#programnote

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.”

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

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.