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.