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THE MISSING PICTURE Cambodia, France 2013 Directed by Rithy Panh Running time: 92 minutes

There is a certain widely held misconception about the nature and usefulness of poetry: that it belongs primarily to the overrefined, the froufrou, and that trivial lot whose cotton candied hands haven’t seen a hard day’s work. The lie is a convenient one; it excuses its perpetrators from engaging with the modes of representation that chisel their very reality – as if there were only one true social order: the one that exists right now, and, as they might tell you, has always existed. If the lie were localized, locked up in the recesses of some poor psyche, perhaps it would be an excusable one. But to underrate the role of poetic representation is always to ensconce the status-quo. The lie preserves those articles that are convenient to the efficient functioning of our social edifice and elides those which are not. It both creates the conditions for and exists because of missing images. It’s a conspicuous absence, like the topside of Bernoulli’s wing, keeping this insidious glider aloft.

Rithy Panh’s Best Foreign Language Film contender, The Missing Picture illuminates the potent nature of poetic images in structuring society, subjectivity, and ostensible revolution. Panh’s handcarved dioramas constitute an attempt to evacuate the horrifying images of life under the Khmer Rouge from his mind. Panh’s tableaux are peopled by bespoke clay figures – rough-hewn, fired, and enameled. Their forms cycle from vivacious to cadaverous with a caprice that escorts the selective memory, frothing in trauma’s wake. The narrator reveals the way his memories have bracketed his self-image into place. “I wish to be rid of this picture,” he says, “so I show this to you.”

If memory is bound to be selective, then Panh’s narrator has taken it upon himself to do the selecting. The filmmakers hands enter the frame and we see them etching, shaving, and painting these hunks of clay – the stuff of figment and flesh. When face and form have been carved away and acrylic clothing has been applied, only the finishing touch of life remains: a fountain pen, the blackest of ink droplets leaking from its nib, colors the left eye, then the right. Do these figurines see what’s around them? Will they be haunted by the same memories as their creator, or will the murky solution that coats their eyes be their salvation?

Perhaps injustice needs a missing image to proceed. During times of revolution, it’s the images of the revolution’s failure to deliver on its promises that go missing. During times when the market is predominant, the missing image is the hard-suffering of the overlooked proletariat. What is constant, though, is the power of the image to remind us of what is and what can be. If we share these images with each other, perhaps only then will they cease to haunt our reality.

KURTISS HARE 20 March 2014 Twitter: @akronfilm/@kurtiss

“Your film is not just any documentary, but a special kind that is my favorite: an essay film. As an essay filmmaker, you don't just tell us a story by showing us images. You also make us reflect on the way you are telling and showing. This is important because the only surviving images of your past are the propaganda movies made by the Khmer Rouge, which only tell their version of what happened. Your images challenge their images, but they also question the power of any image to tell the truth.”

~~ Kevin B. Lee, Keyframe

“Panh’s burnt clay theatre meshes perfectly with the justified pathos distinguishing the narration, while—intensified by complex negotiations with the historical film material—he proposes a miraculous method to represent the unrepresentable.”

~~ Christoph Huber, Cinema Scope

“A profoundly personal meditation on a culture devastated and terminally affected by near-unimaginable cruelty and violence, the film confronts both the absence of official historical images and the inevitable subjectivity of remembered experience by deploying a mix of narration, archive footage, music, photos and recreation using tiny carved models. The result is moving and remarkably resonant.”

~~ Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound

“Panh is not just telling his story and making a picture to go along with it. He has found a way to channel affect, to make his tale of history-gone-wrong resonate for a viewer who, we can assume, is all too familiar with conventional cinematic reenactment. Instead, we observe a filmmaker employing the most primitive of means to achieve a higher level of empathy, as well as an ethics of singularity. We are all unique, after all, which is what the Khmer Rouge chose not to see.”

~~ Michael Sicinski, The Academic Hack

“[Panh's] latest, an unshakable testament to the power of memory, re-creates the period in the unsettling form of kid-friendly dioramas, peopled with clay figures of black-shirted prisoners and sad farm animals. The conceit is tremendously daring, but one with a huge payoff, suggesting an evil that can’t be fully processed by young eyes.”

~~ Joshua Rothlopf, Time Out New York

“This absence of visual documentation [of the Khmer Rouge killings] is the “missing picture” of the title—a void Panh seeks to fill with his carefully, skillfully framed tableaux. Far from a distancing device, these snapshots of suffering somehow feel more vivid, more real, than the grainy celluloid material. They suggest raw memories molded into physical form, history brought alive one evocative still image at a time.”

~~ A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club

“This kind of restaging of the past is in many ways antithetical to the reenacted scenes of murder as directed by the executioners in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and not only for the differences in the historical specificities of Cambodia from 1975–79, and Indonesia from 1965–66. Where Oppenheimer, in his concern for the psychological justifications for murder enabled by power, dwells on the horrifying creativity of the perpetrators, Panh addresses the annihilating force of genocide.”

Hell’s harrower bore a cross. Orpheus brought a lyre. Christ’s solution was more final than Orpheus’s, if less diplomatic. After despoiling Sheol of its righteous, so the story goes, Christ escorted those upright to Heaven’s banquets, leaving the tarnal to their tarnation. While Orpheus’ dulcet bargain moved Hades’ hand to relinquish his bride, the couple didn’t make it very far before the underworld swallowed her up again. Eurydice’s absence swelled as result of this second catastrophe; Aether condensed into perfume, that pungence of loss, and Orpheus carried the scent of the underworld with him.

Based on his interviews with Claude Lanzmann, Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein was acutely aware of these stories. Over the course of one blustery week in 1975, Lanzmann filmed an extensive verbal autobiography of Rabbi Murmelstein, who was the final appointed leader of the Judenrat at Theresienstadt, a council of Jewish elders elected to ease relations between the Nazi rank and the Jews of Adolf Eichmann’s “model ghetto.” From classical antiquity to those of the Islamic Golden Age, Murmelstein adorns his speech with the ideas from human civilization’s great myths; in doing so, he reveals himself to be a facile raconteur and mythologian, unfurling a history that saw the Jews persecuted on Kristallnacht and transported to Auschwitz for extermination.

Thankfully, Lanzmann hasn’t fully bridled his intellectual wanderlust since Shoah. In its most exquisite lines of texture and argumentation, The Last of the Unjust intercuts between phantom rides down the European streets, railways and memorials that have grown up around the Holocaust. We see rows of phaneritic slate, saturated by name after name and made illegible by the sheer density of their contents. We’re shown the gruesome sketches of confined Theresienstadt artists Ferdinand Bloch, Bedrich Lederer, Otto Ungar and Bedrich Fritta. When Lanzmann finally introduces Murmelstein, it’s from behind, his thinned hair slicked back and buzzed on the sides. As the film continues, Lanzmann presents his conversations with the controversial figure in a simple extreme close-up, directing our attention to his words and gestures. The final shot of Murmelstein is also from behind, but this time Lanzmann chooses a wide shot that reveals his feeble gait and forward-flexed posture, his septuagenarian hands trembling behind his back.

Lanzmann manifests a visual attraction to corners and intersections. In particular, he employs a camera move that carves an elliptical path around a fixed center. When that center is aligned with a corner adjoining perpendicular spaces, we experience those spaces as they are projected onto a two-dimensional image, resulting in the diminishment of one space and the burgeoning of another. It’s a kind of shift in the visible presence of competing perspectives and a visual metaphor for the contingencies that determine the stories we tell about power. Finally, it recalls Murmelstein’s own understanding of his privileged position as a go-between oppressor and oppressed, located “between the hammer and the anvil.”

Murmelstein now considers himself to have played a tragicomic role in the Holocaust: a Jew who, to his people, appeared authoritative and advantaged but who was, in fact, powerless. From its inception, the term tragicomoedia was reserved for stories in which the fates of the high and low-born were intermingled. In 1608, the English playwright John Fletcher offered a definition of tragicomedy that reveals the link between power and death. Paraphrased, it is: For the tragicomic, it’s not enough to simply combine mirth and death; the tragicomic must stop just short of the fatal, barring the work’s status as pure tragedy, but it must come so near it as to prevent it also from being pure comedy.

If the tragic nature of Murmelstein’s role at Theresienstadt is self-evident, the comic is a bit more elusive. He describes himself as a marionette, secretly pulling his own strings. His actions can’t be called into question, because he appeared as an unthinking tool of power; in preserving himself, he was preserving the ruse that softened every blow of the Nazi hammer. During trying times, preservation under power always means austerity (for Theresienstadt, this meant Murmelstein’s self-imposed 70-hour work weeks, limited food rations, etc.). In the end, one wonders whether his Scheherazadian persona isn’t just the rattletrap scaffold of a timid, talented survivor.

THE SELFISH GIANT United Kingdom 2013 Directed by Clio Barnard Running time: 91 minutes

A few signature touches have morphed since THE ARBOR in 2010, Clio Barnard’s impressive work of demiurgic non-fiction. For one, she’s modulated bold formalism into affective melodrama. In that film, the real citizens of an impoverished West Yorkshire neighborhood act out a play by author Andrea Dunbar set in their own neighborhood. The citizens’ voices were then overdubbed by professional voice actors. This resulted in a tiered artifice whose representations grasped at truth by appealing to the possibilities of fiction and nonfiction alike. THE ARBOR’s pleasures were cerebral constructions that demarcated an alternative geography — a platonic vantage point from which to consider the socio-existential antinomies of the terrain. With THE SELFISH GIANT, Barnard has given us a more classical work that’s no less brilliant than its predecessor, even if not so sui-generis. If THE ARBOR’s carefully fabricated polemic summoned something like Shirley Clarke’s PORTRAIT OF JASON, then THE SELFISH GIANT invokes the straightforward, heart-tugging social realist work of Ken Loach and Aki Kaurismäki’s proletariat picaresques.

As the 2014 Oscars approach, the flood of nods, snubs, shortlists and surprises instantiate that cramped cinematic tradition substituted for the boundaries of honorable within the art of the moving image. In this sense, the very institution of the Academy is a nefarious aesthetic snub. Still, a dismissal of the tradition is a dismissal of the art it has come to circumscribe, that is, a rich corpus flush with virtuosities and exquisite contrivances of its own. With THE SELFISH GIANT, Clio Barnard has exhibited a stylistic dexterity both inside and outside of that tradition.

From its very first cut, Barnard evokes a kind of cosmic desperation in the trials of Arbor, the young protagonist of the film. From an extreme wide shot of horses grazing in a twilit field, Barnard goes to a close-up of a half-woken boy pounding his fists on the bunk rails inches above his head. The superimposed effect is that of an angry bedlamite, lamenting his lot in life, slobbering and shaking his fists at the sky. At the end of the film, Barnard gives us an extreme close-up on the eyes of one of those grazing horses and it’s a demanding, insistent gaze; it’s neither benevolent nor pitiless; it operates violently on the conscience. The viewer, naked and immodest before that very horse, pours her own interests and concerns into the animal’s empty ethical inquisition. At this final juncture, the attentive viewer’s concerns have been shaped by a careful series of cinematic metaphors that qualify the human value of a behaviorally disturbed boy growing up in structurally sustained destitution.

KURTISS HARE 23 January 2014 Twitter: @akronfilm/@kurtiss

“While the British media have understandably drawn a comparison to Loach’s groundbreaking 1969 British film “Kes,” Barnard is just as much following in the footsteps of François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” [and] Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”... I advise you to brace yourself; like those films, “The Selfish Giant” may tear your heart out. But the passion and possibility Barnard shows us among forgotten people in a forgotten place are fully worth it.”

~~ Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

“Barnard brought a surreal magic to the squalor of The Arbor, blending documentary interview with uncanny lip-sync performance, and while she reins in the formal friskiness here, she retains her feel for perverse splendour.”

~~ Charlie Lyne, Little White Lies

“The subject matter sounds hardscrabble, but The Selfish Giantis deeply tender, one of the most touching movies about friendship between men -- or boys -- I’ve ever seen. This is also the most delicate kind of social realism; it never feels like a screed. Barnard films the landscape matter-of-factly, and she’s open to all its rough, rusty beauty.”

~~ Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice

“Barnard realizes the settings in immersive detail, and she elicits some strikingly convincing performances from her cast; Conner Chapman, playing a boy with an untreated behavioral disorder, delivers one of the scariest performances I've seen from a child actor. The movie takes its title and narrative structure from a children's story by Oscar Wilde; as in the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid With a Bike, the fairy-tale elements bolster the contemporary story with a sense of timelessness.”

~~ Ben Sachs, The Chicago Reader

“For all its relentless horrors (and dear Lord does this movie go to some terrible places),The Selfish Giant never feels predictable. Credit the remarkable young actors, as well as Barnard’s observant style: Every moment in this film is alive with possibility, with the chance that everything will go haywire in a new way.”

~~ Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“[Chapman and Thomas] deliver surprisingly powerful performances, driving the film forward with a palpable—and at times heart-wrenching—energy that overrides the screenplay’s minor flaws. The physicality of the overgrown Swifty and exceptionally runty Arbor make them a particularly endearing odd couple to watch, and their friendship feels real, from start to tragic finish... The film’s final image completes a full visual circle that is sure to make even the stiffest upper lip quiver with emotion.”

~~ Emma Meyers, Film Comment

“Having chosen to pitch her stall this time directly on the royal road of British art cinema, Barnard nevertheless brings a distinctive poetic spin to her material, making the film as much a study of the porous boundary between town and country as Kes was. There’s a strikingly eerie ruralist magic to the repeated shots of horses standing on horizons at night – Barnard and DP Mike Eley make strong, often stylised use of horizontals…”

~~ Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound

“[Chapman] has a camera-controlling physical swagger, with a dry, peppery wit to his line delivery that draws him instantly level with any adult performer in a scene... There’s nothing scrappy about the filmmaking on display here. Where “The Arbor,” for all its innovation in other departments, retained a certain televisual quality to its construction, “The Selfish Giant” is boldly, broodingly cinematic.”

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT Germany 2013 Directed by Ramon Zürcher Running time: 72 minutes

Here we have a grimy ballet. Tennis shoes adhere to a crummy floor. A leg is lifted and foot hesitates, settling over a tender spot with Dionysean caprice. An arm lunges forward in search of a dish. A switch is flipped and a burr grinder roars. One head plunges while another surges. The cat darts and a glass rolls off the table’s edge – no Sterling Hayden to catch it. The space hemmed in by table and counter balloons with flesh. The cupboard door hatches a plan: Bend, grab, slip, lift, brush. That no dancer has yet to take a spill is a minor miracle. It’s that sloppy clockwork we call organic. It’s Jacques Tati’s casual comedic precision. It’s Edward Yang’s morbid chaos of kith and kin. It’s a static lens focused on domestic detritus, stationed somewhere between Chantal Akerman and Yasujirō Ozu.

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT is the debut feature of Ramon Zürcher, and what an ingenious, rewarding feature it is. For the continental philosopher Alain Badiou, “cinema is a thinking whose products are the Real.” This means that movies are capable of sparking, considering and speaking ideas into the realm of discourses that shape our lives. But what thought is tonight’s film thinking? On the one hand, it takes the question of “what is the other thinking?” as its subject. Zürcher’s characters prod, ruffle and provoke each other as if to chart the psychic contours that delineate personhood. Our cartographers show a particular preference for scrutinizing structural weakness: vulnerabilities, sensitivities and breaking points. The housecat’s underbelly, in one of many instances of petty sadism, is threatened underfoot an ultimately merciful shoe. Touch, in this film, is at once threatening and affectionate. Its primary effect is to petrify the beings in its hold.

But this film’s thinking resounds in its formal composition. CinemaScope critic Michael Sicinski likened it to a work of chamber music. There are image cycles that mimic rondo forms, cramped movement allegros and digressive-anecdotal adaggios. I’m reminded again of Ozu, for whom these forms also played a prominent role. His rondos consisted of “pillow shots,” in which the camera cuts away from the dramatic action to focus on a wider scene (usually free from human activity). They typically imbue an august serenity, positioning the troubles of some wayward family in the context of a larger whole. It’s that transcendent, Pale Blue Dot feeling. And if transcendence is a pillow, then (and please forgive the wordplay) Zürcher’s rondos employ something more like “brillo shots.” He gives us perspective on the action not by rising above it, but by diving into it, examining its byproduct. Glasses, bottles, orange peels and crumbs. Each voiced some tertiary role in the play and was discarded. This is not the impermanence of all things, this is the persistence of forgotten things. People come and go and our symptoms remain. With these moves, Zürcher offers us an epistemological model of reality that is disharmonious and estranged. Perhaps this is the breaking point, a worldview from which change becomes possible again. If we touch the cosmic dance with our minds, let us not be petrified by its magnificence.

KURTISS HARE 26 December 2013 Twitter: @akronfilm / @kurtiss

The Strange Little Cat has done a tour of more than two dozen of the world’s most prestigious fests, including Cannes, Toronto, Vienna and now AFI FEST. It’s rare to find a young filmmaker with such a distinct, mature voice, and even rarer to stumble upon a film that so generously rewards post-screening discussions and multiple viewings. It’s a small gem, a film that tells a familiar story in a genuinely new way.”

~~ Darren Hughes, Long Pauses

The Strange Little Cat develops its own means of bending perceptions of time and space. The title offers a clue as to why the actions of this apartment’s residents can seem disjointed or contradictory: This may very well be how the daily rituals of humans seem from a feline perspective. Zürcher’s ingenious debut feature suggests what Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) might’ve been like if Jacques Tati had got around to making it first.”

~~ Jason Anderson, ArtForum

“Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is another small miracle, a compressed, oblique, peculiarly funny and beguiling exploration of shared space. …In his feature debut, Zürcher displays a limpid sensory approach (the rattle of appliances is as much a compositional element as the sun emanating from a window) that’s been justly compared to Jacques Tati’s, though the tight planar arrangements often seem closer to mid-1970s Chantal Akerman. People come and go within these fixed, slightly off-center frames, bits of eccentricity become running gags, and every cut is a droll new visual opening. The Strange Little Cat can feel like a whirring toy, a screen brimming with pointillist delights, and then one look at the subtle yet lingering grief on the mother’s drawn face and the playful surfaces suddenly pulse with melancholy, even ominous undercurrents. It’s a miniature that grows larger and more secretive, tenser and more flowing the more you gaze into it.”

~~ Fernando F. Croce, MUBI

“If we were to return to the metaphor of considering Zürcher’s film as a work of chamber music, these image-cycles are rondo forms, in contrast to the cramped-movement allegros and the digressive-anecdotal adagios. And as the film evolves, we begin to see that Clara may be something very close to Cat’s governing consciousness, a girl who sees much more than she is seen. (One of the most striking of the non-narrative passages is the one comprised of Clara’s crayon drawings, which show that the girl, too, finds this home odd.) But unlike her older relatives, she possesses no wry detachment; like a little phenomenologist (or a cat), Clara investigates by moving ‘to the things themselves.’”

~~ Michael Sicinsky, CinemaScope

“The movie could just as easily be stripped of all concern for ideas and taken for what it also is: A pure, visceral ballet of life as a futile attempt to establish order. In fact, a filmmaker that often comes to mind while watching Zürcher’s film (other than Jacques Tati) is Lucrecia Martel, whose own debut, La Ciénaga is a spiritual cousin to the one in this film, both expertly depicting families in a simultaneous mode of repellence and love toward one another.”

~~ Blake Williams, IONCINEMA

“It’s perhaps the most purely beguiling movie at this year’s festival—the rare film that offers a new way of looking at the everyday world. Zürcher’s sensibility has been compared to that of Jacques Tati, with whom he shares a puckish sense of humor predicated on small bits of business that expand into running gags. But his asymmetrical compositions and discordant juxtapositions, which employ visual and aural misdirection to make the familiar seem fresh and wondrous, are entirely his own.”

EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE USA 1933 Directed by Roy Del Ruth Running time: 75 minutes

Wall Street has long had its wolves. Before DiCaprio and McConaughey there was Warren William – a man whose lycanthropic features extend beyond the mere physical. He’s got a hot dog saunter and a dismaying knuckle wag. Glance once at the arches of his ears and you’ll see refinement. Glance again and it’s ferocity. His greazed back hair (sic.) is the follicular embodiment of predation. William plays Kurt Anderson in EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE, a dept. store manager who wiles his way into “supreme control,” of the company’s board. Up from the diaphragm and out through gritted teeth, the arriviste summons his modus operandi. “There’s no room for sympathy or softness. My code is smash or be smashed!” And one wonders if the same philippic didn’t underlie his headshot as it made studio rounds. His role in UNDER EIGHTEEN (Mayo, 1932), SKYSCRAPER SOULS (Selwyn, 1932) and THE MATCH KING (Keighley/Bretherton, 1932) trained depression-era audiences to expect this ruthless profiteering sort.

And then there’s Loretta Young. In January of ‘33, Movie Classic magazine mused, “now is the time for some good poet to come to the aid of his country, and write an ode to the wistfulness of Loretta.” I doubt that poet ever did come along, but I still have hope. Ms. Young plays Madeline, a talented and witty ingenue. Her screen presence boasts a kind of voltaic immediacy. Whether enthused or depressed, her inner and outer lives seem electrically linked. Young’s multivalence contrasts against William’s, whose energy seems to be always deployed from reserves that are shaking in his belly, waiting to be growled into being. Madeline would rather be hired for her brains than her beauty, but when times are tough, well, she won’t be so undignified as to decline a job. Even if there are a few strings attached.

One of the most beguiling scenes in EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE takes place as Anderson prowls the floors of his store, listening to the sound of a piano. He ventures on a model home meant to show off an assortment of domestic wares. Its proportions are navigable but not quite to size. The camera sees him stepping over a miniature picket fence, like a giant, unconcerned with the domicile’s pitiable defenses. Upon entering, he sees Madeline at the keyboard and his compulsion is apparent. But it’s a kind of shameful fantasy on Anderson’s part, to be caught pining under such impractical, homey surrounds. After all, this is the prig who will later say, “when a man outlives his usefulness, he ought to jump out of a window. That’s the trouble with most men – they don’t realize when they’re through.” But this isn’t the only contradiction Anderson demonstrates.

There’s a brief aside midway through the film, where a store customer asks a sales clerk, “where is the basement?” The clerk answers, “it’s on the twelfth floor.” The customer sputters something, clearly incensed, and the action yields to the next scene. It may seem just played for laughs, but I think it holds the key to this film’s unflinching critique: that competition turns meaning on its head. Precisely when competition seems the only way to survive, it must also produce the extinction of meaning. It will be another 61 years before the Coen brothers release THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, which is, in several ways, a nihilistic reboot of pic.

KURTISS HARE 5 December 2013 Twitter: @akronfilm/@kurtiss

“Department Store Girls--This is your picture, about your lives and your problems! See what happens in department store aisles and offices after closing hours! Girls who couldn't have been touched with a 100-ft yacht--ready to do anything to get a job! Beautiful models who whisper their dread of the "Boss" who can "make" or break more women than a sultan!”

~~ Studio Ad Copy (1933)

“Packaged by Warner Bros.—the most prole-oriented of studios—as the suave, cynical personification of ruthless capitalism run amok, William plays a tyrannical department-store manager with a bust of Napoleon in his office in Employees’ Entrance (1933). Showing this Thursday on the first of four William double bills, the film is the actor’s quintessential vehicle: A workaholic, physically intimidating sexual predator, William twice beds winsome shop girl Loretta Young (the first time when she needs a job, the second after she marries his assistant) and repeatedly bests his timorous board of directors: “My code is ‘smash or be smashed.’ Employees’ Entrance capped William’s career year, which was also the Depression nadir: 1932.”

~~ J. Hoberman, http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-20/film/warren-william-as-titan-of-industry-king-of-pre-code/

“For a brief period in the depths of the Great Depression, the so-called Heel of Heels was a genre onto himself. Working mainly for Warner Brothers, Williams played a succession of slick, overbearing scoundrels. He was an oilier, more self-possessed Gordon Gekko, with a cool to which bumpkin Donald Trump could only aspire possess — the suave, cynical personification of ruthless capital run amok.”

CLOSED CURTAIN Iran 2013 Directed by Jafar Panahi, Kambuzia Partovi Running time: 106 minutes

A blizzard of noble arrows descend on us from Iran. Past the artisans of other modern national cinemas, her archery is synchronized in dreamy and deliberate form.

“The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing.”

~~ F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

This ranged attack has been called the Iranian New Wave. Its first swelling broke with the work of Abbas Kiarostami.

"I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. …Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks."

~~ Abbas Kiarostami

Tonight, the first notion to resist is the idea that slow or quiet films are somehow lacking in efficacy. Rather, properly executed, they lull us into a vulnerable state – the inceptive posture from which the infiltration of ideas proceeds unimpeded.

The second notion is that Jafar Panahi, who’s come to represent the New Wave’s second surge, has authored only a meta-fictional biograph in CLOSED CURTAIN. It’s been called a working-through of the prolific artist’s house-arrest and, indeed, confinement is present here. Unlike the imposed nature of the author’s arrest, however, the film’s confinement is principled and self-disciplined. The writer character, played by a prepossessed Kambuzia Partovi, seems to embody the very work of repression. In drawing the curtains, he blocks the light from outside, ostensibly so that he can protect his dog and accomplish his writing. But why does he also plaster over movie posters and mute the television? Aren’t they a kind of “inside window,” to the outside? One of the posters he obscures is LE CERCLE (Panahi, 2000). Coincidentally, It shares its French title with LE CERCLE (THE RING), a horror movie about an encounter with a wretched girl who climbs through a television. It’s not the state that’s hounding him, it’s all manner of troublesome and foreign intrusion. The dog is something like a fearless muse, an innocent soul able to look upon the devastation of the Real without the flinch of complicity. And Melika (“moonlike”) provokes, overturns and destabilizes, eventually drowning in her own choppy tides. Altogether, Panahi depicts a house in sotto voce turmoil. Its ghosts, fantasies and projections are both at odds and in cahoots. If CLOSED CURTAIN is a personal allegory, it’s not only that. And if it’s not a film (like his previous film under house-arrest, THIS IS NOT A FILM), then it’s something more than a film. It’s a discursus on the possibilities of becoming for an ingenious, censorious, rebellious and storied people.

Asghar Farhadi is a key director in Iran’s third generation of the New Wave. His arrowheads, like A SEPARATION (2011) and THE PAST (2013) are less oneiric than those of his forerunners, but no less infiltrative. I look forward to the development of Iran’s cinema, even while its past continues to possess me in dreams.

KURTISS HARE 21 November 2013 Twitter: @akronfilm/@kurtiss

“Stop comparing this to Charlie Kaufman. Iranian cinema was doing self-reflexive before Kaufman did his 1st book report dressed in costume as the book he was reporting on. Besides, Kaufman's nebbish neuroses are worlds removed from the very real forces constricting Panahi. And yet, Panahi's film is the more expansive, even as it is very much the id-driven, emotional flip-side to THIS IS NOT A FILM's logical questions about how to practice his art when his art has been denied him. Allegorical narratives collapse into surreal, metacinematic muse pursuit, the shift occurring in an unvarnished long shot peering into a mirror like some black box rendition of Kieslowski. If TINAF's experimentalism and daring not only showed its maker unbowed by his harsh sentence but capable of opening up new possibilities of structural and narrative possibilities, CLOSED CURTAIN builds on that, an honest-to-goodness film that continues to splinter and reform as Panahi enters the frame and interacts with the figments of his imagination. Sure, the collapse of a thin allegory for the artist's direct presence suggests a certain level of didacticism, but A) f*** you, that he is speaking at all is more powerful protest than anyone else can match, and B) ignores how he handles his anxieties and fears as the impressionistically affect him, not as social rants. But if the mystery woman slipping in and out of the frame represents Panahi's worries about losing his voice, he should take some solace in the fact that this established master continues to put out his boldest, most adventurous work, and he can't even leave his property.”

~~ Jake Cole, http://letterboxd.com/jakepcole/film/closed-curtain/

“Closed Curtain was another film of mental and physical turmoil projected with considerable restraint and confidence into a drama. Another Jafar Panahi film stuck inside a home, another image of Panahi himself stuck, trapped, behind curtains and doors. A drama of isolation and despair which reveals itself halfway through to be purely expressionistic, the actors literal projections of fears and thoughts of the mind and soul. A door is opened to the night and the poor quality digital camera cannot handled the darkness, which bursts into flames of unstable black pixels, a portal to unknown threats and blank emptiness. In a mirror, Panahi steps into frame and gradually replaces the older man (a timid screenwriter, protectful of his outlawed dog) and young woman (a complex figure: suicidal and a snitch) as the central protagonist whose thoughts—or is it just his house?—are occasionally filled with the words and worries of the two. But the director-actor's demeanor, despite the sorrow, is as unflappable and open as always: a gentle, warm presence, the intimations of suicide seeming almost antithetical to the simple tone of the man's body, his aspect. Which is why the admission of such darkness, of such solitude and doubt comes across with such force. And I cannot tell if the closing image, free and jailed at once, is a hope or fact.”

~~ Daniel Kasman, http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tiff-2013-correspondences-3

“Closed Curtain uses Panahi's beach house to create a metaphysical reality in which he appears as much a political prisoner in his real life as he does within his creative world; the fantastical escape offered to him by his characters' diegesis seems both restrictive and enticing. Melika invites him in a recorded iPhone video to follow him into the water to kill himself; she disappears into the ocean in the video, and we soon watch him start recording a video where he does the same. The film then rewinds the footage and he reappears, dry and unharmed. In Iranian postmodern art, the symbolic use of natural objects and places is an important motif in underscoring the sojourns of its characters, and there are few natural elements more symbolically powerful than the warm, seductive immersion of the ocean. Panahi's symbolic journey won't end with drowning waters, but in Closed Curtain he articulates exactly how warm and enticing the waters can be.”

NINOTCHKA USA 1939 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch Running time: 110 minutes

"Garbo brings her incredible sensual abandon to the role of a glum, scientifically trained Bolshevik envoy who succumbs to Parisian freedom - i.e., champagne. The film includes a historic encounter, when the great instinctual artist of the screen meets the great stylist and technician of the stage -- Ina Claire, as a Russian grand duchess. The fur flies exquisitely."

– Pauline Kael

“Of course, no one doubts that Garbo is going to melt, but the lovely thing about the film is the way chat and smiles do the trick. She doesn’t have to be convinced by some ponderous arguments over political destiny. Flirtation does it – the most egalitarian weapon”

– David Thomson

“A sparkling, witty political fairy tale from 1939, about a cold but beautiful lady commissar (Greta Garbo) who melts to the bourgeois charms of Paris and Melvyn Douglas, jeopardizing both honor and career. That's love. Garbo fully complements the casual sophistication and stylistic grace of director Ernst Lubitsch, cleverly playing off her dour public image. The satire may be mostly a matter of easy contrasts, but the lovers inhabit a world of elegance and poise that is uniquely and movingly Lubitsch's.”

– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“In 1939, the New York Times declared, “Stalin won’t like it!” This sentiment marked Ernst Lubitsch’s classic comedy, NINOTCHKA, as a send up of Soviet-communist life. And it would later bolster Louis B. Mayer’s case before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His plea was that, yes, MGM has made films like NINOTCHKA that, “kidded the life out of communism.” The film stars Greta Garbo, “The Solitary Swede,” who became so yoked to her character’s line in the 1932 film GRAND HOTEL (Goulding): “I want to be alone.” Two years earlier, when her film ANNA CHRISTIE (Brown, 1930) was being publicized, MGM wanted audiences to know that the silent film starlet’s first talkie was a big deal. So they spread the slogan, “Garbo talks!” Nine years later, in NINOTCHKA, it was “Garbo laughs!” And no advertising campaign would let you forget it. The deserving director chosen to crack Garbo’s grimace was Ernst Lubitsch. His farcical fingerprint on the fabric of film history had already become known as “The Lubitsch Touch.” Billy Wilder’s script delivers Garbo from the dour life of a Soviet emissary and into the warm embrace of Western materialism. Contemporary audiences should have no trouble seeing the satire on both sides of the iron curtain.”

NINOTCHKA USA 1939 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch Running time: 110 minutes

You may not know The Song of the Volga Boatmen by name, but you’ll probably recognize its theme. Of its melodic lines, there is one five note sequence traditionally used to signify portent and certain doom. Ba dum dum dumm dummm. “Yo heave-ho! As the barges float along,” its lyrics lament. It wasn’t until 1941, two years after NINOTCHKA was released, that the tune really took off in the States. Under Glenn Miller’s baton, the song acquired the now- slack-now-taut-ness of a ‘40s swing ballad. The new chart-topper kept its Slavic melody, but the thrum and bounce of the rhythm section are Western as a Reveille.

For each historian, a different refrain. Was it the dab-hand with which Ernst Lubitsch recontextualized European politesse for laugh-hungry American audiences? Was it his signature use of the “superjoke,” in which the punchline is delivered just after you think you just heard the punchline? Was it the way he brought out the charm in duplicitous ne’er-do-wells? Or could it have been the integral way music wove itself into the fabric of his films? These semblances, and many more, had already come to be known as “The Lubitsch Touch” – an appropriative gesture to rival that of Glenn Miller’s baton in scope and singularity.

Melvyn Douglas plays the cocksure Count D’Algout, who fled to Paris after the Soviets tore the imperial state asunder. He lives a modest life of leisure in the employ of Duchess Swana, who calls him her, “little Volga boatman.” When three graceless envoys come to Paris from Red Russia in order to sell a collection of imperial jewels, D’Algout is dispatched to intercept them for his employer. They were hers once, before the revolution, when Russia was White. When the envoys bungle the negotiations, unmoored in a sea of capitalistic methods, their stern superior (played by a stoic Bela Lugosi), sends an exceptional comrade: the monochromatic Ninotchka (Garbo).

If the Lubitsch touch had come to stand for an ever-widening circle of traits, then Greta Garbo’s reputation was a more constrictive figure. The silent film starlet made her first talkie, ANNA CHRISTIE (Brown), in 1930. “Garbo talks!” was the headline. Her role in the 1932 film, GRAND HOTEL (Goulding), ushered in the tabloid nickname, “the solitary swede,” and that unforgettable line, “I want to be [let] alone.” The trade mags might suggest that any break from her reputation was worth advertising. So when pic was promoted, the press announced, “Garbo laughs!” It worked; audiences flocked to the picture. MGM implored Radio City Music Hall: “Don’t pronounce it – hold it over!” In 1941, when Garbo reunited with Melvyn Douglas in TWO-FACED WOMAN (Cukor), it was “Garbo at her gayest!”

Interestingly, NINOTCHKA only partly keeps its promise – when Garbo first cuts up, we can’t hear her laughter at all (the whole room is laughing with her). From then on, all we get is a few snickers. Perhaps MGM didn’t offer a high enough price to afford a full-on belly laugh. It would only be fitting if this had something to do with Garbo’s estimation of her own prestige, which coincidentally belonged to the people.

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY United Kingdom 2012 Directed by Sophie Fiennes Running time: 136 minutes

I became aware of Slavoj Žižek sometime after the popular zenith of Occupy. I was living in San Francisco. It’s a productive, modern city. Perhaps capitalism didn’t count on peninsular deployment. You can tell it improvised. (In fact, as Žižek might tell you, capitalism is nothing but a series of catastrophes and improvisations.) Industry spreads South. Hop the 101 and there’s YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Netflix. Any further South and you’re in Monterey Bay. It’s not enough to see capitalism’s destruction, one must see its anti-production – the excrement which accompanies its phones and pharmacies. It creates yards of abandoned 747s in the Mojave, “stripped of their substantial content.” Pure useless object. And, for now, we have places to put this junk. Out of sight, out of mind.

But in those seven miles squared that make up the city proper, every color of the social spectrum collides. If THEY LIVE (Carpenter, 88) had been set there during the dotcom boom-bust-boom, I’m not sure John Nada’s sunglasses would’ve been strong enough. The inherent tensions are writ so plain and in such proximity. The homeless aren’t ignored or cursed at, they’re part of the neighborhood. The obscenely rich wear jeans and sneakers and eat $4 Banh Mi sandwiches in the Tenderloin. Once, when I was walking home from work, crowds of well-meaning electric-haired hedonists were swelling for Love Fest, an outdoor rave held every year in The Heart of the City. A homeless woman, dress hoisted, dragged her ass on the sidewalk leaving a shit stain behind her for lack of toilet paper. She didn’t seem troubled. The house music droned and I continued home.

All this is not to lay a guilt trip. It’s to sketch an image of the paradoxical nature of the highest possibilities of capitalist production. It’s heavy stuff sometimes, but that’s where Žižek shines. He’s a kind of manic prankster philosopher – always worried that if he stops talking, his listeners will stop listening. And nobody tells a dirty joke in a Slovene accent quite like he does. He’ll tell you he likes Hollywood cinema, Christianity and Rammstein. He’s been eager to publish his take on everything from The Wire to ZERO DARK THIRTY (Bigelow, 12) to Psy’s Gangnam Style. He loves Marx, Hegel, Lacan and Wagner. One wonders if he’s entirely performative and if that fact matters.

Žižek is on record as having not seen tonight’s film, because he can’t stand the sight of himself. Neither did he see THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA (2006), his previous collaboration with director Sophie Fiennes. It’s clear that Fiennes is conversant in the theorist’s work. Following Žižek online, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of anecdotes and punchy comebacks to accepted wisdom. So the elegant transitions Fiennes has delivered here should not be undervalued. The film is chock-full of subtle juxtapositions and inside jokes that nip at our attention: Žižek waxes prosaic on the “basic insight of psychology,” as we roam the austere chapel from THE SOUND OF MUSIC (Wise, 1965); he drinks a Coke (slogan: “It’s the real thing.”) not on a movie set, but in the desert (presumably The Desert of the Real, from the title of his 2002 book); sacred chamber music backs Žižek’s Marxist dissection of commodities and their transcendental content; Fiennes returns Žižek to Travis Bickle’s urban bunker from TAXI DRIVER (Scorsese, 76) after he finishes discussing another DeNiro role in BRAZIL (Gilliam, 85). As she repositions him in locales from earlier in the film, the montage takes a pyramidal shape, broadening its scope sequence by sequence. When Žižek comments on the vampiric nature of the Rose character in TITANIC (Cameron 97), Fiennes includes a memorable cross-dissolve between Kate Winslet’s eye and Gloria Stuart’s eye – from young Rose to old Rose – and the tonal impact of the transition is hideously rewritten. In my estimation, a world with more of this kind of perversion would be a better one.

Ashes of Time (Redux) China, Hong Kong 2008 (1994) Directed by Wong Kar-wai Running time: 93 minutes Format: 35mm

There is a melancholic inventiveness that ripples throughout Wong Kar-Wai’s troubled third feature. And as troubles sometimes do, Wong’s had auspicious beginnings. With an epic $5.5m budget, he cast a veritable constellation of stellar Hongkongers: Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, Tony Leung Kar-fai, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung and Jacky Cheung. One byproduct of this accumulated star power was a production calendar saturated with outside commitments. So, in ‘92, Wong paused the shoot which began a year earlier. During the break, he wrote, shot and edited CHUNKING EXPRESS (1994) – the film that, with a typical alley-oop pass from cinematic emissary, Quentin Tarantino, would first familiarize American audiences with the Hong Kong new wave. ASHES OF TIME starts:

“It is written in the Buddhist canon, ‘The flag is still, the wind is calm. It is the heart of man that is in turmoil.’ It is the year of a total eclipse. Drought sweeps the land. Drought means problems. Problems mean good business.”

And while this sage advice may hold for deadly fixers like Leslie Cheung’s assassin-at-a-distance, it didn’t hold for Wong who recovered less than a quarter of his budget. Still, his work is chock full of innovative, eclectic technique that we can suppose was afforded him by the time and space of his immodest budget.

Many of the stylistic conventions Wong (and his go-to lensers, Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bin) employs here make appearances throughout his oeuvre. There’s the double- printing technique which results in a kind of systematic and jerky slow motion. It was first employed in his debut, AS TEARS GO BY (1988), and features prominently in his recent THE GRANDMASTER (2013). The technique draws our attention to the site where the real magic of cinema resides: the inter-frame gaps where a spectator conjures images that render sequences into an uninterrupted arc of motion. The elliptical way Wong captures Sammo Hung’s fight choreography seems to double down on this notion. Action spews forth – always having happened and never happening. Our eyes settle on the still moments in a series of graceful poses that leave us wondering what alarming feat of agility delivered us unto this unlikely present. Then there are the kaleidoscopic effects delivered by spinning lanterns and sapling-wrought bird cages. Trippy lights pierce these ornamented foregrounds, animating the desert as if it were a wuxia discotheque – a lattice of yolky yellow, irreal green and saffron shadow. Wong’s camera angles capture a universe where gravity’s vector is multiplicitous, falling at every angle concurrently in a torsion of uprightness. And the wind. The wind is anything but still. Flags whipper in the violent gusts like so many gaping flesh wounds.

MUD United States 2013 Directed by Jeff Nichols Running time: 130 minutes

The first Jeff Nichols film I saw was 2011’s TAKE SHELTER. I was a guy from Stark County, Ohio, whose edges grew abrasive every manic, San Francisco work week. And so, in some quiet weekend corner of the city, I’d burnish with light reflected from a silver screen. That day, Nichols showed me Ohio’s summer storms. Screen doors and split levels. A tormented pater familias in the Western Reserve. By hallucinating a massive storm on the horizon, he assuaged the psychic pain of a flagging economy and a family plunging into rack and ruin. The threat was so big and so elusive that his fragile ego had little choice but to externalize it. To make it tangible. Visible. Opposable. But was it really a hallucination or were those dead crows actually out there? How about those torrents? And the funnel clouds?

Nichols is a real bruiser. And I think MUD marks a certain subjective breakthrough in his scuffle with modernity. In it, he makes today’s most radical move: to position dramatic threats as fully exterior to his narrative’s main site of identification (Ellis). We have to stomach none of this tired, execrable message: “the true enemy was within himself.” Isn’t it a mantra that manages to busy us? To obsess us with our personal affairs and finances? To fall further into a bottomless river of self-improvement? No matter how it manifests, the problem is to be addressed in isolation, as if our problems were aberrations and not symptoms of something much bigger and more elusive, but radically outside of us.

An ailing spirit weighs heavy on the Arkansas town from which MUD’s protagonists hail. Broods of semi-aquatic pitvipers writhe in waterlogged mires along the riverbanks. Ellis is a kid all of thirteen. He’s as earnest and uncynical as Nichols’ camera. The bildungsroman unfolds and he navigates love’s pitfalls by vicariously identifying with the proliferation of men in his small town. Each with a different orientation to love. Each inscribing her successes and failures with pens of discrete character. This squeeze work of identification is the epiglottal action in the throat of Spirit. Existential options flow from one person to another. Today, we build dams at our borders in a mortified effort to preserve our individuality. We treat vicarious identification as if it were a pathology. To be anything less than sui generis is a fate worse than death. And this is how Nichols renders his young hero: more as a subject prone to a mired world and its inhabitants than as an individual within it. In so doing, Ellis matures and, paradoxically, individuates. Turns out the radical individual is a subject. A miracle. A boat in a tree. “A hell of a thing.”

A few more things I haven’t said enough about: MUD’s affecting performances. There’s Matthew McConaughey’s bouncy house charisma, Sam Shepard’s stone-wrought indignance, Tye Sheridan’s resilience, and Jacob Lofland’s world-weary wingmanship. And Nichols’ steady-cam tension which would be classical if it weren’t so aesthetically subversive. In a summer full of movies that proudly present their faded postmodern colors… in a time when audiences salute those same works with a swipe of the card and a snigger, we can be grateful for MUD.

Dead Man Germany, Japan, United States 1995 Directed by Jim Jarmusch Running time: 120 minutes Format: 35mm

Folks who saw THE LONE RANGER (Verbinski, 2013) this summer bore witness to Johnny Depp’s performance as Tonto, the Indian guide who plays that clichéd, resentful Samaritan to Armie Hammer’s hapless ranger. Eighteen years ago, the polarities were reversed, when an Akron-native filmmaker cast Depp in the role of William Blake, a nebbish clown-clad accountant (“stupid fucking white man!”) from Cleveland. In some ways, Verbinski’s film seems to have weaned at DEAD MAN’s bosom. Paul’s epistles:

“I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.” – 1 Corinthians 3:2, NIV

“…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” – Philippians 2:12, NIV

Let me propose, then, that the Verbinski film is a working out of its own genre’s salvation. It’s a revisionist take on the masked man, whose original creed vowed, “that 'this government of the people, by the people, and for the people' shall live always,” and who, in 2013, disavows the law in favor of justice: “If these men represent the law, I'd rather be an outlaw.” And despite its several tremendous set pieces and some of the summer’s most competently captured action, THE LONE RANGER is milk to DEAD MAN’s solid food.

Its ideas are formal and concise in both realms of text and technique. Blake goes on a Kierkegaard-ian journey thru despair – his sickness unto death.

“In her mild hand the golden Keys: The Grave is Heaven's Golden Gate” – William Blake, To The Queen

If “follow the money,” is capital advice for the social realist work, then perhaps this existential fable implores us to follow the bullet. The “white man’s metal” rips through two chests, narrowly missing the heart of the first. It stops a man dead in his tracks in front of a Paulinian store sign. All the while, Jarmusch’s troupe of arch character actors remain hilariously ignorant of their own idiosyncracies. In some ways, it’s a more traditional Western-set comedy of errors than BLAZING SADDLES (Brooks, 1974). It breaks from Brooks’ style of unflagging self-awareness that bites the funny bone even while tickling the same. This levity plays right into Jarmusch’s juxtaposition of tone and content, and we sup on a manna whose weight goes nearly unperceived.

(Popiól I Diament) Poland 1958 Directed by Andrzej Wajda Running time: 104 minutes Format: 35mm

Peter John Dyer was the editor of the Monthly Film Bulletin in the early ‘60s. It was an influential periodical published monthly by the British Film Institute. He criticized ASHES AND DIAMONDS for its style soaked “baroque excesses.” In it, Zbigniew Cybulski (pictured above) plays Maciek, an assassin in the Polish Home Army (Resistance Army). Maciek is a kind of self-aware James Dean type, who’s plagued more by his perspicacity than he is tormented by the opacity and magnitude of his desire. He’s unrelentingly cool. His suave and toothy grin exude a kind of jouissance in the absurdity of reality. Resisting the temptation to engage the semantics of “baroque excess,” as if it were not a redundant phrase capable of qualifying in a non-deleterious manner, let me propose the following: if one subtracted any of Wajda’s artificial excesses, one would be left with less than a whole work. So let’s reclaim “baroque.” “Excess.” “Artificial.” These are art’s possibilities. And their significance is that of the inter-subjective Real, unstyled at the level of experience.

Wajda’s sense of space is mannered and sophisticated in its diagrammatic use of long takes that comprise multiple compositions. The Italians come to mind. There’s Fellini’s penchant for tableau style shots that rearrange themselves as a character leaves and re-enters the frame. There’s Rosellini, in his expressionistic mode, who wrings every last shade of grey from reality’s rag in service of a pro-filmic whose interiority runneth over. Wajda captures space in a way that renders many distinct spheres of pathos, like so many marbles in a jar. His is a deep action that evades Wellesian deep focus, resulting in perspectival shots that grow impressionistic as one penetrates the vanishing point.

All of this style works in service of a character torn from time. Maciek undergoes a transition from American ‘50s wild child to ‘60s European art film existential martyr, all set in ‘40s Poland, which was undergoing its own political transition after the war. As politically skeptical as I am of arcs that terminate in existential dilemma (starting there is better), this is a tremendously fascinating setup. It’s a film that narrates the political conditions of its own emergence from the war-torn cultural nexus that was mid-century Poland and reignites those conditions in the person of Maciek through violence, anger, remorse, love and death.

French Cancan France 1954 Directed by Jean Renoir Running time: 102 minutes Format: 35mm

powder-puff (adj.): of, relating to, or being a traditionally male activity or event done or played by women.

In one sequence during the grand blowout scene of FRENCH CANCAN, we witness a private moment in the life of cabaret impresario and quiet symposiarch Henri Danglard, played by an unflappable Jean Gabin. He’s slouched regally in a chair backstage while a gaggle of can-can dancers shine the front room with their pantalettes. Offenbach’s Infernal Gallop rings through the hall. Danglard, still comfortably seated, lifts his left leg. Then kicks his right. Then his left. This sublime instant is interrupted momentarily when an observer enters the room. Briefly; and once again, he finds himself alone and kicking.

A cool blue color stained the walls of boulangeries and shops in 1890s provincial France. Its first manufacturing took place nearby, earlier in the century. Powdery cobalt salts are sintered into this most Frankish of pigments. The yellows, reds and pinks, too, have a fine, dusty finish. These colors can be inhaled. Like a brisk walk through a haze of brilliant concrete dust. Like Renoir’s depiction of Holi, the Vedic festival of color, in THE RIVER (1951). Tonight’s director seems bent on envisioning essences in a particulate form. Color, yes, but modernity too. Before the erection of the Moulin Rouge, great clouds of Montmartrian dust bellow from a controlled demolition. The effete patrons of a nearby café take a deep breathe and humorously, but seriously, say “that’s progress.”

Perhaps desire, too, is an invisible particulate. Whatever residue it is that coats Danglard’s lungs, he suffuses into the women around him. Françoise Anoul plays Nini, an effervescent ingenue of limited means, whom Danglard handpicks to become an expert of that lascivious battement. Lola, Danglard’s combative and jealous mistress, gets her va-va-voom from Maria Félix’ aye-aye-aye. Then there’s the siren timbres of Eugénie Buffet given voice by French diva, Édith Piaf. Danglard takes many of them as lovers, promising nothing more than to make them performers. In once scene, Danglard monologues this notion when Nini suggests they commit to each other. The detail and gravity with which he forecasts her eventual unhappiness articulates the film’s highest polemic moment. It’s so American, so un-French, to suggest that maybe it was a personal flourish for M. Renoir, so I won’t.

Talk to me long enough and you might hear me say, “I inhale cinema and exhale life.” Renoir’s artifice in FRENCH CANCAN is mountain air. This second entry in his “art trilogy” takes thematic cues from THE GOLDEN COACH (1952): relationships between performer/ audience, lover/instructor, upper/lower class are painted with soft colored strokes by lenser Michel Kelber, in their first and only collaboration.

AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS Soviet Union 1924 Directed by Yakov Protazanov Running time: 113 minutes

Forgive me this auteurist detour. Instead of concentrating on Protazanov and his relatively simple constructivist tale, let me direct your attention to the dazzling work of Aleksandra Ekstra. Her set and costume design are really what lend this film its lasting impact. Feudal life on the red planet is all flow and ripple for the nobles (known as “The Elders”). Handsome asymmetries and geometric figures range from the Cubo-Futurist to the Suprematist. Musicality seems embedded in Ekstra’s surfaces. There is a visual tactility to the thousand harp strings suspended from the red heavens. Our eyes arpeggiate a tune as our focus sweeps across those glistening guts. To me, it sounds something like the triangulated arithmetic of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, even though I know that comes about fifty years later. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the lines are vertical and angular. Where empty space hung cold in the Martian skies, on Earth there are people. Workers. Soldiers. Backsliding, deluded imperialists. At times, and without speaking from the vantage of history, it feels like aliens have already made contact there. Vacuum tubes, headsets and comrades whose foreheads are pressed deep into the sex of some radio-powered machine. Back on Mars. I’m reminded of the great French comic artist, Jean Giraud, nom de plume Moebius. Organic matter and the purity of artistic feeling intermingle. A Martian door opens like a dragon’s wing unfolding or the bellows of an accordion contracting its pleats. Aelita, The Queen of Mars is a kind of troika-chested Cleopatra decked out in ‘20s alien Vogue. The look of her time is Art Deco Ideal. And while the tranquility of the Agora suggests all is well on Mars, it is not. The red planet proletariat are being herded and thrashed, shuffled and stacked. Consumed for energy. The ideal is a veneer and any good communist knows veneers are for scraping. To expose the rotten wood beneath is to set the conditions for revolution. Tabula rasa. Now seems like a good time to quote an American review of AELITA published in 1924:

In Moscow they are devoting 75,000 feet of motion-picture films to the portrayal of life in a newer, redder world. The story of "Aelita," prepared by a degenerate scion of the Tolstoi stock, depicts a cubistic, futuristic and geometric sphere in which Communists have it all their own way – as if it were their heaven…that it may spread the revolutionary propaganda and confirm the hold of the terrorist regime. -Author Unknown, New Worlds for the Reds

Terrorist… 1924…

Switching pace, let me issue this challenge to you tonight: watch this film from the inside. RiffTrax is great, but it’s not the only way to experience the past. If your feet are planted in 2013, you might be tempted to come to this film with the defensive scorn of hindsight. You might laugh when the film is not saying something funny. Y’know, because we’ve learned so much since 1924. Haven’t we? Then again, our strongest enemies are still terrorists. Maybe not everything’s changed.

VIOLA Argentina 2013 Directed by Matías Piñeiro Running time: 65 minutes

Please forgive me, sincerely, for assuming you’ve not yet heard of Matías Piñeiro. This 31 year old filmmaker hails from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where a typical film of his…

“…plays for one week all over the city at different times, and then suddenly it’s over… [the] system is just an old one that doesn’t adjust to new developments in film technology and production. It’s like making sausages… You don’t have the good German or Spanish films in Argentina. Or Chilean films! There were five good ones from Chile that year, and none of them showed in Argentina. They’re right across from us, over a little mountain, but we don’t get to see them. I mean, people are premiering at Cannes with a USB drive. People under house arrest are showing at Cannes.” -Matías Piñeiro, FilmComment

I was made aware of Piñeiro’s work via the folks I follow on Twitter who (mostly) live in New York. In May of this year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcased this filmmaker’s prodigious oeuvre, which was a New York reprise screening of tonight’s film, VIOLA. Because I’m affiliated with AkronFilm+Pixel, I am approved to subscribe to a service called FestivalScope (“for Film Professionals World Wide”). As such, I was able to watch VIOLA once before proposing it as August’s contemporary film slot. Once. In accordance with FestivalScope’s policy. Stupidly, I didn’t take notes. The prospect of writing about VIOLA without seeing it again is unutterably sad.

Piñeiro’s work is singular (and major) but not without discernable lineage. In his use of actors, with their semi-improvisatory style; in what might best be described as an irrepressible face fetish; in his subversive empathy and humanism, Piñeiro is a compatriot of John Cassavetes, the “actor’s director,” par excellence. In his excursus on the interpenetration of fiction and reality; in his mimetic incantations; in his musical notation of theme and variation, there is something of Abbas Kiarostami and Hong Sang-soo. But what are we to make of his distinctly classical, romantic lighting and soft focus? This is not Cassavetes. What are we to do with his insistence on gabby characters? His thumb-biting at the idea that cinema must move beyond the spoken word to be essentially cinematic? This is not Kiarostami. The way tiny tensions erupt from a simple knock on the door recall Jafar Panahi (that is, the guy “under house arrest”). The way a masterwork of fiction from our world, like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, having inspired so many of us, now inspirits the character arcs of his diegesis recalls, maybe, Eric Rohmer’s use of Jules Verne in THE GREEN RAY (1986). I can’t totally place VIOLA. And for that, I am ecstatic. But I also won’t see VIOLA again until tonight. And for that lack of access, even as our work tonight kindles a tiny fire of defiance, I am devastated.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni Si 2 Zile) Romania 2007 Directed by Cristian Mungiu Running time: 113 minutes Format: 35mm

What are the criteria for a New Wave? Must it be an outgrowth of a national cinema? Must there be photographic or aesthetic experimentation? Must a New Wave stand in stark opposition to the ideas of its antecedents? Why wasn’t Dogme 95 a New Wave? Or Mumblecore? While there is a certain flavor of cinephile who might derive some pleasure from the answers to these questions, we can put them aside and, with utter certainty, say that something remarkable is happening in Romanian cinema. Tonight’s picture, for all its tenebrous residue, fills a shining post in the diadem of this newest of New Waves. Having won the Palme d’Or (and the FIPRESCI) at Cannes in 2007, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS set a high bar for fellow nationals (Puiu, Nemescu, Muntean, …) as well as his rattling followup, BEYOND THE HILLS (2012).

Set in 1987, toward the end of the Ceauşescu regime, two female university students embark on a kind of Long Dark Night of the Soul. The camera reveals their dorm room discretely, skittering back in increments as the action moves toward us. The sound of a clock ticking on the half second seems to meter out the relatively stationary camera’s footage into small eternities. Otilia’s (Anamaria Marinca) half of the room is a chilly blue. Găbiţa’s (Laura Vasiliu) is neutral to rosy. We follow Otilia without knowing precisely what she’s trying to accomplish. Information trickles in slowly. And when it comes, it does so without fanfare. The halls of the dorm are dimly lit. Many interiors in this film blink in and out of view as an inadequate bulb denounces a deteriorating infrastructure. Vessels of authority are not only missing, they’re malign: an ambulance shows up not to help during medical emergency, but to run Otilia off the road. Black markets are everywhere: soap, cigarettes, movies and milk powder. And choice is rare. Marlboros are in supply while Kents are a commodity. Privacy, at least for these young women, is under duress. Otilia finds, through a classmate, that one of her academy officers is looking for her and, incidentally, also knows her menstrual cycle is no excuse to be missing. Later, when she tries to check in to a hotel, Otilia’s motives for checking in undergo interrogation. These items are beyond personal, idiosyncratic nosiness. Despite these several violations, there is something respectful about Mungiu’s camera. It hangs back from Otilia on each occasion she catches the bus. It’s as if her journey is something the spectator cannot really join in on, even as we proceed to follow her.

Ultimately, tonight’s film is a story about transactions: the cost of time, security and being a woman. And what one gets in return. Often in excess of what was bargained for: isolation, fear, distrust and betrayal.