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.