Monthly Archives: February 2005

Oscar shorts

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For the last few years, Apollo Cinema have theatrically distributed mini-festivals of the Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film, and this weekend the American Cinematheque screened the 2005 touring program. For some reason, this collection doesn’t include the nominated films by Bill Plympton (Guard Dog), Mike Gabriel and Baker Bloodworth (Disney’s Lorenzo), or Gary McKendry (Everything in This Country Must). Even so, and although it has been years since I’ve watched the Oscar broadcast, these two categories do reveal unexpected pleasures.

Best Animated Short Film:

Gopher Broke (Jeff Fowler, US)

This is for all the Pixar fans, a manic computer-animated sketch about an obsessional gopher who digs a hole in a rural road in order to destabilize the passing produce trucks and snatch the stray vegetables that plummet to the ground. But before the gopher can steal the treasures, other animals grab the vegetables for themselves.

The film is a polished but straightforward exercise in quick, physical movements and slapstick timing. The gopher is comically rendered and the various 3D textures in the natural setting are colorful and detailed, but ultimately there’s nothing here that one can’t find in mainstream animated features.

Birthday Boy (Sejong Park, Australia)

This is an evocative film that follows a solitary young Korean boy around his nearly deserted village in 1951 as he plays with various toys and found objects, imagining himself as a victorious soldier. His naive heroics are subtly contrasted with his isolation and allusions to actual warfare on the eve of the Korean War–the boy plays in the wreckage of a military plane and watches a train loaded with tanks pass by. It’s understated and lovingly realized as 3D animation, and contrasts innocence and destruction through its quiet vignette. In an age of exaggeration and irony, this quiet mood piece by a student at the Australian Film Television and Radio School is a notable entry. You can view a clip, here.

Ryan (Chris Landreth, Canada)

Far and away the most innovative of the animated films presented here, Landreth’s entry is a hybrid documentary/animation piece that presents a conversation between Landreth and Ryan Larkin, an animator whose work (including the Oscar-nominated Walking) earned widespread accolades in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, however, Larkin is trapped by his own personal demons, struggling with alcoholism and panhandling on the streets of Montreal; he hasn’t produced animation in years. Landreth and Larkin thus discuss art and inspiration and an artist’s need to overcome emotional wounds and the debilitating scars left in their wake.

In addition to this interesting and vital subject, Landreth illustrates their conversation through amazingly rich 3D computer animation that depicts each person as a combination of realism and abstract design, stylized by their emotional wounds, holes, and gaps left by their troubled past. No single still from the film is adequate in portraying the three-dimensional detail of each character (a short clip is available here), and Landreth’s sound design and supplementary animation are equally inventive and thoughtful. At roughly 13 minutes in length, this is a film that should be seen many times over to fully appreciate. Luckily, the NFB is releasing a special edition DVD next month.

This is a sensitive subject that easily could have been sensationalized (and critic Chris Robinson painfully suggests it may have been on the festival circuit), but I found the film to be beautiful, imaginative, and deeply compelling.

(In addition to the above links, the excellent Animation World Network offers a handsome site featuring clips and related material of all the animated nominees.)

Best Live Action Short Film:

Two Cars, One Night (Taika Waititi and Ainsley Gardiner, New Zealand)

I wanted to like this one more than I did. Presented in lovely black-and-white, two cars are parked outside of a bar and contain the children of unseen patrons. Some antagonistic rivalry occurs between a boy in one car and the girl in the other, mostly out of boredom, which slowly shifts into a deeper attraction. Their wait is accentuated by atmospheric time lapse footage of patrons entering and exiting the bar, but the film remains bound to the children in the two vehicles. I simply wasn’t very moved by this portrait of pre-adolescent romanticism, which alternates between tedium (as the kids make faces and gesture at one another) and sentimentality (as they suddenly bond). As is typically the case, the child performances are fine, and the sense of place is strong, but it just doesn’t seem to add up to much beyond its immediate pleasures.

Little Terrorist (Ashvin Kumar, India)

This is a charming, fable-like sketch about an adolescent Muslim boy who accidentally hits his cricket ball across the militarized border between Pakistan and India; he decides to sneak in and fetch it, but is seen and chased by armed Indian guards into a nearby village, where he meets a kindly Hindu man who risks his own safety by hiding the boy from the authorities. The landscape’s rich browns and reds are sensitively captured and the Indian village is careful rendered in detail. The film’s compassionate humanism is a refreshing lens for that border region, and the whole piece has a unity of vision and simplicity that is touching.

7:35 in the Morning (Nacho Vigalondo, Spain)

Of the live action shorts presented here, this macabre, black-and-white musical was my favorite. It’s a film based on a growing realization, so I won’t give away too much of its setup, but its consistent tone, absurdist counterpoint, and note-perfect execution couldn’t have been better. It’s also deeply tinged with a human melancholy that fully captivated me, like a BÈla Tarr scene gone humorously awry.

The good news? You can decide for yourself how you feel about it by watching the entire film online, here.

Wasp (Andrea Arnold, UK)

The latest entry of UK kitchen sink realism is a genuinely provocative film about a poor, single mother (marvelously played by Nathalie Press) who clearly is too financially and emotionally ill-equipped to care of her four young children. Marginalizing their basic needs for an entire day while she attempts to seduce an old friend at a local bar, the film oscillates between her shameful neglect and her own emotional vulnerability, generating a complex portrait of a person foolishly clinging to the only “happiness” she knows–a middle class, leisure lifestyle that remains completely beyond her grasp. Unfortunately, the film incorporates a plot reversal in its last act that suggests a more conventional ending than the preceding film deserves, but this will be a movie that lingers in my mind for some time to come.

The River’s End

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In recent years, Iranian cinema has often been associated with Italian neorealism with its evocative, non-professional actors and direct representations of everyday life. But Behrooz Afkhami’s new film, The River’s End (Gavkhouni), suggests a much more European and formally adventurous mold that merges dreams and reality in a compelling meditation on the grieving process. That it’s also charming and enlivened with knowing humor makes it especially rewarding viewing. I managed to see it as part of UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing festival of contemporary Iranian cinema last night, and immediately began hoping for a chance to see it again in order to plumb its depths with greater insight.

The film is based on an influential Iranian novel by Jafar Modaress Sadeghi and follows the thoughts and actions of a young man in his mid-20s whose father has recently passed away. The film includes the protagonist’s first person narration from beginning to end as he endures persistent dreams and recollections of his father, pressure from his extended family to settle down and get married, and a general listlessness in life that compels him to move from Isfahan to Tehran and live with other eccentric bachelors. The former city is the site of his youth as well as the enigmatic Zayandehrood river that dead ends in a marsh. The river becomes a complex symbol for the protagonist’s feelings toward his father and his own difficult life journey and unknown destination.

The film expertly utilizes two brave aesthetic decisions: the Cinemascope widescreen frame (which is rare for such a personal story), and more impressively, much of the film is shot using a subjective camera, a technique that has occasionally been experimented with (1946′s Lady in the Lake was a notable Hollywood attempt), but never fully accomplished with dramatic success. Afkhami, however, achieves it remarkable well, and combined with the quiet, cadenced rhythms of the narrator’s continuous voice, the technique is perfectly immersive.

The narration gives the film an unusually literate feel which no doubt accents the story’s origins, but also makes the film a notable example of literary adaptation. There is much to glean here in the way the narration and subjective camera enrich and contradict one another, and provide a surprisingly revelatory experience in tandem.

The film also features many memorable characters and performances, several of which are women who exhibit an individuality and dramatic tension somewhat rare in Iranian cinema. As the film alternates between present and past, the narrator’s father (played by Ezzatolah Entezami, famous for his roles in The Cow, Hamoun, and Once Upon a Time, Cinema) is charmingly presented as an idiosyncratic individual, full of mischief and understated wisdom. The narrator’s feelings toward his father are wonderfully ambiguous, and convey the confusion that can often follow in the wake of a death in a troubled relationship.

It’s a quiet, intelligent, and formally inspired film that deserves much greater exposure. It played at Cannes last year and won the NETPAC award for the Promotion of Asian Cinema in Brisbane, but it appears to only be popping up in sporadic venues around the US this year. Don’t miss it.

Citing sources

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Although I’ve seen Robert Bresson’s films numerous times over, I never miss the opportunity to attend the rare local screening or event that pertains to his work, partly to find material for the Masters of Cinema site I co-admin with Trond Trondsen, www.robert-bresson.com, and partly out of personal interest. (Okay, fanaticism.)

Last night, I attended a lecture at a California university that was both an accredited class for students as well as a public event. It was to include a screening of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951). As I arrived, I grabbed a copy of the professor’s screening notes stacked by the door and found a seat. Then I began reading. Basic plot summary, thematic intro, yada yada yada…. Then the more in-depth commentary, and the second paragraph began with “Much has been written about the film as an interior drama…” And I thought, hmm, that’s interesting. As I read further, I thought, hmm, this whole paragraph sounds awfully familiar.

Looking over the “Film Notes,” I realized that four of the remaining seven paragraphs had been written by me and published here at Filmjourney and at robert-bresson.com, but nowhere was I or my sites mentioned. I also noticed two more facts: the notes carefully quoted and cited AndrÈ Bazin and FrÈdÈric Bonnaud, but simply copied and pasted my writing into the body of the essay; additionally, every now and then a word had been dropped or changed, suggesting my work had been intentionally edited. This wasn’t a citation slip.

So on behalf of all Internet writers who take their work seriously and spend a lot of time putting pieces together for public access, I implore all readers to please respect copyrights for our work. Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it is raw material to incorporate into any publication at one’s whim. I realize I don’t have to say this to the vast majority of Filmjourney readers, but my shock last night made a strong enough impression that I feel I need to emphasize this point.

One of the ironies is that I had attended this lecture thinking I would do a story on it here at Filmjourney and http://www.robert-bresson.com if it proved to be educational. I never would have guessed that the event would merely regurgitate what I myself have already written on these sites.

The House is Black

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“There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.”

Thus begins the narration in Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), a landmark short film (roughly 20 minutes) by one of Iran’s most venerated modern poets, a woman killed at the age of 32 in a car accident whose writing still permeates Iranian culture. (Her poem “The Wind Will Carry Us” is prominently featured in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film of the same name.) In the 2001 book Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi cites The House is Black as the beginning of an adventurous decade of Iranian filmmaking that would culminate with Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow in 1969: “[The House is Black] must be considered by far the most significant film of the early 1960s, a film that with its poetic treatment of leprosy anticipated much that was to follow in Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.” Mohsen Makhmalbaf has called it “the best Iranian film [to have] affected the contemporary Iranian cinema,” and in the liner notes of Facets Video’s new DVD (to be released on February 22), Chris Marker compares the film to Luis BuÒuel’s Las Hurdes.

Farrokhzad’s film may be a “poetic treatment of leprosy,” but it’s also a factual and clear-eyed documentary on the daily routines in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran. By confronting the gruesome effects of the disease on people, it gradually strips away the potential for shock and reveals the human souls beneath the physical symptoms, who are busy persevering, playing, learning, living.

One of the striking counterpoints to the film’s potentially depressing subject, and perhaps the element that gives it the greatest depth, is Farrokhzad’s narration, spoken in hushed, compassionate tones by the director herself. Its evocative language incorporates Koran quotes and Old Testament psalms and oscillates between thanksgiving for the beauty of creation and lamentations for physical suffering.

Farrokhzad’s opening shot is emblematic of her approach–a medium shot of a woman with leprosy with her face partially covered by a veil, the camera slowly and compassionately zooming in to a close-up of her reflection in a mirror. The viewer not only looks at the woman, but shares the woman’s gaze at herself, a mark of the film’s implicit empathy.

And Farrokhzad’s command of the medium continues throughout; though The House is Black is the only film she ever directed (other than a minor commercial), it is brilliantly rhythmic, cutting scenes together thematically and pictorially rather than spatially, and using natural sounds (a squeaky wheel, a bouncing ball, a man walking on crutches) to provide the meter for exceptional montage sequences. Her fluid tracking shots through the colony’s school rooms and prayer halls are graceful and observant, and she artfully punctuates them with everyday details–plants in the sun, drying dishes on a window sill, old shoes and bottles resting together.

Intercut with Farrokhzad’s narration is a male voice (perhaps the film’s producer) who provides objective facts about leprosy and its treatment; it’s contagious and not hereditary, nor is it incurable. “Leprosy goes with poverty.” And the film equally balances empathy with an emphasis on the scientific care needed to heal people as it compiles images of medical treatments and physical therapy.

Running times for the film vary depending on the informational source, but in his informative essay included with the DVD, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who helped write the subtitles) cites the official length as 22 minutes and adds, “though it doesn’t appear to be quite complete–one abrupt edit looks like a censor’s cut, and a few stray details visible in some other versions are missing–this is the best version of the film available in North America.” The Facets DVD clocks in at roughly 15 minutes (and includes two Makhmalbaf shorts and a featurette on Farrokhzad), but also appears to have been struck from a PAL source, thus making it about 36 seconds shorter than the film print used.

This is undoubtedly a difficult film to watch, but it’s one that is all the more generous and compelling for being exactly that. Addressing her subject directly with a sensitive but unflinching gaze, Farrokhzad breaks through the repugnant aura that has often haunted victims of the disease and affirms their resilience and human beauty.

Mani Kaul’s Daily Bread

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Last night I had the opportunity to see Mani Kaul, one of the key figures of the New Hindi Cinema of the late-’60s and ’70s, present his first feature, Daily Bread (Uski Roti, 1970), at the REDCAT theatre in Los Angeles. Kaul’s career has been associated with somewhat experimental and documentary films. “As for autobiographical, experimental or otherwise self-reflexive strands [in documentary], these are almost nonexistent in India,” writes Tom Waugh in Cine Action. “Virtually the only exception is Mani Kaul.” Although Kaul studied under famed Indian director Ritwik Ghatak, his primary inspiration came elsewhere. “I think I was his favourite pupil,” Kaul has said, “but I betrayed him. When I saw Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, my outlook changed completely.”

Bresson’s influence can be seen in Daily Bread, a dramatic film full of silences, gestures, near-stoic expressions, and offscreen sounds. But Kaul is far from a simple imitator, and Daily Bread has a remarkable aesthetic all its own, particularly in its emphasis on time. Shots are extended beyond their usual limits, sometimes even incorporating flash frames where the exposure ceases to exist. Telling the story of a traditional housewife who waits at a bus stop for her working and often absent husband, the film artfully transitions between the present and past in a way that accentuates the woman’s subjective experience of time more than a traditional narrative structure would. Kaul has said that he wanted to make a film about waiting. At our screening, he referred to the film’s polarized audience reception in 1970 and joked about the people who hated its pace. (Reportedly, a member of the Indian parliament once said the film was so boring that she would never forget it in all her life. A criticism or a praise?)

Unfortunately, none of Kaul’s films have been distributed in the US, and the print screened at the REDCAT didn’t even contain subtitles. Not that it detracted from the film; on the contrary, there isn’t a lot of dialogue in it and not having to read the words allowed me to immerse myself more fully into the film’s lulling, evocative rhythms. (Kaul pointed out that Bresson often considered the various tones of a film’s dialogue as being more important than the actual words being expressed, anyway.) As the housewife stands beside a tree in the shade, flies buzzing around her, the sun-dappled foliage swaying, her thoughts drift through recent events and conversations, merging memories with the present moment in a fluid, seemingly unordered path.

Daily Bread is a highly impressive feature that makes me enthusiastic to seek out Kaul’s other work as well, and yearn for the day when some of his films might be released on DVD. His mastery of the medium, even in this debut feature produced at the age of 26, is readily apparent. In recent years he has lived in Rotterdam and is currently a visiting artist teaching classes on Bresson and cinematic sound at CalArts.