Some men dream #2

by Ryland Walker Knight

Small Black Room, Powell & Pressburger, 1949
shot by Christopher Challis

Convergence for your cloudbusting (1/8/10)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—For Arne as much as for me

Convergence for your totem trials (9/17/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Everybody's got a noiseuse.

L'avventura: Mapping Monica

by Ryland Walker Knight

Seeing as this masterpiece is next week's Metro Classic and it stars VINYL's beloved Monica Vitti, Mike commissioned an image essay from yours truly to help sell the event. I was more than happy to oblige. You can see the work both at the Classics Blog or at VINYL IS IMAGES. My essay, however, doesn't quite address the theme of the series/week (as Mike laid out back here), nor does it address its own problem of fetishizing Ms Vitti, though Antonioni clearly has the same problem despite attacking men's lust and, yup, their proclivity to objectify women—even women they love, or think they love. Worst, I fear, is the picture of men treating women as disposable or interchangeable. It's not exactly a happy picture, if you, by some odd luck, haven't seen it and happen to be reading this blog. However, downer though it may be, it sure is pretty. And, of course, so is she. So, if this bit of furtive associations about space and faces (of one face) winds up enticing, and you live in Seattle: please, by all means, go see the film on a big screen with loud speakers. Otherwise, wait patiently for that new print that debuted at Cannes to make the art-house rounds. Again: click here to see my map.

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.

In the works: Doillon at FIAF.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Last Tuesday marked the beginning of the current Jacques Doillon retrospective at French Institute-Alliance Française with a screening of 1985's La Vie de famille, which Dan Salitt says is lovely. I missed it, and I'm bummed. However, I can say that tonight's film, Le petit criminel, is well worth seeing if you happen to live in New York City. I hope to have some words formed about it, and next week's Ponette, for your reading pleasure at The Auteurs' Notebook soon. I'll keep you updated. What's most striking, so far, looking at Doillon's cinema in the order of its programmed appearance at the FIAF, is the focus on children—and their complete "naturalness" in front of the camera. The close-up effaces, or makes transparent, any masks they (wish or hope to) wear. Set mostly in a two-door almost-truck, Le petit criminel is meager, and subtle, a restricted (head) space prone to jammed signals, to cluttered thoughts. The endgame may appear "open" to some but, as the cop says earlier in the picture, there should be no doubt as to where the story winds up; how the angles converge and how the camera pushes into that space (as well as away) define its characteristic (to say, stubborn) resilience. I can only guess how this plays out fuller in La vie de famille, as this trailer below hints at a film teeming with a lot of things I love, like Juliette Binoche, words, language, direct-address, diegetic video use, family problems despite good intentions, life's inherent corruption (and corruptibility), Sami Frey all man-like some 20-plus years after Godard had him dancing all boy-like, and so on; my attraction should become readily apparent as you click play.

Since I'm following the screening schedule, kinda, this puts my viewing of Doillon's films of the 1970s back a bit in my personal queue. This is fine by me, of course, as I've subscribed to a certain curriculum, if you will, but it makes it a little harder to gauge at this point how much similarity his work bears to those of his post-vague filmmaking brethren (the press release mentions Eustache and Garrel to get nerds like me excited) over against a larger tradition of gallic cinema. So far, it seems like he's got more to say to Truffaut and Pialat than those other dudes. More soon. —Oh, and a quick thanks to all the ideas and thoughts thrown my way in that last (now enormous) thread at Girish's joint. [x-posted at the curator corner.]

In defense of Ballast

by Steven Boone

I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.

The first time I saw Ballast, knowing nothing about its maker, I spent no more than a cumulative total of five minutes thinking about the race of its characters or creator. Whenever little Lawrence wielded a gun that weighed more than him; when early on, James sat brooding, an inscrutable black hulk; when Marlee fumed and fretted over a tragic turn of events with the all the negro histrionics of Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder — yeah, I thought about race. But that was it. Otherwise, the ethnicity of Marlee, James, and Lawrence rarely factored into my appreciation of their loss, desperation, insecurities, hopes and contradictions. These were Americans, these were human beings. I expect a white upper middle class author on a black working class subject to get some things “wrong”—that’s the way it is. What I hope for in such a film is an honest effort to capture something true.

[A note from RWK: Idiot me missed Lance Hammer's film when it played at the luxurious Sundance Cinema last week. Click here to see if/when it will be playing near you. Hopefully the film will find its way to my eyes and ears soon. With all the love Steve's given this film, it's hard not to kick myself in my butt. But, then again, I've been busy with other cine-stars I'm more than happy to have encountered.]

Sing seeing, sing.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I visited Daniel in class yesterday and made some images; then I cut them up. Since my internet is so slow I uploaded a smaller file, which combs. And yet, again, I'm thrilled by the "failure" of this camera. It's another announcement, another event. I love how this version is different than the 700MB file I exported from iMovie, how both those are different than the raw file I uploaded onto my hard drive, how different all those are from when I was sitting there. Something I thought while sitting there, sweating in that plastic bucket next to the window: this adventure of perception continues to interrupt itself. Every blink is a cut, every step a zoom, every gesture made makes spaces different and the effects play like affects across the face. So what happens when you don't see Daniel's face here? Wait: we see his profile, his hands; his body to begin and end the clip. But it's dark. Where is the face? Behind Daniel, on the wall? That's not his face; it's his boy's face. His face is this pacing, this boiling gesticulation. As he would say, this style, this way of going. Style, of course, being a performance—of one's multitudes, of every angle brought to bear, of every memory made flesh. Things get tricky, then, when all he's doing is talking about seeing and all you want to do is look at the boy and his chocolate, not that flitting figure below.* But, of course, his figure forms the geometry of gazes, too. He even sneaks a peak at me twice, creating yet another announcement-event, and his language gets dizzy, too, there at the end, as he falls into-through that word: seeing. Seeing sounds like being, sure, but it sounds like sing, too. His waterfall of "seeings" sounds like an imperative to sing, sing seeing, sing. Live this seeing.

[If the veoh video above doesn't load for you, you can watch this on youtube: click here. The veoh looks better, and sounds better, but youtube is, well, damn reliable; what's weird is the youtube compression makes this feel more analog (warmer) than the veoh player, which still holds onto the cold of the digital comb.]

[Looks like veoh is just wrong, or too fussy. So I went ahead and embedded the youtube clip. If you want to try the veoh clip, and get irked, click here. Also, you can track Dsee's class via its dedicated blog, which is called -- you'd never have guessed it -- Seeing Seeing.]

*Try to note the lift before the first edit.