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When Hollywood dreams about Hollywood, the Awards season must be near. La La Land is one weird and beautifully ornamented contradiction. Its message: because dreams about true love and true artistry are too big for life, they can only be truly expressed (and experienced) through cinema. We are getting this message while in the cinema, watching a film, in which two of the world’s biggest movie stars pretend to be two nobodies, who dream about making it big (one of them as an actress! how meta!), or at least stay true to their art. The cinema is the temple of dreams because the fake is the truth. It’s a fun tautology, but maybe I’m just putting too much thought into this.

After all, it’s a fun movie about movies. About the golden age musicals, on which silver screen gods and goddesses like Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire used to live. But I shouldn’t dwell too deep into the dance element because it’s clearly not the strength of the film. Rather it’s the music. And Damien Chazelle proves in his third feature once more that he is the master of sound. Sometimes, it feels like the images and actors are added onto a perfect score comprised not only of music but foley and sounds and voices… Chazelle’s dreams are visually colorful, if maybe a bit too nostalgic, but when it comes to the celebration of music on the big screen, he is second to none. His love for jazz music is contagious.

Regarding the story… Of course, the eternal heartbreak that is the pursuit of an artistic “career” may be a bit too close to home to write honestly about. In a way I love and despise the fact that Hollywood makes a film about losers, who (spoiler!) turn into winners, if only after they have “paid the price”. I like it because it’s exactly the kind of plot a Hollywood film needs, I kind of despise it because it betrays the characters we have sympathized with for 90% of the movie.

Aka as “Son of Watchmen”. 

One has to admit: Zack Snyder has balls. And so does Warner. While Fox tries to adapt the Marvel method, which, ironically, was invented by Fox in Raimi’s Spider-Man, and: YES, all of them are making a hell-lot of money right now with action-comedies, Warner’s DC Universe, now in Snyder’s hands, walks in the complete opposite direction. I watched Batman v Superman yesterday and, frankly, am baffled about the negativism surrounding it. Maybe it is because people’s expectations are so streamlined into the Marvel way of doing things and they just can’t handle the humor-free alternative. 

And humor-free it is, this titanic, unwieldy monster of a film. While others are producing catchy pop-songs, Snyder goes for a dark and brooming techno stomper, with an obvious beat pattern but many layers of complex frequencies, which may sound like noise but that’s only because you haven’t heard this kind of music before. Or it’s because you just don’t like this kind of totalitarist precision and the marching style. But don’t you see? This is exactly what the film is about! This is congruence of content and form at it’s best. 

Batman V Superman is as good and philosophical a film about (absolute) power is ever gonna be in mainstream cinema. Watching meat and metal and lasers and bodies, again and again bodies, collide with another on an 500 square meters IMAX-screen, in 3D, can be a cathartic experience. But in this case, it is not. Because there is no winner and no real attempt at morality in the first place. 

The lesson in in this film is that there is no good and no evil. There are just forces at war with another. Every force has one natural drive: It wants to sit at the top. Power drives not only humans, but also metahumans. And gods. One knows that all gods are narcissists. It is Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor, unfortunately the weakest performance in the film, who spills it out: Power is everything. And gods are partial. From Jahwe to Allah to Superman, there will always be a in-group/out-group dynamic going on in some capacity. Even if you try hard to do the right thing, you will inevitably become someone’s monster. You can argue all day with intent, which is the line of argument someone like Sam Harris uses in his defense of Israel’s actions in the Israeli-Plaestinian conflict: While Israel is fighting extremism in a rigid way, they are determined to keep the collateral damage at a minimum. If, on the other hand, Palestinians would have the amount of power Israel has, they wouldn’t hold back at all. Firstly, this might be true, but it’s still speculative. Secondly, the ratio of deaths on both sides (roughly 30:1) still factually trumps every intellectual mindgame.

The one with greater power factually becomes the bigger monster just by the sheer fact of existence. This is the hard lesson Superman has to learn. Yes, his intent is good. He wants to do the right thing. But his arrival on earth and his sheer being-alive calls into existence antagonistic forces, who, though not being able to destroy him, create mayhem and chaos and are responsible for a LOT of collateral damage. But are they alone? And this is where the frontline of argument is drawn in the film: Does Superman own some of this responsibility? 

Other than that, it seems to me that the genre of superhero-movies has passed it’s peak. Warner/DC will furthermore explore the dark and existantial aspect of superheroes, meanwhile the Marvel factory will keep pumping out those (more or less) funny movies. The creative high in the source material, the mid to late 80s, when the genre-defining masterworks like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Return of the Dark Knight were created, are now fully absorbed into the cinematic universes. There is nowhere to go after deconstructing the genre, but to irony. And after irony lies indifference.

Sure, there is still tv. Flash and Daredevil (and a lot more) show there’s actually much broader range of tonality when telling superhero stories. But it’s not the kind of stuff to overwhelm you on a 500 square meter screen. 

Lastly, I was astounded and fully absorbed by the meticulous image composition and use of three-dimensional space. Every other aspect, from pacing and camera angles are equally top-notch. Snyder is the only director who truly understands how to translate iconic comic imagery and the sometimes weird, hyper-dynamic movement to film. And while not without it’s flaws and logical inconsistencies, Batman V Superman, in all of it’s self-importance and emotional coolness, may well be the kind of film the world need right now. 

My first encounter with Zulawski was “L’important, c’est d’aimer” with Romy Schneider, a menage-a-trois featuring the master’s trademark ingredients of manic intensity and excessive fervour. There’s a scene the scene in a cafe, when the man tells the woman that he loves her more than anything. She shouts back at him that love just isn’t enough. After that everything gets worse, darker, endlessly desperate and hopeless. I was at quite of a young age (15 or 16) and very taken by it. I couldn’t have tell that anything was a directorial style or a way of condensing dramatization, wasn’t able to filter anything — it just went straight into my veins like a truth shot, adding some more darkness to this thing called love, which had already taken control of me without any proper instructions manual, nonetheless a target, at all. 

I have re-seen the film later on with a bit more of a distance, but the core motif of the impossible or at least highly difficult conversion from passion to love stayed with me. I can’t think of any director, who was more sincere about this dilemma than Zulawski. But his manic states of love and passion are just conveying something bigger, something so close to the human core, that it can’t be either fragmented nor does it serve as a reference for something else: It is, where being human hits a dead end, there’s nothing hidden behind it. Or is there? 

Given how much in love I was with Sophie Marceau and Isabelle Adjani in my youth, I still can’t wrap my head around why I discovered Zulawski’s oeuvre only bit by bit and over a very long period of time — and more by chance. A few years ago I saw “La Fidélité”. I didn’t love it, but something commended that I watch it again the next day. It finally clicked that it was already the second time I watched a  Zulawski film twice, but that I hadn’t been aware of the director behind it. A few films later, and after I finally have watched “Posession”, I can wholeheartedly say he is one of the most unique and interesting and best filmmakers who have ever lived. Zulawski died of cancer just a few weeks ago. But he left a body of work that is impressing as it is intimidating.

His directing style is anti-theoretic and in a way anti-intellectual with a slight despise for realism. His reality is subjective, not descriptive. When reflecting on his films Zulawski often uses religious language. Either he cites from the bible (he’s polish, after all) or uses words like shamanism and trance when talking about acting. And I think it very much shows in his films. Through revealing something substantial about the human nature Zulawski transcends humanity. What is behind it can’t be properly shown, of course, but can be hinted at. The longing for eternity, for universality and unbridled love and connection is something mystics in every religion have dealt with. And what makes everything so fucking tragical in Zulawskis films is the fact, that his characters, who behave like children, aren’t aware of the impossibility of ever getting it: The eternity, the universality, the unbridled love and connection. 

Zulawski may seem like an anti-thesis to someone like Kiarostami, but for some strange reason they feel like brothers to me. It is another aspect of Zulawski’s work, one he puts the most emphasis on, and which is maybe not instantly visible: The morality behind his films. Where someone like Kiarostami is humble and contains his glowing heart and burning questions in a complex set of manners (and lately: mannerisms), the other breaks down any kind of civility and lets the archaic battles, which takes place in the human soul, just break out into the real world. The battlefields are the fragile and very human bodies of his actors. Real cinema is like a soup and my actors are boiling in it, Zulawski said about his actors. I wish, there’s be more hot soup like that on contemporary cinema screens. 

Oh yeah, and “Possesion”? One of the most intense and best film watching experiences I have ever had. 

Man, that Peter Strickland has a nerve! It’s not necessarily a good sign, if the first thing you come up while watching a film is “This is a really nice tribute to…”. And this is how I felt during the first half an hour or so. But then it slowly becomes obvious (and more so over the course of the film) that Strickland is cleverly playing with your expectations. That he a puppet-master, who is always fully aware where the savvy movie-goer’s/cineast’s mind is dwelling at and that he enjoys to play with it.

I could write up a summary of “what’s happening” in the film, but that’s too boring a task. Let’s just say it has something to do with the triviality of being in a longterm love relationship. This could be way too much or just not enough for a feature, but Strickland almost makes a mannerism out of his very focused and light hearted approach. Like in an orthodox mass, where you think “now this has to be the last time this particular event is happening” and you’re just in the first third of the whole thing, this film is also a lesson in the fine art of repetition. But don’t worry, this is by far more entertaining and 100 times more sensual than whatever is happening in a church. Talking lesbian BDSM here. Not that it does really matter. We are all just social animals disguised as something more interesting. Or, like RuPaul used to put it: everything else besides being naked you can call drag. Nothing’s special enough for life not to ruin it and films like these deconstruct stuff, but not in a destructive way. This is what art is for: honesty. But in style. Art relates to life in the same way counter-culture does to the mainstream: it will never overtake it (nor was it never supposed to) but it’s good to have it there as a pure and sublime something one should aspire. 

The sound for Duke of Burgundy, like on it’s predecessor, is truly sublime. I can’t think of any film in this category (non-monster-blockbuster) having such a precise and dynamic sound. But also narrative, inventive and just plain  beautiful. As is the film as a whole.

This film manages to achieve something, that is insanely rare. Every true artist strives for it, and almost nobody gets there. But let me start this with:

Juliette. Juliette, Juliette, Juliette. Kristen. Yes, Kristen. 

But it is Olivier Assayas, a filmmaker at the peak of his craft and probably also his luck, who is the real triumphator (it is a word, I just looked it up) here. It is triumph over chaos, because “The Clouds of Sils Maria” manages to bring it all together, all the perfectly executed little pieces of filmmaking fall right into place. This a quality right up there with Ozu, Bresson or Tarkovsky, where mise-en-scene, cinematic style and a multi-layered narrative melt into a definitive piece of cinema, in this case, a meditation about the nature of time. Time, of course, means nothing other than change. And this is where the wonderful cast comes into play. And playing, they are. Binoche’s loud and contagious laughter breaks through all the meticulously built layers of narrative and meaning and cinematography, killing off every rush of self-importance and pretentiousness. Together with the congenial Stewart, she manages to make the most obvious metaphor into something fun. And emotional. Binoche is at her best, when the director gives her some leeway. Of course she’s at least very good, like in Haneke’s Caché, but when expanding into improvisation like in this film or in Kiarostamis “Certified Copy”, her keen instinct for timing elevates the film onto another level of intensity. It’s just so much fun seeing her and Kristen act as it is hearing, what she’s saying while they’re at it. 

OK, so just a very short synopsis on what this is about. Binoche’s character, a celebrated actress, is persuaded to act in a play which, over twenty years ago,  had been her professional breakthrough. The play is about a romantic relationship between a young woman and her older (female) boss. She’s hesitant, because now she’s supposed to play the older part. The director kind of talks her into doing it and she starts rehearsing with her personal assistant (Stewart), who, like the character in the play, is a young and determined woman…

Normally, those “a movie in a movie”, “a play in a play” etc don’t go too well. They’re either full of clichés and self-importance (”oh, look how interesting/meaningful/difficult it is to create art”) or they go the route of mashing up fiction and reality, leaving the protagonists (and viewers) struggling to find out what’s what. And for every  “Opening Night” and “Illuminata” there are dozens of pretentious and boring attempts at this trope, obviously one of filmmakers’s favorite ones. 

And this is where “Clouds Of Sils Maria” is bringing something onto the screen, which is very, very rarely seen. It manages to achieve both: invoke an emotional affection for its characters/story and transcend it at the same time. The protagonists become representatives in a system, the story becomes a vehicle for an idea, a principle, a truth which is beyond our understanding. And then, it really is what the story is about: actors allowing themselves to morph into something else. On a stage, or in front of a camera. It is a pattern which reveals itself at different times and different forms throughout the film: time is change. Everything is passing. And then Binoche’s laughter pulls us back into reality. 

There is a spark. 

There! It just passed. 

And we continue with our everyday lives. 

Shortly put: 2014 was of the best years for cinema in a long time with many groundbreaking and innovative and highly remarkable works.

Here are my favorite ones and on which screen I have seen them.

1. "Under the Skin" by Jonathan Glazer (Cinema)

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:25)