Monthly Archives: April 2008

Thierry’s Cannes, Olivier’s Quinzaine

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THIERRY’S CANNES, OLIVIER’S QUINZAINE

By ROBERT KOEHLER

If you happen to be at a film festival in March or April–as I was this year in Guadalajara (March) and Buenos Aires (April) (sorry, Film Journey readers, no BAFICI blog this year, but I promise a soon-to-come rehash/overview)–the conversation inevitably turns to what films can be expected to appear in Cannes (May). It’s part of the seasonal spring chatter/gossip/speculation/informed insider talk, and it’s partly generated by the fact that in pre-Cannes festivals, “The Cannes Effect” is fully felt. This is especially true in festivals in emerging market countries like Argentina and Mexico, but also the case in first-world economy zones like Hong Kong: Post-Berlin festivals from Mexico City’s FICCO to Guadalajara to Hong Kong to BAFICI no longer can cherry-pick new work by filmmakers in their regions. During much of the Gilles Jacob era of Cannes, regions such as Latin America and Southeast Asia were usually ignored, allowing new films to premiere at festivals near where the filmmakers lived and worked, and if they sparked interest, would send out ripples to the rest of the world. In Gilles’ Cannes, there was also no hard-and-fast rule that a Croisette screening had to be the world premiere.

Now, it’s Thierry Fremaux’s Cannes–the 2008 edition will be his first in which he has full rein over all aspects of the program–and, as we’ve seen during recent Cannes festivals, programming seeks to reflect the reality that filmmaking is exploding on every continent. (Whether the programming succeeds in this is another matter.) Bullish for Thierry’s Cannes, but bearish for the BAFICIs of the world, now denied many of the very filmmakers they helped discover and foster. Call it being victimized by one’s own success. Even more, as Rotterdam festival programmer Gerwin Tamsma has noted, filmmakers worldwide are now gearing their production and post-production schedules with an eye toward submitting to and competing in Cannes; festivals landing in March and April may lust for the new Johnny To or Amat Escalante or Lisandro Alonso film, but they just may not get them any more for the hard fact that they’re not ready. (Even true for some select Americans, such as Steven Soderbergh, madly rushing as I write to finish his two-part Che in time to be shown together–as he demands it to be shown–in Cannes.) Just as Hollywood film production geared for awards-season films now targets Toronto as their fall deadline, Cannes is the spring deadline for the vast world beyond Hollywood.

So, what’s the result, now that Olivier Pere yesterday (Friday) announced the full Quinzaine lineup? (It may be Thierry’s Cannes, but it’s Olivier’s Quinzaine.)

First, as those of us huddled around breakfast and cafe tables in Guadalajara and Buenos Aires predicted, Olivier’s Quinzaine, celebrating its fortieth year as the Croisette upstart, looks to be a whole lot more interesting than Gilles’ Cannes. Just look at some of the filmmakers in the roster, and you’re looking at a window on the future of cinema: Alonso and his Thierry del Fuego-set Liverpool, Albert Serra and his Three Wise Men odyssey El Cant dels ocells, Claire Simon’s Les Bureaux de Dieu, Raya Martin and his five-hour Now Showing and the best Romanian you haven’t heard of–Radu (The Paper Will Be Blue) Muntean and Boogie.

I’m suspending comment on Liverpool here until my Variety review appears, but I can already declare that few other films anywhere in the beach town will galvanize audiences and stir discussion more than the meaty round-the-horn combo of Alonso-to-Serra-to-Martin. Few younger filmmakers matter more than these three, and any program that contains all of them unveiling major new work is an event of the highest magnitude. Quinzaine goers will find that Alonso has built and expanded on La libertad and Los muertos but in unexpected directions; that Serra has found an even more exalted and stunning sky-and-earth atmosphere (the rocky, volcanic heights of the Canary Islands substituting for the Mid-East desert) than he did for Honor de cavalleria; that Martin–if his accompanying film to Now Showing titled Box Office: Next Attraction is any indicator–has expanded the syntax by which a film can be simultaneously a documentary and a narrative. Muntean made the kind of film with The Paper Will Be Blue that signals a world-class director–why has this, of all of the recent ballyhooed Romanian work, been by far the most ignored?–and that anything he makes is automatically essential viewing. And Simon–France’s other fascinating Claire–should be expected to forge something new and unsettling, based on her previous film Ca brule.

Then there are the extra goodies, especially the extraordinary surprise of a new–brand-new!–Jerzy Skolimowski film (Four Nights With Anna), double-Straub (Straub’s solo work, Le Genou d’Artemide and what is likely the final Straub-Huillet film, Itineraire de Jean Bricard), the unveiling of the restored print of Robert Kramer’s legendary 1975 Milestones and an Olivier Jahan tribute film for the Quinzaine birthday, 40X15. Not bad.

The Quinzaine, as well, is littered with the unknowns, barely-knowns and sure-to-be-discovereds. (Who’s Josh Safdie, and what’s his new American film The Pleasure of Being Robbed?) I hear excellent things about Miguel Gomes’ Portuguese film, Aquele querido mes de agosto/Beloved August), Federico Veiroj’s Uruguayan Acne, and Lichuan Yin’s Knitting from China. There will be more. Olivier appears to have out-done himself.

As for Thierry, it looked bad up until a week ago. His group, for example, had yet to see Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City, leading some of my colleagues like Variety critic Todd McCarthy to conclude that China may be a no-show this year. Turns out that didn’t happen–Jia is back on the Croisette for the first time since his sublime Unknown Pleasures, and he has to automatically be considered a major Palme d’Or contender. Some may wrongly conclude that a fix may be in though, what with Sean Penn as prez and Clint Eastwood’s period drama Changeling a headline-grabbing, stop-the-presses, hold-the-phone entry in the competition. (Think about it: How can Clint not win? Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that he made Blood Work.) The aforementioned Mr. Soderbergh will be huffing and puffing to get from the Nice airport on time with his wetter-than-Wong Kar-wai-prints of Che Squared–and those, too, may in fact suck. (Wild Bunch has been happily leaking word out for months that it’s genius, but take that with a grain of salt.) Expect horrors from some other Palm contenders like Atom Egoyan (Adoration) and Wim Wenders (the Euro-pudding sounding The Palermo Shooting), and–who knows?–probably Paolo Sorrentino with Il Divo.

Now, it’s not all bad. Thierry did, in fact, nab the following. For starters, my favorite French director, Arnaud Desplechin, with Un Conte de noel/Christmas Story, his first biggie since Kings and Queen. Another Gaul great, Philippe Garrel and his La Frontiere de l’aube. (Garrel on the red carpet. Now, for that alone, the host country should be proud of itself.) He also has my favorite Belgians–the Dardennes–with The Silence of Lorna, instantly generating water-cooler talk of the outlandish possibility that Jean-Pierre and Luc could actually win a third Palm. There’s, as well, my favorite Turk: the bountiful and masterly Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with Three Monkeys. Pablo Trapero has reportedly made an extremely fine film with Leonera, which programmers and others saw in Buenos Aires during the festival, and were quite buzzed about. Argentina should throw a party: Lucrecia Martel joins Trapero with La Mujer sin cabeza. (This is what I mean about the “Cannes Effect”—Alonso, Trapero and Martel, in the old days, would have been able to officially screen first in BAFICI, but not now.) Young Asia is nicely represented–well, younger than the early 40-ish Jia–with the terrific Eric Khoo (My Magic) and Brilliante Mendoza (Serbis, following his highly accomplished Slingshot). For many mainstream and middlebrow critics attending Palais press screenings, this will be their virgin viewings of filmmakers like Khoo and Mendoza. Good for Thierry.

Predictions? You’d have to be an idiot to bet much against Clint. The Palm is his to lose. But, like Hillary, nothing’s for certain. A third win for the Dardenne brothers seems unlikely. Lefty Penn, who may or may not still buy into the ridiculous romanticization of Che Guevara (a Stalinist thug of the first order, which, hopefully, Soderbergh’s film underlines), might push Che down the throats of his fellow jurors; if he does, don’t expect such colleagues as Apitchatpong Weerasethakul and Sergio Castellito to swallow it. Garrel seems a tad outside, and younger directors like Martel, Khoo, Mendoza and Trapero are likely too young. (Youth hasn’t stopped past juries, but again, unlikely.) Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of the best-selling book on contemporary Mafia families, Gomorra, would probably have much more impact if Cannes were moved about 25 miles east of the Italian border.

That leaves, in no particular order, Desplechin, Jia and Ceylan. All are masters, inching toward mid-career, with past work that suggests a definite Palm-ish trajectory. Keep an eye on them. Sight unseen, their films could win the day.

Outside of the competition, indefatigable Cannes watchers might do well to attend the screenings of Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, if for no other reason than it is Davies’ first film in nearly a decade. (Maybe Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which could be all three.) Lynchians may or may not have a treat with daughter Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance.

Un Certain Regard, as usual, looks blah, but don’t forget Kelly Reichardt’s post-Old Joy Wendy and Lucy, as well as Amat (Sangre) Escalante’s Southern California-shot Los bastardos (early word is strong) and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Tokyo Sonata. Another Tokyo movie, originally titled Tokyo!, might be a less essential item, since it’s an omnibus film–a formula which rarely works–by Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a mystery: Although Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin was expanded into a feature based on the short he contributed to Cannes’ Chacun son cinema and Kiarostami, is, well, Kiarostami, he’s nowhere to be found in the lineup. Any lineup. Why isn’t it in Cannes? What happened?

The Secret of the Grain

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I’ve had Bazin on the brain lately, partly in conjunction with spending last week discussing the form and function of criticism as well as reading the Winter 2007 issue of Film International dedicated to Bazin. It’s a provocative magazine (expect a blog on it soon), such as when guest editor Jeffrey Crouse highlights Bazin’s “striking assertion, a dazzlement” traced through the work of Flaherty, Renoir, Vigo, Chaplin, and the neorealists: “In my opinion,” Bazin wrote, “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” This wasn’t rhetorical flare or mere sentiment, but a sustained argument about directorial style. For example: “Rossellini’s love for his characters envelops them in a desperate awareness of man’s inability to communicate,” Bazin wrote. “De Sica’s love, on the contrary, radiates from the people themselves. They are what they are, but lit from within by the tenderness he feels for them.” Crouse writes, “I look forward to the day when film analysis is conducted from an emphasis on love arrangements as Bazin conceived, rather than largely power ones [favored in academia], with the latter being a subset of the former. Imagine the expanded vocabulary and range of concepts one might draw upon so as to delve more precisely into the significance of so many film masterworks.”

I submit that the French film, The Secret of the Grain, which deservedly swept the CÈsars a couple months ago and screened at the Los Angeles COLCOA festival last weekend, is a prime candidate for this kind of analysis. Filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche (L’Esquive) has chosen to tell a story about a North African immigrant family living in the port town SËte in France, and although the narrative strands converge with considerable suspense in the final act, most of the film involves long, lively conversations filmed in close-up that thrust the viewer headlong into the characters’ daily lives. This is a community dear to Kechiche’s heart and he yearns to explore and reveal them in all their vitality. The 61-year-old patriarch is Slimane (Habib Boufares) and he has recently lost his job, which makes it difficult to provide for his two families, his ex-wife and daughters and his current girlfriend and her daughter; so he takes his severance pay and dreams of building a couscous restaurant inside a derelict boat.

This is not a “social issues” film, nor is it a feel-good rags-to-riches culinary fantasy. Some of the characters find themselves burdened with crushing defeats, but none of them are merely victims illustrating a cause or in need of a champion or a tidy plot resolution. Kechiche simply wants us to look and listen to his characters, to spend time in their homes, absorb their energy, mannerisms, and interpersonal exchanges, to recognize their lives.

Kechiche’s technique, inspired by his background in theater acting, is to cast nonprofessional actors–but not for the reasons you might assume. Kechiche requires lengthy rehearsals and a long shoot (in the case of Secret of the Grain, a solid six months) to establish an on-set community that will allow the actors to slowly hone their performances and find their appropriate groove; nonprofessionals simply have more time to dedicate to this. In one sense, the immense work shows on screen, portraying characters and their dense, overlapping conversations with complex, evocative nuance, but it also achieves a naturalism that is so convincing, it seems spontaneously achieved.

It’s no surprise that the intense immediacy of the camera’s gaze is the source of complaints from mainstream reviewers–the Hollywood Reporter balked at the film’s “suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long”–but the film’s visual proximity and immersion is the whole point. One standout sequence takes place at the family’s weekly Sunday dinner, and Kechiche captures a virtual symphony of spirited, candid conversation between the characters as they talk and joke, cajole and tease one another, eat voraciously, praise the food, and debate domestic concerns from modern diapers to language comprehension. At times, speaking with their mouths full and infusing their conversation with implications charged with subtext, the intimacy of the camera is aggressive, even troubling. But it expresses the family’s everyday vitality; at once familiar and other, foreign but never exoticized, the film challenges the viewer to recognize and overcome resistance and share the table with others.

Kechiche has said he highlighted the mullet fish in the French title (literally “The Grain and the Mullet”) because of its biological adaptability, a kind of symbol for Slimane’s resourcefulness in coming to a new country and forging a new life. One can also read “grain” as the potential seed and opportunity enjoyed by his children, and in many ways the film is a comparison between first and second immigrant generations; the sacrifices of the first give way to the freedom and chances of the second, who respond in myriad ways, squandering, entrenching, or eagerly seizing the moment. Through his superlative cast of performers, Kechiche’s family portrait is a doting record of the innate resiliency of this beloved community.

Moving Image Institute, Entry 4

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For decades, the great visionary of film preservation and exhibition, Henri Langlois, dreamed of building a museum of the cinema despite exorbitant costs and dwindling resources, so he obsessively collected scripts, props, costumes, models, art work, and defunct equipment in the hopes of providing a space to honor the hallowed detritus of film production. He’d be thrilled that many archives and museums exist today, including the Museum of the Moving Image (dedicated to film, TV, and digital media), which is currently doubling in size and set for a major reopening in 2009. The expanded museum will include a 242-monitor installation, a garden and cafe, a 264-seat theater with orchestra pit (for silent films), a screening room for educational programs, a video art ampitheater, and much more. (Click on the link for design renderings.)

The Museum was founded by Rochelle Slovin in 1981 and moved into its present location in 1988, fostering two different audiences for its many treasures: family and student visitors for its interactive exhibits and installations (like Gregory Barsamian’s amazing “Feral Fount”) and artifacts (including rare industrial age projectors that are still operational), and cinephiles seeking rare and groundbreaking retrospectives on figures such as Jerry Lewis (’88), Ken Jacobs (’89), David Cronenberg (’92), and modern horror (2007). The chief curator of the film programs is David Schwartz, who received a rare National Society of Film Critics award last year for organizing the first complete Jacques Rivette retrospective (including the 13-hour Out 1) in the US.

The Museum also has significant resources online, including its Pinewood Dialogues, which offers MP3 recordings and transcripts of 68 notable filmmakers, critics, and celebrities.

One of the Museum’s most exciting projects, however, is set to launch June 3 (with a press conference in the lobby of the New York Times): The Moving Image Source, an intended hub for online cinephilia supervised by Dennis Lim, which will include coverage of worldwide retrospectives and archival screenings, publish original writing that coincides with exhibitions in the news, and much more. Lim says they’ve amassed 300-400 online resources for a research database that will be available to the site’s visitors. Bookmark it now…

I can attest to the comprehensive nature and high quality of the Musuem’s exhibitions, which are currently closed for the renovation, and to the knowledge and friendliness of the staff. The Moving Image Institute was a relaxed but fully engaged event that grappled with the rise of the Internet and the future direction of the film-critical industry, and it was a pleasure to attend.

Moving Image Institute, Entry 3

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Now that the Moving Image Institute is over, some lingering images and quotes:

ïIndie publicists telling us they have no idea how three of their favorite films at Sundance–Sugar, Ballast, and Trouble the Water–could possibly be marketed to an ideal audience of young black viewers.

ï Gratitude toward Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum for being the only print critics to offer enthusiastic words about online film culture in Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies.

ï Ace cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Swoon, Personal Velocity, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) telling us that the one thing she wished critics would do is become more versed in technical and formal issues, and consider the intent rather than judge films by convention alone.

ïKuras also suggesting Harris Savides’ (Gerry, Birth, Zodiac) subtle craft represents the best and most overlooked work being done in cinematography today.

ïSony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker swooning over having watched Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala over the weekend; extolling the often overlooked longterm revenues of foreign films despite their reputation for initially poor box office performance; affirming his love of the Dardenne’s L’Enfant; and generally shocking us with his genuine love of movies.

ïFilmmaker Arthur Penn telling us that he was inspired by the French New Wave to make 1965′s Mickey One and how he deliberately sought out Robert Bresson’s cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, to shoot it. I haven’t seen the movie, but I very much want to now. Notably MIA on DVD.

ïPenn also telling us theater is a process of refinement, but film is a mystery.

ïDennis Lim recommending Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste as a model of critical writing.

ïHeather Chaplin and Ed Halter championing video games as potentially new formal experiences with a unique need for serious critical analysis, citing examples such as World of Warcraft and indie games such as Everyday Shooter and flOw.

Moving Image Institute, Entry 2

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More than once this weekend at the Moving Image Institute, we’ve been told that filmmakers have an intense, almost irrational desire to have their work exhibited theatrically rather than on video, even if that means losing considerable sums of money. Distributors shake their heads while describing filmmakers turning down straight-to-video deals or spending virtually all of their cash earned from video sales to make prints, advertise, and book a screen or two here in New York City (a venture that can cost anywhere from $75,000-$100,000, three to four times what it costed fifteen years ago). No doubt this is largely a question of formal purity–filmmakers make, well, films, and want their work to be exhibited on celluloid rather than 525 lines of resolution on a video monitor. But it’s also a question of prestige and public visibility. The question remains: how long can this continue?

Underlining virtually all of our discussions this weekend is the need to find or create an audience, a topic that goes far beyond commercial profits and into cultural transformation. Superficially, the more dependent on consumer markets filmmakers, distributors, and critics are, the more quickly artistic standards and the idea of specialty cinema evaporates from the agenda. But even academics talk of “smuggling” international or classic titles into film courses so as to not turn off prospective students. Everyone says it’s the more challenging, progressive, adventurous films that inspire them to do what they do, but they continually offer reasons why such films cannot be emphasized in the public consciousness–particularly in uncertain times–often on the assumption that “the average person” inherently rejects them.

Setting aside the fact that I believe this fabled “average person” is more often than not a straw man for safety, fear, and convenience (is the “average person” really reading critics or enrolling in universities in the first place?), a primary question emerges: is the purpose of criticism to reflect the public’s taste or to articulate and defend its own insights?

The journalists attending the Institute come from a wide variety of fields–magazines, radio, newspapers, blogs, academia–and one of the best aspects of this weekend has been hearing and resonating with their personal stories. But it’s startling to hear how often their passions are seemingly at odds with their professions, not intrinsically but through a haggard, defeatist perspective, as if the demise of print criticism is the latest inevitability in a war that grows more labored and tenuous with each passing year. There is plenty of gallows humor–jokes about job opportunities in a field increasingly comprised of a handful of positions–but the mood is certifiably grim. The poets huddle together in an evacuated city as the barbarians storm the gates.

I believe one of the central purposes of criticism is to convince or convert, to educate and inspire. When critics decide their writing should be determined by others (implicitly or explicitly), they cease to matter. On the other hand, critics who refuse to compromise their passions, who figure out ways of sharing their observations with infectious conviction (in whatever form) become agents of cultural reflection and renewal. Criticism worth reading is always a form of activism, a resistance to conformity and a ringing call to arms. It attracts an audience and a culture; it is never passive. Whether in print or online, the critical vocation remains the same–explorers, interpreters, and ambassadors for a diverse and global art form.

Moving Image Institute

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The last few days have been a true whirlwind at the Moving Image Institute in New York City, and I’ve only got a couple of hours before we’ll be seeing Gerald Peary’s new documentary on American film criticism. Rochelle Slovin, David Schwartz, Dennis Lim, and Livia Bloom (who just published an interview with Errol Morris in the latest issue of Cinema Scope) and the entire staff at MoMI have been impeccable hosts, and genuinely care about the dialogue we’re generating about the divide between print critics and online critics, or the shrinking publicity market for smaller, more independent distributors.

Hailing from Los Angeles, it’s hard not to feel like a real outsider in the intensely hermetic world of New York film culture, which increasingly revolves around a few major critics, newspapers, and theaters that will continue (for now) to promote and open films outside of major studio fare. Repeatedly we’ve been told that if the New York Times does not run a large, positive review of a film with a photo–capsule reviews do not count–the box office chances of independent or foreign film X in New York are virtually nill, and distributors like Donald Krim of Kino International have long depended on New York buzz to generate waves across the country.

Part of me feels like this trend has got to change, with the shrinking world of print criticism (not only in New York, but also secondary markets like Detroit, Atlanta, and San Diego) being the funnel that could force it; as information awareness–particularly among cinephiles and movie buffs who might be interested in films showing in repertory or art house theaters–shifts from a few print publications to a global network of online dialogue, the idea that a film’s entire fate might be determined by two or three New York critics or editorial decisions seems absurd. (Consider the recent example of There Will Be Blood‘s premiere at a Harry Knowles event in Austin, Texas, an act that enraged New York film exhibitors.) Yet strong buzz online can be ethereal, and often doesn’t translate to butts in seats when films are released on local screens. But this isn’t necessarily any different from print criticism nowadays, either. Bingham Ray (a kind of American Pierre Rissient-type of movie hustler) waxed nostalgically for the days when Vincent Canby would write about one film several weeks in a row, thus getting behind it and helping to build momentum; isn’t part of the problem the glut of films crowding the marketplace today?

The problem of transforming good reviews into ticket sales reminds me of a round table discussion we had at a Los Angeles film festival a couple years back, with exhibitors like the Laemmle theatre chain telling us that even a full-page rave from the LA Weekly wasn’t enough to ensure a successful theatrical run. I’ve long recognized that Los Angeles has unique problems in this regard (many of which revolve around the serious traffic distances between various suburbs and theaters and the utter lack of widespread, efficient public transit) but it was still a shock to hear Ryan Werner of IFC Films and Krim both tell us yesterday that Los Angeles is by far their most difficult market for opening films. The only kind of film that does well in Los Angeles, Krim told us, is French comedies with big stars, a sobering assessment that left me speechless. Another startling factoid: Netflix alone–who purchased 8-10,000 copies of Old Joy–is at times solely responsible for keeping distributors like Kino afloat. No wonder indie distributors are increasingly looking into video on demand as a viable alternative to theatrical distribution.

But the highlight yesterday was meeting Andrew Sarris (who turns 80 this year) and Molly Haskell, two highly influential but shockingly modest and enthusiastic critics who proved to be a joy to interact with during our session as well as dinner afterward. Sarris envinced a particularly self-deprecating humor, referring to his “crazy arrogance and presumption” behind his desire to import French auterist ideas. Not only does he fully credit Jonas Mekas for establishing his career, but also suggests that he’d otherwise only be teaching English (or trying to teach English, he joked). “I’m truly the sum of all the conversations I’ve had about the movies,” he told us. Sarris does teach at Columbia today, and he was quick to graciously assert that “kids today write much better about film then I did when I first started.” At dinner, those of us sitting directly across from Sarris and Haskell couldn’t have been more thoroughly charmed as we breathlessly discussed film (from Borzage to Juno, Billy Wilder to Sidney Lumet’s resurgent career) and when Kevin Lee mentioned some interesting ’90s films dealing with women characters, Haskell was quick to jot down the titles on a note pad. “All I’ve got to say,” Haskell said, “is that if the critical baton must be passed, I’m glad it’s going to such smart people.” Yet their attention and encouragement never seemed like simple flattery; their earthy humor was always in full swing. “I’ll say one nice thing about Pauline Kael,” said Sarris–who still bangs away on a manual typewriter and couldn’t quite fathom what all this talk of blogging was about. “She gave a licence to all critics, male and female, to say that something turned them on.” Sarris and Haskell’s endearing engagement was all the more encouraging given their delight at breaking the politeness barrier.

2008 Moving Image Institute

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In a couple of days, I’ll be headed to New York City to attend this year’s Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, who selected me as one of a dozen participating journalists, and they’ve just updated their website with the final schedule, list of participants, etc.

With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine film critical positions, and the continual growth of serious film writing and discussion on the Internet, this is an interesting time to be reviewing the state of the art, particularly at an event sponsored by the New York Times. I’m sure this widespread cultural transition will be a recurring subject of discussion this weekend.

I’m hoping to blog while attending, but it looks like a full schedule and I don’t know how much free time I’ll have. Either way, I’ll be sure to offer a full account when I return.

Any recommendations while I’m there? My hotel is in Manhattan and the museum is in Queens; I expect I’ll be commuting back and forth daily. I would be grateful for any ethnic food suggestions, bookstores, and of course cinephile-related opportunities in the area, plus anything else you might suggest. I haven’t even planned my trip from JFK yet.

Heinz Emigholz’s “Architecture as Autobiography”

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The industrious Adam Hyman of the Los Angeles Filmforum has organized an exciting collaborative event between various local film institutions (Filmforum, LACMA, REDCAT, UCLA) and the MAK Center: a week-long retrospective of German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz from April 6-13. Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses was one of my highlights of last year’s Toronto film festival, so I’ve been eager to explore previous entries in his thirty-film “Photography and Beyond” series (begun in 1983) showcasing architecture, sculpture, writing, and drawing. Unfortunately, however, I’ll be in New York City next week, so I was delighted to discover that Facets Video has already released a couple Emigholz architecture films on DVD (Goff in the Desert and D’Annunzio’s Cave) with more on the way (Sullivan’s Banks, Maillart’s Bridges, and Schindler’s Houses). The discs are direct ports of fine German DVDs (chapter stops for each building, maps, informative extras) released by Filmgalerie 451.

Emigholz’s architecture films are not the kind of historical/aesthetic information overviews one might expect; the best in that mode I’ve seen is Arte’s excellent European Architectures series (also distributed by Facets) complete with its creative model photography, poetic insights, and wall-to-wall narration. By contrast, Emigholz presents “Architecture as Autobiography” by focusing on the work of a specific designer in its natural environment without any narration at all. (His dialogue-suffused D’Annunzio’s Cave is an exception we’ll get to shortly.) By shunning still photography and talking heads, Emigholz presents the spaces in a more ambiguous, less mediated fashion, allowing the viewer to construct a personal sense of the designer’s creative voice (informed, of course, by the medium’s inherent constraints, ellipses, and subjectivity). “Grasping, designing, and experiencing space is the starting point,” Emigholz says in an interview printed in the Schindler’s Houses sleeve. “I believe in first impressions and the analytical power of the first encounter.”

Several formal qualities facilitate the viewer’s experience through the twin media of 35mm and Dolby stereo: the setting of each building is emphasized visually (structures are often introduced in long shots where the subject isn’t even entirely obvious at first; trees, signs, or cars often loom in the foreground) as well as sound (on-location recordings edited for smooth transitions and atmosphere, which also help convey the space). The almost always stationary frame is often slightly tilted to one side or the other, which breaks habitual ways of perceiving (or ignoring) horizontal and vertical lines. Emigholz knows the viewer will mentally construct the overall space given a succession of shots or related details, and his tilted compositions create an almost playful seesawing effect when the shots are edited together, continually adding one more element to kickstart fresh perceptions. All of these elements (including a reliance on natural lighting) offer ways of perceiving the buildings in ways different from architectural books. His films are meditative and revealing, offering a surprising range of emotions.

Here are some thoughts on the following films:


Sullivan’s Bank’s (2000)

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) coined the phrase “form follows function” and is considered a father of modern architecture, but the eight midwestern banks he designed late in his life showcase his taste for decorative floral ornamentation. Often beautifully contrasting turquoise and red brick colors, the various textures in some shots are a marvel of diversity–graceful, arching curves against thin crossbeams bristling with intricate carvings. At times, Emigholz introduces his banks from outside the buildings; at times, he begins from the inside. Sullivan’s spaces remain cavernous centers of modern commerce–one lengthy shot emphasizes the line before an ATM machine set within the brickwork–under grey, late-winter skies and the easygoing bustle of life in places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Lafayette, Indiana.

The DVD contains an onscreen biography of Sullivan (that can also be read here) as well as a challenging but fascinating one-hour bonus film by Emigholz entitled The Whitman Project (2007). It consists of a split screen featuring the work of two camera crews who follow (in uninterrupted tracking shots) a German-speaking actor and an English-speaking actor (both reciting texts–such as “A Sight in Camp” and “Manhattan Arming”–by Walt Whitman, who was an ideological influence on Sullivan) as they wander around the same space (a large rural enclosure filled with wounded Civil War soldiers) lamenting the human cost of war. Their voices overlap, but they recite the text asynchronously, and their differing interpretations, tone and levels of empathy create a double-pronged, stereoscopic portrait of Whitman’s writing.


Maillart’s Bridges (2001)

Robert Maillart (1872-1940) was a Swiss architect who revolutionized concrete designs; this film showcases 14 roof constructions and bridges built between 1910 and 1935. Of all the extant “Architecture as Autobiography” films, this may be the most pleasantly serene, often featuring remote or vacant structures spanning mountainous vistas and water streams; the sound of rushing water is almost ubiquitous throughout and creates a soothing, hypnotic feel, and the Swiss Alps often provide a stimulating compositional backdrop. But Emigholz isn’t seeking postcard imagery; his compositions contrast the curve of rails over craggy terrain or emphasize the height and distance of each spanning design. One might even note (as I did) the relatively pristine state of the concrete until Emigholz provides a shock cut of a graffitied swastika on the footbridge over the River Toess in Winterthur.

The DVD includes two highly informative extras filmed in 2004, the 53-minute Buildings by Robert Maillart and the 36-minute The Art of Structure Engineering, both of which include casual but highly educated conversations between Emigholz and engineering professor David P. Billington, bridge designer Christian Menn, and structural engineer Jˆrg Schlaich.


Goff in the Desert (2003)

Like Whitman and Sullivan, Bruce Goff (1904-1982) was deeply inspired by nature, and was a major figure in organic architecture; he emphasized circular rooms and unusual materials, such as ashtrays or chunks of glass for windows. Emigholz’s film begins with a brilliant pre-credit image of a flat freeway, with a no man’s land of brown grass in mid-ground behind a wire fence, and assorted corporate signs rising in the background (McDonalds, gas stations, truck stop supermarkets) like industrial conquistadors towering over the landscape: an iconic image for anyone who has every driven through the midwest.

In this metaphorical “desert,” Goff designed unconventional buildings in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma (where he taught at the state university), with a few more projects scattered between Texas and California, including the sensational Japanese pavilion at LACMA. At 110 minutes, this is Emigholz’s longest film in his architecture series, and the most diverse in its content, tracing over 9,000 miles and 62 buildings, from gas stations to private homes to cathedrals. As with his previous films, so often telephone poles or stop lights obscure initial views of the buildings, creating a teasing ambiguity that emphasizes the designs within their natural locations and calls on the viewer to venture around, behind, closer. (A conical church in Edmond, Oklahoma is compositionally obfuscated by oil drills and road signage.) Writhing trees create a visual contrast to the stately edges of several constructions.

Goff’s organic forms often reminded me of the sets of imaginative science fiction films; the metallic railing, circular design, and rustic, warm tones of the Ford House in Aurora, Illinois could have been an alternative set for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, while the endlessly curvaceous Gryder House in Ocean Springs, Missouri (precipitated in the film by a rare and beautiful pan across a pond) suggests a pavilion that could be (artfully) designed for a futuristic theme park.

Just as he begins Schindler’s Houses with a bit of narration, Emigholz ends this film by describing the ruins of Shin’enKan in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, what many (including the filmmaker) once considered to be Goff’s masterpiece. After a fire in 1998, all that remains now of the home are piles of rocks and glass, the residual testimony to an intensely creative vision.

Impressively, the DVD contains a German and an English audio commentary by Emigholz as well as a breezy “making of” feature shot by the filmmaker and his crew on their trek across the United States in 2002. The film (unsubtitled but featuring a mishmash of German and English) records the filmmakers visiting locations, planning and executing their shoots, interacting with residents–even getting pulled over by the highway patrol–while always remaining fascinated by passing examples of odd Americana.


D’Annunzio’s Cave (2005)

Not all of Emigholz’s films are about architects he admires–Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863-1938) was a fascist writer who (along with his personal architect) designed his ultimate pleasure dome, the Villa Cargnacco on Lake Garda as a monument to his grotesque inner life. Stylistically, it diverges the most from Emigholz’s previous architecture films; it’ s entirely comprised of handheld, constantly moving camerawork twisting and turning–seemingly floating–through the fifteen shadowy, decadent, heavily cluttered rooms of the villa.

Moreover, the soundtrack is comprised of unnerving (and overlapping) computer voices intoning various texts by figures such as d’Annunzio, Mussolini, Joseph Conrad, a raging American film producer, tourist guides, and Emigholz himself, which are mixed with snippets of grating, pulsing electronic sound effects and bursts of atonal music. A subtle, raspy breathing seems to emanate throughout. The end result is one of the most disturbing films I’ve seen, an instant cinematic companion to the terrifying mansions in The Innocents or The Shining, but perhaps more accurately, the kind of claustrophobic, tyrannical worlds seen in Sokurov’s trilogy, Moloch, Taurus, and The Sun. (Emigholz has written, “Considering this spectacle [of the villa], my hate began to recede, covered by my satisfaction at the dust that had settled like acid on everything…I felt as if I were on the inside of an embalmed corpse whose intestines and brain had been shunted away because they had begun to stink.”)

In dark rooms with few windows, porcelain sculptures depict disembodied heads, naked bodies resembling prisoners rather than human ideals, and an unending series of lean, aggressive-looking animals that are interspersed among thousands of books and objects of every kind. Each room conveys a sense of suffocating, intricately arranged mania that overwhelms the viewer like an all-powerful, deranged consciousness. “I have wallpapered the area around my bed with red brocade,” one inhuman voice recites from d’Annunzio’s diaries, “and hid it behind dividers. I have created this alcove to sleep in purple, the beautiful color of blood.”

About twenty minutes into the film, the atonal sounds are replaced by soaring Debussy, and Emigholz shifts the film into a different register, one that emphasizes the perfectionism and lure conveyed by the villa, thus giving the viewer a taste of its twisted, encompassing vision of power; it’s one of the most challenging parts of the film, its flirtation with the villa’s dark majesty is momentarily shocking in its clarity before it once again descends into its haunting phantasmagoria of sounds and images. Unlike Emigholz’s previous films, the individual spaces are not set apart by blank screens and text, the voices merely call out room names from shot to shot, thrusting the viewer from one room to the next like a terrifying fun house.

The DVD includes a 60-minute compilation of the raw footage used by four different cinematographers to create the film, but interested viewers won’t want to miss the film’s excellent website, which includes all of the (sometimes unintelligable) text read in the film, with attributions.

“The stolen collection of every kind of art object, rearranged in layers, becomes an externalized ‘brain’ revealing [d'Annunzio's] thoughts and associations in the form of fetishes,” the filmmakers says in the film’s press notes. “Things are granted meanings like medals, sense becomes power, meaning becomes kitsch, dialogue a decree.” For a filmmaker like Emigholz, who relishes the ability of art to invite exploration, contemplation, and discernment, d’Annunzio’s aesthetic egoism is an aesthetic nightmare.