CPHDOX day 9: The Lack, Horse Money

The Lack (Masbedo, Italy, 2014)

CPHDOX is amazing at blurring the boundaries between documentary, art and fiction, showcasing hybrid films as well as putting stuff in other contexts. But then, at times, because the festival overall is so amazing at considering docs as an artform, the series devoted explicitly to art-films might suffer. When amazing art-cinema like Lav Diaz' Storm Children or Pedro Costa's Horse Money is playing in the main competition, it's reason for aplause, good for not keeping artfilm confined to a ghetto of sorts. But the films left behind might suffer a bit.

The Lack is a fine film, but I'm left with the feeling that it's really regular artfilm-making. Working from ideas I gather was gathered from psycho-analysis, the film showcases six women through four dream-like episodes, where their needs, dreams and frustrations are visualized. It's very beautiful, and the sound is great. The first and the third were filmed in Iceland, the second on the Aeolian islands, as a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, also concerned with the appearence of a 'lack' so to speak, though in that case a lacune left by the dissapearing woman. The first episode showed a woman in a white dress waiting for a man, realizing he'd stood her up once again, then driving into a landscape with a gun and shooting at the dress, which had been gifted to her by the untrustworthy man. As this retelling should make clear, it's not the most subtle thing. The other episodes were better, more poetical. One has a woman named Xiu travelling to an island with a heavy projector in tow, carrying it up a hill and creating a beautiful light. Not subtle, but the final light was very very beautiful, and beauty is what this type of film needs. Third episode, back in Iceland, had two women travelling to a floating glasshouse. Fourth episode concerned therapy explicitly, and included some crazy shots of a naked frightened woman going down a dark tube on a stream of water, like a water-slide, filmed from the inside. I can't explain it, absolutely crazy how on earth they did it.

The directors from the artgroup Masbedo were two men. As you can imagine, a film made by men, about women and what they are lacking, is balancing on a knifes edge. The men talked about wanting to show a different type of woman than the 'Berlusconi'-woman dominant in Italy, but it turns out, being a better feminist than Berlusconi might actually not be enough to impress an audience of young Danish women, who had some quite pointed questions afterwards. And the film is a bit weird. Like, it's quite easy to see it as a film about penis-envy... 'Lack' is a Lacanian term, and it can be used quite subtly and universally without much gendering but... Yeah, pscyho-analysis is weird, man.

Horse Money (Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014)

One of those films that could perhaps have been in the art-category is Pedro Costa's new weird Horse Money. In any way, I don't think it should be categorized as a documentary. The film has been called the fourth film in what is now known as the 'Fontainhas'-tetralogy, which for it's first three films, Ossos (97), In Vanda's Room (00) and Collosal Youth (06), took place in the now demolished Fontainhas slum in Lissabon. But grouping these films together perhaps minimizes the big differences between the four, and naming them all for Fontainhas glosses over how much the films, especially the last two, are concerned with the immigrant experience in Portugal, and the hangovers from Portuguese colonialism, something also present in Costa's Down to Earth from 95. Actually, In Vanda's Room is the only one that seemed truly documentary to me - though it's also the only one of the four I haven't finished, so perhaps it changes after the first half. At the Q&A, Pedro Costa talked about having worked in the same method for 15 years and 3 films, that is after Ossos. And this method - shooting with a minimal crew and on digital, developing films together with his subjects - aren't as much used for documenting raw reality anymore, but for getting into the heads of the subjects of the films, for basing the narrative on their desires, memories, histories. All in all, I feel we might have to reevaluate what Costa has been trying to do, and I also feel that the old narrative of his work has harmed the reception of this new one. Because this new one isn't really a documentary, it's heavily fictionalized and stylized, and it doesn't have a lot to do with Fontainhas, and yet it builds pretty logically on Colossal Youth. But from some of the confused reviews I've read of this film, it doesn't seem as if the critics were prepared for it anyway.

Alas, the film does have it's share of problems, and some of them derives from it's deviation from the earlier films in the trilogy. The loss of Fontainhas is deeply felt. That claustrophobic neighborhood was an extremely filmable location, where the personality of the group of people who'd build it could be sensed almost everywhere. In Colossal Youth, when focus moved to the new, sleek, white apartments that the government would be giving the inhabitants in return for their demolished homes, you could feel the loss of history, and the absence of anything substantial given in return (if there was any sense that living conditions would improve, obviously it would be worth it, but the sense I get is that nothing was done about the root of the problems, it's just that people were moved from a neighborhood where their squalor had become too visible). Horse Money is shot in studios, in abandoned factories, in doorways and elevators, and the visuals don't work like they used to. Not exactly. Costa still uses light better than pretty much anyone, so most of the film is still an aesthetic delight, but there isn't the same sense of lived life in the pictures.

Further creating problems: The film dives deep into the head of Ventura, the lead character of Colossal Youth as well, where he wandered around and talked with his 'children'. This time he's been out in a hospital or prison or asylum, it isn't exactly clear, and he talks as much with doctors, soldiers and specters of his past. Ventura remains a striking presence, though he's gotten much older since last we saw him, and the traumas and losses in his life is interesting to explore, but while there are some other immigrant persons in the film - a woman named Vitalina, arriving from Cape Verde; Ventura's 'godson' whom he sings with a bit - there isn't the same sense of a communal epic being told as there was in the two earlier films. Further exacerbating this problem is the short runtime by Costra's standards, only 105 minutes, hardly enough to establish the landscape where used to from earlier. (yeah, I know: "Such a boring film, and way too short as well!")

I was a bit dissapointed in this film, but understand me correctly: Pedro Costa is one of the most important filmmakers working today, and my dissapointment only means the film is not as good as Colossal Youth, one of the best films of last decade. Horse Money is still a unique experience, extremely beautiful, and important in the way it gives voice to the outcasts and shines a light on history we might want to forget in Europe. The film shines a light on the fact that the Portuguese Carnation-revolution, which toppled the dictatorship in 1974, was done by the same soldiers who'd comitted dreadful atrocities in Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, and that this development might have been an extremely frightul one for the immigrants. In a sequence towards the end Ventura is trapped in an elevator with a soldier in full camo gear, whether he considers Ventura fellow countryman or enemy is hard to tell.

It is a good film, one that needs to be seen and discussed, and one that hopefully will help give Pedro Costa, Ventura, and the rest of the Cape Verde immigrants more exposure. But I'd hoped it might be the film of the year, and it's not.

CPHDOX day 8: Episode of the Sea, The Fortune You Seek is in Another Cookie, Actress

Episode of the Sea (Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Holland, 2014)

So I saw my first truly bad film of the festival today. A portrait of the fishing community at Urk, Holland, it was truly tough to get through, and pretty much a complete failure. It began with some women declaiming some stuff in a field, which it was then explained was the old island of Urk, later made landlocked due to official policy, forcing the community to move to the coast. A section followed from a fish factory, with workers cutting the fish. That was ok. Then we moved to a fishing boat. At this point, I began to get worried. Now the film had gone on for too long with too little payoff, and the depiction of fishing life had nothing on Harvad SEL labs masterful Leviathan from a few years back. But then it all turned to crap. The seemingly endless second half consisted mainly of stilted scenes of fishermen talking to each other about stupid EU quotas and bureacracy. It was excruciating. Who on earth would want to see a film about people badly saying dialogue complaining about everything and everyone? The film was completely torpedoed by shots of rolling text explaining this and that, which just destroyed every piece of sympathy I had for the project. The text explained that the filmmakers felt a kinship with the fisherman, since artists in Netherland also had an 'image-problem' and was seen as 'freeloaders'. Well, if this is the level of achievement, then I'm not surprised. Another text explained that the film had been shot on analogue, since it was all supposed to be about materiality, and therefore should be made through a material practice. Unfortunately, as the endresult was completely worthless, every statement on filmmaking in the film just leads me to advocate doing the complete opposite, to avoid turning into something like this. Did I mention the film was in black-and-white? Or did you already guess this?

The Q&A afterwards felt endless as well, I had to run after half an hour with no end in sight. But I'll admit my feelings towards the film changed from anger to sadness. The director admitted that they'd never done sound cinema before, and the whole process had been about troubleshooting. So many problems also seemed to stem from the filmmakers commitment to collaboration with the community. They'd originally wanted to focus on the practice of fishing, and the specifical work done on it, but the fishermen themselves just wanted to complain about bureaucracy. Realizing that people normally didn't care to hear those complaints, the filmmakers decided on trying out a 'Brechtian' scheme to make those complaints seem more fresh, though they just made them slower. The will to give due to every part of the production was also the reason behind the endless end credits. And the lopsided nature of the film, with so little on the boat, and so much complaining also had a lot to due with the filmmakers being nauseus while filming the boat-footage, and much of it therefore being unfit for use. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This was really, really unfortunate. I have to wonder, though, what ever made the filmmakers think they were on the same page as the strictly Calvinist fishermen, some of whom couldn't even be in the film for religious versions. The director said that the fishermen struggled with modern liberalism, but complaining about state regulations is not normally seen as an anti-liberalist viewpoint. Especially not endlessly railing against environmental regulation. I really, really don't know.

The Fortune You Seek is in Another Cookie (Johannes Gierlinger, Austria, 2014)

That title is a Mario-reference innit? An essay-film, a travelogue from all over the world dealing with 'the pursuit of happiness' in it's many forms. It talked several times about how it was a film that had been made before 30 years ago. A reference to Chris Markers masterpiece Sans Soleil, I think, which it shares quite a lot with, though without being at all on the same level. The man travels all over the world, filming demonstrations, carnivals, uprisings, interviewing scientists, hippies, shamans all looking for truth, discussing art and literature. I would need another viewing to unpack most of it.

I liked a central idea about masks, first mentioned in the section on carnival. The voiceover ruminates on the masked face, how it can only express halftruths. Then we cut to a demonstration where way too many people wear the famed Guy Fawkes mask, creating a carnivalesque atmosphere at what should perhaps be a more serious affair. And then we cut to fighting in the street, where, once again, the young people wear masks to protect their identity while they throw stuff, break stuff, set stuff on fire. Once again, perhaps it's THE MASKS! Perhaps a theatricality has set in, the rituality, political change as performance. It's hard not to think of those anonymous masks and Occupy Wall Street as a completely ritualized form of political attack, when one has seen quite a few documentarys on actual political struggle already.

But then as the film goes on, there are certain other kinds of 'filtering' at he least. The great microscopes looking at the universe looks like a tool for truth, but then it's juxtaposed with art and religion and rituals in the desert, as other ways of finding truths. And it strikes me, perhaps thats like the masks? Tools for looking at the world through other eyes? And then... then I sort of loose the thread for a moment, and it all becomes too much. I'll watch this again at some point, I think. I'll watch a bit more Marker as well. It should be said the TFYSIIAC was quite beautiful to look at, with grainy16MM imagery edited together with a good sense of rhythm. In the crowded genre of the essayfilm, though, you probably need something more than that.

Actress (Robert Greene, US, 2014)

There has been a thing this year, with portraits of the life of actresses. Nitrate Flames focused on the life of Maria Falconetti, famous for Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc. Olmo & the Seagull portrayed an actor-couple going through a pregnancy. Both of those are small, Scandinavian productions, and I'll write about them elsewhere. This is the big one, the American one with the quasi-famous actress in center. Brandy Burre played Theresa d'Agostino in The Wire, and... that's pretty much what she's known for, though she did theater as well. Then she became a housewife and a mom, and was very happy doing so. But now she wants to get back into acting. Perhaps she wants to get out of her familial role as well?

Yeah, stuff happens. It becomes VERY personal. 'Life intervenes', the director and Burre both repeated in the Q&A afterwards. This was one of the better Q&A's I've been to, with many interesting insights from the two. One big spoilery one from Burre: She had sort of a dilemma, because when do you tell your documentarian that you're having an affair? That whole thing turns the film into an unflinching portrait at the unravelling of an identity. A question from the audience also brought into focus an earlier scene, where Burre sits in her 'toyroom', a big room filled with toys, that she's constantly cleaining and keeping in order. Burre says somethign along the lines of 'This is my creative outlet now'. Looks distressed and unhappy. Then repeats the line, and looks ever so slightly different. It brings into focus the performative aspect of it all - but Burre just explained that she repeated it because Greene had asked her to say something like that, and she was kinda making fun of it. But the performative questions remain. Are we actually getting an unguarded view of the person Brandy Burre, or is she acting? Well, we are, because she is acting. She is, as the title says, an actress, and the performative way she talks to the camera is naturally her. Just as an academic would give longwinded impenetrable talks, or a lawyer would probably be very negotiable, the actress Brandy Burre is always a bit theatrical, using her arms, declaming, fooling around. It's very interesting, and she's very funny to look at. She does not come off as perfect in any way, perhaps not even that likeable, but her explanation, that she stopped acting because she got too much caught up in the role of being an 'actress' with all the stupid stuff that entails, and now has to realize she did exactly the same with the role of 'housewife' as well, is a good one. I also liked her revelation that she was 27 when she played Theresa d'Agostina, which is WAY too young for who the role is supposed to be, and what that taught her about the role of women in the industry.

CPHDOX day 7: Storm Children - Book One, Three Artfilm Shorts, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects

Storm Children - Book One (Lav Diaz, Phillipines, 2014)

I'm not sure if I saw this film the wrong way, or completely as intended. The first part follows children in rainy weather in a city. It was almost like Monsoon, except that film was in boring hi-fi 4K digital, while this is in glorious black and white. Long static takes. It's so beautiful, with the black water, and the white sky, and the shades and hues of the cityscape caught inbetween. The city seems derelict, lots of trash and debris being fished out by the kids, lots of construction work and rundown buildings, a dog on three legs. Then the film moved to the beach, where the water is grey and the sky was filled with grey clouds as well. A shanty-town has been build up next to a stranded ship, which is weird. I thought it had to be about poverty, and that the ships had been left by shipping firms. The children search for scrap-metal, or swim in the water. At one point a downpour happens, and the world changes yet again, with a fog making the boundary between water and sky unclear, and land now being indistinct blots in the background. I was very moved by this film, which had the patience to simply observe the existence these children had to deal with, and let us make up our own opinions on it. Perhaps the storm was the unfair world economy, the ships equal to the debris and trash if only on a larger scale?

Well, no. The storm was a real storm, Yolanda, the biggest typhoon to ever hit the Phillipines. Countless people died. This is revealed only late into the 2½ hour movie, in what is only the second dialogue at the time. Many of the children has lost entire families, or siblings. The ships were cast ashore by the typhoon, and wiped out whole stretches of houses, killing loads of people instantly. All of a sudden, the whole experience changed. But was this really a 'reveal', or should I have known? A short while before, there is a clip of three foreign backpackers taking pictures of the poor children, smiling and laughing and having a great time, with a big ship looming in the background. Silly fools, I thought, and a moment later I realized I've been as dumb myself. I thought they only saw pretty pictures, while I understood what was going on, but I was very, very wrong.

Nothing can take away from how stunningly beautiful the pictures are, though. I've only seen one other Lav Diaz film before, Norte, at PIX in april this year, and I wasn't as impressed as some. It was impressive, but it wasn't as beautiful as I'd hoped. But that one was Diaz' first colourfilm, and perhaps his last? The eight hours of cinema he has released since then - this one and the 5½ hour From What is Before, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno this year - has all been in black and white, and I loved the aesthetics in this film. Like, really loved them, so much that I feel very much guilty inside about it. But perhaps that was the point? Perhaps I will know never forget it, because I was tricked into investing myself in the pictures, before I knew what they depicted? No matter what people think, this should be a strong experience for everyone.

Three Artfilm Shorts:
Another grouping of films, this time I'll just deal with them in order.

Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (Bill Morrison, US, 2014) is a collection of old archival footage from World War I set to music by Aleksandra Vrebalov played by Kronos Quartet. To be perfectly honest, it felt as if the musical performance was the important part, and the filmic portion created to add to that. The footage was very interesting, and there'd definitely been done some artistic choosing with it, like juxtaposing some footage of tanks tinted in blue with footage of planes tinted in warm yellow and red hues. The tank showed it's prowess by mowing down a tree, mainly. A battle scene was made unintelligeble by tear and wear in the almost 100 year old footage. A shot of a fire bled out onscreen. It was all well and good. But the soundtrack seemed like the most important part, and it would obviously have been more served if the Quartet had been there, though of course then it would have been a very different kind of show. The music was interesting, moody and dissonant, with found sounds of old speeches, millitary commandments and hymns. I'll give the soundtrack a listen a few times if it pops up on spotify.

Filmicly speaking, How to Make Money Religiously (Laure Prouvost, France, 2014) was much more interesting. A collage of low-grade digital and video footage, with voiceover, text on screen, and musical ques, it all reminded me of late Godard films (like 3X3D, which I wrote about last spring) and it's an aesthetic I love. It was all very confusing and hard to grasp, but then came the coup: A text said that 'multiplied' viewings was recommended, and then the film began again. But it didn't seem exactly the same, it seemed much more understandable. Or was it just because I'd seen it twice? But no, there were definitely some small diferences, adding up to a somewhat logical narrative of some sort of crime escapade and the money made from that, and all the love and respect that money brought. It was all very toungue in cheek and sarcastic, but it was also very well-made, and I loved the aesthetic. A nice surprise from an artist I didn't know anything about, even though she won the Turner prize last year.

I know about Ben Rivers. His collaboration with Ben Russell, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, won the New Vision prize last year, which honestly pissed me off, as it meant the screening I had planned for days all of sudden unexpectedly was sold out. So actually, I know nothing about Ben Rivers. Things (2014) didn't teach me that much more. A portrait of his house in four seasons, it was all well and good, if nothing out of the ordinary. There was a squirrell that attacked a wooden squirrell and started to bite into it. That was fun. The end was great as well, all of a sudden the house was made into a computer game. But, yeah, the big discovery of the screening was Laure Prouvost.

Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2013)

2014 has been a quite brutal year for the documentary community, with too many filmmakers dying, at times under tragic circumstances. The death of Farocki was perhaps less than tragic, with the 70-year old filmmaker having managed to make over 90 films in his life. It felt soon to me since I'd only learned about him some months ago, when a few of his films were shown in Copenhagen, and I managed to catch Still Life from 97. I was determined to catch this one, his last, at the festival.

It turned out to be a very straightforward portrait of the titular architecture firm. I'd perhaps hoped for something more, like the juxtaposition between old art and modern commercial photography in Still Life, but on the other hand I'm quite interested in architecture, and as such, this was cool. The firm had a lot of balls in the air, with a university building in Potsdam having trouble with the choice of colour for it's facade, competition proposals being made for other buildings including a 'virtual reality' center, and design work being done on chairs and doorhandles. Most of it was extremely detailoriented. People holding small patterns of colour next to each other talking about november light and stuff like that. What was of particular interest was the way reality reacted to the creativity. Doorhandles had to be of a certain thickness due to the design process. The chair had to be easily constructed, since earlier designs were too complex. Costs were too high on certain proposals. In Potsdam, the contractors didn't want the proposed colours, to the frustration of the firm. In a late scene, the firm went to an engineer with their nearly identical proposals for doorhandles, and the guy immediately chose one of them, as the other one would perhaps at times let the hand slip and get caught in the door. So that was the end of that discussion. This wasn't the greatest of films, and either the camera was very poor, or the equipment the film was shown at couldn't due it justice, but there were some ugly artifacts in the film, but as a cheap portrait of an interesting firm, this was well and good.

CPHDOX day 5-6: Scenario, Journey to the West, The Mad Half Hour, The Land of Seven Sheep

There are some strange pairings at the festival. I saw a Swedish 15-min short on Moments of Silence paired with a 50 min Taiwanese film on a man walking slowly. I guess both of them was about something speciel entering the everyday. The Swedish short will be reviewed elsewhere. I also went to a showing of two shorts that were still works-in-progress. They'd been financed with money from DOX:LABS. It's a bit difficult and probably also unfair to review works-in-progress, but I've written a bit about them anyway.

Scenario (Philip Widmann & Karsten Krause, Germany, 2014)

Scenario is apparantly born out of an art installation. It shows. Based around a suitcase containing a report on an affair in early seventies Cologne, between a married secretary and her equally married boss. Along with the often explicit description of the affair from the boss' point of view, the film offers neutral, statistical information mostly on the lives of young German women at the time. The woman herself, Monika, remains silent. This becomes pretty obvious as the boss seems less than enlightened on gender-relations -at one point he describes yet another young lover as 'sex-starved' because she moans loudly during sex, ie. actually enjoys it.

The visual side is sparse. Apart from a few short staged sequences and shots of the suitcase, mostly the film consists of shots from Cologne. Modern day Cologne, though it looks older as it's shot on grainy celluloid. There is a wonderful sense of mood, constantly overcast weather, empty space or crowds passing by, never singular persons. It might seem a little dull. But we learn many interesting things about Monika, and yet she remains vague. What she's like in bed. We see the nude-photos her lover took. That she had three abortions and a kid who died five days old. That she would have her period aprox 260 times througout her life after the affair. But without her own words, how can we know her at all? It's like trying to know a society through statistics and pictures of it's crowded streets. Or something.

Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2014)
I'm absolutely in love with this film, it's one of my favourite films of the year. It's about a monk walking around really slowly! Mainly it's some absolutely stunning pictures, mostly from Marseille. Tsai Ming-liang released Stray Dogs last year,one of the films of the decade, and has been making these films on this monk for a few years. He is a master of the form.

For the unprepared, the film migh be hard to take. There were some walkouts at the screening, especially at the first shot, a close-up of a face, held for what seems like an eternity. But patience pays off, through beauty and humour. A small girl in awe of the monk. A man surprised by the strange creature walking by his window. Two shots uses Norman Fosters Ombriere building to disorienting effect. And there is a cameo from Denis Lavant, the great French actor who played so many roles in Holy Motors, did this in Mauvais Sang and this in Beau Travail. His final appearance in this film is one of the greatest things ever.

I'll admit it took me some googling to figure out what this was.

I'll admit: I cheated a bit. I saw the film on a stream back at the beginning of the year. But it's so much more stunning on the big screen. I want to go to Marseille, just to see the places this was filmed, and perhaps walk slowly down a few stars myself. I'm so unhappy I can't watch this at the second showing on saturday, but Journey to the West will be released along with Stray Dogs by New Wave Films in Europe. That is one hell of a package.

The whole of Walker is on youtube. Journey to the West is a lot like this, but better.

The Mad Half Hour (Leonardo Brzezicki, Argentina, 2014)

Last year I saw Brzezicki's debut feature Night at the PIX-fest, and really loved it. This, being a short film, and a work in progress, was a lesser work, but it was ok. A black and white depiction of a night in Buenos Aires, it had a young man having an existential crisis during a tennis match with his boyfriend, then going out on a night of the town. There was also a group of young women, and an art show. It was ok.

I wanted to see what it added to Night. That film was about a group of young characters travelling out to a house in the woods after a suicide of a mutual friend, who'd created a series of sound-art on tape. This had another young man losing the will to live, though not killing himself. It had an artist, who created a sound-piece with strings of nylon. It had the characters travelling into a wooded landscape all of sudden, where they acted like feral animals. There were some repeated motives. I'm not sure this film really added up to much on it's own, but the director is one to watch. He can do something with sound and grass, and hopefully he'll find a more substantive story and the money to tell it at some point.

The Land of Seven Sheep (Wiktoria Szymanska & Martin Boege, Poland and Mexico, 2014)

This is now in black and white.

I have even less of an idea what to make of this. Funnily enough, it was also in black and white, and was also about travelling into a wooded area (of Mexico, I think, though I guess it could be some part of Poland I don't know about, or somewhere else entirely) A young girl spending a vacation at the house of an elderly man, mostly spending her time with the sheep. Very beautiful pictures, the young girl and the lambs were all very cute. Actually, it wasn't as much black and white, as it was completely desaturated of color, but there were some traces of red and blue at times. But at one point, the young girl ran through some puddles of water as she followed the sheep, and it struck me how uncannily like the beginning of Carlos Reygadas Post Tenebra Lux the whole thing was. And yeah, this short film didn't tell me that much that Reygadas didn't tell me more poetically in the short segment of his film. But, you know, work-in-progress short films are a bit like demos. There is definitely promise in these two directors, the film was beautiful. If they get another film at a festival near me, I'll check it out. But I'm not gonna prioritize watching the finished version of this one, I don't think.

CPHDOX day 3-4: The Iron Ministry, Maidan, The Second Game, CERN

This weekend was a weekend of big-name directors. Some very great stuff here. Some things that was a bit tough to get through.

The Iron Ministry (J.P. Sniadecki, US, 2014)

This film, on chinese trains, seemed tailored to me. I love long train travel. I'm deeply interested in China. And I looove the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, the group of ethnographers/filmmakers, who has also given us Sweetgrass, Leviathan and Manakamana. This is less formalistic than some of those, just a bunch of footage from Chinese trains, filmed all over the country over three years, with handheld digital cameras, but I love the style. Yet another soundscape by Ernst Karel, who quite honestly is one of the modern masters of sound. Chatter, pop-music from phones, the incessant clattering from the trains, an edited version could be released as a found-sound album and be very good at that. And the footage is great as well, from the opening disorienting closeups of details from the train to the many walkthroughs of overfilled carriages.

The film is also filled with discussions of modern China. The trains are filled with migrant workers, obviously, traversing the country in search of better lives, or to go home to their families. There is a scene where two Chinese Muslims discuss China's politics towards minorites - the Han chinese bystanders insist that Mao Zedong was great at that (which, incidentally, is kinda true. The five stars in the red Chinese flag symbolizes not only the five social classes, but also the five biggest minorities. The Manchu dynasty was obviously discriminating against everyone but the Manchu's, and the nationalists were pretty (Han)nationalistic. But Mao massacred everyone kinda equally. The country has been awful against Tibetans and Uighur Muslims lately, but it's not entirely wrong to give some props to the communists on this point) But the conductors on the train, constantly checking for identity papers, says something else. There is a bravura scene with a small kid (though sadly, no cat) who impersonates the information given out, asking that people with bombs make sure they go off in most crowded areas, to help with the countries population control. Once again, I simply loved this film.

Maidan (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine, 2014)

Maidan is a glorious examination of the mundane realities of revolution-making (PARKLIFE!) Yeah, it's a bit pretentious. It's a rigid longtake-style look at what happened on Maidan square during the recent Ukrainian revolution. When people started camping out last november, Loznitsa turned up with a camera. And as events developed, he continued shooting. The results are amazing and unique. I've never seen a revolution in such obsessive detail. Some might say Loznitsa actually does not portray the revolution, as he only films what happens on the square, never includes the politics, diplomacy, foreign powers, etc. But that would be to look at the film the wrong way. It is not a depiction of Revolution as historical event, but of Revolution as continuous practice.

Loznitsa films the singing, the drumming, the foodmaking. Later on, as events take a turn for the worse, he films the digging up of cobblestones, the medics gathering the wounded,  and the distribution of gasmasks. I've never seen that depicted before. All the little details. I might have been a bit more inclined in looking at all the buildup, since I'd seen Battle for Ukraine just a few days before, which talked a bit about how much money had obviously gone into the Orange Revolution, to organize it all. The same thing is obvious at Maidan. The stage is nicely build. There is a projector projecting speeches up on a nearby facede, and fireworks and laserlights. Somebody organized and paid for this.

Some might get bored by the strict film language with long static shots. The camera only moves a few times, mostly when it's too close to teargas. But I could easily have spent another hour with this, I was engrossed. The long takes allows one to search the crowd, find the interesting faces. In some of the overhead shots, there are people protecting a fallen man and dragging him towards medical help, while in the other direction people are dragging materials for baricades. As the city burns, the camera sometimes move away, and captures the frightening mix of black smoke and orange fires overwhelming the streets. It's scary, but in it's own way beautiful as well. The police stand still with their shields up, as they are pelted with missiles, and then all of a sudden break rank and attack. Once again, I also need to mention the soundscape, which has been edited masterfully. Shouting mixes with gunfire/explosions, and the noise from the speaker at the stage asking medics to go where they are needed. In the final scenes, the sounds of hundreds of thousands of voices chanting: 'Glory, glory, glory' is goosebumb-inducing. Like, this is important filmmaking, this is documentation of the finest order, this could very well become pensum.

Endnote: Seeing this film and Battle for Ukraine brings to mind the insane amount of street-uprisings there has been since Serbia 2000. And so, when people lament that Occupy Wall Street didn't really lead to anything, it's basically typical Western-centrism. OWS should be seen in the context of the rest of the world also taking to the streets, not as the beginning of something new. And if the Nobel comitee was really brave, they'd give the Peace Prize to CANVAS and OTPOR and whatever else those groups are called, that has been educating revolutionaries in the practices. Those ten million kroner could do a lot of stuff. Many uprisings only lead hardline autocrats to further the bloodshed, which also sadly seems to be what happened in Ukraine, but, well, Obama has hardly been a dove as well, so how much worse could it be?

The Second Game (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2014)

This is a nichefilm. The tv-footage from an 88 football game between Steua and Dinamo Bucharest, only overlaid with a commentary from the filmmaker and his father, who refereed the game back then. Perhaps you're very interested in Romanain football? I've seen a Romanian team play exactly once before, in their World Cup quarterfinal against Sweden in 94, in Sweden, with my Swedish family. I was seven. I rooted for Sweden. On the other hand, I am a big fan of Porumboius work, especially his earlier films. I've blogged before on both Police, Adjective and When Evening Falls on Bucharest. And as such, I found the film to have some interest in the way it commented on the typical Porumboiuian themes.

Porumboiu has kinda used refereeing as a thematic detail before. His Police, Adjective uses the communal regulating of footvolleyball as a contrast to the authoritarian practice of the police. While the police will wreck a young pot-dealers life because the law says so, the four men on the field in a game hash out the law themselves, to play the best game. Perhaps he got this idea from his father, Adrian Porumboiu? Adrian talks at great lenght on how he chose to use the 'Advantage' rule excessively, to keep the quite violent game from too many interruptions. At one point, he even ignored a second yellow card for throwing the ball away, since it would be stupid to ruin the balance of the game over something so dumb as that. He was in some ways an anti-authoritarian referee. But was that the smartest way to referee the game? At one point, a striker from Steua is thrown to the ground in the penalty-area, but the ball goes to another player from the team, who hits the riposte from six feet away. Adrian admits he got critiqued for that call. How really to know when to bend the rules? Further complicating this, the whole league was amazingly corrupt and unfair at the time. The two teams were run by the army and the secret police, respectively. They both had loads of 'satelite' teams in the league, whom they'd always beat 2-0. And both teams tried to bribe the judge, as Adrian says, if they got anything on a judge, he would be their slave. It is not hard to see how the bending of the rules to make the game 'flow' could be distorted into corruption and partisanhood.

For those themes, I'm happy I saw the film. It's really boring, though. Nothing much happens in the game, very few shots at goal. Adrian is happy at how energetic - read: violent - the players are. The visuals are striking, old video, heavy snows, but they don't by themselves withold interest through 90 minutes. And the two commentators take long breaks throughout the match, where they don't have much to comment on. There are some funny things, though. Adrian has become a bit of a crank in his old age, it seems, and repeatedly mentions how nobody would want to watch the match again. Corneliu compares the match to one of his films, since it's overlong and nothing happens. Yeah, it's a niche product.

CERN (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria, 2014)

I like Geyrhalter. His Abendland is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, and his latest Donau Hospital was an incisive portrait of a modern institution. But this one failed to move me. Obviously a portrait of the CERN labs, where the Higgs Boson was recently found. It's where the internet was invented, it's where the fundamental reality of nature is discovered. It is a pretty impressive place. But the film lacked the visual greatness of the other of his films I've seen, and instead it was mostly filled with CERN employees talking about their jobs and their lives. Much of it was ok interesting, though I'm guessing you need to have a somewhat firm grasp on physics to get suitably impressed by the revelation that the superconducters are cooled down to only 4 Kelvin, and other stuff like that. I love trying to pretend I can understand modern physics, but I've given up on the technical details, which is most of what they talk about. Also, there was something wrong with the screener copy at first, and the film began rather abruptly, and I can't shake the feeling that we missed something crucial. It all feels so slight.

Perhaps it's just that I don't really care for the kind of physics they talk about. I can't help but feel that they feel 'wrong', somehow. When they say that Dark Matter and Dark Energy has to be in the universe in large quantities, because otherwise space does not develop as it should, well, I can't help but think it sounds inelegant. Kinda like the 'aether' of pre-Einsteinian physics. I mean, they are probably right, but when I read about relativity or quantum mechanics, I don't understand it, but I can at times grasp at the beautiful simplicity in the way it solves hard questions. So the speed of light (distance over time) is always constant for some weird reason? Well, distance and time has to be malleable. Etc. I can't see the beauty in Dark Energy, Higgs Bosons and The Large Hadron Collider. I'd hoped this film would bring some visual beauty into it, as that has often been what Geyrhalter does, but not this time. So I'm dissapointed by it, though it's probably just me who are dumb and too much of a humanist.

CPHDOX day 2: Battle for Ukraine, The Postman's White Nights, Monsoon

That Andrei Konchalovsky would have two films at this years DOX-fest would probably come as a surprise for many film-lovers a few years back. The 77-year old director of the Sylvester Stallone / Kurt Russell buddy-cop feature Tango & Cash has had quite a carreer, working on Tarkovsky's early features like Andrey Rublev, but he hasn't made that much noise recently. He got some kind of a comeback earlier this year, though, at the Venice Film Festival, where his The Postman's White Nights got much positive attention, was a favorite to win the big prize for a moment, and ended up winning the Silver Lion. I watched both of his films today.

Battle for Ukraine (Andrei Konchalovsky, Russia, 2012)

First up was this documentary from 2012. Just looking at that title, there should be little doubt as to why this film would be interesting this year. But of course, being two years old, this doc does not offer any insight into what happened at Maidan and afterwards - for that, I'm hoping Loznitsa's Maidan can live up to the hype. Watching this film, it's not hard to see why it wasn't included at the fest earlier. It's not a particularly special film, and it sorta seemed to be part of a series of documentaries, perhaps made for tv. The visuals are plain, the truckload of guests are filmed talking to the camera, often in front of a bluescreen playing visuals connected to what they say. It's all well and good and informative, but nothing special.

What was really interesting, though, was to see how the recent Battle for Ukraine has changed not just the present and the future, but also the past. There is a bit of grim humor when we reach the Budapest Agreement of 1994, where Ukraine gave up it's nuclear missiles in exchange for promises that neither US or Russia would ever attack the country, and a talking head says that they gave up their missiles in exchange of nothing, really. Yup, that seems about right nowadays. But in general, as the film concludes with the Orange revolution in 2004, it seeks it's explanation of this Battle for Ukraine in the long run-up to that crisis. It surprised me how little I knew about that. After Maidan, the stories of Ukraine I've seen always now begin with the Orange revolution, and the resulting divide, they don't climax with it.

Kuchma and Konchalovsky

But this film does, so the main part of the film is the story of Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine 1994-2005. The man who brought the country out of the economic crisis that followed independence, and was a hero to the nation. But who then became a different president after his reelection in 99, in the words of a talking head taking the country from 'weak democracy to autocracy'. There is a scandal where the bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko bugged the president's office and released tapes of Kuchma aproving sales of radar-systems to Saddam Hussein and perhaps even approving the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. There was the ostracizing from the west, as George W Bush's USA wouldn't want anything to do with a country selling systems to Iraq on the eve of the second war, and Kuchma's following turn towards Putin. The film includes talking heads from all over the political spectrum, who points fingers in every direction, so it also becomes clear just how much the political scene changed at the turn of the century, as Putin followed Jeltsin (who is also in the film, mainly being a drunk fool) and Bush II followed Clinton I. And Kuchma II followed Kuchma I. I wonder how many other important national elections one could point to in those years. We think of 9/11 as having changed everything, but there was a new guard of more agressive politicians, who'd gotten elected earlier than that. I wonder what kind of silly drug was in the air, to make it all happen. Anyways, this was an informative doc, that made me a lot more knowledgable on one of the defining conflicts of our age. So that was ok.

The Postman's White Nights (Andrei Konchakovsky, Russia, 2014)

But I'll admit that this kind of thing is more to my liking. This is hardly a documentary, though it's filmed with amateur actors, and does give an idea of life at Lake Kenozero in Arkhangelsk. It follows a postman called Lyokha (which I'm assuming is short for Aleksey, since that name is in the Russian title, and is also the name of the actor) who travels around the lake, carrying suplies for the elderly villagers, being lonely, keeping his sobriety going for two years now. He fancies his old schoolmate Irina, but has more of a connection to her young son Timka. That is basically the important strokes in this film.

I love the visual style of this film. Shot on digital, using natural lighting. And the light in Arkhangelsk is quite incredible, especially during those white nights. To help the non-professional cast, Konchakovsky often hid the camera in dialogue scenes, which gives the film a special guerilla look, which reminded me a bit of Tsai Ming-liangs very, very great Stray Dogs. Other films focusing on non-professionals on the fringes of society, with this kind of visuals, and even this films weird mix of most mundane everyday with light surrealism include the work of Apichatbong Weerasethakul or even Pedro Costa. So yeah, this film is part of a group of film, which in my view are the most important thing happening in world cinema so far this decade. And therefore, it is obviously very much worth watching. But, well, if it's part of that club, then it's pretty clearly the least overwhelmingly masterful. It's fine. It's delightful. But it's no Colossal Youth or Uncle Boonmee who can Recall His Past Lives.

But perhaps it's more mainstream, perhaps it could aclimate the audience to this style? That would be great. Godard once said that to make a film you need a girl and a gun, and great artfilms were made on that premise. But today, I feel that if you want to make a popular arthouse film you need a kid and a cat. And this film has fine examples of both. Timur Bondarenko gives a great performance as young Timka, especially in a scene where Lyokha takes him on the lake to find a witch. And the cat! The cat is the most amazing cat I've seen in a long time. It's a mystery cat, a special effect. Every white night it's there, and then it's gone again, and it's very surreal. Not because of any cgi or other effectery, but because the cat is so striking with grey fur and piercing yellow eyes. That cat alone is worth the prize of admission, that cat will have you talking for days, that cat could play Behemoth in an adaptation of The Master and Margherita. It might even be a reference to that novel. As in Bulgakov's masterpiece, the buildings are emptying of people (though through people leaving the desolate villages rather than through purges), and weird things are going on. The weirdness also includes the local drunk The Bun, who all of a sudden has his own scenes where he rambles in the darkness about visitings from the other side, and another shock in the second half of the film is Lyokha and Timka leaving the countryside and going to the city, all of a sudden introducing malls and even a missile factory into the film. It's weird like that. I really, really recommend this film, though it's not a masterpiece. A Silver Lion seems about right.

Monsoon (Sturla Gunnarsson, Canada, 2014)

I don't really want to dismiss this film, it's not bad, but I definitely feel like I was promised much more than I got. The programme promised a 'breathtaking film' 'shot in 4K' whose 'visuals are nothing short of overwhelming', adding up to a 'transcendental film experience of the really rare kind' and a 'film that leaves you with a feeling of having looked at our little planet from an almost cosmic perspective.' What I got honestly felt more like a BBC-Nature Special. I just realized 4K can really make me think that it would look good on bluray on my hi-def telly. And there were way too many talking heads.

I guess a 'promo' is different from a trailer, because there are many things in this clip which wasn't in the film, including those bloody elephants!

The film focused on the people. The inhabitants in the south, living on ground below sea-level, protected from the rising water by feeble levees. The fishermen of Goa, having to put their lives in danger by sailing out during the storms. The farmers in areas hurt by drought. The animals of the national parks, being forced to higher grounds filled with lurking poachers. A bookie betting on whether or not a day will bring rain. It was all very fine and thougtful, showing water as life, but also as danger. There were no transcendental visuals, though. The slow-mo rain-passages were ok, but the music was kitchy techno with indian vibes. A fine documentary about the forces of nature, but I still feel cheated. Just a bit.

Just to be clear, I'm just teasing. I've written these kind of festival blurbs as well. And I wrote stuff where people afterwards said 'Really? Lifechanging?'. It happens.

CPHDOX day 1: Tomorrow is Always Too Long, Visitors, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, The Lanthanide Series

So, the CPHDOX festival har started. I will be writing about the films I see, but not everything will be posted here. I'll link to other pieces as they become available.

Tomorrow is Always Too Long (Phil Collins, UK, 2014)

No, not that Phil Collins. This is a british artist, and the film is a mix of shadow-puppet sequences; sequences from an imagined public service station replete with dumb quizzes, infomercials, an Elvis impersonator making cheese sandwiches, elderly poets; and musical sequences with ordinary people singing orchestrated versions of songs by Welsh songwriter Cate le Bon. It all adds up to a weird, weird portrait of Glasgow.

It was apparantly a very communal experience making the film. It definitely has a lot of humor, and it was overwhelmingly Scottish. I did not get the dialogue at the start of the film due to the heavy Scottish accents. The orchestral pop also felt really Scotish, like a more dramatic Belle and Sebastian, but apparantly it was Welsh. Oh well. But for all the inclusion of locals in the film, and the sense it was made collectively by a large group of people, I can't help but feel that it was a pretty dark, cynical and mocking portrait of Glasgow. All the public-tv sequences obviously was taking the piss, with a fitness instructor helping people get all the drugs from last night out of the system, and the participants in the quiz failing to answer any big questions, but always knowing stuff about brands, celebrities, etc. The shadow-puppet sequences was dark as hell, shadow-puppetry being pretty scary to begin with (in my opinion, at least) but portraying the people as drunkards, party-drug-takers (in a handicap bathroom, obviously, with a guy in a wheelchair desperately banging on the door, obviously), graveyard-orgy-havers and tv-junkies. Most of the musical sequences really worked. They went from birth, over school, up to old age. In the birth sequences, there was a real sense of joy of life in the voices of the proud parents. And a duet about middleaged people in love was touching as well. On the other hand, one of the school sequences contrasted the youth of today brainstorming about 'the freedom not to like Miley Cyrus' with archival material of young folks of yesteryear marching in the streets, and it came off as pretty unsympathetic. The greatest sequence, though, was about a young man in prison, singing the hit Are You With Me Now?, with a surprising amount of passion. That felt heartfelt. Especially the end of the sequence, as the young man was released, waiting in the courtyard for the door to freedom to be opened, then walking hastily out onto the street, and slowing down just a bit, actually a bit unsure of where to go. I'll take that scene with me. Plus the discovery of Cate le Bon, who's album Mug Museum I've heard on repeat while writing these reviews. Good stuff!

Visitors (Godfrey Reggio, US, 2014)

Godfrey Reggio is one of the grand old men of the abstract documentary scene. His Koyaanisqatsi from 1982 is one of the most famous documentary films, having the kind of fame where it gets referenced in Simpsons. He turned that into the Qatsi-trilogy, along with Powaqqatsi (88) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Visitors is his first film in 12 years.

It's almost the same idea. A bunch of silent footage, with music underneath, around some sort of theme. This time in high contrast black-and-white. Koyaanisqatsi was famous for it's sped-up footage, Visitors is more about slowness. There are still spedup sequences, where the sky is racing past, but there the focus is more on the slowness of shadows moving over a rundown appartment block. The first half is filled with long and slow looks at peoples faces, and then a few shots of hands fiddling, twidling. It's not that exciting. And it would probably be very beautiful, but either the copy wasn't in good enough quality, or the screen was dirty or something, either way, the pictures weren't sharp enough. If I have to sit and stare at two fingers for a minute or so, I should not be distracted by blurs and grain. That did not work. The pictures weren't beautiful enough to carry interest.

Luckilly for Godfrey Reggio, he always has an ace up his sleeve, in the way that all his soundtracks are made by famed composer Philip Glass. I'm not the worlds biggest fan of him, but I'm up for listening to 90 min of new Glass-compositions every now and then, and cool pictures are then just a bonus. This soundtrack isn't as good as Koyaanisqatsi, but it has some great stretches. It's very elegiac, matching the mood of the pictures, but still just nice music. And every now and then, there were some funny stuff onscreen. Reggios style will always seem a bit too much like commercials for my taste, and the films doesn't really seem that deep to me. I spent a bit of time thinking about who the 'visitors' of the title were, if it was aliens observing us or anything, but I came to the conclusion it's more about how we all are just visiting the earth for a moment, and then we stop visiting. Many shots of vacation destinations in the offseason/at night, shots of volcanos and big trees to make us remember what's really old. There was also something about how cinema is always just about visiting peoples lives, never really getting to know them, no matter how long the camera stays on someone. But it wasn't that deep. Misc stuff I liked: The shots of Triska, a lowland gorilla, and the fact that Triska was mentioned five times in the end credits. A shot of a group of people watching a sports event, one of them rooting for the other team than the rest. That was so entrancing I forgot to listen to the music.

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Kazuo Hara, Japan, 1987)
Every year, DOX curates an assortment of older films. It seems to me there are fewer this year than usual, but there are still some gems. This, for instance, is a masterpiece. It follows an angry, angry man called Kenzo Okuzaki, who repeatedly states how much time he has spent in prison, for amongst other things murdering a man, and shooting at the emperor with a slingshot. Kenzo was in the Japanese army at New Guinea, amidst inhumane condition, of which he holds the emperor accountable. The film follows him around as he tries to uncover the mystery of two soldiers, who were executed after the end of the war. He confronts old soldier after old soldier, at times with the victims siblings in tow, at other times with people he instructs to impersonate those siblings. His style is extremely confrontational. And that is an euphemism.

It reminds me of parts of Shoah, except more crazy. The story of the atrocities done by the Japanese army is incredibly dark. There was just a complete, almost unfathomable breakdown of morals. It seems different to me than the evil of the German army, which it seems has mostly been coupled to Hannah Arendt's notion of the 'banality of evil'. The holocaust was industrialized death, on a scale unseen. It was morality twisted into it's complete opposite, by a disgusting ideology. The evil Kenzo Okuzaki uncovers is different, more like absence of morals. The soldiers were desperate for their own survival, unsure of what to do, only informed that they should fight to the last man, and lashed out, killing natives, prisoners, perhaps even their own. It is a dark, dark tale that stays with you.

A small thing on aesthetics: Visitors is made to be beautiful, but the bad digital copy made it into nothing special. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On is a lo-fi film, the camera mainly follows the main character as he travels around, without a lot of trickery. But the 35mm print, flown in from Japan, made it a special, unique experience. I don't really think of myself as a format fascist, but today, it was very clear that the old way of doing things, while perhaps unreasonably clunky and expensive to be the only format at a big festival like DOX, is simply filmicly a better experience. It was beautiful to look at, no matter the scratches. A great big thanks to the DOX-team for presenting this classic in the right way.

The Lanthanide Series (Erin Espelie, US, 2014)

And finally, an essay-film on the uses of Lanthanides in the modern world. This was a very good essay. I'm not entirely sure how great of a film it was, like, filmically speaking. The whole film was shot through the black screen of an iPad, which meant that all we saw were reflections. It was okay, if a bit samey. More problematic for me, seeing this as the fourth film in day, the tempo of the film was too laidback. Seemingly every Lanthanide had it's own chapter, and they were all introduced by black screen and white text, which after a while seemed to stop the film again and again. Reflective footage, archival footage, calm voiceover by the director herself, without subtitles. I'll admit I didn't get all of it. But I got most, I think. Enough that I liked it.

Because as stated, as an essay, this was really good. It did what an essay should do, find a theme, and use it to spur thought and create connectons. Those Lanthanides! There are lanthanides seemingly everywhere, in x-rays, detecting earthquakes, creating red light in modern tv's. And yup, in iPads. They are rare, and mining them is a big industry. The film contrasted our relationship with lanthanides, with past relationships. The aztecs and obsidian mirrors, in which they apparantly glimpsed their god Tezcatlipoca, 'the smoking mirror'. There was an old film from the fifties about modern glass-making, celebrating how that illustrated progress. There was a baby playing with an iPad, and a monkey doing likewise, and a story about whether or not monkeys realize mirrors show themselves. They do; babies do not. There were bits from Primo Levi's The Chemical Elements, on how a piece of Cerium kept him alive at Auschwitz, along with bits of Proust, Yeats, and others. According to the director at the Q&A afterwarsd, 75-80% of the voice-over was quotations from literature, manipulated and cut together. It was quite poetic, I'd have to say. I was probably just a bit too tired for poesy.

Here's what I find thoughtprovoking: We normally damn our age as being 'materialistic', but this film seems to claim we have actually lost a sense for the materials that surround us. As seen in the trailer, obsidian mirrors, 'an ancient credit card', were taken with people in their graves. People were buried with materials. Who would be buried with their iPad? We throw it out after two years. At the scene with the baby and the touch-screen, I had an immediate negative reaction. Small children should not have iPad's, it's obviously bad for them. But... why is that? Portable computers is one of the most amazing things ever created, come to think of it. Lanthanides are pretty incredible as well, why aren't we hailing the mining of Lanthanides as a sign of progress? Well, because mining is murky business. China had a monopoly. The US is eyeing a volcano in Helmand, Afghanistan, worth billions. Radioactive leaks from mining in California and elsewhere has contaminated ground water, killing livestock, causing cancer. The world is out of balance, as Godfrey Reggio would say. Lanthanides are seemingly too complex, too impersonal to embrace. When did this happen? When did we go from earnest romantic poets (I didn't catch who exactly, sorry) ecstatically walking backwards in forrests with mirrors in hand, to our modern days of buying every new Apple product, while begruding the ways it's produced, the minerals are exhumed, basically all it stands for? Are we more honest now? Well, no, probably not, I mean, we still celebrated Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network as a hero of our age, even though everybody hates facebook. Do we just celebrate persons, even unlikable persons whose achievements we don't much care for, more than materials? I'll keep thinking about that for a while. And that is kinda the sign of an effective essay-film.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a film about light. On a plot-level, it's about a group of policemen in Anatolia driving around one night trying to find the place where two murderers buried their victim, which they can't recognize because the light was different. So the first half is litterally about people waiting for the light to change - and as soon as morning comes, one hour and twenty minutes into the film, they find it immediately. But also, as anyone who has read one of the many hyperbolic reviews can attest, the visuals of the film is all about light as well: The streaks of car-light in the Anatolian grass; the flashes of lightning illuminating the mysterious stone-face; and of course - who can forget - the scene where they drink tea at gaslight. So yeah, the film is a 157 min murder mystery, which actually mainly consists of people driving around, drinking tea, and looking out of windows, and it's a masterpiece mainly due to the ligthening. And why on earth do some people think that is weird?

I might have been thinking a bit much about light at this showing of the film. I came right from the National Gallery of Denmark, from an arrangement which took place in the room dedicated to paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi. One of the most famous Danish painters, most of his famous pictures depict interiors, doors, windows, people with their backs to the viewer, and much of his fame derive from his depiction of light. He died nearly one hundred years ago, fashion has changed, the city looks different. But the light remains the same. If a painting can be a masterpiece due to the way it shows light, then why can't a film? Film IS light. It's projected light on a screen. Yet to be honest, I rarely think that a filmmaker is great due to the way he/she uses light. Of late, there is Michael Mann and the way he uses digital to show the streetlights of LA in Collateral and Miami in Miami Vice. And I love the single-source lightening of Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, which at times looks like a Rembrandt painting. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is definitely at the same level of achievement in light. And, like the rest of these artists of light, the use of light in ...Anatolia says a lot about the place it depicts. You could only get the light of the first half in a place like Anatolia. Or, more correctly, you could only get this kind of contrast between pitch-black night and blinding headlights in a place like hilly, lightly populated Anatolia. If you tried to make it in a country like Denmark, you could never get far enough away from villages, farms, country houses. The image of police-car headlights beaming out over grassy hillsides says a lot about the state of Western Turkey in 2011. About how far modernity has reached into this area. It is streaks, it is flashes. It's not firmly entrenched. In the home of the mayor of a nearby village, the wind will still knock out electricity, leading to the aforementioned gaslight intermezzo. And instead of paying for a better electrical system, the money in the village will go to a better morgue.

Let's talk metaphor for a mo. Light and shadow has been intrinsic to crime cinema since at least film noir. And light has been a metaphor for truth and reason since at least, well, the enlightenment. Sun is wisdom. Moon is mysterius wisdom. But in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, we never see the sun, and the moon is only glimpsed shortly. When morning arrives by a sudden cut, there isn't any triumphant rays of dawn. There is an overcast sky, pale light, and morning fog. In the same way, the solving of the crime at the center of the film is never a triumph of reasoning. It's a farcical and tirering procedure. To be a bit hyperbolic: This isn't a crimefilm from an enlightened country. Or, more accurately, at the least it's not a film drenched in the ideologic idea of the 'crimefighter', fighting for truth and justice, etc. That is so often what the detective is in Western cinema, a fighter in the battle for reason: Sherlock Holmes using scientific deduction to disprove the superstitious idea of a ghost-dog. The pale dawn of justice in ...Anatolia is the dawn of a country not really sure of the role of it's executive branch of power. This kind of sceptical crime-film isn't unique to Turkey, but is fairly common to crime films from all over the fringes of the 'West'. The filmmaker most concerned with this question might be Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboi, whose 'Police, Adjective' is probably the best example. In this film, a young police-man is reluctantly doing a pointless investigation into a young marihuana-dealer, while also discusising the merits of the case. Other examples of films discussing the state of the nation through an innovative look at a crime could be Argentines Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman and Iranian Asghar Farhadi's A Separation. These films combine a central mystery with a look at the more or less dysfunctional institutions of society getting at the truth of it. Another comparison might be to a film like David Fincher's Zodiac. This is also sort of an anti-crime film, but it's still a film about crime-fighters, and truth-seekers, the point is just that they are unsuccessful.

Compare with the doctor of ...Anatolia. He is a skeptic, he refuses to believe in the mysterius story the prosecutor tells. But when his obduction of the victim uncovers an awful piece of evidence, he covers it up. To understand this, we have to realize that the film actually shows us two parallel crime-stories. (And this is where this post gets REALLY spoilery, so beware) On the one hand we in the audience get clues as to what happened: That it wasn't Kenan but his little brother Ramazan who killed Yasar, but Kenan is protecting his brother - and probably feeling guilty over cuckolding his friend Yasar. Knowing this, the realisation that Yasar was buried alive points to Kenan being too drunk to realize what happened, and burying him in a panic. But through the ramblings of commisar Naci, we can see another narrative being build: A narrative in which Kenan savagely killed Yasar due to a conflict over Yasar's wife. In this narrative. which isn't the true narrative, but in all likelihood would be the official narrative, the evidence that Yasar was buried alive would be indicative of truly inhuman evilness. The doctor ignoring the dirt in Yasar's throat is him accusing the Turkish court-system for being unable to achieve the truth in the case.

Few films need a second viewing as much as this one. The first half of the film by intent lacks any sort of forward progression: they are trying to find the place where the body is buried, and there's simply nothing to do but wait for the light to change. And then all of a sudden the beautiful night-pictures stop, and instead we watch a tired doctor sitting around waiting for the time when the autopsy will be made. I was bewildered the first time I saw it as well. But so much of the film has stuck with me over time, from small visuals details to the tragicness of the circumstances leading to the murder. And watching it a second time, I was completely bewitched. Once you know that the apple tree will lead to the lambmeat, which means dawn is just around the corner, etc, the episodic nature of the film stops being a concern, and I could fully apreciate the masterful aesthetics of the film, while pondering the subtext, which I can't imagine I'll stop doing from know on. This film is quite simply a stunning work of art.

PS: As we left the Hammershøi-room, my friend commented on the massive contrast with the colourful and energetic paintings in the next room. And the museum really build up that contrast: In the Hammersøi-room the light was dark and moody, while the next room was completely lit up. The surroundings and context really influence the art. I thought of that on this rewatch of ...Anatolia, since the medium was different. Watching the film for the first time, in spring 2012 in London, it was a digital copy, while this time it was on 35 mm. And as the film is so much about light, in a way I don't even think it was the same film I saw. The mood was subtly influenced by the warmer light from the celluloid copy, but the mood is everything in this film. So if anyone has watched it on 35 mm, and think that I'm way too critical of what the light symbolizes about Turkey, well, perhaps I'm still influenced by the harsher, colder, light I saw the first time.

Closed Curtain (Pardé, Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2013)

(This is a translation of what I wrote after seeing the film at the 2013 Copenhagen PIX festival)

Jafar Panahi has in a pretty short time, and to some extent through no fault of his own, become one of the most important directors in the world. For many years, he was a bit in the shadow of his countryman Abbas Kiarostami, making fine and realistic films on the troubles of the Iranians. Films like The Mirror toyed with a meta-layer, but mainly, Panahi made subtle but powerful social realism, with films like The Circle and Crimson Gold being much more explicitly political than Kiarostami's more poetic ouvre. After the failed 'Green Revolution' in Iran in 2009, the regime under Ahmadinejad tightened it's grip on it's artists, and while Kiarostami afterwards went abroad and made his recent films in Italy and Japan, Panahi was thrown in house arrest and hit with a 20 year ban on film-making. Therefore, it was a powerful gesture when in 2011 his film This is Not a Film was smuggled into Cannes on a USB-stick hidden in a pastry. On top of that, the film was pretty much a masterpiece, a portrait of Panahi himself while he waited in his appartment for the final ruling in the case against him, and tried to uphold his identity as a creating film-artist.

One important thing: For such a minimal production, this is an incredibly beautiful film.

Closed Curtain is in some ways the diametrically opposed film to This Is Not a Film. Where that film was presented like a documentary, and filmed minimalistically on a handheld camera, Closed Curtain is demonstratively a construction, filmicly and narratively. The film opens patiently, with a long shot taken out of the window from a villa at the Caspian Sea. We follow the main character, an unnamed writer, as he drives up to the villa in a taxi, walks from the taxi to the house, opens the door outside the frame of the window, goes back to the taxi to pay the driver, and walks back into the house, where he closes the curtains.Only then does the camera leave the window, and follows the man to his bag, where we find the reason he has fled for the villa: He has smuggled a dog with him in his bag, as dogs has been outlawed by the regime. The whole first part of the film is only the man and his dog - dog-lovers will love this film! - in a villa with heavy, black curtains for all windows, and it is filmed in steady, well-composed shots. The camera turns around, but never moves. But then the film receives the first of many shocks: The writer suddenly discovers that a young couple has intruded into the villa, and the film is suddenly handheld and shaky. The young man quickly leaves, but the woman stays behind, and we find out she is depressive and suicidal. It could seem as if the camera has become unstable due to the young woman, but even after she's dissapeared without a trace, the style stays shaken. Only after a series of shocks, where the woman reapears in impossible ways, tear down the curtains, and the director Jafar Panahi himself all of a sudden steps into the film from an alcove, does the film find a calmness again: Panahi's calmness. The rest of the film is torn between a plane where Panahi is in the villa, and a plane where the writer and the young woman is in the villa, and the two planes are filmed in different ways. I won't reveal all the surprising twists from the last half-hour, I was exhausted and couldn't really remember them all clearly. The film got a Silver Bear for Best Script at Berlin last year, and it really is an amazingly constructed film.

But most of all it's an extraordinary brave film. Where This Is Not a Film tried to circumvent the ban from the regime, by claiming that it wasn't a film, and that anyway it couldn't be proved that Panahi was the one making it, Closed Curtain is an insistent roar against the rules. Thereby, the film is an attack, not just on censorship, but on the earlier reaction of Panahi himself. While the film from 2011 insinuated that Panahi was holding a camera, but never presented any conclusive proof, in Closed Curtain he demonstratively holds a camera in his hand in one of the best meta-twists of the film: In an earlier scene, the writer has told a camera-phone how he behaved in an even earlier scene in the film, and when Panahi finds that film on his iPhone, the camera has obviously caught himself filming the scene we saw earlier (yeah, it's complicated...) And where TINAF had a melancholic ending, with Panahi being left behind at the entrance of his apartment complex, because he couldn't move outside, CC on the other hand ends with him leaving the depressive and doubting woman behind, and driving away with the creating writer, thereby openly breaking his housearrest. It's a confusing, layered and mindbogglingly strong film, which enriches and is in turn itself enriched, through the interplay with the earlier film. In my opinion, Panahi is so far the most important director of the decade, not just as a political martyr, or because his films are so brave and weighty, but because these two film together are better than what any other director has acomlished these last five years.