Round sound and stopped clocks. Stellet Licht sees sun spots.

by Ryland Walker Knight

While Carlos Reygadas' first two pictures are without a doubt more immediately impressive (to say more shocking) than his third film, neither Japòn nor Battle in Heaven have anything on Stellet Licht when it comes to ebullient photography. For all the flashy formalism, though, Reygadas has made a quieter, more tender film than before because of this picture's remediation (evolution?) of his signature aesthetic preoccupations. If Battle in Heaven shuttered the broken wall country vistas of Japòn in Mexico City’s urban myopia, Stellet Licht nearly strips the world of material frameworks: here, the glass of windows (and of the camera lens), coupled with the light of the sun, and its splayed presence (or its dark absence), are enough for Reygadas to round the pleated space of his films (of the spirit). Sure, frank sex still plays a part. But those unabashed lens flares, as well as the film’s impeccable and complex sound design, background Reygadas’ concerns with the messiness of sex and desire to foreground the relative purity of, and paramount confusion between, love and faith. Perhaps it’s Stellet Licht’s gentility that shocks most of all.

The film opens gentle enough with a protracted time-lapse dawn accompanied by sounds of the world awakening. Yes, Genesis. The single-take sunrise is gorgeous, to be sure, but the exaggerated sounds (as in a Bresson offering) frame the film as much as the light of a new day: animals bleat, wind whips, and, once indoors at a breakfast table silent with prayer, a clock ticks. The prayer lasts long enough for Reygadas to introduce us to patriarch Johan, his wife Esther, and their stable of six children, in perfect compositions that isolate the parents and group the children. After a mostly-silent breakfast, and a reminder “I love you” goodbye, Esther and the children leave Johan alone, at the end of the table, in the middle of the image, directly underneath that won't-quit clock. Johan sits quiet, staring at a spoon. Then he stands, retrieves a footstool, and steps up to stop the clock. Sitting again in the still of the room, the camera pushes in closer, and Johan cries.

The story is simple: Johan has fallen in love with another woman, Marianne. The complication is Johan still loves Esther, and he has been completely open about his affair from the beginning. This proves too much for Esther’s heart to bear, naturally, but the amazing thing about Reygadas’ film is its lack of judgment. There’s no scolding. Or, even when there is a scold, it’s undercut by empathy a second later.

I am told the great act of humility that closes Stellet Licht owes a debt to Dreyer’s Ordet, which I have not seen (nor have I seen any of his films, for that matter). Some critics have used this against the picture; others do not. I imagine Reygadas is smart enough that as much as he may inherit from Dreyer, his vision of the scene is singular. For instance, I doubt the Swedish film uses Jacques Brel as a touchstone for humble, beautiful, sexy gallantry. The inclusion of Brel’s 1967 performance of “Les Bonbons” (look below), viewed in a van with the doors closed, says as much about the gentle spirit of Stellet Licht and its characters, as does the supposed Dreyer quote. For one, it’s a song, a combination of storytelling and music. For another, it’s a filmed version of the song, introduced first on a television, then, bookended by fades up from and down into black, reprised across the full widescreen as a cropped television image. In a film about a remote group of Mennonites (a Christian Anabaptist denomination that resists pictorial representations) in Northern Mexico, this minor movie watching is an immanently suspect activity for its characters. But if Johan is testing his faith by falling in love with Marianne, what should stop him from pushing the boundaries of his faith with music videos, as he loves music, too. Earlier in the film we see Johan at his most excited singing along to a song on the radio, circling the camera, and his best friend, in his truck, in a patented Reygadas 360 (or a dizzying 1080 as it is here). Perhaps the overriding thematic question thus far in Reygadas’ films is “Where and how do love and faith intersect and interact?” The hilariously baffling thing about his films is that Reygadas wants to answer that question with every single shot he composes: he sees the beauty in everything.

Filmbrain’s mid-essay assertion points towards how I find myself drawn to these three marvels Reygadas has provided us with, as it speaks to certain filmic obsessions I harbor:

As with his other films, Stellet Licht’s tremendous power comes not from its narrative, but from Reygadas’ aesthetics; a masterful, poetic blending of son et image. The film exists at the intersection of John Ford and Terrence Malick, what with its epic landscapes, use of shadow, and depiction of nature and the elements as almost sentient beings.

It’s this regard for the “real matter” of the natural world, in tandem with his generosity towards his characters, that makes Reygadas’ films so special. You’re as likely to see a close up of a dog, or an orchid, or catch an umbrella flying through the corner of the frame, as you are likely to encounter a human face (or other body parts of humans, for that matter) front and center. In that regard, it’s easy to identify why finding Apichatpong Weerasethakul, along with Reygadas, this year has meant so much to me as a viewer, and a thinker. Their brand of what I want to call philosophy in film is one born not simply of humanistic striving for transcendence (although you can see that struggle in both filmmakers’ oeuvres thus far), but from how humans live in a world filled with things that are not human—spiritual or material, aural or visual, it makes no difference. So when Johan’s father starts the clock again at the close of Stellet Licht, it signals a choice of how to live in such a world. Ignoring the world doesn’t work. Faith and love are about respectful, thoughtful attention—to the world, to the spirit, to the life lead here on earth under the sun and stars among all cries of pain and delight heard across all time, clock or no clock.


[Final Notes: I wish I could have shown you more from the film but this will have to do. Also, I saw the picture at the Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts Screening Room on Sunday night and the projection was a little wonky, which made it a little harder to gauge certain scenes, as Reygadas plays with focal points in this picture in distinct way. So, as nice as it was nice to see in a theatre, I look forward to my DVD copy so I can play with screenshots and revisit all I missed. Even this post didn't get to talking in earnest about all that goes on in this. I promise that one day down the line I'll get into it real serious with his films. (Still learning, always learning, right?) Until then, can't wait for the next one, Carlos!]

Susana: Buñuel at Play

by Steven Boone

Luis Buñuel's Susana (1951) might be his worst, most entertaining film. After shooting his low-budget masterpiece, Los Olvidados in 1950, Buñuel was on rocky terms with Mexican audiences. That film represented Mexico as a nightmare in which failed social services and a hostile or indifferent economy resulted in children tossed aside like trash. Bunuel's producer, Oscar Dancigers, had agreed to let the aging surrealist make one personal film for every two commercial ones. Buñuel had delivered, with two crowd-pleasers, the musical Gran Casino (1946) and the screwball comedy The Great Madcap (1949). But the hostility toward Los Olvidados ended Danciger's and Buñuel's scheme just when it really got going. The director made Susana for another producer, Sergio Kogan. (The ironic postscript is that Los Olvidados went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes before its release to worldwide acclaim in 1952.)

With Susana, Buñuel honed an elegant "invisible" storytelling style that would reach perfection in Viridiana. This might account for the overacting and bombastic musical score: Maybe Buñuel was so caught up with camera choreography (on a tight 20-day schedule) that he let the performances run amok. Seen today, the bombast works as camp. It kind of fits this (literally) stormy melodrama about a female juvenile delinquent (Rosita Quintana) who single-handedly wrecks a wealthy Mexican rancher's home by seducing him, his son and his most trusted ranchero. Fernando Soler (who brings the most subtlety of the entire cast) plays the rancher as a tough-minded middle aged jefe who Susana reduces to a fool in love.

Buñuel uses the horny premise to indulge his leg fetish and favorite sacreligious themes. Buxom, hot-blooded Susana prays to the "God of prisons" to bust her out of juvie-- and He does. She escapes to don Guadalupe's ranch and proceeds to eat every man in sight. If you watch Susana without sound, it's as feverish and irrational as something like L'age d'Or. Buñuel's camera gets away with sensuality and eroticism less visually adroit directors wouldn't know how to manage.

Here's a sample of that craftiness, set to David Axelrod's song A Divine Image:

[Editor's Note: This is a belated submission to the Luis Buñuel blog-a-thon (hosted by Flickhead) that ran last week. I was planning on seeing Los Olvidados to contribute a tandem piece with Steve's delightful little appreciation, here, but life got in the way. So, if you want more on Buñuel from me, you'll have to wait. Luckily, thanks to a special gift from Senor Boone, I will be able to watch a lot of the Mexican films sooner than later. So stay tuned. -- RWK]

CINCO DE VINYL!

In honor of none other than yours truly's birthday on this holiest of holy drunken days here on the Gold Coast, we thought we'd offer a series of essays about Mexican filmmaking. What with the recent aint-it-cute trend to name Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu the Three Amigos, I, along with other colleagues, have thought to ask, what about the rest of the Mexican filmmakers that have made or are making seminal works?

My personal investment centers around a film I saw not too long ago, Battle in Heaven, and its director, Carlos Reygadas, who I'd like to argue trumps all Three Amigos. His cinema owes a lot to his admitted hero (and, yes, mine too), Andrei Tarkovsky as well as the hyper-aestheticized quotidian of Bresson's films: (1) the long take is preferred; (2) time in space is foregrounded, situating the film and the viewer inside the film's world; (3) all the actors are non-actors as to retain a level of realism -- and to deny viewers any pre-conceived notions of the actors, and by consequence, the characters, the film; (4) there's a religious aspect, of course, as the title alludes to; (5) there's a transcendence through both sex and violence, which links Reygadas to another Bresson acolyte, Paul Schrader; (6) sex is something of pageant but never exploitative, it happens as would anything else; (7) things just happen. But there's more of that below. For now, I'd like to cede the space to my fellow writers who will explain a bit of their approach to this project, this day, this neighbor of ours.
[Ryland Walker Knight]

* * *

I cannot claim to be an expert on anything related to Mexican cinema. I know that I have enjoyed everything else Mexican that I've experienced so far, including cuisine, music, and literature. Sure, I've seen some of the more modern, mainstream stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Amores Perros. And I am not ashamed to have liked the hell out of those. So, after hearing such good stuff about Carlos Reygadas from RWK, I knew that the time was right to check out something that kinda flew under the radar screen for most of my fellow countrymen. I chose Reygadas' first feature length, Japón, which was released a few years back in 2002. My mind was blown, in the good way. I'll try to show how, below. Viva La Raza!
[Leile One]

* * *

Our first guest column, by Jennifer Stewart, speaks for itself. Her first paragraph:
I've tried to begin Pan's Labyrinth's apologia where the sting of your charge leaves it: namely, that its gory violence is voyeuristic, useless, and empty. This attack is a complicated one, I think. Without a principled objection to onscreen face pulverizing, then you must say what it is about the aesthetic and stylistic terms P'sL gives itself, such that its onscreen violence can't be justified (whereas it could, perhaps, in another film). Having said that, if you think such onscreen gore is never justified, then that's a moral highground which only ends the discussion. Instead, I assume that if I can provide an account of what the onscreen destruction of the rabbit hunter's face is doing, I'll have at least succeeded in providing what your indictment assumes is its lack of structural and thematic content. [What this kind of reading means for the status of a film being "good" or "bad" is - I find - a paralyzing question, but I'd welcome discussion from you less ataxic film buffs.]

* * *

Luis Buñuel ties with Shohei Imamura as my favorite cinema cynic, so, naturally, he's my favorite Mexican director -- even though he was born, raised and educated in upper class Spain. In Mexico, Buñuel was no mere artistic tourist. Some see his years of making cheap Mexican comedies and melodramas as a colorful detour; for me, El, Susana, Illusion Travels by Streetcar, Nazarin, and Los Olvidados represent the director's greatest, most personal work (the Spanish masterpiece Viridiana notwithstanding). His later European provocations may have shown a little more freakish surrealism (and, of course, a lot more leg) but Mexico is where Buñuel really got his groove on -- and left his heart, I dare say. Let me persuade you with some pix and text.
[Steven Boone]

* * *

Easy access:

• Negotiating Battle in Heaven [Ryland Walker Knight]
• Everything is Everything: Beauty, Ugliness, and Universality in Reygadas' Japón [Leile One]
• Pan's Labyrinth's Apologia [Jennifer Stewart]
• Buñuel's Travelling Illusions [Steven Boone]

CINCO DE VINYL: Everything is Everything: Beauty, Ugliness, and Universality in Reygadas' Japón

by Leile One

I wish we had more of a Mexican presence here in Boston. In case you didn’t know, Mexico is the best. Mexican food is the bombest substance on the planet. All the funniest, coolest kids I hung out with in high school back in Cali were descendants of the almighty Aztecs: funky fresh Vatos who could school you on American shit while maintaining a culture supreme. Hell, what would California be without the vast contributions of our Chicano brethren? And people are always talking about immigration reform...please. The West Coast wasn’t yours to begin with.

But how does it play out in New England? For the most part, the scene is non-existent. Indeed, La Raza is represented to a decent extent in a sizable Brazilian population in certain sectors of Boston, but there definitely isn’t much Mexican action going on. Which is why it seems weird that the city is hyping Cinco de Mayo so hard this year. Some of the local Irish Pubs are boasting celebrations for the holiday, which amount to discounted prices on bottles of Corona and perhaps a special on Margaritas. In special cases you may even get a live mariachi band (for a cover fee), but the whole thing seems kind of bizarre and out of place. Maybe Bostonians are just down to get drunk for whatever occasion? There’s my idea of a good time: a bunch of frat boys and blond chicks slamming Coronas and getting loud.

I’d give my left arm to be in the Mission District in SF this afternoon, fucking with some al pastor at El Farolito and getting in on the real celebration. Alas, it isn’t really an option, so I’ve elected to skip the weird bar scene here and instead take in some Carlos Reygadas cinema in the privacy of my own living room. I have rented a copy of his first feature, Japón, which is perhaps the closest you can get to visiting Mexico itself without moving an inch. Tell Tommy O’Doyle’s Pub I’ll take a rain check.

Japón is about decisions, actions, and consequences. It’s also about mountains. Additionally, the film contains graphic footage of horses copulating, and an extended scene featuring sex with the elderly. There’s a lot going on here.

This is my first experience with Reygadas’ work, and I find it challenging to say the least. Japón hits hard from multiple angles, reflected in stunning, spinning 360-degree camera shots of the Mexican landscape, as well as the multi-dimensionality of each situation presented. The film continually demands questions of morality, right and wrong, without giving any answers as to how the audience should categorize what’s happening in each scene. The result is confusion for the spectator, leading to an examination of one’s own beliefs, and it’s entirely intentional on the part of Reygadas.



The surface story is of a painter who leaves Mexico City in order to commit suicide on the countryside. Almost to the site of his mission, he stops in a village and ends up falling in love with an aging peasant woman with the heart of a Mother Theresa. The old woman gives and gives, and in the end it is this over-giving that results in tragic consequences. Her generosity may prove to be her downfall, but in the end we are unsure whether to conclude that we should therefore strive to avoid giving. Like I say, it’s complicated stuff. But I like that. I’d prefer for a film to test my reactionary tendencies to the point of moral confusion than to tell me how to feel. There is beauty here, no doubt, and there is ugly too. Sometimes the boundaries blur within the same image. When asked in an interview why he tends to favor the ultra-long shots, Reygadas responds with perfect justification: “To anyone who doesn’t like the long shots...deal with it. There’s so much going on within the frame; look at it.”



At times the sheer lengthiness of the landscape shots seems to stretch time itself, making each scene seem to last even longer than it does in terms of clock-time. This can be disorienting to your average American moviegoer, who may become restless and wish for dialogue or tits or explosions. Sorry, dude. There’s a lot going on in that there canyon-side panorama, if it’s any consolation.

When there is dialogue, the picture appears at times even stranger. The protagonist’s sexual advances upon his elderly host may be disquieting, but even more surprising is her rather casual agreement to go through with the deed. She agrees out of a sense of generous holiness, not because she finds him attractive or thinks it’s a great idea. She believes that by committing this selfless act, despite her discomfort, she may be saving him from ending his own life. It all culminates in what is perhaps the most uncomfortable sex scene ever committed to film. Only to be followed by more glorious revolving shots of the Mexican countryside.



It is fitting that a film which insists on invoking such a wide range of emotional responses would be titled after a land as distant yet somehow similar as Japan itself. Why Japan? When one envisions Tokyo, do the images that come up seem synonymous with a tiny, barren village in rural Mexico? Or is it the mountain itself, towering over the characters in the film, like Mount Fuji which plagued the haiku masters time and time again. Perhaps we could apply the metaphor of Seppuku, the ancient Japanese suicide ritual, to the film’s protagonist whose aim is to end his own life. In the end, after spinning one’s head 360 degrees over this puzzle and all of the others in Japón, viewers potentially come to the conclusion that “everything is everything and let’s not worry our pretty little heads about it.” After all, Reygadas himself has mentioned that he would have rather left this film untitled.

Confounding title or no, the images are plenty evocative. Not only did I get to visit Mexico by visiting Japón, I feel as though I’ve in some ways visited an entirely different universe. This rugged landscape, desolate yet detailed, is a place where the subconscious shows better judgmental instinct than the intellect in most cases. I propose a toast, to the Cinco, and to our poetic and sensible neighbors down south, who often show an understanding of life that, if not better than your average gringo, wills a questioning of, and illumination of, how complex life is for everybody, from doomed Mexican painters to generous elders to copulating horses to your average gringo...

CINCO DE VINYL: Buñuel's Travelling Illusions

by Steven Boone

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Luis Buñuel and family fled their newly fascist homeland for the United States. The rising 39-year-old filmmaker suddenly found himself in a marginal position in world cinema — as a dubber for Hollywood films and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Mexico provided the unlikely stage for his return to directing when the Russian-born producer Oscar Dancigers offered him the Mexican "political musical" Gran Casino (1946). Buñuel would spend the next 13 years churning out Mexican comedies and melodramas aimed at a mass audience. Accordingly, his triumphs and failures in this period were judged primarily by box office receipts.

Buñuel's third film for Dancigers, the devastating Los Olvidados (1950), forced world attention back onto the former surrealist upstart, whose Un chien andalou (1929) and L'age d'or (1930) were now distant pinpoints in the rearview mirror. Los Olvidados, a story of ghetto kids in Mexico City, won Best Director and the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951. This established Buñuel's pattern of alternating between commercial films and riskier artistic projects that were his reward for the former. For example, the international success of his Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) provided for Wuthering Heights and Buñuel's most personal film, the obsessive masterpiece El (both from 1953). (Ironically, the poor box office performance of Los Olvidados temporarily halted Buñuel's partnership with Dancigers; the low-budget Buñuel quickies that immediately followed it were produced by others.)

Mexico has often been described as the place where man-without-a-country Buñuel "made do" — making art on slim budgets in between more crass, popular projects. Along with El, Wuthering Heights and Los Olvidados, counted among the "art" are Nazarin, El Bruto (1952), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), and the Mexican evil twin of his Spanish Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962). Bill Krohn's assessment in the book Luis Buñuel: The Complete Films (Taschen) typifies this attitude: "Shipwrecked in Mexico, Buñuel had found a way to keep working and had become, like Crusoe, 'Governor of the Isle'."

But what about the dozen Mexican films — potboilers, capers, screwball comedies, soapy tragedies — that get such short shrift from critics and historians? Do the box office receipts really tell the whole story? Were Buñuel's heart and mind truly elsewhere when he was hammering out these, the cinematic equivalent of page-turners?

I propose that, high and low, Buñuel's Mexican films are his most personal and enduring. In Mexico, he learned to tell stories in the "invisible" visual style perfected in Viridiana (and often either overindulged or neglected in his subsequent European classics). Though the plots in his Mexican programmers typically followed proven formulas, Buñuel's class politics, his surreal, fetishistic imagery, his private fears, and, above all, the abiding humanism that his atheistic cynicism tends to obscure, are bursting out of these films — but only if you're watching.
Here are some images from one of his forgotten Mexican cheapies, the lighthearted Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953). In the film, two drunk, frustrated streetcar mechanics take one of the vehicles on a nighttime joyride but get mistaken for an on-duty car. They have no choice but to continue the charade into the work day, giving free rides to working stiffs all over Mexico City. The caper unfolds like a lucid dream.