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.

Nothing's better than this, and it never ends.

by Ryland Walker Knight

—We just recycle is all
We all carry a list, some even write lists down, to remember what to watch or to read or to eat or to buy or to accomplish. But, come on, let's face it: lists are easy. And, at this moment, do you really need another list? To answer, sort of, Danny and I decided to chuck the list, mostly, to try to winnow this year's year-end wrap up in The Notebook. Today starts this new cycle in this Part I post. As we wrote over there, we switched styles and asked contributors to pair a new film (theatrical, festival, whatever barometer) with an old film (rep house, disc, you pick) seen this year. I felt mine was pretty obvious, but, nonetheless, it's easily a dream double bill I'd love to sit with in a theatre: 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009) + The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953). I say more in the post, which you'll have to read over there, and I even propose a few other pairings. But I wrote that copy a little while ago. And, per the rules, my minimal commentary for my secondary double bills couldn't be used. So I decided not only to propose another, sixth double bill in this dedicated link-thru but also give you my complete list of double bills complete with the themes (jokes) I see emerging from those pairs:

• 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009) + The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953) — Wear your smile not your hurt
  
• The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, USA) + Ordet (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955) — Telling stories to ourselves
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, USA) + Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1953) — Run a ring around the egos
  
• La frontiere de l'aube (Philippe Garrel, France) + Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) — Ghosts
  
• 35 rhums (Claire Denis, France) + Le garçu (Maurice Pialat, 1995) — Dads
  
• Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA) + A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944) — There's a war on?
  
• Inglourious Basterds + Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006) — Pulp fiction [see below]

———


Last week I finally saw Paul Verhoeven's 2006 feature, Black Book, and it quickly catapulted up my favorites list. In fact, I watched it twice—and the second time I made my own double bill, pairing it with Inglourious Basterds. This is another slightly obvious double bill, but the films are such different modes, and actually such different postures, that, seen back-to-back with plenty of snacks, the pairing was rather illuminating beyond the World War II "settings" we're given.

Verhoeven's less a formal master than Tarantino (whose stylistic evolution since 1994 is significant, though also almost subtle in that its tied to his editing patterns, which is inextricable from his obsession with talk), but the Dane's film is no less stylistic or dashing or conceptual. Indeed, Black Book is arguably freer, and more dashing, though it is also the more circumscribed, the more "factual" and "representational"—even, I'd say, more narrative—film. The power of Black Book is precisely that it fuses into both a conceptually stimulating and a plain entertaining master work. Verhoeven's film throws up action scenes galore, yes, and a compelling revenge yarn, to say nothing of its bald prurience (yet), and hosts one of the best performances of the decade, easy, from Carice Van Houten. In short, though it's got some bitter pill stuff, it's a fun flick.

The real rub remains that both these films are pulp objects, mash-ups maybe, of infinite sources. Tarantino makes it more obvious, of course, with direct visual quotes and a few more names dropped, but the movies motivate Verhoeven in equal measure. However, Verhoeven's not a metabolic function the way Tarantino is: Verhoeven simply uses the movies, and nods at symbols while making his own; Taratino, on the other hand, shows his hand constantly. For instance, Black Book cat calls Mata Hari in a tossed off line of dialogue, to remind us of another reason both culturally specific at the time and cinephilliacly tickling now why this Jew went blonde, while Basterds punctuates its first major scene with as big a "quote" as possible, lifting Ford's doorway from The Searchers (and others) to plant it in a southern France pastoral of 1941. In fact, nearly everything in Basterds is a quote or in quotes—especially the actors—unlike Black Book, always a cynical horrorshow, which aims to eschew all trickery just as soon as the world allows.

Which is to say that, since Tarantino the American is obsessed with charisma and Verhoeven the Euro is obsessed with sex, one film is built on rep and one film is built on bait (respectively). In fact, everybody in Basterds is obsessed with their rep, forever asking "What have you heard of me?" while all of Black Book is premised on Carice's undeniable appeal, her nudity not a tease so much as a fact of the world—men go dumb and forsake themselves for such a small cost/price.

These postures, too, help define the films' attitudes towards history. Tarantino's out to earn the right to write it as he sees fit, as if by sheer force of talent he gets that honor. Verhoeven's out to simply write a story, to given face to a certain strand, to show you how history is, in fact, written not by the winners but rather by the survivors. Further, Tarantino closes his own film off, burns it to the ground and seals it in its own skin-tomb, while Verhoeven leaves his open to scramble, its final tableau a design of perpetual defense. You get the sense that Black Book, though it's putatively inspired by true events, is a fiction invented to talk about a moment in history rather than a document, of sorts, about how some Jews fought their cultural legacy. It's that fantastic. On the flip side, it's easy to see Basterds as a-political, a complete reverie of light and dark, blood and guts, everything celluloid can capture. The trick to the double bill, if you want to have a really good time, is obvious: you save the fantasy for second. You still won't get out alive, but you might smile more while trying.


———



I should also say, watch the Metro Classics blog for a quick top five comedies of the decade from yours truly. I only played along because I miss those dudes, and I thought that'd be a fun way to participate. Otherwise, I have no time for that kind of thing. Plus, I like to advocate for comedy. A great comedy is rarer these daze, but, believe me, although it might appear different from an "objective" angle on the films I often laud, a great comedy will most often trump a great tragedy in my book.

What might get this list into trouble with some of you, as it has with the friends I've shared it with, is how I define "comedy." For me, it's still a structural classification as much as "did it make me laugh?" If it ends well, with a marriage or something like one, then it's probably a comedy. However, there are black comedies, too, which flip that necessity around past tragedy. The Coens are great at this: their brand of comedy is often of the "what else can we do?" variety. You either laugh or you die. Actually, you'll die either way, but at least you can die laughing. It's nihilism, yes, but not everybody can be Wes Anderson or Arnaud Desplechin. And nobody, I mean it, nobody's Jean Renoir.


———



—Laugh a little.

Alain à la recherche #7: SHORTS

by Ryland Walker Knight

—The halls have eyes
[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Though I arrived halfway into Le chant de styrène, it still tickled me into the goofiest posture possible all teeth, every limb under another, as if pushing into the chair hard enough would help release the giddy brio building up in my bones. Put otherwise, Queneau's puns (oh to be actually fluent!) and Alain's balletic geometry pretzel'd me up into a great mood. Then Toute la mémoire du monde grumbled onscreen out of focus and an odd English voice started escorting me around the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, trying its damnedest to not "do a Borges," to just present a topographical index, we can suppose. However, Alain's image-making inflects this portrait—everything's a tracking shot—with both pride and unnerved anxiety, a weird fear of the calculation of this repository. Each structure our Alain encounters seems to strike him as a possible tomb, and every system a trap, however useful it may be, for any system can ossify. Next: Guernica's a dirge. Solemn though fiery and sometimes mannered, its idea of barbarism will be further fleshed with "real" documentary work in the opening salvo (anti-salve) of Hiroshima, mon amour (still some of the hardest images for me to watch; the sexy sand-shower just prior must play a role, of course, in that reaction). Then the treasure of the night, the very rare (and neglected) Statues Also Die, whose title sounds so much more elegant in French, Les statues meurent aussi, with that "aussi" dangling, like a tsk. Talk about angry: as Rosenbaum already lined out, the final reel of this bad boy is one of the most direct anti-imperialist/anti-racist screeds in cinema—and in 1953! It's a text by Chris Marker, which is another level of cool (and smarts), which is another reason to root with it, which is (of course) really easy. It's also a fine object lesson outside of the polemic, though the political is unavoidable (I must remind myself), as we see just how loaded every thing is in these so-called aboriginal cultures; how histories are most often mythologies; how tradition cannot be ignored; how, ultimately, revolution is a dream and hardly a reality; that is, how little we fight these worlds we're locked into every day. Another way at this idea is right up front in Night and Fog: that, yes, weeds grow but scars and train tracks remain reminders, and nothing's been razed. I quickly realized I was too tired to let that movie work me over (as it always does), and I tipped out in the dark to a misty rain outside.

A Christmas Tale. A house is an outfit. [part three]

by Ryland Walker Knight

Today you can go out and buy one of my favorite movies not only of last year but of all time: Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. I'll have more to say over in The Auteurs Notebook shortly, but for here, for now, know now that it's worth every finger-lickin cent you have to spare. Not only is the single-platter transfer beautiful (I'm sure the Blu-Ray disc looks great, too, as looking at the standard DVD on a BR player with HDMI-upconverting made it all the more crisp and lovely), but the second disc offers up Desplechin's short, L'aimée, which he made a couple years prior, and after Kings and Queen, about the sale of his family home in Roubaix. It offers a nice companion angle on the sense of home a home can give somebody—here, Arnaud's dad as he tells his history, his story riddled with familial lacunae—despite the inevitable hurt we accrue in families (in life). It's a terrifically sad picture. Yet, as with all of Arnaud's movies, its collaging impetus broadens the world; his focus somehow enlarges his scope; his world, forever cinematic, is maximal. In fact, you might say he's greedy for life. And, you might say I am, too, which might explain my ardor for his films.

I will never shy from the fact that I see myself in his art, and that this recognition—instead of devaluing—enriches these experiences. It's a form of flattery, sure, where I can pat myself on the back a bit, but it's also a challenge; his movies forever push me back, make me ask myself questions. Understanding is never one-way. My Sex Life... makes me question my formative relationships and long-delayed undergraduate degree; La Sentinelle makes me question my isolation, and my occasional impulse towards solipsism; Kings and Queen makes me throw up my hands and love my mom; A Christmas Tale makes me cry, and shows that, yes, life is hard, but it's just life—that you don't get to wallow, that you have to keep going, and will, despite your selfishness—that the world, and life, will accommodate a lot more than you ever expect. Also, there's a lot of formal fun, and the rush of it is exhilarating: life can fly by and still be rich every second. If you're lucky, you'll get some help (some love) along the way, and giving it back will only make things better. Take the gift and relish it now.

Viewing Log #22: Everybody in the world [11/23/09 - 11/29/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—No exit

• Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip [Joe Layton, 1982] # So dark, so perfect, so hilarious. So hard to be good at standup. You can watch it online over here, but we watched it on cable. We all fell over a lot.
  
  
• Mon oncle d'Amérique [Alain Resnais, 1980] Didactic, sure, but most of it's a joke. Resnais lets Henri Laborit play "sage" but the score, and the choral arrangement of images—talk about convergences—undercut even that know-it-all stance. More to come, I promise, on this one.
  
• Stromboli [Roberto Rossellini, 1950] Ingrid shines alone, victim of her ego, and that house is a kind of brain, but the fascinating thing—right off the bat—is just how jagged the film unfolds. It resists any structure, though there is a rhythm, and themes emerge. But, at bottom, it's a basic story made more basic, nigh elemental, with its refusal of systems. Everything's aimed at "natural" even though these humans keep forcing things to disastrous effect.
  
  
• L'aimée [Arnaud Desplechin, 2007] Not quite a scrapbook, but surely a collage. That is, the aim is expressive-affective, not documentary, despite the overflow of facts and, say, reportage. Above all Arnaud marvels at his history, at the luck to have such a history (to have a history) to recount. That's his gift: to enrich the world about him, to swirl stories full of color, of warmth; to say, render a wide world full of life. After all, ghost stories should brim, or point you all over the place.
  
  
• In Bruges [Martin McDonagh, 2008] Fell asleep about an hour in, then finished the next morning. McDonagh sure isn't much of a filmmaker, and I'm not entirely sold on his brand of violence as a story backbone, but I laughed enough, and that girl from Harry Potter 4 is delicious.
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox [Wes Anderson, 2009] Perhaps the most pleasurable film in, like, forever. I know I loved The Informant! a whole bunch, but, well, this one's even more fun, and touching (though maybe not as "smart"?). In any case, I plan on seeing it as often as possible on a big screen.
  
  
• Where The Wild Things Are [Spike Jonze, 2009] No fun. Wasn't a big part of the book that that recklessness is fun? Isn't that the fun of being a kid? If all we're doing here is heralding youthful verve, how come all the movie's a dreadful downer? I, for one, did not have any fun. So there. I can get petulant, too.

—Well, don't fuck up the suit...

Alain à la recherche #4: Je t'aime, je t'aime

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Perhaps Alain was trying to one-up that left-bank homunculus, Sartre, with this one, a time travel loop where the only exit is that prior end game choice that landed our monad-man with the guinea pig gig in the first place. It's a frisbee film, a breeze built on repetition, one gesture lazing into another laser. It's a gimmick, for sure, all this jumbling, but the conceit is rather perfect; and the opening fifteen minutes, before Claude Rich's Claude Ridder (Claude Raubois in the war) falls asleep in that pod, caper a quick route through jokes of hurt to get us into the "science" part of this "science fiction." Rich-Ridder tried suicide and failed, so a cloaked commune of scientists pick him for their first human sent through their pod of time, a blob of wiring and indeterminate shape. The plan is for our man in the middle to return one year into his past for exactly one minute. The plan fails, like the suicide, but it succeeds as well as suicide, trapping Rich-Ridder in a mosaic of moments. Some moments repeat. His woman, Catrine (the doomed beauty Olga Georges-Picot you see above), never looks happy. The pair play then dig at each other; he's mostly a jerk. We get more information as varied threads reappear and expose more history. The film shifts from frisbee to football, a calfskin of guilt, though it's never quite oppressive—just sad. Its hopping turns to treading, folds the simultaneous around a rubber-band ball of ignobility. And there's Rich-Ridder, placid, both vessel and detective. And that's us, peering on, piecing together a jigsaw we can't get a handle on: all we see are seams.

Viewing Log #21: Bleed heat by night [11/16/09 - 11/22/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Bring yourself, roll

• Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7th Season [Larry David, 2009] Hard to beat "The Table Read," no doubt, among so many episodes this season, but, once again, LD proves how smart he is about people's petty shit and everybody's desire for a fairytale—despite knowing all too well that most things in life, as it turns out, aren't just jokes but lies. Or, a house of cards and red herrings. I feel like a human again.
  
• The White Ribbon [Michael Haneke, 2009] Almost exactly what I expected, but it's the first Haneke film I've wanted to see a second time. The film's ambiguities, in ways I've not felt from this hectoring hooey hocker's work before, feel ambiguous. Since I'm still sussing the political-historical mumbo jumbo, my perhaps-predictable excitement is primarily perceptible: Haneke's digital shift is an aesthetic tool, strictly technological, to register the world in luminescent darkness even more stunning than Public Enemies's wood-bound fire-fight. This light doesn't dazzle, though dazzle it does; rather, in these corridors and on these farms, light and its lack seep and spread, hint even, or slab the world into a plastic fresco at noon. A field of wheat waving is gorgeous, of course, but so is the older brother in the corner, his nightgown a ghostgown and his head missing in the shadows. We're left with voices, and contours. I could watch this movie outside, eating cheese next summer, and be okay.
  
  
• Je t'aime, je t'aime [Alain Resnais, 1968] The stutter of time, and proof of proofs that you don't need "special effects" to make great, hard Sci-Fi. However, it's also "Sci-Fi" in that it's a film of referentiality, and of an index, of how top-down maps don't work (and least of all with the brain). A heart-soul, however invisible, lives in dimensions. More in a separate post soon.
  
• Mouchette [Robert Bresson, 1967] # Anybody who calls Bresson boring is, like, the worst. This movie, though hard, is, like, the best. Here the cinema (or maybe just the camera?) poaches life, or can; here the cinema captures spirits, or uses them; here the cinema clacks at the world. It's stubborn, like its subject, and everything's a row. DVD can't help it, as Bresson's cinema desires celluloidal textures felt by the flicker first, but the extras are pretty great on this Criterion disc. (Godard's trailer, for instance, is a treasure.) And I know in my bones that all I got when I saw the film at Film Forum ages ago was that, shucks, the world is rotten. Now I want to read some Baudelaire, and never slap any body.
  
  
• The Magnificent Ambersons [Orson Welles, 1942] Big admission: this was the first time. What a doozy and dizzy quilt of a movie. Even though you can see some seams, it's still wholly fascinating, and surprisingly touching. Matter of fact, it's super sad. —Boy did I hate that guy who wouldn't quit guffawing at the so-perceived anachronisms. Just because its about history doesn't make it a relic itself. I could, and maybe should, watch this movie a ton. Definitely one of the great "house movies" in movies.
  
  
• Muriel [Alain Resnais, 1963] # Still knotty, still devastating, always too fast. A blink of a movie containing so much in its elisions. Here's the jump cut, for Heaven's sake. More, still, back here.

—Marked by lightness, a shining shroud

Alain à la recherche #3: Night and Fog and Muriel

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

The third night showcased a pair of ghost films, Night and Fog and Muriel, that dovetails one phantasmagoria of "history" with another knot of pain to paint a picture of memory as only ever a haunting. It's the dread affect. It's how you don't need to see some scars to feel them line your visage, or your soul. The most alarming thing besides all the hurt bottled in these films is that the duo rush by, clipped in to let time slip away. The earlier documentary acknowledges this pretty basically in that it's a short, a little poem of collocation. One form of representation is pitted against another. One imagines seeing two films at once, and how some current artist, like say Jennifer Reeves, might project both media simultaneously; however, Resnais could have done that, too, but he did not; one would be wise to understand the power of a more "linear" contiguity to better shock, assault and mortify an audience. As the title attests—in spite of its before-and-after death camp images—it's not an ashtray film and it's not a smoke trail film; rather, it's that cloud film, hanging; it's a fog fugue. Of course it hurts.

Muriel extrapolates this reckoning project, but instead of a fog of competing threads, it's all tied up, everything a gnarl, as only a Hitchcock fan could dream. Again, it's a crisp film—blink and you'll lose your bearings—but, like a lot of nightmares, the pacing's off. It lumps on, then flies to a cliffside, then a few months fall away and plans are dropped; life's a gambol as much as a gamble. Nothing really happens but a series of "you hurt me once" rounds of sparring. It's a film of remove set in the port town (a liminal space if ever there was one) of Boulogne, outside Paris, away from Algiers, eons from The War that changed everything. Resnais seems given to dialectics in this early phase (though Marienbad's clearly a prism), and here we have not just past and present but young and old, memories and events. Nonetheless, it's hard to call anything an event in a film this oblique, this hidden, this burled, this tangled. Like all of the best cinema, at bottom Muriel is just images, folding, a string of signals that resist that symbolic. Nothing is so reducible in a Resnais film, it would appear. In fact, what I'm already loving is that he's at the other end, exploding things. He claims lineage with the Surrealists and it makes sense: Muriel may be a cube, not just a knot, built of mirrors; however, unlike Marienbad, those mirrors are corporeal, physiognomies rather than reflections, with pores and creases. —We're back, somehow, at the human.

Alain à la recherche #2: Stavinsky...

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Some might call Stavinsky... a lavish lark. I called it a "goof" walking out. But its easy charisma, rubbed off Belmondo's debonair superstardom, does not devalue its interest in history (histories, stories) or, again, memory. Though there is no recovery here. The past doesn't loom for Sacha-Alex-Serge; he won't allow it. However, for that matter, he can't out run it. The ellipses matter at the end of the title: they indicate a path, or something unsaid. They can also signal a sigh, as most people floating around Belmondo do just that and shake their heads, calling him out as crazy—sick, Lonsdale's doctor insists—a supreme narcissist megalomaniac. Redundant, yes, but some people are—some people, as it happens, are a sickness no matter their charitable spirit or the love they inspire. This one, this man of a million names, this fake 'stache man with nothing but a grin, this sick sadness can't seem to figure it straight. Belmondo plays him like he believes him. Belmondo knows he's lying, or showing off for ill, but, like he tells that German actress, he's out to deliver happiness (not pleasure) to those around him as equally as he aims to tickle himself with each fancy before it leaves him, caught in an eddy while he floats on. —But what of that silent Trotsky hovering on the sidelines? What's his role? Red herring? Not quite. He's more like an idea, a sign of other quashed dreams. Trotsky inspires his circle but otherwise wrecks little havoc in centers that ripple out, causing a political ruckus, and, it seems, an atmosphere rife for toppling; this France careens, no doubt, towards The War a mess. Its history, as embodied by Boyer's Baron, cannot read the present for signs of the future, nor react with much beyond disbelief. Perhaps that's the price of class honor rolls and their imagined debts: such faith yields ruins, or graves. The Baron, after all, quotes Giraudoux's spectre at the close to signal his own end, to nod at an era he knew and defined now drowned by time.

Convergence for our open mouths (9/13/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Earning an earful (?/!)

Public Enemies: We Spray Spots.

by Ryland Walker Knight

What began in giddy anticipation as Michael Mann's Public Enemies fast approached through June, with talk of something like a symposium, turned out to be that series of set dispatches by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (one, two, three) and this: a subsequent, massive e-mail exchange between Ignatiy, Kasman and yours very truly. The movie's moment may be past in blog-time but that doesn't stop us from throwing our belated lot in with the crowd of almost equal parts praise and derision. For one thing, for us, it's one of the real highlights of the summer. For another, who says we need to be so timely? In any case, we know this thing is long, but we do hope you like it, and try to read it all. Or, I really do, if only because I know Danny took a lot of time to cobble together these broad range missives. And to think that we could still miss talking about so much.


For my money—big shocker here—Manohla wrote the best review of the weeklies. And to re-link, here's the Log's post and Martha's enthusiasms.

Convergence for your first finale (7/8/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—or, your 10 zillion light years

Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, where death begets art.

by Ryland Walker Knight

One of the first film nerd moments in New York back in January was the opportunity to see this Straub-Huillet piece projected big and loud at the Walter Reade. Given my transient status that month, it took me a little longer to finish a piece on the film. Long enough so that Kasman decided to sit on the piece until now. I like to think it's more than a space filler and implore you to click right here and gauge for yourself.

One for you and one for me: Everlasting Moments. UPDATED.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Some of you may remember our friend Martha's glowing essay about Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments from a little while back. Well, I've seen the film now, too, and I threw together a little review for Spout Blog. Knowing how much the film means to my friend makes it resound that much more with me but I do think, independent of that association, that it is a refined film: gentle, curious and quite lovely. I'm told Troell was something of a to-do in the 1970s, when his film, The Emigrants, was nominated for Best Picture despite its foreign tongue (cough, subtitles). Given all the "he's back!" profiles (such as this one in the Times) leading up to this new film's release, perhaps we can expect it to rightfully garner an audience and earn some money away from the latest so-called "film adaptation" of a comic book that happens to open today as well. Because, for all its easily dismissable "prestige" qualities (and one goofy icicle gleam), Troell's work is so careful and so loving that his film develops into the exact opposite: something filled with wonder, brimming past hurt and swinging into life with open eyes.

UPDATE: Martha's new piece on this film can be found at The Auteurs' Notebook.