Year 2007 in movies (part 2)

5. Paprika

In our content-saturated world, media is our new religion, advertisements our new icons for veneration. Instead of images as sacred intermediaries to another reality, there is now a constant attack of images on our psyche that we don't pay much attention to. The result is a merging of reality. Where in the past, dreams become the repository for images that we see, now real life is so filled with these images that its quality has become almost dream-like without us noticing.

In Paprika, characters dive into billboards, jump through video camera lenses, merge into paintings of classical mythology. "Don't you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents, " says Paprika, the eponymous red-head girl who is the dream alter ego of the real life Dr. Atsuko (or is Atsuko the alter ego of Paprika? Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream is repeated several times in eerily sinister ways), in a conversation on the internet that is portrayed as being as real as reality. With animation, you never know which reality is real, because they are all unreal. The internet, TV, and perhaps more primitively, cinema, are all outlets where the world dreams collectively. Chuang Tzu's dream in our modern age is multiplied like endless reflections between two mirrors. Our realities have become so fractured and fragmented that the modern man is never just one person anymore; reality is not just blurred, the concept of reality is altogether irrelevant.

There is a sleep condition called 'lucid dreaming,' which refers to the state of being fully conscious while dreaming. While knowing that he is in a dream, the dreamer is in full control of his dream, becoming God temporarily, able to manipulate and mold reality to his wishes. From my own experiences, this is possible up to the point where the dream regains control of itself and imposes something extraordinary - often nightmarish - on the dreamer. That is the point where the dreamer tries to shake himself awake; but this is often difficult, and the dreamer is trapped inside his own nightmare, unable to escape. Satoshi Kon (and perhaps also novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui) must be familiar with this, because although it is often funny and exuberant, Paprika is also terrifying in this way. Although now, it can be said, our waking life has become our playground for lucid dreaming. We are all lucid dreamers; one day our reality will regain control, and we would be trapped in a nightmare of our own making.


4. The Duchess of Langeais (Don't Touch the Axe)

Getting to like a new filmmaker is just like learning a new language - it always seems incomprehensible and impenetrable at first, and after the initial awkwardness of learning a few words, you soon begin to know what to expect, and then subsequently you can just slip into it as comfortably as you would with other languages.

It is altogether humbling when a filmmaker who began his career more than 50 years ago, and who influenced countless of filmmakers, is still making films as powerful as this today. The Cahiers crowd glorified the power of mise-en-scène in their criticism, but none of them - none - has perfected the much-feted concept as well as Jacques Rivette. Rivette's films are each a palpable reality, at once enigmatic and oneiric, his figures move around the frame as corporeal entities in a dance with the camera.

Having seen Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress around the same time, I was naturally more immediately drawn to Breillat's acute psychological realism. Though both deal with sexual politics that play out like theater - the novels on which they are based on are the stages on which the drama is played - both films are as different as waking life and dream. It might be useful to compare both films to see the merit of Rivette's film - ultimately it will be Rivette's that haunts your mind. I will now try to find reasons for this.

Breillat's film gropes for (and grasps) the reality of the characters' games by depicting them with an accurate feel for the social and psychological milieu, due, in large part, to some dazzling acting by Asia Argento; in a sense, she locates the reality of the characters within the stage of the tragedy. Rivette's film, as many of his films do, strains for the reality that lies elsewhere, beyond psychology and society, perhaps in a realm of spirituality, or perhaps it is a realm that is not even spirituality anymore. Breillat's film locates the metaphysical through logic while Rivette's film is squarely located in the metaphysical. If Breillat's film, like Italian Renaissance art, uses precisely constructed geometric perspective, then Rivette's film is like the Flemish Renaissance, where perspective and space is intuitively felt. Breillat makes you understand the metaphysical, but Rivette makes you feel it.

To look at how Rivette does this would warrant a lot more words, and I'm probably the least qualified to do this, even more so when I've yet to see much of his important work (Out 1 and L'Amour Fou to say the least). There are two scenes in this film, however, that are perhaps the most affecting I've seen in cinema this past year, and they are worth pointing out. Both are pivotal scenes in the story, and what Rivette does with them using cinema is incredible. One is a scene in the middle of the film that marks its turning point. In Balzac's original novella, the scene is written with a frank brutality, a raw realism that makes it almost like rape; in Rivette's film, however, this becomes a scene that hovers on the edge of consciousness, still brutal and nightmarish, but at once immediately physical and oneiric at the same time. The other scene is the film's ending - a pan to emptiness, the horizon, like the 'dash' in writing, disappearing into infinity, into speechlessness and silence.

Jean-Luc Godard's Week End

To put it in Godard's own words, the only way to really talk about film is to make a film itself. What makes his work interesting is that it is never cinema, but cinema about cinema. And thus, writing about Week End, a film about films, not only seems redundant, but a little foolish as well.

Much as we would like to assume Week End provokes discussion, Godard throws a huge fuck-you in the face of his audience (faux-intellectuals like me) in the opening scenes. "ANAL-YSE," instructs a film title that interrupts a long 'erotic' (is anything truly erotic in Godard's films? Or does he reflect eroticism?) monologue that is shot in a restless one-take that frames and re-frames its characters.

This nihilistic satire is not without its own humor though. The many brawl scenes are played out with an outrageous physicality that borders on slapstick; the (in)famous long tracking shot that shows the couple stuck in a traffic jam from hell with animals, yachts, and picnicking people in line is pure cinematic grandiloquence (Godard supposedly did the scene, which included 300 tracks in total, just to piss off his producer); every character in the film is murderous, and always angry. One scene shows the couple, stranded from a car accident, wandering in the forest and meeting Emily Brontë and an unnamed philosopher, a pair antithetical to the couple, full of graces and gentility. Brontë, the only character in the film that still sees beauty in rhymes and riddles, is burnt alive by the impatient couple, when she wouldn't give them directions out of the forest. 'Isn't it cruel to burn a philosopher?' the husband asks the wife. 'What do we care? She's not real anyway.' 'You know,' replies the husband. 'We are little better than her.' The only advantage that these ugly characters have over her is the fact that Godard has made them the protagonists of the film, and like them or not, they are the ones we have to watch till the end; their superiority comes only by birth (if characters are mankind, and the filmmaker is God), hence theirs is a class struggle similar to reality.

Their consciousness of this relates the underlying class struggle in every movie, film noir, horror or otherwise. The only reason why other characters die in a serial killer movie is purely random coincidence designated by the author. Whether or not the main characters are worthy of survival means nothing but for the fact that they are picked by the hand of the author to carry the story to its conclusion (although certain types of films might conform to a discernible moral code: in slasher movies the sexually promiscuous die first; Hitchcock killed his main character halfway through in Psycho and we see how shocking this effect is, even though by the code, that character deserved to die). This altogether existentialist theme comes through, especially, because the two main characters in Week End are resolutely annoying.

As in many of Godard's 60s period films, these characters know fully well that they are characters in a film, and constantly address the camera or refer to themselves as unreal. But what is 'real' anyway, when our perception of ourselves is only the relationship between how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others perceiving us? Reality - by that term encompassing self and society - as we know it, is nothing but reflections of more reflections, endlessly refracting and changing its quality as it passes through people. Although the nature of film makes it a pseudo construct, it can be also said to be a reflection when the author means it to be. If film is also a reflection of a reflection, isn't it a reality too?

The husband's comment: 'We are little better than them' makes sense when seen in this light - they might be little better than the people that are killed off, but we (the audience) are little better than anyone else in the film too. Framing this in its meta-context, when we have characters that know their innate quality (that they are merely characters), they cease to be inferior to us. In fact, these characters might even be superior to us, because they know themselves, but we - whether as individuals or as a society - including the filmmaker himself, Jean-Luc Godard, do not know ourselves. We look at the film, and the film looks back at us in utter contempt and disgust.

The film does not look at this as an absolute truth though; like many meta-films, there is a deep distrust of itself as a film. A manipulation/exploitation/distortion of image-realities is always suspect in its many (intentional or unintentional) political implications. Being a film 'aware' of itself, being a film that in parts exposes the manipulation of images through images (which, although paradoxical, might be the best means; it reminds me of Haneke's experiment in Funny Games), Week End never allows empathy with actions. In this regard, it can appear surrealistic to some extents. A scene features a frustrated concert pianist playing Mozart on a grand piano in a farmyard - his audience: a few scattered people and a whole lot of heavy farming machinery. In one long take that sweeps across the farm as it travels, people are put on the same plane as the landscape; it seems as if the audience were the steel vehicles rather than the humans.

To Godard, it is not ironic that technology has wrested the power over the world from humanity's hands. One could not easily forget the melancholic image of the wrinkled ex-film noir super spy Lemmy Caution quietly contemplating a gregarious hydraulic machine in Godard's disillusioned, information/technology-saturated Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. The product of the industrial revolution and civilization's need for some form or progress (regardless of what form) has resulted in the dominance of tools (one of which is cinema). These tools are the same weapons wielded by the Western civilization for purposes of imperialist hegemony, out of which capitalism is unleashed. Machinery, war, genocide are all poisonous waste produced by civilization (which, for argumentative purposes, we'll consider as uniquely Western).

Undoubtedly, it is a gross simplification of a complex evolution which can only point to one solution - a naive ideal of socialism (which is how I see Godard's thought to have evolved). But Godard finds a strong metaphor to express this theory, in which J.G. Ballard, and later David Cronenberg found a kinship - the car crash. It is a culmination of Western progress, ambitions, and also every form of entropy that is thrown in the way. And so Week End is littered with terrific crashes and copious amounts of blood - or, as Godard puts it, 'red paint.'


The artificiality of the image does not condone its complicity; there is nothing more political than the image. Godard intercuts a series of politically correct tableaux mixing people of different races and classes with an intertitle that accuses photography of becoming 'FAUX-TOGRAPHIE.' The fact that reality can be arranged, manipulated into a coherent reality - that is able to prolong its temporal existence - makes the image propaganda, whether or not the image itself believes in its politics. If considered on all the implications an image can make in its reality, then one cannot take the image lightly - even the placement of African and Arab characters in the film becomes charged with political meaning. It is more than a little chilling that the call-to-arms uttered by these characters in the film are the exact ones that are still being uttered today, 40 years later. In using these characters as mouthpieces for a diatribe against the West's neglect of the 'Third World', it is inevitable that we reach the other pole of this politics instead. They are reduced to symbols; tools to serve another design (in this case, Godard's design). It is perhaps, then, only socialist enough that Godard treats all his characters and designs as pure symbols.

Perhaps influenced by the situationists at the time, the film acts as one to drive people out of the cinemas; to destroy the shaded environment - the cinema - in which audiences replace spectacle for the real world. In Godard's Le Petit Soldat 7 years ago, a character might have declared that 'photography is truth, hence cinema is truth 24 frames per second,' but that ideology only seems naive now. Cinema - especially the hyperreal form of the musical, as parodied toward the end of the film - becomes a form of idealism that will forever disappoint. Equally unattainable as the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity), the political ideals of the repressed 'Third World,' musical and fantasy scenes - albeit with politics more subtly shaded - are also doomed to be corrupted by the real world. Quoting Georges Perec in Masculin Féminin, a character sighs while watching a film, 'It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to live.' If we attempt to replace this spectacle with reality, cinema will forever remain for us a disappointment. Hence, Godard's proclamation of 'FIN DE CINÉMA' at the end of the film is a call to subsume cinema with life, striving together for the ideal, and anticipating his purely political films with the Dziga Vertov Group.

by Paul Verlaine

The rain falls gently on the town.
Arthur Rimbaud

It's raining in my heart
As it rains in the town;
What is this langueur
That penetrates my heart?

O the gentle sound of the rain
On the ground and on the rooftops!
For a heart that frets
O the song of the rain!

It's raining without reason
In this disappointed heart
What! No betrayal?...
This grief is without reason

Nothing pains me more
Than to not know why
Without love and without hate
My heart has so much sorrow

-

II pleut doucement sur la ville.
Arthur Rimbaud

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon coeur?

Ô bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits!
Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie
Ô le chant de la pluie!

Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure.
Quoi! nulle trahison? . . .
Ce deuil est sans raison.

C'est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi
Sans amour et sans haine
Mon coeur a tant de peine!

--Paul Verlaine (my translation)

Year 2007 in movies (Part 1)

I realize it is February, a little late to be posting 'best of 2007' lists. But this list has been sitting in my Mac for the longest time; I've been hesitating to post it ever since I wrote it. I have a love-hate relationships with lists - the definitiveness of listing things down only contradicts the arbitrary nature of taste. If I hadn't held out this long to post this, I know I wouldn't have seen one of the great films of the last 2 years, Inland Empire. And now that I've already made up my list, I find it hard to displace any of the films below. So perhaps I should let it be known that I'm ready to abandon ship on my list any time. 5 years may pass and I might look back in horror - as is the case with my lists of previous years - but at least they serve as landmarks of my time.



10. Southland Tales

Just brilliant. The debate that started over it since its Cannes premiere now seems passé, and its defenders (J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin & Manohla Dargis) have made their points so well that there's really nothing else to add. But I'll just say one thing: it says more on the part of the critical institution than the audience it's 'defending' when Richard Kelly is slammed for precisely the same reasons that made Robert Altman so acclaimed in the 70's with his messy, bustling experiments. Southland Tales is as sarcastically funny as those films, and probably captures the new millennium's zeitgeist and celebrity culture better than any film I've seen so far.



9. No Country for Old Men

With the Oscars around the corner, the Coen brothers have been getting the exposure and acclaim they deserve with this pitch-black, dark-as-hell thriller. Recalling the macabre relentlessness of their first feature Blood Simple, this film is even sparser, and more intense, taking a potboiler premise and metamorphosing it into a monster all of its own. The Coens' biggest accomplishment however - and definitely also cinematographer Roger Deakins' - is the film's obsession with spaces. Using the premise of a chase, it shows different characters revisiting the same spaces, feeling the traces of the people who were previously there and leaving imprints for the people that would come after. This sense of space is already present in the plot of the McCarthy book, but the ability of the Coens to translate this sense of space onscreen, together with the intertwining of time, makes this one of their finest achievements.


8. Flight of the Red Balloon

The central concern of virtually all Hou Hsiao-Hsien films - how to make ultra-mundane conversations/scenarios engaging. Solution: to play with the texture and illusory/realistic quality of film itself. Referencing LaMorisse's The Red Balloon only slightly, Hou's film is aglow with warmth. It is an ode to modern life (in a foreign city) as much as it is an ode to cinema; or instead of finding bad metaphors for his film, perhaps it's more appropriate to say that his films are odes to life, itself. His hand is, as usual, characteristically light, and he seems to be able to use life as his raw material, capturing moments of wonder in fleeting scenes of magic.


7. Shortbus

If I had my way, Shortbus would be the poster queen of Indiewood. It has all of Indiewood's pitfalls - headlines-making 'taboos,' snappy 'I-wish-I-could-talk-like-that' dialogue, characters that were worked out sitting round a conference table ('Okay, you're the sex therapist that has never had an orgasm!'), an indie-cred soundtrack, themes (interconnectivity! alienation!) and most of all, sex sex sex and more sex. How did it go from a recipe for disaster (please refer to Little Miss Sunshine) to a 'work?' I wish I could answer that question. Maybe it's the gung-ho spirit with which John Cameron Mitchell and the ensemble cast approached the material - they don't so much pump up the characters and their arcs (minimal backstory, thank god!), as they iron them out and flatten them, ironically making it more sincere. Even the requisite uplifting un-happy ending is believable and, truly uplifting.


6. Children of Men

Perhaps a re-evaluation of the computer generated image is in order. Artistry in that field has reached new highs (Transformers) and new lows (Robert Zemeckis' shit) that it is cockeyed to just follow the critical trend of damning the use of it. CGI has become its own type of cinema altogether - it no longer makes the effort of covering up its falsity, parading, instead, the detail and artistry that went into its making. Beautifully rendered images, like that of Transformers has made them the attraction instead of the stars or plot; some, like the computer animation called Superman Returns tries to excel at both but succeed at neither. The fact that anything CGI could be called out immediately by any kid further removes the immediacy of cinema - we are so faraway from the times when audiences would run in horror at the image of the train pulling into the station in Lumiere's film. Some would say that the advent of CGI has killed the magic of going to the movies, I don't really know whether to agree. The CGI is a Brechtian technique too.

It is perhaps partly in reaction to this trend that determined the style of Children of Men. While Alfonso Cuarón has been using his long takes for ages (even in his bland Harry Potter entry), there is a strong determination to blur the lines between what is technically and realistically achievable with the camera and what is not. CGI and fancy camera trickery play a big part here, of course, but they counter the philosophy of the CGI spectacle altogether - instead of wondering how he did the shot, we wonder if we are going to escape alive.

In the 1950s André Bazin wrote, 'the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute.' Cuarón style is Bazin's theory in the CGI age. Although at times the long takes threaten to verge on showiness, Cuarón controls the bullet-speed pace with a tight rhythm of mise-en-scène. The effect is not awe at the maker but awe at the spectacle.

The relevance of the plot to reality is terrifying. I have dreams like these sometimes, and seeing them being transposed directly onto the screen breaks down the barrier of screen for me. It reclaims somewhat the magic of going to the movies.

To be continued.

A haiku

how dare I have thought
that the coldness of winter
was the birth of spring!