Hot in here: Aide-toi le ciel t'aidera Telluride #6, Rendez-vous #2

by Ryland Walker Knight

Félicité Wouassi stars as Sonia, mother of three and wife to a deadbeat, in François Dupeyron's Aide-toi le ciel t'aidera. She broils through the picture, fierce and sexy, lending it her always-brimming face and her forever-fighting grace. Routinely shot from a canted angle below, Dupeyron builds a portrait of Sonia as larger than her station—although, of course, she is never quite free from her life's limits. There will always remain an obstacle. What keeps Sonia afloat, we see, is her understanding that, equally, there is always a solution. Sonia's solutions, though, often startle. They hardly look like the right choices, but she owns these choices and she does make things happen, and settle, with an eye to consequence.

Set during the 2003 heat wave, the image washes yellow and red through most of the film, a picture of heat as has yet been captured (as far as I have seen) on a digital format. The beads of sweat on skin glisten and the pools under arms (or across backs) on shirts stick, feel like a too-hot summer. It's not Spike Lee and Ernest Dickerson's celluloid smear, it's some kind of glitchy pop of light punctuating a field of humidity. The weight of the boundless and roving camera rests in the image's diffusion, somehow, where color is like paint, a layer unto itself. This is nothing new, of course, as plenty have proven, like Godard (from Contempt to Eloge), and it's not quite Costa, but this desire to give face to the weight of poverty is another refreshing element reflected in the film's built-on-proximity mise-en-scène. If pressed, I'd say there's more Cassavetes than anything in the background here with all the focus on the face and all the insistence on the event. There's a lot of thisness.

A funny (albeit grave) little film that may, with a little help from this Rendez-vous series exposure, gain a following and blossom into some kind of "art-house hit" or what have you, I saw Aide-toi initially at the Telluride Film Festival last summer. I'm happy it went on to win Wouassi an award at Toronto, and that it appears now, in New York at least, for more to see. When we saw it included in this program, my friend Martha and I asked ourselves, "How come we never wrote about it back then? Or, at least, made more than a passing mention of it to more people than our non-internet friends?" Part of it was due to the rush of that weekend. Another part is that Aide-toi, although it hits all its targets, is not as immediately arresting and demanding (to say complicated and conflicted) a film as, say, Waltz With Bashir. In fact, Dupeyron's film may be too good (too fun?) for its own good. It will likely draw a lot of "sure, I get it's great; so what?" reviews, and could very well attract a certain middlebrow audience, but for some reason I think it will fade into that fog of unjust American neglect.

—All while the assuredly more pointed (although plenty lovely) L'Heure d'été by Olivier Assayas will be distributed by IFC Films in May and, thanks to its (ahem, more white) cast and its typically digestible ideas about art's worth, it will be an easy thing to laud.

Found Facts. Telluride 2008. Telluride #5

by Ryland Walker Knight

With little footage to edit, there was only one way for this one to come together. However, I'm rather certain anything I shot there would wind up in a similar arrangement. And the fact (these facts) remain: this is what I culled from that magic. Yet this is hardly a full picture. Just another sliver, a few dots arrayed. To get a broader view (or more personal, too? I dunno), you can take a look at the flickr set my New Good Friend Rebecca has uploaded by clicking right here. There's a lot of sky there, too. More faces, though. And faces are good. Especially these two doing this and mine about to burst past the banister. I think Drew is saying, "Get big, gurh!" past Martha and Rebecca. We laughed a lot. And, I will admit, the 'zza was better than the burritos; and my tacos fell apart real quick. So happy we skipped Hunger to play in the sun.
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Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon - So Much Love To Give (CD Promo Club Mix) (zshare)
Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon - So Much Love To Give (CD Promo Club Mix) (imeem)
[To whom it may concern: If you'd like me to remove these, let me know. I'm gonna trust it's cool for now. We got lots of love to give here, and that includes this song. So, thanks!]
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Note: Ignoramus that I am, I just discovered imeem has video options. I shall continue to upload these to my youtube channel as well, since youtube is mega reliable and (cough) attracts traffic, but I plan on hosting the imeem versions here on the blog because, well, because they look prettier and imeem somehow understands, at a fundamental level, this whole digital is mosaic thing. Oh, and, you can (please) go here to see the previous Found Facts missives a little clearer. Nope: I'm not gonna go back and change the earlier posts.

VINYL IS PODCAST #1: Almodovar, Ray, Melodrama Telluride #4 UPDATED: iTunes link.

by Ryland Walker Knight and Mark Haslam

Here we are, joining the internet radio fray, with our first attempt at a podcast. This is an introductory test run in a lot of ways but I think you might get a kick out of the Eddie Huntington song we've chosen to use as intro/outro music this week. We experimented with a lot of hosting options and finally stumbled on the really cool site, podomatic, thanks to my friend Daniel's usage (he's "casting" his last course at UC Berkeley and you can listen here). We've got our own page there: CLICK HERE TO SEE IT and subscribe to the RSS and, if you like, download the file for your ride into work. As for this episode, there's a lot of rambling, a lot of dead air, and my nasal voice -- all great selling points. Please, listen! You might have guessed, but we talk about Pedro Almodovar, Nicholas Ray, and melodrama with detours into some talk of my Telluride trip and Slavoj Zizek and a little bashful scolding (with a smile) along the way. And, as the song says, don't be shy, let yourself go with the attraction, and talk at us in the comments. If you want the song, you can grab it here and dance your butts off (although, if the owners request its removal, we'll happily and heartily comply).
"Live in the world, or something."
UPDATE: If you want to subscribe in iTunes, please click here and enjoy. To those who already have, we thank you, and await your suggestions, comments, critiques, gripes, enthusiasms. Again: I hope we get liven things up a little more on the next episode. If anything, there will be another (smart, kind) voice to break up our monotone madness.

Telluride #3: The image is alive. Waltz With Bashir.

by Ryland Walker Knight

[Waltz With Bashir had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It was the first official screening we in the symposium attended. As can be expected around these parts, lots of life happened in the week and a half between that viewing and this posting. Sony Pictures Classics has bought the film and will distribute it beginning in December after its festival run concludes. It's certain to be brought up again as more people see it; the opportunities will present themselves soon enough. Until then...]

Amber flares shower past high rise hotels on the beach of Beirut and youthful Ari Folman floats naked off the shore, ignorant and immobile. Two fellow Israeli soldiers wade to the foreground and Folman stands up to follow them ashore in silhouette where they dress in fatigues, their pliant limbs cut against the golden night skyline. In the streets at dawn, Folman turns a corner into a wave of women clad in black burkas wailing; as the cavalcade of cries pass the stationary soldiers, Folman stands fork, impassive. Survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, these wives and sisters flood the frame aimless and wretched, crowding Folman. Twenty-four years later, the grown man Folman cannot remember where he was during the massacre despite being stationed somewhat close to the bloodshed. In fact, he hasn't thought of it in ages. But after hearing his friend describe a dream about rabid dogs, and its links to the Lebanese Civil War where he shot canines not people, Folman has this dream about water and flares and the hurt of it all without specifics. To counter as much as to document this plaintive and guilty resonance, he makes a film. Encouraged that investigation produces understanding, even if such a project forges intuitive links that proffer more questions in lieu of definite answers, Folman starts to draw out his past. Waltz With Bashir is that labor of and for understanding.

The film opens in that dream about dogs: racing through a city, plowing through cafes and intersections, their snarls wet and fierce, seeking the dreamer, Boaz Rein Buskila, ragged. Not rotoscoped like Linklater and not as ugly as an Aqua Teen bit, the flash animation juts and floats in delicious washes of color. The dogs don't quite run but glide, the rain doesn't quite fall but simply slant, tables jerk upend and bodies skid aside; nothing is "real." Indeed, the real is the question. Bashir is organized around series of interviews that yield memories recounted as dreams, including one that explicitly goes into the dream world. Carmi Cna'an opens his war story, perhaps the most gorgeous sequence in the film where darkness pervades the frame, on a boat, where nerves get the better of him and, after vomiting, he lays down to escape: "When I'm scared I fall asleep and hallucinate." He dreams a giant, naked, blue woman boards the now-teal boat to save him; she brings him into the water where he lays between her legs looking back at the yacht, which promptly explodes a blood red. Another interviewee, Roni Dayag, tells a story about water: after an ambush, he flees to the coast to wait for dark; under nightfall he slips into the ocean and swims countless miles south in retreat, occasionally dipping under the surface to avoid helicopters' spotlights and armory, only to find the unit he thought abandoned him (and that he thought he abandoned). Folman's best friend, Ori Sivan, tells us what we know later: water is associated with guilt and fear, a fake haven from the blood on shore, that Ari's recurring dream (however material and palpable) is a projection. Thus, this Waltz is a reckoning, a search to account for Ari's intentionality, how his mind (which ours becomes in the film) has failed to be and is directed anew towards this terrible lacuna.

Ari understands he will never erase his (or Israel's) complicity, but if he can flesh out the picture, he can provide a voice to their limitedness that asks forgiveness without assuming endline benediction. The spike of the final five minutes reasserts that: after an animated zoom into Ari's face, standing at the edge of the Sabra and Shatila camps, watching another wave of wailers, the image breaks form into video coverage from 1982. Not quite a Kiarostami coda, but certainly effective, we see these women cry along with the image; the digital bleeds, combing the bodies massed in corners or piled in the thoroughfare, the trace immediately ephemeral, the world as a glitch. It's unmistakable -- this happened and you can't hide from it. But the animation isn't papering over guilt that the video unveils. It's a direct mediation, an admission that we mediate our memories, that memory may be matter but its image is metabolized over time.

Ari shows Roni a picture of himself from 1982: "Do you recognize me there?" Roni, always blank, offers, "No." Ari says, "Me neither." Roni begins his story and we see a tank troop set a camera on the canon, pointed back at the quartet; right before the picture clicks, the camera falls off that arm of destruction out of frame. The camera fails, lies even. This is not representation. Film is creation, making material. Unfortunately, this brilliant, subtle moment is trumped by a much larger explication of the same in a protracted monologue by a psychiatrist Ari visits who tells a story about another veteran who dealt with being in the war by pretending he was filming, pretending he was behind a camera; until the camera broke and his mind with it. However, Bashir does not suffer too heavily under this or other instances of literal interpretation. Its queries about documents and film documentary, about how we seek absolution and catharsis, about the ethics of the image -- all stimulate imagination and investigation rather than shut it down simple and closed. The film exists in tension with all this evidence, pushing its material, its memories (at one point across the globe and back in time from the Netherlands of now to that West Bank of then) past general dread into singular horror. If anything, at bottom this Waltz against death reminds that the image (memory, understanding, light) is alive and deserves (demands) our accountability at all events.

Telluride #2: Amor fati.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Two very different films that linked up rather well before and after lunch yesterday. It's hard to compare them at first glance but there's something going on in that programming choice beyond the masculine masterpiece of old followed by a pretty smart contemporary comedy populated primarily with women. A quick reduction: Sternberg's phenomenal understanding of the cinema as material as much as medium gives his mise-en-scene a palpable quality of light (whites burn, blacks pool, smoke hangs dense), and amplifies the melodrama in ways you don't see now. Leigh's new film is just so full of affection (the camera pushes in close and stays there) for its characters that I could not resist its hilarious and stubbornly optimistic embrace of this world, which elevates its perhaps simple story. I was pretty giddy, and touched: both films subscribe to that notion that life is worth living, and loving, even when it gets ugly, despite the troubles of acting in the world (with other people, by its rules, as love). Both offer enormous generosity towards their characters, but each takes a different tack to profess the frequent failure but persistent drive to love everything that pushes lives forward: The Last Command is a tragedy structured around loss (of memory, of capacities, of meaning) that ends with a (rather triumphant and restorative) death while Happy-Go-Lucky is a comedy of manners, of sorts, structured around lessons about how to move within the world with productive, joyful creativity. Plus, Sally Hawkins is nothing but lovely, even when she's annoying, because her Poppy really seems to believe that there's good to do, even if it's just putting your smile into the world.

Telluride #1: A look ahead.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After a raucous eight hour drive complete with lunch stop in Paonia, I had time for the briefest of showers before our first Symposium function where, among other pleasantries, we were given our schedule for the weekend. Suffice to say, this looks to be fun. This morning and early afternoon are our pretty much our only free time so I thought I'd go ahead and detail what I've got in store ahead. And this is just a sliver of what the festival has to offer this year. Still, I don't think I'll be able to offer precise thoughts on all of this, but I'll give it a shot. Stay tuned.
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Friday: Most of the afternoon will be spent with the symposium, talking to Ken Burns, Peter Sellars and Paolo Cherchi-Usai. Linda Williams said Burns and Sellars have something of a spiel to impart but she hope we'll be able to ask some questions, and that we'll definitely have the opportunity for good conversation with Cherchi-Usai. Given his involvement with Kevin's project, I hope I can ask him about the role of criticism in film history, and preservation, beyond the obvious "more eyes can't hurt" argument. After that there's the "Opening Night Feed" with the rest of the town. Tonight we get to see Waltz With Bashir (dig) and A Private Century (a series of short films by Jan Sikl about memory using amateur "home movies").

Saturday: We get started early discussing films with the group before seeing The Last Command (Sternberg, 1928) before a quick lunch and an early afternoon screening of Mike Leigh's new film, Happy-Go-Lucky. In the afternoon we get to talk to one the festival's tributary David Fincher (others: Jean Simmons, Jan Troell, Richard Shickel) and Leigh before evening screenings of Youssou Ndour (a profile of the Senegalese musician and his plight to bridge an understanding of Islam outside "the fundamentalist monopoly of discourse surrounding [his religion]") and Innocence Unprotected, brought to Telluride by Festival Guest Director, Slavoj Zizek (this will be my second Makavejev in a cinema; that essay by Gary Morris is featured in the festival guide).

Sunday: Another early morning discussion followed by the Indian film Firaaq, which Salman Rushdie has accompanied to help promote. Directly after that we get Laughing Til It Hurts, a group of silent comedies presented by Paolo Cherci Usai and his Pordenone Film Festival; this sounds like a real highlight. I hope there's time for a bite to eat before we hit the next film, With a Little Help from Myself (or, translated literally from French as "Help Yourself, and Heaven Will Help You"), from François Dupeyron, director of Monsieur Ibrahim. Our afternoon discussion features Dupeyron and his lead actress Félicité Wouassi first, followed by a conversation with Rushdie and Firaaq's director, Nandita Das. Sunday night ends with a screening of The Fall of Berlin, another Zizek pick.

Monday: Again we discuss over breakfast before our last screening of Nicolas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, another pick by Zizek in his sidebar, "Neglected Noirs." The last official symposium activities are a noon seminar and Labor Day Picnic followed by a two hour block with Zizek to wrap it all up.
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Again, the widget.

Throw a rock, board a plane. Fly that flag and sing.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Spent Tuesday in the sun with those guys and that girl; Wednesday is her birthday. The Yuba River was low but still perfect. I'm a bit burnt and worn out. I should be in bed. I need my sleep with all the activity to come this weekend. But, you know, fuck it. This little adventure should be a lot of fun. Definitely something new. Guess I have to come to terms with the fact that, since the TIFF schedule says it's hosting the North American Premiere, I won't get to see the new Denis; ditto Che. However, I'm sure there will be other high profile pictures. For instance, Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabasa is not on the TIFF docket; ditto Waltz with Bashir. On top of the new stuff, there will be Zizek to contend with (or let go and enjoy) and a bunch of fellow film fiends to meet. I still have yet to decide if I'll make the time to blog from Telluride but my guess is that I'll write a journal by hand (in some fashion) and transcribe the cool stuff for a longer essay, or some other form of criticism (dun dun dun), once I'm home. Seems like the only way when they say we'll be busy from 8am to midnight every day. And when I'm really tired, and I'm too jazzed to sleep, like now, I can settle into two books, among millions, every kid should read after s/he graduates college. I mean, de Certeau's is what every book should be called -- and it's not some new age mess; it's a thoughtful account of how we operate in all the systems big and banal that we encounter each day through (dig this) what he likes to call "a science of the singular." Then there's Burroughs, a man it's taken me some time to understand. I don't know if do, yet; I may soon. Returning-to-class Daniel understands, or claims to, and I grant him what he's related here. (See: it's about singularity, too.) As I get ready to fly into Denver, a city careening, I hope I find some Johnsons, and not Vampires, on my trip. I trust I will see both. As ever, I'm just hoping for a decent ratio around me and that I don't play Vampire too much, or (uh-oh) too often.

Going to Telluride 2008. UPDATED.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I've known for a while now that I'll be attending this year's Telluride Film Festival as part of the Student Symposium. But now that I know I've got my travel arrangements squared away, I thought I'd go ahead and blog about this exciting opportunity to invite recommendations (restaurants, bars, where to run, etc), donations (hey, it ain't cheap), stories (who did you meet?), any and all kinds of enthusiasms for one of the most unique film festivals I know. So unique that it won't announce its lineup for a while yet. But if tradition holds there will probably be a few of the Cannes '08 films, maybe some 2007 hold overs, and perhaps even a Hitchcock screening given Slavoj Zizek's post as Guest Director. Plus, as a member of this Symposium, I'll get the opportunity to meet and talk with the luminary artists of the festival; not to mention hang out with a bunch of peers similarly interested (I presume; to a certain degree) in film and film writing.

What I'm maybe most curious about are these opportunities to meet filmmakers and actors because I'm simply unsure what to ask them. I'm usually so wrapped up in my own reading of films that I hardly think of what I would want to ask a filmmaker. For instance: I joined a Facebook group for the Symposium and there were some pictures of an alumi standing with Eric Bana. First, Eric Bana is huge, like 6'3" -- and buff. Second: the first question I think of asking him is something idiotic and shallow like, "Is Marie-Josée Croze as gorgeous in real life as she is in pictures? What about Jennifer Connelly?" I mean, I could ask something like "What's been your most favorite job? Which director did you enjoy working with the most?" But those are going to lead to pretty canned answers about stuff I don't really care about. I'd rather learn what he likes to eat and drink; what's his favorite movie; what movie does he wish he could have acted in (from any period); whether or not he's gone river rafting. Sure, I could question him about the worth of film as an art and all that but I would only want it to come up in conversation. Maybe that's the problem: it's hard to get to that stage in "regular" interviews. Local hero Michael Guillen is excellent at generating a conversation (in printed interviews and in person) but he's a much more outgoing, lively personality than silly, self-conscious me. If somebody like Marie-Josée Croze shows up in Telluride I'll be happy if I don't blush too red, let alone ask her a question.

Perhaps this speaks to my general interest in film as personal accountability. By my lights, a film writer's job is easier said than done: to account for his or her experience of the film and check it against the associations it produces (which change, screening to screening) to build some kind of evaluation of the picture. More and more I'm beginning to realize just how much of me there is in everything I write. Even when I try to avoid the first person, I'm betraying myself (whether my readers know it or not), which produces this constant stammering: the need to offer as many angles on a sentence as possible. But what's the value in me? I'm trying to talk about the art. That's always the goal: to turn out from in. I spend enough hours a day with myself. When I look back, the essays I'm most proud of either completely absent, or completely embrace, the words "me" and "I" (such as "The Touch", or "2007: It's okay to play catch-up", respectively). This is a prime example of what some people like to call the "subject-object problem" and what a lot of the philosophy I gravitate towards grapples with mostly through form, through these kinds of structural dialectics, through what I've called "stammering." But this kind of heady talk can quickly bore most people I talk to. I don't think Eric Bana or Marie-Josée Croze are all that interested in how we get out of the subject-object relationship through varying practices, such as Cavell's skepticism or Wittgenstein's language games or Gadamer's horizons or Freud's psychoanalysis or Zizek's Lacanian-Marxist approach. Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Eric Bana sought that role in Munich because he was interested in all the philosophical-theoretical crap at play (besides the obvious political and social agendas) therein. (I could probably write an interesting argument about Munich as a film about tradition as hermeneutics, about how we choose to participate in or diverge from tradition, how we define tradition not as a concept but as a form of life. Of course, you can write that argument about any number of films -- maybe any film, straight up -- but it's pretty unavoidable in Spielberg's almost-masterpiece.) In any event, I could strike up this conversation with Zizek himself, right? Maybe that's what I should mark on the calendar: the possibility of a seminar with the guest director and the attendant opportunity to talk hermeneutics with him. Failing that, there's going to be movies playing, of course, that I can talk about with my fellow symposium participants.

Looking over Telluride's program for last year, I see a lot of the Cannes '07 films, which makes me start to look back at the big films from Cannes '08 that might make their way to Colorado this year. Luckily, Andy Horbal already did something like this, and I can look to his post, titled, simply, "Cannes '08". Of the likely candidates for Telluride, the Cannes pictures I'd most hope to catch in Colorado are (all links to David Hudson's tireless Daily GreenCine round up posts): Un Conte de Noel, 24 City, Waltz With Bashir, Gommorah, La Mujer Sin Cabeza, Synechdoche, New York, and, of course, the uncut version of Che. I'm sure there are others from Cannes '08 that are not on my radar (for whatever reason) and I'm sure there are others not from Cannes '08 that are not on my radar (for the reason that film does not start and stop with Cannes) that will surprise me. One title from the past year of festival circuitry I'm hoping Telluride schedules is Reygadas' Stellet Licht, since it has yet to secure US distribution either for a theatrical run or a home video release; and because I'd love to see it again on as big and wide a screen as possible; and because it might mean an appearance from Carlos Reygadas, a man I would love to talk to about film (sure) and life (more), a man that (I get the sense) has lived*. Another I hope to see is Barry Jenkin's Medicine for Melancholy, which I missed at SFIFF, for all the reasons Michael talked about here and for the other reason that the trailer is oh so charming.

If none of these films happen to show up in Telluride, I trust the experience will be fun and eye opening. I'll be sure to take pictures, and write. I haven't even gotten to the Silent Film Festival yet, and I've been feeling the strain of not earning much money, but with the Pedro Costa retro in March and my private (at home) Hou Hsiao Hsien retro these past two months, not to mention all those hours spent thinking and writing about Michael Mann and Terrence Malick (among other names) for my thesis this past spring semester (still holding onto it), 2008 is shaping up as quite an educational and enjoyable year.

*Also, I could ask him in person what he thought the chances of an America release are now given the shuttering of Tartan US. Looks slim. Such a weird thing, this recession, right? We can't even get screenings of those Mexican films with dialogue in Plautdietsch in the States now. Sheesh! What a world!

UPDATE, as if anybody scrolls this far down the page: I got an email from Lawrence Boone with news of the fest and with code for this Festival widget. I think some other bloggers have put it up on their sites so I figured, what the heck, can't hurt to help promote just a bit more. I mean, I am rather excited. So here's the widget, with all kinds of features, like restaurant guides and photos, all in one tiny 350 by 600 pixel package.