Monthly Archives: October 2006

La Commune (Paris, 1871)

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British filmmaker Peter Watkins’ nearly six-hour film, La Commune (Paris, 1871), made in the year 2000, is without a doubt one of the best and most important films of the decade, and it was just released this week on DVD by First Run Features. Count yourselves lucky–the film, which commemorates the short-lived working class attempt to turn France into a socialist republic following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, has rarely been screened in France or elsewhere, although I’ve had the French DVD on hand ever since I first saw the film at a special screening in Los Angeles last year. (Arte TV in France, who financed the film, has apparently chosen to bury it, giving it as little exposure as possible.) Filled with wall-to-wall political debate, pleas for social equality and critiques of power, the film is a furious, provocative, and rousing experimental documentary that reenacts the Commune’s historical moment.

After the Revolution of 1789, France went through a series of empires, monarchies, and republics. By 1871, Napolean III had been defeated by the Franco-Prussian War, prompting a six-month Prussian siege of Paris. The workers and poor of the city were suffering extremes of poverty and starvation; many were feeding on rats. A provisional government, led by Adolphe Thiers, signed a treaty that would include the ceremonial German occupation of Paris. But the French National Guard–a large network of citizens’ militias who had served during the war–had no intention of opening their city to the Germans, and seized and hid cannons under the auspices of their newly-formed Central Committee. The Germans came and went without incident, but Thiers soon realized that a rival authority had risen in Paris, and ordered his army to repossess the cannons. Citizens (mostly women) in Montmarte, however, would not relinquish their weaponry; when troops were subsequently ordered to fire on them, the soldiers rebelled and a popular insurrection ensued.

Thiers immediately evacuated to Versailles (where the monarchist National Assembly resided), taking his administration, his police, most of his troops, and a lot of bourgeoisie and business owners with him; the National Guard’s Central Committee promptly elected a Commune to govern Paris and implemented socialist reforms that would improve the livelihood of the poor and working classes.

Watkins begins with the Prussian siege and follows the Commune through its short existence to its brutal suppression a few months later. But his film starts with a documentary preamble filmed on the last day of the production’s chronological, 13-day shoot; actors introduce themselves and the characters they play, and the camera roves around the film’s labyrinthine set, a collection of rooms and alleys poised between realism and artifice. Although there are many props and period textures, the studio’s concrete floor and ceiling lights are plainly visible, and continue to be throughout the film.

Thus begins the film’s formal strategy to provoke active viewing; Watkins–a longtime critic of standard, “monoform” media conventions–juxtaposes period drama with filmmaking artifice in a way that tells the story, critiques the story, and challenges the way it’s being told all at the same time. Dramatic reenactments are punctuated with reams of text that question and clarify the drama, offer commentary, and draw parallels to current events. Interviews with many of the film’s 200-plus actors (the majority of whom are nonprofessionals recruited from Paris and surrounding suburbs, including undocumented workers from North Africa) occur throughout the shooting, which allow the participants to offer their thoughts regarding the characters and events in medias res. Finally, Watkins offers a bracing critique of mass media by imagining how Commune life would have been represented by competing modern news sources, the National TV Versailles and the independent Commune TV. The result is a multilayered and thoroughly absorbing work that is as informative and thought-provoking as it is feverishly dramatic, suspenseful, and surprisingly brisk despite its length.

La Commune is shot with striking, black-and-white digital video, often in ten-minute takes. The wide-angled footage would seem slower if the action wasn’t occurring simultaneously in the foreground, midground, and background–usually in the form of public masses in “streets” or long, crowded rooms–and if the handheld camera didn’t move through the crowds as often as it does, pushing from one conversation to the next. Dramatic momentum is comprised of a multitude of small conflicts, all coexisting and colliding with one another through protests, arguments, and ongoing discussions.

In all of this, the actors maintain startling conviction, even as they oscillate in and out of character–as fine a distinction that makes in a Watkins film; many of the actors developed their own dialogue through a combination of research and personal conviction. “This film showed me the huge gap between reflection and action,” one woman playing a dissident remarks. “In a barricade situation, for example, deeply involved in a direct, strong, chemical, physical struggle, as soon as the camera comes up and we have to speak, it’s a very difficult relationship; for reflection to connect with action. Real change will come from this type of work.”

The faces are real and the emotions are palatable as the film highlights bakers, midwives, teachers, servants, mechanics, soldiers, and many other Communards who envision and attempt to forge a society founded on personal dignity, political participation, and livable wages for all members.

The Commune implements a variety of reforms and precedents: it insists on a separation of Church and State, and a free secular education for all, particularly women, who at that time were trained in religious schools only to be housewives or homemakers. (“Jesus was an anarchist, the carpenter always on strike! You have made him the God of the bourgeoisie,” one women shouts at a priest.) A system of pensions for war widows is created, late-night hours for bakers is abolished, pawnshops are forced to return tools and household items less than 20 francs in value, and stores abandoned by their owners are given over to the workers (with the owners, should they return, receiving requisite compensation).

Yet organizing a society is a complex task, particularly when the national army is bearing down with encroaching finality. Thiers eventually launches his assault on Paris, and as cannons rumble in the distance and the untrained and ill-equipped National Guard clumsily attempt to defend the city, the Commune struggles to balance its various tasks and contradictory factions. Should Versailles be met with violence or peaceful negotiations? Should women be able to serve on the battlefield or on emergency medical teams? How can traitors and conspirators be rooted out without trampling on the freedoms and civil rights of citizens? Watkins doesn’t shy away from highlighting the dark underbelly of Town Hall, with its promises of systematic surveillance, the wives of suspects being interrogated, or drunks being charged with sedition. And while the Church is seen as a potential tool of oppression, it provides genuine services and meals otherwise hard to come by.

In order to highlight the role of the press at the time, many quotes and statistics in the film are taken from progressive journals of the day, such as PËre DuchÈne and Cri du Peuple. But Watkins also focuses his aim on the modern media, and the continual spin doctoring by the national TV station in Versailles provides some welcome humor as pseudo-intellectuals pontificate on the Commune’s ineffectual idealism or provide sound bites re-articulating the party line. One talking head cites Napolean’s writing on workers’ rights, as if such concerns were addressed decades earlier. “Things would’ve worked out, but they wanted revolution instead of evolution,” he sighs. For their part, the Commune TV reporters do a serviceable job giving voice to the Commune, but they, too, struggle with finding a balance between penetrating analysis and nonpartisan coverage.

Yet for all of Watkins’ carefully conceived interruptions and proverbial mirrors highlighting his creative process, the film never substitutes irony for genuine feeling or seriousness of purpose, which may be its singular aesthetic triumph. Watkins obviously cares about the subject deeply and his many passionate actors clearly do as well; no amount of self-imposed critical distance diminishes the film’s dramatic force or real world relevancy–it only intensifies it. (Many of the film’s participants have formed Le Rebond, an association for the promotion of the film and the development of discussions and workshops that address its themes. “Le Rebond is undoubtedly the most important ongoing development in the process of any film I have made,” Watkins has written, “and shows that it is entirely possible to create processes within the audiovisual media which can move beyond the limitations of the rectangular frame.”)

As the film builds to its violent and tragic climax, its atmosphere of urgency is overwhelming. Ultimately, 20,000 to 30,000 Communards and others–men, women, and children–are executed, while many others are rounded up, arrested, and placed in exile. (Some readers may recall that the title character of Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast was a Commune survivor whose husband and son were killed during its suppression.)

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the worst riots in France in 40 years, and news reports are already stating that police are descending into poor neighborhoods in the hopes of warding off potential repeat events, even though little has changed in the social fabric within the past year. With those concerns and a crucial US election coming up, La Commune may not only be one of the towering achievements of cinema of the last few years, but also an electrifying examination of issues and conflicts that couldn’t be more relevant today.

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?

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Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001)

The news is spreading that DaniËle Huillet–the personal and filmmaking partner of Jean-Marie Straub for over half a century–passed away this week, ending one of the most acclaimed filmmaking teams of the New German Cinema (though Huillet and Straub were both French and lived in Rome). If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can be forgiven–only their first feature, the exquisite Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) is available on DVD in North America, and co-director Huillet isn’t mentioned once in its liner notes by Armond White or the excerpts from Richard Roud’s study, simply entitled Jean-Marie Straub (1972). Barton Byg, whose scholarly Landscapes of Resistance (1995) I’ve just discovered is online, refers to Huillet’s constant marginalization:

“Although DaniËle Huillet is clearly one of the most important women working in the postwar European cinema, she remains almost totally ignored by film criticism. One reason for this is as scandalous as it is simple: since all of Huillet’s work has been in collaboration with Jean-Marie Straub and the two have refused to stylize themselves in any particular way as ‘artist personalities,’ the sexist assumption of the 1950s that Straub is the principle auteur of the two has remained unquestioned. . . . Instead, for years [Huillet] has stayed in the background, especially since she believes that interviews and discussions–in which Straub more readily engages–may do the films more harm than good. . . . Furthermore, the single area in which Huillet does leave more of the decisions to Straub is the aspect of filmmaking that has been reified into the directorial ‘signature’–e.g., script and mise-en-scËne–and especially those areas in which Huillet may be more in charge–sound, editing, ‘scene design,’ and many producer’s functions–all fit more readily the stereotype of women working behind the scenes.”

But nowhere is the equality of the Straub-Hullet creative partnership more evident than in Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s excellent portrait of the duo, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, filmed as part of the estimable CinÈma, de notre temps French TV series. Since Costa’s magisterial Colossal Youth (one of the best films I saw at TIFF) is receiving accolades at the moment, I thought Huillet’s tragic passing would be a good time to consider the documentary (available as a Portuguese DVD from AssÌro & Alvim).

Costa observes Straub and Huillet in the editing process, juxtaposing Huillet’s movieola screen (featuring clips from 1999′s Sicilia! that she runs through the viewer) with wider shots of her room (which Straub continually paces), another room of technicians (probably editing assistants), and a public screening in which Straub delivers an informal talk.

I was immediately struck by the film’s similarities in tableau visual style to Colossal Youth: Straub and Huillet’s room is dimly lit and statically shot with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 at a slightly lower angle, with a figure (in this case, Straub) frequently posed in the doorway. More than an aesthetic signature, however, this approach lends the setting a dramatic gravity and emphasizes the shifting space–and corresponding emotional and creative distance–between the two filmmakers. As tensions flare at one point, Straub saunters out of the room (“You don’t want me in here anyway”) but gently reappears: “I’m afraid you’ve won,” he tells Huillet after admiring her scene assembly. “Men!” she sighs.

And flare their tempers do, even as their preferences to cut a shot may differ only by a single frame. Straub, a natural magpie mind with a quote for every occasion, seems to thrive on osmosis and verbal pontification; Huillet seems more task-oriented and focused on immediate solutions. “After all this time we’ve been editing films together, how come you still don’t have the discipline?” she shouts at Straub. But after talking through their differences, Straub eventually finds the words to articulate a stronger defense for his perspective.

As Huillet repeatedly runs the film back-and-forth, searching for precise editing moments, Straub muses on film theories promoted by Cocteau, Bresson, and Chaplin, quotes scenes by Tati and Mizoguchi, and racks his brain trying to recall the name of Hitchock’s script girl. (When talking of how he met Huillet at the LycÈe Voltaire for the first time in 1954–”I had fallen madly in love at first sight”–he claims he was kicked out because “I knew too much about Hitchcock and that disturbed the class.”)

As might be expected, Straub provides the bulk of the film’s philosophical flair, describing why formalists have less patience and therefore less creativity than realists (“charged with contradictions”), or why professional actors are more false than non-professional actors. But Costa’s film is infused with Huillet’s creative energies as it emphasizes the nuances of her constant searching, playing, marking, and replaying moments of film. In addition to being a multifaceted portrait of their creative process, it’s an instructive examination of the art of editing in general; one of the film’s pleasures is watching how closely Huillet and Straub observe their own footage, discovering unwanted palm trees, random butterflies, or subtle smiles, and coming up with solutions to incorporate or elide them in their final cut. The film’s obtuse title, in fact, could be a playful riff on the latter as a tribute to the filmmakers’ sensitivity to cinematic realities, but also as a testament to the subtle warmth that has clearly cemented their long and fruitful collaboration.

Straub-Huillet will be missed. You can read an insightful 1976 interview in Jump Cut with them here. Let’s hope their films will continue to surface on DVD in the near future.

Magic Lanterns

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“Those who had the least confidence in the future of the cinema were precisely the two industrialists Edison and LumiËre. . . . As for the real savants such as Marey, they were only of indirect assistance to the cinema. They had a special purpose in mind and were satisfied when they had accomplished it. The fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers, capable, as was Bernard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a few seconds of shaky images, were neither industrialists nor savants, just men obsessed by their own imaginings. The cinema was born from the converging of these various obsessions, that is to say, out of a myth, the myth of total cinema.”
–AndrÈ Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema”

I attend a lot of film related events in Los Angeles, but last night’s sold-out lecture, “Magic Lanterns and the Evolution of Film Narrative” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (co-presented by the estimable Filmforum) was an exceptional one. Professor Joss Marsh from the University of Indiana offered a lively and highly informative, multi-media crash course in magic lantern technology and 19th century visual culture.

A predecessor of the slide projector, the magic lantern was a technological marvel for 250 years; it stayed in fashion well into the 1920s. A network of itinerant lanternists fueled a thriving pop culture in a Victorian Britain captivated by dioramas, narrative paintings, illustrated books, comics, and advertising. Magic lanterns evolved over time, incorporating multiple lenses for dissolves or levers for simple movements (all precursors of cinematic grammar), gathering an audience eager for mechanical enchantments in a darkened room. As Bazin suggested in his famous 1946 essay, the motion picture wasn’t a new idea so much as the latest expression of an ongoing cultural desire for an ultimate, “realistic” screen experience.

Marsh was joined by archivist and lantern collector David Francis (pictured above), who carefully choreographed an antique slideshow with a vintage lantern throughout her lecture. I was amazed at the clarity and vibrant colors the lantern produced; these weren’t crude projections but detailed photographs, etchings, and drawings printed on 3.25 square-inch glass slides and hand-tinted; subjects ranged from the exotic (moonlit landscapes and seaside caverns) to the everyday (domestic interiors and taverns) to the abstract (moving kaleidoscopic patterns). A whole genre of phantasmagoria slides featured demons and ghosts that were once projected on smoke or transparent screens.

The Victorians were obsessed with narrative, and magic lantern shows told stories comprised of long slide sequences, dramatic readings, live music–even audience singalongs (none of which we at AMPAS were spared); it was a spirited evening. I can’t say I belted out a chorus of “Cherry Ripe” at the appropriate time, but many in the audience did, and it was an undeniably fun event that evoked a genuine feeling for the lantern in its heyday; additionally, it was easy to perceive the “mythic” elements that link such technology with today’s visual technology, and beyond.

One of the more fascinating themes of Marsh’s presentation was her emphasis on the role lanterns played in popularizing the British Temperance movement, which wasn’t funded by reactionary moralists so much as capitalists and merchants who wanted consumers to spend less money on drink and more on their products. Buy Your Own Cherries (1864) was a prototypical example, with its tale of a worker who decides to avoid the pub and invest in his family’s future by–you guessed it–buying his own produce and thus becoming a model citizen. (As the singalong cheerfully reminds us, it’s not who you are but how rich you are that matters in this world.) The show was remade into a 1904 short film by Robert W. Paul included on Kino’s The Movies Begin DVD set. Many early films were adaptations of popular lantern shows.

Equally engrossing was Marsh’s assertion that Charles Dickens–a lifelong lantern lover whose stories of sullen protagonists redeemed by watching images of their lives (Gabriel Grub, A Christmas Carol)–was the single author most inspired by, and inspiring to, lantern culture; the fact that Dickens himself performed popular readings of his works further encouraged their adaptation. Coincidentally, Dickens and early cinema are highlighted with the British Film Institute’s new 2-disc Dickens Before Sound DVD release, which includes “an entirely original attempt to animate a series of original lantern slides depicting the story of Gabriel Grub“; likely the very show screened at AMPAS.

Yet no matter how professionally the BFI recreates the lantern show, I doubt the experience of watching it will compare with seeing it live. Marsh and Francis combine scholarship with an evident love for the technology and its entertainment value in a way that is positively infectious. Antique magic lanterns are apparently not the most portable of devices, which may be a good thing for Marsh and Francis–if the enthusiastic AMPAS audience was any indication, I could see their program becoming a highly sought after touring event.

Kieslowski’s documentaries, Part 2

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The following reviews cover the films included on Disc Two of the Polish region-2 DVD release of documentaries by Krzysztof Kieslowski. (Disc One reviews and other relevant info can be found here.)


First Love (1974)

Of the twelve films included on this DVD release, this is among Kieslowski’s most emotionally compelling works, and also an early hint of his strong intuition for narrative. The film follows the lives of two youths–Jadwiga, pregnant at the age of 17, and her boyfriend, Romek (19)–as it carefully reveals their struggles (finishing school, getting married, finding an apartment in a city with multi-year waitlists) and future hopes. Jadwiga is headstrong and impressively mature for a girl her age, and Romek is dependable and supportive, but both are inexperienced and vulnerable. It’s impossible not to root for them as they battle bureaucratic hurdles and institutional bias; Jadwiga’s teachers seem more intent on telling her what a bad example she sets for other students than giving her credit for the effort she makes. Every living arrangement and formality comes with a price, and Kieslowski emphasizes each one, piecing together the couple’s life together through a deft shuffling of major (ceremonial) and minor (private) incidents. (Apparently, he even invited a policeman to confront the youths in order to provoke some drama.) As an addendum, Krzysztof Wierzbicki–Kieslowski’s assistant on this film and director of I’m So-So (1995)–directed a follow-up film, Horoscope, featuring Jadwiga and Romek in 2000.

Hospital (1976)

It’s hard to watch a film about doctors these days and not think of last year’s The Death of Mister Lazarescu (but maybe that’s because it’s a new DVD release, too), but this examination of close to 24 hours in the life of a group of physicians working in a hospital conveys the same sense of professionalism, stretched Eastern European resources, and increasing weariness. Kieslowski liked to structure his documentaries according to a recurring question or element, and in this case, each hour of the day flashes onscreen as an intertitle. (Although the 20-minute film compiles footage obtained once a week over the course of two to three months.) The patients are rarely shown; the doctors do their best with sub-par resources: fluctuating power, faulty instruments (“you could sew boots with this needle!”), dwindling plasma, and so on. One scene shows the medics standing in line to collect their paychecks, earning 17 zlotys an hour (in today’s conversion, that’s about $5.50.)

Although the film shows the staff working from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and beyond (sleeping in a special room for an hour or two), Kieslowski later told Danusia Stok that once a week, doctors would work 31-hour shifts, and this is what they filmed. And he prized the intimacy of his approach: “Those doctors were so open and we became such good friends, that they felt as if we weren’t even there. That’s the whole point of documentaries taking so long to make, yet nobody knows this, especially television reporters these days. They come along, stick a microphone under your nose and tell you to answer some question; you’ll answer wisely or stupidly but that doesn’t reveal the truth about you.”


From a Night Porter’s Point of View (1978)

“Everybody loves something, don’t they?” a middle aged guard muses in first-person narration. “Me, I love running checks on people, you know. . . . You could say this is my hobby.” He then enthusiastically describes randomly raiding fishermen for licenses, impounding their equipment, and maybe buying it at a discount before they can reclaim it.

The protagonist is a decidedly unpleasant personality, and the film highlights his overbearing legalism. The man champions authority and power, dislikes youth with sideburns, endorses public hangings, and utters witticisms like, “Regulations are more important than people.” Yet this is a straightforward description of his point-of-view without a note of irony or ridicule (though one might cite the lyrical music or the fact that the guard’s only companions seem to be dogs he can leash up). I’m reminded of Kieslowski’s remarks to Stok regarding the brutal impositions of the Party Board of Control in Curriculum Vitae (1975):

“My attitude is: even if something is happening which isn’t right, even if somebody is acting badly, in my opinion, then I have to try and understand that person. However good or bad they are, you have to try and understand why they’re like that. . . . If I see that people are acting according to some ideology–political, for example–through an inner conviction and not through the need for a comfortable life, then even if they are on the other side, I have a certain respect for them. But only up to a certain point, of course. . . . It’s not a question of justifying these people. Understanding isn’t necessarily associated with justification. Justification, in this case, would imply making the film through the eyes of the other side. I don’t look through the eyes of the other side in my films. I always look through my own eyes.”

Though the night porter trespasses Kieslowski’s humanist inclinations, the filmmaker allows his subject the chance to freely state his case. (In fact, Kieslowski opposed airing the film on TV because he feared the backlash the man might’ve faced.)

The film is also notable for its garish, faded color scheme, an effect Kieslowski achieved by using poor film stock from East Germany (“This porter is a distortion of a human being and we wanted the color to accentuate the grotesqueness of the world surrounding him”), foreshadowing his use of heavy filters to distort the world of his dark-protagonist masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing (1988). Both films seem to labor under the weight of the characters onscreen; empathy asphyxiating.

Seven Women of Different Ages (1978)

This is a fairly straightforward film, notable mostly–as is all of Kieslowski’s work–for its structure. In this case, the seven days of the week (identified with intertitles) are representative of seven different stages in the life of a typical ballet dancer, with seven women of different ages representing each stage from clumsy little girl to elegant performer to aging, authoritative instructor. One might see the first percolations of Kieslowski’s interest in shared lives–each individual provides part of the collective soul. And figure movement, performace, and dancing would recur in many of Kieslowski’s subsequent films.

Talking Heads (1980)

Kieslowski’s final documentary is an austere exercise in “man on the street” interviewing: people of all ages are filmed as they are asked when they were born, what they are, and what they would like the most; the film assembles their responses with straight cuts from youngest to oldest (one to a hundred), their birth years appearing onscreen. Paul Coates describes the film as “the most richly polyphonic and complex example” of Kieslowski’s penchant for collating many different voices to produce a cumulative idea in his documentaries, “whose every voice feels like Kieslowski’s own, calling for less aggression in everyday life, for freedom and love.” And while I don’t disagree, Kieslowski was typically contrarian when asked about the film in I’m So-So: “These people didn’t precisely know what they wanted. . . . Only a drunkard said, ‘I’m all right.’” It’s a fascinating collective portrait and a social summa that would become even more relevant as Solidarity began its slow political ascendancy throughout the ’80s.