In Between Days

By Robert Koehler

Good, smart festivals–and BAFICI is one of them–can dole out terrible awards. The Saturday awards capping the final days (which I’ll be reflecting upon in postings to come) were no exception. I’ll be breaking down some of the results later, but the happiest result was unquestionably my international jury’s wise selection of So Yong Kim’s In Between Days for best film (with the nifty bonus of an acting award for the film’s beautifully instinctive lead actor, Jiseon Kim). Despite being a popular title on the festival circuit since Sundance ’06, Days had yet to win any festival’s top prize; so, to say the least, it was overdue, and in this particular field, clearly deserving. (BAFICI had attempted, as it had with Old Joy, to program the film last year, but scheduling and print difficulties forced a cancellation.)

The worst? The Argentine Authors Association making the titanically stupid decision to award a best screenplay prize to Federico Leon’s and Marcos Martinez’ wafer-thin documentary, Estrellas, which contains not a jot of anything that could be remotely termed a “screenplay.” Indeed, four total prizes to Estrellas (including a special prize from my jury) were four too many, a near-scandalously excessive celebration for a minor work of dubious worth and with an even more dubious agenda. Estrellas‘ ego-maniacal estrella (star), Julio Arrieta, strutted around the stage like he was some incarnation of Juan Peron. I do hope, in retrospect, that this isn’t the lasting, embarrassing memory from a festival with several visionary films. Sometimes, though, it happens that way.

Here are the results:

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION:
Film:In Between Days (So Yong Kim, US/Canada/South Korea)
Director:Hugo Vieira da Silva, Body Rice (Portugal)
Actor: Arturo Goetz El asaltante (Argentina)
Actress: Jiseon Kim, In Between Days
Jury Special Prize: Estrellas (Federico Leon and Marcos Martinez, Argentina)

ARGENTINA COMPETITION:
Film: UPA! Una pelicula Argentina (Santiago Giralt/Camila Toker/Tamae Garateguy)
Director: (tie) Rafael Filippelli, M˙sica nocturna ; Raul Perrone, Canada
Special Mention: La Leon (Santiago Otheguy)

AUDIENCE AWARD:
Foreign: 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
Argentina: Filmatron (Pablo Pares)

ARGENTINA SHORT:
Short: ABC, etc. (Sergio Subero)
Special Mentions: Simpatia (Galel Maidana); Ana (Gabriela Trettel)

CINEMA OF THE FUTURE AWARD:
Film: El tiempo que queda (Jose Luis Torres Leiva, Chile)
Mention: Street Thief (Malik Bader, US)

HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD:
Film: 9 Star Hotel (Ido Haar, Israel)

FIPRESCI:The Sugar Curtain (Camila Guzman Urzua, Cuba/France)

SIGNIS AWARD FOR FEATURE:
Film: The Unpolished (Pia Marais, Germany)
Special Mention: Estrellas

FEISAL (IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN IMAGE AND SOUND FEDERATION) AWARD:
Film: Estrellas
Special Mention: La Leon

ARGENTINA AUTHORS ASSN. AWARD:
Screenplay: Estrellas

ARGENTINE FILM JOURNALISTS’ AWARD FOR BEST ARGENTINE FEATURE:

UPA! Una pelicula Argentina

ARGENTINE CINEMATOGRAPHERS AWARD:

Jorge Crespo, El desierto negro (Argentina)

For those readers who have already snooped around on the web to check the awards results and tracked them down at variety.com, please note that this site incorrectly reports the audience awards. The Cannes Camera d’Or-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest and the world-premiering Argentine comic-book styled Filmatron snatched the top vote totals on the final day of audience voting.

(Day 11 entry.)

Raya Martin’s Autohystoria

BAFICI, Day 11
By Robert Koehler

What does a film culture look like? Is it even apparent when it materializes in a certain place, a certain country? Even more important, when it disappears in a certain place, a certain country, does anyone notice?

The issues around this circulate in the context of BAFICI in Argentina (which has some kind of film culture), particularly as it is showing the films of Raya Martin from the Phillippines (which supposedly had no film culture). It centers on a community, and the crucial matter that a local film culture simply doesn’t exist without one. (This is why, when one attends REDCAT or Filmforum especially, one can conclude that there is an alternative film culture in Los Angeles.) There’s growing concern–at least as I’ve heard it in conversations here–that the much-vaunted Argentine cinema (remember when it was the toast of every serious film festival?) may be in serious crisis; at the very least, there’s great worry that the various filmmakers in the lead of the country’s cinema are all off on their own projects, with little actual community to hold it together. “They don’t even want to be around each other, let alone together,” says one BA film observer. BAFICI’s own “meeting point” (a phenomenon that I described in yesterday’s post) is the festival’s fine and lively effort to foster a community, and the healthy state of Argentine film production is a matter of record. The only nexus, however, of a real group of filmmakers—filmmakers who share ideas and labor (and possibly much else)–appears to circulate at the UniversitÈ del Cine, and the film program there run by the director of the superb M˙sica Nocturna, Rafael Filippelli. It’s obvious that at the screenings of M˙sica, or at those for Matias Pineiro’s El hombre robado (The Stolen Man) (both of which, ironically, are in the official Argentine competition), the circle around Filippelli and the university is friendly and supportive, and extends to such exceptionally talented former Filippelli students as Santiago Palavecino. This could prove to be the proving ground for a second wind of the more radical, leading edge of the country’s cinema, where a palpable (inevitable?) sense of exhaustion has settled in.

When the most interesting new work here is from a nearly 70-year-old veteran director (Filippelli), there’s something afoot. “Waves” are called such for a reason; they rise, crash and recede, and I tend to avoid the term, not least for its excessive overuse in critical writing. I would hate to think that this is happening in Argentina, and I would counsel patience to some of my Argentine friends who perhaps have a sound basis for feeling skeptical about the near-future. Their sense is that too much festival and critical success too soon has swept once-radical artists into a new mainstream. I’m not sure that I would include someone like Lucrecia Martel in that mainstream (it’s hard to imagine that she’ll ever make anything approaching even a mainstream Argentine film, let alone a mainstream film for the international market), but the Daniel Burmans and Adrian Caetanos? Standing on the corner of Av. Corrientes and Anchorena tonight after trying to absorb the utterly astounding revelations of Raya Martin’s A Short Film about the Indio Nacional, Quintin, his friend and I were joking about the future Hollywood projects of Burman, for whom a New York family comedy produced by Miramax seems just a matter of a few phone calls and signing documents.

At the same time, I’m not sure what it means when an audience seems to enjoy a film like Federico Leon’s and Marcos Martinez’ Estrellas (in the international competition, which I’ll be commenting on only after my jury has arrived at its decisions)–and my puzzlement continues after seeing it a second time today with a public audience. Or, in a different vein, that the audiences here seem to be going in a big way for a forgettable bit of trivia like the previously noted UPA! Will they also go for a film like Raul Perrone’s Canada? (The likely answer–if it’s like Perrone’s other personal and intuitively structured films–is “no.”) Is a BAFICI even possible if there’s no film culture in Argentina, as some make a powerful case? When, as I mentioned previously, I witness the audiences in sheer mass in BAFICI vs. the relatively paltry crowds in Mexico City and Guadalajara, I have to think there is one. But what if they support only bad films–as is almost always the case in the U.S.?

And what of Raya Martin? How to even fathom this indefinable artist, each of whose three films are works of art of the highest order, each entirely different from the others and each made with a rigorously personal aesthetic? Having noted his first film, Island at the End of the World, which I now understand he may have made as a teenager, I happened to see his next two films–A Short Film About the Indio Nacional and Autohystoria–in the reverse order they were made. I’m too fresh to Indio to even write about it coherently; I’ve emailed Martin (who’s currently at home and unable to attend BAFICI) to help explain such details as the peculiar and possibly unprecedented nature of the film’s score, which is actually different each time the film is projected, played with a set of CD tracks selected by Martin. (For example, tonight’s screening had a strangely compelling ultra-romantic score that sounded like something out of the 1930s, including what sounded like Tagalog vocals. One 2006 screening, possibly in Rotterdam, had a score that was more Chopinesque.) Closing credits citing two Filipino historical texts were impossible to scribble down in my notes, though I suspect that the texts are helpful to provide further historical context to the film. I await Martin’s reply.

But in the meantime, I’m overwhelmed with the sense that I’ve seen something like the future of cinema. To watch Martin’s films, combined with the mind-altering experience of drinking in (one doesn’t merely watch) Lav Diaz’s epics like Evolution of a Filipino Family and last year’s John Torres triumph,Todo Todo Teros (which should be at BAFICI but isn’t)–while not having seen the films of Khavn, who’s also a prolific musician–it’s impossible not to conclude that not only is the rising talk of a “new Filipino cinema” not hype, but the term tends to be reductive. Watching this group–and they ARE a group, working on each other’s films,even playing in each other’s bands–has to closely match the sensation of being a filmgoer in 1959, and watching the French nouvelle vague explode. In the absence of a formal film culture (the only film journal of note, and a very fine one, is Criticine (www.criticine.com), to which the aforementioned filmmakers have contributed articles and interviews), genuinely independent filmmakers have decided to make one instead.

Martin’s Autohystoria is easily the year’s most radical and astonishing film at this point in the calendar, and it’s beyond imagining to think that anything at Cannes will touch it. (Of course, we did have, at Cannes and in competition last year, Martin’s favorite film of 2006, Costa’s Colossal Youth.) So let’s just call it the film of the first half of 2007, and then see what happens. It starts with a 37-minute handheld tracking shot, looking across the street at a man walking several blocks down the sidewalks of two noisy boulevards in Manila. The duration is Diaz-like, but the conception is entirely more sinister, and, in the greater context of the film as a whole, deeply tragic. Walking ever so steadily and without barely a pause, he seems to be on a mission, but when he arrives at the apartment building that was his destination, no one is home and he appears stuck. The camera itself keeps several yards away–it never even crosses the street with him–lending the mise en scene the quality of stalking prey, and the darker sense that what we’re seeing is a death march. The film’s soundtrack overwhelms the ear with traffic noise, which reaches a fever pitch in the next shot (lasting twelve minutes),observing a major roundabout intersection in the city and a large war monument in the center island. (The visual pun of a frozen battle scene in a concrete island seems altogether pointed for a film set in an archipelago.) Traffic flows by uninterested in the monument itself, and police cars scream past. Two shots follow (six and three minutes, in that order) inside one of these cop cars, showing the first close-ups of two arrested young men who seem to be brothers. They’re both visibly terrified–too terrified to utter a sound.

Autohystoria then makes one of the more dramatic elliptical jumps in recent cinema, in which the brothers are cuffed together by strips of cloth and being followed by an unseen force or menace (soon, it’s apparent that these are state security police), whose point of view the camera adopts. Indeed, until a startling shot in the jungle that happens several minutes on, each shot has carried with it some weight of having been viewed by a menace, surveillance or police authority, and here the film has interesting connections with Todo Todo Teros, which also ponders and visualizes the activities of a state security apparatus, and the paranoia that flows from this set of visual constructs. The danger is further heightened by the sight of blood on both brothers, and obvious signs of torture and beating. At one point in the jungle–the traffic noise is a long-distant memory at this point–one of the brothers faces the camera and asks: “Are you going to shoot us?” It has to be the most disturbing line of dialogue in any film I’ve heard in some time, deepening the gnawing sense that the camera itself is a weapon.

And yet, just as Martin appears to be making a larger inquiry into the uses and abuses of the camera as a tool of invasion and even murder, he throws his gaze to nature, and a series of landscapes drenched in impossible beauty. His gaze pauses, allowing the eye to watch how a wave of misty clouds curling over the cliffside of a ridge dissipates as the day’s sun takes hold. Like Albert Serra granting the viewer access and temporal liberty to watch the moon actually rise and move through the night sky in Honor of the Knights, Martin takes measure of nature as it is, and places it directly adjacent–and abutting–the human savagery just witnessed. More mysterious (and perhaps Martin can shed light on this as well) are the film’s final graphics and images; one graphic notes: “Aguinaldo’s Navy, 4/18/1902 American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.” and the final images are the newsreel footage that graphics identifies, of a naval force and land army marching. The clips are from one of three Biograph-produced films, all shot in 1900. Martin selected shots of the force led by Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, who declared an independent Filipino republic on January 1, 1899. War soon broke out between the new republic and the U.S., which had been governing the islands for some time like an American colony. Autohystoria thus ends in revolution, albeit a revolution that failed.

The film language and syntax here is something entirely new. Each shot is a discrete element unto itself, and yet provides connective tissue to the next shot. It contains both montage and what one might call “panels” rather than conventionally edited shots. It collapses documentary and narrative, not only in terms of questioning what’s actual and fiction on screen, but in terms of history: Are we seeing something in the present, or perhaps something from the past? As in A Short Film, history is used as a character in an wondrously nuanced fashion–Quintin agreed with me that Hou Hsiao Hsien’s incorporation of history into his narratives is the only comparable model, but here, the expression of that incorporation is much more radical. Drama, just when it feels completely drained from the film, delivers a stunning blow. Beauty, just when it seems the last thing possible, floods the eye and ear. The film, in a matter of some twelve shots, has taken us from contemporary Manila to the primordial forest and back in time. I can’t fathom how this was achieved, but it’s sheer astonishment is one of BAFICI 2007′s great gifts–and a suggestion that Rotterdam (where the film premiered) still very much matters…..

(Day 10 entry.)

BAFICI, Day 10
By Robert Koehler

The public nature of film festivals is getting steadily mitigated by where they’re located. This dawned on me today crossing the extremely busy Avenida Corrientes, one of Buenos Aires’ major boulevards and traditionally the home to the city’s many Broadway-style theaters and cultural institutions, such as the Centro Cultural San Martin where the Lugones cinematheque is located (and immortalized in both Adolfo Aristarain’s Roma and Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma). My hotel is located directly across the street from the Abasto shopping center, where BAFICI is primarily based. Instantly, the moment you stick your head out the door of your hotel, you’re thrust into the rush of a big, pulsating city–made even more pulsating by the crazy, never-stick-between-the-lines driving that’s rampant in the city. By the time I merely walked one block to the entrance leading to the Hoyts Cinema complex, I had negotiated a massive flow of cars, and then timed my jaywalk across another street after another stream of rushing taxis had passed–not to mention a construction overhang, and a gaggle of pedestrians going hither and thither.

Most festivals lack this big city electricity, the physical rush of an ongoing urbanity that daily slaps you in the face. Most festivals have retreated to resort locations (following the trend set long ago not only by Cannes but also the Biarritz festival in far southwest France, where Cocteau brought Godard and Truffaut together for the first time in 1949), or to culture palaces. The latter is true, for example, in New York with the New York film festival, while the former is stuffed with examples, from Palm Springs to Dubai. There are exceptions (Los Angeles film festival, Tribeca, Vienna, Vancouver among them) and BAFICI is one of the most dramatic—even if it is set inside a huge shopping mall. This energy compounds itself with the festival’s so-called “meeting point,” where audiences and festival attendees exit the theaters down a long, winding ramp that spills out into a large area full of chairs, tables, a mini-cafe, small conference area, private meeting spaces and various spots to chat or indulge in the pleasure of randomly bumping into folks. It’s really an essential part of the BAFICI experience which does set it apart from most festivals, and accentuates its identity as a true city festival.

Add to the list of items I wasn’t expecting here–mosquitoes. They’re buzzing around (I just smashed an annoying one on my hotel desk with BAFICI’s compact but fat and weighty catalogue), and they’re inflicting pain on a few unfortunates. They weren’t here last year; where did they come from? Perhaps they’ll go away when the Argentine films get better….

Festival immersion cuts the audience off from the rest of the world, and the added lack of CNN International in my hotel room tends to add to a sense of being ever so slightly cut off. Late-night web surfing resolves this problem, but there’s only so much time. So I learned that Obama is schooling Clinton in campaign money-raising, McCain remains in denial about Iraq, Bush is still massively despised by most Americans (a fact that I have found has yet to be absorbed by much of the world outside of the U.S.), and Don Imus is in the shit can. But I also learned that Argentine teachers have been going on strike this week,pressing for higher wages (in the face of a corrosive 18% annual inflation rate) and protesting the killing (by intent or by accident, no one can say) of a teacher by cops last week in a small city far from the capital. Even as we were huddled in the Hoyts theaters watching movies about efforts to make Juan Peron’s 1950s supersonic plane to fly again (Pulqui) or a desperate teacher robbing other schools’ cash registers (El Asaltante) or a young farm lad’s fear of an intimidating milk seller (Luc Moullet’s Litre du lait), thousands of teachers were marching at Buenos Aires’ Obelisco monument and down boulevards, choking traffic. We cinephiles were in our own little (big?) world, oblivious. I’m not sure that this is a good thing, but I sure know that I would’ve hated to miss Pulqui or the Moullet….

As the competitive lineups unroll and a larger and clearer picture is emerging of the overall field, I’ll be catching up with my thoughts on the Argentine films that I’ve seen to date, cognizant that I’ll have some significant ones that I won’t be able to see until I return to Los Angeles. What’s apparent at this point is that there are few if any revelations (an overrated concept that I tried to take the air out of a few days ago), a very few good films, and a building hope that the really strong stuff ends up at Cannes and Toronto—as essentially happened last year, with Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma and Pablo Trapero’s Born and Bred. Still, like they say in baseball, the book hasn’t been written on BAFICI ’07. We wait, and hope….

And while we’re waiting and hoping, Cannes rumors circulate around the festival. With the competition lineup being announced in a week, it’s a natural BAFICI sport; surprisingly, I’ve heard no talk of any Argentine film tipped for the main competition, or even other sections. By contrast, a couple of weeks ago, rumors around the Guadalajara festival were thick with all sorts of self-serving b.s. about this or that Mexican film set for a section, ranging from the Quinzane to Critics Week. The only Mexican film that’s even close to certainty is Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, and possibly a film Reygadas is producing, Pedro Aguilera’s La Influencia. Google on this stuff and you read mostly sheer nonsense; but the wait between films here and the “meeting point” chatter combine to fuel the rumor mill. I can only add that I hope one rumor is untrue: That Cannes wants Zodiac as the closer, behind which is the obvious strategy of Warners picking up the closing night party tab, a typical Cannes routine. To slot this great American masterpiece into precisely the position that guarantees nobody sees the film. Everybody knows that Cannes closing nights are about bad movies, getting exactly what they’re worth. Zodiac hardly deserves this fate….

(Day 9 entry.)

BAFICI, Day 8
By Robert Koehler

I came to BAFICI with many expectations, including what may be turning out to be a hope-against-hope of seeing at least a handful of good Argentine films. (More on that, most likely, tomorrow.) There was the additional expectation of catching up with some interesting titles from Rotterdam; again, the jury’s out, but if Vignatti’s La Marea (to name one–Pia Marais’ befuddled Tiger-winning The Unpolished is another) is everyone’s idea of a good Rotterdam film, then we’re all in trouble.

You don’t get what you want, but maybe what you need. The last thing I expected in BAFICI was to see the most authentic and direct depiction on film of what it is to actually live in Los Angeles. As usual when it comes to art and observation about my city, it comes from an outsider: German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz, whose past work includes a study of architect Bruce Goff (Goff in the Desert in 2003), who built the Japanese Pavilion at LACMA, and the previous Photography and Beyond. Emigholz’ Schindler’s Houses–Photography and Beyond, Part 12, continues that 2001 film’s project, but also marries it with the Goff project.

In May of last year, Emigholz filmed 40 buildings by Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler from 1931-1952, most of them (like his contemporary and fellow exile Richard Neutra) private residences in the Los Angeles area, particularly in Silver Lake, Echo Park, the Hollywood Hills and Studio City. The film’s subtitle screws with those rather stupid critics whom, according to my colleague Mark Peranson (who saw it in the Berlin festival and devoted lavish space to it in his Berlin-Sundance overview essay in the current issue of Cinema Scope), dismissed Schindler’s Houses as photography. They must have missed the “beyond” part in the subtitle, because Emigholz’ entire point is to begin from the point of portraying Schindler’s buildings as if we were watching a still photograph; his camera is absolutely still and, characteristically–except for the hilariously droll opening shot with the filmmaker offering some comments–only natural sound is permitted (though refined slightly through editing) on the soundtrack. He then holds the shot just long enough for a kind of micro-longeur, enough time to allow for the visible flicker of tree leaves in the breeze, or a dappled shadow to stir, or the rare car to roll past. He doesn’t position his camera in such a way to match the professional architectural photographer’s standard for absolute objectivity and straight, right-angle alignment. Rather, Emigholz will tilt his camera to and fro, as if in sympathy with the steep slope of the land on which the home sits (many are built into the sides of the hills, either above the Silver Lake reservoir, or some perched above Coldwater or Laurel Canyon, or just above Ventura, others near Sunset).

He then cuts, in a varying, faintly unpredictable but undeniable rhythm, from one shot of a given building to another, sometimes building great drama by moving closer and closer to the front door, and then finally entering (sometimes involving a cut from an exterior shot of a closed, potentially forbidding front door to an interior reverse angle shot of the same door, now amusingly open). He continues cutting, as he explores every nook and cranny of many of the interiors, pondering the custom-built dark-wood fixtures, tables, and seats that Schindler favored (including a sweet American trope involving several cases of naugahyde coffee shop-style breakfast nooks). Even better, Emigholz never seems to miss a house’s best angles, such as the most interesting positions of windows strategically placed to capture a maximum of outdoor light and landscape exposures. He’s like a roving, ever-curious animal, prowling around the house not in steady forward motion but in a montage of moments and angles as he makes progress from the outside in.

Emigholz explained after the screening that each building’s natural sound was recorded and then edited for a consistent sequence of sound. That the sound is dominated by birds and the ruffling of trees apparently throws some non-Angeleno viewers into a state of denial that they’re even watching Los Angeles at all. But, as anyone who has truly lived in the city and closely watches the film will attest, Schindler’s Houses is arguably the first film to ever grasp the essence and feeling of what it is to live at home in Los Angeles, where birds and trees and sun and breeze are far more ever-present than the movies that “play Los Angeles” (after Thom Andersen) would ever allow, and would ever permit the viewer to imagine. Andersen, incidentally, appears in one shot, sitting in near foreground at a desk in a study, and the insertion appears quite pointed to underline that the movies can lie to an outrageous extent, and turn a known place (like Los Angeles) into an unrecognizable monstrosity; the movies, as with Emigholz, can also tell the truth.

(Day 7 entry.)

BAFICI, Day 7
By Robert Koehler

Two cool dudes in Buenos Aires….

Reg Harkema, the towering (six-foot-six) Canadian Godardian, has been here with his complete works (A Girl is a Girl, Better Off in Bed, Monkey Warfare), and sounding rather amazed that BAFICI would even consider being the first festival anywhere to screen his complete works. A good thing it has, since it’s given me a chance to catch up with the 1999 A Girl, which starts with a sweet, good-natured tip of the cap to Godard–large, bold title and text graphics and an “interview” with actors that busts through the fourth wall–then dives into a smart, incisive saga of a young man’s adventures with a series of women, each one a bit more suitable than the last, thus lending the film an unexpected aura of optimism about love. And even though it’s told from the perspective of Andrew McIntyre’s Trevor, it doesn’t exactly favor him: He’s forever learning from the women he’s with, more than a little hapless but at least listening to them, lending the film a male ear but not a male gaze. Because Harkema is an editor (he works, among others, with Don McKellar), his films contain montage, plus the kind of awareness of film history so a wonderful group encounter during an art gallery opening sometimes looks and pulses like a scene out of an early film by Jerzy Skolimowski (whose work Harkema knows well–I was especially thinking of Skolimowski’s early masterpiece, Barrier). I know that it’s sacrilege in some circles to put down Andrew Bujalski–whose films are easily among the best (only?) genuine contemporary American comedies–but Harkema completely schools Bujalski when it comes to marrying observant comedy about young men and women today with real cinema. In Harkema, there’s editing, and the music that comes with this; it’s simply not found–not yet anyway–in Bujalski’s funny but comparatively static films.

Harkema was nice enough to give me a DVD of his second (2004) film with a genius title–Better Off in Bed–and expressed over breakfast across a few days all of the disagreeable decisions and choices a filmmaker has to make on the festival road. “South by Southwest kinda turned out to be a debacle,” he said, adding with characteristic humility, “but that might’ve been our fault. (For a number of reasons), we submitted late and ended up like in the absolute dead zone of being the second screening of the first day, and being screened away from the main central area of the festival, and all sorts of stuff. I really felt like this Canadian outsider there, with all of these cliques going on.” SXSW has developed its own cult, but that contains the price of making worthy non-American filmmakers like Harkema feel very much on the outside, looking in.

Which raises the culturally intriguing question: How is it that a festival several thousands of miles away from Harkema’s home in Toronto is capable of assembling his films in a simple but comprehensive way–and even going a step further, and matching Monkey Warfare with Godard’s La Chinoise in the festival’s ingenious “Dialogues” section (devised by programmer-critic Diego Lerer, who was inspired by Rotterdam’s slightly different model), and yet a major North American festival (ie. SXSW) pushes him to the margins, and beyond?

Besides, you have to love a guy who lugs around a copy of Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, and asks you: “Say, I’ve got a plane to catch tonight–what are the good films on today’s schedule that I can catch before I take off?”

Another young guy who completely puts the lie to the lazy notion that anyone under 30 today doesn’t really care or know about film–Michel Lipkes. Now, BAFICI is teeming with young people: The festival screenings often feel like college cinÈ-club affairs, packed with kids and folks well under 30. (And I mean PACKED. Screenings routinely sell out, regardless of the film, whether it’s a Straub-Huillet or a Miike.) But Lipkes, one of the head programmers of FICCO (the Mexico City international film festival), is a wildy enthusiastic cinephile, insatiably curious about the entire range of cinema, and polemically militant when it comes to cinema’s radical edge, where most programmers tend to shy away from for fear of pushing their audience out the door. The FICCO folks are here in a big way, and it’s not surprising since BAFICI and FICCO consider each other sister festivals under the skin (I like to lump them together with Vancouver and Vienna): These are the kind of festivals where one can catch up with Peter Whitehead and Pedro Costa without blinking an eye. What Lipkes is helping promote, though (with the crucial support of FICCO’s director, Paula Astorga) is a daring film culture where one is just getting started. Like nowhere else I know, Mexico City’s nascent filmgoing base, too long dominated by commercial movies, is being prompted to consider alternatives. FICCO’s programming is sometimes almost absurdly ahead of its potential audience (I was in an audience of roughly twelve for a screening of the remarkable Rome Rather than You), but this is what it takes to build an audience, and Lipkes shows uncommon bravery in this regard. When I hear those mumblings that FICCO isn’t long for this Earth, I understand, because the programming risks are high. But if Mexico City is ever to remotely approach Buenos Aires’ considerably developed film culture (on display here daily), it will require programmers with foresight like Lipkes. I wish he could be cloned for more than a few U.S. festivals I can think of….

Lipkes’ t-shirt today (direct from Cinema Scope magazine): “Vote for Pedro….Pedro Costa, that is.”

* * * *

For Los Angeles readers of this blog, I should have noted before that Claire Simon’s «a Br˚le is one film screening here in BAFICI that will be on view in our fair city as soon as next week. It’s part of the final weekend programming at COLCOA, where it will screen once on Sat. April 21 at 5:30 pm, in DGA 2. While I’m on the topic, I can also strongly recommend another film in an otherwise tepid COLCOA lineup: Bruno Dumont’s Flanders, which greatly impressed me at Cannes last year (where it was in the main competition, the only other Cannes competition film in COLCOA being the exceptionally mediocre The Singer, starring a charming Gerard Depardieu). Dumont plumbs a human connection this time that he has either avoided or has eluded him previously; still, it remains as formally daring as any of his past work…..

It’s also worth noting, regarding John Parker’s beyond-strange one-off film, Dementia, which I wrote about here earlier, that it actually isn’t quite as obscure as I had assumed. Kino actually released it on DVD in 2000, and the package includes such items as material on its single screen U.S. release, at the 55th St. Playhouse in NYC; a photo of the marquee is viewable at an interesting web page on the film.

What this apparently infers is that, despite Dementia‘s explicit Los Angeles location (a page out of a Hollywood newspaper with a headline about a murder clings like an annoying tumbleweed to the heroine’s ankles, and the downtown Los Angeles locations are enough to make Thom Andersen salivate), it never opened in what was effectively the film’s hometown.

This Flickhead web page also includes such fascinating and arguable details as noting the credit for then-ubiquitous voice of Marni Nixon as the soundtrack’s comically eerie singer; writer Herman G. Weinberg declaring with no evidence that Dementia is “the first American Freudian film” (which would take Lang and Hitchcock out of the equation, apparently); the fact that the film’s alternatively titled Daughter of Horror actually represents a slightly trimmed–censored, to be sure–version; that the film is immortalized in The Blob, in which Steve McQueen is watching it in a cinema balcony; Preston Sturges praised it as “a work of art” upon its two-year-delayed release; and that Bruno VeSota, who adopts an Orson Welles guise throughout the film, subsequently claimed that he directed most of the film, not Parker.

This latter, if true, could be one of those intriguing back-alley details regarding Welles’ massive though usually unacknowledged influence at the time. If VeSota not only adopted a mimicry of Welles on screen as an actor, then extended it behind the camera as well, this could mark Dementia as one of the most thoroughly worked-out Welles tribute films ever made. To be sure, the film’s mise-en-scËne is often as blatantly Wellesian as any 1950s film I’ve seen. On the other hand, this could be a case of sour grapes going public; web writer Ray Young himself observes that none of VeSota’s films in which he’s credited as director approach the sophisticated aesthetic that’s applied in Dementia. To be sure, a check of VeSota’s Female Jungle, The Brain Eaters and/or Invasion of the Star Creatures might be in order. Hell, with titles like that, I’m there already…..

(Day 6 entry.)

BAFICI, Day 6
By Robert Koehler

Fernando Solanas has appeared at BAFICI with the optimistic culmination of his trilogy of films examining the state of things past and present in Argentina–Dormant Argentina, in which he makes a lengthy, substantial argument that few countries in the Western Hemisphere are better prepared for a technological explosion. He extends the critique he delivered with fierce energy in his La dignidad de los nadies and Memoria del saqueo, that privitization and “neo-liberalism” has robbed Argentina of resources and talent, but that the country’s scientific, technological and labor base provides a strong foundation for a national renaissance. After his two previous, intensely polemical works, the proud futurism of the new film is both a surprise and a tonic. It’s not likely to travel far beyond the borders of the country he’s addressing–though he finishes the film with the hope for a greater “Latin American nation” in the spirit of Bolivar–which is why it was so moving to catch this letter of hope in the place where it matters most….

* * *

More thoughts on the Solanas….It’s always been one of the cinema’s most contradictory and even self-negating qualities that far too much of the time when science is addressed, the movies demonize and transform it into a nemesis. Science fiction, to cite only one corner of cinema, has with few exceptions long indulged in this attitude. One of the pleasures of Solanas’ work in Dormant Argentina is that he has effectively made a film celebrating science and scientific achievement; he views the country’s progress as primarily one propelled by science and research, not politics, which has so often here proved a crushing disappointment–and worse, as Solanas himself has shown repeatedly, a betrayal. Much of what he reveals in Dormant Argentina (a better title, I think, is Potential Argentina) is fairly obscure: He includes, for example, newsreel footage of Argentine rockets that sent monkeys into space; few Argentines, it seems, know about this. Which was Solanas’ entire point.

I was also struck by the fact that Solanas briefly asked Argentines on the street if they thought that their country was rich or poor; without exception, they answered with the latter. Now, as always with documentaries edited to make a particular point, answers in the former vein may have been specifically removed. This response nevertheless contrasts sharply with similar person-on-the-street queries made by Brazilian documentary filmmaker Eryk Rocha (son of Glauber), whose Clandestine Interval I saw at the Guadalajara film festival, which ended just a few days before BAFICI. To Rocha’s identical question, a striking percentage of citizens reply that they believe Brazil is rich–even, in the words of some, “one of the richest countries in the world.” Each film proceeds to show that it’s not a matter of each country’s resource wealth, (Solanas does this with infinitely greater success than Rocha); it’s a matter of who controls the resources. And I left musing over how these matters, so central to two of the largest countries in the Western Hemisphere, are routinely ignored in America, whose concern for Latin America is close to that of an ADD teenager…

Dementia

After a day of watching Santiago Otheguy’s ever-slightly-Fordian La LeÛn (coming here from Berlin), Heidi Maria Faisst’s concise, much-travelled debuting Danish drama, Liv (or as it’s also known, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), Naomi Kawase’s latest video astonishment, Birth/Mother (aka Tarachime) and a viewing of the extraordinary Raya Martin’s latest feature, Autohystoria (more on this very possibly high masterpiece later), I decided to unwind with what I assumed would be a horror double-bill: A once-only screening of what’s surely one of BAFICI’s most unseen entries, a revival of the rarer-than-rare John Parker film, Dementia (which–and this seems to be a thing today–also has gone under the unfortunate title of Daughter of Horror), capped by a midnight screening Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest, Nightmare Detective.

Horror isn’t what I got; instead, with Dementia, I got a wild, post-Surrealist noir filtered through a peculiar kind of psychological terror by way of Beat hipsters, Be-bop and ruthlessly violent LAPD beat detectives whooping the shit out of anyone they spot. Utterly cracked and supremely modernist (it could be argued that the next most modern films to follow that were filmed in Los Angeles–Parker shot this, his only film, in 1955, the same year as the only film at the time that it could possibly be compared to, Kiss Me Deadly–were Cassavetes’ Shadows, much of which was shot in Los Angeles, and Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles), Dementia may have admittedly awful voice-over narration (“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” the voice screams at a woman who appears trapped in a maze of her own dreams) and rather absurd acting, but it openly embraces and imaginatively synthesizes several influences and makes them into something that can be termed as authentically Underground ’50s.

Welles is all over the film, from magnificent deep-focus compositions and highly sinister expressionist imagery drenched in black shadows, and even actor Bruno VeSota (as a curiously predatory and paternal man of some means) is clearly doing an impersonation of Welles throughout. BuÒuel is also in abundance, maybe most vividly in a stunning image near the end where the heroine opens a bedroom chest drawer, and discovers a fist inside gripping a pendant. Los Angeles’ underground jazz scene is amply on display (don’t ask how the film shifts from a foot chase through downtown streets that reminded me of Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss–also the same year–do we sense a pattern here?–to an extended sequence amidst West Coast Sound hipsters, but it does) and includes a highly elaborate and lengthy score by avant garde composer George Anteil. It adds up to a kind of ultimate film maudit, and, it goes without saying, must be shown at the American Cinematheque toute suite.

I also expected horror from the Tsukamoto, but instead of getting more than I possibly expected from Dementia, Nightmare Detective delivered something far less. I had hoped that it’s concept of an investigator who invades people’s bad, often violent dreams to unravel their issues might make it at least a close cousin to Satoshi Kon’s mind-blowing Paprika. I also hoped for a bit of the old Tsukamoto from Tetsuo days. I was wrong in so many ways (but firmly convinced that Tsukamoto is permanently off my list), and left wondering what festivals, forced to scramble to fill their midnight movies section (mind you, BAFICI is the rare festival that starts screenings at 1 a.m.), are then forced to settle for. Well, actually, the answer is easy: They’re forced to settle for hooey like Nightmare Detective.

(Day 5 entry.)

Abasto Shopping Mall in Buenos Aires

BAFICI, Day 5
By Robert Koehler

Some additional thoughts on M˙sica nocturna….The film’s sense of comedy runs to such moments as a droll exchange between two of the characters, perambulating around the streets and finding themselves in a bookstore that’s actually closed but that they have somehow gotten into anyway, about how the Papacy in Rome has commissioned writers acquainted with Latin to devise new Latin terms for contemporary terms, like “hot pants.” It’s part of the film’s greater fabric, which is to ponder (in thoughtful and light ways) how the inheritance of older civilization is adopted and altered by our own; but equally, how the brightest of people can manage to fail creating a rewarding personal life for themselves.

BAFICI programmer Sergio Wolf, who introduced the film last night, told me today that part of the joke of the film is that, certainly in Buenos Aires, older or middle-aged people as those depicted in M˙sica nocturna simply don’t walk around the streets at night. “It’s a projection,” Wolf said, “of an artist of the older generation, recalling a time when they were night owls”….

The night owls are regularly out in Buenos Aires–a city that truly never seems to sleep. My room is on the 19th floor of Abasto Plaza Hotel, looking directly down on the massive Abasto shopping center (formerly, the city’s main open market) where BAFICI is centered. The perspective out my window is almost vertiginous, and I can also see the foot and car traffic buzzing along at well past 2 a.m.–the noise isn’t even a slight din I’m so far up, but the lights and movement suggest deep-night wanderers, prowling, exploring, some living ghosts from M˙sica nocturna…..

There have been varying reactions so far to the Argentine competition films–those in the national competition and those in the international section–with a hint at exasperation that the Next Great Thing has yet to be discovered. Well, I’ve already argued that there has been one exceptional work (which actually isn’t bad for what had been effectively three full days of projections–compare this ratio, if you will, to a typical Sundance year in the American competition, and you get an idea) and, besides, it’s a fool’s game anticipating such “greatness.” I hope for good films, and to expect or demand revelations on a daily basis is a strange case of setting oneself up for disappointment.

This may be why I’m not terribly bothered by Extranjera, InÈs de Oliveira Cezar’s stark, Western-style adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis, since it was hard to resist a film that presented a rather unique blending of Greek tragedy and Anthony Mann (and, as someone noted, another item from the ’50s Western canon, Yellow Sky).

A minor piece like UPA! (Una Pelicula Argentina), from which I just returned, is too inconsequential to attack, as I’ve already heard from some quarters. An ersatz behind-the-scenes video-shot depiction of an indie Argentine film that manages to self-destruct, this is a calculated juggling of influences from Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion and Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to Dogme, and if the blatant overlay of American manners is something new for the younger Argentine filmmaking movement, it’s also demonstrably a strategy marked by a dead-end, with momentary amusements along the way.

Another film that openly thieves from another is Diego Martinez Vignatti’s La marea, which is one of several films that arrive here more or less direct from Rotterdam. Vignatti was Carlos Reygadas’ cinematographer on JapÛn and Battle in Heaven, and unfortunately, has effectively copied Reygadas’ cinema–from a stress on wordless physicality, figures in wild landscapes and characters facing the reality of death in solitude, down to the same anamorphic widescreen image and grainy film process as in JapÛn–a film that one duplicates at enormous artistic risk.

Essentially a metaphoric fable about a mother who can’t bear accepting the tragic death of her husband and only child, the film leaves this woman in the dunes and simply doesn’t know what to do with her. In the Latin American film world, there’s the additional arguing point that Vignatti’s isn’t a proper Argentine film (he lives permanently in Belgium, and most of his production money and post-production was based in Europe), though the locations (as far as one could detect) and characters were certainly Argentine, and the tale itself is essentially universal—indeed, abstract to a fault.

This is-it-Argentine-is-it-not bores me, and one hears it again and again; the film’s essential cultural sources seem to me sufficiently Argentine, but because of various national and regional interests (some of whom grow instantly suspicious, in the same way that critics of Francophone African films have tended to be, when European money is involved), this doesn’t seem to matter. What concerns me far more than the silly tic-tac-toe of claiming a film’s national identity is how Vignatti seems to be searching for his own voice with his first narrative film as a writer-director, but merely mimicking that of a former colleague.

And the naysayers of BAFICI’s Argentine selection would truly have a solid case if we were being inflicted with a steady attack of such disposable nonsense as El desierto negro, the debut from former film sound recordist Gaspar Scheuer, who appears to have ingested entirely too much Terrence Malick and Glauber Rocha for his own good. An archly mannered piece of pictorialism that’s much more about photography than cinema, Scheuer’s film is a stripped-down Western (again) featuring a kind of Gaucho-with-no-name (he has one, though for the life of me I can’t remember what it is, and hardly care) who–I’m not making this up–is the object of a manhunt through huge expansive wheat fields populated by birds and is finally downed by a bullet, at which point he promptly falls head-first (from our p.o.v.) into a river stream. (And that’s just the first half.) Free Dodger tickets to the first one who can spot what movie I would appear to be talking about here….

I’ll try my best to get back to Reg Harkema tomorrow, who appeared fairly tickled today when I told him the good news that not only has Gaumont finally–finally–released Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinÈma on DVD, but it’s done so with English subtitles…..

(Day 4 entry.)

The Island at the End of the World (2005)

BAFICI, Day 4
By Robert Koehler

Of the several “retros & focus” sections that BAFICI has organized this year–organizers swore to me weeks ago that they would trim down from last year’s bulging 15 or so retrospectives, but being true cinephiles, they simply couldn’t help themselves, and have arranged 19 for our viewing pleasure–I most want to catch the surveys of Luc Moullet, Malaysian filmmaker Ho Yuhang and 23-year-old Filipino artist Raya Martin. Now, 23 seems like an awfully young age to have a retrospective, but as I noted to Quintin earlier today, BAFICI appears to be in the mood to select filmmakers with three features under their belt: Not only Martin, but also Ho and that jolly Godardian Canadian, Reg Harkema (of whom more later).

Martin and Ho are among those from both countries who are hotly under pursuit by festival programmers and East Asian film lovers alike, since it’s become quickly apparent over the last year of the festival circuit that both the Philippines and Malaysia are becoming homes to critical masses of young, extremely independent filmmakers (most of whom work mostly in digital video, though not exclusively so). I can speak better at this point on the Filipino situation, since I’ve yet to see the several Malay films that have hit the scene, most prominently in Rotterdam. The Dragons & Tigers jury I served on last year at the Vancouver film festival opted for one of Martin’s bright and original contemporaries–John Torres, and his dreamy, fleecy doc-turned-fiction-turned-doc, Todo Todo Teros. The Èminence grise, so to speak, for both Torres, Martin and others like Khavn is Lav Diaz, who makes some of the longest films currently on the planet; his Evolution of a Filipino Family ultimately clocked in at around 11 hours, though I may be missing an hour or two. Diaz’ syntax is for a radical revision of plan-sequence, with frequently static shots that can last up to 20 minutes or more, and yet are stuffed with temporal excitement and even historical and cultural information.

In Martin’s case, his first full-length work, The Island at the End of the World, seemed to have begun as more of a project than a proper film, and yet its development into a quietly powerful study of Itbayat, one of the archipelago’s northernmost isles (and one of its most isolated) is part and parcel of the filmmaking process itself. I speculated afterwards that Martin may have structured his video documentary (filmed with a light DV-cam in the summer of 2004, when Martin was around 20 years old) in roughly the chronology in which it was shot; he and his camera arrive on the island by bi-plane, and then start exploring the people and the landscape, and, each step along the way, the journey itself lends greater meaning to the entire work.

Some of my Argentine colleagues, including Diego Lerer, chief film critic for the Buenos Aires daily, Clarin, disagreed, noting that Island is structured in such a way that we watch various jobs practiced by Itbayat’s residents, each job given a discrete section of its own. In the end, it’s difficult to tell whether the film was more deliberately constructed along the lines Diego suggests, or matching the process of a visitor’s discovery as I saw it. It may also be some combination of the two; in any case, work and labor are indeed central subjects of a film ostensibly about an island more often than not cut off from direct contact with other Filipino islands, and because of Martin’s unquenchable curiosity and generosity, his open interest in how these residents live their lives literally consumes his film.

Memories of the fisherman in Visconti’s La terra trema flood back to the mind when watching extended sequences of the island’s fisherman hauling in their catch or struggling to simply dock their tiny wooden boats in hellaciously choppy waters along rocky shorelines. Quintin rightly observed that Martin certainly earned the locals’ respect and must have lived among them long enough with his camera in tow that, by the time he films them, there’s not a drop of visible self-consciousness of the camera’s presence. The effect is of a kind of pure, immediate naturalism, impelled by energetic curiosity and drive, creating a strange, gorgeous sense of a visitation. Martin never hides or lies about his outsider’s status, nor does this seep into alienation. Instead, Island provides a record of moments as they actually happened, unfettered and sympathetic without the slightest whiff of cloying attitude. I look forward immensely to his next film in the retro, his fiercely debated 2006 A Short Film About the Indio Nacional. Go, Filipinos….

Essential Argentine film of BAFICI (so far, it being only Day 4!): Rafael Filippelli’s exquisite Musica nocturna. No less than the current (Fernando Peña) and most recent (Quintin) directors of BAFICI inform me that Filippelli, nearly 70 with fairly few films–mostly documentaries–to his credit, has never before made a film approaching this one. There is something both startlingly new for Argentine cinema in M˙sica, while a sense of graceful maturity and the illusion of effortless craftsmanship marks it as something almost classical.

What’s new is a style that beautifully blends an unapologetically intellectual and highly civilized perspective on art–actor (and sometimes director) Enrique Piñeyro plays a creatively blocked author, while actor Silvia Arazi plays his cynical, burned-out playwright-wife–and a rigorously objective mise en scene of such painful beauty that I haven’t seen on screen since the unjustly barely-seen German films of Sohrab Shaheed Saless. Filippelli’s characters are upper middle-class, middle-aged flâneurs, wandering the nighttime streets of Buenos Aires (the city has never, repeat never, looked so sweetly nocturnal and even–do I risk a touristic faux pas here?–Parisian, and I include the magnificent nighttime sequences in Adolfo Aristarain’s masterpiece, Roma), mixing talk of personal concerns and art matters together in a magnificent jumble of half-sentences, mini-thoughts, barely formed arguments, and impulsive utterances for which there may be no turning back once they’re uttered.

There are too many moments to itemize in a film that runs barely 80 minutes, but a few stick in my head right now: Piñeyro standing at his apartment balcony looking down on the street below at no thing in particular, while a Schubert sonata (the same heartbreaking one used by Bresson at the end of Au hasard Balthazar), leaving the balcony to go inside, coming back out, leaving again, coming back out (what is he doing? living); Arazi and a novelist friend played by Horacio Acosta walking around the deep, deep late night streets, speculating on what it’s like to go to school reunions, and what he thinks of Piñeyro’s work-in-progress; Piñ;eyro sidling up to an elderly gentleman at a bar, and sliding into a discussion about how good story ideas can come from newspaper articles; and, choicest of all, the final scene at home between Piñeyro and Arazi, which is the most realistic depiction of a married couple that I’ve seen on screen since Cassavetes.

The pair have tired of each other, and yet somehow barely tolerate each other in the way of tired, old friends. They lightly tussle over what to play on the CD (and this says everything about the film’s cultural reference points): Olivier Messiaen’s piece written in the concentration camps, or a 16th century choral work. Another day passes, and Piñeyro’s author is no closer to finishing his book. Is there a crisis? No. Instead, there’s a strange sort of peace that descends over Musica nocturna, and long before it’s over. Piñeyro speaks on the soundtrack of how, in listening to music, he learned from Beethoven that all art that matters contains an essential abstraction that remains, like a granite-hard kernel. The film’s speculations and its very nature are of a part in this regard.

I thought afterwards that this is the film I had always hoped for from Ingmar Bergman and never saw: A mature contemplation of contemporary civilized people, but stripped of the psychoses, neuroses, psychology and obsessions on God’s existence that often weighed on Bergman’s films, and created a superstructure that was an elaborate distraction from this couple over here, in this corner, having this interesting if frustrated life together. Why don’t we simply film that? This is what Filippelli has done…..

(Day 3 entry.)