Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani is an elegant little film, and one of the most emotionally resonant movies I’ve seen this year. Based on a story by the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami that was published in the New Yorker in 2002, the characters and narrative are so lightly sketched, the film’s gravity sneaks up on the viewer, largely through the gradual force of its form and rhythm.

The film opens by evoking the carefree lifestyle of Tony Takitani’s father, Shozaburo, a jazz musician who lives in Shanghai during World War II, endures prison, returns to Japan and marries, but becomes a widower shortly after Tony’s birth. Tony (whose odd American name was the result of a drunken suggestion) is socially marginalized almost from the get-go and his musician father is rarely around during his formative years.

Tony (Issei Ogata) compensates by turning inward and away–he becomes an exceptionally talented draftsman specializing in realism, replication, and mechanical accuracy, and he emotionally keeps to himself, never recognizing his own loneliness until mid-life, when he meets an attractive client (Rie Miyazawa). The rest of the story describes his varied responses to this event and his potential transformation through the love, life, and hardships that ensue.

Seemingly the entire film is shot with long lenses that flatten the visual space and reduce the depth of field, and director Ichikawa emphasizes figures seated in front of large windows that reveal a blurry neighborhood or cityscape beyond their reach. The film’s compositions fragment the space, evoking a studied, sterile milieu that the soft light and desaturated colors imbue with a deeply-felt melancholy. It’s a lucid expression of contemporary isolation and loneliness, and Ichikawa’s recurring tracking shots (repeatedly moving from left to right) establish a pattern of scene transitions that suggest the inexorable flow of time.

But if this visual style alone had defined the film, it might have overpowered its delicate dramaturgy. Instead, Ichikawa offers subtle counterpoint by incorporating an omniscient narrator who reads Murakami’s text, and a playful touch–moments when the characters continue the film’s narration as if lost in private reveries. The way the film develops a rhythm between narration, image, dialogue, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s minimalist piano score, is tender and thoughtful, and lends the film the rhetorical uplift of a fable. It’s a beautiful example of literary adaptation, with the text remaining cohere and independent but smoothly coexisting with the sounds and images, amplifying their meaning. (Ichikawa’s screenplay also adheres to Murakami’s story while offering his own coda.)

Surprisingly for a film as spare as this, I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of its lingering reverberations. (I also think it’s a mistake to reveal too much of the plot, as many reviewers have done.) There is much here about inner voids and attachments, analytical and emotional paradigms, private prisons and releases, a merging of Western and Eastern values. But discovering and exploring these shadings is what makes the film so pleasurable and expansive; while they’re tempting to elucidate, I’ve seen the film twice and to be honest, I’m not positive the inflections are solidly there, anyway. Yet few recent films have challenged me to consider their implications with greater conviction. It’s not the film’s particulars that remain in the memory, but its quiet, potent yearnings.

In this age of global communication, we think of the world as getting smaller, but then a documentary like the BBC’s A State of Mind (distributed theatrically in the US by Kino International) comes along and offers a glimpse into one of the most industrialized but closed societies on earth, and it’s like discovering life on another planet. North Korea, whose war with South Korea has remained in a cease fire for the last half century, is a totalitarian state that bans international mail, travel, and cell phones, offers one official television and radio station, and only admits a trickle of guided tourists, provided they don’t have cameras. It had one venerated president from 1945 to his death in 1994 and he’s now considered their eternal leader; his son runs the government in his absence.

When I lived in South Korea for a summer in the ’90s, we spent a morning at the famously-misnamed Demilitarized Zone and gazed out tiny windows across a no man’s land of evacuated bunkers at North Korean soldiers staring back at us. Both countries broadcasted propaganda from loudspeakers, and the chill morning air encapsulated the sober mood.

But despite the country’s hardships–including a rigid class system, famines, and one of the worst human rights records in the world–North Korea has produced a thriving and unique culture rarely glimpsed by the West. One of its ongoing projects is Mass Games, described as the largest human spectacle on earth, which occurs sporadically every few years. An expression of the personality cult of North Korea’s leaders, the national Juche Idea (“self-reliance”), and collectivism, Mass Games are radically choreographed celebrations involving up to 100,000 acrobatic dancers who leap and twirl in perfect unison, separate by the hundreds into geometric designs and vast swathes of color, and recombine with all the precision of a kaleidoscope. Young gymnasts train a minimum of two hours per day for months at a time and compete intensely for the honor of performing.

Having charmed the North Korean authorities with his politically neutral 2002 documentary about their 1966 World Cup victory, British filmmaker Daniel Gordon was not only allowed to return to the country and film the Mass Games, but also record the daily lives of two schoolgirls training for the event. Thus, he became the first Western filmmaker officially endorsed by the North Korean government. And although A State of Mind plays by the rules (Gordon was limited to the elitist and relatively pampered culture living in Pyongyang), it’s hardly a propaganda piece, offering candid interviews, footage of power outages, and narration that highlights many of the country’s problems.

Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of the skill, determination, and spirit of the two girls and their supportive families, culminating in the Mass Games themselves. One would ordinarily be hard pressed to find anyone less interested in public spectacles than myself, yet I was absolutely transfixed by the film’s energetic montages, which can only be visually described as resembling Busby Berkely routines remade by George Lucas and his army of animators using tens of thousands of computer-generated models. (The backdrop to these performances alone is a gargantuan mosaic comprised of thousands of schoolchildren flipping colored cards.)

Yet the film is also admirably intimate, giving a human face to those living in a totalitarian society; their fears, joys, inspirations, and hopes.

This weekend, the International Documentary Association began screening its DocuWeek program (not “festival,” they were quick to emphasize) so the films could qualify for Oscar nominations next year by playing in a commercial theater in Los Angeles. Whatever, I’m just glad the films are being shown even if there have been less than a dozen people at each of my screenings. The first two documentaries are stylish, engrossing pieces about art and artists, and the third is one of the best films I’ve seen all year, a sober look at global economics and third world devastation.

Touch the Sound

I found Thomas Riedelsheimer’s new film much like his earlier one, Rivers and Tides: an aesthetically immersive but philosophically overextended look at the work of a unique artist. Evelyn Glennie is a virtually deaf musician renowned for her classical percussion skills (often using found objects). A passionate and thoughtful onscreen presence, Glennie stages public performances, travels the world with various musicians, and improvises an album in a large industrial space with avant garde musician Fred Frith. In between, she muses at length on the philosophical qualities of sound and describes how she perceives it through her whole body rather than her ears alone, which is undeniably perceptive and inspiring for a while, but eventually begins to drift into a thick haze of poetic abstraction. (“Hearing is a form of touch. . . . . Something that’s so hard to describe because, in a way, it’s something that comes to you. . . . Silence is probably one of the loudest sounds and heaviest sounds that you’re ever likely to experience. . . . I believe that we all have our own individual sound, we hear the sound within ourselves differently, and then you understand–wow–we are the sound.” And on and on.)

The beginning of the film contains its strongest moments, as when Riedelsheimer organizes a cacophony of urban sounds (cars, footsteps, machinery, flapping fabric) into rhythmic sequences. A scene at an airport is positively Bressonian in its celebration of recurring sonic textures: luggage wheels running over the cracks in a floor tile, water dripping in a fountain, footfalls on a translucent ceiling. I enjoyed the film’s aesthetics, and Glennie is photogenic and charming, but the singular approach begins to wear thin after a while. Apparently, a shortened version of the film was made for German television, and I suspect it’s an improvement.

Who Gets to Call it Art?

This lively and amiable film about Pop art in the 1960s is an entertaining overview of the first bona fide American art movement and focuses on the curator who helped define and shape it more than anyone else–Henry Geldzahler of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Geldzahler, rotund with his ever-present cigar, befriended and supported many unknown artists of his day (especially Andy Warhol and David Hockney), consciously attempting to understand and promote their work to a wider public. His efforts culminated in his landmark 1969 exhibition, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, which was seen as a decisive turning point for the Met as well as an entire culture still obsessed with European art. The new exhibition featured artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella.

The film interviews many artists from the era and records their candid impressions of Geldzahler and the ’60s art scene in a loose, free-flowing manner, sometimes focusing on the personalities and sometimes focusing on the works through a montage of film clips, art photos, and personal documents. Given the ease with which myths develop around art and artists, it’s refreshing to see a film highlight a curator who invested a great deal of time, energy, and professional effort toward forming a canonical snapshot of the era. Film buffs will also enjoy seeing curator, writer, and filmmaker Jonas Mekas as a recurring talking head.

Darwin’s Nightmare

This quiet, shattering film focuses on Lake Victoria in Africa, the second largest lake in the world (the size of Ireland), and the havoc wreaked by its non-native fish, the nile perch, introduced there in the late-’50s. The large, predatory fish has reproduced so extensively and devoured so many of the lake’s diverse fishes that in the last 40 years, it has rendered a couple hundred species extinct, allowed uncontrolled vegetation and algae to deoxygenate the waters . . . and become the primary focus of a booming “globalized” fishing industry. The nile perch is a European delicacy that has prompted monumental fishing operations owned by foreigners who harvest the fish and fly hundreds of tons of fillets to Europe weekly in huge cargo planes, while the local Tanzanian, Kenyan, and Ugandan workers and surrounding population (who can no longer afford the fish) suffer from malnutrition, poverty, disease, and social disintegration.

Making the situation an even more acute example of the exploitation of the Third World is filmmaker Hubert Sauper’s discovery that many of the cargo planes import arms and munitions just as they export fish, thus highlighting the arms trade to impoverished countries that helps perpetuate the region’s violence and instability. (The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are responsible for 88 percent of arms exports, and the US earns far more selling arms each year than it gives in aid.) One of the local men interviewed in the film openly pines for war purely as an employment opportunity–soldier’s pay beats poverty–and the Great Lakes region is continually marred by civil wars and strife. Four million people have died in the Ituri district in nearby Congo in the last six years, the bloodiest conflict since World War II.

Sauper, in fact, gets quite close to his subjects–the fishermen, prostitutes, orphans, and struggling families of Mwanza, a small village on the Tanzanian side of Lake Victoria. Over a four-year period, he documents their struggles to stay healthy and alive while competing over discarded scraps of fish or melting down plastic packaging that children inhale for sedation. Yet the beauty of the villagers are continually evoked in the film, their resilience and dreams for a better tomorrow, and the film’s lack of narration allows the people and culture to speak for themselves.

Sauper also gains the confidence of the Russian cargo pilots and Indian fish factory owners; the former miss their families and the latter pride themselves on a well-managed product. While it might have been easy to vilify the pilots (particularly one cynical racist), Sauper allows them to express their own financial dilemmas that compel them to ignore the deeply corrupt system in which they participate. “Children in Angola receive weapons on Christmas Day; European children receive grapes,” one Russian shrugs. “That’s business. But I wish all children could receive grapes.”

In addition to its images of human suffering and economic injustice, however, Darwin’s Nightmare achieves its potency by giving viewers admirable space to connect the dots and interpret the various powers at work themselves. Sauper is no polemicist, and his close observation and eye for challenging juxtaposition provides more than enough impetus for engagement. It’s an informative, harrowing, and deeply compassionate achievement.

The film’s website can be accessed here.

UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing Festival of Preservation screened Li Hanxiang’s charming Love Eterne (1963) last night, one of the most popular Hong Kong films of all time. It’s a romantic musical of the accessible huangmei opera genre derived from folk songs, consisting of short stanzas and choruses that are often sung by non-professionals. The movie is a colorful, widescreen Shaw Brothers production; the famed King Hu (1966′s Dragon Inn) is credited as having directed the “action scenes,” but what those might be are anyone’s guess–everything but the final scenes is a placid and cheerful costume drama. Nevertheless, Ang Lee cites it as one of his favorite movies in a lengthy and revealing 2001 interview in the New York Times:

“It was a big hit in China, but particularly in Taiwan,” Mr. Lee said. “This is because of the Mandarin culture in the movie. We had escaped from the mainland in the civil war, and we missed that culture. For those of us too young to remember the mainland, we did not really know the old culture. So when we would see it in this movie, we would think, `Oh, that is China.’ When I went back to China to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I knew nothing about the real China. I had this image in my mind, from movies like this. So I projected these images as my China, the China in my head.”

Love Eterne was so successful that Hanxiang left the Shaw Brothers (at the time, the largest independent film studios in the world), emigrated to Taiwan, and helped revitalized the film industry in that country throughout the ’60s. (When Hong Kong martial arts films began to dominate the market in the ’70s, however, Hanxiang returned to the Shaws.)

The story, based on a classic folk tale, is decidedly straightforward. In the 4th century, a young heiress named Zhu Yingtai (Betty Le Di) disguises herself as a boy in order to enroll in a school and befriends Liang Shanbo (Ivy Ling Bo), a poor young student. After three years of study, the two become inseparable friends, but Zhu Yingtai secretly plans to reveal herself as the woman she is in order to marry Liang Shanbo. But upon returning home, she discovers she has already been promised to a local ruffian, and operatic tragedy ensues.

Both lead characters are played by women, in keeping with the genre and Chinese screen performances in general (“To have seen a real man expressing romantic feelings for a woman on the screen would have been too strong for the audiences then; China was a very repressed society,” Ang Lee explains), and Ivy Ling Bo was so prized in her role that she continues to play it onstage today at 66. (Sadly, Betty Le Di committed suicide in the ’60s.) The film propels itself forward with bright costumes and elaborate period sets (drawing rooms, living quarters, ornamental bridges over koy ponds) and easily flows from dialogue scenes to songs laced with irony as Zhu Yingtai playfully deceives and teases the unsuspecting Liang Shanbo.

It’s an undeniably charming film–even if its style is conservative, its feminist subtext is not, and one can easily imagine Chinese audiences adoring it in the same way American audiences flocked to Gone With the Wind or The Sound of Music in their day. It’s a playful, sentimental, “Shaw Scope” extravaganza (and it has also been released as a a special edition DVD in Hong Kong).

Werner Herzog has long obsessed over grandiose imagery and unusual documentary subjects (Kuwait’s burning oil fields, the Loch Ness monster, a lost tribe in the Amazon). So I expected his latest documentary–about a man and his girlfriend who were killed by a grizzly bear after the man spent years living with the beasts for months at a time–to be an exercise in style that would milk the eccentricity of its story. Fortunately, Grizzly Man is much more than that; it offers a humane and multifaceted portrait of an individual whose emotional makeup probably wasn’t all that different from the rest of us.

Timothy Treadwell was an out-of-work actor with a lifelong attachment to animals. In 1990, he began camping out in the wilderness in Alaska’s Katmai National Park in order to “protect” and “study” the grizzlies, but this mostly entailed watching them, attempting to develop some kind of nonviolent interaction with them, and–beginning in 1998–video recording them with his own bubbly, adventurous, quasi-Nature Channel introductions. Only once in the 300 hundred hours of footage he amassed does he ever come into contact with poachers, nor does he follow any rigid scientific procedures.

But underlying Treadwell’s project is the sense that animals and the wilderness provided him with a certain personal “acceptance” unavailable to him in Los Angeles or even human society in general; though he was a verbose extravert who wore his emotions on his sleeves, he never managed to achieve success in his career and seemed perpetually flummoxed by the people he knew. In a very real sense, his video recordings were the ultimate independent production, and he presented them at schools around the country for free. Treadwell clearly relished being in front of the camera, gushing words in a spontaneous burst of conviction, and then immediately scratching a take and launching into another monologue with a slightly different mood or emphasis.

Herzog constructs his film with Treadwell’s footage as well as his own, interviewing the friends and family who knew Treadwell and various biological and forensic experts. (The family of Amie Huguenard, the woman killed with Treadwell, refused to talk with Herzog and thus remains a mysterious presence in the film, rarely caught on tape.) The commentators run the predictable gamut between calling Treadwell a foolish idealist who “got what he deserved” to friends and lovers who deeply grieve his demise. A lesser filmmaker would have stopped there with a dramatic premise, “reality” footage, and a variety of talking heads for “tension,” but Herzog highlights Treadwell’s complex psyche, at times seemingly fragile and at other times, seemingly resilient and creative. Herzog shows us the man confessing his thoughts and feelings to the camera in frank and revealing ways: Treadwell rages against the environmental bureaucracy he feels endangers the bears, pleads for the conservation of nature as he strokes the fur of foxes he has tamed, and humorously describes his own romantic frustrations after a bear is defeated in a violent match over a potential mate.

Just as Treadwell’s amateur footage is largely a dramatic performance, Herzog’s assembly is largely an excellent example of film criticism, selecting and highlighting the material, narrating throughout while adjusting audio levels and displaying a combination of empathy and critique towards Treadwell. Herzog clearly admires the man’s fearlesssness and inspiration, yet challenges his reckless love of nature and miscalculated anthropomorphism. Watching Treadwell interact with the beasts and then watching Herzog interact with that footage, presents a strikingly tragic, frightening, moving, and reflective film experience.