SFIFF54 #5: Hear the words in here out there

by Ryland Walker Knight

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Toronto's own Adam Nayman as he was in San Francisco on FIPRESCI jury duty for the festival. One of the fruitful conversations we shared was about Kelly Reichardt and her new movie, Meek's Cutoff, which, at first, made me madder than a snake. (What're spoilers?) The finest point to point at in my reaction to the film is its ending, which is exactly the kind of storytelling move that I've grown to detest: that seemingly open-ended "grace note" that feels if not over-determined then a cop-out. I complained to another friend that, if you're going to write a story about life and death consequences (risking starvation) on the road to the frontier, then you ought to make some real choices about trajectory, about what those consequences mean; and that it appeared Reichardt "copped out" on any such choices by opting for a "mystic allegory" that makes the film's alarmingly literal lefty slant unavoidable and, well, without argument beyond what I already know about how confused and confusing humans can be. That is, the political element is as rootless as the characters, awash in reaction not conviction. After all, the majority of the film made me angry because the way Meek is characterized—the ignorant blow hard wearing a red shirt quick to beat The Other he refuses to grant any value, let alone agency—leaves little room for interpretation outside allegory when met at first glance (1). But I must admit that not only was I rapt through the plodding but also that I marvel at Reichardt's gift for film grammar and staging. And, yes, that, while grimacing my way through the post-screening talks, trying and failing to bite my angry tongue, I tried to add to every exchange that I did not trust my basic reaction because it felt reductive and far too broad (funny how those dovetail!) for a film this specific.

When Adam and I started talking about the film a few days later nobody had presented any kind of argument to get me out of my funk with the film. I still explained the anger in terms of expecting the ending: "In that reverse shot through the trees, looking at the Indian, before the penultimate one of Williams, I was thinking, Please don't do it, and then you get Williams' face—did you realize her lips are perfect no matter what?—and she's all 'confused' or whatever before the final reverse, this time with less leaves, and I kept thinking, Don't fucking do it, and then it starts down, starts to fade, and I'm a riot inside, just totally, You fucking did it, didn't you? And I wanted to bolt from the theatre." Adam's reply was as simple as it was brilliant, one of those, ouch, I-should-breathe-better moments where your jaw doesn't drop but your mouth does open. He asked, "Does it matter that it's Williams' point of view, looking through those trees, to you?" My head went click and thud, my eyes widened and I said, "Huh, well, okay. Yes, of course that matters. How did I not think of that?" It's not like that question precipitated a complete reversal but it did open a new way to appreciate the film, or, at the very least, a way to let my useless anger abate. Because I'm still not sold on it, nor Reichardt, though I do like being forced to think about a movie, about a filmmaker, about my criteria, about myself. Thinking about thinking and thinking about how you are thinking are rather indulgent modes, I suppose, but that's all I understand criticism to be at bottom. Or, that's the kind of philosophical criticism I'm attracted to: the kind that brings intentionality into play while guiding a reader through one's experience of an object. I realize that ideal is not always possible, or desirable.

Part of what makes it improbable is that sense of duty a critic feels inside a festival's screening schedule not only to see as many films as possible but also to have something to say about all those free tickets she's received (2). "Duty" may be the wrong word, however, when what's really motivating me (I can only speak for me) is that I simply like going to the movies. But, in turn, I guard that enthusiasm by not going to the movies. (In fact, after Meek's, I only saw five films of the fifteen I'd planned (via iCal) to see. There were a lot of reasons, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted to watch basketball more than I wanted to watch movies. Luckily, this is something Adam is amenable to since he is, among other things, a big basketball fan as well. We will return to this.) Which gives me pause on the eve of my first visit to the Cannes Film Festival. I'm in Nice writing this and though my fatigued body wants to stay inside and lay down or get into some stretching, my brain wants to push that body outdoors as often as possible to feel a different sun and speak a different language walking around a city I do not know. Granted, I'll have a running mate in Danny at the festival and I don't doubt some odd kind of competition will push me to see more and write more than normal. Yet, no matter how flat out cool it is to the fan in me that I get to participate in this festival this year, the sun will always tempt me. Which is another motivating factor to pump out this post to wrap up my SFIFF54.

Thus, to regain the thread: I enjoyed Adam's question of perspective because it brought back a rather basic question I'd forgotten in the haze my eyes had created, reacting to the simple story onscreen in Meek's. Because that is the great thing at work in the film: bringing this woman's eyes to the fore. Her gaze may not be clear, or always level, but she's the moral rock of the picture and by the close she has, in fact, been brought from the back of the wagon ditching heirlooms to the center of the frame with a voice and a face for all to reckon. This reading, too, is reductive of course. But I'd much rather value the film for its picture of a woman emerging than disparage a film for its (by my lights) lazy storytelling. Reichardt may not be interested in story the same way I am, I must allow, since she has a certain a-g background that speaks to interests in space and time (both paramount abstractions here), but the fact is she chose to make a narrative feature that is only ever subtle in its patient formal craft, not its ideas, and that still bugs me. Then again, all three of Reichardt's Oregon pictures are on the cynic's side of the table and part of my problem may simply be my desire for a more generous world, my desire to see some new way towards charity. Put otherwise, I know I rate magnanimous movies higher for their obvious alignment with my own values. This may be selfish.

This is also why I love something like Claire Denis' 35 Rhums, which is nothing if not charitable. So imagine my thrill to meet Stuart Staples of Tindersticks prior to their event at the festival, adding a live score to a sort-of clip-reel of films they have worked on with Mme Denis. Our chat was brief but I can assure that Mr Staples is a gentle and patient man. He talked about a duty, too, he feels to the object at hand, to do right by it by the end of the process. On their first score with Mme Denis, for Nenette et Boni, he said the band had the idea that they would follow in Miles Davis' footsteps by trying to play live to the images, to be real jazz musicians, before they realized it would take time to find apt melodies and write real songs where needed. Now, he says, they get ideas earlier thanks to the script and dailies but it really takes seeing a rough assembly to have the kind of emotional reaction necessary to inspire his/their/that responsibility to the object that can produce such wonders as the delicate, lilting rhymes of the opening image-and-score tandem of 35 Rhums, where the train and its tracks shuffle a bit in time with the accordion. Or the title track from the soundtrack to Trouble Every Day, which was a highlight of the live performance (3) along with the song "Tiny Tears" from that first partnership on Nenette et Boni. Lucky for us, somebody talented shot that part of the show, its finale, and put it on youtube:

It was a low-key event. But it was certainly more about the concert than it was about the visuals (or the interplay between stage and screen) from my vantage. Which is fine, of course, since I feel privileged to live in one of the two U.S. tour stops for the show. And the music is really great, no matter how much I wanted to re-order things or at least open with more of a bang than that (admittedly lovely) shot of Alice Houri floating in the pool near the front of N&B. So I'll quit that tact by saying, Thanks.

Some other things I was grateful to catch on a big screen before departure include: Ben Russell's Trypps #7, which really did start its shorts program with a bang (or a bong, or a gong), as it took me forever to figure out we were looking in a mirror at that lady's face stay placid in the quivering frame; T.Marie's Slave Ship was projected smaller than the rest of the series but it still impressed the hell out of me because it flips the "watching paint dry" quip into something productive, forcing us to see an image not take shape but explore its own variance; The Mill and The Cross by Lech Majewski is somewhat confounding, especially from the 2nd row, but its palate is wide and deep and its ideas, though rooted in the narrative structure of the painting, feel yet more modern in how arrayed (not inter-related) they are, but then maybe Breugel was just ahead of his time (in any case I was too tired to offer a more cogent take); Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte is by turns cute and brilliant, with far more whimsy than any note could prepare me for, which isn't a bad thing since we should welcome some levity inside a largely wordless observation on cycles of life (it's not Disney, ok, though its like-minded brevity is a blessing) that still exist outside cities; Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty is nowhere near Disney and so full of stuff that I can't say what I think other than I like how she sees a dream life in a similar way to Lynch on a thematic level if nowhere close on a stylistic or formal level; and, finally, that big bad momma of some smoke and a shitload of mirrors, RWF's World on a Wire.

Believe me, I'm sorry to have missed plenty, but at the least I saw this large-scale goof of a thesis on modernity that's so funny and smart it's hard to believe people get daunted by its size. It's the kind of movie all cinephiles will enjoy, if not adore, and the kind they can never sell to non-movie-people they love. The running time is unavoidable in any description one might try to entice with due, in part, to the fact that the film just keeps getting better as it goes along, accruing incidents of insanity designed for maximum punchline effect. The gambit is easy enough, though, and largely ripped off: there's a government-funded project to build a computer world that mimics our own with a series of programmers, each holding the (invisible marionette) strings on fabricated subjects, going mad when they realize the very apocryphal truth of their own reality. Sounds familiar, huh? Well part of the joy in the thing is precisely its lower case, 16mm filmmaking that relies on performance and structure and sound design with very minimal set decoration to get at a sense of a future just past our present (even if the costumes are unmistakably 1973)—as well as a world enveloping itself. I'm astounded this is only the second Fassbinder film I've seen. But that just gives me another autodidact project, among so many, for after Cannes.

The trick is to step out of such impulses, though, when you're in a foreign country (4) (5) and look how I've failed today, spilling so many words. Whatever, I say; I say, my body saw the sun this morning—for a stroll to the market and beyond, for a lunch in the park and for a snack on the patio at my hotel with the owner. So out I go again, hoping for a cheap pizza and some good wine on a sidewalk where I can watch people in clean clothes try their best to act like they don't have a million eyes on them at all times, or actually convince themselves their lover's the only one looking at them—and only them!—in the world.

—Happy Mothers Day, moms
(1) He's an easy Bush stand-in, if I must use that name, and Michelle Williams' character has a line of dialog that only helps cement this link: "I don't know if he's ignorant or just plain evil."

(2) Not to mention the fact that you want to ply press people with clips to quiet at least one chorus of voices ringing in one corner of one ear.

(3) However, the selection of the man-eating scene was, as S.S. promised, shocking. Even when you see that scene in the context of the greater film it's brutal, gross and nigh gratuitous. Here, it rankled more than most and, again, I looked away for the duration, though that didn't spare me the sounds of the horny young dude screaming and choking and bleeding to death.

(4) I'll be in Europe for a while post-Cannes.

(5) That's the trick anywhere, I think, which is part of the point of World on a Wire: you should want to want your own body, you should want to live in it, you should want to move it and slap windows with delight at movement and light.

SFIFF54 #4: A Useful Life

by Ryland Walker Knight

Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life is a black and white short feature (only 67 minutes) that doesn't need your eyes to be excellent but your eyes could only help its cause since its main point is a flip on the title of Dave Kehr's new book: movies matter. Not only that, our reparatory houses matter no matter what somebody with a microphone* tells you. Matter of fact, this movie's got rather simple aims but it's also got enough love for the movies that any cinephile will likely fall in love with it. The style echoes Bresson's presentational purity (this desk, this bag, this staircase) and the film is full of so many references that they're too many to name here** but the two that matter most are pretty tough to miss.

First, as hinted by a title card up front (the entire credits precede the film), there's a speech culled from Mark Twain about lying and the value of lying in a world of lies delivered by our main man from the cinematheque, Jorge (played by Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek), in a law classroom when he nods, "Yes," to the query, "Are you the substitute teacher?" He finishes his speech (I wish I could quote it or find the passage online) as the real substitute teacher enters the classroom and leaves without confrontation. No one stops him. No one should. Besides, he's not the only one having fun in the scene: the student who asked him to take a role he was not meant for understands his practical joke and she laughs from her front row seat.

The second quote involves our man, alone, on a white staircase, trying out some Fred Astaire moves—up and down and around the steps—making himself smile for a good few minutes in an unbroken shot. It's truly a joyful moment, his movements filling the frame with an energy of something like discovery and everything like pleasure; that is, he's having a ball playing with this world. But it's not cloying because our man is more clumsy than graceful, moving in spurts, his hands still as slack at his sides as when he trudges Montevideo's streets or the hallways of his dying/dead home of cinema. It's not learning how to walk—he does that fine—, it's learning how to make use of what he learned in the dark, which is as good a classroom for life as any other arena. After all, the pick up line that works for Jorge isn't, "Care for a coffee?" Rather, with a bunch of teeth flashing: "Want to see a movie?"

* or an impressive New York apartment, or a lot of cash to withhold, or an institution's denial of said funds to hide behind

** in part because I could not tell you what other movies were mined for a lot of the sweeping score on the soundtrack

SFIFF54 #3: Convergence for your ship gone glass (5/25/11)

by Ryland Walker Knight

SFIFF54 #2: Waking up to life sometimes seems worse

by Ryland Walker Knight

— Getting naked with clothes on
Despite the worst projection/presentation I have ever experienced at the Kabuki*, Hahaha proved once again all you need to make a fabulous movie is a sense of humor and a couple of good actors. This flick has more than just a couple, though, with at least seven fully realized characters criss-crossing, eluding each other even, over a rainy week in the port town of Tongyeong. I don't need to really tell you who these characters are, though, nor what really happens, since the charm of the picture is just how conceptual it is without being clever or, as is often the case in Hong, overtly structural. Granted, there is a device: the present tense of the story is rendered in black and white still photographs, heard as narration, as two friends meet for drinks to talk about their recent visits to Tongyeong, ignorant of the peripheral role each played in the other's vacation. However, it becomes more of a tool for rhythm than anything else as these two stories cohere around the perpetually liminal space of the port with one friend finding a way to leave untethered to anything or anybody and the other finding his way towards the commitment he's been avoiding. True to its blood as a comedy, it ends in a marriage of sorts—let's call it a pledge—and a laugh.

Though the majority of the film is spent observing the problems boys encounter when they wear the bodies of men, the women somehow matter more even though we're never granted a look from inside their eyes. One lady keeps saying, "You see me," without realizing this boy-man does not know her, truly; rather, he knows how to compliment her—not to mention stalk her, to the point of breaking into her apartment while she's gone. Almost an axiom: men in a Hong picture, even when they are True, are always creeps. That is, they all drink too much and they all seem mainly interested in sex, not love, to say nothing of work. Which is odd since Hong's the ultimate professional. He debuted two pictures in 2010 for Heaven's sake. And this one is just superb. It's casual, like a good dinner: one story leads into another and after a couple hours you're full or you're wasted and it's time for one last joke before you hit the road satisfied you understand your friend, and maybe life, a little better.

A movie at opposite ends—not once does it picture a better world—Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below is practically apocalyptic from the get-go. As lucid an interpretation of a certain Mille plateaux perspective on our recent global crash climate, the film isn't strictly a political engine though its main structure as far as I can see is to de-center everything, to expose how this fiberobtic planet of moving monies is as thin as a glass wall is a look-don't-touch denial. To that end, I'm slightly sympathetic to the people who find the film "cold," but, that's a starting point not an argument. And, in fact, its distance is simply part of its Resnais-like openness. Its Biblical coda is (I'd like to think D&G would approve) crazy multivalent with significance moving in a million directions thanks to its oblique construction. A "complete" read is impossible for me at this point in part because I was so seduced by the aesthetics.

Looking forward to exploring more of Hochhäusler's work with the help of my Cargo editor, Ekkehard Knörer, who interviewed the filmmaker and his writing partner here (in German, but you can hit "translate" in Chrome and get the gist), who agrees I could probably make an argument about the apocalyptic gloom of this easy-to-allegorize but still-rich tower of depravity. (Bonus: any movie that makes Gang Gang Dance** a part of its characterization of the lead earns lots of points.) And I've said nothing about how excellent the acting is, nor the economy of the script, or any other thing I might want to praise, because I don't really need to, I'd hope; after all, compliments are nice but often boring. The most thrilling moments of this film are the ones where characters literally or metaphorically wake up because it's great to watch a face recognize a shift in the world they live in.

Which reminds me, it's okay to love somebody and tell a story about it. And Mysteries of Lisbon is nothing but stories. In fact, Ruiz makes a joke about the length and breadth of his film right at the start of the second part, presumably experienced after an intermission as we relished, by having one character tell another that he has a long story to tell and it will be mystifying as to why he's telling the story but that if his audience of one is patient and keeps listening everything will be told in the proper order for maximum cathartic effect. This is the film, of course, talking to us in the seats***. Because the film takes its time. And it repeats itself. We hear one story after another, with stories within stories, making audiences of every character at almost every encounter; or every character has a chance to play narrator. Which reminds me, the voice is a powerful tool.

This polyphony is a way to bend your ear, the same way that the way Ruiz circles scenes bends the space, and because we learn so many histories, motivations get bent into new senses or understandings of the world. The entire film is trying to bend you to its formal will, put you in a place, force you into roles you hear inside your own head, make you lose yourself as much as our first/primary narrator winds up losing himself through the course of his maze of a life. With most of the movie taking place indoors, a series of interlocking chambers, this makes rigorous sense thanks to Ruiz's roving eye so nimble to traverse a wall or glance past a hidden stairwell with a face gone sour listening to evil perpetrated beyond this private box of echoes. Again, audiences; again, multiplied; again, again. It's so interior that locales beyond walls remain concepts, fantasies, stages. And we remember the dioramas that double the scenes here and there where everything's a cut-out, a make believe, and you begin to wonder just how much of any of these stories are—here's a dumb word—real. Real is necessary, though, since it's the root of surreal and that's just what this labyrinth winds up: a magic mirror dolly into the light of a new life yet to be dreamt.

* The center of the frame was out of focus for long stretches and at two separate points in the last third of the film, the SFIFF digital slideshow of sponsor ads popped up in purple and pink to cover the screen.

** I feel like GGD is what I always wanted from Deerhoof and never got.

*** SFIFF, like any film festival, has a number of grey hairs who think they're retaining some grasp on high culture by coming to "obscure" foreign movies only to talk their way through whatever it is they've forked over however many dollars they had to in order to spend, as was the case here, four hours in the dark. My complaint is an old one: let the movie tell you how to watch it. And shut up. Asking, "Does this mean he's his son?" right before the reveal is announced (we all felt it, lady) is one hell of a way to not be subsumed by the images in front of your eyes. Which is a long, stupid rant shoved into a footnote so I could include a likely-useless bit of blogging tid bit saying that, thanks to a mom and a daughter under the impression that movie time is gab time, I switched seats at intermission from a perfectly good seat with a decent neck-bending ratio to the front row, which, though it is recessed thanks to a rather deep stage in K1, forced a slouch I did not want to make my body perform. I know, boo-fricking-hoo. At least my ticket was free and the movie itself didn't suffer because of my pet peeves.

SFIFF54 #1: Viewing Log #82: Lilac under linen [4/7/11 - 4/20/11]

by Ryland Walker Knight

— "landscapes and mindscapes"
One of the funny things about the San Francisco International Film Festival, which starts tonight, is that a good portion of its offerings are festival circuit "holdovers" that started their trek to SF last year at the Cannes Festival. Well, funny only because this year I'll be playing catch-up here and then leapfrogging a lot of tour stops by hitting Cannes in May. Granted, this year's Croisette selections are not quite as appetizing as a lot of us had hoped; however, it's still the premiere fest and it still costs an arm and a leg to be a part of it. But more on that adventure later. Here, I'm concerned with laying out what my last few weeks in town look like from a cinephile standpoint.

There's certainly plenty to see at SFIFF54 (pronounced "s'fiffty-four" by some), and I do plan on attending daily, but I also don't want to get burnt out on a bunch of movies all at once. So, as often as I can, I'm going to just see one film a day. And then I'll throw up a quick take here that night or the next morning. Given that two of my most anticipated titles are 272-minute and 212-minute affairs, this one-a-day dictum should be easy enough on those two Saturdays: this weekend I'll settle in for Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon for the entire afternoon, starting right at noon, and the following week I plan to head over to the PFA for the 35mm screening of Fassbinder's World on a Wire. Yet there are a number of shorter films as well, such as Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life, which is only about an hour long and easy to pair with an evening of avant-garde shorts in a program called The Deep End, with newer work from people I respect and enjoy like, say, Ben Russell and Vincent Grenier to name two of the nine featured filmmakers.

I only caught two press screenings prior to the festival and I don't think I'll be looking at any screeners but I do have a copy of Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg that I've been meaning to watch ever since I saw/felt Dogtooth. The two films I have seen, I should say, are Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light and Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Both of these films will open in the Bay in the summer months so, logistics wise, there is no real rushing need for you to see them at the festival. However, both are very good pictures. The Guzman is a tad less poetic than I'd've hoped (in fact it's kind of hokey near the close) but the Herzog, though I could quibble with it, is just great. You might know by now that it's his first and last film in 3-D, but his use of the medium makes so much more sense than so many productions force fed at kids these days. Ostensibly a documentary, as they often are, the 3-D is less about realism than it is about phenomena and creating new realities for your eyes; that is, the experience you have seeing these rare paintings matters because you're given a sense of their physical depth and of their curves for light to play against. You see new movement of old visions. It's thrilling, moving even, and it should only be seen as big as possible.

The main highlight of the run, for me, is likely the evening with the Tindersticks at the Castro (more here), which will feature clips of Claire Denis movies accompanied by live performances of the scores of the films in the clip reel. Truth be told, it sounds like quite the nerd event (it could be a major let down), but I'm more than game to see those images and hear those sounds in that theatre. If all goes according to plan, I'll have something extra on this event.

Other items on the list include: Hong's Hahaha, Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below, Kelly Reichart's Meek's Cutoff (which I hafta catch at SFIFF54, despite its wider release a week or so later, because I'll be gone for so long), Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty (which sounds even better than the superb Bluebeard), Lee Anne Schmitt's The Last Buffalo Hunt (in part because Haz liked her last film at SFFIFF52 and in part because James Laxton shot some of it), Michelangelo Frammartino's Le quattro volte, Lech Majewski’s The Mill and The Cross, J.P. Sniadecki & Véréna Paravel's Foreign Parts, Florent Tillon's Detroit Wild City, Otar Iosseliani's Chantrapas, Andrei Ujica's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, Mike Cahill's Another Earth, Romain Goupil's Hands Up, Christopher Munch's Letters from the Big Man (one of Sean Uyehara's favorites), and Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy. There are yet others, of course, but those are the ones I'm targeting, the ones I'd feel less "ok" skipping, the ones I hope I can find something to say about in a timely manner.

In any case, I do hope to offer more than glib summaries. But I've got these last two weeks of dayjob work that I must focus on before the fun of the festivals takes over my life, fostering a whole new set of anxieties (am I writing enough? is it worthy of eyes? where's the coffee? why can't I stay awake? is there food in my beard? do I stink? how bad can my posture get?) to wade through. So, until then—let's say, Saturday—end that week with a bang! Any way you want to! Any way you can!

— I thought it'd be more fun to go down the street this way.