GIFF day 7: Clouds of Sils Maria, From What is Before

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France, 2014)

One of my favourite things about film is how well it works with acumulation. Seeing a director struggle with his favorite themes over and over throughout her films. Or discovering a new interesting voice, like Jessica Hausner and Eugene Green this festival, and diving into the rest of their work. A less than great film can still be of interest due to how it plays into a larger body of work (For example, Corneliu Porumboiu's film The Second Game is just the director and his dad discussing the art of refereeing over pictures of a boring football game from 1988, but since refereeing has been used by the director as a metaphor for how a justice system should work in general, the discussion took on a much larger significance for me). Literature also works a bit like that, of course, and my favourite collection of art will probably always be the writings of Thomas Pynchon, but then, you can't really read four-five books in a day, as would be the equivalent experience to the great festival I'm having at the moment.

So because of that joy, I tend to prioritize seeing films by directors I've already seen films from. And yet, while Assayas is one of the directors of this festival I've seen most films by, I originally hadn't planned to check this one out. Just as I didn't watch Something in the Air, his 2012 film on the aftermath of 68, when it played at CPH:PIX13. I've liked most of his films. But one way or another, they don't really acumulate well in my mind. He has his themes, but they are really diverse. Clouds of Sils Maria, about female actors in modern filmmaking, probably seems most like his Irma Vep from 1996, which also included examples of different kinds of filmmaking, as does this one, showing clips from an old silent film, and an invented superhero blockbuster. He's also concerned with a sense of the death of the modernist values from the sixties-seventies, and how they got replaced by something perhaps more phony, as was seen in Carlos and Something in the Air, and in this one is represented by the split between Juliette Binoche's middleaged actress Maria Enders, and Chloë Grace Muntz' young starlet Jo-Ann Ellis. They are going to star in a staged version of the play Maloja Snake, a play about a destructive lesbian relationship between a young, freespirited girl and an elder, buttoned up woman. Maria Enders played the young girl in her breakthrough performance, but now she gets the role of the elder woman.

That play is written by a playwright named Wilhelm Melchior, who commits suicide at the beginning of the film. He is supposedly based on Rainer Maria Fassbinder, who died in 82. Fassbinder would have been Melchior's age, had he lived, but there is still the sense to me that the film is depicting a kind of play that hasn't really been relevant for a much longer time than the film implies. Binoche also seems both a bit too young and a bit too old in a paradoxical way. I got the sense that she was supposed to have played the young actress as an 18-year old a bit more than 20 years ago, but Binoche is 50. On the other hand, I associate young Binoche not with serious modernist filmmaking, but the postmodernist 'cinema du look' like Leon Carax' Mauvais Sang. There is a sense of being out of time with this film, which might actually be the thing I have a hardest time with in Assayas. He seems out of time. Not as in 'timeless' but as in neither fish nor fowl. His handling of his themes seem dispassionate at times.

What I've just written seems way too auteurist, as if films should only be considered according to their directors. Of course, a 'body of work' could work for every kind of person involved in filmmaking, from a scriptwriter to a cinematographer. Most people judge films worthy of watching based more on actors. And in this film, the actresses might actually be the ones who bring more 'baggage' to the film, so to speak. Especially one actress. Most of the film actually focuses on Maria Enders and another young woman, her personal assistant Valentine, played by Kristen Stewart, who goes with her to Wilhelm Melchiors mountain home at Sils Maria, to rehearse the play. The clear subtext of the situation with the play is that Maria Enders has been replaced by a younger, more suitable actress. But with regards to the filmmaking situation, it's Kristen Stewart who has been replaced by Chloe Grace Muntz, as it's Stewart who has both had the sort of troubled tabloid existence and the same attempts at balancing franchise filmmaking with more personal works, that the young Jo-Ann Ellis shows in the film. I like this fact, since it brings a twist into what could be a boring 'generational' conflict between old and good and new and bad. But the film positions that the battle might be more in the women of every generation having to fight for the position as a 'timeless' actress such as Maria Enders. This changes a late scene, where a young filmmaker dispirits the antics of actresses of his own generation such as Ellis, and shows him more like a person without solidarity for his fellow youngsters.

From What is Before (Lav Diaz, Phillipines, 2014)

More acumulation: A film that is 5½ hours long. Perhaps it didn't need to be quite as long, there could probably be 30-45 minutes excised without causing any major damage to the fabric of the tale. But again: The cinema of director Lav Diaz becomes more interesting to me, the more of I see. I saw two of his films last year, his 4-hour 'breakthrough' Norte, the End of History, and Storm Children: Book One, a 2½ hour documentary on the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. He has made a bunch of films before that, most of which are very long and hard to come by, so it'll take a while before I get a grip on him, I think. Especially since he is currently in the midst of truly establishing himself in the pantheon of living directors, with Norte having premiered in Cannes, and From What is Before having won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Also, the two films are very different, with Norte being plot-heavy, in colour, and with a very moving camera, and From What Is Before being black-and-white, more about mood than plot, and with a static camera that only rarely pans side to side. I wonder how his style was before, and how it will be hereafter. Probably, there will be another many-hour-long film next year to check out.

It is truly a privilege to spend so many hours keenly observing the problems of the Philipines. This film takes place in the early 70'ies, two segments taking place in 70 and 71, before the bulk of the film happening in 72. So many scenes in the first stretch of the film feature characters slowly moving towards something. It seems as if they are gathering together at the location for the film, though most of them have lived there for a young time. In 70, we watch as a procession brings sisters Itang and Joselina to a place where they act as healers, in a long interlude with music and dancing - already, this was where the first of the audience lost patience and left. In 71, Christian priest Father Guido has arrived, and is kindly but firmly correcting the way the sisters act and believe. Joselina was unwell from the beginning, but she succumbs more and more to madness and selfharm as the film progresses. There is also Sito, the elder rice-farmer who has taken in young boy Hakob, Tony, a winemaker, and Heding, a saleswoman with an annoying attitude, who spreads rumours and sticks her nose in everything. Then, in 72, the darkness comes. Cows are hacked to death. Huts are burned down. A man is found dead at a crossroads. And Philipino politics will also soon intrude in a big way.

5½ hours is a long time, but it does allow us to truly get to know the place of the film. The camera will hold steady and observe for a long time, as characters perhaps walks on a mountaintop, or perhaps works inside their homes. We get to know these hillsides, seashores, homes, fields and forrests, churches, schools, roads and rivers, from seemingly every angle. And there is definitely a sense of atmosphere. It is cloudy all the time, it rains a lot, and since the soundwork seems to be done really cheaply with microphones stuck on the actors, there is an almost constant roaring of wind on the soundtrack. Also, we get to know these characters through the way they talk, with people using words from Philipino, English and Spanish languages seemingly at random, but much accordingly to the status and education of each person. The rich characters in Norte did the same, so I think I'm learning something about society and language in the Phillipines.

The film is compared to Haneke's The White Ribbon in the programme, another black and white movie about a small society where political evil intrudes. But that comparison, while understandable, is a bit superficial, as there is a definite difference in theme in the two films. In The White Ribbon, evil comes from the characters themselves, we watch as the pathology that would lead to the Reich is first blossoming. In From What Is Before, the evil intrudes on a society from the outside (so a more fitting comparison might be with something like Cabaret). Not all of the characters are innocent, and there has seemingly always been an undercurrent of violence this place, but there is still a dichotomy between the mostly good poor rural people, and the mostly evil and callous government forces who intrude on them. Norte had quite the same, with the intellectual recreating the Crime from Crime and Punishment, and the poor man receiving the Punishment. This scheme might seem a bit simplistic, and I'm not entirely sure it needed 5½ hours to be put forth, much less so an assortment of films of that length. But the documentary Storm Children powerfully observed how neglegted the poor and dispossed were in the Philipinnes, even in the aftermath of a major catastrophe like a once-in-a-century Typhoon. That is so far what I like most in Diaz' cinema, and it is the reason that I'd rank the three films Storm Children > From What is Before > Norte. They work best when they are simply concerned with observing what the country has not wanted to observe. Oh, how they observe, for hours and hours and hours. I'll look forward to yet another dispatch in a years time or so.

GIFF day 6: When I will be a Dictator, Amour Fou

When I Will Be a Dictator (Yaël André, Belgium, 2014)

According to the film, this consisted of found 8mm footage, which the director then all of a sudden realized told the story of her good friend George. Uhm, I doubt it. Some of the footage was from a moonlanding, do they want us to believe that this Belgian director just all of a sudden was offered home footage from an astronaut? No, this can't have been an accident, this must have been planned out in advance.

I don't have much to say about it, though it was good. Reappropriated 8mm footage can't help but feel like countless indie rock videos such as this one, which does cheapen the experience a bit. That it was still so very good had a lot to do with the amazing voiceover. French is such a great language doing this in, and the voice over artist was so animated as she talked in a highpitched voice about killing all the people from their own homevideos: 'Ratatatatat! Bif, bif! Swoooosh!!' (It's in the trailer) That was in the section 'Quand je serais une psychopathe' There were a bunch of sections like that, as the story became about parallel universes where the speaker became a bunch of things. Some of the sequences were meta about film, as we were told that in one universe the big studios got tired of using actors, and then hired ordinary people to act out their own life, causing some dedicated people to act out their own deaths. The pictures were nicely manipulated. In one universe reverse speech was fit into what the characters were saying. In another, where she became a God, she changed time and all the images ran backwards. In that universe, heroic Nazi's saved 6 million people from the gas chambers.

I have nothing more to say, don't think. This will probably be hard to find, but it was nice to see in an almost full theater. People up here have so amazing taste.

Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner, Austria, 2014)

This was the best 'rectangle-drama' I've seen in a long time. Take a look at those pictures above.Those are two amazingly composed pictures, with many many lines and rectangles. But that first picture, while it's photographed straight on, and the two white lines at each side mirror each other, it's still slightly off kilter. The chairs don't match, and the kid and the painting are out of synch. And that second picture is diagonal, with several planes of color meeting each other. There wasn't a single picture in this film that wasn't exquisite. Even the few shot-reverseshot were good, with one side being straight on and the other diagonal, or with one of the persons sitting in front of a big curtain, meaning that in the reverse shot, half the frame was filled with red cloth. I haven't seen any film by Jessica Hausner before, an Austrian filmmaker who has competed in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but that seems to be a big mistake. Austrian filmmakers are amazing at rectangle-drama's, actually. Haneke, of course, but he changes it up. Less 'auteurist' filmmakers like Ulrich Seidl (Paradise-trilogy, In the Basement) and Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Abendland) can be even more rectangular. Perhaps we need to speak about Austrian Rectangle Films? If so, then Hausner is seemingly the ruler of that style. Yes, this was that good. I am very very impressed.

The whole trailer looks amazing.

As can be seen, this was a costume-drama. Based on the true story of Prussian romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist and housewife Henriette Vogel, who comitted suicide together in 1811. There really isn't a lot to that story. Heinrich wants to die because he is unhappy, and Henriette becomes diagnosed with a tumor, so she wants to die on her own terms. What makes the story great is the way it becomes entangled with the depiction of time and place. Henriette's husband is working on a tax reform that would liberate the peasants and even force the nobility to pay, which makes his noble friends very unhappy. And frightened, since the spectre of the French Revolution still hangs over the country. We know what will happen, that Prussia will become Germany, will become dictatorship, then two countries, then democracy. They don't. The people navigate in a world they don't know. Henriette's sickness might be a tumor the size of an 'unripe apple' in her lower abdomen, but it might also just be a nervous disorder - and it's probable that the doctors would be able to figure this out if only they, instead of analyzing her urine or doing 'magnetical' therapy, simply touched her abdomen, looking for a lump. But they don't. That is simply not part of what can be done at this time. Just as the tax reform cannot be made without a much bigger bureaucracy. In so many ways this world is nothing like ours, with people honestly talking about how most people shouldn't be given freedom. But the central unknowability, that these people has to act without fully knowing the rules, that feeling is universal through the ages. One of the very best I've seen this year. Bravo.

Also Seen

Three competition films. Homesick and Underdog, from the Dragon Award competition, two films most noteworthy for amazing female performances at the center. And the documentary Every Face Has a Name, telling stories of refugees in 1945 and a bit in 2014, which won the Angelos-prize from the Swedish churches.

GIFF day 4-5: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, Wild Tales, Still the Water

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Josephine Decker, USA, 2014)

US filmmaking can feel like a pretty insular world. Lots of different kinds of filmmaking, lots of different kinds of scenes, but many of those can feel a bit closed. There are Hollywood blockbusters, finetuned to make money, there are prestige filmmaking, finetuned to win oscars, there are indie-scenes such as mumblecore, finetuned to... I have no idea what could possibly be of use in mumblecore, but I guess their friends like it? Most American films feel like they are in conversation with other American films, and not trying to discuss that much with films from the rest of the world. Josephine Deckers film definitely speaks with Terrance Malick, first and foremost, but for long stretches it feels more international, like it speaks with Carlos Reygadas' rural Mexico, or with the sensuous images of Argentinian filmmaker Lucretia Martel. Perhaps it just felt Latin American?

It's not that the film isn't connected to American filmmaking. Josephine Decker has acted in mumblecore films, and mumblecore filmmaker Joe Swanberg plays the main character Akin, a hired hand who arrives at a secluded ranch with an old owner Jeremeiah and his lovely daughter Sarah. That part of the film is the oldest story in the book. The growing atraction between Sarah and Akin is depicted with a shocking amount of sensuality. One of those films that make me think, that I know nothing about women. A young female filmmaker making a sensuous film about a girl and a boy longing for each other, begun with voice-over from the girl, that should be filled with lustful images of the male body, right? Why does the camera focus so much on the lips, hands, hair and clothe-covered curves of Sarah? Akin can't stop looking at her, as she is bending over to pick weeds, as she sits and knits with her legs slightly apart, as she walks around in various states of undress, but even when he's not around, when it's just Sarah alone with herself, the camera will glide over her body. I think I got it at the end: It's not really about Sarah discovering Akin's body, as it is about her discovering her own. Discovering how crazy she can drive him with a smile, a posture, small noise. Sarah is so imaginative in her sexuality, as she writhes in grass, dances while sighing, plays with string, even at one point biting the head of a small frog and spits blood out, splashing her blonde hair and lips with glowing red. Which is sexy in action, I promise. Akin furiously masturbates and fantasizes about her in common pin-up positions - but he incorporates the thing with the string - when he finally takes her it's rough, short and to the point. Akin is just a body, when he tries to be playful and flirty it's awful. Jeremiah - who is a weird old man indeed - uses an amazing farmers metaphor: Apparantly horses can be inseminated very easily, while cows need a lot of finesse and a good syringe. He asks Akin: Are you a horseman or a cowman? The film seems to suggest that men are horses and women are cows.

So many good and imaginative things in this film. A short sequence is even shown from the point of view of a cow. The film does become a bit more conventionally American as it goes along. One of the first scenes is a long take of Akin driving up to the farm, getting out of the car and walking, then coming back, taking off his wedding ring, and leaving it in the glove compartment. And fine, mysterious gesture. But that whole wife-thingy is then used to cause drama in the final part. Towards the end, there is a brilliant sex scene, one that fully builds on the great sensual scenes leading up to it. Have never seen a sex-scene quite like it, and I've seen a lot of European films. But the film also takes some surprising twists and turns, which perhaps makes it on the whole more unique, but makes the ending dissapointingly American. Oh, well. Only a second feature. Decker's first is also at the festival, hope to catch that one as well. If it's as good as this one, then Decker is my new favourite American filmmaker.

Wild Tales (Damián Szifrón, Argentina, 2014)

This was sensational! Szifrón was almost unknown when his film was selected to compete at Cannes last year, but his film received a rapturous response. Perhaps not as in people thinking it should have the Palme d'Or, but as in people thoroughly enjoying the film and being happy to see something like it in what can be a pretty serious competition. It's one of the best comedies I've seen in a long time. Six short, unrelated tales, with a common theme of revenge and violence. Most of them depict the indignities of our everyday so perfectly, that we don't know whether to be happy or angry when the characters snap. Road-rage, bureaucracy, parking tickets, unfaithful spouses, traffic (really, quite a lot of the film revolves around cars...) Almost everything begins as relatable, but then quickly spirals out of control. The one section that didn't really work, about two women considering poisoning a mobster who visits their diner, is also the one that is farthest from everyday experience. Though perhaps not in Argentina?

But it's not just what is being shown, the way it's being shown is also uncommonly assured. The first tale is the most outlandish, involving a complicated scheme and massive violence. Then a sudden freeze frame leads into a great, colourful title sequence, with all the names of the many actors matched by clips of animals. At that point, you already know you will have a good time. The best sequences builds and twists and turns, and the filmmaking matches with brilliant tension and release. Camera inside car, inside car, close and claustrophibic -> camera outside, overlooking entire traffic que. Camera inside luggage compartment, or bolted unto revolting doors, mixed with distant longshots. So many good musical interludes. It was the biggest success of the year in Argentina, it has been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar, it could honestly be a big international success. It really is arthouse cinema at it's most accessible and riveting.

But then you might speculate about the future. Is this perhaps lightning in a bottle? Will Damian Szifron be able to follow up on it? I'm not sure. It's so wellmade, in all ways, but perhaps it doesn't show that much personality. It has the dreaded teal and orange look, even. I watched Roy Andersson's latest, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, today, another film from a maker of weird but sort of funny films from a foreign country, and his films is so uniquely Anderssonian that he still has an audience today, 14 years after Songs From the Second Floor. I don't know if Wild Tales can be repeated and offer the same rewards. But for now, we have a great film.

Still the Water (Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2014)

Why on earth was this film called Still the Water? What does that mean? Why not just Still Water? Or perhaps Still is the Water? There was some kind of very important metaphor about water in this film, about two Japanese teenagers falling in love, and dealing with their families. The girl, Kyoko, loves swimming in it, and think it is envoloping like sex will be. The boy, Kaito, is afraid of the sea, as he does not know what is in it, and thinks that it is 'sticky'. To be perfectly honest, I think this film was badly translated, from the title and all the way through. Kyoko's mother, a shaman in the village, is gravely sick, so her father takes her home so that she can 'flop' on the terrace outside. Que? I did not get this film. Now, the festival didn't make it easy on us presspeople, as there was an overlap of fifteen minutes between the press screenings of Wild Tales and Still the Water, which, since there were only three films showing in the cinema at that point, seemed like weird planning. And I've said once or twice that I might have missed the point of a film due to fatigue. But still, I don't think it was solely my fault for not getting this film. I think it was oblique and muddied.

I'm not sure that, even if it had been perfectly translated, that I would have liked it. I'm not sure I like this style. Naomi Kawase has had several films in competition at Cannes, and won the Grand Prix in 2007 for The Mourning Forest. This was the first one of hers I've seen, so I can't speak to the quality of her films in general. But this seemed like the same kind of films that Hirokazu Kore-eda makes at times, such as Like Father, Like Son, and I run hot and cold on his films as well. All nature imagery, and young people, and piano music. Without some firm grounding, if the dialogue isn't good enough, or the characters superficial, it can become very cloying and sacharine. And in this film, the dialogue was weird, the acting wasn't that great, and the psychology of the characters didn't ring true. So it all fell flat for me.

As mentioned, the dying mother is a shaman. She talks about being one with nature, that death is just transformation. Her philosophy is water at it's stillest. But Kaito is troubled. His parents have divorced, and his mother has taken new lovers. One of them drowns at the beginning of the film. He is water at it's most disturbed, like the typhoon that hits the island. Problem is, every 'typhonic' scene in the film rings false. They slaughter a goat, and the goat just bahs a bit while it bleeds out. Kaito and Kyoko's teenage love seem to be completely devoid of hormones, at least in the way they act. The big death scene, that the film builds to, is sacharine as well, though that seems motivated by the people. Whenever Kaito has to be angry and yell, the limits of the actor are very clear. This did not work for me at all. But some of the images are undeniably beautiful, so beautiful that a short clip rightfully ends the short film running in front of every screening at the festival. A clip of the teenagers diving nude. So before each and every screening at this festival, there is a two-second short clip of the bottoms of two teenagers. That is Sweden for you, I guess.

Also Seen:
Many Scandinavian films, which is why I've only written about three films in two days. But I've seen Winter Buoy, a strong documentary on social workers working with pregnant women to work on their problems with addiction and abusive boyfriends. From the Dragon Award Competition, there was Icelandic comedy Paris of the North, and the darkest film seen this year, Finnish youth road movie They Have Escaped. Two Swedish prize winners from 2014: Rotterdam Tiger Award winner Something Must Break, about two young men struggling with sexual identity; and as mentioned, Roy Andersson's Golden Lion winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. All of those will hopefully be reviewed elsewhere. And finally, I rewatched Tsai Ming-liang's Journey to the West, which I've written about elsewhere, for the third time. On third seethrough, the fiftyfive minutes felt more like fifteen.

GIFF day 3: Alive, Life May Be, Field of Dogs

Alive (Park Jung-bum, South Korea, 2014)

A threehour Korean drama about poor people struggling to get by, from a director I didn't know before. Well, of course! It's from Locarno! I had one, major problem with this film, but first: The good things. This was a very wellwritten film. Park Jung-bum both wrote, directed and played the main character, and especially first and third role was nicely done. A threehour movie has room for plot, and in this one it just rolled along. So much so that I'll admit to losing the thread after 20 minutes, and only really fully understanding what was going on an hour later. Park plays Jung-chul, who lost his parents in a landslide that also destroyed most of his house, which he's trying to restore. The disaster also turned his sister, Soo-yun insane, so she can no longer take care of her daughter Ha-na. To begin with, Jung-chul and his friends loses their paycheck from their construction jobs, as another man takes off with all their money. After a brawl with the supervisors, who don't think it's their problem, they have to find another job. Jung-chul then finds a job making soy-bricks or something (apparantly, they are making tofu?), and then the film also follows the life of his new boss and the boss' daughter, and at this point I got the tiniest bit confused, as a whole bunch of plotthreads are layed down. But wow, when they return! It seemed theatrical, the way fortunes kept being returned and revelations kept coming. Perhaps Chekovian? But instead of Chekov's gun, there's an open window, and a removed frontdoor, which all of a sudden returns and turns the film upside down.

Yeah, it was also welldirected, with many scenes being done in long takes with handheld cameras following characters around. A bit like the Dardennes, perhaps? The view on laborers without solidarity seemed Dardennian as well, spectres of Rosetta or Two Days, One Night. After Jung-chul is hired, the boss fires two older workers who could only work half as fast. Jung-chul then convinces the boss to hire his friends as well, resulting in the rest of the old crew being let go. There are no unions, no way to stand up to the more well off. It's everyone for themselves, and when fortunes turn, it's time for payback. But now about the problem with the aesthetics: Allow me to talk about color-grading for a bit. Almost every film is digitally color-graded these days, and at times it can be great. But there's also the cliché of the film being made too look only teal and orange, resulting in a boring and uninteresting pallette. I hated the colors in this film as well. We're talking winter in a rural area, so everything is all white sky and white snow, with grey concrete and a bit of black earth. And then so many people wore beige as well, for some reason. There were only a few splashes of color, which can really work, when a stripe of green or red bring light into the grays. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep kinda uses color that way. But here, all the colors were dark and drab and almost sickly. At one point, a character stands in a purple sweater against a yellow wall. Now, those are complementary colors, had they been lighter it could have been cool and sixties'ish. But an earthly yellow-orange contrasted with dark reddish purple. It looked sickly. So much of the film looked sickly and unwell, including the people. Perhaps it's a Korean thing, because Kim Ki-duk's Pieta looked the same way. With that film, the combination of super-pretentious themes and ugly images made me angry. Here, I was just sad that the images weren't more pretty.

Life May Be (Mark Cousins & Mania Akbari, England/Iran, 2014)

I'm not going to write a whole lot on this one, as it was essayistic and discoursive. Filmmakers Mark Cousin and Mania Akbari exchange filmic letters. I came for Mark Cousin, filmhistorian and maker of the very great series Story of Film: An Odyssey. Yet I wasn't surprised that his contributions were quite overshadowed by those from Mania Akbari, who it turns out I knew about, as she played the main character in Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Ten. In Cousin's first letter he talks about Akbari, who she is, that she has directed a bunch of films herself, that she's in exile. Cousin's is a great filmcritic, and as he namedrops Scorcese, Bergman, Miklos Jancso, Bela Tarr, and several more, he makes Akbari's films seem like absolutely must-sees. Visually, he just parks the camera on a hillside watching as fog rolls down a mountain and over a lake for about fifteen minutes perhaps? It's beautiful, like James Benning, only perhaps not quite as good. But then Akbari starts talking about her house in Iran, life in exile in cities all over Europe, artpieces seen and thoughts thought. It's a jolt of energy. Cousin's picks up on the naked people in the artworks, and starts discoursing on the greatness of being naked, and then Akbari makes almost a feminist shortfilm of her waxing her legs and bathing her body, before she runs naked through the streets of London. Cousin's response seems stunned and overwhelmed. I need to watch some more Akbari, she seems amazing! And I don't think Ten will ever be quite the same film.

Field of Dogs (Lech Majewski, Poland, 2014)
Remember this one? The visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy I talked about wanting to see yesterday? Caught it today. Twas quite good. It wasn't really a retelling of Dante, though. The main character listened to Dante on tape, and long segments of the incredible Italian original was recited, with English translation onscreen as well. But the film was about a young former scholar who'd been in carcrash that killed two of his friends, and who now always fell asleep and had weird dreams. But he was a scholar of symbolist poetry, not Dante, and the dreams were more symbolic creations rather than something taken from the Comedy.

It's probably easier to watch the trailer, than for me to explain all the imagery...

So, Eastern-European symbolism, and as the trailer shows: Churches and floating bodies. It has to be Tarkovskian, right? Well, not quite. An important difference is that Eastern Europe is of course not just Eastern Europe, and that Poland is catholic while Russia is orthodox means a lot. Religion in this film is less austere, less iconographic than in Tarkovsky. It's more kitschy and romantic. The style also combines highbrow and lowbrow, discussions of Heidegger and Seneca with imagery from supermarkets and informercials. The whole film is on digital, and not afraid of looking like it. There's also a bunch of CGI, though I couldn't tell you how much. When a chuch is flooded, the water is obviously fake. But are the people? Is the church? When the young man dreams of sitting on a chair on a beach with a bikini-clad babe in his lap, the beach is obviously fake. But then it cuts to the chair standing on a mountain-side, that looks real enough. And then there are the animals, the doves, the snake and the oxen. The doves seemed fine, the big yellow snake that crawls around the supermarked had to be fake, and those two oxen that plow up an aisle had to be fake as well, right? But animal wranglers are credited for every animal at the end.

In the end, the film is unique, but I don't know if I'd call it 'visionary'. Majewski definitely sees images others don't, but I'm not sure how many other would even want to attempt something like this? The film also takes place in 2010, during which time Poland was flooded, the president of Poland Lech Kaczynski was killed in a planecrash, and the ash-cloud from Iceland enveloped the airwaves. It all adds to the apocalyptic mood. And it's as a moodpiece unlike few other that the film is worth seeing.

Also Seen:
Some more competition films, Amir Escandaris visceral documentary on grafitti-artists from Sao Paolo, Pixadores, and in Nordic Competition, Danish director Samanou Acheche's very fine and poetic debut In Your Arms, on assisted suicide.

GIFF day 2: La Sapienza, Goodbye to Language, Daughter... Mother... Daughter...

La Sapienza (Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014)

My plan this morning was to go and see Dominik Graf's three-hour Schiller-biopic, Beloved Sisters. But it turned out I misread the programme, and when I was ready to leave it had already been playing for an hour. I had a Plan B: Field of Dogs, according to the program a visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy. But that one was sold out. So instead I went and saw this one, which played at the local business school, 100 m from where I was. There were a lot of tickets, and it was about architecture, which interests me. So that seemed a fine Plan C.

It was an amazing experience. The plot of the film is simple: A French architect named Alexandre travels to Rome with his wife to look at architecture by the great Borromini. On the way there, in Schwitzerland, they run into a young brother and sister. He wants to study architecture and she is sick. The rest of the film is the men looking at churches and the women talking. But the style... The style was like the rigorous modernist cinema of old, except in digital, and with a deadpan humour that never allowed things to get too serious. The actors walked around and declamated their lines like in the cinema of the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Many shots of only feet and hands of people also seemed Bressonesque. The rigourously composed symmetrical shots and long discussions with actors at times looking directly into the camera reminded me of the late-late-late period from 106-year-old-and-still-going filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. With it's discussions of architecture and multilingual characters especially Oliveiras very great A Talking Picture (2003). And a large percentage of the images is just the camera looking at architecture, filming modern appartment buildings and factories from a distance, and contrasting it with loving closeups of the detailed, light-filled beauty of the old churches.

There is a tiny problem: The film depicts people fed up with functionalistic, modernist life and compares that to the baroque beauty found in Roman architecture, but the style of the film is kinda modernist and functionalistic as well. That is in and of itself not the biggest problem, and the film does critique it's own style as it goes along, slowly accumulating enough over-the-top characters, details and weird interludes, to carry on a sense of baroque-ness. And as the characters achieves the titular 'sapience' (which is a word for wisdom in some way, I don't really know) the style changes, becoming more rounded. But there was another big film recently about intellectuals looking for meaning amongst the old buildings of Rome: Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. And while La Sapienza works with the same outmoded, modernist form that he critiques, Sorrention's cinema seems to strive towards a new cinematic language, perhaps more fitting to the critique. The GIFF-programmers wittingly describe La Sapienza as a 'rectangle-drama', a great description of a certain type of cinema. In contrast, Sorrentino's film is all curves, broken lines, movements, fluidity. When Alexandre describes a facade by his beloved Borromini as being 'always in motion', his description sounds more like Sorrentino than the static shot we get from Green. And also, Sorrentino's film was one of the biggest arthouse successes in recent years, and even won a Foreign Language Oscar, one of the few times that prize has gone to a truly brilliant film. There is no way Eugene Green's film will get even close to that attention. So in a way, this whole film might be a bit... superfluous...

But on the other hand. I watched this film with many, many people in a big theater, and the people laughed, smiled, and had a good time. Two of the other three showings are already sold out. I was also surprised to find, that director Eugene Green is an old and experienced artist, having worked extensively in theater and only directed four theatrical features before, but those films premiering at Cannes and Locarno. It took no more than ten minutes before I mentally made a note of checking everything else I could find by this weird and idiosyncratic director. I had no idea what I was getting. I will perhaps never get the chance to watch this or the rest of the directors filmography again, at least not on the big screen. This was a unique experience, one I didn't anticipate at all. And surprises like this are the reason I love film festivals so very very much!

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014)

Ah, Godard. Trying to handle a late-period Godard film after only one viewing is a foolish task. And this one was in 3D, so there were twice as many layers. I'm mainly confused, and grasping at straws, trying to connect as much of this montage of sounds, words, works cited and images into something adding up to something. I saw and wrote about his first 3D short Les Trois Dés-Astres last year at PIX, so I might begin there. That one depicted 3D as a disaster for cinema, yet another in a lineage of failures for the medium (ranging from the Holocaut to the domination of Hollywood, because those two things can obviously be compared). Perhaps Goodbye to Language is about saying goodbye to the old language of film? The screen flashes Ah, Dieux at times, and the final time I understood it to be a pun on Adieu, but perhaps also on Un, Deux (if you say it with an accent?) There are of course a bunch of clips from old films, but not really anyone I recognized. And the main story is something about a woman and a man, and another woman and a man, and the women are naked a lot of the time, and the men are disparaging and don't really think much of the women. 'Women can't create evil', they say (or something to that effect). Then there's a scene with Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, reminding us that a woman wrote perhaps the first piece of horror-fiction. So there is that. I don't know, I don't at all get what the plot was about. There was a great dog named Roxy, though, I liked the dog!

So much stuff on language. Over the end credits, a couple is 'speaking' in dog-language with a baby. There are a bunch of philosophical quotes on language. The two parts of the film are called 'Nature' and 'Metaphor', perhaps suggesting that the second part turns the first part into an understandable language? Except the two parts apparantly mirror each other quite a lot, and none of them are easy to figure out. There's a discussion of language and atrocity, one of the women tells a story of an SS officer yelling at a kid at the entrance to the gas chamber, that 'There is no why'. In the beginning of the film, a professor comments on the subtitle of Solshenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: A Literary Investigation. What lies beyond language is atrocity. Horror. But also childhood, and nature, shown on screen through the many many scenes featuring the dog Roxy. There is also a scene where a painter tries to explain how to show depth through water colour, mirroring the way Godard himself tries to figure out the grammar of this weird new technology.

And Godard struggles with turning 3D into a language. As with many of his more recent films, he uses low-grade video and digital, and those blurry images create sheets of colour when the image is given depth. The film checks out the ticks of this new medium, for instance filming out of the windshield of a car on a rainy night, which creates floating specks of neon-light where the water-drops mirror streetlight. There are a couple of times where the filmmakers must have turned one of the two cameras needed to film in 3D to the side, making the image simply split, and forcing me to blink each eye to watch two films at once, until the camera turns back and the image connects again. There are other sequences where the effect simply doesn't work for me, where the foreground is too far away from the background, and all of a sudden what was a couple tablelegs turns into a ghostly seethrough presence. And at times there are only abstract dots and lines onscreen. Basic filmic grammar is also broken, as the camera turns upside down, the shadow of the cameraman is seen on the ground, the plot is achronological, etc.

Haven't got a clue. I read the book Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian by Michael Witt recently, and that book noted how perhaps Godard should be thought of as a mixed-media artist than a filmmaker, since for the longest time he has been working with collages of existing media, as well as video, installation, text, sound, etc. This film definitely blurs the limits of the new 3D medium, and is to a large extent about those limits. That is what I got from it on the first try. That, and an ever so slight headache.

Daughter... Mother... Daughter... (Panahbarkhoda Rezaee, Iran, 2014)

When watching a bunch of films over a short period, there will probably always be some that don't get full attention. I was tired, and the Godard mindfuck kept swirling round my brain. Also, this was a sloooow film, without dialogue, but with a beautiful soundtrack of music, nature sounds, and poetic narration in Iranian. Always the sounds of birds cheeping, water running, and a train passing by from time to time. It was hypnotic in a way. It put the person next to me to sleep several times throughout the seventy minutes.

It was a film on boredom, on being trapped in a life without any hope for a future. Grandmother spins yarn all the time, spinning spinning spinning. Mother walks around the wheat-fields, longing for her husband who took the train to get away. Daugher is sick and struggling to breathe, lying in bed all day, listening to the sounds of nature, dreaming of seeing the sky. There is a son, but he also leaves early on. The women are stuck - as many women probably are in Iran. Most of the film is longheld shots of each woman standing or sitting or laying alone, and then the narrator says something about them. We never hear any names. At times the women watch tv together, and we get old black and white clips, or perhaps it's new clips made to look old, I don't know. Death is never far from the family, and at times the women look ghostly covered as they are completely in black, walking the barren landscape. A shot of light streaming over the mountains is amazing, perhaps showing grace. There is only a single shot where the women interact, where the mother strokes the hair of the daughter, and then they cry. It's very cathartic, after having watched so much film without anybody showing any emotion at all.

This was artfilm. Very lowbudget I think. High res digital pictures, no cameramovements at all, all sound added afterwards, only four people in the film. I love seeing such a small and personal projects, and I liked listening to the Iranian poesy. Had it been much longer than 70 minutes, it would probably have been too much, though... Also, googling the director, his name is apparantly spelled a bunch of different ways in the west, and his other features have names like A Cradle for Mother and even Daugher... Father... Daughter... Now I'm intrigued, and would like to see if his films might make more sense through accumulation.

Note on language, apropos Godard: I like Iranian cinema, I've seen quite a lot of Iranian films, which means I've seen a bunch of Iranian writing rolling over screen at the beginning and end of a film, and it has always seemed like curves and not like words. But all of a sudden, tonight, in the blink of an eye, I could make out letters. Not that I understood anything, it just looked like a language all of sudden. Weird how that works.

Also Seen:
Another film from competion, Susanna Lenken's debut feature My Skinny Sister, which I will write about elsewhere. A fine debut, a great depiction of two young sisters.

GIFF day 1: Timbuktu, Mateo, Tokyo Tribe

Hi. I'm at Gothenburg International Film Festival! It's great, the mood is awesome, the theaters are packed, people really seem into it. I'm from Denmark, and have been going to Danish festivals a few times, but they aren't like this. There really is a sense of excitement over here, which makes the whole thing so much better. And also, I have family over here, and they are awesome as well! So so far, the whole thing has been pretty much perfect! The only problem is, I can't really get into all the films I want to see, because they are sold out...

Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania, 2014)

African film rarely get the spotlight, so when a film like this gets nominated for both the Palme d'Or at Cannes as well as an Oscar, it's cause for celebration. And when it's as good as this, it's could actually be pretty important. I really wanted to see this, but all the screenings are completely sold out already. Luckily, an extra screening was arranged, and I made it into that.

Well, honestly, this was more 'important' than 'great'. The film depicts what happens after a group of islamists take over Timbuktu, and it's great at both showing the processes of jihad as well as sharia, and at showing the way people slowly fight against it. There are amazing sequences in it, like a group of kids playing football without a ball as balls have been outlawed. Or a shot of two people struggling in a lake, filmed at a distance with the afternoon sun shining down, making the water glisten and the men into dark shadows. But the main story never really lifts off, and the main family are honestly a bit boring. Much more interesting things are happening on the sidelines, both with the jihadists and their victims.

The film is surprisingly nuanced towards sharia, though. It shows the many horrors coming from the strict laws, but it also shows the violence and turbulence caused by lawlessness. When the young boys play soccer, it's amazing not just because they show such great imagination, but also because they actually manage to agree on who scores at which time. It's a utopian dream of collaboration and compromise. But immediately after that, two men come to blows in a conflict based on their conflicting uses of the sole river in the area. Two kids matter of factly discuss the death of the one kid's father due to him being a fighter. This area has been ravaged by war and violence for a long long time, it's not something the jihadists has brought. But they really don't help it. Make no mistake, they are hypocrites, violent and lustful. The film has no illusions things would be right if they dissapeared.

Great scenes where people play Malian music are followed by horrifying scenes where musicians are publicly whipped. Many characters are great, like Abdelkrim, a jihadist learning to drive his four-wheel Toyota and struggling with a now clandestine smoking addiction. Or a female witch, of sorts, a practitioner of some sort of old African religion, claiming to have been dislocated from Haiti a few years back, and walking the streets un-scarfed confronting the jihadists and getting away with it through force of will. So many great stories are in this. It's just, the spine isn't that interesting, and those scenes can grind the film to a halt. But important filmmaking, definitely, showing new perspectives on a global problem. And those great scenes absolutely lift it above just being 'worthwhile', or some other kind of faint praise. It's good.

Mateo (Maria Gamboa, Columbia, 2014)

When you watch a gangster-film, you don't expect there to be great choreography. So this one kinda took me by surprise.

Young Mateo works for his uncle Walter, the local loanshark, in one of Columbias most dangerous cities. He's doing simple work, collecting money from local merchants, every now and then taking merchandise instead, and not realizing the dangerous mess he's getting himself into. You've seen this film before. Young boys in dangerous cities. It's City of God. It's Gomorrah. It's The Wire season 4. But then Mateo joins a local theater-group, first to not get kicked out of school, then to spy on the participants for his uncle, and then the film becomes somewhat strange. What seemed like a slow build to death and violence instead becomes about trust and solidarity. That is pretty clearly what the theater-group is about: The first thing they practice is looking each other in the eyes and carrying each other up. Mateo knows how to act, when we first see him he moves through streets and poolhalls with practiced swagger, but he don't know how to act along with others. He can never look the leader of the group, a young priest, in the eyes. The young priest preaches standing up to the evil forces, showing solidarity. Mateo's mother works with her friends to build a small farm that will bring more wealth to all of them. They are clearly small solutions to the big problems doing so much damage to Columbia.

It's a gentle film, with beautifully filmed scenes of young people acting, dancing, moving around. The guns almost move out of the film, almost. The camera moves fluidly as well, including some absolutely wild craneshots over rivers I have absolutely no idea how they got the resources to do in a small film like this. At some point I didn't know if I was willing to go along with the tale, the whole theater-beating-thugs thing can seem like complete wish-fullfillment at times. But the ending is suitably dark and ambiguous, which really helps a lot. This was a film a looong way down the bill, one of the films in the 'New Voices' section for debut features, that isn't in the 'Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award' competition, nor in the section for 'Visionaries', which include some very young filmmakers as well. I had no expectations for this film. But I was pleasantly surprised.

Tokyo Tribe (Sion Sono, Japan, 2014)

Sion Sono makes a film a year, and every film makes the festival circuit. And they aren't austere, short films, they are packed to the gills with ideas, images, twists, and characters. I watched and liked Land of Hope in 2013, and Why Don't You Play in Hell in 2014. This is his biggest, weirdest, yet, of the ones I've seen. A truckload of crazy characters, in big costumes, on amazingly big and intricate sets where the camera roams for minutes at a time without a cut. And, oh, the film is a hiphop musical, so most of the dialogue is rapped. It's insane, is what it is.

Actually, this time I get how he does it, because the whole thing is based on a manga, called Tokyo Tribe2. Googling images, it's clear that a lot of character and set design is taken straight from the page. A lot of the lyrics are apparantly written by the hiphop-artists playing the characters as well. The plot is apparantly heavily modified from the manga, but it doesn't make any sense at all, so it probably didn't take that much time to put together. Something about a bunch of 'Tribes' in Tokyo, gangs warring for territory, and one of them all of a sudden has a bunch of henchmen so all the other tribes has to band together. And some of them are for love and peace, and others want war and domination, and there is some kind of High Priest from 'Wong Kong' who's daughter has dissapeared and two diminutive teenage karate experts kicking ass and a beatboxing waitress and a swordwielding thug in a thong and a bunch of other weird stuff. It's packed to the gills with wacky details. It's destined to become a cult-film for a long time to come.

A song from the French version of the Anime version of this. Which for some reason exists.

But... I don't think it was as riveting as Why Don't You Play In Hell. The difference is, WDYPIH was a loveletter to cheap filmmaking in all forms, from 8mm amateur film to glossy commercials, and that joy of film was always easy to see in every frame of the film. Tokyo Tribes is an ode to hiphop culture, but... The beats aren't that great, and the rapping isn't that great, and I don't know about Japanese hiphop, but American hiphop actually has a visual grammar from it's videos, and it looks nothing like this film. The visuals of this film are West Side Story meets The Warriors meets Mad Max in a dayglo-neon-cityscape. Don't get me wrong, that is cool. But the different parts at times work against each other, and at times the hip-hop aesthetic seems like stick. Or it could be that Japanese hiphop-culture is as weird as this.

Nevertheless, this one will probably be watched by many people, and that is as it should be. This is weirder than weird, and Sono is a massively accomplished filmmaker. Long, one-take scenes on big sets with masses of extras walking back and forth and several stories playing out at once. Great fights. Beautiful images. It's all cool, I'm down with it, the scratching grandma, the jewel-encrusted katanas, the human furniture, the guy creating a lockpick through breakdancing. This was cool. But do watch some more Sion Sono afterwards, he is really on a roll these years!

Also Seen
I've also seen Michael Noer's (R, Northwest) Key House Mirror which is in competition, and which I will write about elsewhere. But to say it short: It's a big leap forward for the young director, Ghita Nørby is great as an old lady trying to create a life in a nursing home, and I wouldn't be surprised if it won a bunch of awards here and elsewhere. Also, I rewatched J.P. Sniadecki's The Iron Ministry, which I've written about here. Related to Harvard SEL, the experimental group famous for films like Leviathan and Manakamana, it's a great visual portrait of China in motion as seen through it's trains.