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.
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