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.
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