in fact, less about a dramatic order then that of moral order.”

And in the last le cinéma et nous that I could find, December ’82 (N.262), for Alain Garsault from any film, "I expect what expected Joachim du Bellay from poetry: that it makes me feel: "angry, calm, happy, sad, love, disgusted, to admire, shocked, in short [that it] changes how I feel, twisting how I feel, like a good song"; forcing me to welcome it all in, I might add." And for Michel Sineux, “Like for many people of my generation, I had the chance to discover cinema in its temples – caves like unlike anything you’ve ever seen, between a rococo theater and a musical (Le Parisiana!) – and not in these multiplex, that are all over the place today and that are reducing the experience to a collective televisual spectacle.”

I haven't seen any more le cinéma et nous in the following issues, and I wonder how much longer the series lasted. But around this time a new feature also started at the magazine, which is “autour du cinema” that would eventually turn into “bloc-notes.” The first autour du cinema started in January 1982 (N.250), and two early ones that really stick out include: Michel Ciment wrote his first autour du cinema: 31 jours de Janvier in the March ’82 issue (N.252), where he would list his favorite films of the previous year, a tradition, that of putting forth his top ten films of the previous year in the January bloc-notes, that Ciment would continue onwards. While in the June ’83 issue of Positif (N.268), Robert Benayoun in autour du cinema: 30 jours d’avril, would really open up about having hemiplegia, which arose from a stroke, and the personal toll it had on him while still finding hope in the films of Resnais, Altman and Lewis.

This emphasis on the writers personal disclosure, and giving them space to do so, makes Positif unique amongst other film magazines. Their series, first off, le cinéma et nous, and then autour du cinema which would become bloc-notes gives their writer's a chance to break the fourth wall of a film review to discuss their other interest. While also for Positif this opening up of their space leads to the creation of new forms of film criticism.

The reason that I bring up le cinéma et nous is because of a new series organized at the French film-blog, Nightswimming, is doing something very similar. Edouard Sivière, who manages Nightswimming, started a series entitled En couverture de(s) Cahiers/Positif: Une couverture à soi, un numéro fétiche, where unlike in le cinéma et nous, where people discussed their cinephilia in relation to movies and movie-theaters, here the contributors are discussing their relationship with Cahiers du Cinéma and/or Positif, with one of its goals of being to explore the magazines with their own histories.

So far some of the highlights of the series include: Positif film-critic Fabien Baumann's Un pubis en vitrine, where he talks about a poster of a cover of Positif, that features a nude women from a still of Raul Ruiz's Klimt, that would go on their office window, and he was surprised by peoples response to it, “I don’t think an issue of Positif has ever had such an impact on such a varied public.” Phil Siné's contribution is of great interest as it discusses a readers response to Cahiers as it evolved and grew, and how Cahiers has a way to champion a certain kind of American mainstream cinema, and taking an anti-pedantry position: de Casino à Scream et de Martin Scorsese à Skeet Ulrich. While Oriane Sidre discusses the Septembre 2010 issue of Positif (n°595), Le visage de Yun Junghee, and that issues cover, Poetry by Lee Chang-Dong, and the magazine's championing of South-Korean cinema, as well as how the magazine looks today under Michel Ciment. More recently the contributions are becoming more complex, and esoteric with their references (which is a good thing) and in the most recent contribution by Pascal Manuel Heu, "Des Couverture et Trois Couleurs", he even gets reflexive about the whole En couverture series. This is film writing which is pushing the limits of what it can be - a fufillment of the Positif spirit of writing.

Honesty Competitions (Part 3) by Arielle Gavin

This is the first guest contribution by Arielle Gavin, it is the third chapter of her Criticism and Curatorial Practice prize-winning thesis "Honesty Competitions" (OCAD, 2012). You can find the introduction and the first chapter on Bas Jan Ader at her blog, Dragonaut. - D.D.

*****

Past, present, future

Irony maintains a strange connection to history, always inhabiting a tricky past-present. Its many meanings continuously build upon and erase each other, only to return again. Irony appears as a rhetorical device beginning with Plato, as a characteristic of dramatic theatre, as a core concept of German Romanticism, as the colloquial definition of “saying one thing and meaning another,” as proposed cultural dominant of postmodernism, and as sacrificial lamb of New Sincerity. Its methods sometimes involve knowingly digging up material from the past in order to say something about the present, its many reference points forever falling in and out of fashion. When we speak of irony today, we speak of it as cultural mood, as synonym for sarcasm and cynicism. Since the following chapter is centered around the early 2000’s – the site of a secondary rupture, of a “post-postmodern”¹ break - it seems customary to bring up the end of irony, and along with it the end of postmodernism.

Linda Hutcheon foreshadows these links with “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” (1998) an essay she begins with a personal anecdote. Hutcheon writes about completing the final manuscript of Irony's Edge (1995), one of the many texts she has written on the subject of irony. An hour after submitting the manuscript to her publisher, Hutcheon walked into a bookstore. The first thing she noticed there was a magazine whose headline read “The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition.” The feature article announced that irony had tired itself out, and that it was currently being replaced by “seven different types of nostalgia."² Hutcheon had spent the good part of a decade writing about postmodernism and what she saw as its defining feature - irony - but had not thought to write about nostalgia. Not only did she find irony more appealing, more "edgy," she did not think that irony had much to do with nostalgia anyway.³

Hutcheon's accidental encounter with this article prompted her to reflect on what it might mean to write about irony towards the end of the twentieth century. As a result, she tries to make sense of the unlikely marriage of irony and nostalgia, the latter being alternately indulged in and derided by postmodern culture. Like nostalgia, sincerity can unassumingly stage itself as “a mode of self-expression generally held to be nondiscursive, transparent, outside of ideology.”⁴ “Back in the day”-type rhetoric suggests that there was simply more sincerity to go around in the past, and that this reserve of sincerity has since been depleted. This thought process stands in opposition to the varied and “transideological” uses Hutcheon attributes to irony.⁵ That is to say, where nostalgia tends to idealize the past, irony tends to instrumentalize the past in order to critique it. Herein lies Hutcheon’s belief in the political applications of irony.

Hutcheon’s article made a few things clear to me. One, that as postmodernism drew to a close, irony (its defining feature, according to many) began to close in on itself. A strange culture war emerged on its grounds, one where the supposedly lost value of sincerity is selected as a radically conservative, oppositional tactic for combatting postmodern irony. Second, that the question of irony and its “end” is inextricably linked to the ends of both modernism and postmodernism. Third, that irony’s end had been announced prior to 2001, and that its end(s) will continue to be announced in the future. The very act of placing irony along a historical continuum is an exercise in “evading teleology” that requires one to shuttle between the past and the present.⁶ 

An irony of ends

The ends of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced to a single name: that of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki designed the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a monolith of modernist architecture. Modernism’s (thwarted, so the story goes) aspirations to utilitarianism, functionalism, and progress were embodied, caricatured, and incapacitated by the building’s imposing square structure. The complex's small apartments and large communal spaces - initially intended to be practical, economical - quickly became run-down. Less than twenty years after Pruitt-Igoe was erected, its buildings were largely abandoned and uninhabitable. On March 16, 1972, the first of the thirty-three buildings that made up Pruitt-Igoe was demolished. Architectural critic Charles Jencks famously announced this as the movement’s death knell, or “the day that Modern architecture died."⁷ While the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe did not bring modernism to its end (it was going to die anyway - of old age, of inefficacy, according to Jencks), it stood as a pretty clear indication of the way things were going. 

The pathos of Yamasaki’s failures as an architect extends to his other famous project; the buildings that made up the World Trade Center. Many interpreted the collapse of its towers on Septemeber 11th 2001 as the twin end of postmodernism and irony. The act of ironic interpretation suddenly seemed ineffective in the wake of unforeseen cultural trauma. In the weeks following the attacks, announcements of irony's death proliferated. It is true that a certain kind of irony - cynical, detached irony as cultural mood - had naturally gone out of style by the early 2000's. But this is only one kind of irony, so our conversation doesn't end there. To reject irony in favor of a simpler simplicity is no simple task. How is one to forget cultural irony when its aftermath is still strongly felt? Linda Hutcheon makes a good point by observing that our age “joins just about every other century in wanting to call itself the age of irony.”⁸ The very recurrence of that historical claim supports the claim held by some that irony is “inherent in signification, in its deferrals and in its negations,”⁹ that every age is ironic in one way or another. If anything can be agreed on regarding irony at the end of the twentieth century, it is that “irony had become an extremely charged clear by the time the towers fell code word masking a number of larger social, cultural and aesthetic divisions,”¹⁰ eventually dividing itself into our current conversation of irony and sincerity.

The etymology of the word ‘sincerity’ contains two meanings:

1) of one growth, unmixed

2) that which is not falsified.

Alison Young uses this definition as the jumping-off point for her essay “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity,” which discusses a contemporary “aporia of sincerity."¹¹ Through examining the methodology and outcome of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), Young concludes that we must reconsider the question of sincerity. As sincerity shifts from affect to “media effect,” Young wonders whether texts can succeed in delivering the sincerity effects their authors seek.¹² Young is not questioning whether authors are sincere or insincere, but rather how works of literature or visual art might go about communicating sincere things. Hopefully it’s become clear that my intention in writing is not to claim particular artists for the camp of sincerity while banishing others to the land of irony. To vouch for an artist's sincerity would mean to know fully that artist’s intent, to be sure of the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling”¹³ Lionel Trilling gave as a formula for sincerity. Because our reading of sincerity is primarily one of effects, and since infinite (mis)readings of these effects can and do occur, a sincere attempt at expressing something can easily appear ironic.

It follows that my discussion will center on recent stylistic techniques used to represent sincerity. After the “death” of irony rose two strategies of the sincere within visual culture. The first takes the form of a codified aesthetic of sincerity within contemporary American cinema,¹⁴ the other a nostalgic-ironic appropriation of so-called amateur aesthetics in video art. The subject or document that is viewed as amateur generally has no conception of itself as being sincere, but nonetheless comes to signify this quality. 

Is there a sincere colour?

Around the time these things were happening, I was ten years old. I remember going to to see the film Zoolander with my family on the weekend of its release - September 28, 2011. We arrived at the theater early, and sat watching previews. One of the trailers made a distinct impression on me, not least because I thought it only made a distinct impression on certain kind of person. Though I never liked pink when I was younger, I found the faded Pepto Bismol that spelled THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS delightfully disgusting. Maybe I was a little proud of my newfound appreciation for strange shades of pink. These shades filled a montage of white, upper-middle class characters exhibiting vaguely anti-social behaviours. A man with a bright geometric pattern painted on his face sped towards the screen in a vintage car. A grandfather cheered on a dogfight with his grandchildren, surrounded by a cast of “ethnic” characters of non-specific ethnicities. A blonde girl stalked around her bedroom decorated with African masks. The scenes unfolded against the soundtrack of “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones. Both the film and the song, which I had likely just heard for the first time (I was ten years old, after all), felt interesting in a new way. After all, my reading of the trailer had nothing to do with the contentious avant-gardes of punk music and reactionary sincerity. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001) shortly after its December release, and subsequently tried to model myself after a young Margot Tenenbaum. I quickly took to walking around my middle school with the Ramones blasting from my headphones, though I was never very good at affecting Margot’s disinterest. At some point in my early teens, I fell out of love with Anderson’s films. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe I thought them insincere, maybe I was going through the teenage ritual of rejecting childhood things – but I think my total adoration-turned-total-disgust speaks to the inexplicably strong reactions Anderson’s films draw from audiences.

The most (in)sincere director

A friend wrote to me in a February 2012 email, “wes anderson is the most insincere director i can think of, because i think the naivete is false and a twee refusal to grow up is a gross and counterrevolutionary…super heteronormative as well.” I read the email and agreed with him, only to find myself in the middle of a heated bar conversation a few nights later. I brought up Wes Anderson, and before I could get a word in, an acquaintance declared Anderson to be a supremely sincere director. Not only was Wes Anderson sincere, he insisted, but he was sincere in a way that many people just didn’t understand.

In light of these two responses, Wes Anderson seems a particularly compelling subject of inquiry regarding the post-9/11 “aporia” of sincerity that is the focus of this chapter. Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums is set in an anachronistic New York populated by whimsically decrepit buildings, for example a fictitious “375th Street YMCA.”¹⁵ With no Twin Towers in sight, one is almost allowed to believe that the film took place sometime before they were built, sometime before postmodernism and the brand of irony associated with it.

But The Royal Tenenbaums is bookended by a hyper-awareness of nostalgic stylization. The film begins with a neatly composed shot of a book being checked out of a library. A hand peeking out of a camel blazer stamps the card enclosed in the book’s cover, something I haven't experienced since childhood trips to the library. The book is then closed to reveal a quaint illustration of melting candlesticks, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS spelled out in the pink Futura of the film’s trailer. In the following shot, the cover illustration reappears as a real-life set design, using the same mustard-green colour scheme and curtained backdrop. These mirrored images make unclear the starting point of stylization. Anderson could very well be flattening the personalities of his characters to fit a simplified storybook format. But Anderson works almost exclusively with stock characters, mainly drawn from white upper-middle class America. Or, to be more specific, the stock character of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Of course this "character" exists in the real world, but it has been sufficiently mythologized (see The Preppy Handbook, Ralph Lauren advertisements, the disaffected prep school students of J.D. Salinger novels, and so on). We can say that by framing The Royal Tenenbaums as fiction - its intertitles take the form of book pages, “scene” swapped for “chapter” - Anderson counters the argument that he is merely stylizing a referent firmly based in reality. An astute observer of aesthetes and an aesthete himself, the visual style of his films reads to me as the combined efforts of his own narcissism and the narcissism of his characters.

The characters in The Royal Tenenbaums largely understand themselves through representation. Some fashion their reality in writing, Margot with her plays and Raleigh, her husband, with his studies in anthropology. Some emotions are explained only through their bracketing, the story of Richie’s fall from tennis stardom succinctly told in television footage of his losing game and a tabloid cover that reads MELTDOWN. Etheline also styled her children, a “Family of Geniuses,” in prose. Like the rest of the film’s books-within-books, Family of Geniuses appears onscreen dog-eared and faded, a simulacrum of the book as intellectual fetish object. Family of Geniuses is not a real book, empty of content (asides from the story of the film that contains it), but nonetheless appears significant, handsomely weathered. Like the many unread books that make up an impressive library, the books written by the Tenenbaums are markers of lives dictated by the pressure to endlessly perform individual intelligence and precocity.

The Royal Tenenbaums and mise en abyme subjectivity

The Royal Tenenbaums is a portrait of a family and their now-grown children. All three were child prodigies - Margot a gifted playwright, Richie a star tennis player, and Chas an astute businessman (businessboy, perhaps) - who faded into obscurity with the onset of adulthood. The story picks up with a cast of characters obsessed with recapitulating the glory of their youth. They continue to wear their childhood clothes, as if the garments had magically grown in a gesture of solidarity. Like the closet of a cartoon character, Margot's wardrobe is filled with a dozen penny-loafers and a striped Lacoste dress in every colour. Richie continues to dress like Björn Borg, even in non-tennis situations. Chas replaces the business-wear of his childhood with a new daily uniform, but the repetition does not end there. Now a father, both Chas and his two sons wear red Adidas tracksuits at all times (save for a funeral, where the trio opts for black Adidas tracksuits). They also share the same curly brown hair, though this can be owed more to genetics than to intent. By projecting his self-caricature onto his own children, the cycle of repetition extends to an absurd degree.

This bittersweet navigation of identity fits with the tone of The Royal Tenenbaums, which film scholar James MacDowell describes as the composite of deadpan humour and melodramatic subject matter.¹⁶ In "Notes on Quirky" and subsequent essays, MacDowell argues that tone - not subject matter, not certain editing techniques, not uniform visual style - is the strongest indicator of the "quirky" film. Treating the quirky film more as a sensibility than as a genre, MacDowell explains that its tone is illustrative of a larger cultural condition, a structure of feeling characterized by its back-and-forth dialogue around irony and sincerity. I follow MacDowell's analysis by focusing on Anderson's films in an essay concerned precisely with this ironic-sinere structure of feeling. But before I delve into the topic of tone, I want to comment on a particular aspect of the quirky film. Central to The Royal Tenenbaums and other quirky films is a certain kind of character best encapsulated by Anderson's paradoxically self-conscious adult-children. I would offer the titular characters of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007) as culturally significant and instantly recognizable examples of the "quirky" character. The aestheticized awkwardness of these characters can be located along a spectrum. At the one end is the character whose idiosyncrasies serve as fodder for cheap jokes, and at the other is the character whose idiosyncrasies are meant to endear the audience. On the first end, I think of the painful confession Napoleon Dynamite makes after presenting his crush with a hand-drawn portrait: "It took me like three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip." Even if Napoleon's misguided social interactions are endearing by proxy, they are generally treated with a kind of detached, jokey irony. MacDowell points out that the ostensibly cathartic/redemptive dance scene at the end of the film still mines from a "comedy of embarrassment."¹⁷ An earnest but uncoordinated (note, uncoordinated) Dynamite performs a solo dance routine to the applause of his classmates, but even his choice of song - the musically awkward blue-eyed soul of Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" - is meant to be a kind of in-joke with the audience. 

Still comedic but more melodramatic, more openly sentimental, Juno treats its main character more kindly. She shrieks would-be, cutesy teenage slang ("Honest to blog!") into her novelty phone, which is shaped like a hamburger. These qualities are not framed ironically, though; they contribute to a vision of a benignly dorky teenage girl unexpectedly faced with the very adult responsibilities of having a child. Returning to MacDowell's diagnosis of the quirky film, Juno tones down deadpan humor in favour of emotional engagement. 

Also worth mentioning is the character-person of Michael Cera, who plays Juno's boyfriend in the film. Cera's first popular role was as George Michael Bluth on the sitcom Arrested Development. Cera was fifteen years old when the series debuted in 2003, a real-life awkward-looking teenage boy at the onset of puberty. Also an awkward teenage boy facing the onset of puberty, George Michael mumbles nervously through most social situations that take place on Arrested Development. One of the more notable situations is the crush he harbours on his cousin, a teenaged girl named Maeby (whose strange name serves as an endless source of puns, including the running joke of her questionable conception). Humour drawn from awkward-seeming characters and situations is a mainstay of quirky cultural output. Adam Kotsko explores this point in his 2010 book Awkwardness, partially explaining the phenomenon of awkwardness-based humour as a contemporary response to the issues of postmodernism, one of these issues being the much-treaded theme of irony as cultural dominant. Kotsko selects Woody Allen as the progenitor of this kind of humour, describing the ambivalently autobiographical leads of all Allen films as "the Woody Allen character."¹⁸ Woody Allen clearly bases this character (and its nebbishy charm) on his own idiosyncrasies and neuroses, fashioning many doppelgangers in the characters of Alvy Singer (Annie Hall, 1977), Isaac Williams (Manhattan, 1979), Mickey Sachs (Hannah and her Sisters, 1983), and others. The Woody Allen character does not necessarily need to be played by Allen himeself; Larry David (Kotsko devotes a whole chapter to David in Awkwardness) recently assumed this role in the Allen-directed Whatever Works (2009). Beyond this, the Woody Allen character has its own life as a cultural type, the character-person of Michael-Cera being a contemporary example. Since Arrested Development, Cera has continuously been cast in the role of the adorably awkward teenage boy. Perpetually virginal and sheepish, he still manages to impregnate his love interest in Juno. Subsequent roles in films like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), Youth in Revolt (2010), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) see Cera shyly charming his way into the hearts of manic pixie dream girls, subtly reputing the common notion that confidence is sexy (see chart below). I imagine Cera was first cast in this type of role because he was, conveniently, an actual shy teenage boy. But Cera has been playing this role for a good part of the last decade. Yes, playing the role of himself, contrived as it sounds. This confusion of identity is compounded in Paper Heart (2009), the meta-documentary (I don't know how else to describe it) based on the unverifiable romantic relationship between Cera (who plays himself in the film) and Charlyne Yi, the film's screenwriter and lead actress.

What does it mean for a person to purposely act awkward, acting being by definition self-conscious and awkwardness being by definition unconscious? It leads to the impossibility - as with Allen and as with the Tenenbaums - of verifying whether the character of a film is necessarily the stylization of a referent firmly rooted in reality (in simpler terms, of the actor or actress who plays the character). Further, it makes any claims to authenticity near-impossible to confirm, resulting in a perpetual chicken-or-the-egg-type questioning of subjectivity. 

What, then, should one make of the Tenenbaums? Are they just a cast of lovably "quirky" characters? Are we supposed to interpret their antisocial behaviour as a fashion statement or a remote critique via inhabitation? In his article "If I Can Dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson," Mark Olsen writes that Anderson "does not view his characters from some distant Olympus of irony."²⁰ After all, how is Anderson to maintain emotional detachment from characters who stand as infinitely repeated versions of himself? The director's early films - Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1999) - were filmed in his native Texas. As an adolescent, Anderson atteneded the preppy collegiate - seemingly lifted straight from a Salinger novel - used as the set of Rushmore. One can easily identify Rushmore's Max Fischer - serial overachiever and director of pretentious, cutesy middle school plays - or the dysfunctional geniuses of The Royal Tenenbaums as the director's gently self-mocking portraits. If we trace the caricature at work in The Royal Tenenbaums far back enough, we end up with Wes Anderson infinitely styling and projecting himself as the characters of his own (the) film.

Knowing naiveté

Art historian E.H. Gombrich writes, “The more you prefer the primitive, the less you can become primitive,"¹⁹ a statement that is taken up ambivalently in The Royal Tenenbaums. This paradox is best expressed in the film’s knowingly naïve visual style; its neatly composed shots look like childhood drawings traced by an adult, the final product retaining none of the original messiness. James MacDowell points to this in the “sweetly unsophisticated pink flag” that flies above the Tenenbaum home.²⁰ Anderson’s aesthetic can be easily described (and dismissed) as cloying. Unusual shades of pink pop up everywhere; the awning of a hotel, a rotary phone, the walls of an ice cream parlour, a woolen glove. The decidedly unrealistic proliferation of such details holds a mirror to the suspended naiveté of the film’s characters. MacDowell writes that the childhood artifacts that Margot, Chas, and Richie cling to remind us that they are no longer children. Richie sets up an anorak-yellow tent in the family’s living room, his too-tall body dwarfing the structure clearly intended for children. This visual gag frames the character’s longing for childhood instead of expecting us to indulge uncritically in it. The “wrongness” of these images rests not only in their resemblance to impossibly perfect children’s drawings, but in their ability to evidence the Tenenbaums’ problematic relationship to childhood. 

This unfaltering belief in the purity of childhood is not the only element of primitivism evident in The Royal Tenenbaums. The characters display a tendency to view other cultures as exotic or less advanced than their native American one. Margot bolsters her writing career with cultural tourism, the kind I imagine she thinks of as "zany anthropology." A brief montage shows Margot at the age of nineteen at a wedding on an unidentified West Indian island; flirting with lesbianism in Paris at twenty-one; then a few years later in New Guineau, groping a man in tribal dress (her in a pink bikini). Etheline works as an archaeologist, and Raleigh St. Clair as a neurologist who conducted field studies on a fictional tribe called the Kazawa Atoll. St. Clair's book on the subject, The Peculiar Neurodegenerative Inhabitants of the Kazawa Atoll, features a photograph of the author with one of his research subjects. The two men stand side-by-side, St. Clair in a bathing suit and the subject in a loincloth, headdress, and body paint. The photograph is shot in classic ethnographic style, straight-on and perfectly centered. The composition of the photograph is not unlike those of the shots that make up the film, their veneer of order and artistic control contradicting the unfinished emotional business (adult children, intentional naivete, an "aporia" of sincerity, and so on) taking place in the frame. 

Throughout the film, St. Clair studies the behavior of Dudley Heinsbergen, a boy inflicted with a peculiar form of autism. He calmly watches Dudley struggle to arrange a set of toy blocks in a particular formation, calmly taking notes on the boy's progress. He later reads the results and chuckles to himself “How interesting, how bizarre,” as if the boy were a mischievous pet or inhabitant of remote New Guineau. What is actually bizarre, I suppose, is that St. Clair does not make much of a distinction between the two. St. Clair takes Dudley everywhere he goes, the boy narrating in deadpan the details of their surroundings to no person in particular. Dudley favors a Jacques-Cousteau-plays-tennis outfit of corduroy shorts, yellow ringer t-shirt, and bucket hat with navy stripe, his nerd-chic style later cashed in on by films like Napoleon Dynamite. The unlikely fashion plate of Dudley Heinsbergen reflects a world where no person or thing is immune to being aestheticized.

“I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum”

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.²¹ - Pierre Bourdieu

In his essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film, Kent Jones points out that The Royal Tenenbaums – alongside other films directed by Anderson – centers on a character “from a little lower on the economic ladder.”22 This character is Eli Cash, the boy grew up in a simple apartment with his aunt. Cash lived across the street from the Tenenbaums and became a regular fixture at their home, an honorary member of the family also inflicted with their complex around creativity. Eli was not a child genius, but later tried his hand at writing. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the grown-up Eli at a reading for his newly-released novel. After reading, he takes a phone call from Margot, and anxiously implores of her “You think I’m especially not a genius?” Cast as his adoptive family’s foil, Eli illustrates just how strongly the concepts of taste, precociousness, and genius are linked to class. We are reminded of many kinds of work that factor into the designation of genius. 

Eli writes middlebrow fiction that is met with lukewarm critical reception and offhand remarks from those close to him. Having grown up in a lower-middle class household, the quality of Eli's work is never validated with the label of “genius” his wealthier counterparts already attained before adolescence. In fact, Eli’s books are only met with positive regard at the very end of the film. In the middle of a police questioning, the officer pauses to pay Eli a compliment; the officer, transparently portrayed in jus'folks-style, had read Eli's new novel and greatly enjoyed it. The officer even asks for an autograph, temporarily alleviating the embarrassing events leading up to the police questioning. 

The Royal Tenenbaums points to the cycle of legitimation that links class, taste, and cultural production. Eli's inability to be validated as an author of "highbrow" fiction reflects a kind of glass ceiling of class mobility; (lower) middle-class upbringing, middlebrow writing. Conversely, the Tenenbaums cannot escape the trappings of their own background. Their predetermined, premature success is crystallized forever in the figure of the adult-child. Like fallen rulers, the “royal” Tenenbaums are trapped by the privileged status they reached as children. They remain there indefinitely as dysfunctional apparitions of their former selves. I feel that the film is neither as explicitly political as my discussion of it, nor as apolitical or twee as it has been made out to be. Maybe I'm at fault for not picking a side, but it's the film's back and forth - between irony and sincerity, critique and indulgence, artifice and naturalism - that makes it so intriguing. 

The strongest point of Jones’ essay on The Royal Tenenbaums is in his identification of the film’s political  implicaions. Unfortunately, this point is a little lost on Jones, whose assertions of Anderson’s particular brand of sincerity read as self-congratulatory. Jones writes, “For someone like me, who connected directly with his sensibility from the first frame of Bottle Rocket, it's difficult to comprehend how anyone could not get the work of such an exquisite storyteller.”²³ Jones suggests that Anderson presents a secret kind of sincerity that only a special kind of person would understand. I do not know what to make of this “secret” sincerity; I have made it clear that the definition of sincerity is no simple task, but the idea that it can only be decoded by some kind of super-sensitive aesthete does not sit well with me. Despite pointing out the issues of class raised by Anderson, Jones only affirms these relations by designating sincerity as an esoteric taste category requiring specialized understanding. This category, which formed in reaction to the perceived ideological threat of postmodern irony, possessed a problematic ideology of its own. If postmodern irony was dismissive and mocking of the stupid, the unrefined, the "primitive," then the New Sincerity romanticizes the "primitive" in a way that is (often unbeknownst to itself) condescending. 

In the following installment, I will discuss the New Sincerity, a term that has risen to prominence in the last decade. As I understand it, the New Sincerity - like Anderson's films - concerns itself mostly with problems of the self, the double or performed self, the artistic process and artistic self-representation, a reactionary stance towards irony that favors a highly idealized vision of the sincere, and an arguably regressive engagement with primitivism. 

Arielle Gavin

_________________________________________________________________

1I'm hesitant to use the word, but no single term has been agreed upon. Of the many terms put forth in the race to name the contemporary moment - off-modern, hypermodern, altermodern - the one that interests me most is the metamodern. I will discuss the concept of metamodernism in the next chapter. 

² Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 193.

3 Ibid. 195

⁴ Jane Taylor, “Torture, Truth, and the Arts,” The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Eds. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 22.

⁵ Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 20.

⁶Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 195.

⁷Charles Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 57

⁸Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 27.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film,” Screen 43:4 Winter 2001: 353.

¹¹Alison Young, “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibilty of Sincerity,” eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 99.

¹²Ibid. 104

¹³Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) 4.

¹⁴This aesthetic is best represented by what has been termed the "quirky" film.

¹⁵375th Street does not exist; The highest street number in New York City is 263.

¹⁶James MacDowell, “Wes Anderson, tone, and the quirky sensibility,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10:1 March 2012: 8.

¹⁷Ibid. 11

¹⁸Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness:An Essay (0 Books:Winchester, 2010) 1.

¹⁹E.H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive (New York:Phaidon, 2006) 297.

²⁰James MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism I (2010) 5.

²¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,

Trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 6.

²²Kent Jones, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Criterion Collection: Current Jul. 8 2002. www.criterion.com/current/posts/214-the-royal-tenenbaums

²³ Ibid.

Pop Quiz: Le fils

Pop Quiz 1

           A man marries a woman, they aren’t too well off, but that’s not important to the story, and they have a baby, a boy, who they love, a lot. One night, the boy, the couples son, he gets killed, he was in their families car and it gets broken into and he gets killed, it’s a tragedy, terrible, wouldn’t even wish this onto ones enemies, but life has to go on, right? The happily married couple, after the murder of their son, splits up, gets divorced, are no longer together, i.e. are no longer legally married, though he still misses her, or not exactly “her,” but his wife, and his son at that, and the life he had, which he longer has. And the man, who sees his ex-wife regularly, has found out that she is now with a new guy and pregnant again, with a new child that wont be his. Let’s say that the man X is a carpenter, you know the blue denim overall type, and at his job, one day he sees this sixteen-year-old kid, let’s call him Y, come in looking for a job, and he recognizes the boy from the trial for his sons murder. This boy Y at first gets a job in the wielding department of the factory, but then, for some complex reason the man X wants for some reason be closer to this “messed up” kid, well after what he’s done, he has to be messed up – right? So this blonde-haired boy who has just got out of a five-year prison term, and you can tell he’s probably living in a half-way house with a social-worker or a shitty one-room apartment with his mattress on the floor and stuff, and he’s so happy and feels lucky to have this job, and but like starts to appreciate X’s guidance and helpfulness, as this kid never knew his own father and apparently his mom’s boyfriend doesn’t allow him to see her, i.e. the boys mom. And X does help him out, not exactly because he wants to, but he’s caught in a few instances where he just kind-of has to help, like he’s asked where a certain street is and, really, if you know, how can you not direct him to the right street, or else you would be a total dick. And Y is impressed with X’s ability to precisely measure objects and distances, to the fucking centimeter, and they play around with this, the distance between Y and a car, the length of a piece of wood etc. Let’s return back to X and describe him more faithfully: X is a big man, he does sit-ups on his floor regularly, looks to be around 5’10 and weighs around 210 pounds, balding with short brown hair, thick lenses in his steel-rimmed glasses, with a constant pissed off look on his face, as if he’s keeping at bay an overwhelming anger (with the loss of the son, this is understandable), and when ever X is around Y this seems to be amplified. While Y is aloof, silent, also more introspective, but unlike X the reasons for Y w/r/t the introspection it seems like its more like that of a hurt puppy or that of a child who accidentally touched a cooking element, he’s gone through too much and is now weary, and its painful to hear Y describes playing foosball when he was locked up as a way “to forget my problems,” because its a perfectly child-like thing to do, but in a very un-childlike mise en scène. So X and Y work more and more together, and on one day they go on a suspiciously long drive to a lumber yard (so far they’ve only been working in the carpentering workshop), and on this drive X asks Y about the murder, and Y asks X if he would consider taking him in and being his guardian. Silence. They keep driving. They are now in the lumberyard, where everything seems to reach a climax w/r/t to their interpersonal relationship. As at the lumberyard, this expansive industrial space, with its steel walls and ceiling, full of stacks of lumber, stacked on one another, full of hiding spaces and shadows: X tells Y that he’s the father of the boy that he killed. An unbalanced moment, for Y as he has to both (a) think about all of the experiences he had with X and mentally revisit these experience – some of them have been pretty scary, e.g. X knocking him off a ladder, X throwing down large planks of wood at him – to see how this might change his perception of them and (b) run, get away from this deranged figure, um, because who would actually spend all of this time to get close to the person who killed your son, right, and what does he, X, want to do to him, anyways? After an extensive chase, which seems like its right out of French Connection II or something, the two of them are now outside on the dirt, X catches up with Y, is on top of him, choking him, X has his hands around his throat, Y isn’t breathing right, X’s grip is getting tighter, there is the look of a murderer in his eyes, shit, is he going to do it? Kill Y, the person who killed his son, who he’s been working with for these last few days, and who he now kind-of likes, what good would it actually do? There is no way X’s son is coming back, and what about, when X was chasing Y, and tells him that he doesn’t want to hurt him, and now he’s doing just that.

And then X stops, and throws his hands, his fists, on the ground.

They both sit up, beside each other, for a while, and breathe heavily, and then the man, X, walks away. He’s now back at his car, dirty, after all the rolling around in dirt, and he’s putting the last few pieces of lumber in his vehicle, and then the boy, Y, is there and after a brief moment of hesitation, the boy starts to help.

Q: (A) Is the man, X, a good father?

*****

For the answer to this question, and more concerning Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's film Le fils come to hear Adam Nayman discuss it at the next talk in the series What We Talk About at the Drake Underground later on this month.

First Look: Kazik Radwanski's "Tower"

Kazik Radwanski's first full-length feature Tower starring Derek Bogart and Nicole Fairbairn will be having its World Premiere at the 65th Locarno Film Festival in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition.
Here is the synopsis of Tower from the films website:

Tower centers on thirty-four year old man, Derek, who limes at home with his parents in Toronto, Canada. Unlike his married brother who is expecting a baby, Derek is single and without a career. Although he aspires to become a graphic-animator, he works part-time at his uncle's construction company. Late at night he wanders the streety alone and frequents nightclubs in search of companionship. Derek suddenly finds himself in an intimate relationship with a woman he meets, Nicole. When a neighbourhood raccoon becomes a constant nuisance by tearing up his family's garbage, Derek sets out to catch it.

Spielberg, Spielberg, Spielberg

"The question isn't to know when Spielberg is the best, but instead to know when Spielberg is the most Spielberg. And there you might find your answer." - Stéphane Delorme

With the new, director-approved digital restoration of Steven Spielberg's 1975 Jaws playing at the Lightbox it's high time to discuss Spielberg over here at Toronto Film Review. 

Over the recent winter-time two of Spielberg's films were released in theaters in such close successions they might as well have been a double-bill: the B-picture, digital childhood fantasy The Adventures of Tintin and the A-picture, live-action War Horse. Along with J.J. Abrams's ode to Spielberg with Super 8 and Andrew Stanton reaching for the stars with John Carter – Spielberg seems to be now as relevant as ever.

Even the revered French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema recently dedicated an issue to him, Spielberg - Face A Face (N.675) – which includes ten articles* on Spielberg!

Alright, now returning to Jaws, which to discuss: it’s relevant to bring up Carl Gottlieb's book The Jaws Log (which is available by Newmarket Press in a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition). Yes, Jaws made movie history at the time as the highest grossing movie ever. Yes, it established a business model and release pattern for large scale summer movies, that persists to this day, where instead of the usual "platform" pattern in which a film would open in big cities and then roll out into lesser markets, Jaws would open wide, playing on over 500 screens – becoming the first "summer blockbuster." But it's a lot more than that.

During the making of the film, in the industry shift towards the post-studio system filmmaking era, Gottlieb's behind the scenes background information presents what was then a new model of filmmaking. Spielberg, and others, were shooting out on location, using non-professional actors, engaging with new technologies – all of this to create new experiences for the film-going audience. This capturing of the seventies era film industry makes it similar to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. 

The Jaws Log brings up the difficulty the filming crew had with the islanders when they were filming in Martha's Vineyard. Gottlieb also highlights all of the different participants that worked on the film (and in the books new annotations, he writes what they're doing today), showing that it takes a whole community to make a film: from the actors Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss; to the technical crew like the director of photography Bill Butler, the shark designer Joe Alves, editor Verna Fields, music by John Williams et cetera. It's mentioned that even John Millius contributed a couple of lines to the final screenplay, when Quint says, "It'll find him for five, kill him for ten," that was Milius.

Gottlieb not only contributed to the Jaws screenplay, but he also acts in the film as the Aminity Newspaper publisher, Meadows - in the book, there's even some funny pictures of him being knocked off a boat. In The Jaws Log, Gottlieb provides a behind-the-scenes perspective: Jaws first started out as a book by Peter Benchley, which when published would be one of the New York Times best-sellers. Then the producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film-rights to the book, which would go to Spielberg, who they have already worked with on The Sugarland Express – a characteristic New Hollywood film where a marginal women and/or couple drives off and hits the road to find a better life (e.g. The Rain People, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore).

As much as it has been said that at the time, the twenty-eight-year-old Spielberg was only interested in making “movies” and to “entertain”: the burden of the past as symbolized by the murderous truck in Duel, the Bonnie and Clyde-like social criticism of Sugarland Express, and in Jaws there is Police Chief Brody’s trouble with dealing with the complexities of the correlation between natural terror and the political and economic realities of Aminity. All of these examples exemplify traits of a director whose aims are more then to “entertain”.

It’s hard to pin-point exactly what directors are the forbearers for Spielberg: people have brought up Michel Curtiz, David Lean, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Frank Capra, and Chuck Jones. Though I think it’s rewarding to bring up Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford.

There's the anecdote in Directed by John Ford, where Spielberg talks about visiting Ford at his office, and where they talked briefly, and where Ford pointed to a Western painting and tells him, "When you understand what makes a great Western painting, you'll be a great Western director," and that the horizon  should never be in the exact center of the shot. You can see this influence in how Spielberg has a painterly approach to the frame. You can see some of Hawks in Spielberg, like how in Spielberg's films there is sometimes a light-hearted and comic atmosphere like in the Indiana Jones films and in Always. Though Spielberg has discussed being influenced by Hitchcock on the making of Duel (“What I learned from Hitchcock, was don’t ever let the audience off the hook, be a whore about keeping the audience on the hook as long as possible, before giving them some clue or some kind of relief.”), I mean the Hitchcock parallel more in the way that just like Hitch had his iconographic silhouette, no director today best encapsulates Hollywood other then a cap-and-glasses-wearing Spielberg.

The French film critic Pierre Berthomieu** in a interesting video by the Cinematheque Francaise, argues that when Stanley Kubrick passed away the world-greatest-filmmaker batton was passed down to Spielberg, who would even finish Kubrick’s unrealized A.I.. 

Spielberg has evolved a lot over the years. Where his early work might be better described as being characterized by spectacle, humor, and adventure. For example, Robert Benayoun’s Positif review of Raiders of the Lost Ark was entitled, Le retour du plaisir [the return of fun] (N.246). There has been a maturation in Spielberg’s films since the eighties and nineties, and in his recent films there is a stronger grappling with what it's like living with the complexities of today, especially in an American context - he shows both fractured identities and fractured politics. Like how in War of the Worlds to discuss 9/11 the films imagery needs to reference WWII to impart a scale of reference, or how Munich is the reverse-shot of Schindler's List, Spielberg at his most interesting seems to reflect what Nicolas Azalbert, characterizes as the post-Daney visuel schizo (Cahiers N.679),

“If the visual (an image as a substitution for an other), obliges us, according to Daney, to search for the non-represented, for the purpose of including it in what we are being shown, the visual, this new realm of images that we are engulfed in (a space within another) forces us now to distinguish these two spaces, the represented and the non-represented, to be then able to show them together.”

* The issue includes: Jean Philippe Tessé on the ideologies in Spielberg’s films, Vincent Malausa on Amblin Entertainment, Florent Guézengar's on Spielberg fantastic visions, Delorme on Spielberg at his most personal in the commercial failures Empire of the Sun, Always and A.I.; Cyril Béghin on Spielberg and WWII, François Truffaut's letters to Marvel Berbert from when he was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin on Spielberg 2000's work and a review of War Horse; and short-takes by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jinshi Fugii.

** Berthomieu even made a Spielbergian film, Le Temps des Géants.

"In Search Of Treasures" by Moen Mohamed

In Search Of Treasures by Moen Mohamed
IL CINEMA RITROVATO 2012
BOLOGNA, ITALY

Cinephiles, curators and programmers gather annually in darkened theatres to relish in the abundance of delights offered by one of the world’s most important and treasured film festivals.  Il Cinema Ritrovato is impossible to disappoint.  This year, an unsung master of French cinema was showcased.  How Jean Grémillon could have escaped my attention all these years is a mystery.  And why I never even came across his name in countless readings is an even bigger mystery.  Aside from the various programmes, there are the restorations.  Thus, herein lies the importance and significance of what they do here at the Restoration Laboratory at the Cineteca Bologna.

The length and breadth of the programming is remarkable.  Almost every print is from the national film archive of a country.  In this day and age, when everything has gone digital, these rare 35mm prints, some of which are quite pristine, make the trip amidst the sweltering European summer worth one's while.  But think not that it's all roses and perfume:  the heat in Bologna is akin to punishment - relentless and unbearable.  I drank 1.5 litres of water daily and that was insufficient.  There are projection issues some days; the air-conditioning is not always working in the cinemas - but I tell you, it’s all worth it. And then some. These complaints wither away with just one glance at the programme.

The masterpieces, chronologically:

MALDONE
35mm, 1927, France, 90 min, Jean Grémillon
A revelation. A young man, disgusted by his richness and life of comfort, abandons it and lives as a simple villager. Many years later, he is forced by circumstance to return and become the master of his estate, a position he still abhors. With brilliant acting and expert editing, Maldone is one of the most inexplicably unserenaded French films of all time. 

GARDIENS DE PHARE (LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS)
35mm, 1929, France, 73 min, Jean Grémillon
Poetic realism at its shimmering best and a complete knockout. I have never seen anything like this film. An elderly man and his son are hired as keepers of the lighthouse on a remote post surrounded by water, and with no other human contact. Their loved ones are on the mainland. And then, there is a descent into madness. This is a unique film that defies explanations. It must be experienced on the big screen to appreciate its brilliance. Grémillon is a master of atmosphere, movement and lighting. 

RAILS

DCP, 1929, Italy, 75 min, Mario Camerini
If I were forced to select the best film I saw at the festival, this would be it. One of the last silent films made in Italy, and perhaps the best silent film of Italian cinema, Mario Camerini's Rails has been restored and rediscovered for all to bask in its greatness. Like Sunrise and Sonnenstrahl, Rails was made in between those two. These three films were made by different directors, but are so similar in theme and atmosphere, they feel like a trilogy of sorts. These are the first 10 minutes of the film:  On a dark, rainy night, a young man and woman walk to a run-down hotel, holding each other. They take a room, sit silently and regard each other as if in agreement. The sadness in their eyes is devastating.  The hotel is next to the railway station. The whistle of the train echoes loudly and the wind blows open the window. With stunning close-ups, Camerini lingers on the expressions of his two leads throughout the film, and allows those expressions to convey the state of mind, and not rely on inter-titles.  For me, this is one of the newly rediscovered masterworks of cinema. 

SONNENSTRAHL

35mm, 1933, Austria, 88 min, Pál Fejös
If Murnau's Sunrise was not made a few years earlier, Sonnenstrahl would probably have been the film in its place. With Gustav Fröhlich (Metropolis) in the lead, the film tells the tale of two lost souls on the streets of Vienna during The Great Depression as they find themselves thrown together.  Opening with a memorable sequence on the contemplation of suicide, we go on a journey of societal necessities, restrictions and conformity. Poetic and tender, Sonnenstrahl reiterates the importance of living life to the fullest. I am now anxiously looking forward to Lonesome, also directed by Pál Fejös.

The rest of my Top 25, chronologically:

THE GARDENER

35mm, 1912, Sweden, 33 min, Victor Sjöström
One of the best films of the festival is one-hundred years old, made and released in 1912. It is the first film of the great Victor Sjöström. The Gardener is a revelation, even at only 33 minutes. A young couple is separated by the boy's jealous father who has his eye on the young woman. Her father is the gardener (played by Sjöström) who works for the man and tends the roses in their greenhouse. After sending his son away, the boy's father shows his true intentions. And this is just the beginning of the film. Sjöström gives this film everything. After being an outcast of society, to show that she is no longer a good girl, there is a scene of her smoking a cigarette - very subtle for 1912, but revealing. I love that each year Bologna celebrates films from 100 years ago. Next year it’s 1913. I hope I will be around and able to go from 2020 to 2029, when the zenith and twilight years of silent cinema, 1920 to 1929, will be showcased. There will be countless treasures revealed over those 10 years.

THE FIRST-BORN

35mm, 1928, Great Britain, 93 min, Miles Mander
A beautiful restoration and a superb 35mm mint print of this drama of hypocrisy and devotion. Directed by and starring Miles Mander in a most unflattering role of a hypocritical cad who flirts and cheats on his wife, but cannot bear the thought that she is even friendly with another man. When he decides to leave his wife for a while as she is not getting pregnant, she takes matters into her own hands to provide him with the offspring he so desperately needs. 

MARY

35mm, 1930, Germany, 82 min, Alfred Hitchcock
Decades and decades later, when it became en vogue for popular foreign films to be remade in English, Alfred Hitchcock was doing the opposite some 80 years ago.  Shot entirely in German with a complete German cast, Mary is, for me, one of Hitchcock's great early achievements. There is so much of that special Hitchcockian touch in this 80-year old film. Sadly, I was not able to see Murder! (the English version) to compare and contrast. Awash in German Expressionism in terms of style and structure, one is reminded of the early sound films of Fritz Lang.

PRIX DE BEAUTE

DCP, 1930, France, 114 min, Augusto Genina

Louise Brooks pays the price for being beautiful and for wanting both worlds - glamour and fame; love and family.  Beautifully restored by the Bologna laboratory and screened in the Piazza with a full orchestra, Prix de beauté makes excellent use of Miss Brooks' talent.

THE NEIGHBOUR'S WIFE AND MINE

35mm, 1931, Japan, 56 min, Heinosuke Gosho

Deftly balancing comedy with social realism, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine gently observes a traditional Japanese marriage. Every time you get the impression it is a comedy, you are quickly reminded it isn't by a quick gesture. The plot is simple - a playwright struggling with writer's block goes next door to investigate some very loud jazz music. He takes a very long time to return and his wife begins to worry, and with reason. After seeing only three of Heinosuke Gosho's films, I am certain a retrospective of his oeuvre will yield many treasures.

FIRST STEPS ASHORE

35mm, 1932, Japan, 88 min, Yasujiro Shimazu

Josef von Sternberg's great classic, The Docks of New York (1928) is reworked, scripted and transplanted to Yokohama. It is amazing how completely Japanized the film is. A sailor saves a suicidal woman from drowning and this begins their strange and dangerous affair of dependency. I am keen on learning more about Yasujiro Shimazu. He, like many of his contemporaries, never loses focus on the main elements of the story. And he knows how to direct his actors. It is important to note that The Docks of New York was named Best Foreign Film released in Japan in 1929 by Kinema Junpo. Another important note is that both Heinosuke Gosho and Keisuke Kinoshita worked as Yasujiro Shimazu's assistants before embarking on their own very successful careers.

NAMIKO
35mm, 1932, Japan, 54 min, Eizo Tanaka

A young couple is married, they go on their honeymoon. Soon after, she becomes ill and he goes off on a trip. While he is away, his family, fearing the scandal of the young wife’s previous relationship with a man, uses the pretext of infection and sends her away to her accepting parents. A simple story but studied with such precision that makes it stand out. This is yet another gem from the retrospective on early Japanese sound films.

WILD GIRL

35mm, 1932, USA, 80 min, Raoul Walsh
A young Joan Bennett stars as the wild and outspoken woman who lives in the woods (untamed California) and is relentlessly pursued by not one or two, but by four different men. One of whom is a young and dashing Ralph Bellamy. Three of them covet her body and one, her heart. Alas, the one who covets her heart must hang! Wild Girl deserves to be heralded as one of Raoul Walsh’s best films.

NEW EARTH

35mm, 1933, Holland, 30 min, Joris Ivens

A superb 35mm print of one of the all-time great short films. Programmed as part of the films on The Great Depression, what Joris Ivens achieved in just 30 minutes is outstanding. In the face of abject poverty and total economic collapse, the Zuider Zee project (farming new land for Holland), is akin to restarting life on earth. What is special about this film is how Ivens intelligently blends the footage of the construction with the politics of economics and the plight of human suffering during The Great Depression. Ivens shows the tragedy of class realities, starvation of millions while vulgar waste of priceless grain continues.

MAN'S CASTLE

35mm, 1933, USA, 71 min, Frank Borzage

Set in the ghetto of the homeless, Hooverville, the narrative is almost fairytale-like. Loretta Young (very, very young indeed) and Spencer Tracy play a couple thrown together by circumstances, when even getting food thrown to pigeons was one's way of surviving. A woman who is willing to give everything to stay with the man she loves. A man who refuses to compromise when it comes to any kind of affection. Man’s Castle is a standout from the retrospective of films on The Great Depression.  It also makes me want to discover more films of Frank Borzage.

LA TETE D'UN HOMME

35mm, 1933, France, 99 min, Julien Duvivier

Julien Duvivier's highly stylized policier is way ahead of its time. It took me by surprise. Based on the novel by Georges Simenon (La nuit du carrefour), we know whodunit from the start. There are no twists and turns, but the direction and the way the screenplay undulates is a twist in its own execution.  At the beginning, the film is told from the police's perspective. Then, it becomes the wrongfully accused man's story. Then, it is owned by the actual sickly criminal, played with ferocity by the magnetic Valéry Inkijinoff, who has more dimensions to his character than everyone else. His arrogance, anger at his illness and verbal jousting with the police are something to behold. Poignant is his obsesssion with a neighbour who sings (not unlike Edith Piaf) a song of remorse, lost love and grief.

A WOMAN OF TOKYO

35mm, 1933, Japan, 51 min, Yasujiro Ozu

I believe this may be one of Ozu's most overlooked films, if such a thing was possible. This gorgeous 35mm print from the archives was a treat on the last day of the festival. Scandal, truth and social realism are at the centre of this 51 minute film. A younger brother and older sister live together, with the sister taking care of the brother as he studies. He finds out that she may not be as good as she seems. The three scenes of confrontation are among the best Ozu has mounted. A Woman of Tokyo is expertly edited and superbly acted, with the sublime Kinuyo Tanaka in one of the lead roles.

GUEULE D'AMOUR

35mm, 1937, France, 93 min, Jean Grémillon

Jean Gabin stars as the titular Ladykiller and one expects him to make women swoon and pant throughout the film. Not under the auspices of Grémillon. In fact, the opposite happens. Jean Gabin is reduced to a vulnerable fool so hopelessly and uncompromisingly in love, one wonders where this film is headed. It is a performance and character from Gabin I have never seen. He is reduced to almost nothing. What is different here is that he is not clueless. He knows he is being played with, but he cannot curb the avalanche of emotions, nor his obvious obedience.

PURSUED

35mm, 1947, USA, 102 min, Raoul Walsh

Judith Anderson and Teresa Wright steal the show in this gem from Raoul Walsh. Robert Mitchum is a man haunted by childhood nightmares and cannot understand why he was adopted in a family that is beset with a legacy of hate and death. The key to the mystery is held firmly by Judith Anderson in a completely different performance that rivals her own Mrs. Danvers (Rebecca). Tragedy, remorse, revenge and a child's destiny all intertwined to create this wonderful concoction of classic Hollywood. Pursued is my personal favourite of the Walsh films I have seen so far.

PATTES BLANCHES (WHITE LEGGINGS)

35mm, 1948, France, 103 min, Jean Grémillon

Grémillon is a master of setting and atmosphere.  Nothing seems forced or fake in his films.  He has complete control of his material.  The scintillatingly scandalous Suzy Delair (Quai des Orfèvres) plays that sort of woman who is entangled in an affair of sex and materialism with a fishmonger.  He brings this worldly and carefree woman to his very small village where there is more than enough going on already. Dark family secrets; a self-sacrificial hunchback; a seemingly sickly man who is the illegitimate son of the count’s father; a naughty yet victimized Suzy Delair; the unwilling count of the manor who is never without his conspicuous white leggings. A delectable recipe?  Indeed. 

AFTER THE CURFEW

DCP, 1954, Indonesia, 101 min, Usmar Ismail

The aftermath of the Indonesian republican revolution which ended Dutch rule, and destroyed the administration of the Dutch East Indies, is explored in this passionate film about a new country, completely lost. This new society of angry and disillusioned young people is faced with the question:  Is this what we fought for? After The Curfew is not a big film about exciting, revolutionary skirmishes, but it is an intimate portrayal of a young man, and the challenges he faces after the revolution. He is a conflicted ex-revolutionary, trying to find his way in their newly created world.  Digitally reconstructed at the Bologna laboratory, using damaged 35mm prints, painstakingly restored frame by frame, After The Curfew is an important classic of Indonesian cinema. Kudos to Martin Scorsese (Chairman of the World Cinema Foundation) and his team for having selected this film for restoration. His advisory team includes, Abbas Kiarostami, Fatih Akin, Wong Kar-wai, Abderrahmane Sissako, Ermanno Olmi and many others. They are doing important work by creating a film preservation consciousness in developing countries, so that these countries can preserve their cinematic treasures, thus creating an international archive of restored classics to be seen and studied by generations to come. The World Cinema Foundation is the kind of organization that makes a significant contribution to the great heritage of international cinema.  Regretfully, I was not able to see Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (India 1948), also restored by the World Cinema Foundation and screened at the festival.

LA ROMANA (WOMAN OF ROME)

35mm, 1954, Italy, 92 min, Luigi Zampa

After the very successful retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2011, and seeing all of his classic films, I didn't think there were any other major films by Luigi Zampa to be discovered. I was wrong. Set in Rome 1935, a young girl is pushed into work that relies completely on her physical beauty. She is seduced, betrayed, compromised and finally becomes a prostitute. But she becomes a prostitute of her own volition, not because she is a poor victim. All of this happens in the first 30 minutes. Then the real trouble begins. Highly stylized, which is unusual for Zampa, La Romana is very blunt in its sexuality and frank discussions on matters of sex and prostitution. 

BAND OF ANGELS

35mm, 1957, USA, 127 min, Raoul Walsh

This film probably shouldn't work as well as it does, but Walsh creates such compelling character who keeps you to the end of their arduous journey. These are not quite likeable characters. Even Sidney Poitier comes across as slightly rough. At the onset of the civil war, a southern belle discovers publicly that she was borne of a Negro slave, and suddenly finds herself an outcast as a new slave because of her ‘tainted blood’. The woman decides to live as a white person, without identifying with the real slaves. For her, it is about survival and she doesn’t make it easy for anyone to like her, except the imperious and determined Clark Gable – plantation master, slave-owner and ex-slave trader with a whole lot of guilty conscience. 

THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR

DCP, 1960, India, 126 min, Ritwik Ghatak

Of the many restorations at the festival, this is the most stunning of them all.  It retains that unique film-like quality that is so very difficult to reproduce even with the most pristine digitizing.  Amidst the melodrama of a struggling family and the suffering daughter, we experience a lyrical tale of self-sacrifice and resilience. There is such poetry and movement in the images and sounds that one is enraptured by the beauty of the images and devastated by the suffering. The opening shot of a tree is perhaps the most sublime shot of a tree that I have ever seen. It is not hard to see why The Cloud-Capped Star is considered one of the greatest films in all of Indian cinema.

REGARD SUR LA FOLIE (LOOKING AT MADNESS)

HD, 1961, France, 53 min, Mario Ruspoli

Long overdue for rediscovery, this film should be regarded as a classic of direct cinema and a pioneer work. In what may be the first film to be shot in an mental institution, with many sessions of patients and doctors, it does not feel like a documentary (as Jean-Paul Sartre said of the film), but it demands that the audience look at mental illness as if we are experiencing it ourselves. 

THE ANTI-MIRACLE

35mm, 1965, Italy, 84 min, Elio Piccon

A rare discovery. It is noted in the programme book that Elio Piccon is one of the most overlooked Italian filmmakers, and it is obvious why. Part fiction, part ethnographical documentary, this film is brutal and demanding. It was dismissed upon release and largely forgotten. With echoes of Las Hurdes and Araya, coupled with a loose narrative, The Anti-Miracle is simply miraculous. Elio Piccon moves to this very remote village and lived there for months before shooting. Over the course of a year, whilst still living there, he films the inhabitants as they tell and act out their own stories, in their dialect. The clearing of a large marshland by hand in the dry season to create a river to await the rainy season in order for eel-fishing to resume, is an astounding feat of labour. 

Other noteworthy favourites, chronologically:

PADRE (rediscovered and restored)

35mm, 1912, Italy, 44 min, Giovanni Pastrone

THE CHALICE OF SORROW (restoration)

35mm, 1916, USA, 70 min, Rex Ingram

PILLARS OF SOCIETY

35mm, 1916, USA, 54 min, Raoul Walsh

THE IMMIGRANT (restoration)

DCP, 1917, USA, 24 min, Charles Chaplin

EASY STREET (restoration)

DCP, 1917, USA, 26 min, Charles Chaplin

AFTER THE VERDICT

35mm, 1929, Great Britain, 70 min, Henrik Galeen

ME AND MY GAL

35mm, 1932, USA, 80 min, Raoul Walsh

THE PARTY CARD

35mm, 1936, USSR, 99 min, Ivan Pyr'ev

THE STRANGE MR. VICTOR

35mm, 1937, France, 99 min, Jean Grémillon

6 PM AFTER THE WAR

35mm, 1944, USSR, 100 min, Ivan Pyr'ev

JUNE 6TH AT DAWN (restoration)

35mm, 1945, France, 56 min, Jean Grémillon

THE BIG KNIFE

35mm, 1955, USA, 103 min, Robert Aldrich

POINT BLANK (restoration)

35mm, 1967, USA, 92 min, John Boorman

TESS (restoration)

DCP, 1979, Great Britain, 171 min, Roman Polanski

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (Restoration, Director’s Cut)

DCP, 1984, USA, 250 min, Sergio Leone

Until 2013…