Monthly Archives: May 2009

Armand Gatti and L’Enclos (1961)

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“When I studied, I met a filmmaker who decided for me, in a way , what I was going to become. It was Armand Gatti who brought us together.” –Jean-Pierre Dardenne at his 2009 Cannes masterclass

“Film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist, Gatti to make theater, and me to make essays.” –Chris Marker

The name Armand Gatti hovers in the background of many filmmakers today. One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, and Jean Cayrol, but due to the fact that none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles. He appears in Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and in Marker’s Immemory CD-Rom (reprinted this year); he wrote China (1956) for Marker’s Petite Planète collection and traveled with Marker in the making of Letter from Siberia (1957), which inspired his book Siberia — Zero + Infinity the following year.

According to his 1989 biographer, Dorothy Knowles, Gatti was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco (his Italian anarchist father, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities, fled Mussolini’s reign); during WWII, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Gatti eventually escaped and joined a British SAS special forces team. After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, The Enclosure (L’Enclos, 1961).

L’Enclos was screened out of competition at Cannes but it was hailed by Truffaut, Resnais, Cocteau and others. It’s available on DVD in France from Doriane Films. (My review follows.) Gatti went on to write and direct the satirical El otro Cristobal in Cuba in 1963 (which won the Critic’s Prize at Cannes but was never distributed in Europe), Der Übergang über den Ebro for German TV in 1970, a couple of video series for French TV in the late-’70s, and The Writing on the Wall (Nouse étions tous des noms d’arbe) in Ireland in 1982. While making these films, Gatti also established himself as a leading figure in the experimental popular theater, producing plays developed in “collective writing” workshops at universities, factories, youth rehab centers, and prisons. (As late as 2006, he wrote and directed a play at the Ville-Evrard psychiatry ward outside Paris.)

The Dardennes met Gatti in 1971 when Jean-Pierre was an acting student at the Institute of Diffusion Arts (IAD) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels. Gatti had been invited by the student coordinator Henry Ingberg, who writes in the 2005 Belgian Dardenne program L’image, la vie that he spoke to Gatti about the “very strong desire to leave classic production behind in favor of a participative approach of research, encounter and dialogue with people, with militants, weirdos, suburbanites, and so forth; in short, of this desire to forge a bridge between the poetic creation and a world generally considered to be incompatible with it.” The rise of video technology encouraged this approach and the production research resulted in the student plays The Durutti Column (1971) and Adelin’s Ark (1972). Later subsidy-funded workshops allowed the Dardennes to expand this experience into ongoing documentary work, of which they eloquently spoke last week. (Their association with Gatti continued with The Writing on the Wall; Jean-Pierre served as assistant cameraman, Luc served as assistant director, and both were co-producers.)

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From its bravura opening shot that disorients the viewer by rotating and tilting down from a picturesque cloud to a rock quarry, the credit sequence of L’Enclos is its most visually striking: lines of concentration camp prisoners silently trudge over the desolate landscape, the black-and-white imagery emphasizing the dry, dusty terrain and harsh shadows. (The cinematographer, Robert Julliard, had previously shot Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and Clément’s Forbidden Games.) The muted sounds of crunching stone and falling gravel intensify the sense of physical toil, but the setting exists in an abstracted space with compositions that fragment prisoners and relegate guards to the background–a world both immediate and removed.

The first scene asserts the danger and cruelty of camp life when a kapo orders a prisoner to kill a weaker one or be killed himself–the classic prisoner’s dilemma–but unlike The Dark Knight, the scene is presented with such sobriety and naturalism that it registers as sad desperation rather than a thrilling plot device. An observing Nazi guard recommends the same strategy be used on a Communist German inmate suspected of harboring secrets, and soon an enclosure is populated by the burly Karl Schongauer (played with world-weary presence by Hans Christian Blech) and David Stein (Jean Negroni), a Jewish watchmaker. Stein is told he has twenty-four hours to “prove he is at least half a man” and kill or be killed; the Nazi commanders bet on who will win.

Gatti’s abstraction situates the action at a fictional camp called Tatenberg. His goal isn’t to document the grisly details of camp life (which he felt were unfilmable) but to highlight the culture of fear and psychological dehumanization that pervaded all the camps. “Before killing a man one kills his dignity,” he has said, and the film extends the active dispiriting of prisoners to the usage of signage hung from their necks and sexual slavery. Most of the drama pivots around the dialogue between the two men in the enclosure and their ultimate decisions. Gatti has attributed his survival of WWII in part because of his ability to retain his sanity, and impressively, the film isn’t an escape drama (though it does highlight organized resistance in the camp); rather, it asks whether it’s possible for a person to maintain his or her humanity in the face of certain death, perhaps the kind of question that only a survivor could pose with utter conviction.

The Dardennes and Lorna’s Silence

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If last week seemed like a windfall for Chris Marker, this week the torch has been passed to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Tuesday at Cannes, the Belgian filmmakers gave a truly fascinating two-hour masterclass that is already available online, which features extended discussions of key scenes in each of their films. The brothers’ filmography–including many of their rarely seen documentaries–is also screening at the Harvard Film Archive beginning this week, and the program begins at the Walter Reade Theater the following week.

In the US, Sony Classics isn’t releasing the Dardennes’ 2008 film, Lorna’s Silence, until August, but it’s already available on DVD in France and the UK.  The French Blaq Out DVD includes a unique prize: Jean-Pierre Limosin’s addition to the Cinema de notre temps series, The Home Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers (2006), in which the filmmakers stroll through their neighborhood in Seraing while pointing out filming locations and discussing their work; the episode–previously packaged with Jacqueline Aubenas’ recent collection of French essays–includes Dutch subtitles.

Lorna’s Silence won the best screenplay award at Cannes last year, but its overall critical reception was decidedly muted, if not mixed.  Having seen the film, I can only presume this response had more to do with a kind of backlash (the Dardennes are among a select few to have won Cannes’ Palme d’Or twice) or a misreading of its ambiguous ending: the Guardian asserts that the “narrative machinery simply seizes up,” the World Socialist Website questions the film’s lack of “social impulse,” and Screen International complains that the film “spins into an unexpected and unsatisfying conclusion.”

But none of these criticisms address what actually occurs in the final act of the Dardennes’ most heavily plotted film to date. As always, equally attuned to their protagonist’s inner and outer lives, the story unfolds on two levels. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman in an immigration scheme that involves her marriage to a Belgian drug addict (played by an emaciated Jérémie Renier) whom her employers hope will die soon so that she can marry a Russian mobster. At first, Lorna sees the scheme as her only hope for success in post-industrial Liège, and the Dardennes are adept at suggesting the ways in which modern relationships are governed by money. (Like Bresson’s L’Argent, which features an ATM machine behind its opening credits, the first image in Lorna’s Silence is bills being counted.)

However, as much as Lorna’s steely resolve attempts to deny the human costs at stake, her silence masks a tangle of emotions slowly growing within her. While the trafficking plot dominates most of the film, Lorna’s suppressed conscience gestates in spite of herself, and as the Dardennes’ visual focus builds intensity, the viewer is brought deeper into the mystery of Lorna’s inner life, identified by her increasing attempts to physically and psychological free herself from a plot of her own making (or at least acquiescence). The narrative doesn’t seize up or spin out of control, it simply becomes secondary to Lorna’s nascent and all-consuming perceptions and convictions.

The French DVD also includes an informative interview with the Dardennes by filmmaker Sólveig Anspach; among other things, the filmmakers reveal that they wrote eleven different versions of the film’s script before settling on their final one, and they discuss their lengthy rehearsals and continuity shooting methods. It’s rare that filmmakers not only have a powerful command of film technique but are eloquent enough to discuss their methods in detail while still leaving room for interpretation and discovery. One often gets the feeling that the Dardennes consider themselves explorers, probing their films with the same combination of observation, speculation, and inquiry they inspire in their viewers.

A Grin Without a Cat (1977, 1993)

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Last week, Icarus Films released the latest DVD in their excellent Chris Marker series, A Grin Without a Cat (originally released in 1977 but shortened with an added coda in ’93). Not only is this one of his most acclaimed documentaries, summarizing the decade of the New Left worldwide as well as his own globetrotting SLON collective filmmaking period, the DVD also comes amid a flurry of new Marker events:

• Cannes Classics has announced it’s debuting a new and restored print of Far from Vietnam (1967), the protest film Marker organized and edited with contributions by Joris Ivens, Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and William Klein (who, along with Raymond Depardon and many others, also contributed footage to Grin). Given that Marker begins his history of the New Left with international outrage against the Vietnam war, this is a timely restoration.

• Harvard Film Archive is featuring a series of Marker’s best-known films this week, and will culminate on Saturday, May 16, with a Marker-led Q/A tour of his Second Life cyber museum (which will be dismantled later this year) set in the virtual realm of Ouvroir. (You can watch a preview here courtesy of Les Inrockuptibles.)

• The Peter Blum Gallery in New York City is offering an exhibition of Marker’s Owls at Noon installation (which Rob Davis reviewed here) beginning this Saturday.

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Marker begins A Grin Without a Cat with a moving, tour-de-force credit sequence (set to a rousing march by Italian composer Luciano Berio) that juxtaposes images from the famous Odessa Steps scenes in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) with first-hand footage of demonstrations that Marker and his SLON colleagues amassed over the years, forging a universal archetype of the clash of peaceful protesters versus state militia. It’s one of the great editing sequences of the cinema and showcases the rhythmic ingenuity that Marker (who only credits himself with editing and sound) has demonstrated in all of his work since the early-’50s.

As in Marker’s later The Last Bolshevik (1993), which begins with a newsreel clip of a parading Tsarist ordering the poor to remove their hats and bow to the rich, Grin opens with the face of injustice in its most crystalized form: an American bomber bragging in his cockpit about the spectacle of terrified Vietnamese people fleeing from his napalm. Though the antiwar resistance (especially in France) is often dated from May ’68, Marker shows how it began in ’67, noting in his extensive liner notes provided with the DVD:

“Perhaps too much has been made of the famous editorial by Pierre Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde, March ’68, ‘France is bored’–a moody column from which rose the consensual idea that May had been a thunderbolt in a clear sky, that no one had seen it coming. As for me, I wasn’t bored at all, and to discern the waves of the seism that began to shatter our planet you really didn’t have to be prophetic.”

Using multiple narrators (including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand), the pseudo-anonymous Marker charts how self-determination sentiments merged with the workers’ movement to create new critiques and demands within established power structures. The film winds together workers’ strikes in France, demonstrations against the Shaw of Iran in Berlin, interviews with Fidel Castro in Cuba and Regis Débray in a Bolivian prison; it remembers riots in Santiago, Prague, and Mexico City, where police killed hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco massacre just days before the 1968 Summer Olympics, after which “not one country refused to attend.”

The film captures the excitement and promise of the times, which became a grin without a cat as competing factions of the Left–Stalinists, Trotskyites, Maoists, union organizers, Communists, Socialists, radicals–failed to unite (or sold out to middle class interests), and assassinations and coups prevented many revolutionary dreams from fully taking shape. Marker wryly points out that one of the biggest victories for the Left–Nixon’s resignation–came about not by political protests but by television. The film is also a cogent preview of postwar corporate issues that would become increasingly dire: “Until recently,” the narrator says, “those in power oppressed or killed directly. Today, death or madness could be a simple by-product of their activity.” Marker shows a heartrending protest at a Chisso board meeting in Minimata, Japan, due to the company’s mercury poisoning of the public water supply.

In contrast to the idealism and beauty of the film’s opening montage, the bulk of the film is comprised of bits and pieces of found footage and hastily shot protest films and newsreels, and edited at a breakneck pace, emphasizing the fluid, unformed chaos of the times, yet it’s never without grace and wit. Marker brilliantly transitions from a playful digression about cats (comparing their clear-eyed watchfulness to the shifty eyes of people in power) to a Belgian parade honoring felines to a sickened cat in Minimata, then cuts to footage of the town’s human victims. In similar fashion, the film links major global events with humor, outrage, and compassion, and serves both as a potent time capsule and a call to arms that can still be heard ringing around the world.

Oshima: Death by Hanging (1968) and Boy (1969)

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A cemetery mound initiates a conical motif in Oshima’s Boy.

The new retrospective of Nagisa Oshima–widely regarded among experts as the most important filmmaker of the Japanese New Wave–is currently poised between its Los Angeles hosts, the American Cinematheque and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; LACMA begins its half of the series tonight with two masterpieces: Death By Hanging (1968) and Boy (1969).  Both films showcase Oshima’s ferocious sociopolitical edge and preoccupation with the interplay of fantasy and reality, as well as his stylistic diversity: the former is a black-and-white melange of Bretchian techniques and mobile camerawork while the latter is a color film, widescreen and deliberately paced.  Originally curated by the Cinematheque Ontario’s estimable James Quandt (interviewed by LACMA’s Bernardo Rondeau yesterday), the Oshima retrospective is shaping up to be one of the year’s cinemagoing highlights.

Despite Oshima’s international acclaim, I’ve only begun dipping my toes in his oeuvre, and I’m far from the only cinephile to do so: only a handful of his work (from the late-’50s to the ’90s) have been released on VHS or DVD in the US, and even Criterion’s new releases (In the Realm of the Senses  and Empire of Passion) are actually polished reissues of two titles already available on DVD.  Rights issues appear to be one hold-up, but Oshima’s dedication to a cinema that directly challenges notions of convention and acceptability is another; Oshima designs his films to question political assumptions (particularly those held by Japanese viewers), an emphasis he qualified for Joan Mellen (in her mid-’70s Voices from the the Japanese Cinema interview that seems as cross-purposed and disconnected as Schrader’s famous chat with Bresson during the same era): “I am not interested in the surface of politics or in how political issues appear to our society.  I try to look into political perception in the minds of the Japanese, not as an element which you can see, but rather as interior feelings.”

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Death By Hanging

By his own admission, Oshima’s farcical and multilayered critique of the death penalty is one of his most issue-driven films, but it also ranks
with Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) as one of the cinema’s supreme works on the subject, making something like Hajime Kadoi’s recent Vacation (2008) seem like a sentimental trifle rather than the reasonably good melodrama it is. Oshima’s film is so thematically and technically aggressive with its wall-to-wall dialogue, textual statements that directly address the viewer, exaggerated ensemble performances, and freedom with degrees of fantasy, it immerses the viewer in a vortex of shifting perceptions that chart the thin line between souls and bodies, thinking and doing.

Beginning with a statistic about the number of Japanese people who supported the death penalty (71%) and moving into a documentary-like examination of a death chamber and the process by which someone is executed, the film then shifts into the realm of black comedy when a Japanese Korean man named R accused of rape and murder doesn’t die after he is hung, created panic and confusion among the presiding officials. The doctors are forced to resuscitate him; the guards want to hang him again but are stymied when R exhibits nearly complete amnesia (they conclude they can’t legally execute him unless he’s aware of his past); the priest believes R’s soul is already in heaven and opposes executing the “new man.” The three figures embody the authoritarian voices of state, religion, and science.

What follows is a farcical, impromptu psychodrama in which the guards act out their interpretation of R’s past and crimes, hoping to spark his memory or instill what they assume were his motives. But R behaves like a benign innocent, and the guards’ histrionics increasingly expose their own inclinations and desires. Their latent racism comes to the fore (speaking in broken Japanese or encouraging vulgar “Korean-like” performances) and the situation prompts several of the guards to recall war crimes they committed. As their imagination grows, Oshima depicts (visually and aurally) their murderous reenactments in the crimes’ original settings, and it’s not long before the guards’ collective imagination and reality become fused, much like R’s initial crimes were set off by his own fantasies. In the end, no one seems entirely innocent.

Oshima makes great use of the cramped rooms of the execution chamber, pivoting his camera to reframe characters as they enter and exit doorways with theatrical flair; while the pace is frenetic, the sound design is increasingly selective, impressionistic, and dreamlike. The film features gutsy, unrestrained performances by the entire cast, and it’s by turns chilling, thought-provoking, and comical: when one of the murder victims transforms into R’s sister, who insists on R’s politicization, one of the guards yells, “Look, this is an execution chamber; it is neither the time nor the place to debate with an imaginary woman!” Yet Oshima masterfully unveils the layers of pretense and hypocrisy that infuse the prison setting.

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Boy

This film, as quiet and stately as Death By Hanging is verbose and dynamic, is based on a true story about a criminal couple who used their ten-year-old son in an ongoing scheme in which they flung themselves against passing cars and browbeat the drivers into paying for “damages.” While the film is in no way a sentimental examination of the ten-year-old (merely called “Boy” throughout), it is a profoundly moving portrait of the boy’s premature and powerless exposure to a twisted adult world of scheming, extortion, manipulation, violence, and isolation, and its devastating effect on his childlike sense of wonder and imagination (not to mention his ideas of truth, family, and reality).

Oshima expertly uses widescreen compositions to highlight the vacuity of postwar social life: characters are continually confined to the edges of the frame, emphasizing the empty spaces (lobbies, alleys, ferries at sea, deserted stadiums, depopulated cityscapes) and impersonal crowds of urban Japan. Like Tarkovsky’s films, the color is randomly and periodically reduced to monochromatic scales of blue, an effect here that emphasizes the underlying dreariness of a society that could foster such crimes: one of the few social interactions the boy witnesses apart from his parents, ironically, is two thugs who bully a student for accidentally bumping into them. Wandering aimlessly around Japan, the family finds itself in northernmost, wintry Hokkaido, where the bleak snowfields and deserted streets literally seem to embody “the end of Japan” in more ways than one.

The boy occasionally fancies escape but inevitably clings to his parents despite their abuse, though his worldview is so tainted by them that it’s questionable how much psychological autonomy he actually possesses. He becomes a potentially protective figure for his three-year-old brother, who listens–barely comprehending at best–to the boy’s whimsical stories about aliens from the Andromeda galaxy who will one day fly down to earth and destroy all the evil men. The boy’s imagination (symbolized by his obsession over a cheap, yellow Sci-Fi hat) offers one of his few outlets for transcendence, but it’s a different object (a red boot) that ultimately inspires his grasp of reality, a burden inevitably too heavy to bear.

Los Angeles Film Festival Line-up

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The Los Angeles Film Festival announced its line-up today, and any fears that its new director might steer the festival–with its solid line-up several years running–in an untoward direction have been put to rest. Some of the highlights follow.

The latest edition of the always excellent “The Films That Got Away” series programmed by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association:

• Musica Nocturna, described by Robert Koehler as “the most realistic depiction of a married couple that I’ve seen on screen since Cassavetes.”

• The Silence Before Bach, which I’ve been dying to see ever since it earned raves at MoMA and the Film Forum.

• United Red Army, which Daniel Kasman compares to Satantango and Out 1 and writes that it “hits the same notes, the same brutal actions again and again, with tremendous results.”

Other films from world cinema:

• Turistas, Chilean Alicia Scherson’s second film after Play–one of my favorite films of 2006–and embraced by Robert Koehler here as “a superb delight, equally light and heavy.”

• A Week Alone, Celina Munga’s first film since her excellent Ana and the Others (2003), which is a droll and socially observant portrait of Argentine youth that plays like a cross between Rohmer and Kiarostami; it’s also available as Instant Play at Netflix and highly recommended.

• The international premiere of Elementary Training for Actors by Martin Rejtman (and co-creator Federico Leon), whose Copacabana documentary I deeply admired at LAFF two years ago, but whose fiction work is among the most highly praised of contemporary Argentine cinema. (I’ve got a copy of Silvia Prieto that I’ll be sure to watch soon.)

• My Dear Enemy by South Korea’s Lee Yoon-ki (This Charming Girl); if you scroll down the link I just gave for Copacabana, you’ll see my warm reaction to Lee’s previous film, Ad Lib Night (2006), which struck me as an unusually sensitive family drama.

• Our Beloved Month of August, the film that graced the cover of the second-to-last issue of Cinema Scope, which featured an interview with filmmaker Miguel Gomes by editor Mark Peranson.

• Crude Oil is acclaimed Chinese documentarist Wang Bing’s 14-hour video installation; I haven’t seen his other opus, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003) yet, but I did have the pleasure of taking in his remarkable Fengming: A Chinese Memoir at the Toronto film fest a couple years ago. I admire LAFF a lot for programming this.

• Advance screenings of films with distribution: Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (which Rob Davis–interviewing Denis–describes as “wonderful”), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking (along with Assayas’ Summer Hours, the most perceptive family drama I saw last year–even if it should end a couple minutes before it does), the Sundance-championed SF film Cold Souls, and Michael Mann’s new thriller, Public Enemies (but let’s hope this is closer to The Insider than Miami Vice).