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Special to Tativille: The Eternal City at Forty: Fellini’s Roma (1972), by Jeremi Szaniawski

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Woody Allen will delight his undiscriminating group of fans (but no one else) with yet another sloppy, inept comedy this year, this time located not in Paris, but in Rome—you have such exquisite taste and you like to share it, Woody. Although an event of admittedly lesser importance, another film set in and dedicated to the eternal city turns forty this year: Federico Fellini’sRoma(1972). A germane opportunity to return to an underestimated crepuscular masterpiece, to which, sadly, not all roads have necessarily led since.

I was recently sitting at a café telling my friend, the one-time feature filmmaker, self-published writer and dilettante extraordinaire Patrick de Selys Longchamps, about my enthusiasm upon seeing the film at one of Paris’s repertory theaters this summer. This prompted a fascinating anecdote. Back in the days when he was a dashing, independently wealthy aspiring filmmaker, Patrick had used family connections to spend a day on a Federico Fellini film set, where he reportedly learned much more than he had in film school.[1]The year was 1971 and the film was Roma.

Patrick enthusiastically recalled witnessing Fellini at work, his meticulous approach and authoritative search for perfection, in this case with an elaborate tracking shot across the crowd of diners eating ‘al fresco’ in a typical Roman street filled with restaurants. While the result on the screen might convey, to the inexperienced eye, the appearance of a merry ebullient mess of hungry Italians captured spontaneously (it is its greatness), everything here was rehearsed to the minutest detail, from each of the extras’ positions, timing and movement, to focus pulling. It took a whole day of work to set up this one sweeping tracking movement across the crowd. By the time the crew was ready to shoot, it was late at night already and the residents of this popular neighborhood started complaining about the bright lights and noise generated by the production. The police showed up on the set to stop work for the night, but Fellini was not to be denied his shot: after a brief discussion, growing impatient, the mercurial director exclaimed some insult in Italian and slapped the agent who had dared slow down his work—worse even, threatened to interrupt it as it was picking up and finally acquiring its desired shape. Any other man, probably, would have been arrested and thrown to jail for the night. But this, after all, was Federico Fellini, and at the peak of his artistic powers and reputation as a world cinematic genius, to boot. The policeman left the premises, the shoot was resumed and the shot successfully completed. On the screen, it is one of the many instances of seemingly effortless bravura featured in the film, which is a majestic experience, imperious and, like Fellini, possibly tyrannical and even punishing—but in a sovereign, legitimate way, like a bolt of lightning that the common mortal will admire and thank the Gods for.

Romais composed of a mosaic of episodes, all connected through electrifying non-sequiturs, rarely returning to previously visited locations, and set in a variety of timescapes, divided among Fellini’s youth in Fascist Italy and the director’s everyday life and entourage in the early 1970s. It constitutes the zenith in the new turn the Italian director’s aesthetics had taken at the time. Initiated in 1969 with another film set partly in Rome, Satyricon, it was continued with equal aplomb (but gradual declining rigor and power) in films such as Amarcord(1973), Casanova (1976) up through And the Ship Sails On(1983). In Roma, Fellini depicts a city that is in turn sublime and decadent, the ideal locale for powerfully evocative images alternating realist and oneiric tones in quick succession, one of the artist’s trademarks. Often, scenes segue into one another almost unexpectedly, even if the general structure is of a progressive lengthening of sequences culminating in the 10 minute long clerical fashion show—one of the summits of Fellini’s collaboration with genius set and costume designer (and notorious substance abuser, something probably in evidence, here) Danilo Donati and legendary composer Nino Rota. In its climax, this hypnotic scene borders on the hallucinatory, as the audience of decadent aristocrats and high rank clerics bow in awe and ecstasy to an uncanny and bespectacled impersonator of the Pope dressed in a garish illuminated garb. Or, where the pomp of the church meets the garishness of the carnival, and a stark critique of idolatry is hammered home. The scene also rhymes and parallels the somewhat sickening parade of grotesque prostitutes in a cheap brothel earlier in the film. All three universes ultimately blend together, as Fellini’s Rome is the Rome of the spectacle, but also the Rome of dirt and decay, of vulgar yet oddly poetic attractions while death and tragedy are at hand, something nowhere better encapsulated than in another one of the film’s centerpieces: the music-hall sequence. In this long and multi-layered sequence, and while the more interesting drama and comedy unfolds in the audience and orchestra pit, half pathetic, half inspired performers do their best to keep the ‘show’ going, as fascist Rome succumbs to the Allied forces’ bombs. The film’s politics are thus never left behind, with the director’s brilliant ridiculing of fascism’s histrionic nature and liberal democracy’s inner contradictions clearly at the fore. Fellini may actually be ultimately less tender with the present than the past, as the nostalgic tone of the film would seem to call for: Italy’s operetta fascism seems less disturbing than the indifference of a dining bourgeois crowd looking on as the police beat a group of peaceful hippies to vacate some historic landmark. All the while exhibiting his intelligent libertarianism, Fellini conducts a corollary self-critique, allowing for his motto, ‘be faithful to yourself’ to take its full expression.

Roma is striking in its apparent refusal of adopting any leading character—even the young Fellini (Peter Gonzales) is only one among the very many characters seen just in passing. It would be incorrect, however, to consider that Rome herself is the main character here, just as it is to state that there is no guiding principle or real structure to the film. Articulated, like a poem, around motifs and themes, of course, Roma also boasts another form of narrative progression. An obvious trajectory is that moving from early childhood to old age (even if this is not done in any strict chronological manner), but there is also a fascinating work at play in the film in terms of modes of enunciation. At first, it seems as though the film is a monological affair—Fellini looking at himself and at the object of his love. Yet things are not that simple, being instead of a different, dialogical nature. The stronger the artifice, the more particular and personal a reminiscence, the more we feel as though we can relate to it. As a consequence, the dialogue between the discreet yet overbearing narrator/image-maker (Fellini) and the viewer makes for a tremendous, almost overpowering experience, allowing us to experience our own childhood (but also to gaze into future departures of all sorts) and our own city of choice through Rome. In this, the film is creating a new connection between techniques of literary modernism and cinema. Many parallels can be established here, from the masters of English modern novel and its stream of consciousness to Proustian recollections. But credit must be given where it is due: the genius behind the genius here is almost certainly the problematic Curzio Malaparte, a writer as admired by some (he was among Stanley Kubrick’s professed favorites) as forced into the vaults by the literary establishment and academia for his discomforting lack of political allegiance. His wartime recollections, deformed and magnified through imagination, yielded a score of semi-grotesque and unforgettable characterizations and representations such as in the extraordinary Kaputt and its companion piece, La Pelle. This way of blending recollections and a strong sense of authenticity with fabrication and a satirical emphasis on details is clearly at play in Fellini. Malaparte’s striking images drawn from wartime Italy have also had a lasting, if substantially repressed influence on another major Italian film director, for that matter. Roberto Rossellini actually plagiarized entire passages of Malaparte’s La Pelle in Paisa and clearly references him in passages of Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany Year Zero(1948). It is not by chance that Jean-Luc Godard elected Malaparte’s beautiful Capri villa to shoot his aptly titled Contempt(1963).

As far as references and intertext go, Roma relates most strongly to two other Fellini films: the pessimistic, resigned yet elegiac tone vis-à-vis lost opportunities in the vibrant eternal city reminds one of La Dolce Vita(1960), while stylistically the film’s treatment of childhood recollections announces Amarcord(set in the director’s native Rimini), with which the opening part of Roma shares a great many attributes, also in terms of tone and casting. But unlike Amarcord, Roma is not exclusively composed of burlesque if poignant reminiscences: it proposes a dual, internal and external view, negotiated formally through the grotesque and parodic bits, and a more ‘objective’ quasi-documentary (yet just as heavily composed and rehearsed) vision of the director and his world. More the latter than the former, indeed: this is Fellini’s Rome, a most personal and idiosyncratic vision, which reduces or derides the ‘academic’ glory of yore. The Rubicon is shown as a small stream whose crossing hardly invokes a fateful or irreversible action; and Julius Caesar is played by an old overly made-up thespian, revered but clearly way past his prime (Fyodor Chaliapin Jr.). As for historical monuments, they are expedited through a slide show shown by a priest to schoolchildren, until the photograph of a naked woman, placed in the sequence by some mischievous hand, short-circuits the proceedings to the children’s irreverent glee.

La Dolce Vita, Roma, Amarcord: all three films (but they are hardly alone in this case in the director’s corpus), riding on their episodic structure, are powerfully invested in the female body and the mother figure, although the latter is always relegated to the fringes of the narrative, indispensable yet covered up, as if in a gesture of respect. In La Dolce Vita, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) compares Rome to a warm jungle where one can hide easily, clearly attributing feminine and womb-like qualities to the city. In one of Roma’s comical scenes, a young Fellini, freshly arrived to Rome, discovers an intricate apartment on a sweltering hot day, peopled with children of all ages, and whose mother is a huge obese slob (at first only heard, as if hidden or displaced) who can’t move out of bed. Roma, whose opening music evokes a sad, brooding lullaby, also invites the spectator to discover the entrails of this city where a multitude of unforgettable women come and go, some grotesque and some mesmerizing. Much like the city, women are endowed with a familiar mystery that men never seem to possess. In this sense, the image that captures the film best might be that of the silhouette of a woman under a bridge at night, in extreme long shot, her shadow as dark as her body, standing still yet filled with the anticipation of the moment, while a siren alerts the people to take shelter from the impending bombings. The stillness and the tension of this tableau are rendered palpable yet elusive, visible yet unknowable. As another silhouette runs to the woman and causes her to motion again, her movements might be panic-stricken and filled with dread, they are nonetheless graceful and intensely captivating in their quasi abstract quality.

It is impossible not to conceive of Roma as an allegory for femininity and motherliness, something announced already in one of its memorable posters (the Romulus and Remus she-wolf replaced by a slender woman on all four and boasting three breasts), but this interpretation does not suffice to explain the film’s appeal. The latter resides also in one of the best meta-commentaries ever made about cinema. The overt references to the proscenium are numerous, here: from stage and cabaret representations to the actual screening of a 1930s peplum that the whole family religiously rushes to. But more importantly, the film embodies the real spirit of cinema in its virtuosic use of movement. Two sequences are little else: one composed of shots of the highway in the rain and the Roman roads, witnessing the heavy traffic and its own brand of sublime while also revealing Fellini and his crew on the car from which the camera and its crane are suspended; and the closing episode, where roaring bikers circle around Rome before leaving town and into the night.

In movement—this very essence of cinema—we find the inevitable corollary: time, for which Rome serves as the paradoxical crucible, as when modern highways and antique buildings are made to co-exist, or old American tourists dress pretty and arrive in flocks, more so to be picked up by young Italian gigolos, making them forget their age, than to photograph ruins that allegorize their own process of decay, and will survive them nonetheless. After all, as Gore Vidal puts it in one of the ‘candid’ interviews the film portrays, Rome is the city where life and death co-exist to the point of becoming non-differentiated. The city becomes a haunted place of a myriad of geological layers of history and stories, which appear as though in a cross-section before us in the contiguity of peace-and-love professing hippies sitting next to the Coliseum. Time, but also tenses are played with here in a variety of ways: the past and present, and perhaps the future, too. In eternity they are all blended and become meaningless. The scene in which bulldozers and drills dig the Roman subway and unearth a Roman villa is a fine illustration of this conundrum: as air penetrates the previously interred place, it destroys the beautiful paintings on the walls. Here the paradox of a time that can be captured and yet cannot escape its own passing in a purportedly eternal city evokes a perpetual present that is also perpetually effaced or covered up, offering a not-so-distant geo-historical equivalent of Deleuze’s crystal image. In a brief yet unforgettable appearance, Anna Magnani, the eternal Mamma Roma, in her final screen role, captures this paradox: refusing to grant an interview to Fellini, she is still captured by his camera. The cinematic icon, this quintessential Roman woman, fierce and nurturing like Romulus’ wolf, although 64 at the time, has the energy of a young woman, married to the experience of a lifetime. Magnani (1908-1973) appears before us like an antique statue suddenly endowed with the gift of movement, rich with a thousand years of experience and the admiration of spectators, a second before it freezes again forever.

Combining the heathen element of epiphany through art (found most clearly in Satyricon) with the angelic intervention of an icon (such as Giulietta Masina’s look at the camera at the end of Nights of Cabiria; 1957), Roma is almost inexplicably, miraculously touched by Grace. Better than any other Fellini film, it combines sheer beauty with grotesque ugliness, cultivating in the process the essence of the Italian master’s cinema, intensely pure and intransigent, fun yet filled with regret, one that we watch with a smile, while a tear wells up our eyes, as this is a cinema of what is lost, and can only be retrieved in the symbolic realm.

Forty years after its release, twenty years after Fellini’s death which it announced better than any other of his films, Roma might have emerged as his most personal and, perhaps, greatest cinematic achievement.

Jeremi Szaniawski holds a PhD in Film Studies from Yale University. The author wishes to thank Michael Cramer for his assistance in editing this piece.




[1]Inspired by Fellini, Patrick directed a remarkable, if uneven, adaptation of Georges Bataille’s ‘L’Histoire de l’oeil’ (Simona, 1972). When the film was confiscated by the Italian authorities on counts of obscenity, Patrick had to resort once again to his family connections, which led directly to the Pope’s confessor, in order to obtain the church’s benediction and a prolonged distribution in the Peninsula. Reportedly, the film, now lost, made a lot of money before falling in the hands of some distributors of ill repute.

"After the Crash: European Film ca. 1929-1930"

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What follows is a combination of my partial program notes for After the Crash: European Film ca. 1929-1930, and my further reflections on those titles about which I did not specifically write this year. Before these short synopses, I have post my historical overview for the immediate post-Crash period. 

After the Crash 

While the events of October 1929 would be felt immediately throughout Europe, the force with which they were to be experienced, both in the short term and long, would vary markedly throughout the continent. Having endured a postwar ‘era of inflation’ that brought with it “hyperinflation” by the summer of 1922, Germany had corrected its economic course by the “golden” middle years of the decade, only to plunge deeply into the financial crisis as American banks called in their short-term loans. By the beginning of 1932, as Weimar historian Eric D. Weitz has pointed out, six million Germans or one-third of its workforce would be unemployed, with two million more “unofficially” unemployed, bringing the total to an “almost unbelievable forty percent.” Figures in industries such as iron and steel and shipbuilding were even higher ranging from 41.9 percent in the case of the former to a staggering in 63.5 in that of the latter. All told, GNP declined from a high of nearly 89,000,000 RM in 1928 to less than 56,000,000 in 1932. As the new decade was dawning, Weimar Germany was experiencing the Great Depression as acutely as any nation in Europe.

America’s closest cultural ally in Europe, Great Britain, likewise felt the full force of the Stock Market Crash almost immediately with demand for its industrial products collapsing over the course of the winter of 1929-1930. Especially hard-hit would be the nation’s industrial and mining regions, with thirty percent of Glaswegians, for example, unemployed by 1933. However, in the case of Great Britain, unemployment itself was not a new problem, though its scope certainly would make it a much greater one. Rather, when Britain’s second Labor Government ascended to power in June 1929, high unemployment, according to British historian Peter Clarke, “was already the key issue,” with the nation’s lack of jobs alternately blamed on Britain’s capitalist economy, its Free Trade policies, its “painful” decision to revert to the gold standard and its industrial decline. What the Stock Market Crash effectively meant for Britain was that “economic depression was no longer a peculiar British problem but a world problem, bringing cyclical unemployment on top of pre-existing structural unemployment.”

Ramsay MacDonald’s Labor Government acted quickly in 1929 to relax borrowing limits for the long-term unemployed on the ‘dole,’ while removing the stipulation that claimants must be “genuinely seeking work.” As a result, the nation’s unemployment statistics saw a substantial increase from 1.5 million in January to 1930 to 2.5 by the end of that same year, placing great stress on the National Insurance Fund. Early in 1930, Labor politician Sir Oswald Mosley issued a memorandum proposing that the workforce be cut by raising the school-leaving age, reducing that of retirement and easing credit to stimulate trade behind a “tariff wall.” Mosley’s memorandum was rejected, leading to his resignation from the Government in 1930 and to his eventual turn toward fascism as the decade progressed. In any case, his final suggestion of a system of tariffs did find currency in the Labor Government, where protectionism experienced greater gains in 1930-1931 than in it had “in the whole of the previous quarter-century.” The Second MacDonald Ministry also succeeded in passing the (perhaps under-enforced) Coal Mines Act of 1930, which reduced workdays to seven-and-a-half hour shifts in exchange for allowing owners to form cartels and also the Housing Act of 1930, which provided subsidies for slum-clearance.

Across the English Channel, French Prime Minister André Tardieu (1929-1930, 1932) championed a ‘national retooling program,’ which sought, through public works, to “stimulate prosperity and bind peasants and workers to liberal capitalism.” While it would be deliberately sunk by radical opposition, the work of Tardieu governments was partially carried on by those of Pierre Laval. As for the economic crisis, unemployment in France during the Great Depression was “notably lower” than it was in its contiguous nations. In part, this was the result of France’s comparative lack of manpower brought on the nation’s steep World War I casualties: France lost more than 1.3 million soldiers, of which more than one in four was younger than twenty-four, with three million more wounded in battle. However, even if the Depression was not quite as severe in France from an economic standpoint, it remained very serious indeed from a political perspective, with the French populace voicing countless fears as the Depression deepened: “peasants complained of falling prices, civil servants feared wage-cuts, businesses faced bankruptcy, students and professionals resented foreign competition for jobs, [and] white-collar workers demanded the return of women to the home.” For Kevin Passmore, “the result was extreme governmental instability,” culminating in the rise of the Leftist Popular Front in 1934.

On the other side of the Pyrenees in Spain, 1930 began with the resignation of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera on the twentieth-eighth day of January amid rising inflation and a currency whose value was plummeting. By August of the same year, the Socialists signed an agreement with the nation’s republican parties to work towards the installation of a democratic Republic. That goal would be achieved following the municipal elections of 12 April 1931, which were assumed by monarchists and republicans alike to be a “plebiscite on the constitutional future of Spain.”

There was no similar challenge to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy during the first few years of the Depression. In power since 1922, Mussolini pursued an economic strategy during the Depression years that was more propagandistic, according to modern Italian historian Martin Clark, than it was targeted toward concrete achievement. In general, Italy pursued policies of protectionism and proto-Keynesian demand-side economics, with public works and welfare spending peaking during the four years that followed the stock market crash. When a number of debtor firms became insolvent in the year following the Stock Market Crash, the Fascist government rescued the nation’s largest banks, with its first act to supply industrial credit beginning in 1931. This policy would prove especially popular in Fascist Italy. At the same time, the Fascists cut wages by twelve percent, encouraged price-fixing and arranged cartels. The money supply declined from 19 billion lire in 1927 to 16 billion lire in 1932, with cost-of-living experiencing a dramatic 16 percent decline over a concurrent five-year period. In total, Italy fared the early Depression years better than many of its rival nations, which in the minds of the public, seemed to add legitimacy to the Fascist regime’s anti-liberal economic policies.

As the Great Depression arrived in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was finally “returning to normality,” following an exceedingly tumultuous 1920s. The summer of 1929 witnessed Millenary celebrations in honor of Bohemian prince St. Wenceslas, which culminated in the completion of the medieval Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague. Politically, the nation had achieved an “ideal half-way” between extremes of Right and Left in the judgment of Czechoslovak historian R. W. Seton-Watson, thanks in no small measure to the power of the Roman Catholic majority that opposed both Clerical rule and Communist revolution. The Great Depression however would hit Czechoslovakia hard, with 750,000 unemployed by 1932. Amid the sudden economic chaos, the nation’s governing Coalition would be threatened by collapse, with thirty Communist deputies and a new Fascist formation actively working to discredit those in power – though ultimately with a “singular lack of success.”

The situation of course was very different to the east where 1930 would mark the second anniversary of the Joseph Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. With the Politburo resolved to complete the massive economic transformation in four rather than five years, despite the concerns of sympathetic economists, the Soviet Union undertook the “gigantic task of amending schemes involving the country’s industry, agriculture, transport and commerce”: cities such as Magnitogorsk were being built, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was dug, mines were sunk and factories were put on seven-day work weeks – all of which helped to transform the Soviet Union into a great industrial nation, even as the rest of the West was experiencing steep economic decline. The Soviet Union indeed was one of the rare success stories during the Depression years, at least from the standpoint of economic markers: gross industrial output had risen 137 percent between 1928 and 1933; capital goods increased by an even more impressive 285 percent; and the total employed labor force, which numbered 11.3 million under the new economic policy, reached a total of 22.8 million.

In the countryside, Stalin introduced two types of collective farms in 1929, the sovkhoz and the kolkhoz, which though officially voluntary would rely on a set of coercive levers for total implementation. By December 1929, however, these collective farms would no longer be open to all Soviets as the kulaks (a comparatively affluent class of farmers) would be banned from becoming collective farm workers. On 30 January 1930, the Politburo approved the kulaks liquidation as a class, sending many in their ranks to concentration camps while others were sent to distant places within the Soviet Union or to other sections of their home provinces. By July 1930, over 320,000 households were subjected to “dekulakisation.” Stalin’s persecutions did not stop at the kulak class naturally, but extended to “bourgeois nationalists, priests and private traders… as well as recalcitrant economic experts.” Leading figures in these groups (save for religious leaders whose persecution, along with the Red Army’s, remained out of the public eye) were subjected to show trials in 1929-1930, after being tortured and forced to read rote confessions. “Hundreds of defendants,” according to Stalin biographer Robert Service, “were either shot or sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment” in the nation’s Gulags, with many of those that survived the former ultimately losing their lives as forced laborers in the construction of an industrial Soviet Union.

Select Bibliography 

Clark, Martin. Modern Italy: 1871 to the Present. Third edition. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Educational Limited, 2008.

Clarke, Peter. Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Passmore, Kevin. “The Republic in crisis: politics 1914-1945.” Modern France 1880-2002. James McMillan, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2004.

Seton-Watson, R. W. A History of the Czechs and the Slovaks. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1965. Vincent, Mary. Spain 1833-2002: People and State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Program Notes and Reflections

Regen / Rain(Joris Ivens, 1929, Netherlands, 14 minutes)

Though it clocks in at less than fifteen minutes, Joris Ivens’s lyrical portrayal of a sudden rainstorm as it descends upon a sunny Amsterdam was more than two years in the making. With the subject first suggested to Ivens in October 1927 by his soon to be estranged collaborator Mannus Franken – Franken like many of Ivens’s subsequent co-conspirators would complain of the filmmaker’s propensity to monopolize credit – Ivens proceeded to shoot Rain in between his various other projects for the next two years, relying throughout much of the period on “rain spotters” to “alert him to appropriate images” that would fit his shooting script. The finished short, which debuted in Amsterdam in December 1929, manufactures a “poetic impression of Amsterdam as seen through the eyes of an introvert observer wandering through the city during a rain shower,” with imagery ranging from the single beads of rainwater collecting on the metal tips of an open umbrella to the aerial set-ups of the rain-soaked metropolis. While Rain no doubt owes to Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) in its lyrical treatment of urbanism, Ivens’s micro-scaled adaption of the formula favors the presence of the natural in the built environment. To echo graduate film scholar Grant Wiedenfeld, Ivens's is an extraordinary piece of “pure cinema.”

This short is available on a variety of home video formats including on Kino-Lorber’s Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. 

Menschen am Sonntag / People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930, Germany, 73 minutes)

A wellspring for postwar film noir with collaborators Siodmak, Ulmer, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann all making significant contributions to the later mode, People on Sunday nevertheless looks forward less to the Hollywood that this decorated collection of émigré filmmakers would soon shape than it does to the concurrent transformations in the European cinema, where the non-professional strategies of the German feature shortly would be re-played (in the fascist south especially). People on Sunday, however, differs ontologically from this nascent art cinema as reality does not so much protrude on the filmmakers' fiction, but rather, fiction supervenes, through Wilder's screenplay, on the reality of five non-actors, drawn from the 4 million Berliners, whom the filmmakers take as their subject. (The non-narrative digressions substantially ground the film's grafted on fiction.) In this sense, People on Sunday is even more modern in its prediction of Abbas Kiarostami and his twenty-first century followers Lisandro Alonso and Miguel Gomes, whose hybrid creations have enlivened the last decade of international art cinema.

This film is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on the Criterion Collection label. 

K.Sh.E / Komsomol – shef elektrifikatsii / Komsomol – Sponsor of Electrification (Esfir Shub, 1933, Soviet Union, 54 minutes)

A friend of Sergei Eisenstein and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Esfir Shub got her start in the Soviet film industry re-cutting and titling foreign films in order to make them ideological “suitable” for domestic audiences. From this point of departure, Shub transitioned into the work of editing and assembling newsreel footage, which commenced with her feature-length archive-footage compilation, The Fall of the Roman Dynasty, in 1927. Five years later, Shub attempted her first work in the sound cinema with K.Sh.E (short for 'Komsomol – Sponsor of Electrification'), which would focalize not only the subject of its title, the contributions of the “komsomol” (or youth division of the Communist party) in bringing electricity to the nation, but also the sound technology that Shub was employing for the first time. In fact, before K.Sh.E moves to its primary ideological purpose – one it should be noted that was born out of the conclusion of Stalin’s “five year plan” – Shub begins with a prologue filmed inside a Moscow “sound factory,” where the “futuristic” and exceedingly magical theremin is debuted as Shub and her crew look on, their cameras rolling and directional microphones recording in a testament to the film’s post Man with a Movie Camera (1929) self-reflexivity.

A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929, United Kingdom, 88 minutes) 

Begun in early 1929, a few short months after The Jazz Singer became the first talking picture to screen in Europe, Anthony Asquith’s fourth and final silent feature (as it is remembered and screened today), would also be his first to bear a synchronized soundtrack, now lost, which according to Variety featured ‘six percent’ spoken dialogue. A Cottage of Dartmoor in fact announces its very position on the threshold of this new technology, and in so doing the historical accident of its silence, through a focal set-piece near the picture’s midpoint that shifts attention away from a boisterously scored and edited crescendo of an off-screen Harold Lloyd short, to an “all talking, all singing, all dancing” dramatic adaption of W. Shayspeare’s My Woman. With the orchestra laying down their instruments in exchange for a round of pints and decks of playing cards, Asquith’s previously breakneck montage thusly proceeds according to a newly measured pace that more closely reproduces the slower, dialogically calibrated rhythm of early sound cinema. A Cottage on Dartmoor however will remain more the creature of the silent cinema’s last dizzying gasp with topics of conversation figured in illustrational inserts and the act of speech itself in visual metaphor. Then there is Asquith’s infinitely more memorable inclusion of a gushing sprayer hose, following a percussive series of visual metonymies, to mark a sudden outburst of workplace violence. At this moment, Asquith demonstrates a pitch-black visual wit to equal that of his countryman Alfred Hitchcock – just as he has produced a work of the crime thriller genre to match anything that the 'Master of Suspense' produced during his highly accomplished silent period. The very peak of the After the Crash program.

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of the British Film Institute, with live accompaniment provided by Donald Sosin. 

Die Drei von der Tankstelle / The Three from the Gas Station / Three Good Friends (Wilhelm Thiele, 1930, Germany, 99 minutes) 

A major popular hit in Weimar Germany, outpacing even Sternberg and Dietrich’s iconic teaming in The Blue Angel (1930), Wilhelm Thiele’s The Three the Gas Station, opens with a briskly cut passage of transitional montage that will slow to a multi-figural crawl as Thiele stages his three male leads in a series of medium set-ups as they declare their eternal loyalty. From this point of departure, The Three from the Gas Station abounds with both charm and kitsch, with the consequent, unexpected appearance of trick effects only adding to the quotient of each. The beautiful English-born Lillian Harvey also contributes more of the same, thanks to her thick, unmasked Anglo accent – The Three from the Gas Station trades heavily on early sound forms of spectacle – and also her keenness to raise her skirt high above her thighs, revealing her badly bunched stockings as she awkwardly hooves to a musical number. Ginger Rogers Ms. Harvey is not in this ultimately minor entry into the After the Crash corpus.

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of Transit films. Special thanks to David Pendleton of the Harvard Film Archive.

Prix de beauté / Beauty Prize / Miss Europe (Augusto Genina, 1930, France, 93 minutes)

Originating from an idea by France’s greatest film artist of the transition-to-sound period, René Clair (Sous les tois de Paris, À Nous la Liberté), “able” Italian craftsman Augusto Genina’s expertly paced Prix de beauté remains best known today as the final major performance by the iconic Kansas-native Louise Brooks. Breaking her Paramount contract in 1928, which in turn led to her unofficial blacklisting in Hollywood, Brooks departed for Germany where she made her masterpiece in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) later that same year, to be followed in quick succession by a second significant collaboration with the same director, Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). While Prix de beauté accordingly would prove only the third performance of Brooks’s ultimately brief European sojourn – following three short years in Southern California – the impression that the talented raven-haired actress would leave with her boyish bob and shapely lower physique was more than enough to cement her consequent, post-1950s rediscovery reputation beside such screen legends as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo (with whom the avowedly heterosexual Brooks reportedly once claimed to have a romantic dalliance). In Prix de beauté, Clair and Genina deliver a subject that befits both her immense appeal – Brooks stars as a newspaper typist who, despite the objections of her fiancé, enters and wins a San Sebastian-set beauty pageant – and also her tragically short film career, one that would conclude more than four-and-a-half decades before her 1985 death. Prix de beauté’s final act surprise resounds with both this latter professional intertext, as well as with a sharp formal self-awareness that in Brooks’s last appearance as a screen star highlights the post-synchronous nature of the film’s Clair-inspired sound experimentation, separating as it does Brooks’s visage from the sound of Edith Piaf’s overdubbed vocals. In this moment as throughout the film (which originated as a work of the silent cinema), we see silence but hear sound.

This film is available on DVD through Kino-Lorber. 

L’Âge d’or (Luis Buñuel, 1930, France, 63 minutes) 

Withdrawn from circulation less than one month after its late November 1930 premiere – following a Ligue des Patriotes attack on the Studio 28 theatre where it was receiving its premiere Parisian engagement – Luis Buñuel’s second film would primarily remain an object of rumor and dimmed recollection for the next half-century, appearing only in the occasional private screening, as would occur at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. It was not until November of 1979 that L’Âge d’or would receive its proper U.S. theatrical premiere, once the “gates protecting [Western society] from sex and blasphemy,” as Dudley Andrew has put it, had been thrown open. Appearing in the breach was a work, from a Buñuel and Salvador Dalí script, which belonged unequivocally to the earlier moment, to that of surrealism’s revolutionary “Second Manifesto,” as well as to the last gasp of postwar France’s modernist avant-garde. Much more than any of the director’s later works, L’Âge d’or also bares the influence or at least an affinity with the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, with which it shares a fundamentally linguistic orientation and a corresponding interest in audience response – which perhaps accounts for its successful appeal to a more passive spectatorship, despites its undeniable thematic density. If L’Âge d’or therefore does not feel entirely familiar in view of the proceeding forty-seven years of narrative practice with which audiences of 1979 (as today) would have been aware, Buñuel’s first feature does still disproportionately anticipate the corpus that would follow, from its satirical engagement with bourgeois values and the dispersed (social) focalization strategies that would mark such masterpieces as The Exterminating Angel (1962) and of course The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) to the liebestod and fetishism that would define the very great Él (1953) and its many followers. To echo Dudley Andrew, particularly in view of its checkered reception history, “long live L’Âge d’or.”

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of the British Film Institute. It is also available on DVD through Kino-Lorber. 

David Golder (Julien Duvivier, 1930, France, 86 minutes) 

In a great year for the French cinema, Julien Duvivier stands out for the appreciable force of his anti-corporate diptych, with David Golder analogically marking the post-Crash fall of Au bonheur des dames’s (1930) all-powerful retail juggernaut. Elegantly shot in a rich variety of grays – cinematographically speaking David Golder looks very modern indeed – Duvivier’s novelistic adaptation possesses many of the qualities of nineteenth century Russian literature, beginning with its abiding predilection for psychological nuance; this alone sets David Golder apart from and above much of the 1930s field. On his death bed (aboard a Soviet ferry), the eponymous protagonist Golder (Harry Baur in a magnificent grounding performance) makes belated contact with a braided earlier version of his Judaic self, who happens to be in transit to Capitalistic capital of New York. At this moment, Duvivier appears to be neither for not against his capitalist hero, though this concluding meeting does signal the return of the culturally repressed - amid the mists that would soon come to define an entire 'poetic realism.'

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of Conaissance du Cinema. Special thanks to Cecille Lagesse of Yale University. 

Bezucelná procházka / Aimless Walk (Alexandr Hackenschmied, 1930, Czechoslovakia, 8 minutes) 

The inaugural feature in the Czech avant-garde (drawn again from the city symphony corpus of the 1920s), Hackenschmied - aka Alexander Hamid - would become best known as Maya Deren's partner and collaborator on the no-less epochal Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Rather than read my inarticulate thoughts on the Hackenshmied film, a film for which I will admit no powerful impression, I would suggest viewing the work in full at this link.

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic.

Ze soboty na nedeli / From Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931, Czechoslovakia, 69 minutes)

An extraordinary summation and ultimately optimistic reconsideration of After the Crash’s accidental obsession with the romantically disadvantaged working-class male and his upwardly mobile feminine counterpart – Lisa K. Broad has rightly pointed to this subject’s tragic contemporary resonance amid America’s endless Recession – From Saturday to Sunday makes explicit the corresponding sex for money calculus that in its cinematic predecessors rules out the aforesaid male. In From Saturday to Sunday, however, Machatý’s fleshy, very average heroine runs from sexual payment (as she approaches a clandestinely arranged hotel), opting instead for a night spent floating in and out of waking consciousness – and characteristically postwar adult situations – in the flat of one of After the Crash’s surprisingly numerous working-class type-setters. The space itself, designed by the great experimental filmmaker Alexandr Hackenshmied (see above), contributes to From Saturday to Sunday’s rich social panorama, one that finds memorable object-centred expression in the film’s competing menus. Machatý’s gracefully experimental and lightly surreal From Saturday to Sunday accordingly represents the most welcome discovery of the 1929-1930 series.

This film screened on 35mm courtesy of the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic. 

Select Bibliography 

Andrew, Dudley. “L’âge d’or and the Eroticism of the Spirit.” In Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema. Ed. Ted Perry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

British Film Institute. K-SH-E. http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4ce2b735daa98.

Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. 5th edition. Revised by Fred Klein & Ronald Dean Nolen. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.

Ryall, Tom. Anthony Asquith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Schoots, Hans. Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens. Trans. David Colmer. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.

Hulu Plus on Tativille: Jean Grémillon's Remorques

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Begun in 1939 but not completed until well after Germany's 1940 occupation of northern and western France, Jean Grémillon's masterful Remorques (Stormy Waters, 1941, 82 mins.) may well stand as the last 'Brillante' gasp of the pre-World War II French cinema, with its consistently inventive mobile framings, fragrant mise-en-scène and lush musical accompaniment all certifying a by then lost golden age. Grémillon and cinematographer Armand Thirard immediately establish a potent, personal form of expressionism, with an inebriated forward tracking shot stumbling along with a boozy minor player. He brings the camera to a glimmering, though on occasion ruggedly cut wedding banquet, where Grémillon organizes the elegantly keyed interior in a receding series of luminous planes that rapidly fall out of focus. As the dancing proceeds, Grémillon's camera waltzes with lead, married guests-of-honor Jean Gabin and Madeleine Renaud as they converse beneath a heavy orchestral canopy. A sudden, brisk, punctuating track backward will momentarily close the scene - though it will soon re-commence with the consequent arrival of one of Gabin's tugboat employees on the back of his speeding motorbike, having arrived out of the onyx night.

In the poetically under-lit nautical scene that follows, Grémillon's mise-en-scène becomes increasing haptic, with the cold Atlantic rains piercing through Gabin's outerwear. The filmmaker liberally alternates between pleasurably quaint models and second-unit documentary set-ups that feature the sailors at work as they labor to rescue a storm-tossed vessel. Inside the cabin of the tugboat, Grémillon's tripod set-ups swing violently with the ship, thus extending the film's expressionistic program. Gabin and his crew save a soaking, slick-haired Michèle Morgan as she risks her life in an attempt to flee from her soon-to-be estranged, villainous husband's ship. Back on shore, the previously happily married Gabin and Morgan abruptly begin an affair, one that opens with a now lighter-haired Morgan expressly taking the place of Gabin's absent, ill wife. As they arrive at an unoccupied beachfront cottage, Morgan observes that the place reminds her of a ghost film she once saw - an apt citation given the low-key visual and model work (reminiscent of James Whale) and the angular architecture drawn from German Expressionism that in this space in particular, strongly obtains. A second meeting in another flat coincides with a powerful lightning storm that both extends the metaphor that brought Morgan into Gabin's life and also externalizes the couple's electric passion. For its visual pursuit of its thematic motifs alone, the Jacques Prévert-scripted feature matches if not exceeds any of the screenwriter's prewar work with Gabin, Morgan and the far-better known Marcel Carné.

Remorques concludes with one of its most inventive, if also somewhat primitive passages: the spectator hears a voiced-off funerary oration that doubles as a moral chastisement of the unfaithful Gabin. In this moment, Grémillon re-frames his cardinal storm metaphor within an ancient tradition of divine judgement that stretches back to the Book of Genesis. On the very waters that by 1941 would be controlled by the Nazis, Gabin is fated to travel life alone aboard his ghost ship.

A special thanks is due Lisa K. Broad for her observations included in this piece. Remorques is available on both Hulu Plus and in the Criterion Collection's Eclipse-label Jean Grémillon During the Occupation box set.

New Film: Trouble with the Curve (2012) & The Master (2012)

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Robert Lorenz's Trouble with the Curve(2012), from a Randy Brown screenplay, represents Clint Eastwood's first on-camera work since Gran Torino (2008), the multi-hyphenate's final extraordinary entry into the "Dirty Harry" cycle, and the auteur's first role in a film by another director since In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Petersen, 1993). What emerges, despite Eastwood's lack of credited presence behind the camera, is some of the most personal Hollywood filmmaking of the year, with the actor's long-standing, psychoanalytic preoccupations with estranged father-daughter relationships (True Crime, Million Dollar Baby) and child victimization (A Perfect World, Mystic River) confirming the filmmaker's secret authorship over his former assistant-director's debut. Much more meaningfully, Trouble with the Curve also extends the self-reflexive project of the actor-director's work, with the star's latest explicitly ceding control to a younger generation. Eastwood's sight-impaired Gus Lobel begrudgingly gives his daughter (Amy Adams as Mickey) his keys - only to wreck his vehicle later, in a moment of characteristic self-deprecation - before literally receding into the background of the frame, as Mickey rushes to be with Justin Timberlake's Johnny in the focal foreground. Trouble with the Curve indeed marks a handing over of sorts, to Adams and Timberlake - the latter representing the 'Ice Cube' generation of actors with whom Gus and his fellow scouts needle one of their colleagues - no less than to Lorenz.

Eastwood's withdrawal, however, is by no means unambiguously positive. On the one hand, Adams and Timberlake's chemistry does provide much of Trouble with the Curve's pleasure, whether Johnny is chatting up Mickey beside the chain-link or the beaming couple joins the clogging in a backwoods North Carolina watering hole. On the other hand, Trouble with the Curve is diminished, though not so much for this writer to cancel his recommendation, by Lorenz's direction, which oscillates between the perfunctory and the overly literal (in his point-of-view framings of Gus's deteriorating sight), as well as by Brown's screenplay, with its frequently too-on-point dialogue. Then there is the film's denouement that violently strains credulity, even if its counter to the statistics-driven analysis of Bennett Miller's Moneyball (2011), a film that it should be admitted is superior both on the level of its writing and also in its direction, is both plausible on the microscopic level and also ably integrated into Trouble with the Curve's cliché-riddled narrative.

At this point, it would seem germane to turn to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012), which shares not only Adams with the Eastwood film - albeit to lesser effect - but also Philip Seymour Hoffman with another superior Bennett Miller film, the latter's biopic Capote (2005). Here, however, the comparison essentially ends, with Trouble with the Curve's opening scene urination announcing Eastwood's return to a low-brow aesthetic, while The Master declares its significance in not only its title, but in its selection of a 70mm format and even, perversely enough, Joaquin Phoenix's more intellectually respectable masturbatory gestures that take the place of Eastwood's prostate. The last of these sets the tone for the taming of Phoenix's primitive, which all too often Anderson squeezes into standard-issue shot/reverse-shot decoupage - thereby belying the selection of the more expensive and expansive format. Of course, The Master does have its visual moments, whether Phoenix's Freddie Quell is racing over a California field or exploding in an ably chosen static two-shot with his impassive seducer Hoffman in the next cell; it is simply that these passages are more the exception than the rule.

In the end, however, The Master's problem seems perhaps less its ability to sustain visual interest - after all, Trouble with the Curve rarely achieves any, save for its atmospheric Carolina pinewood exteriors and freshly groomed ball-fields - than that there seems to be little beneath its surfaces, behind Phoenix's and Hoffman's scenery-chewing push-and-pull (to Adams and Timberlake's gentle courtship). The Trouble with the Curve is of course predominately what exists beyond the frame, a work that invites if not actually calls its viewer to consider its place in Eastwood's career as both an extension and a new direction. The Master by comparison seems to exist in no world other than those of its characters, who enact a psycho-sexual drama that fails to offer viewers anything meaningful about post-war America or a Scientology faith that Anderson seems far less comfortable criticizing than the Christian fundamentalism of There Will Be Blood (2007). Despite the ambitions of its title, 'the Master' appears to have lost his nerve in what may well be his weakest film of his career.

What White Collar Is

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Let us begin with what the USA Network's White Collar (2009-2012) is not: prestige, long-form television  of the HBO-Showtime-AMC variety. It lacks the novelistic structure and density to make it hipster/Slate/coastal water-cooler fodder. In a writer's medium (to cinema's director's art), White Collar is not particularly well written, especially on the level of dialogue - David Milch, Jeff Eastin and company are not. Nor is it particularly well acted in its forty or so minutes each week, especially within a cable world that gives us the extraordinary work of Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Giancarlo Esposito, et al., on television's current best, and most consistently well-acted program, Breaking Bad (2008-2012). In short, White Collar does not correspond to the way that we, which is to say those of us with some stake in elite culture, consume quality television. White Collar just doesn't figure in the public discourse - and understandably so.

What White Collar is, however, is the most consistently visually compelling hour on American television; it is a series, almost without parallel for contemporary works of the medium, that thinks first, and quite a bit, of how to gracefully compose the visual field. If show-runner Jeff Eastin has not created a series that conforms to our idea of what makes television good, he nonetheless has created a visual style of exceptional density and moment-to-moment optic interest that competes with if not outright distracts us from the banalities of what we are hearing. White Collar in this regard tells us one thing about how we in-the-know types watch narrative television: we don't actually attend to the plasticity of the image. When we do consume television visually, it is typically for its sexy mid-century design aesthetic or the undeniable pleasures of seeing Christina Hendricks in a plunging neckline, not that we should take either for granted.

White Collar is different, as the above, more characteristic than you might think image, clearly attests. From about the middle of the first season, Eastin's series began increasingly to attend to the graphic possibilities intrinsic in its Midtown Manhattan settings, with particular attention lavished on its narratively focal high-rise boardroom settings. In this sense, White Collar adheres to USA's loose location-centric house style, which might otherwise be defined by its Sony CineAlta F35 HD camera work - White Collar uses the same technology - and its clean, even lighting strategies. However, there is not an once of White Collar's visual interest in all of Royal Pains' (2009-2012) Long Beach-shot images combined, with the latter opting for shallow medium set-ups tagged with the bright local yellow light. This is just to say that though White Collar shares some of the technical specs and even the fidelity to location of its fellow USA programs - one of White Collar's pleasures for this former New Yorker is its very recognizable mapping of Midtown East, from Gramercy to Kips Bay - White Collar has an aesthetic ambition all its own.

What makes White Collar's visual strategies so singular is again the use the show makes of its New York interior sets/locations. Among the most paradigmatic of the camera crews' strategies - one that since it developed, once again, midway through the first season, has reoccurred in every episode - are its wispy, lateral, mobile travelling set-ups, which cue into the impossibly reflective surfaces that predominate within the show's FBI headquarters in particular. For these typically short though frequently repeated compositions, White Collar's camera crew (helmed by a number of different directors over the course of four seasons) shoot through the space's glass walls as they compress numerous planes into a single, visually quite complex graphic field - one that asks to be looked at first, as we hear the perfunctory conversation on the other side of the semi-visible barrier. Thanks to the stylistic program that Eastin has instituted for his directors and cinematographers, we have the makings in White Collar of a whole new generation of "wagon wheel" Joseph H. Lewis's who have not yet met an intermediate object through which they did not look to shoot (see the lelouch below).

What these 'White Collar shots' encourage, whether inside the show's FBI sets or increasingly in whatever interior or even exterior locations the makers can find to enact their baroque visual program, is a pleasure in looking - a pleasure that I think we can all concede is all-too-often unknown in narrative television. This is the modest, though in another sense significant accomplishment of what would initially seem another USA Network throw-away - another show that cries out for a "What is Burn Notice?"-style parody. Of course, there are other pleasures to White Collar, beginning with Matt Bomer's (pictured right) forceful charisma and abounding sex-appeal, and the easy rapport he has created with co-stars Tim DeKay (left) and Willie Garson. In the terms of contemporary world cinema White Collar is a middle-of-the-road or better Milky Way product to the better respected (and often rightfully so), though also stodgier festival feature; though it might not have what we expect from the best of the art, we would be unwise to sleep on its many commendable qualities. Eastin's show is indeed easy to overlook - at least for those who have not spent time looking at it.

This piece was co-conceived by Lisa K. Broad, with whom I have watched most of the first three seasons, all of which are available on Netflix's instant streaming service.

Pure Spectacle, Pure Theory: Returning to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982)

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In a year that has witnessed real movement toward deceased action-hack auteur Tony Scott, an unapologetic Tativille favorite since he directed one of the finest blockbuster-mode features of the early twenty-first century in Déjà Vu (2006), my own grandest moment of reappraisal and personal (though not complete) reversal came ironically with the most critically lauded of the Scott brothers' work, older-sibling Ridley Scott'sBlade Runner (1982). Of course, there are very few films of comparable aesthetic interest that owe less to their director's artistry than does Blade Runner - a fact that has dictated the elder Mr. Scott's series of post-release efforts to re-cut and re-package a film that perhaps was not nearly enough the director's own; that is, to belatedly claim authorship over his sleazier, proto-Avatar (2009) major-work. Then again, Mr. Scott is himself, like this writer, more than justified in returning to a work of science-fiction whose mode of address represents the ultimate in cult appreciation: that of the reusable commodity.

The essence of Blade Runner's re-usability resides in its construction of an intricate and immersive diegetic space that invites its spectator to return time and again, to explore, re-explore and escape into the dystopian world created by the filmmakers - an activity that is encouraged additionally by Scott's multiple re-cuts. Lawrence G. Paull's production design emerges as a cinematic dominant, with the narrative pausing to luxuriate in Rachael's (Sean Young) Egyptian flat, J. F. Sebastian's (William Sanderson) Victorian-styled mansion and the trashed-filled back alleys of Blade Runner's teeming Los Angeles. Perpetually damp, eternally nocturnal and painted in neon, Scott's soiled, Tokyoesque L.A. is indeed absolutely ripe with an all-consuming urban decay that serves to situate the film in its immediate, early 1980s moment. In short, Scott's cinema of production design and art direction provides a pure form of visual spectacle that ideally complements the to-be-looked-at-ness of Blade Runner's special effects, director of photography Jordan Cronenweth's graphic lens flaring and naturally, Miss Young's intentionally inhuman beauty. We are asked to survey, scrutinize and in the case of the film's female lead, stare.

Blade Runner's steampunk aesthetic - brought to the screen at the cultural crest of the Anglo-American "new wave" that Pris's (Daryl Hannah) white and black face paint most directly inscribes - contributes to the film's larger mapping and re-mediation of the historical nineteenth century. Scott and Cronenweth's effectively pre-electric spaces (see Joe Turkel's candlelit home) catalog the earlier historical era, whether it is the aforementioned Egyptian and Victorian interiors or the stone, steel and glass Richardsonian architecture to which the narrative shifts late in its running time. Then there are the even more discursively significant automata that link Blade Runner to the late nineteenth century time of cinema's naissance - in addition to functioning as a narratively motivated double for the film's Replicant subjects. Scott's postmodernism, like the Victorian culture that Blade Runner focalizes, samples from both disparate historical sources and remote geographical locations - no less than George Lucas's even more cultist Star Wars trilogy, with respect to which Blade Runner stands in obvious dialogue.

Scott's film indeed emerges as a theorist's alternative to Lucas's cinematic mythologizing, with the film's cyberpunk, neo-noir aesthetic and the aforementioned proto-cinematic forms providing sexy counters to Akira Kurosawa, Buck Rogers and Saturday matinee television pulp. However, it is in another sense an accidental object of theoretical interest with the filmmaker's deficiencies as a storyteller - which perhaps become clearest in Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer's limply choreographed fight sequence - implicated in the film's cult appeal. Indeed, it is not simply that Blade Runner's richly detailed environments invite further examination, but that the narrative's occasional lack of immediate clarity likewise encourages repeat viewings. In this sense it is Blade Runner's traditional imperfections (at least in part) that make it a cult-style reusable commodity. 

Ten Years Older: Víctor Erice's Lifeline (2002)

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Produced as part of the two-film Ten Minutes Older project, a set of omnibus features that premiered at the 2002 Cannes film festival, Víctor Erice's ten-minute Lifeline (Alumbramiento) represents one of the cinema's most concentrated and philosophically expansive ruminations on the nature and meaning of time - which is to say the core substance of the art form. Prefaced along with the rest of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet by Marcus Aurelius's Meditations words - "Time is a river, the irresistible flow all created things. One thing no sooner comes into view than it is hurried past and another takes its place. Only to be swept away in turn." - Erice's short, black-and-white masterwork opens with the piercing, acousmatic cry of a newborn, followed in rhythmic succession by on-camera set-ups of the sleeping infant, his unconscious mother and a small Madonna statue. Returning to the child, a heart-shaped stain begins to spread through his white cotton garments, introducing a rudimentary form of temporally-based suspense as Erice dissolves to a second short passage.

Here, Erice showcases a pre-adolescent boy as he sketches a wrist watch on his upper arm, thereby signalling the film's thematic focus: time. So too can this subject be deciphered on the soundtrack early on, with the clicking of a pendulum adding to the crowing rooster that accompanied the first appearance of the infant. As the short film progresses, we are given further audio-visual access to this theme, with a dripping faucet marking not only the work's evanescent subject matter, but also the infant's apparently perilous condition. (Lifeline in this sense seeks to focalize time in much the same fashion that the brilliant The Quince Tree Sun [1992] does light.)

The child of this second sequence will further prove essential to the film's temporal rhetoric in that he provides an another instantiation of the film's catalog of generations and ages, following the mother and infant, and with two older men (who sit in a photo-filled drawing room) presented in the short wordless scene to follow. The boy's gesture, more complexly, also introduces a frozen form of temporality that finds more obvious expression in the aforesaid photos, and in a newspaper headline dating to the twenty-eighth day of June 1940, or two days before Erice's birth. The newspaper, La Nueva Espana, an Austurian publication - Erice was born in the neighboring Basque Country - depicts Nazi soldiers on the French-Basque border, which is to say the condition into which both the film's infant and Erice were born. In this respect, Lifeline is a film about personal history and historical time - with additional references made to Christian tradition (or the West's religious history), from the snake slithering among the fallen apples to the Virgin statue - as much as it is about the suspenseful moment-to-moment temporal sequence that the child's unacknowledged injury produces.

With regard to the photos that hang on the parlor wall, Erice highlights a portrait of workers at El Paraiso, a place of business in Havana, with his camera slowly moving between the temporally fixed workers. The location of the portrait becomes additionally significant when Erice consequently shows four village children playing in a parked automobile that also sports Cuban plates. Within the 1940 context of the short's setting, this pairing of geographical references serves to position the film's subjects as pro-Republican, inasmuch as the island nation contributed scores of soldiers to combat Franco and his allies. The memory of the Civil War, which we must be reminded also haunts the director's debut masterpiece of personal history, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), indeed returns within Lifeline, with the short's one-legged soldier providing an even more conspicuous reference. This is to say that Lifeline is a work of the past and remembrance, lost time, as much as it is about its subjects' present, or lived temporal experience.

To return to the latter, Erice's film proceeds with images of the village population, who again spread across the age and gender spectrum, as they perform their daily mundane rituals in a series of acts which though temporal in nature, feel almost timeless in their actualization: a woman sews clothes for the infant Luisin, and another kneads bread; one man sharpens a blade, while a second thrashes in is field; the crippled young adult wraps a string around his toe, while a young, barefoot girl sits alone rocking on a swing. In other words, Erice's villagers pass time participating in mundane rituals - even as, as we are often made to remember, the infant child continues to bleed off screen.

The sudden shriek and mother's cry, "he's dying," stops this assorted collection of villagers in the midst of their routines, compelling each to rush to their neighbor's assistance in what will prove a measure of the community's shared sense of purpose. (Considering again the film's historical references, Erice's work demonstrates an essentially Socialistic politics.) With each member of the community accordingly looking on, we see as one of the oldest villagers removes the infant's umbilical cord, calmly reassuring child and parent alike that everything will be fine. Erice thusly transforms what appears to be a sign of ill-health into a natural stage in the child's growth. Or, to put it another way, we see life emerging where first we feared death - a metaphor that we are invited to extend to the film's post-Civil War rise of Franco and his Nazi allies, and surely to Erice's own life story. The personal history that is depicted therefore in profoundly poetic form is at once imbricated with Spain's political past, even as it maintains the deeper existential resonances identified in the feature's opening epigram, and which we will see in the short's closing passage.

With the healthy child returned to his parents' loving care and his mother singing "you wanted to leave us before your time" in voice-over, the clock hits 3:50 as the daily rituals of the small community recommence - and as the pre-adolescent boy wipes the frozen timepiece off his wrist. Erice's Lifeline villagers, in other words, reenter the inexorable flow of time that though arrested in portraits, historical memories and the child's watch, and though pausing for the community's concern for its youngest residence, continues unabated as the filmmaker's ten-minute masterpiece of multiplying and reinforcing temporal forms fades to black.

For those who wish to view this short with English subtitles, albeit in slightly lower resolution and with adds, you may do so at this link.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: In Another Country

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In Another Country (Da-reun na-ra-e-suh, 2012), leading Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's thirteenth feature in seventeen years and his third to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival (in eight appearances), maintains the writer-director's career-defining and spanning predilection for multi-part narratives with a three movement work that centers on the great Isabelle Huppert as three separate French visitors named Anne. As Huppert passes from film director to adulteress (in a heavily subjective, dream-centered segment) to wronged wife in Hong's three discrete parts - the filmmaker frames each with self-reflexive voice-over from the young female screenwriter (Jung Yoo-mi) who invents Huppert's diverging incarnations, out of an impulse to escape from her real-world familial concerns - Hong preserves the same coastal Mohang setting and supporting cast with whom all three Anne's will come to interact. That is, in her separate identities, Huppert's characters will encounter and spend time with a maritally unfaithful filmmaker colleague/stranger (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his very pregnant and justifiably jealous wife (Moon So-ri); a local female twenty-something who time and again hospitably supplies Huppert with an umbrella; and a muscular lifeguard (Yoo Jun-sang) whom she asks, to no avail, for the location of a lighthouse (in all three parts). Hong, in other words, creates a continuous narrative setting, a unified diegetic world - with one object pointedly carrying over from parts two to three - which Huppert's respective Anne's will each inhabit and explore.

Through In Another Country's tripartite organization, Hong effectively produces a metaphor for his broader body of work, which in the tradition of Piet Mondrian and the director's spiritual master, French director Eric Rohmer, adheres to a discrete or closed system. In Hong's particular case, the key elements - to Mondrian's primary colors, negative white or off-white spaces and thick black lines - tend to include a mid-to-late thirty-something filmmaker, typically on holiday in a seaside location, where he spends most of his waking time drinking, conversing and screwing; male and female friends, including at least one younger, romantically dissatisfied female lead, who often maintains a professional or institutional connection to the director; and, aesthetically speaking, single-shot sequences comprised of conspicuous moments of stasis, panning set-ups that alternate between two speakers and the occasional re-framing zoom. While the Huppert-centered In Another Country therefore represents some form of break from the more conventional Hong system (though it does still adhere strongly to Hong's visual schemata) the director's latest again serves to allegorize the theme-and-variation structure that heretofore has spread out across the outstanding Korean director's corpus. This is to say that In Another Country translates Hong's broader, closed method of practice into a discrete single-film form, with each part analogous to a full feature.

In Another Country of course also represents yet another in a line departures from the two-part structures that served as the director's most recognizable signature from his masterpiece The Power of Kangwon Province(1998) on through to his superlative Woman on the Beach (2006). In these films, as programmer and critic James Quandt has very adroitly pointed out, one can see the split (North and South) identity of the Korean nation as it is portrayed in a set of narratives that though they parallel and even mirror one another, nonetheless remain divided. In Another Country, on the other hand, belongs to a more recent phase in the director's body of work, one that began especially with the Parisian-set Night and Day (2008), which though it still keys on repetition, seeks instead new forms of organization - like Night and Day's Rohmerian diaristic structure or once again In Another Country's three-part division. Though the filmmaker continues in these films to portray the same feckless Korean male and his outspoken feminine counterpart (see the filmmaker and his wife of In Another Country), which is to say though he extends his depiction of Korea's dysfunctional masculinity and at times unruly femininity, he does so through forms that speak less to the broader implications of national identity, than to the aesthetic sources of his art - which true to the inter-texts of Night and Day and In Another Country, are French in nature. (In fact, one might even say of In Another Country that while the film continues to identify the shortcomings of the Korean male in particular, its primary parallel focus has become the French, rather than the Korean woman, with Huppert providing a multi-faceted, emblematic depiction of Gallic womanhood.)

Huppert of course is the catalyzing factor, as was Paris in Night and Day, in identifying Hong's latest as French in its artistic orientation. (Hong as always is the most French of Korean directors.) However, it is Eric Rohmer, again, who provides not only the conversational holiday idiom to which the director's latest adheres, but also a conceptual source for the Korean film's multi-part organization in his Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) and the tripartite Rendezvous in Paris (1995); as well as the personal Hong favorite, Rohmer's supreme masterpiece The Green Ray (1986), which In Another Country will subtly reference. With regard to the latter, Hong succeeds in evoking the Rohmer picture in Huppert's inquiries about a small lighthouse (cf. Rohmer's eponymous ray and Saint-Jean-de-Luz seaside location), her lonely perambulations and solitary gazes toward the expansive water, and even the religious content that appears in a Buddhist shrine and Huppert's consequent discussion with a monk. Ultimately, though, In Another Country reaches its own romantic epiphany, which expressly lacks both the transformation of The Green Ray's concluding set-piece and also its the parallel religious implication. This is to say that though Hong references Rohmer, he very much makes his inspiration his own.

Most of all, still speaking of the film in its Green Ray context, there is the lack of verbal expressivity that is common to both works. In Hong's film, the inability to express oneself comes not from his characters' personalities or states of mind, but rather from their imperfect ability to communicate in a shared English language, which in the case of the Korean film provides a number of immediately pleasurable comedic exchanges. Among the most memorable, certainly, are those that feature Yoo's semi-fluent lifeguard, who in all three parts invites Huppert to visit his tent, before awkwardly offering his tiny residence as a gift. In parts one and three, Huppert's Anne accepts the former invitation with the first Anne being greeted by an impromptu musical performance, presented in an extreme-long, occluded framing, and the third by more intimate exchange - and an appropriately more restricted shot choice. Yoo's character, it remains to be said, provides much of the easy pleasure of a film that for the English viewer is nothing if not accessible. Indeed, with its effectively drawn supporting comedic players, its dialogue-centered comedy that relies disproportionately on its spectators' comprehension of the English language and most of all, Huppert's presence, Hong at long last may have made a film that will provide him with some minute measure of American commercial success. At the very least, he has made another in a long, if perhaps only modestly variably line of first-rate art house entertainments.

In Another Country, which will be released theatrically in the US by Kino Lorber, screens at the Starz Denver Film Festival Friday, November 2 at 6:45 PM; Saturday, November 3 at 10:00 PM and Monday, November 5 at 1:45 PM.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Alps / Caesar Must Die / Sister

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Awarded the "Golden Osella" for best original screenplay at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps(2011), from a Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou scenario, figures to be one of the stronger and certainly, one of the more singular offerings at this year's Starz Denver showcase. Succeeding Lanthimos's (b. 1973) artistically major, Un certain regard Cannes prize-winner and Oscar-nominated Dogtooth (2009), Alps brings the same pervasive absurdity and anti-naturalistic psychology to its portrayal of a four-person firm of professional doppelgängers, the "Alps" of the title, who for the bereaved, will take the place of their lost loved ones. In this sense a film that, similar to Dogtooth, offers itself up obliquely to an analysis of Greek or even European identity - as a death-saturated work that the privileges the ersatz, the copy - Lanthimos's latest, nevertheless, is even more concerned with providing a novel perspective on the nature of acting and performance in cinema that follows from the same narrative discourse. Lanthimos and Filippou indeed underline their thematic emphasis by consistently signposting the acting profession in their citations of contemporary screen stars and by repeating lines of dialogue as the film's 'actors' transition invisibly from rehearsal to performance. As they do so, Alps invites its active, modernist art-cinema spectators to consider what it means for the actor to be authentic and to adequately fill the role, and even more whether it might not be the case that there is a greater cathartic power for the performer than there is for the intended recipient of the fiction. Certainly this seems to hold for instant Lanthimos axiom Aggeliki Papoulia, who transgressively inhabits her various parts to the point of sleeping with her employer (an act that Lanthimos characteristically shoots with extraordinary tactility) and invading their homes. Together with Dogtooth and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg(2010) for which Lanthimos served as producer and male lead, Alps confirms its young director as the most distinctive new voice in Greek cinema since the 1970s emergence of the late Theo Angelopoulos.

The surprise victor at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and Italy’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire, 2012) presents an engaging testament to the transformative power of art and performance. Directed by veteran filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani– joint recipients of the Maria and Tommaso Maglione Italian Filmmaker Award at this year’s Starz Denver Film Festival – Caesar Must Die is set in the Rebibbia high-security prison in Rome, where a group of inmates prepare to stage a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Mixing conventions drawn from fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, the Taviani brothers chart the expansion of the prisoners’ closed world.  In a preponderance of medium close-up framings that attend to the picture's scripted dialogue, Cosimo Rega, Salvatore Striano, and Giaovanni Arcuri remake themselves into Cassius, Brutus, and Caesar respectively. At the same time, they also undergo another more subtle transformation from prison inmates into Shakespearean actors, creating more self-assured, theatrical versions of their own personas. Their intellectual and emotional development is echoed and reinforced at the visual level by the filmmakers’ elegant treatment of cinematic space. The structure of Caesar Must Die is made up of series of rehearsals rendered in stark black-and-white and staged within the impersonal spaces of the prison, culminating in an ecstatic live, color-footage performance. However, over the course of the film the Taviani brothers progressively break with the conventions of documentary style, introducing scripted interactions between the leading actors, more expressive camera movements, and a broader more carefully composed, longer view of the action. In so doing, they effectively open up the walls of Rebibbia, creating an immersive fictional environment that is at once vibrant and fleeting.
Joining Caesar Must Die as a 2012 Berlin prize-winner (earning a special Silver Bear for its forty-one year-old female director, Ursula Meier), Sister(2012) or L'Enfant d'en haut, as the French-Swiss co-production was originally titled, is no less predicated on a fictitious, self-created alternative reality than those witnessed in its two performance-centered counterparts. In Sister, however, this fiction is employed within a naturalistic narrative architecture and for the principle purpose of shock, making any more said inappropriate within this context. What can and must be noted of Sister, a ski-resort 400 Blows (1959) that reaches for a similarly existential ethos, is that its French's title is closer to the spirit of Meier's work, with the filmmaker's narrative and identificatory camera work built around the film's twelve year-old lead Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein). The cinema of fellow French diasporates Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne provides another social-realist touchstone for Meier's latest, with their observational aesthetic and rhythmic cutting patterns employed as Simon expertly exercises his criminal trade. Claire Denis cinematographer Agnès Godard, as The Guardian's Jacques Mandelbaum has intelligently noted, vividly juxtaposes the blown-out, bright-white sunshine of the upper class ski-slopes with the overcast (under-class) valleys where Simon and his eponymous older sister Louise (Léa Seydoux) struggle parent-less in their dispiriting tower flat. All of this is to suggest that Meier has created a work of purpose that deserves its modest recognition.

This piece was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Alps, which is being distributed in the U.S. by Kino Lorber, screens at the Starz Denver Film Festival on Friday, November 9th at 2:00 PM and 9:30 PM, and Saturday, November 10th at 7:00 PM. Caesar Must Die screens once at the SDFF, on Saturday, November 10th at 7:45 PM. Sister, which like Caesar Must Die will be distributed in North America by recent start-up Adopt Films, will play in Denver on Friday, November 2nd at 7:30 PM and Saturday, November 3rd at 4:15 PM.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Focus on National Cinema: Argentina (Argentinian Lesson & Mar del Plata)

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Our current favorite for personal discovery of the 2012 Starz Denver Film Festival, Polish cinematographer and documentarian Wojciech Staroń's Argentinian Lesson(Argentyńska lekcja, 2011), a medium-length, non-fictional follow-up to the filmmaker's 1998 Siberian Lesson, displays an exceptionally deep commitment to the domain of the visual and to the medium's sovereign objective to capture images of poetic grace and grave physical beauty. Staroń's invigorating approach becomes clear from his rain-soaked, elegantly indistinct opening set-up, shot as always by the unseen documentary filmmaker in hand-held 16mm, and his consequent, rhythmically alternating visuals of his travelling wife and two children and of the verdant, overcast and extremely rural Argentinian countryside into which they will temporarily settle - for Staroń's wife's work as a government-dispatched Polish language instructor. At first focusing upon his pre-pubescent son Janek's experience of their trans-Atlantic move, Staroń rapidly shifts his attention to eleven year-old neighbor Marcia Majcher (pictured) - the discovery of this discovery - who over the course of the film's near sixty minutes, in addition to studying Polish and earning top academic marks, builds mud bricks, constructs a kiosk (demonstrating her considerable woodworking skills) and performs manual field labor; that is, Marcia does vastly more than her share to help out her economically disadvantaged nuclear family - more it would seem than even her mother and older brother. Janek serves as a near constant companion for the beautiful young local of Polish descent, as does his invisible cameraman father, who, like his son, seems invariably in awe of the film's female subject. The elder Staroń, to be sure, provides a palpable, if unseen personal presence, thanks not only to the intelligence and sense of feeling behind his lyrical selection of images, but also in his facilitation of Marcia and Janek's rail trip to visit the girl's itinerant laborer father. In their journey, we see her lovely visage behind a foggy train window, underclass child riders whom Marcia notes are travelling without shoes, and finally Marcia's emotional reunion with her father in his shack-like hovel. As Marcia is about to return home with Janek and Wojciech, her father uncharacteristically acknowledges the filmmaker to remind him of how difficult things are for his family. In Staroń's deeply moving Argentinian Lesson, the weight that Marcia's father feels rests squarely on his remarkable daughter's very capable shoulders. 

Approaching much of their slacker comedy material in a manner diametrically opposed to Staroń's observational aesthetic, first-time directors Ionathan Klajman (who also authored the screenplay) and Sebastián Dietsch instead display a Wes Anderson-style predilection for explanation in their mostly successful Mar del Plata(2012). Klajman and Dietsch's debut centers on a pair of one-time friends, Joaquin (Pablo G. Pérez, pictured left) and David (Gabriel Zayat, right), who despite their mutual distaste for one another, set off for a weekend vacation in the eponymous resort city. Pérez and Zayat demonstrate their comedic acumen from the opening set-piece, with their uneasy interaction culminating in a CD being tossed out the car window and the steering wheel commandeered in response. Klajman and Dietsch thusly establish the comedic template for Mar del Plata, with Joaquin and David remaining at one another's throats on the beach (as David ungraciously refuses Joaquin use of his boogie board) and at dinner. In the latter interaction, Klajman and Dietsch inaugurate one of their better gags with David confronting a plagiarist dinner guest (Pablo Caramelo), who along with the lead, will set off to a bookstore to prove his innocence - before throwing a punch at his persistent accuser. David, like Joaquin, also finds romance during their weekend getaway, with his first seaside date (with the beautiful Daniela Nirenberg) unfolding within a particularly lengthy split-screen set-up. Though less graceful than the film's longer compositions (including David's one-take approach of Nirenberg's Leticia in a Mar del Plata nightclub), Klajman and Dietsch's hyperactive visuals work in this instance, as they will likewise when the filmmakers project a tennis score in the corner of the screen. Less successful are Joaquin's diegetically disruptive monologues into the camera and Mar del Plata's Instagram flashbacks - though not nearly enough to discount Pérez, Zayat and Caramelo's effective comedic work.

This piece was co-authored by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Argentinian Lesson will screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival on Friday, November 2nd at 4:45 PM and Sunday, November 4th at 11:45 AM. Mar del Plata screens on Monday, November 5th at 2:00 PM, Tuesday, November 6th at 7:00 PM and Wednesday, November 7th at 9:15 PM.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Here and There

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Awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes' Semaine de la Critique parallel selection, Antonio Méndez Esparza's Here and There (Aquí y allá, 2012) sketches a few short years in the life of a rural Mexican nuclear family, following the return of patriarch Pedro (Pedro De los Santos) after years spent working in a New York kitchen and supermarket. Méndez divides his narrative into four discrete parts, "The Return," "Here," "The Horizon" and "There," with each treating key junctures in the life of the under-class family following an unmarked temporal interval. The filmmaker's imposition of this epic, novelistic structure contributes to the film's larger project of constructing a humanistic universality, one that exceeds a simple social-realist schemata. Here and There's introduction of a second, younger couple likewise adds to this effect by de-centering the narrative and broadening its scope. Indeed, Méndez looks to portray the existential condition of his Guerrero villagers as their adult males are forced North of the Border to seek the financial betterment of their families - often to mixed results - time and again. That is, the Mexican-American-Spanish co-production, from the perspective of the U.S. spectator, depicts the existence of the wealthier nation's itinerant laborers and service workers both before they leave and after they return home to their geographically and emotionally estranged families.

Pedro's first-act return indeed engenders a spectrum of responses among his wife and two daughters, with the adolescent Lorena (Lorena Guadalupe Pantaleón Vázquez) slowest to accept her long-absent father. Here and There's epic temporality, however, allows for personal reconciliation, which in Pedro and Lorena's relationship comes in the form of a musical tutoring session. It is at this point worth noting that Pedro pursues his musical ambitions (with the hometown Copa Kings) upon returning to his mountain village - Pedro's music is heard both diegetically and non-diegetically, and shown in the form of rehearsal, a commissioned gig and even a private, lightly comedic show for his wife and daughters - while his younger, teenage counterpart practices his break dancing and the latter's love interest performs in a folk dancing group. Méndez's multi-generational protagonists, in other words, share an artistic avocation, which in part helps Here and There advance beyond social realist stereotypes and the polemical trap of a pitiable other.

While Here and There is in this sense lightly anti-social realist - Méndez's subject to be sure still very much conforms to expectations of this mode, with its intrinsic critique of the Mexican medical system especially conspicuous - it is much more assiduous in its avoidance of melodrama, which is to say Latin America's quintessential televisual mode of address. Méndez does this by opting for existential struggle over bathetic suffering - as exemplified by the conclusion to part two's emergency C-section - and even more, by withholding many of the narrative's more dramatic encounters. Here and There achieves this both through its elliptical structure, with key incidents happening after the cut and even between the film's four parts, as well as within Méndez's occluded long framings. Among the most telling applications of the filmmaker's strategy occurs with Pedro's initial return from New York, where his dramatic reunion with his wife is presented at an extreme remove from the static camera. In this opening scene, Méndez makes his anti-melodramatic, which is to say his counter-cinematic intentions known.

Méndez works consistently though not exclusively within a long-take idiom, with tighter, intimate compositions and even shot/reverse-shot passages interspersed with elegant plan séquences and long mobile framings. Throughout these disparate strategies, Here and There maintains an emphasis on off-camera space that elegantly duplicates the film's structuring thematic of the immediate and local here and the invisible, referential there. Indeed, in Méndez's departures from social realism and melodrama, Here and There discovers a richly contextual idiom for making Mexican art cinema, one it should be added that gently references European and Middle Eastern sources including the Antonioni of the film's emptied final sequence. Socially and economically conscious but neither pandering nor miserablist, deeply felt but gracefully lower key, Here and There is one of this year's major achievements in the annals of contemporary world art cinema, and without question will prove one of the very best films to screen at the 35th Starz Denver Film Festival.

This piece was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Here and There will screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival on Wednesday, November 7th at 1:45 and 6:45 PM, and Friday, November 9th at 4:15 PM. Here and There does not currently have an American distributor.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival Report Card

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Alps(Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece, 2011, 90 min.)
"A brain-twisting and ultimately profound meditation on performance and the nature of intimacy from Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek filmmaker behind 2009’s Dogtooth."
Lisa's Grade: A-
Michael's Grade: A-

Argentinian Lesson (Wojciech Staroń, Poland, 2011, 61 min.)
"This poingnant and exquisitely filmed documentary follows the Polish filmmaker’s son who befriends a remarkable young neighbor-girl."
Lisa's Grade: A
Michael's Grade: A-

Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany, 2012, 2012, 105 min.)
"A new peak in Stasi-themed cinema, Petzold's political thriller-cum-medical melodrama may also represent a career best for Germany's new master of suspense."
Lisa's Grade: A
Michael's Grade: A

Caesar Must Die (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 2012, 76 min.)
"This engaging Italian docu-drama from the Taviani Brothers details the preparations for a prison-set performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar."
Lisa's Grade: B+
Michael's Grade: B

Clandestine Childhood (Benjamin Ávila, Argentina, 2011, 112 min.)
"Argentina's Oscar nominee, Ávila's semi-fictionalized remembrances of adolescence combine handsome production values, unexpected comic-book illustrations - and a real dearth of originality otherwise."
Michael's Grade: C+

The Fitzgerald Family Christmas (Edward Burns, United States, 2012, 99 min.)
"Despite a winning cast, Burns's family melodrama sinks under the heavy weight of exposition and cliché."
Lisa's Grade: C
Michael's Grade: C

Flower Buds(Zdeněk Jiráský, Czech Republic, 2011, 91 min.)
"An exploration of Czech sexuality that moves into the field of socialist nostalgia, Jiráský's richly photographed feature largely avoids the traps of quirk and miserablism."
Lisa's Grade: B+
Michael's Grade: B

Germania(Maximiliano Schonfeld, Argentina, 2012, 75 min.)
"Produced with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund, Schonfeld's feature debut brings a lot of Tarr and a touch of Apichatpong to its Old Testament treatment of plague and incest among Argentina's Volga German minority."
Lisa's Grade: A-
Michael's Grade: A-

Headshot(Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand, 2011, 105 min.)
"Thai Renaissance star Pen-ek's high-concept thriller boasts striking cinematography and sound design, but falls short of his better, more personal work."
Lisa's Grade:  B
Michael's Grade:  B-

Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza, Mexico, 2012, 110 min.)
"Making use of an elegant long-take style, this novelistic Mexican art film captures a few years in the life of a family whose musician patriarch has returned home after several years in the US."
Lisa's Grade: A
Michael's Grade: A

In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2012, 89 min.)
"An ingenious and often funny mobius-strip triptych from self-referential Korean auteur Hong Sang Soo and the actress Isabelle Hupert."
Lisa's Grade: A-
Michael's Grade: A

Lost Embrace (Daniel Burman, Argentina, 2004, 2004, 99 min.)
"A comic family melodrama set in a Buenos Aires mall, the middle installment of Daniel Burman's informal 'Ariel' trilogy pairs rapid-fire dialogue and vertiginous hand-held close-ups."
Lisa's Grade: B
Michael's Grade: B-

Mar del Plata(Ionathan Klajman and Sebastián Dietsch, Argentina, 2012, 82 min.)
"This charming, low-key buddy comedy about two bickering friends who find romance at a seaside resort is occasionally marred by unnecessary narrative hijinks."
Lisa's Grade: B
Michael's Grade: B-

Paradise: Faith(Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2012, 113 min.)
"Combining Von Trier-esque schlock melodrama and Bunuelian dark comedy Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl paints an ambivalent portrait of a woman whose religious devotion shades into perversion."
Lisa's Grade: B+
Michael's Grade: B+

Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2012, 120 min.)
"Seidl's unblinking camera watches as a seemingly sensible Austrian woman searches for human connection on an African sex safari."
Lisa's Grade: B+
Michael's Grade: B+

Salt (Diego Rougier, Argentina, 2011, 112 min.)
"Despite slick production values and a promising premise, this Argentine homage to the Spaghetti-western suffers from poor pacing and tonal confusion."
Lisa's Grade: C-
Michael's Grade: D+

Sister (Ursula Meier, Switzerland, 2012, 97 min.)
"An affecting if derivative Dardenne-esqe coming-of-age melodrama set in a Swiss ski resort - a 400 Blows at higher elevations."
Lisa's Grade: B-
Michael's Grade: B+

Surviving Life (Jan Švankmajer, Czech Republic, 2010, 105 min.)
"A kind of psychoanalytic detective story, the latest from surrealist Czech animator Jan Švankmajer interrogates the process of symbolic interpretation."
Lisa's Grade: B
Michael's Grade: B

All descriptions written by Lisa K. Broad, except for Barbara's, Clandestine Childhood's, Flower Buds' and Germania's, which were authored by Michael J. Anderson.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Surviving Life & Flower Buds

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In a matter of speaking, Surviving Life (Přežít svůj život, 2010), Czech master animator Jan Švankmajer's feature-length collage of live-action cinema and stop-motion cutout animation, may prove among the 35th Starz Denver Film Festival'smore old-fashioned offerings, thanks to its highly orthodox surrealist iconography and its no less conventional readings of both Freudian and Jungian theory. Surviving Life, a "psychoanalytic comedy" as the filmmaker describes his work in an introductory talking head, functions no less as a primer to all of the above, with the film's immediately absurd flow of symbols all systematically decoded over the course of the film's explorations of middle-aged lead Václav Helšus's Oedipal unconscious. Švankmajer allows for very little ambiguity, which adds both to the lucidity of the film's narrative - Surviving Life is about as accessible as any work of traditional European surrealism - and again insures that on some level the filmmaker's latest is anachronistic, that it is a work of the twentieth century (and its first half at that). Yet, it is in its commitment to surrealism and the dream, which Švankmajer insists our civilization "has no time for," particularly as there no money in the latter, that Surviving Life gathers its force.

Two generations Svankmajer's younger, fellow Czech director Zdeněk Jiráský's handsomely photographed Flower Buds (2011, Poupata) expresses a decided nostalgia for the socialism of Jiráský's youth, the same socialism that Svankmajer's masterpiece Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) devoured with a relish equal to the anti-materialism of all three films. In Flower Buds, Jiráský stages his contrast between the collectivistic old and capitalistic new in a set of competing dance outfits and styles: the "flower buds" of the film's title, a middle-aged, all-woman exercise club who rehearse and perform socialist-brand mass spectacle routines for their small town public; and the millennial-aged strippers who perform for the community's inebriated pub habituates - and at one point, markedly displace the older women. Of particular note, with respect to the latter, is the focal Susana (Aneta Krejčíková, pictured) who in a measure of the perversity of the new system, is purchased by Joseph Gordon-Levitt lookalike Honza (Miroslav Pánek, right) in attempt to insure her affection. Though the specter of middle-aged dance rehearsals and dive-bar stripteases suggests the path of quirk or worse yet condescension, as do the the hobbies of building match stick shops in a bottle and the presence of Vietnamese immigrants, Jiráský mostly avoids these world cinema traps, as he likewise escapes the miserablist tendency that his struggling backwater subjects would no less seem to telegraph. Instead, Jiráský pursues a strategy of realism - with one major, unfortunate exception in the picture's penultimate scene - that emits occasional moments of humor and irony that help to elevate Flower Buds above the more standard backwater subject.

This review was co-authored by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Surviving Life plays once more at the Starz Denver Film Festival, on Saturday, November 3rd at 5:00 PM. Flower Buds will screen Monday, November 5th at 6:30 PM and Tuesday, November 6th at 5 and 9 PM.

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Paradise: Love & Paradise: Faith

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Released as the first installment in writer-director-producer Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise trilogy," a set of three features that the Austrian filmmaker first conceived as a single epic-length work, Paradise: Love(Paradies: Liebe, 2012) follows the late middle-aged Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) as she travels to coastal Kenya for an extended stint of sex tourism. Upon arriving, Teresa joins a similarly robust friend (Inge Maux) who details the ease with which she has secured a young, well-endowed lover. Teresa accordingly commences with her own search for erotic companionship, a process that is simplified somewhat by the crowds of young males who offer goods (and implicitly, their services) to the seashore's female visitors, Teresa included. (Paradise: Love's extreme gap between its wealthy neo-colonialist tourists and its colonized Kenyan under-class occasions a reversal of the traditional economics of sex.) Teresa ultimately settles on Munga (Peter Kazungu) who, to the lead's mind, chivalrously saves her from her more aggressive suitors. Munga seems to understand Teresa's desire to be courted, something that her first potential hook-up misses as he attempts to force himself on the lead in a narrow hotel room. Indeed, throughout Paradise: Love, Seidl shows a special facility for shooting constricted interior spaces (like the aforesaid hotel bedroom) with his often static camera frequently holding for extended intervals on the narrative's darkly comedic interactions. Seidl privileges duration over movement and scale as he produces long takes that speak less to the composition of the image over time than to a stubborn unwillingness to end his shots, to cut. In Paradise: Love, Seidl frequently makes his spectator feel as though she or he has overstayed their welcome, as, most spectacularly, when birthday-girl Teresa and her fellow Germanic tourists fail in their attempts to arouse a lanky male sex worker in one of the film's more graphic set-pieces.

Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube, 2012), Seidl's second installment - the third is planned for release in 2013 - manifests an even more more rigorous relationship between its form and content, thanks in particular to Faith's reliance on thematically meaningful, confined domestic settings. The irony implied by the film's title, in the pattern established by Paradise: Love (with its conspicuous absence of liebe), is particularly well suited to the filmmaker's static frontal set-ups of Anna Maria's (Maria Hofstätter) kitschy Austrian home. Seidl's immobile, symmetric part two framing emphatically presents the film's religious fanaticism in a manner that is at once clinical and deadpan; it professes a lack of commentary to accompany its intrinsic (ironic) criticality. Outside her own home, in a series of evangelically minded visits to a progressively more hostile set of immigrant households, the careful circumscription of Anna Maria's home life disappears, with Seidl's ever looser camera work capturing the increasing chaos of the respective scenes. The unexpected return of Anna's wheelchair-bound Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh) contributes, to an even greater degree, to Anna's destabilization and ultimate crisis of faith. At the same time, the presence of Nabil also crystallizes a set of references from Fassbinder (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) to von Trier (Breaking the Waves, 1996) to Buñuel (Viridiana, 1961) as Paradise: Faith devolves into a pitch-black, if somehow still subtly comedic struggle between the sexually frustrated Nabil and his bride of Christ wife.

This piece was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Paradise: Love will screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival on Friday, November 9th at 1:30 PM, Saturday, November 10th at 10:00 PM and Sunday, November 11th at 2:15 PM. Paradise: Faith screens on Thursday, November 8th at 2:15 PM, Saturday, November 10th at 11:30 AM and Sunday, November 11th at 7:45 PM. 

35th Starz Denver Film Festival: Barbara

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Recipient of the Silver Bear for best director at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012), from a screenplay by Petzold and renowned experimental documentarian Harun Farocki, succeeds in providing one of the most incisive portraits yet of the everyday paranoia brought into existence by the German Democratic Republic's all-seeing Stasi. In Petzold's highly accomplished latest, everything is minutely calibrated detail and unerringly precise observation, which is to say that Barbara is absolutely saturated with its police state subject matter. Nowhere does this discourse play out with greater concentration or drama than on Nina Hoss's angular, intractable face. Petzold both opens and closes his film on the visage around whom will build his GDR-era thriller - on the dark blue eyes, high sculpted cheekbones and sullen lips that will conceal the mysteries of past traumas and keep secret personally damaging future designs.

Barbara commences with the arrival of Hoss's eponymous heroine in the East German countryside, 1980. Barbara is a reassigned Berlin physician and former member of the nation's prison population, for crimes not specified anywhere in Petzold's film. Being fully aware of the Stasi's constant human surveillance, Barbara is deeply guarded and cautious upon first arriving in the provinces; when, for example, her immediate supervisor André (Ronald Zehrfeld) fails to ask her address when driving her home from the hospital, she protests and demands that she be let out of the vehicle - thus recognizing that he is one of the East German police's countless civilian agents. At home, the sudden shock of her apartment buzzer - Petzold has long since mastered the sonorous effects of the horror film - is accompanied by the appearance of a prying neighbor who demands that Barbara immediately inspect a storage area. Barbara, in other words, is surrounded by those who will scrutinize her every gesture.

Of course, Barbara's own actions early in the film also resonate with intrigue: after receiving a small monetary package inside a restaurant lavatory, she departs for a desolate stretch of countryside where she buries her newly acquired bundle. Returning home on her bicycle later that evening, she is stopped by state officials who are dubious of her nighttime choice of transportation. Indeed, they will later pay Barbara a pair of home visits, which in both instances will include off-camera cavity searches administered by a female agent. Petzold's slow-burn narrative thusly shades from the initial mystery of Barbara's undisclosed identity to the realm of suspense as her clandestine activities, including her secret meetings with a West German lover Jörg (Mark Waschke), must be kept from the watchful eyes of the Stasi's expansive network of civilian informers. In Barbara, the smallest of on-screen details possess the capacity to destroy the film's focalized female lead - and her hopes of reuniting with the no less enigmatic Jörg.

As Barbara progresses, Petzold's subject begins to pivot from pure political thriller to ethics-oriented melodrama, with the needs of the titular lead's patients coming to take increased precedent. Of particular note is a hysterical young female patient named Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), whom Barbara soon discovers has spent time at an East German prison/concentration camp. Barbara's compassionate attitude toward the patient is contrasted early on with André's lack of apparent sympathy: he inhumanely refers to Stella on multiple occasions without once mentioning her by name, a point that Barbara accusatorially notes. André, however, will consequently show his own Hippocratic commitment and human feeling in treating another male patient, who, like Stella, will play a key role in the film's final suspense-filled act. Suffice it to say that admitted Stasi informer André will prove more an ally than an antagonist as the film transforms into medical melodrama. Petzold in this sense, as in another key instance, humanizes the film's Stasi, though admirably not to the point that they are prevented from carrying out their heinous activities.

In both content and form Barbara again represents a new peak in Stasi-themed cinema, easily besting Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's somewhat suspect Academy award-winner The Lives of Others(2006). What von Donnersmarck's film does well, Hitchcockian suspense, Barbara does even better, which following first-rate thrillers like Jerichow (2008) and Beats Being Dead (2011) - Barbara strongly recalls the former in its low-key nocturnal set-pieces and the latter in its cool verdant landscapes - should come as no surprise. Petzold indeed has long since confirmed his stature as the Berlin school's master of genre, while that movement's leading female lights especially - Maren Ade, Valeska Grisebach and Pia Marais, to name three - continue to supply the small "a" art cinema (when, that is, they have the opportunity to work). Of course, Petzold is no stranger to this latter mode, having made one of the first humanist masterworks of the Berlin-school movement in 2000's adolescently focalized The State I Am In. In returning in Barbara to terrain proximate to the historical-political content of The State I Am In, Petzold has made his best film since the latter work - and perhaps his best film to date.

Let me thank Lisa K. Broad for her many contributions to this piece, and throughout the festival. Speaking of Lisa, be sure to check out her final festival report card, where she and I grade eighteen films from this year's event.

New Film: Tabu (2012)

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Orchestrated brilliantly in a measureless variation of silky gray tones and underwritten ironically by a light twinkling of ivory, the 35mm prelude for Miguel Gomes's third feature Tabu(2012) subtly sets the internal parameters for the fast-rising Portuguese director's sidelong take on F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's eponymous original. Gomes's robustly referential fiction opens on a dejected intrepid explorer, a Robinson Crusoe-type in darkest Africa, who in Wes Anderson-esque ethnographic voice-over laments the loss of his beloved wife. The latter however will appear as an apparition-like presence to the suicidal bereaved, before taking her place in a still photo beside the now dead explorer's melancholic crocodile alter-ego. Gomes thus infuses the faux ethnography of his crisply cinematic open with a Bataille-inspired surrealism that (together with the Flaherty-inflected former) will continue to obtain, as categorical opposites, throughout the remaining two halves of the forty year-old director's post-colonial, post-structuralist narrative.

Inverting Tabu: A Story of the South Seas's (1931) two-part organization, Gomes's twenty-first century incarnation opens with "Paradise Lost," a Rouch In Reverse bit of first-world ethnography that soon finds first-half lead Pilar (Teresa Madruga) in a semi-fluent English exchange with an itinerant EU traveler. Pilar is then summoned by her elderly neighbor's African servant Santa (Isabel Cardoso) after the aged Aurora (Laura Soveral) loses a fortune at a local casino. Arriving, Aurora confesses her folly, observing that "peoples lives aren't like dreams," before narrating the fantasy (replete with gambling, monkey men, and dead women who fornicate with celebrities) that somehow convinced Aurora to imprudently try her luck. Gomes's luminous black-and-white 35 captures the elegant Aurora, masked by her prominent, dark-rimmed sunglasses, as she narrates her fever-dream atop a slowly rotating restaurant platform. In so doing, Gomes provides a richly lensed, lightly uncanny visual backdrop for what amounts to part one's first incursion of the surreal - a sense of everyday unreality that will return immediately thereafter in Pilar's flare-lit visit to a local Roman catacomb.

As 'Paradise Lost' progresses, Aurora accuses Santa, her fellow remnant of Portugal's colonial past, of devil-worship and witchcraft; she pleads with the devoutly Roman Catholic Pilar to entreat St. Anthony on her behalf (something that the focalized lead will do, impolitely, at a UN protest). In Gomes's Tabu there is no substantive difference between religious belief and superstition; both belong to a category of belief that no longer obtains in part one's alienated, post-Christian European civilization. With Aurora's health continuing to decline thereafter, she begins to speak in a surreal code that will become lucid only with the consequent arrival of "Paradise." Before reaching part two, however, Gomes stages one last set-piece in a liminal shopping-center jungle, which is to say in a threshold space that connects and combines the first half's urban capitalist-twilight with the second part's primitive plantation economics. As Gomes thusly exchanges his Oliveira-esque isomorphic dialogues for voiced-off recollection, part two commences with its very specific and radical aesthetic break.

With 'Paradise' being restored in part two, Gomes replaces the expansive 35mm gray-scales and crystalline conversations of the first half for a grainy 16 stock and even more conspicuously, a non-dialogue soundtrack (which nonetheless incorporates post-synchronous sound effects and even vocal pop performances). That is, Gomes trades in the loss of sound cinema for the paradise of Murnau's silent-shot, post-synchronous sound original. Of course, in dividing his film into sound and silence, 35 and 16mm - with a brief, super-8 home movie diversion in part two - Gomes procures a vivid sense of technologies and textures that, in the contemporary aftermath of the digital turn, speaks to the filmmaker's overriding scholarly impulse. We see this same instinct likewise in the filmmaker's encyclopedic approach to the stylistic figures (from the festival long-take to trick POV set-ups), media forms (the still image, the films within the film of part one, and even the Blissfully Yours-inspired scribbling on the image) and most distinctively of all, the modes of narration that structure Gomes's Tabu (the mimesis of part one, voice-over diegesis of part two, and the letters that conclude the film). As in his very fine Our Beloved Month of August (2008), Gomes seeks to include everything in his 2012 follow-up.  

If the latest Tabu is most obviously a consummate work of historical reference and obsessive piece of postmodern scholarship, this is not to suggest that it, in any respect, lacks more conventional narrative and psycho-sexual pleasures. The adulterous, taboo romance of the young Aurora (Ana Moreira, pictured, in 16mm) and her globetrotting musician lover Ventura (Carloto Cotta) will provide many of the film's more lusty pleasures, while the Iberian translations of "Be My Baby" and other period pop hits introduce a kitschy experience of nostalgia that is no less immediate. However, as pleasures go, there are none more bracing - and memorable - than Tabu's densely luxurious black-and-white visuals.

New York-based Adopt Films will be opening Tabu at Film Forum on December 26, with a series of single dates to follow, including Minneapolis's Walker Art Center on January 11.

New Film: Holy Motors (2012)

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A work of enterprising vision and aggressive newness that finds all narratives exhausted, Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012) emerges as one of the year's most fully realized ruminations on the current and coming status of film art. With flash Muybridge inserts, Hugoesque fiction and a battery of prosthetic disguises, Carax's first film in thirteen years brings the century of cinema's invention into contact with the incidence of its digital expiration and even its extrapolated fictionalized future. Holy Motors is a film without an outside, a cinema that is all cinema - a cinema as dream, in the spirit of Carax's opening metaphor - that nonetheless feels the fatigue of the productive act in the ages of the DCP multiplex, satellite broadcasting and inevitably, Internet image-making.

Holy Motors constructs its allegory for the twenty-first century artefactual experience as a omnibus-style sequence of nine "appointments" (in addition to a reflexively surreal prologue, de-constructive musical intermission, and post-human epilogue) that the aptly named M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) keeps over the course of a single, extended work-day. Chauffeured to each by professional associate Céline (Édith Scob, pictured, beneath the mint-green mask), Oscar is charged with incarnating a series of disparate figures that he cometically contrives in the spacious backseat of stretch limousine. (Holy Motors almost inevitably suggests an aleatoric companion-piece to David Cronenberg's fellow Cannes premiere, Cosmopolis; 2012.) In thus relying so exceedingly on the mise-en-scène of the celluloid index (make-up, costuming), Carax's film openly resists the transformative capacities of digital editing.

What Holy Motors opts for instead is already and more profoundly present in Muybridge: the movement of a body in space. In Carax's latest, the ubiquity of Lavant's physical presence suggests nothing less than the displacement of the traditional film index onto the actor's body. In fact, the body is so central to Holy Motors that it remains the focal presence even when it is submitted to technological effacement: in the instance of M. Oscar's employment as a motion-capture actor, it is not the animated adult-fantasy imagery that provides the chief source of the passage's spectacle, but rather the astonishing bodily contortions performed by Lavant's co-star (in addition, of course, to the glowing abstractions produced by the body-suit sensors). In any case, it is the body in space once again that perseveres as Carax's subject - even when it is submitted to digital conversion.

Oscar's fantastic motion-capture 'appointment' contributes to Holy Motor's comprehensive cataloging of genre, with forms as disparate as Gothic horror, deathbed melodrama, the musical, and science-fiction comedy also included in Carax's encyclopedic project. This same omnibus structure equally serves to inscribe the changing cultural tenor of contemporary Paris: indications of radical Islam, single-parent households, demographic exhaustion and (of course) celebrity all emerge over the course of Carax's nine-part narrative. (In attempting on some level to contend with Paris as it is now constituted, Holy Motors achieves a surface-level contemporaneity that is absent all-too-often among art-house French imports.) Finally, Carax's shifting subjects and settings afford the director the opportunity for revisiting his own cinematic past, from the return of his "Merde" (2008) sewer-dweller to the sparkling nocturnal presence of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf's (1991) focalized structure.

It is Paris ultimately that completes Holy Motor's historically grounded sense of the cinematic index. However, it is a Paris that the spectator will never fail to behold without the filmmaker's self-conscious mediation. Holy Motors is cinema that perpetually reminds its viewer of its status as fiction, explicitly transforming the often familiar, though rarely less than fresh narratives that surrealistically unfold as a series of acting 'appointments' into the stuff of the capitalistic commodity. Holy Motor is a film for our media-saturated moment and one of the few releases of 2012 that might just merit the title masterpiece. Minimally, Carax's latest represents a career peak for the director, and at the risk of damning with faint praise, a new high for the filmmakers of France's Cinéma du look.

This review was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Holy Motors is currently being distributed in North America by Indomina Releasing.

The Best of 2012 In Review: The Deep Blue Sea

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Adapted by the director from Terence Rattigan's eponymous 1952 play, Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea (2011) opens in a procession of powerfully cinematic figures, from the filmmaker's Ophülsian (commencing) crane work to a breathy collection of cross-dissolves and fades that seem to inhale along with the on-screen heroine. As Rachel Weisz's Hester slips into a suicidal unconscious, Davies' film slides imperceptibly into Hester's recent fire-lit past, thereby initiating a Proustian temporality that will continue to obtain throughout the remainder of the filmmaker's highly refined reworking of Rattigan. With Samuel Barber's stringed Concerto sobbing along with the unhappily married lead, Davies cuts to the obsessed-over object of Hester's diffusely-lit memory, Tom Hiddleston's impeccably tailored, laddish combat veteran, Freddie Page. With their kiss - wrapped in the amber warmth of a London pub - becoming an almost gender-less knot of pale white flesh, Davies' camera circles above his adulterous pairing in the first of a set of similar rotations that will return the viewer back to Hester's receding present. It will remain for a sudden hard sound edit to snap Hester and the spectator back into the diegetic now, to break the narcotic spell of Davies' opening romantic salvo.

Through its masterful manipulations of space and time, light and sound, Davies' Deep Blue Sea beginning bolsters the filmmaker's already unimpeachable status as the very best that the British cinema currently has to offer. So too does the physical precision that Davies pulls out his performers, whether it is Sir William Collyer's (Simon Russell Beale) hovering hand that in the faintest measure of his all-but-absent sensuality makes next to no tactile contact with the surface beneath it, or the achingly beautiful rhythmic rise and fall of wife Hester's seizing chest. The Deep Blue Sea's feeling for gesture, in this respect, elicits comparisons to the extraordinary observational acumen of the director's Mizoguchian masterpiece The House of Mirth (2000), while the fragmented temporal structure of Davies' very great Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) returns in Hester's fluid subjectivity. Similarly present is the Liverpudlian Davies' pop sensibility, which as it happens belongs much more to The Deep Blue Sea's pre-rock-and-roll early fifties moment than to the 1960s British Invasion sound that Of Time and the City (2008) excoriates.

Davies' diegetic use of pop, in his signature sing-along format, serves to construct The Deep Blue Sea's proletarian public. In the film's first group sing, a collective public-house rendition of  "You Belong to Me," Davies establishes the class disparity that divides lovers Freddie and Hester, and which finally denies the latter full membership in the film's postwar community: where Freddie freely belts out the 1952 hit, Hester only sporadically mouths the familiar pop lyrics. However, amid the socially leveling experience of World War II bombardment, Hester and her husband Sir William are allowed temporary membership in London's closely knit public: in another of the film's fluid long-takes, Davies discloses the upper-class couple, huddled together on a populated tube platform, as they sing along with the Dublin street anthem, "Molly Malone." In this flashback-within-a-flashback, inaugurated by an architectural madeleine, Lord and Lady Collyer join an historical British public that is finally defined by a shared popular culture.

Even more than its carefully rendered class dynamics and its exceptional aesthetic sensitivity - save for the supremely focal remembered warmth of the postwar period's interior illumination and the dull morning light that stages the work's prodigious melancholy - The Deep Blue Sea emphasizes the staggering romantic commitment of Hester to her beloved Freddie, a love that Hiddleston's objet du désir ultimately refuses to reciprocate. Lady Hester risks everything for Freddie's occasional gift of himself - an offering that he only rarely extends to the endlessly devoted heroine. Hers is an absolute in passion that landlady Mrs. Elton (Ann Mitchell) nonetheless distinguishes from real love. (Mrs. Elton defines genuine love rather as wiping someone's ass to preserve their dignity.) For her cuckolded husband - whom it should be noted learns of the affair in a static, behind-the-back framing of Weisz that constructs an expectation of discovery - their story is fundamentally tragic, a worthy heir to the filmmaker's Ophülsian and Mizoguchian sources. For Hester, however, her great love of a man who does not share her feelings is merely "sad," not least of all as it proves an experience that can be overcome. Indeed, Davies ends with an emblem of perseverance: in a circular return to the film's nocturnal opening, the psychologically ruins of the Second World War are presented in the clear light of day, following an unexpected shift in Hester's heretofore gloomy disposition.

The Deep Blue Sea is currently available on the Netflix Instant streaming platform and on home video.   

The Best Films of 2012

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The Ten Best New Films of 2012: 
1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
2. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
3. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
4. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
6. Django Unchained(Quentin Tarantino) 
7. In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo)
8. Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza)
9. Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)
10. Footnote (Joseph Cedar, 2011)  

First Runner-Up:
Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Performance of the Year/Second Runner-Up: 
Seann William Scott, Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011)

Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order):
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
Argentinian Lesson (Wojciech Staroń, 2011)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)
I Wish(Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011)
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)
Miss Bala (Gerard Naranjo, 2011)
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)
We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti, 2011)

The above films represent the best new commercial releases and festival premieres that I first viewed in two thousand-twelve. Excluded are those commercially released features that I screened previously - mostly at the 2011 New York Film Festival. For those choices, see last year's selection of the Ten Best Films of 2011. Of course, I would be remiss were I not to mention the large swath of 2012 premieres, which have not yet had their local festival or commercial debuts. Please assume that my exclusions of films such as Amour, Leviathan, Like Someone in Love, Neighbouring Sounds, Night Across the Street, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, and Zero Dark Thirty reflect my inability to see the films before year's end, and do not constitute intentional slights. 

However, I do not wish my readers to assume the same about The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and The Master - three films that impassioned audiences and/or critics, but which left me greatly underwhelmed. As for the lauded Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Cosmopolis, Looperand Magic Mike, while I found all five to be creditable works of the English-language cinema, none felt quite list-worthy to me. I might be inclined to say the same for Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Retribution, were its substantial virtues not overlooked by most critics. So for it, let me offer the 'best use of 3-D' garland and one last 'honorable mention' citation.     
  
Excellent Belatedly Screened 2011 Commercial Releases (In Order of Preference):
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

Twenty-five Outstanding Older Films Seen for the First Time (In Alphabetical Order):
Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948)
The Adventures of Robert Macaire (Jean Epstein, 1925)
Au bonheur des dames(Julien Duvivier, 1930)
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)
A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
Clouds of May (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 1999)
Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978)
Flowers Have Fallen (Tamizo Ishida, 1938)
From Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931)
The Girl I Loved (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)
Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959)
Lifeline (Víctor Erice, 2002)
Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
Only Yesterday (Takahato Isao, 1991)
Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)
The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)
Prix de beauté (Augusto Genina, 1930)
Remorques (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
The Report (Abbas Kiarostami, 1977)
School for Scoundrels (Robert Hamer, 1960)
The State I Am In (Christian Petzold, 2000)
The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)
The Stranger (Satyajit Ray, 1991)
Whisper of the Heart(Yoshifumi Kondō, 1995)
Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970)

Major Films that I Came to Appreciate Considerably More (In Alphabetical Order):
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Hallelujah!(King Vidor, 1929)

Finally, there are my nominations for film event and screening of the year: Sight & Sound's commendable selection of Vertigo (1958) as "the greatest film of all-time"; and a private, six-person screening of the film in a pristine, 1983 re-release print, a matter of weeks before the announcement of the poll results. In almost any year - and certainly in 2012 - seeing Vertigo under these extraordinary circumstances would qualify as my single best cinematic experience. 

The Ten Best Films of 2012

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