9/10 Nostalgia For The Light, Patricio Guzmán's latest documentary about his native Chile, is a poetic, phenomenal work of both genius and horror.
Guzmán begins the story describing his childhood love of astronomy. From here he moves to the Atacama Desert, a strip of land which covers over 100,000 square miles, and the preferred destination for professional astronomers because of the clear skies above it. Working around the astronomers on the floor of the desert are archaeologists, who trace the history of the area through fossils and etchings in the rock face. A parallel is drawn between both groups, as they try to peace together the past from the scarce clues left to them. Both also attempt to answer fundamental questions about the purpose and origin of life and of humanity.
From here Nostalgia winds in another group who are seeking answers about the past - relatives of political prisoners who disappeared under the Pinochet, their bodies scattered in the vast desert without markings or a proper burial. Despite the seeming impossibility of the task, they continue their search - a new body is found every once in a while to keep their hopes up. Guzmán conducts heartbreaking interviews with some of the searchers, as they describe how they often find just part of body (the result of corpses being buried and re-buried to make finding them even more difficult) but are still able to find a morsel of closure in a foot, or a jawbone.
No matter what strands of stories Guzmán is following - they intersect each other throughout - the film looks consistently stunning. The images of far off solar systems and constellations, as seen through powerful telescopes, reveal twisting spirals of immense beauty and colour. Even as a harsh contrast to this the never-ending dunes and rocks of the Atacama look beautiful, in their own unforgiving way. At various points throughout the film flecks appear super-imposed over the images, like specks of dust floating in a ray of light. It is never clear what they represent; glistening stars, sand whisked by the wind, or the memories of the lost bodies buried in the desert, floating in an emptiness.
The collage of images and sound, perfectly fitted, recall Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, with the legacy of the Pinochet regimes crimes against humanity that give Guzman's work a drive, and an emotional tie.
It is indeed this legacy, and the reluctance of Chile to confront it, which Nostalgia For The Light aims to tackle. We are enthusiastic when astronomers and archaeologists peer back into the distant past, and pick away at unsolved mysteries, and yet a more recent past, the Chile of the dictatorship, is largely ignored. One woman who is searching for the body of her brother says that her, and the people like her, and referred to as 'Chile's leprosy,' and they are marginalized for literally digging up the past. As Lautaro Núñez, an archaeologist, notes, there are still people alive today who helped to murder the political prisoners, and who helped dispose of the bodies. And yet they do not come forward, and do not help the relatives find the closure they yearn for.
Guzmán's point recalls the old saying "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". We need an understanding of the past to live in present. Whether in the stars, or the earth, that is what we are searching for.
The Master is a
big film for Joaquin Phoenix. It’s his first appearance since fall-out of his
fake documentary I’m Still Here, in which
he faked a mental breakdown and aspirations towards a rap career. It was an
ultra-dedicated piece of method acting which could have exorcised him from
Hollywood. His role as Freddie Quell, a drifter ex-marine who falls in with a
religious cult, needed to be fantastic, to re-establish his place as one of his
generation’s best actors, and Phoenix does indeed play the role exceedingly well.
His Freddie is a tightened coil of a man, constantly hunched, as if crushed by
a physical injury sustained during the Second World War (of which he is a
veteran), or by deeper emotional toils. His face is constantly contorted into a
snarl, and he mumbles most of his lines in a Massachusetts drawl. He is ugly,
in every sense of the word.
The Master is also
a big film for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Phoenix he has been away from the
limelight for a few years, emerging now to write, direct and produce the follow
up his 2009 masterpiece There Will Be
Blood. Regarded as one of the best films of the last decade, it would be a
hard act to follow for anyone, but Anderson has a greater weight of a
career-long run of excellent films to uphold. Again, like Phoenix, his work on The Master accomplishes this task, directing a film with extraordinary depth, both in content, as well as visually. Unfortunately I was unable to see the film in the intended 90mm version, but even the 'standard' print looks gorgeous. There is a pervasive sense of sadness around the film, as Anderson invites us to pity both of the main characters in turn.
He again returns to a theme that has become as familiar a
trademark of his films as expertly crafted tracking shots –the father-son
relationship. The patriarch of The Master
is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), figurehead of ‘The Cause’, a cult
which believes that a person’s current life is pre-determined by
past-existences from thousands of years before. Like Phoenix, Hoffman gives a
terrific performance (as does Amy Adams, playing Dodd’s wife Peggy). He delivers
his solo scenes, the sermons extolling the theories of The Cause, with the magnetic
fervour typical of film’s religious zealots (powerful, but not alienating), but
his best scenes are those when he is one-on-one with Freddie. Theirs, like many
of the father-son relationships in Anderson’s films, is a tense one, based on
fear, or need, as much as love. It is an obsession; a need to conquer the
other, a conquest which they believe will help the other. Think of the warring
relationship between Daniel and Eli in There
Will Be Blood. Dodd believes that he can be the saviour of the wayward
Freddie, and adopts him with a view to making him a project for The Cause, a
test of their true redemptionary powers.
Dodd first finds Quell drunk a yacht where the former is
hosting his daughter’s wedding (as well as allowing The Cause some time away
from the ‘attacks’ detailed by Peggy – dissenters, non-believers, and Lancaster’s
ex-wives). Quell has fled from a farmer where he worked briefly as a land
labourer. An elderly man drank some of his homemade alcohol (one of several
toxic blends Freddie makes throughout the film, using everything from paint
thinner to torpedo fuel) as died. Before this Freddie worked in an upper-class
department store as a photographer, which gave his access to further chemicals
he can use as intoxicants, and offered him teasing glimpses of perfect families
captured on film.
As stated above, much of the film focuses on the
interactions between Freddie and Lancaster. Some of the most gripping scenes of
the film, (the same ones which are the most uncomfortable, for this is an
uncomfortable film) are a back-and-forward between the two men. Soon after they
first meet Lancaster tapes an interrogation by him of Freddie, where he grills
him about his view of life, as well as his sexual relationship with his aunt.
Lancaster forces Freddie to undergo a form of past life regression therapy (the
practices of The Cause appear to be mainly a cherry picking of this and parts
of a Buddhist circle of life theory), but, unlike other characters in the film
who take part in this, he asks Freddie to think about Dorris, his pre-war love.
Despite this focus on the paternal relationship, Anderson
still devotes time (the film is drenched in detail, and strains to fit in even its
two hour-plus running time) to explore The Cause, and the insular workings of a
cult. Once Freddie meets them, it films hands itself over completely
(flashbacks aside) to the group. Dodd’s biological son Val, for example, at one
point denounces his father’s theories, and claims they are made up on the spot.
After this scene he disappears from the film, only re-appearing when he returns
to the fold once again, at The Causes’ England-based school. This is similar to
the way that real-life cults work – when you get in, you are always in. If you
leave, you are forgotten about. It is at this point that doubts about Lancaster and The Cause begin to seep in. Freddie begins a flirtation with scepticism, and Lancaster is slowly revealed as a fraud, and as a much weaker man than he imagines himself to be.
Similarly, the theories of The Cause are presented to
outsiders (the audience) as nonsense. Anderson refrains from any detailed explanation
of Lancaster’s writings, leaving us to pick up odds and ends as they are
dropped in front of the camera. What is clear is that it is a theory obsessed
with metaphysics, and of the ‘journey’ which a person takes throughout their
many lives. Another part of the teachings are important to the role of the cult
in the film in general – the clear superiority of men to animals. Men,
Lancaster states, are not animals,
and animalistic actions – like flatulence – are to be looked down upon.
As a war veteran, Quell has seen some inhumane - some animalistic - things. He suffers from some kind of mental disorder, which is not specified, but inferred it may be some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This goes some way to explain his often-sociopathic behaviour. In the opening beach scene, for example, he starts dry-humping a woman rendered from sand by his fellow sailors. They laugh, but the scene, and Freddie, drag on, as he becomes more graphic and intense in his pleasuring of the sand-woman. Later he lies down with it, as if enjoying a post-coital hug. His is oblivious to their disgust and confusion, or least does not care (another credit to Phoenix's performance is the way he portrays Freddie's disorder in a way that avoids the typical Hollywood tropes of verbal tics, or being able to count cards). His job as a store cameraman exposes him to family life, and to happiness he cannot attain. His past, be it in the war or before that, haunts him, and has reduced him to a shell of a man, on the run and alcohol dependant. In this scenario, religion becomes a safety net, a shelter, and, as Marx stated, 'the heart of a heartless world'. Marx believed that embracing religion was actually a cry for help, and that religious belief was not a barrier to a socialist society, but a sign that this society was needed, even if the people did not yet know it.
Anderson's films, as obsessed as they are with warped representations of the family unit, often allow themselves to spread out into analysis of a wider situation. There Will Be Blood explores the growth of greed and capitalism in America, Boogie Nights looks at the morality, and the negative effects of, the porn industry. The Master is an exploration of the abandoning of war veterans, and their various coping strategies. The film was apparently inspired by Anderson reading that post-war societies are particularly susceptible to new forms of organised religion. Set in 1950, The Master captures a period of American history where the hangover of the most brutal war in world history remained, albeit below the surface. Around this time, many of the men who were mentally scared by the deaths and bloodshed may have realised that they were not getting any better, and that their PTSD was not subsiding. Destruction on such an epic scale removed the barrier of civilisation between men and animals, reducing life to a dangerously pointless exercise. What The Cause offered Freddie, in this context, is obvious.
This post originally
started as a feature I planned to write for my college magazine. As I’ve
graduated now, I imagine this will be the last time I regurgitate and reform a
piece of writing that was intended for the pages of Fusion magazine first.
There was no specific
reason that this wasn’t published – I asked my editor if it would be possible
for me to write a brief article that broached the ‘films to see before you die’
subject. I decided to settle for ten, because it’s a round number that could
fit into the space available. Any more and it would have just been a list with
a sentence each for description. Right from the very start I planned it to
reflect my own personal tastes, and to be open about that – the same rule
applies here.
I part wrote it, but
never finished it in time for my second-to-last issue (I’d been given two
pages, spread over two editions) and I forgot about it in time for my final
issue, due to exams and such.
Ten films is, actually,
far too insignificant to cover the history of cinema. It couldn’t cover a
decade, and, in a lot of cases, couldn’t cover a full year.
But any more and it’s
a mammoth task that I don’t have the energy or interest to properly devote
myself to. If you do want this kind of list, you can’t do any worse than the
annual ‘1001 Films To See Before You Die’ tome, which introduced me to
countless great films I likely would never have heard of otherwise. Similarly,
Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film is similarly expansive and, if you wish, can be
treated as a reading list.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
A classic example of the minimalist, religious power that
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film channelled, The Passion of Joan of Arc is simply a
beautiful film. It was Dreyer’s last silent film, one which was adapted
straight from actual records of Joan of Arc’s trial. There would likely have
been a temptation to make a film on this subject a huge, D.W. Griffiths-style
melodrama, but Dreyer went in the complete opposite direction – much of the
film is shot in extreme close-up, the screen framing Renee Falconetti’s face as
she is interrogated by demonic court – who are also shot close up to emphasis
their inhumanity and leering cruelty. Mark Cousins recognises these shots as
what began to differentiate cinema from theatre – cinema allowed actors to move
closer to the audience, or further away. Like the films of Sergei Eisenstein,
The Passion of Joan of Arc helped to define cinema as a unique, special entity.
Falconetti, at the instruction of Dreyer, wore no make-up –
it is as if it was removed to let the full emotion of her terrific performance
get to the camera, and to further his quest for complete minimalism. The walls
of the sets were painted pink to remove any glare that could be caught by the
camera. Dreyer, recognising the one-off performance of Falconetti, was content
to allow her to loom over the film, instantly becoming its defining
characteristic. Even though it is shot in such a refined way, Dreyer still
finds space for small acts of symbolism. Falconetti is frequently shown with
pale light around her head, like a halo. The religious Dreyer would reprise
this lighting in his later films, such as the austere Ordet.
In many ways, The Passion... is a ‘difficult’ film. Watching
silent films from the 21st century, when we are so used to dialogue,
means that it can often be difficult to follow the exact nature of the plot in silent
films. The Passion... is no exception – the title cards, which do carry text,
are sparse compared to the amount of talking that the actors actually do on
screen, leading to a sense that something is missing.* And the intensity of the close-ups can be wearing. But the austere beauty of Dreyer's vision always shines through.
L'Atalante - 1934
I'm a huge fan of Jean Vigo. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, leaving less than three hours worth of films - three shorts and L'Atalante, his only feature. But all are injected with his anarchic style, all attempting a mixture of social realism and surrealism (a trait picked up by Lindsay Anderson, hugely inspired by Vigo's work). I struggled to pick between L'Atalante, and the film that Vigo made just before it, Zero for Conduct (of which Anderson's classic If..., which nearly made it on to this list itself, is largely derived from) but in the end went for L'Atalante.
Jean and Juliette are that old cinema stapled - young lovers chasing excitement, with life bound to come between them. While Jean is a sea-faring adventurer, Juliette dreams of living a Parisian life of glamour. They get married, and inhabit Jean's barge L'Atalante with Pere Jules, a drunken madman who lives in a nest of nick-nacks he's collected from his years at sea.
Vigo was able to draw on the irrevent style of his earlier short A propos de Nice, as well as mixing it, in a fantastic scene near the end of the film, with Eisenstein's montage methods. But whereas Eisenstein used this method to convey the horror of the Odessa steps, Vigo uses it to express the longing of the separated lovers. L'Atalante sees Vigo channelling a romantic tale which was being told before the Lumiere brothers ever thought of stringing photographs together, and subverting it with the various styles and ideologies that cinema had offered up ever since. Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou played as big a influence as any of the romantic dramas which served it plot-wise.
Vigo's tragically young death, which left a cinematography shorter than any one Transformers film, does not, as you may expect, hang over L'Atalante, even though he had died just a few months before it had finished shooting. It almost seems to run on the energy of the love of Jean and Juliette, bounding with enthusiaism, not just for idealistic young love, but for what cinema can do, and what it can achieve, and what, most importantly, it can make people feel.
A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1959)
It was two Frenchmen who invented cinema, and it was two Frenchmen who, in the late fifties, helped to revolutionise it once again. Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard dragged cinema, kicking and screaming, from the studios and onto the Champs Elysees.
Coutard, a photographer like the Lumiere brothers before him, filmed scenes on a handheld camera, allowing them to effectively shoot while on the run. Jean-Paul Belmondo's chain-smoking, unbelieveably cool car thief Michel Poiccard, is himself on the run from police after shooting dead an officer. As he races about the streets of Paris, the film races after him. The film, like Poiccard, stands still for barely a second (barely, meaning that it does allow time for a Godard Standard - a long, bedroom set conversion between the leading man and woman). The film was shot without permission giving the cast a feeling of tension and excitement, which transfers onto the screen.
What A bout be souffle is most remembered for is breaking the 'rules' of cinema. Before, films were shot as if there was a line behind the camera, where the film stopped and the audience began. Shots didn't cross this line. Godard decided against this rule, and many others. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (arguably the last Western-made film before Breathless which had the same revoltionary impact on film), Godard was accused of being a hack who had no idea what he was doing (he still gets that, actually). But, like many of his French New Wave contemporaries, he was a writer for Cahiers du Cinema, and knew exactly what he was doing (Welles, in a bid to prove that he had indeed learnt the rules of the trade before ignoring them, made The Stranger, his most 'Hollywood' film, and his only financially successful one).
It is fitting that Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo award for A bout de souffle, (an award given in homage to Vigo to reward a French director who displays an independent spirit in their film making) because it simiarly uses a standard plotline, revolutionising around it. Godard borrowed a lot from old Film Noirs (Humphery Bogart gets a number of references throughout), while Vigo, as we have seen, made a romantic film. Both managed to use the basics of classic cinema to change it further - both fit perfectly into the ever-changing, ever-evolving styles of film.
The Red Desert (1965)
Earlier this year The Guardian, and no doubt a decent number of film blogs and magazine, ran articles focussing on the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day, and that Bergman was incorrectly sitting on the throne of European Art-House Film King. It should have been Antonioni, they argued. It should be. Bergman called Antonioni 'boring', and he sometimes was - but so, sometimes, was Bergman. Bergman's films sometimes feel as if they have become stereotypical European Art-House works (probably due to their ubiqitous nature in parodies), and Antonioni offers more to explore in his films.
Like Carl Theydor Dreyer, Bergman was heavily interested in religion, and the human spirit in these conditions. His films were dark, but overall humanity came out more positive than negative, even if we struggled at times. Antonioni's attitude to the human race is largely negative - he rarely, if ever, portrayed his protaganists as likeable, or even tolerable. Often they had a disinterest in life - they suffered from ennui, and they couldn't even care about that.
Like L'Avventura before it, and Blow-Up after it, The Red Desert fails to really find a plot, despite presenting the audience with a mystery. In L'Avventura it's a disapperance, in Blow-Up, a murder, and in The Red Desert it is the nature of Monica Vitti's depression. She wanders around an industrialised landscape somewhere in Italy - it is bleak, and the bleakness is emphsised by Antonioni's use of colour - or, more specifically, his lack of it.
Much of the landscapes which Vittis haunts - and haunt her, as the film goes on - are filled with flat greys, greens, blacks and blues, with an occasional burst of technicolour in the background. It is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's M, which, despite being at the forefront of the sound revolution, showed restraint in it's use of dialogue and natural noises, where others overloaded. This was Antonioni's first colour film, and the effects are the same - the restraint places more emphasis on what the colours/sounds actually are, rather than just that fact that they are there.
The Red Desert is not only a key work in Antonioni's filmography, but perhaps the best use of colour in film history (for me, the only thing that comes close to beating it is Bertolucci's The Conformist.
La Haine (1994)
La Haine works better under it's English translation title - Hate. La Haine is a neo-realism drama without the humanity. It follows three 'banlieue' kids the day after a riot in a Parisian suburb. A friend of theirs - although it's suggested they barely knew him - his been hospitalised by the police, leading, as it does regularly, to the tension between poverty-aflicted youths and the police force finally giving out to violence. Vinz, the most unhinged, cop-hating of the three, has stolen a police gun, and is threatening to use it. Hubert and Said follow him around the city, picking through the chaos that lies in a run down housing estate both after a riot and in general.
It may be hugely stylised, by La Haine is a hugely powerful film - it doesn't lose any of the social impact that a film would if Quentin Tarintino would, for example. The three boys come from three distinct social background - Vinz is Jewish, Hubert Afro-French, and Said Maghrebian (it's never revealed his specific country of origin, but this does leave it open to suggestions that he's part of an Algerian immigrant family, which further expands the dynamic between the three, and their role in society). At one point they meet with a group of Le Pen supporting Neo-Nazis; at another they argue with a camera crew looking for a story about the violence the night before; in between, they clash with the police at various points. Throughout, director Mathieu Kassovitz's attempts to explore contemporary France could not be clearer.
La Haine succeeds because it articulates the anger - the hate - which rules the everyday life of thousands of people like Vinz, Hubert and Said. It does so with fantastic flair - one stand-out scene, from a film full of them, features a DJ playing a remix of 'Fuck Da Police' and Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'. It has to be seen to be believed.
Part two will be out at some point during the week, I hope. Let me know how much you disagree with these choices below.
*Earlier this year I volunteered a silent film festival in
Bo’ness, where, among films like Safety First and I Was Born But..., I was
lucky enough to catch 'The Lost Art of The Film Explainer'. It was once of the best experiences I
have ever had at the cinema. Accompanied by a two-person, multi-instrumental
backing band, ‘The Film Explainer’ Andy Cannon showcased a forgotten art-form – during the
silent film era, many of the people who attended the cinema couldn't read, or films were shabbily put together so that, even if you could read the title cards, they were difficult to follow. So film theaters began to hire people who would read out the intertitles of the film, as well as just generally narrate it.
Often they were just the manager of the cinema who lazily read off the screen, but many other people made a living from it. They were especially popular in Japan, where cinemas would advertise films based on what Film Explainer was going to be narrating. They did it in all manner of styles - political, comedic, serious. They were so popular that when 'talkies' were introduced in Japan many cinemas turned down the sound so that they could keep their Film Explainers.
Andy Cannon's style was lovely - the films he choose were forgotten, and largely crap, and he made fun of them, but in an affectionate way, in a way that you can tell he genuninely loves film, silent film especially. There's more information here: http://www.reelscotland.com/the-lost-art-of-the-film-explainer-19-august-filmhouse-edinburgh/ and I cannot urge you enough to go see it if you get a chance.
The Coen Brothers continued their flirtation with nilihism and existentialist philosophies in 2009s A Serious Man. Larry Gopnik suffers a series of unfortunate personal and professional events which cause him to question his faith - his life leaves him for Sy Ableman, his kids show him no respect, his brother Arthur sleeps on the family couch and spends most of his time draining a cyst on his back, and Larry's aim of getting tenure is being set back by anonymous letters critising him.
It's generally accepted that A Serious Man draws Camus' theory of the absurd - the message is that we shouldn't try to decode or understand life. Events happen, we exist within the confines of these events. Larry's quest for answers, and the inability of him to find these answers, is underscored by the tale of 'The Goy's Teeth', a seemingly allegorical story without an ending, or, as we eventually, realise, any real meaning at all.
To take any Coen Brothers' film at face value though, is missing half the point of the film itself. The key to a great understanding of A Serious Man is the setting: 1967. The late sixties, especially 1968, have become an infamously turbulent time - the Vietnam war escalated far beyond control. American forces peaked in number during the Tet Offensive, and the spread of the conflict into Cambodia was on the horizon. The opposition to the war led to a wave of student unrest, most famously leading to the May 68 protests and riots in Paris, during the which a wildcat general strike was called and the country brought to a standstill. Any optimism gained at the 'end' of the Cold War would surely have been lost by this point.
Culturally, something was changing as well. Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a book about the 1967 Oscars, argues that American cinema was changed forever by the new range of films that were chosen in the most desired film award in the world. The Best Picture Catergory that year was contested by Look Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, Doctor Doolittle, Bonnie and Clyde and the eventual winner In The Heat Of The Night. The influence of the French New Wave, and changing attitudes to race, sex and relationships, as well as a huge shift in the traditionally successful Oscar genres are all represented in the shortlist, which covered the '67 and took place in the spring of '68.
This is the volatile setting of A Serious Man, one which the conservative and resigned Larry Gopnik, in his conservative and resigned Wisconsin town, could hear banging at the front door. The transitions which the world is going through are symbolised in two major ways in the film. The first is the bar mitzvah of Larry's son Danny - the Jewish journey from boyhood to manhood, and the younger generation coming of age as they discovered their political might over the next year. Danny is already engaging in acts of rebellion - he spends a great deal of the movie, including his bar mitzvah, stoned.
The final scene of A Serious Man, which a tornado is seen approching the town, is again a huge piece of symbolism - the tearing up of everything that Larry knows.
As mentioned at several points in the film, Danny has signed Larry up to the Columbia Record Club, who begin hassling Larry to buy albums - specifically, either Santana's Abraxas or Creedence Clearwater Revival's Comso's Factory. Given the Coen's constant use of a period setting in their films, and fantastic reconstuction of an American small town in the late sixties seen in A Serious Man, it seems strange that they would include two albums released in 1970. Again, another reference to an emerging counter-culture, something underlined by what might be a genius bit of intertexuality by the Coens. Comso's Factory is the Creedence tape which The Dude has in his stolen car in The Big Lebowski. The Dude is the antithesis of Larry, and symbolic of the counter-culture discussed above (The Dude says in the film he was a member of the Seattle Seven, and is based heavily on real life Seattle Seven member Jeff Dowd).
Overall, I don't think A Serious Man can be considered entirely by either of the two train of thoughts talked about above. It has the mark of the a great film, in that it makes you want to discuss the true meaning of it, teasing out clues, like I have in my analysis above. I don't think that the aburdist nature of it can be denied, but to settle on that being the meaning behind the film is missing out on a whole lot more.
