New to DVD: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford + Best Picture Preferences

Writer-director Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford extends both its generic model - the revisionist Western as exemplified by Sam Peckinpah's 1962 masterpiece Ride the High the Country - and also the early twenty-first century's preoccupation with proto-cinematic media (cf. Neil Burger's 2006 The Illusionist, among others). With respect to the former, the picture's near ubiquitous situation within the winter months alone (as compared to Ride the High Country's autumnal setting) locates the film after the Western, to the extent that is that Ride the High Country represents the symbolic end of the form and the director's subsequent The Wild Bunch (1969) is the supposed last Western. Indeed, The Assassination of Jesse James... figures not only a tradition that is already over (the Western), but also an era that has similarly concluded, a hero whose career (as robber) finishes shortly after the film's beginning and most obviously of all, whose life, the title tells us, will soon cease. The Assassination of Jesse James... does not preside over the death of a form; it lives after the Western's death.

Which leads one to Dominik's film's obsession with the proto-cinematic and all things nineteenth century - at a time that many of the earlier era's inventions are being displaced by newer (digital) technologies. In fact, The Assassination of Jesse James... exhibits frequent digital manipulation to simulate the visuals of the earlier period: i.e. with the edges of the frame blurring to intimate similar effects in the daguerreotype or on early film stock; and with monochromatic visuals that suggest the tinting of a pre-Technicolor era. Moreover, with the assassination complete, the eponymous Ford (Casey Affleck), himself a collector of Jesse James dime novels, reproduces the incident on stage. In sum, The Assassination of Jesse James... seeks the recreation of not only Jesse James's (Brad Pitt) last days but of the formal preconditions for cinema itself - again at a time when it is being transformed under the digital sign.

Nevertheless, The Assassination of Jesse James... may be less notable for its allegorical and generic valences, as noteworthy as Dominik's interventions may be, than for Roger Deakins's cinematography and for Affleck's performance - both of whom have secured well deserved Academy nominations. Regarding Dominik and Deakins's visuals, The Assassination of Jesse James... features a large share of the year's most unforgettable imagery, from the arrival of the train during the picture's first act robbery - a bright incandescent light glows in the distance with the wide-hooded thieves waiting in the fore; the robbers subsequently cross through the golden hued, claustrophic interior of the night train - to the frequent time-elapse skyscapes that decorate the work. To be sure, this is a work of the imagistic and of visual ornamentation (style here is certainly an add-on) though it is also rhetorically cognizant of its form's past and particularly to the equally image-oriented John Ford - and to that director's shadow-cast foregrounds with well-lit landscapes framed beyond.

And then there are the film's performances whether it is Pitt's stabilizing star-turn or Affleck's squeaking, fidgety Robert Ford, whose villainy this picture largely refutes on the basis of his sympathetically pathetic portrayal. Ford is the original celeb-worshipper who happens to be as at home in our age as he seems appropriately suited to the era of James. It is a performance of astonishing singularity to Pitt's notable abstraction (in the words of film scholar Lisa Broad).

All of the above should have made The Assassination of Jesse James by Robert Ford, in a perfect world, worthy of a best picture nomination. At the very least, this writer would argue that The Assassination of Jesse James... is clearly superior to three of this year's selections - Joe Wright's Atonement, Jason Reitman's Juno and Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton - as good as each of these films might be, and is every bit the equal of a fourth, Paul Thomas Anderson's impressive if somewhat overrated There Will Be Blood. (Making a film that feels like one's sources - namely Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, which is itself a key point of reference for Dominik's picture - does not assure a film's greatness, even when it does demonstrate its maker's considerable talent.) However, in its effortless combination of Western and horror syntaxes and noir semantics, No Country for Old Men remains the cream of this year's best picture crop.

Apart from No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James..., the aforementioned perfect year might have also included nominations for Wes Anderson's significantly underrated The Darjeeling Limited, David Cronenberg's English-language film of the year, Eastern Promises, and David Fincher's career-peak, Zodiac. Still, these personal preferences aside, 2007 proved a uniquely strong year in the American cinema, and even among those pictures cited by the Academy. Thankfully no Crash's or Little Miss Sunshine's in the lot, regardless of what Juno's most fervent detractors might believe.

Correspondences from 1989: No, or the Vainglory of Command

This is the first in a series of posts devoted to Yale University's 1989: Film Culture and the Fall of the Wall film festival, which screened February 7th through the 9th in New Haven, CT. Please note the following piece contains spoilers.

Manoel de Oliveira's No, or the Vainglory of Command (1990, 'Non', ou A Vã Glória de Mandar), from a P. João Marques text with dialogues added by Oliveira, is said to have marked an "international breakthrough" for the Portuguese master, whose first directorial credits included the silent 1931 short Douro, Faina Fluvial and the filmmaker's superlative 1942 feature debut Aniki Bóbó. It would be twenty-one years until Oliveira's next full-length feature, the 1963 passion-play Rite of Spring, and yet another decade-plus before the director would work continually in the cinema. However, as the well-known story goes, Oliveira has not only remained active since the late 1970s, but has indeed increased his output in recent years, releasing an average of at least one film per year since No, or the Vainglory of Command. The fact that the still working Oliveira will turn 100 this coming December makes the above narrative nothing short of miraculous. That Oliveira's output from the early 1990s has proven the most continuously experimental and inventive corpus in the European cinema exceeds all hyperbole.

No, or the Vainglory of Command represents the director at his finest and in very familiar territory: the history of his Portuguese homeland. Briefly, it is worth noting that following No,... the director expanded his subject to discuss the broader parameters of European civilization, as for instance in his supreme 1993 masterwork Abraham's Valley, and also in his exceedingly topical, small-scale 2003 opus A Talking Picture. Of course, the latter refers to a trans-European identity that has remained current in the era of the EU and particularly in the period following the installation of the Euro. In other words, the director has retained his interest in his sovereign homeland, whatever the current dividing lines might be.

The 1990 work, set at the brink of the 1974 revolution that ultimately dethroned Salazaar, centers on a group of soldiers in the midst of transport in Angola. Oliveira depicts his human subjects initially back-to-back on the flatbed of a truck and later seated in a circle in a small clearing. In both locations, the soldiers wax on the their nation's military history and on the philosophical implications of the state. Beginning with the region's first anti-Rome insurgents and continuing into the early modern era, the discussion of specific figures (Viriato) and battles (Alcácer) initiate flashbacks that complete the stories begun by the modern soldiers. In many cases, the actors in these earlier eras are played by those same gentlemen who are narrating the story: Luís Miguel Cintra, for example, serves not only as Ens. Cabrita, but also as Viriato and Don João de Portugal. Hence, the modern day narrators' role in forging the fiction is highlighted in the overlapping casting of these historical moments. This is a history being told, not merely one that is shown.

In this respect, No,... belongs to a traditional of theatrical filmmaking dating to Sacha Guitry's 1930s canon, and particularly to that filmmaker's 1936 The Story of a Cheat. Though not precisely equaling Guitry's distain for the cinema, Oliveira nonetheless has persisted in questioning the medium's ontological individuality, arguing that 'cinema does not exist,' only theatre does. With No,... cinema's theatrical antecedent - or in Oliveira's frame, its fundamental nature - is made manifest in the picture's extended passages of dialogue in which the speakers are often framed frontally and are removed from their spatial setting (as for instance on the back of the flatbed). In fact, this is a film that not only isolates and emphasizes the speaker, but one that makes the content of their dialogues cardinal to the narrative. The sequences of action serve - they illustrate - the narrative's conversations.

The picture's lone break from this pattern of straight-forward illustration occurs with the arrival of Vasco de Gama (Paulo Matos) in a native - read virginal - land. Here, the arrival of the explorers, previously named the one positive of Portuguese imperialism, is met by naked young male cupids, and voluptuous nude nymphs. Consequently, Oliveira shifts registers to that of allegory (and fantasy) figuring the settlement of new worlds in the imagined coupling of European explorer and virgin body. Soft focus to intimate this fantastic setting has replaced the hard lighting of other passages - as for instance in the palace settings of the Iberian empire segment.

Nevertheless, this allegorical valence is largely absent in No, or the Vainglory of Command. Rather, once again, the film's breaks from its frequent, extended passages of conversation to depict various losing military campaigns and other instances of historical irony that contribute to the film's thesis: something to the effect that imperial ambition has always been to the ruin of the Portugese people. Therefore, No,...'s primary purpose seems less the narration of the nation's history alone than it is the elucidation of a thesis specific to that nation's experience. In this way, Oliveira's film follows in the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 October.

Moreover in its particular theatrical method of narration and address, No,... might further be said to connote a third form of cinematic modernism beyond those of the 1920s visual arts avant-garde (Ballet Mechanique, et al.) and the postwar literary modernism exemplified by Michelangelo Antonioni (eg L'Avventura; and to some extent picked up by Oliveira in his subsequent Abraham's Valley). Rather than exemplifying modernity in an abstraction of visual forms or in the novelistic rendering of ennui, No... represents the form of Brechtian history lesson, shot in discrete segments of an ever-shifting proscenium.

New to DVD: The Naked Prey (1966)

Actor-director Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966, Paramount), from a Clint Johnson and Don Peters screenplay, seems to have introduced a revisionist ethos into the adventure picture's postwar safari cycle. Wilde's film followed four years after the safari form's ultimate masterpiece, Howard Hawks's Hatari! (1962, Paramount), which itself was released after a near decade gap in the production of A-pictures of the type - namely, of such pictures as King Solomon's Mines (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950, MGM), The African Queen (John Huston, 1951, United Artists), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952, Fox) and Mogambo (John Ford, 1953, MGM). While Hatari! effectively fulfills the earlier tradition, finding solutions to a number of the form's ongoing problems - not the least of which was the issue of how to show its actors in the same spaces as its African wildlife, i.e. how to show its stars in real or at least plausible danger; Hawks did exactly this by using his performers as their own stunt people - The Naked Prey retreats from Hatari!'s literal safari experience toward a form closer to the picture's 1950's era touchstones.

The Naked Prey relies on two ontologically-differentiated registers, documentary and non-documentary, that rarely converge within the picture. When we do see the film's director-star in the same space as the wildlife, he occupies a plane far removed from those in which we see an elephant or a giraffe, for example. (The one exception to this rule seems to be snakes with which Wilde on a couple of occasions comes into close contact.) In this respect The Naked Prey renews the mixed nature of the 1950's period work that Hatari! and its filmmaking as a safari mode did much to overcome. In other words, the lack of realism that the earlier pictures worked so hard to minimize is again manifest in the 1966 picture.

Backing up, The Naked Prey treats a safari guide's (Wilde's) attempt to escape from and subsequently outrun a band of African tribesmen after his employer - a wholly unsympathetic figure who incredibly professes a desire to go into the slave trade - needlessly runs afoul of the aforesaid tribe. In this regard, The Naked Prey might be regarded less as a safari film than as an adventure picture which uses occasional safari footage as does The African Queen for instance. Either way, The Naked Prey, like Huston's picture, features the same problem that all 'A' safari pictures share - again how to believably combine documentary and non-documentary footage to simulate a single diegesis. In its case, the fact that Wilde shot on location in South Africa mediates the visual differences prompted from a combination of location and studio settings found in such pictures as The African Queen or The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Here, it is simply that the footage is sutured by its traditional shot/reverse-shot pairing of images.

If in terms of its style The Naked Prey does not exactly figure an intervention into its genre, the work's narrative structure and certain of its dramatic details nevertheless indicate a true revision of form. (Hatari! on the other hand is all dialogue; Hawks's picture, along with its 1959 sibling Rio Bravo, provides nothing short of a model for the cinemas of such word-obsessed auteurs as Eric Rohmer and Quentin Tarantino.) For one, this is a film that features very little dialogue following Wilde's initial escape from the tribesmen. Once on his own, nearly all of the conversations we hear are those of the Africans' which Wilde has chosen not to translate. In these instances, the English-speaking viewer is forced into a position of 'other,' prevented the experience of knowing what is being said - in comparison to an imagined South African public (speakers of the unnamed dialect) who would receive a much different dramatic experience. Likewise, the picture's overarching narrative, of a man silent and on his own in the African veldt, procures an effect fundamentally dissimilar to those secured in most adventure films: this is an anti-adventure film of a sort. Far from the visceral experience of John Wayne and company in speeding trucks on the trail of real African game, Wilde's picture gives us the anti-spectacle of his character hunting a small lizard with a spear (which we see in an extended-duration long shot).

This is not to say that The Naked Prey entirely lacks action. During the initial capture of the white safari-goers, for instance, Wilde treats us to their ritual torture in a series of graphic set-pieces that reaffirm the period's violent turn. Likewise, in true exploitation fashion (we also see many topless female natives during the same scene) our protagonist is forced to kill a number of his pursuers one by one. If The Naked Prey does not therefore connote a revolution in visual form inasmuch as we are given shots and their reverse angles throughout the majority of the picture, Wilde's film nonetheless signals the most graphic entry into the safari tradition: not only in terms of its human violence, but in that of the animal world as well, which Wilde includes to allegorize the human savagery depicted on screen.

In the end, The Naked Prey emblematizes a key direction in the post-classical Hollywood cinema: namely, of a revisionist cinema that supported a new permisiveness in content and narrative experimentation, while largely retaining the shot/reverse-shot armature of the classical mode. While the latter choice does not entail a value judgement in its own right, the effect of this technique in a work following Hatari's spatial integration of performers within a wild context - which itself relied on a formal revision of classical decoupage in the form of a greater density of multi-figure, extended duration shots - marks a regression in the safari picture's historical development as a form with its own unique set of problems. Apart from these aesthetic concerns, however, The Naked Prey emerges as an important node in the history of the adventure picture.

The Naked Prey is currently available on Criterion DVD and will be broadcast on TCM February 1st at 4:00 PM.

Film in New Haven: Ernie Gehr's Eureka (co-written with Lisa K. Broad)

Ernie Gehr's Eureka (1974-1979), which screened in 16mm last night at Yale University's Whitney Humanity Center, constitutes a synthesis of two of the more noteworthy trends in the North American avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s: of the ontologically-inflected long-take structuralism of Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) on the one hand, and of the rephotographed interrogation of the silent image in Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) on the other. In Eureka, the Milwaukee-born experimental filmmaker has re-photographed a 1905 phantom-ride newsreel of San Francisco's Market Street, multiplying each frame eight times. With the picture's 16fps projection, Gehr has stretched the original five minute film into a new thirty-eight minute form.

Following in the tradition of Snow, and prefiguring the latter-day structuralist cinema of James Benning (Ten Skies and 13 Lakes, both 2004), this extended duration is comprised of a limited number of takes that will conclude at an immediately discernible juncture - in its case, when the phantom-ride reaches a skyscraper at the end of Market Street. Like Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, Gehr's work reuses an early film source for new conceptual ends; however, unlike Jacobs's painstaking horizontal analysis which organizes a swarm of detail into set of discreet events, Eureka emphasizes the vertical flow of continually changing images. In other words, Jacobs's film explores simultaneous movement within the frame, while Gehr's privileges sequential movement between frames.

Indeed, Eureka, in greatly slowing the visceral five-minute document, has nevertheless retained the experience of the unexpected that accompanies the mobile newsreel in the urban environment. It is very much this experience of the unexpected that recommends Eureka and accounts for its aesthetic interest. Like the Benning films noted above, Eureka plays on audience distraction throughout the majority of the film's thirty-plus minutes (save for the spectators' increased intensity as the skyscraper nears) utilizing our inevitable drift and subsequent renewed focus to make what passes exceedingly slowly before our eyes exceptional and even exciting. That is, after loosing focus, we take a look at the film again and what we see is surprisingly different than our last vantage. For instance, as the intensity of the natural light source wanes, the bleached image is replaced with a more nuanced mise-en-scène that discloses the brick paving unexpectedly, relatively late in the film's run-time.

However, it is often less the effects of light and shadow on the original picture's high contrast stock than it is the effects procured by the slowed motion that secures the picture's substantial aesthetic interest. In particular, with automobiles and streetcars passing surprisingly close to the image, we are not only made to experience the breathtaking pace of turn-of-the-century urban life as is undoubtedly manifest in the original, but are also forced to consider precisely where the camera is located vis-à-vis the oncoming traffic. That is, with cars seemingly breaching the space of the appartus, the (focal) distance between the camera and the world depicted is underlined. We are made re-aware of the camera's location in space and of the world that we never get in reverse.

Eureka yields infinitely more information than is at first clear. With the camera moving slowly forward, stretching out the image's frontal spatial field, pools of light and new corners of interest open themselves up with each successive frame. What we have is a cinematic Zeno's paradox, where the sense of of expanding space seems to cancel our movement toward the distant terminus, while a hightened awarness of the still frame brings the medium's fundamental stasis is back into view.

Further works by Ernie Gehr, curated by Richard Suchenski, will be screened at Yale University's 212 York St. facility on February 6th at 7:00 PM. The series will include Serene Velocity (1970, 16mm, 23 min.) Untitled (1977, 16mm, 4 min.) Signal - Germany on the Air (1982-1985, 16mm, 35 min.) Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991, 16mm, 41 min.) and Passage (2003, 16mm, 15 min). The total running time for the five films is 118 minutes.

New Film: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon), adapted from Jean-Dominique Bauby's biographical text by Ronald Harwood, recently placed second in the National Society of Film Critics' annual feting of the year's best pictures, following Schnabel's best director citation at Cannes this past spring. Even in Tativille's own accounting of the year's finest films, conducted in concert with sister sites Fourteen Seconds, Scarlett Cinema and Termite Art, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly received as many first-place mentions as any other film, including my own personal favorite The Flight of the Red Balloon. It was, in short, one of the year's most important films in the view of many.

Of course, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has had its detractors as well. In last week's Slate "Movie Club", for instance, Village Voice film critic Nathan Lee called the director's point-of-view camerawork "Brakhage for dummies," while fellow club member and Voice critic Scott Foundas noted that its style was "caked on like a heavy plaster." To put an end to the suspense, this reviewer's position is far closer to those of Lee and Foundas than it is to my esteemed blogosphere colleagues and to their allies in the critical mainstream. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will not be, in my mind, one to remember among the current crop of critical favorites.

Nevertheless, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly cannot be faulted for lacking visual ideas - or more importantly still, for calibrating those ideas to match its narrative content - that is the baseline of any appreciation of film as an art. Indeed, from the film's opening frames, following an admirably stylish credit sequence, Schnabel makes these ideas and indeed the singular problem of his task in adapting Bauby's work eminently clear: namely, how does one match the interiority, the sense of imprisonment in one's unresponsive body? Schnabel's choice is as Lee says to adopt a strategy similar to that of the American avant-garde master, Stan Brakhage, though without that filmmaker's didactic program. Whereas Brakhage can be said to have pursued a new form of subjective filmmaking that sought to encourage a pre-rational, pre-linguistic form of seeing, Schnabel's similar aesthetic attempts to simulate the phenomenal experience of a newly cognizant coma patient (Mathieu Amalric, Kings and Queen) and again his entrapment in his stroke-paralyzed body.

Schnabel's particular technique, which my wife ruefully noted lacked the materialist (and optical) components of its avant-garde applications, presents frequent digitally-enhanced fluctuations in focus to intimate the lead's strained perception, flicker effects to match his communicative blinking and a hollow, metallic reverberation to suggest his inability to project verbally, in addition to its relatively straightforward visual POV. When Bauby's eye is sewn shut, however, which the filmmaker shows in all its cringe-inducing spectacle, Schnabel reverses to a position outside the figure's body, in essence cheating to further maximize the scene's tactile impact.

The above choice portends a conventionality that characterizes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as a whole: this is international secular humanist cinema avant la lettre; no genuine deviation from the formula will be possible. To this end, Bauby glibly mocks the large number of gods that have been implored on his behalf and the monks who have been unable to secure a miracle. Willfully, Schnabel even discloses the author's choice of an ending with his character standing in his wheelchair (only to learn later that it is a dream). In so doing, Schnabel refuses the magic of such an ending, should he decide to follow Bauby's suggestion, or to rather show this impossibility and thus to reinforce the film's strident secularism. Either way, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a cinema without magic, be it that of religion or of cinema itself. (The film's one nod to cinema's transcendent properties is its rather ordinary and even trite acknowledgement that Bauby can travel anywhere in his mind.)

Ultimately, this is the greatest problem that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly manifests: a lack of, and indeed a foreclosure against any surprise. As soon as the aesthetic is set, very quickly into its running time in fact, little else is possible. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the solution posed by the problem of its interior narrative. Once Schnabel's choice is established, little remains except to play to expectation, and to tell us that Bauby still has the same human emotions that we all do. Chief among these natural sentiments is his sexual frustration, which accompanies the camera's numerous peeks at his gorgeous therapists' legs and cleavage. Such are Schnabel's insights in a film that we might finally say lacks mystery. In demystifying its subject all The Diving Bell and the Butterfly leaves is its means for doing so: an expressive rather than scientific subjectivity.

2007: The Year in Film

2007 was one of the finest film-going years in recent memory. After a disappointing 2006 (at least for this writer), 2007 witnessed major new works from many of our finest Anglophone directors: David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Brad Bird, Noah Baumbach, and so forth. Indeed, the successes of the American cinema in 2007 has been one of the leading stories since their initial impact at Cannes this past May. Outside the English-language cinema, the continued prominance of the so-called Romanian "new wave" has continued to entrance critics (with the US premieres of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and 12:08 East of Bucharest), even if this nascent movement is not represented on any of Tativille's contributors' lists. Interestingly, a recent, unexpected upturn in the German cinema is indicated in both Lisa and my choices with our inclusions of the pictured Longing and Summer '04 (even as the higher profile The Lives of Others did not quite make the cut). Otherwise, 2007, at the local level at least, witnessed the appearance of a series of fine Southeast Asian pictures, including Syndromes and a Century (which our contributors saw in 2006 making it ineligable), I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Opera Jawa and The Elephant and the Sea, among others.

Globally, Richard's list in particular gives the best indication of where world cinema might be at this specific moment. Personally, I cannot wait to see many of his preferences, especially the latest by one of our shared favorites, Jacques Rivette. As always, I will post my global favorites of 2007 once I have caught up with many of the more highly-touted works. Until then, here are the best pictures we saw during the past twelve months:

Michael J. Anderson, Ten Best Films
Lisa K. Broad, Ten Best Films
Emily Condon, Ten Best Films
Matt Hauske, Termite Art
Andrea Janes, Spinster Aunt
Pamela Kerpius, Scarlett Cinema
Maggie Lyon, Fourteen Seconds
Mike Lyon, Fourteen Seconds
Michael Polizzi, Fourteen Seconds
Matt Singer, Termite Art
Richard Suchenski, Ten Best Films
R. Emmet Sweeney, Termite Art
Karen Wang, Scarlett Cinema
Alberto Zambenedetti, Termite Art

Updated (1/1/08): Currently, the selections of the "year's best" are as follows: 1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Alberto, Karen, Pam), Flight of the Red Balloon (Mike A., Richard, Rob); 3. No Country for Old Men, (Matt S., Maggie), There Will Be Blood (Michael P., Mike L.); 5. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Lisa), I'm Not There (Emily), Nancy Drew (Andrea).

2007: Michael J. Anderson

Michael's list has been moved to Ten Best Films.

2007: Lisa K. Broad

Lisa's list has been moved to Ten Best Films.

2007: Emily Condon

Emily's list has been moved to Ten Best Films.

2007: Richard Suchenski

Richard's list has been moved to Ten Best Films.

New Installation: The Forest

Ori Gersht’s thirteen minute The Forest (2005), screening daily at the Yale Center for British Art in one hour increments (now through December 28th), depicts a series of trees falling unobserved – save for the camera and audio recording equipment – in an undisclosed forested location or set of locations. Gersht modifies the camera location, angle of view, mobility of the apparatus, speed of the celluloid and the accompanying audio throughout, thus confirming the variability of spectatorial experience secured by a single event. That is, we see and hear differently depending on our relationship to the phenomenon: in one spot we might see a particular patterning of shadow, in another a gray light filters the dust produced by the tree’s collapse; from a position low to the ground we see the tentacle-like branches waving in the breeze, whereas a position higher up shows us a second tree being impacted by the falling object. In real time our attention may be more calibrated toward the lighting effects procured, while the use of slow motion cues us into the descending leaves.

Significantly, Gersht controls the relationship between sound and image in a manner incommensurate with visual experience: namely, the camera never searches for the source of an audio cue. We are limited to the static rectangle of the camera frame or to its fluid circular movement through space. There is always a selected sound and image, which are never modified for the presence of one or the other. Consequently, Gersht underscores the precariousness of perceptual experience: if we are not at the right place and the right moment we will necessarily miss components of the experience. The Forest represents the inherent limitations of point-of-view, even as it suggests a multiplicity of perspectives. Gersht’s cubism is revealed to be estranged from nature.

Gersht’s audio recordings, like the visual perspectives selected, also vary from instance to instance: whereas we might be given the thundering fall magnified in one moment, in the next we see the tree falling without a sound, save for the ambient canopy of hissing insects that remains nearly ubiquitous throughout the work. That Gersht reduces and even removes the audio track highlights the necessity of the apparatus in the act of hearing: if our angle of vision allows us to see, then our auditory presence makes it possible to hear.

Hence The Forest seems to confirm one of science’s more famous (perhaps initially counterintuitive) claims: that the tree which falls in the forest with no one to hear in fact does not make a sound. Therefore, Gersht’s work replicates Jean Epstein and his fellow classical film theorist’s claims for the medium’s epistemological possibility: that it can help us to conceptualize realities which our perception would seem to belie. That is, if slow motion and reverse motion aids our understanding of a universe where time is relative, The Forest’s audio manipulations assist us in conceiving of an object falling without sound. If there is no subject present to hear the collapse – be it a human being or a tape recording – then there is no sound.

New Film: Lions for Lambs

With the opportunity to attend a free advanced screening of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs this evening, and with eighty-eight minutes basically free, I decided to break my self-imposed embargo on this year's countless anti-Iraqi war films and take in a film that conspicuously has received nil Oscar buzz this season. I made the wrong decision. No one will ever have enough time or disposable income to justify a viewing of Lions for Lambs, which I so regrettably did earlier tonight. Hopefully the opportunity to say nasty things publicly about Redford's latest will in some sense make up for the way I spent a portion of this evening, because I assure you just knowing that Lions for Lambs is terrible is no solace whatsoever. There is no joy in having an informed opinion about this movie.

Were I to liken Lions for Lambs to anything in particular, it might be the worst film I saw in 2005, Paul Haggis's permanent blight on the reputation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Crash. Perhaps the comparison follows more from what I believe to be the similar low level of quality exhibited by each film - indeed, while I would call Lions for Lambs the worst film I've seen so far this year, it should be noted nevertheless that I avoid Dane Cook vehicles and films where washed-up African American comedians dress up like their fat grandmothers with even greater steadfastness than I do new war films. Still, this is a film with three implausibly overlapping story lines, very Crash-like (not that this is really the problem with Redford's film) featuring Redford as a college poli-sci professor striving to engage a talented though disaffected frat kid; Tom Cruise as a fictional Republican senator attempting to spin the latest Afghani war offense he has devised to Meryl Streep as a liberal reporter for a fictional all-news network; and one black and one Latino soldier respectively waiting to die on a snow-covered mountain top.

In defense of Crash, which I hope is the last time I ever utter that phrase, or more accurately, Hollywood's reception of Crash, is what I perceive to be the general belief (at least at the time) that Haggis's work in some sense represented the true feelings of the Hollywood elite towards race - however perverse these feelings may be; you know you want to help a woman of another color in a car accident, even though you're an inveterate racist, before you molest her. Lions for Lambs attempts to talk about current events by making them up: again, Cruise's senator concocts the very war strategy that puts the aforesaid racially-other soldiers in peril; amazingly, Streep's reporter attempts to compare the fictional ground operation, and by implication the US's military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq at present to Vietnam on the basis of this very plan of attack. We are asked to draw parallels, in other words, based on explicit fiction. Whatever one may think about the US's presence on either front, Redford's strategy does not seem a rhetorically sound one.

But of course Redford didn't allow his lack of ideas to get in the way of his making of Lions for Lambs, which before I forget was scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who has a promising future project White Jazz slated for 2009. I would just ask Mr. Carnahan to kindly leave the profession thereafter. Who knows, perhaps the writer's strike will still (mercifully) remain unresolved? We can only hope. Also, it is worth stating that this is a film with remarkably low production values, which is most obvious in the combat scenes that give Lions for Lambs more of the generalized look of a basic cable production. Imagine if G4 TV commissioned a war film.

As for Redford, the director's metronomic shot/reverse-shot technique would have been perfunctory in and of itself, was it not for the horrifying content of these images - and of course I am not talking about the inevitable graphic war injuries. Rather it is the solipsistic presence of Redford's professor and Streep's journalist - and the progressive wisdom they continually impart to us - that really makes Redford's reverse angle close-ups excruciating. This is a film that itself does a great violence by imposing its own vacuousness on the world, even in what would seem to be a relatively short duration. Of course, this is not to say that Redford never lets his technique implore; in a pivotal final scene on the mountain, we have a crescendoing score and slow-motion, lest any of us is unaware of how we are meant to feel. If so, your stupidity truly served you well on this one occasion.

New Film: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, from a screenplay by first-time scribe Kelly Masterson, recently marked the the octogenarian director's first appearance at the New York Film Festival in 43 years, which is to say that the film's status as an event certainly preceded it upon this weekend's limited release. Whether this is Lumet's finest in that lengthy span - or more plausibly since his 1970s through early 1980s heyday - is not for this writer to say; to me, Lumet is as much the writer of an introductory film-making tome as he is the auteur of Dog Day Afternoon (1975, which I haven't seen it), Network (1976, seen it, actually) and The Verdict (1982, again haven't seen it). The point is that I'm no Lumet scholar, so if that precludes me from an insightful analysis of his latest - and I understand if you believe it does - than I would caution you from reading the rest. In any case, I will be uncharacteristically brief.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens with a startlingly graphic - and given that the couple is married, cinematically unconventional - sex act between Philip Seymour Hoffman's Andy and Marisa Tomei's Gina (who for the record looks absolutely extraordinary as she inches toward her mid-40s; Hoffman less so). This prologue, as will become clear, is the "thirty seconds of heaven," 'before the devil knows you're dead.' Back in the New York metropolitan area (the explanation for their personally-exceptional love-making is that it is because they are away, in Rio) Andy recruits his similarly money-troubled brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to hold up a mom & pop jewelery store in Westchester. The twist, as many readers will undoubtedly already know, is that mom & pop are their Mom and Pop (the latter of which is played by Albert Finney).

But first, commensurate with the picture's non-sequential narration, the disastrous results of the robbery: Mom is shot along with the masked perp. With the latter being blown through the front door, Hank circles away from the scene, caught in an extended, static close-up registered by Lumet and cinematographer Ron Fortunato's HDCAM video camera. With this long-take, as with the other extended shots that punctuate the film (Lumet and Fortunato, for example, stay with Hoffman for an exceedingly long duration during a hotel room sequence) the purpose seems to be the registry the film's florid performances without intervening - or cheating - by editing. In this regard, Lumet's is the consummate actor's film with performances calibrated to impress, even as they remain equally capable of providing distraction, as they did for my regular viewing companion Ms. Broad in particular.

Of course, Lumet's film is no less noticeable in its non-chronological structure, which indeed plays with spectatorial feeling in a manner that more than justifies this narrative choice. For instance, in the aforementioned robbery scene, we are not immediately certain who the masked robber is, and when later we hear that typically another woman - not their mother - works the morning shift, we hope that maybe we confused the identity of the woman in this scene; perhaps the woman we saw is not their mother but only looks like her. (Similarly, early on we likewise hope that it is not Andy who was shot in the heist, not that he doesn't deserve the fate.) In short, Lumet expertly manipulates our sympathies, procuring our empathy - and in some sense, our hope for success - for characters who in no sense deserve anything of the sort.

This narrative-embodied relativism is matched by idea the world is comprised of those who make money through duplicity and those who are impacted it - not that the former always get away with their crimes. Finney in particular is vicitimized here, with his wife being killed in a heist orchestrated by his two sons. With the revelation of this detail - via an underworld jeweler who demonstrates his contempt for the (mostly) virtuous patriarch - Finney accepts the role of fate's agent, enacting an Oedipal drama that highlights the film's ultimate core: in the relationship of father to son. Then again, by shifting emphases in the film's denouement, Lumet does leave slack other threads that perhaps deserve greater attention, though he remains true to his manipulations of spectatorial desire, allowing in a sense the most favorable characters to at least, in the space of the plot, get away with it. The punishment does land on the most deserving.

New Film: The Darjeeling Limited

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, from a screenplay by Anderson, Roman Coppola and co-lead Jason Schwartzman, replicates a strategy inaugurated in the director's 1998 Rushmore and repeated in his 2001 masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, where the narrative is refracted and shaped by a (second) referent art form. Whereas theatre is the formal-thematic key of the earlier work and the novel - more fully, to be sure - defines the latter, The Darjeeling Limited proceeds according to its connections to the cinema itself.

The Darjeeling Limited opens with Anderson's axiomatic leading man Bill Murray rushing to reach the eponymous train as it departs from the station. As Murray languishes, proving ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt, Adrien Brody's Peter speeds past, reaching the caboose from which he will shortly observe the lagging star - characteristically, Anderson marks this pivotal sequence with slow motion and the film's first (and arguably its most beautiful) pop song, The Kink's "This Time Tomorrow." Indeed, as Anderson registers this passing of the leading man torch, so to speak (the film's other two male stars, Schwartzman and Owen Wilson, belong squarely to the director's regular troupe), he likewise indicates the film this could have been but will not be - that is, Murray's next vehicle. Rather The Darjeeling Limited, reflexive from its opening moments, becomes the story of three brothers on a journey to reconnect with one another, with a figure from their collected past and with their spiritual selves - albeit under the coercion of Wilson's Francis.

Following this opening sequence, Anderson's soundtrack largely highlights a more South Asian inflection, utilizing Ravi Shankar's scoring from Satyajit Ray's landmark Pather Panchali (1955), which certainly also reinforces The Darjeeling Limited's filmic point of reference. When Anderson's taste for classical Anglo-American pop/rock does reemerge, however, Anderson provides Schwartzman's Jack with an iPod and dock to allow for its presence within the film's story world - its diegesis - rather than on its non-diegetic soundtrack. In this way The Darjeeling Limited refers again to the combination of image and soundtrack that defines not only Anderson's latest but the entirety of his mature corpus.

Speaking of Jack's songs, when he endeavours to woo a pretty rail attendant, Amara Karan's Rita, he opts for Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)," which happens to be the same track he plays for Natalie Portman in the film's companion short, Hotel Chevalier (also 2007). Ostensibly, Hotel Chevalier provides Jack with his back story, and gives a face to his ex. Yet, considering The Darjeeling Limited's film-conscious rubric, the existence of the accompanying short proves essential to the feature's situation within the aforesaid logic. Indeed, when Jack reads the ending of a story - he has only written the ending he admits - to his brothers late in the film, they are none other than the words he spoke to Portman in Hotel Chevalier, which is itself an ending without a beginning (like his story, again). Similarly, for those spectators who have not seen Hotel Chevalier, The Darjeeling Limited might itself repeat this pattern.

Portman, it is worth noting moreover, does appear momentarily in The Darjeeling Limited: namely in an extended tracking sequence that places Portman, along with Murray, Brody's wife glimpsed briefly in a flashback and the crew members of the eponymous train, on a newly reconstituted iteration of 'The Darjeeling Limited.' To back up, we see this quintessentially Anderson cross-section after the brothers and their lost mother (Angelica Huston) agree to continue their time together, communicating without talking. What results is another of the film's overtly reflexive gesture, in its case the linking of disparate characters in the narrative in a single strip - with the separate compartments serving as single frames. Indeed, given The Darjeeling Limited's status as a work of the train-travel sub-genre, it becomes evident why Anderson would chose cinema as the picture's referent medium - both for its modern connotations and again for its ready-made visual analogies.

The aforementioned references in fact do not stop with the train or the music or even Jack's story but find further expression in both the film's most dramatic moment - a child's death: again, read Pather Panchali and also Jean Renoir's The River (1951) - as well as in the setting for the picture's ultimate reunion, the Himalayan monastery (cf. Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus [1947]). Likewise, the film's ubiquitous use of zoom lenses further moors The Darjeeling Limited's visual rhetoric in the terrain of the unequivocally cinematic - while perhaps extending an additional reference to the look of 1970s era popular Indian filmmaking (as practiced by Sippy and Desai among others).

At the same time, in spite of The Darjeeling Limited's clearly circumscribed echoes of the cinematic art form, what may be most striking about Anderson's latest is its continuation of the preoccupations of his mature work, Rushmore onward. Once again, we have a family, broken up, beset by tragedy, which is attempting to move forward, to rise from the wreckage that their lives have become. (We have redemption through action, as when the three brothers rush to save three drowning boys, which leads to the death mentioned above.) This fundamentally mythic story of perseverance is distilled most clearly onto the wrapped head of Wilson, who we will later learn was not the victim of an accident but a suicide attempt. With this revelation perfectly/horribly mirroring the real-life suicide attempt of the same star, it might seem natural to wish that Wilson heeds his auteur's humanistic optimism, whether or not one agrees with the film's dismissal of the efficacy of the spiritual that The Darjeeling Limited would seem to posit. Like the New Age iterations of the faiths it depicts, The Darjeeling Limited represents a form of spiritual tourism.

In closing, The Darjeeling Limited may indeed invite criticism on the register of its (potential) cultural insensitivity. Then again, that this milieu seems to so perfectly suit Anderson's preoccupations - and moreover, since his references highlight a genuine thoughtfulness in terms of the sub-continent's celluloid tradition (at least with those works best known in the west) - this reviewer feels inclined to defend Anderson's intervention. To say nothing of the film's, and the country's, sumptuous visuals, which I have yet to speak of: the baby blue train, the ever-present saffrons, the stark, northern landscapes - this is a work that reflects its foreign subject both humanely and beautifully. (I must point out that my brother Mark, in an email correspondence on Anderson's body of work, rightly underlined the director's preference for primary colors that is again predominate in The Darjeeling Limited, and is surely an essential source of the film's pleasure. As is the fact that it is simply funny.) In short, The Darjeeling Limited is a work of striking auteurist achievement, and a clear return to form after the disappointingly shallow The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004, the one exception in his career-spanning string of achievements). Here it is not simply decor for its own sake, but a world that registers Anderson's world with thematic and visual precision.

The 45th New York Film Festival: Flight of the Red Balloon

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

From at least his 1996 Goodbye South, Goodbye onward, nearly all of director Hou Hsiao-hsien's films have relied upon a single, structuring motif to shape the relatively classical narrative content in the image of each film's thematic specificity. For the aforesaid, it was the repeated compositions moored to the forward progress of the film's ubiquitous trains that allegorized the transformations in the director's Taiwanese homeland. In his follow-up, 1998's Flowers of Shanghai (which in the opinion of this writer remains among the director's supreme masterpieces and continues to be his finest work in this most recent phase of Hou's career), the stupor created by the opium consumption partaken in frequently within the film's opium den settings, is transferred onto languid camera work that is Flowers of Shanghai's most conspicuous artistic feature. 2001's Millennium Mambo finds inspiration in the picture's pulsating techno soundtrack, transforming the musical looping into the relatively static lives of its young protagonists. (A break in soundtrack and setting naturally accompany a similar development on the level of plot.) With 2003's Café Lumière, literally "Coffee Time," Hou structures his narratives around the interstitial moments that are referred to in the film's Japanese title. In other words, Café Lumière, a tribute to director Yasujiro Ozu on the occasion of his centenary, is comprised, appropriately, of a series of "pillow shots."

The one exception to this rule would seem to be 2005's Three Times, a portmanteau collage of two lovers in three separate eras, which serves to refract three discrete time periods utilized by Hou in a series of his previous works. In other words, whereas the above motifs become points of reference for the films that contain them, Three Times's meaning is in part generated by its connection to his prior work - as well in the simple comparisons that each segment facilitates.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest, Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du ballon rouge), from a screenplay by the director and François Margolin, fits squarely within the trajectory charted above. In its case, the structuring point(s) of departure become the factuality of its adaptation of Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short The Red Balloon, and its inclusion of a second adaptation within the film, by a young Chinese filmmaker Song (Fang Song). That is, the film adaptation of The Red Balloon - both in its textual specificity and also for its role in the process it describes - each become as important to the narrative structure and thematic preoccupations of Flight of the Red Balloon as is the opium use in Flowers of Shanghai or the techno in Millennium Mambo.

Song, in collaboration with the child for whom she nannies - he acts in her film and on occasion shoots footage on her camera (and even initiates a flashback in Hou's picture with the beginning of an anecdote, which in a fashion typical for the director requires some duration before the time of the event is situated; for reference, this motif is taking to its furthest limits in his 1989 A City of Sadness) - creates her own version of The Red Balloon. In fact, we see a segment of her DV production on her computer screen, appropriately sustaining the same long-take aesthetic that Hou's 35mm work similarly utilizes. (A third format, 8mm, appears with the presentation of home video footage.) As such, Song emerges readily as a double for the filmmaker, even being lauded for the abstract quality of her filmmaking. While in this way it might be tempting, therefore, to read the entirety of Flight of the Red Balloon as the film Song produces, Hou characteristically delimits between film and the meta-films, sustaining the classical, diegetic world that his film constructs. In comparison to say Michael Haneke's 2005 Caché, the status of the world he creates is never in dispute, even if it is possible to read it according to its self-reflexive matrix.

That Flight of the Red Balloon goes behind the scenes of its filmmaking process is further referred to in a couple of separate details, among others. The first occurs when the child Simon's (Simon Iteanu) mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) asks about a person in a green suit - the balloon wrangler, so to speak - who assists during Song's shoot. The latter notes that his costume allows for easy computer erasure of the figure in post-production, thereby demystifying not only her own shoot, but Hou's film as well. The second emerges in Suzanne's related vocation as a voice actor for the experimental puppet theatre. Hou's mobile camera allows for our seemless transportation from the role of theatre spectator to glimpses of the back stage. Consequently, Binoche's role as actress - for the puppet theatre and in Flight of the Red Balloon - is disclosed, again completely within the world of the director's fictional world.

Moreover, the introduction of this particular art into Flight of the Red Balloon reaffirms the work's connection to Hou's earlier corpus - and particularly to 1993's The Puppetmaster - as well as its theme of remaking of culture artifacts, be it the Chinese puppet theatre or The Red Balloon itself. With the respect to the former, we might be able to see Flight of the Red Balloon as a continuation of Three Times's corpus-based rhetoric, and of Café Lumière's highlighting of the process of filmmaking (in the case of the 2003 work, of the soundtrack). Perhaps then we are in a new phase (or even sub-phase) of Hou's work that is particularly calibrated toward an awareness of the director's art.

This awareness of the work's construction, disclosed within a coherent narrative universe, likewise finds form in Flight of the Red Balloon's manipulation of its soundtrack. In particular, with the emphasis that is placed on Simon's piano lessons, it becomes evident that the film's piano score relays the child's rather melancholic disposition. This externalization of the internal is similarly picked up in the film's frequent utilizations of windows to reflect what is both outside a space and inside it at the same time. This duality, be it again on the soundtrack or even in Hou's characterization of the manic Suzanne and her harrowing close-ups stands at the core of the work.

Returning for the moment to Hou's use of the soundtrack, one particularly revealing passage occurs with the arrival of a blind piano tuner at Suzanne and Simon's apartment. As he commences to tune the instrument, a job which is reproduced in real-time by the director, again with one of the film's systematic long takes, Hou alternately moves his camera to show and then conceal Simon playing his PlayStation, talking on the phone with his sister and Suzannne arguing with her neighbors in the hallway and then inside the threshold of her apartment. Over the course of this passage, the tuning itself becomes a discordant, non-diegetic soundtrack within a sequence where all becomes sound - again with the appearance of the blind piano tuner. Hou's consistently moving camera perfectly facilitates the thematic logic of the scene.

Yet, it is less in this scene than in the director's aerial follows of the eponymous object that his form becomes most conspicuous. Like in Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up (1990), where we follow a kicked can for quite an extended duration down a small slope, here we are forever following the aleatory drift - and on other occasions, seemingly intentional movements - of the red balloon. With respect to the more directed drifting of the object, it often appears through those windows, both in and out of view, that are closest to the young protagonist. As such, it soon becomes evident, when we consider his implorations of the object at the film's opening to allow itself to be caught, that the balloon itself serves as a symbol, however obliquely, of a happiness that the child doesn't quite attain.

To back up, Simon lives alone with his mother - his father has left the family and is living in Montreal - in a flat with echoes of the living quarters of The 400 Blows. In this latest incarnation of Truffaut's classic, the young male lead no longer has a step-father, but only a neurotic mother who commonly leaves him with his nanny. Simon is himself a brooding child, who, when asked late in a film whether a painting of another red balloon is either happy or sad, intuitively affirms that it is both. So is his life, elevated by the diversions that fill his days with Song or better yet his pinball played with his absent older sister, but still defined by these absences and the instability of his beloved mother. Indeed, Simon never does retrieve his balloon, which importantly floats over the Paris cityscape in the film's concluding passage, thus making universal the mixture of joys and sadnesses that the child himself professes. To be sure, Hou's particular, rather existential worldview - among other works, it is prominent in such absolute masterpieces of Hou's as The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) and A City of Sadness - is once again displayed in Flight of the Red Balloon: happiness is ultimately allusive, finally, though mercifully for the film's child-lead, there are moments of happiness. Surely there are these as well for Suzanne - both in her motherhood and in her art - that salve her otherwise chaotic existence.

To close, what remains to be said, beyond words of praise for Pin Bing Lee's sumptuous 35mm cinematography, and for the performances - especially Binoche's truly rich portrayal - is simply that Hou has made his finest film of this current decade, and the single best film of 2007. If anything bests the master's latest in the final three months of the year, we will be truly fortunate indeed.

The 45th New York Film Festival: Silent Light

Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (Stellet Licht), purportedly "the world’s first talking picture in the medieval German dialect called Plautdietsch," commences with a view of a nocturnal, star-filled sky. As the take proceeds, Reygadas and cinematographer Alexis Zabe's camera circles downward, tracing the invisible convex surface that separates the terrestrial from the celestial beyond. As the take becomes static, a pitch-black void replaces the previous sky-scape. However, accompanied by the increasing auditory din of chirping crickets and yelping dogs, the sun slowly begins to rise over the Chihuahua landscape. Pink clouds emerge over the distant panorama; middle-ground trees pop as if black cut-outs from the newly emergent landscape. As the camera zooms forward, Reygadas and Zabe capture the Mexican sunrise with a truly breathtaking range of hues and tones. The miraculous workings of nature, regulated by the invisible hand of its creator, are here our introduction to the filmmaker's "metaphysical" melodrama to follow.

Moreover, Reygadas also acquaints us with the film's rigorous formal template within this opening long take. On the one hand, we have the first of the circling camera movements that appear periodically in Silent Light, which moor the film to its most conspicuous source, Carl Th. Dreyer's 1955 supreme masterpiece Ordet (a special thanks to a Yale colleague of mine for reminding me of this fact), as well as allegorizing the film's own circular structure; on the other, we have the first of the film's ubiquitous surface-sub-surface relational dynamics, where the film's metaphysical thematics are most directly evident. In this instance, it is the division of heaven and earth again that is being underscored. While obviously it is within the former that the subsequent narrative unfolds, incursions of the heavenly sphere are reworked into the film's penultimate - and most overtly referential - scene.

As the narrative proceeds from this opening heaven and earth magic, Reygadas transitions to the Mennonite household that will provide the narrative with its protagonists. From the first, it is immediately clear that flatness will define the film's visual strategies. In this way, Reygadas relies every bit as much on that second master of the filmic metaphysical, Robert Bresson, for the visual lexicon of his work. This is a film that explicitly positions itself within the traditions of the religious European art film. Of course, the picture's structuring surface-sub-surface relationships are likewise a borrowing from film's greatest creator of religious artifacts, Bresson.

Then again, Reygadas does not simply adopt these formal strategies, but remakes them for his extension of the cinematic transcendent. On the one hand, Reygadas's camera moves into flat, shadow-obscured fields, as in a sequence at a garage, to penetrate the surfaces that his work so insistently creates. (At moments, Silent Light seems to most clearly evoke Robert Bresson's The Process of Joan of Arc [1962] and its emphasis on surface fissures - in its case, graphically, the holes and crannies that punctuate a stone wall; separately, as in the male protagonist's appearance in the house of a woman other than his wife, Dreyer's spatial disorientations from his 1928 picture on the same French subject become the guiding inspiration.) On the other hand, and much more significantly, Reygadas introduces another variation in the relationship between surfaces and what they contain in his insistent referral to the surface of the camera lens itself. Routinely, for example, Reygadas and Zabe capture prismatic lens flares, which it must be added attain a particular pictorial grace. Similarly, in one of the film's more dramatic encounters between husband and wife, torrential rains stream down the surface of the lens, thereby grounding both the glass surface of the apparatus and what exists beyond it, the space it is filming.

All of this is to say that Silent Light seeks to figure visual - and in the case of the opening shot, invisible - mediations and what they mediate, be it the inexpressive exteriors of the film's performers or once more the apparatus itself. In fact, with respect to the former, Reygadas in the film's post-screening question-and-answer, indicated that he coached his actors to feel what they, in the situations of their characters, would feel, without outwardly expressing these same emotions. That is, even in the level of direction we find an insistence on promulgating the reality beneath and behind the visible.

Of course, Silent Light nonetheless secures much of its effect from its documentation of Mennonite routine, as for instance in the wonderful extended bathing sequence near the middle of the film. This is to say that Silent Light seeks to both ground its narrative in the particular terrestrial experience of its characters, while highlighting the invisible structures that maintain the life that we see. Suffice it to say then that the film's defining penultimate event, while breaking from the film's ostensible exteriority, partakes in the same dynamic that incurs throughout the film. In its case, the simple surface-sub-surface relationship of the individual figure is buffeted by the much grander heaven-and-earth contradistinction that the opening shot intimates. It is at this juncture, in a moment of the unequivocally miraculous, that an invisibility hinted at in the beginning of the film and suggestively present throughout, finally and spectacularly asserts itself. This culminating moment is also one of the contemporary cinema's most overt moments of photogenie.

Having said that, this event relies on a presumably human agency for its coming into being. Without spoiling the film's conclusive moment, it may still be noted that Reygadas mixes the sacred and the profane at this pivotal instance, thereby reinforcing a similar strategy in his Battle in Heaven (2005), a work like the latest that finally highlights human sacrifice. Still, it is perhaps his previous, superior Japón (2002) that most often reverberates in Silent Light - particularly in the rural landscapes and traveling automotive takes that evince the director's unmistakable debt to one of the spiritual cinema's more recent proponents, Abbas Kiarostami. Like with that director's work, Reygadas's is rooted in the particularity of the film's settings, which in their case were recommended for their extreme climatic variations. (In addition, the awareness of the camera in Silent Light, both in the lens flares and also in the performances directed toward and addressing the apparatus and filmmakers, likewise speaks to Kiarostami's influence.)

In the end, however, these settings are only half of the very large, metaphysical equation. For the film's staggering ambition, and even more for its rigorous reinterpretations of forms that are suitably melded to content, Silent Light is not only Reygadas's best film (by a substantial margin) but is easily one of the year's best to date.

The Medium is the Message: Béla Tarr’s The Man From London (Written by, Lisa K. Broad)

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

With his remarkable new film, The Man From London, Béla Tarr tries his hand at genre filmmaking, producing a laconic noir study that is as much a meditation on celluloid’s dual propensity to grant and withhold access to projected light as it is on man’s dual propensity toward vice and virtue. Based on a 1938 novel by Georges Simenon, the film tells the story of Maloin, an unassuming railroad switchman in a sleepy seaside town, who witnesses a crime and subsequently retrieves a suitcase full of stolen money from the water. Perhaps as a result of its artificially imposed generic structure, The Man From London does not resonate as deeply or unite form and content as meaningfully as Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), a visionary masterpiece that puts forth a cinematic theory of everything. However, the simple mystery story lays the groundwork from which Tarr’s unique aesthetic and philosophical vision springs forth unfettered. Tativille’s primary author and administrator - and my esteemed viewing companion, Michael J. Anderson - noted perceptively that The Man From London feels “more like the application of a style than its invention.” If Workmeister Harmonies is a fully original composition, The Man From London is an incredibly sophisticated set of variations on a theme, which is as old as the cinematic medium.

The film opens with an ode to light and dark, the bread and butter of classic film noir. As it moves into the harbor, the white form of a ship’s prow is broken up by waves of shadow. The rhythmic movement of the grey lines on the white surface hearkens back to the mechanical basis of cinematic production and projection – the advancing of the celluloid strip, the opening and closing of the shutter. This motion is carried over into the next scene where the Maloin observes the docked ship and a nearby train from his switch tower. A prolonged panning shot through the window reveals the entire bay, which is mediated by foggy lens of the window and broken up by the frame lines that divide its panes. This scene reminds me of a strange inversion of the Bazinian idea that films should offer the freedom of looking out a window; in Tarr’s tightly controlled diegetic universe looking out the window is an awful lot like cinema.

This becomes ironically clear a bit later in the scene when Maloin’s becomes the unwitting witness to a fight over a suitcase that ends in a drowning. The struggle between the two men, and the actions of the murderer – the eponymous Londoner/McGuffin Mr. Brown, who is played by Hungarian speaking Tarr regular János Dersi – brings the projector to center stage. The water and much of the area surrounding the harbor is absolutely black. The figures move in small, isolated pools of light that create a masking effect, changing the shape of the frame.

A beautiful instance of the extreme contrast between light and shadow occurs in a later scene, where Maloin’s wife (played by with melodramatic élan by Tilda Swinton – the film’s lone Brit – who, dubbed in Hungarian gives the silent film performance of her career) throws open the shutters of the flat where she lives with Maloin and their daughter Henriette, admitting a flood of brilliant white light that surges around her black silhouette. She subsequently shuts a set of thin inner blinds which mute both the brightness of the light and the blackness of the silhouette to blend with the gray on gray interior of the apartment. Similarly gray, although somewhat more cozy, is the seaside tavern where Maloin wiles away the hours playing chess with the lonely barkeep. While grizzled men drink, brood, and play the occasional game of pool. An extended take where we watch a regular customer eat a bowl of stew is like the cinematic equivalent of a passage from a Melville novel.

One of the film’s most buoyant passages is set in the tavern, where Maloin and Henriette share a comparatively warm if nearly wordless moment over a drink and a coffee, as the bartender attempts to seduce a coy customer. Throughout this scene the lovely, atmospheric accordion motif that provides the basis for the film’s soundtrack is a bit more insistent than usual. The reason for this is revealed when the camera turns away from the two couples and reveals an accordion player who accompanies an impromptu dance sequence involving two old men, a chair, and an egg. Tarr’s revival of the old play on diegetic film music has the effect both of briefly lifting the veil of existential angst that hangs over the film and highlighting the slippery relationship that obtains between Tarr’s sounds and his images.

As in his other films, Tarr alternately amplifies everyday sounds, artificially mutes them, replaces them with music, or cuts them altogether. This is in great contrast to the contemporary convention that tends to hold sound as a reality-grounding constant against which the image track can be more freely manipulated. For Tarr – as for the pioneers of the early sound cinema – the two tracks are not necessarily sutured but contingently juxtaposed, sometimes emanating from the same space, sometimes not. One of the most amusing uses of sound in the film occurs in a scene where Maloin buys Henriette a fur. The scene opens with an angled medium close-up of two salesmen who talk over each other in their rush to extol the virtues of their product. Like a caricature of the fast-talking characters that populate classical Hollywood films – especially those of Howard Hawks – these character’s artificially amplified over-dubbed voices seem to separate off from their sources and take on a life of their own, creating strange vibrations as they overlap.

The relationship between sound and image comes to occupy a privileged epistemological position at the film’s close. Having heard that Mr. Brown has holed up in a small hut he owns, Maloin decides to bring him some food, perhaps to assuage his own guilt about having taken the money. The camera stays outside the door of the hut, and no sound can be heard from the inside. When Maloin confesses to Brown’s murder in a later scene, the lack of any visual or auditory evidence leads the spectator to wonder what transpired between the two men. Was the sound of their altercation concealed from us? Film spectators are intimately familiar, even comfortable with the idea the appearances can lie. But the idea that sounds can lie is deeply unsettling.

Fittingly, the significance of the film’s final image proves to be as opaque as its climax is mysterious. Having learned of her husband’s death, a despairing Mrs. Brown stares off into the distance, as the camera frames her face in a searching close-up. After a few minutes there is a dissolve to a white screen before the closing credits. Having been told very little about Mrs. Brown aside from the fact that she must have loved the 'Man from London 'very much, the spectator of Tarr’s film is left to contemplate the image created when light is projected through celluloid onto a white screen, and to wonder – perhaps for the first time – what it might mean.

Lisa would like to thank film scholar Richard Suchenski for his insightful commentary following the film's screening at the 45th New York Film Festival.

The 45th New York Film Festival: The Romance of Astree and Celadon

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

If, as is rumored, The Romance of Astree and Celadon proves to be octogenarian writer-director Eric Rohmer's final film, the nouvelle vague's senior auteur will have accomplished something truly remarkable - and perhaps even unprecedented for a film director of his level of productivity: namely, Rohmer will have completed a feature filmmaking career spanning nearly fifty years and some twenty-plus features without having once directed a single work of even middling quality. This is not to say that The Romance of Astree and Celadon is merely 'good'; perhaps more than even his late masterwork The Lady and the Duke (2001), The Romance of Astree and Celadon serves to consolidate and even extend a number of the director's key themes. This is to say that The Romance of Astree and Celadon is truly up to the extraordinary task of being the director's finale, not that we wouldn't relish more still from one of the medium's supreme masters.

Adapting Honoré d'Urfé's novel of 5th century Gaul life, The Romance of Astree and Celadon claims to reproduce less the period depicted than its 17th century readers' imagination of the earlier period. Commensurate with this goal, the director features canvases painted in the seventeenth century, a castle built well after the novel's setting and importantly a grafting of the Christian faith onto the Druid-themed source material. Also Rohmer, in typical hyper-realist fashion, apologizes for setting the film in a location other than that represented in the novel - as per the place's disfiguration in the coming industrial centuries. That is, rather than utilizing matte painting to substitute for that which could not be recreated with a high degree of verisimilitude (as he does with the 18th century Paris of The Lady and the Duke) Rohmer substitutes locations, confirming the place that the environment plays in his pastoral narrative.

Indeed, this untrammeled nature appears on both the sun-dappled 16mm cinematography (on the same format he used for his supreme masterpiece Summer [The Green Ray; 1986]) or in the ubiquitous bird songs that fill the film's soundtrack. Hence, The Romance of Astree and Celadon serves to synthesize Rohmer's hyper-stylized period work (The Marquise of O, Perceval, The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent) and the naturalist ethos of his contemporary corpus (everything else): here we have a film that maintains Rohmer's interrogation of the problematic of period recreation, while introducing a series of natural locations that define his more widely-appreciated present-day works.

In these landscape, Rohmer commences with a misunderstanding between the film's eponymous lovers, Astree (Stéphanie Crayencour) and Celadon (Andy Gillet), where the former sees her male paramour in the arms of another - comparable to a similar misunderstanding appearing late in An Autumn Tale (1998) that features Rohmer axiom Marie Rivière, who also appears as Celadon's mother (uncredited) in this opening scene. Following Astree's clandestine sighting of Celadon, the young woman states her desire to never again see Celadon, leading the latter to attempt suicide. Suffice it to say that he survives his attempt, though he does find himself in the presence of three nymphs (including a second Rohmer regular Rosette).

Of course, it is in their amorous company that Celadon's love will be put to the test, as so often occurs in Rohmer's universe. Likewise, this theme of fidelity - similarly characteristic for the director's corpus - allegorizes religious faith, though in the case of his latest it is with the added valence of a pre-Christian Druidism that nonetheless sounds an awful lot like the director's trinitarian Catholicism. Here, we have Celadon's philosopher of love brother arguing the case for fidelity - where magically two lovers become the same person - versus the musician's philanderer, who says we love what he have yet to carnally love. He is the unbeliever, the film's Antoine Vitez to its Jean-Louis Trintignant (i.e. the Marxist philosopher and the Catholic in My Night at Maud's [1969] to which The Romance of Astree and Celadon shows an unexpected resemblance). And like that film, Rohmer's latest establishes the conflict through conversation before providing its double in the consequent plot.

In the film's closing passages, among the most absolutely sensual in the contemporary cinema, Celadon, resolute in keeping his promise to remain forever out of Astree's sight, takes on the appearance of a Druid priest's missing daughter - after encountering her sleeping body (and uncovered legs - cf. Claire's Knee [1970] in a forest grove). Soon thereafter, her bare snow white breast proves too much for the frustrated Celadon, which compels the costumed lead to passionately grope his soul mate. Noticing that her girlfriend has no chest, she asks Celadon who (s)he is. Having since changed into her clothes, Celadon responds he is Astree, thereby literalizing the construct introduced by the former's brother. With his identity thereafter disclosed, Astree jubilantly responds "live, live, Celadon," with only the closing credits to follow. As such, Rohmer gives us a truly great ending - surpassed in his corpus only by the single "oui" that concludes Summer - to what may prove his truly great final film.

New Film: Eastern Promises

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

As Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman has pointed out (among others, certainly), David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, from a screenplay by Steven Knight, is "very much a companion to A History of Violence [2005]." That is, like the director's earlier masterpiece, Eastern Promises examines the gap between surface - between the person that one appears to be - and sub-surface, or the conflicting/conflicted reality of the individual. Whereas A History of Violence utilized this distinction to craft a hero (Viggo Mortensen, as will be also the case in Eastern Promises) whose perfected exterior conceals a phenomenal capacity for violence, Eastern Promises reverses this equation to disguise - in the person of a Russian ex-con turned mobster - another whose peaceful proclivities may out-weigh his apparent sadism. In other words, as Hoberman likewise notes, we have another potentially schizoid, Cronenbergian hero.

In Eastern Promises, the process of concealment is achieved not only through the exigencies of character, but in the appearance of Mortensen's flesh itself. The actor is covered in prison tattoos - as we are told, purportedly commensurate with a Russian axiom, that the man without any tattoos "doesn't exist" - which narrate the story of his life. Indeed, in one of the film's pivotal set-pieces, Mortensen is tattooed with stars on his knees and over his heart to officially and inexorably initiate his character into the Russian mafia. However, this tattooing is revealed to be a set-up, a gambit on mob king-pin Semyon's (Armin Mueller-Stahl) part to pass Mortensen off as his dandy son (Vincent Cassel), whose life a clan of Chechen mobsters demand. His flesh is manipulated to deceive. Of course, the fact, as will be revealed subsequently, that Mortensen is an undercover agent dictates that the very story inscribed on his flesh is itself a lie.

Even so, the violence his body suffers, whether or not under the auspices of undercover work, are entirely authentic. In the film's most notorious set-piece - its truly extraordinary bath house hand-to-hand combat sequence - the wounds that Mortensen's Nikolai incurs are very real indeed (as were the bruises to the film's nude star). His body is here subject to an extraordinary, disfiguring violence, even if it doesn't quite compare to that he inflicts on others: namely, in the dead mafioso's fingers that he clips off or in the Chechen's eye that he stabs only inches in front of the camera lens. This is a film of grotesque, hyperbolic violence - of slit, truly gaping necks - that somehow still succeeds in shocking thanks to the suspension of disbelief entered into by its horror-trained audiences.

Speaking of Mortensen's flogging, his body, as film scholar Lisa K. Broad suggests, is made to suggest that of Christ's crucified figure, replete with an incision on his side. In fact, Broad notes that Russian iconography is emphasized throughout the work, be it in the impregnated Virgin who sparks the film's investigative story line or in the frequent close-ups extracted from background detail that call attention to the traditional form of the icon. (Indeed, Mortensen, in the first indication that his character may exceed his obvious villainy, hands a prostitute an icon portrait - imploring her to stay alive a little longer.) And as Hoberman notes, apropos of its iconographic content, this is "a Christmas story complete with a miracle." We have our Holy Family.

Then again, comparisons to icons aside, Cronenberg's style is foremost an instantiation of a profoundly old-fashioned classical Hollywood continuity technique of editing. With metronomic regularity, Cronenberg establishes his scenes with a long or lateral tracking shot, cuts in to a two-shot composition and then into a shot/reverse-shot schema - before re-establishing and again launching into subsequent articulations of the same technique. (Broad additionally notes that Cronenberg frequently utilizes wide-angle lenses, as is typical of his visual style.) Even so, Cronenberg calibrates the framing lengths of his shot/reverse-shot pattern to accentuate singularities of the various character relationships that he shows in dialogue. In other words, while there may be no passages that explicitly exceed the bounds of classical continuity editing as does the opening, thematizing real-time sequence of A History of Violence, Cronenberg's minor manipulations of classical style maintain the expressive individualities that exemplify this technique at its very best.

Then again, Cronenberg does seem to find a second model for his decoupage in the bath house sequence - according to Broad - beyond that of classical-era Hollywood: namely the perfected analytic editing of Robert Bresson and Pickpocket (1959). That is, in striking comparison to The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), again in the insight of Broad, where the most visible moments are felt rather than seen, Eastern Promises shows us far more than we would ever have the opportunity to see (secured through a series of clarifying close-ups). Indeed, what we see often shocks in Eastern Promises, through its sheer gratuity, often coupled with the most old-fashioned of forms. Actually, one could argue that the film's use of English, French and Polish speaking actors to create a milieu entirely foreign to them and the film's Anglo audience trades in the same evocations of an earlier moment in Hollywood filmmaking.

In sum, Eastern Promises may just be the English-language film to beat in 2007. It is also one of the director's better efforts, placing just below career peaks Dead Ringers (1988), A History of Violence (2005) and the highly-underrated Spider (2002). Importantly, Eastern Promises, like Spider, clarifies one of his earlier themes - this time on the tattooed flesh of the director's newest axiomatic split performer.

Masterpieces of the Early Sound Cinema: Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (by, Lisa K. Broad)

Rouben Mamoulian’s second film City Streets (1931), with a screenplay by Dashiel Hammett, screened yesterday at Film Forum as part of a larger Mamoulian retrospective. In it Gary Cooper plays a straight arrow and sharp shooting carnival man who is roped into the mob when his girlfriend is framed for a murder committed by her bootlegging father. Mamoulian famously remarked that the film contains 10 murders, none of which are seen.

The film opens with a low-angled shot of trucks barreling down the eponymous boulevards before passing over the camera, a close-up of a mysterious liquid leaking out of the back of one of the vehicles prompts an explanitory cut a to a beer bottling plant, and finally to a pint of beer being dispensed in extreme close-up. The camera lingers on the head of the froth in the glass as a light, effervescent bubbling sound is picked up on the soundtrack, a pregnant moment which distills the exuberance that greeted the sound cinema in the early 30s – the new and improved beer bubbles of the talking cinema can be seen and heard.

A man moves into the shot and downs the glass prompting a cut-to a close-up of a large wooden vat of beer being filled with a hose, the rushing and bubbling of the liquid fills the soundtrack, drawing a fascinating contrast between the recorded sound of moving and still liquid. After a beat the camera pulls back to reveal a crowd of bootleggers around the still, arguing over their territory. One man pulls a wad of bills out of a hat – a silent-film style close-up draws the spectators attention to the initials marking its crown – and pays the other. At the conclusion of a tense but amiable discussion between the men, the camera returns once again to admire the swirling vat of liquid that will bring joy and heartache to many as the narrative continues.

A first instance of the latter comes to the fore as a graphic match transports the story from the froth of forbidden ale to the threatening waves of the river where the hat with the initials is seen floating. Here again the sound of the water is highlighted. In this way, Mamoulian the consummate cinematic innovator is not content merely to highlight the existence of cinematic sound – as he did with great success in 1929’s Applause – but its possibility for subtlety and variety. He gives the spectator both the auditory thrill of jazz clubs and gun shots, and also the nearly scientific fascination (audio-microscopy) of recorded beer bubbles. Mamoulian also plays with early sound film conventions, providing a close-up of a bird in a cage but refusing the audience its song – the bird’s owner notes that it hasn’t produced a tune all day.

Despite the aural fireworks, City Street’s image track holds its own just fine. The scenes in the seaside carnival provide plenty of spectacular bells, whistles, flashing lights, and funhouse mirrors while the love scene between Cooper and Sylvia Sidney as Nan yields up breathtaking beauty. A 180° panning shot sweeps the moonlit beach and finds the lovers ensconced on a large rock in the surf. Cooper and Sidney are both lovely to look at, and the moonlight reflected off the water gilds their faces as they embrace, squabble, and embrace again.

A clever and appealing use of shadow and smoke throughout the film – a gangster converses with an offscreen man whose giant, speaking shadow can be seen on the wall; a nightclub scene is so fogged with smoke that each lamp casts a delicate halo – creates a mysterious yet playful tone similar to that of Jean Renoir’s early sound masterwork La Nuit Du Carrefour (1932). While City Streets is every inch the sound film, it harkens back to silent-film convention in its frequent use of extreme close-ups, attention-directing camera movements, and associative montage. In this way, Mamoulian places heightened emphasis on the materiality of both the sound and the image tracks, creating a film that is constantly directing the audience’s attention to its own virtuosic construction.