Carax's "Merde"

Emerging from the sewers of Tokyo to the strains of Akira Ifukube’s “Godzilla” score, Merde is dirty, unkempt, with long, claw-like finger nails, a bizarre hooked beard and a dead, milky white eye – Denis Lavant strikes an impossible figure, his body capable of contortions and configurations seemingly not possible with regards to normal human physiology. His increasingly violent escapades range from stealing cigarettes and flowers to licking arm pits to, eventually (almost inevitably), fire bombing the Japanese populous with WWII era grenades. A cultural terrorist? The return of the historical memory or the repressed “other”? Lavant returns to his sewer abode, limping past a burned out tank and a strategically placed Japanese rising sun, only to reemerge as a force of pure anarchic chaos. The forces of law and order never far behind, Lavant is eventually captured by Tokyo authorities and put on trial. Coming to his defense is superstar French attorney Jean-François Balmer, who (mysteriously) shares Lavant’s crooked beard, pupil-less eye and mysterious language (a language based on grunts and violent gesticulations, which leads to a hilarious, minutes long, subtitle free conversation between the two – it is Marx’s Bros inspired lunacy). Director Leos Carax then embarks on a series of familiar pop culture tropes – religious cults spring up in honor of Lavant’s “Merde”, his image is plastered on posters and tee shirts in a striking, black and white print that resembles a generation of Che merchandise, action figures, etc. But Lavant remains incorrigible – unrepentant, he’s given the death penalty and hung, only to then be resurrected. The film ends with a joking text, a taunt of future installments – coming soon, “Merde in USA” (Godard would approve).

Merde as punk rock Jesus Christ? Perhaps it is Carax himself, returning from a decade in the wilderness to provoke once again. The victim of a series of follies – some of which might have been his own doing – Carax seemed to disappear after the hugely expensive, and commercially unsuccessful, Lovers on the Bridge, which led to a lengthy gap in production, before returning with Pola X, another commercial and critical flop (that Pola X might remain his masterpiece, a highly personal, dense experience full of weird symbols, codes, and genre mutations, all in the service of a main character literally dying for his art work, led some people to question Carax’s sincerity, if not his sanity. It remains their loss). A decade long separation for Lavant and Carax; it is difficult for me to separate the two, Lavant long Carax’s preferred on screen surrogate, and one who has gone from boy-like innocence in the throes of first love (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) to a an old man (Denis’ Beau Travail), his body chiseled out of granite, his face creased with lines that seem the result not of aging but of a particularly brutal knife fight. Lavant’s initial rampage as Merde – a long, graceful backwards tracking shot down a Tokyo sidewalk, Lavant seemingly finding his feet for the first time; stumbling, but a graceful stumble – the movement, of the human body and of the camera, harkens back to Bad Blood - a jubilant, younger Lavant, in a moment of ecstasy, cart wheeling, skipping, jumping, running down a Parisian sidewalk, Carax’s camera barely able to keep up to this fierce explosion of pure energy, this little ball of fury that has a name. Carax himself seems drunk with the possibilities of the camera, indulging in long tracking shots, split screens, extreme close ups and more meditative wide shots – it is almost as if he is reacquainting himself with an old lover, this camera that he hasn’t seen, or touched or caressed in far too long. I look forward to Merde in USA – lets just hope it doesn’t take another decade before it happens.

Some News:

I don't plan on turning this little site into a clearing house for news, but several things have happened in the last week that seem worthy of discussion:

-after the news several weeks ago of New Yorker Films untimely demise, the first question on everyone's mind was what happens to their film holdings? With the advent of home video, people might forget that some companies still posses, and occasionally distribute, actual 35mm film. In point of fact, New Yorker Films itself was bought out some time ago by a larger company riddled with debt, which in turn used New Yorker's rich film holdings as collateral on loans. When the collectors called in their marker and no one had any money, said library became up for grabs. A recent post at Dave Kehr's site has details on the upcoming auction, in which films can apparently be bought individually or en mass. We'll see who steps up to the plate (or if any one actually has the funds to do so). In the meantime, I would assume that the company's dvds are, for all practical purposes, out of print, so snatch them up if you see them. Yes, they aren't exactly at Criterion levels of digital excellence, but sometimes the films themselves are simply worthwhile enough.

-more disturbing news for us beleaguered cinephiles - Kent Jones has resigned his position as associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I wasn't aware of any behind the scenes tumult until this news dropped almost literally out of the blue (Jones himself was recently posting on Dave Kher's site about an upcoming Robert Mulligan series that he seemed particularly proud of). According to Glenn Kenny, who has spoken with Film Comment (the magazine of the FSLC) editor Gavin Smith, the resignation will not alter Jone's status as the magazine's key contributor (sorry Amy and Olaf, but it's true). Here's the original Indiewire story, as well as the comments page on Kehr's site and Some Came Running. David Hudson's site also collates some related links, so go there as well.

-two articles over at The Moving Image Source: first up, critic Michael Atkinson eulogizes vhs. I assume that anyone roughly my own age got most of their film education through these little hard plastic rectangles, and I must admit I'm sad to see them go (I've still got a few hundred of them stacked up on shelves in my office). Anthony Kaufman's piece reports on the more pressing concern of films that get lost in the shuffle from one format to another. As I brought up in my last post on New Yorker Films, there is a persistent myth, brought about by ignorance coupled with studio logic, that anything and everything is available to the home viewer. Kaufman quotes Dave Kehr, that of the over 150,000 titles listed on TCM's list of American films, less than 4 percent are available in any format for home viewing. Dire straits indeed.


-a recent piece from Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent has, for lack of a more congenial term, really fucking pissed me off (it's my blog, and I'll curse if I want to). Macnab proffers the thesis that the French New Wave, on the eve of an academic conference celebrating its 50th anniversary, has lead, irreducibly, to decades of inferior films, filmmakers and insurmountable expectations. That is, new generations of European filmmakers are subjected to the standards of the New Wave and "found wanting", to which Macnab suggests a casting off of those standards - his deduction? That the young turks are now venerated old masters, therefore their railing against a "cinema of quality" has lost its validity. Really, go a head and read the article. It's here.

Back? Good. Pissed off? Me too.

I'm particularly fond of the following: "meanwhile, new French directors are burdened with a sense of expectation that they simply can't meet. Whether Leos Carax, Mathieu Kassovitz or the bearish old Jean-Claude Brisseau, these film makers are not simply judged on what they've done but their work is assessed (and ultimately found wanting) through the prism of the past." Poor old Kassovitz, who followed up his international breakthrough La Haine with a tepid Hollywood style thriller called The Crimson Rivers before jumping ship to America, where he has made two masterpieces in a row - the Halle Berry vehicle Gothika and the Vin Desiel mega-hit Babylon A.D. But perhaps these films failed not on their own (virtually non-existent) merits, but because they just simply can't live up to the expectations of the New Wave. Brisseau and Carax, on the other hand, seem to be making whatever it is they want, and on their own terms. Carax's bad boy reputation, obscure working methods and huge budgets have done as much to curtail his career as anything else, and unlike some of the venerated New Wave masters that he is indebted to, Carax's entire filmography is readily available on home video (we certainly can't say the same thing about much of Godard, almost all of early Chabrol and Rivette himself, the most underrepresented of the whole group). Brisseau, meanwhile, is producing film after film of pretentious art house soft core porn (although Secret Things and The Exterminating Angels, his last two features, are good for some titillation and inadvertent laughs).

Macnab sums up with a hell of an ending - "when all the academics assemble in London in March and April to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Nouvelle Vague, you just hope that they will spare a moment to reflect on the movements checkered legacy. Over the last half century, there have been many drab films made in the name of the New Wave... that everybody today still looks back to Godard and Truffaut suggests how bereft of ideas European filmmakers have been since the days of Breathless." You can almost sense the sneer on Macnab's face when he hisses the word "academic" - good to know that America isn't alone in its rabid anti-intellectualism. As for being "bereft of ideas", a heck of a large generalization, it seems to me that Techine, Assayas, Denis, Desplechin, Chereau, Nolot, Cantet, Noe and Breillat are doing just fine for themselves. Perhaps Macnab has simply never gotten over Truffaut's famous disparaging remarks about the British film industry, something along the lines of a certain incompatibility between the terms "cinema" and "British". To which we might now add, a certain incompatibility between the terms "intelligent criticism" and "British".

Obituary:

The word began to spread last week, and was made official on Monday, that venerable distributor New Yorker Films was going under. It's hard to imagine the impact the company made in just its first few years, way back in 1965, well before the advent of home video and, later, dvd, when film was still watched in theaters and projected off of, um, film. They released a number of now established classics - films by Akerman, Herzog, Bresson, Lanzman, etc. Just a quick glimpse at my own video shelf reveals about two dozen of their cassettes, and about a dozen of their dvds (including films by Denis, the Dardennes, Resnais, Godard, Sang-soo, Zhangke and Kiarostami) . Indeed, the transition from video to digital perhaps revealed the first signs of an impending decline, if not out and out collapse - a number of their holdings never made the jump from one format to the other, either through lack of care, concern or rights retention. As point of reference, their video releases of Bresson's The Devil Probably and A Gentle Woman have not only not been released on dvd by them, they have in fact not been issued on dvd by anyone at all in this country.
Another sign of the times? Not quite - even before our current financial woes, distributors were going under left and right (Think Film, Palm Pictures, Wellspring, etc). More a sign, then, of the shifting tides of the state of film itself. As fewer and fewer companies release fewer and fewer films, even one financial disappointment can spell certain doom. Add into the mix higher budgets and increased advertising dollars for those few films, in addition to shrinking exhibition opportunities, and you've got a near suicidal business plan. So what's the concerned cinephile to do? Your guess is as good as mine. Smaller companies like the recently founded Benten Films are trying to carve out a little corner of the market on their own modest terms, more a labor of love than anything else, while Koch Lorber and IFC continue to release worthwhile films, although I fear to increasingly diminishing returns. While Washington fumbles about with its bailout plans and the bankers wait with baited breath, I'll be mourning (in private, with a minimum of fuss - a state that us increasingly marginalized film lovers are becoming more and more familiar with).

Oshima @ The Film Center

“The problematic nature of Oshima’s work arises from the question: what is the relationship between this me and the struggle out there?”
Noel Burch, “To the Distant Observer”

“Film critics, film festivals, film magazines - they are all too obsessed with the latest thing, the cutting edge, the most incredible new discovery. Retrospectives are disappearing from film festivals and slipping into the walled-up tombs of museums, archives, libraries and cinémathèques. You can't read about an old movie - not even one by Rossellini or Borzage - in an issue of Film Comment or Cinema Scope these days unless it either a. is touring in a roadshow, b. is the object of a fabulous print restoration, or c. has just been released in an expensive dvd box set. Meanwhile, the fashions flush in and out: Wong Kar-wai, Sokurov and Kiarostami are yesterday's news, as we greedily leap upon Gomes and a couple of Filipinos.”
Adrian Martin, “Rank and file: The (re)discovery of William Klein”

I can’t bring myself to totally disagree with Adrian Martin and his above rant on criticism and the desire to turn learning into a marketable “event” – such is the nature of capitalism and commodities. I said something similar myself in the introduction to my end-of-year best list (a tradition that, in itself, seems to typify this desire to stay on “the cutting edge”). But I’m surprised by his tone – for one, my past experiences with Martin’s writings reveal an engaged, funny and above all optimistic critic, and second: that this kind of tirade does a certain dis-service to the magazines he singles out for derision. They happen to be two of my favorites, and, while both are guilty of the occasional hype mongering, both magazines, as institutions, have always struck me as the kind of film coverage we so desperately need more of. Furthermore, Martin’s dismissal of Film Comment doesn’t take into account their regular columns by Guy Maddin or Alex Cox, always dedicated to obscure past oddities that have been largely forgotten by the culture at large, or Cinemascope editor Mark Peranson’s peculiar blend of enthusiasm and anti-establishment curmudgeon (and since I'm unfamiliar with "Gomes" or these "couple of Filipinos", I'm looking foward to yet another avenue of untapped possibilities).
If the situation at “museums, archives, libraries and cinematheques” is really as dire as Martin would have us believe, thank god we Chicagoans have The Film Center. Their current retrospective of Nagisa Oshima is probably the first major event of the new year (woops, there I go) and indicative of the Center’s dedication to the oeuvres of key directors - about this same time last year saw a near complete retro of Imamura films, and their late-spring de Oliveira series was, while far from exhaustive, an indispensable primer for one of the major underappreciated figures in world cinema. Not coincidently, and perhaps further evidence for Martin’s discouragement, the de Oliveira series was accompanied by a lively essay in the pages of Film Comment by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Even more damning, the current Oshima series was preceded by a career assessing essay by, yes, Rosenbaum, in the pages of Art Forum. I happen to know that both directors are Rosenbaum favorites - he’s been writing about them in some capacity or another for years. It seems clear that it’s the magazines in question that needed some kind of up-to-the-minute, present tense reason for being interested in the careers of these particular directors. Regardless, anything that can drum up interest in films that aren’t The Dark Knight or more mindless Oscar predictions is all right in my book.

I’ve only seen three of Oshima’s features, and virtually no one can claim to have seen all of his work, which includes numerous documentaries and assorted television works (none of which, to my knowledge, are part of this series). I offer here some thoughts on two films encountered during the second week of the Film Center’s two month program, and hope to be able to catch at least six more by the end of February. Most critics familiar with Oshima agree that he is something of a stylistic chameleon, even if his thematic concerns (a kind of antagonistic, anti-social pedagogue) remains relatively consistent. Seeing Pleasures of the Flesh (1965) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976) back to back on a Saturday afternoon goes some ways towards validating this generalization. To my mind, both films present a soured, misanthropic view of society, which the two lovers of Senses struggle against - although in Flesh it extends to every character in the narrative. I’m not familiar enough with Oshima’s body of work to claim any kind of special insight, but I’m interested in several specific choices he makes in each film, and how those choices inform each other. Flesh is shot in a beautiful 2:35 aspect ration, the widest of widescreens. He alternates between wide open spaces that obscure characters with intrusions into the foreground, or, conversely, cramping multiple characters into one section of the frame, leaving the rest in a kind of negative space limbo. Whether obscuring an action or face, or creating a claustrophobic clumping of characters into clean, crisp straight lines (the protagonist’s modern apartment), both kinds of compositions hide something from the viewer while simultaneously revealing a character’s state of mind or physical condition. The contours of the plot are too outrageously convoluted to be fully revealed here (although in the film, it is repeated several times, almost as if Oshima is making sure late-comers will be up to speed), but it involves a teacher and his unrequited love for a pupil – he kills her rapist, who is trying to blackmail her family and ruin her good name. Once the deed is done, the pupil marries another man, sending our teacher into a serious funk. Meanwhile, he is blackmailed into concealing embezzled government money, which he must return once his blackmailer is released from jail. Our teacher decides instead to spend all of the money in one year and then kill himself before the embezzler/blackmailer gets out of jail. Anyone familiar with Vertigo will guess what happens next – he hooks up with women that resemble his lost love, showering them with money, gifts and fancy apartments. And that’s just the first thirty minutes or so.
In the Realm of the Senses is an entirely different beast, at least formally speaking. Shot in the relatively more cramped ration of 1:85, Oshima discards the horizontal emphasis of scope, along with the accompanying negative space – instead, we get something of a tableau style, with multiple figures “stacked” in space, their various movement choreographed to retain legibility within various levels of focus. Sidestepping the ever present “what is pornography?” issue, it seems likely that In the Realm of the Senses has become Oshima’s best known feature almost entirely due the controversy surrounding its explicit, hyper sexual content (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is probably the second best known, presumably because of the presence of David Bowie).
Senses can barely conceal its disgust at society – the two lovers abscond to a small room where hey indulge their every sexual whim, only occasionally venturing outside to earn money or buy food – eventually, their outdoor excursions simply turn into extensions of their love making. Other characters comment on their shocking behavior – clearly, Oshima is interested in a didactic kind of anti-moralizing. If the intense, non-stop sex in the film starts off as liberating, it eventually disintegrates into a kind of crazed dementia – each partner demands more and more of the other, and they threaten to consume each other. That the man concedes to his own demise, in fact making himself complicit in his own murder, is presented by Oshima as the only logical conclusion for two people who can no longer exist in this world. He leaves it open as to whether this world is worth existing in or not.
To reiterate, I’m no Oshima expert, and on the basis of these two films (I’ve also seen Taboo, but some years ago), I’m not even sure if he is the “master” that Rosenbaum, Burch and James Quandt might have us believe he is. There seems to me limitations to such an acerbic world view, not the least of which is a kind of anti-social belief that we are beyond hope – if the world is a horrible place, and always will be, then what’s the point? Senses apocalyptic ending is almost romantic, in a sick kind of way, but Pleasures of the Flesh is particularly unsatisfying in its final moments. Like a kind of twisted variation on a Twilight Zone episode, fate conspires against our teacher in an avalanche of ironic futility – he finds out that his blackmailer has died in prison, meaning he would never have to give the money back. Unfortunately, he’s spent it all already, just before his long lost love come crawling to him, desperate for a loan, ready and willing to subjugate herself to him. He’s then implicated in a murder that he didn’t commit, fingered by his old student and woman of his dreams, only to inadvertently confess to the murder he actually committed. Used up and empty, our protagonist has played his part in Oshima’s cosmic dance of futility. It is an interesting question, and one that critic Robin Wood discusses with some frequency – does violence erupt logically from the perceived break down of society, or do the two in fact inform and perpetuate each other? Or, to put it another way, do we in fact have the right to be violently angry? I look forward to delving deeper into Oshima, without any pre-conceived notion that these mysteries will be resolved/reconciled.
Coming up next, Cruel Story of Youth (1959) and Night and Fog in Japan (1960).Cruel Story follows a group of disaffected young people in a bombed out, post-WWII landscape, and critic Dave Kehr describes Night and Fog as a stylistic precursor to Godard’s Maoist period – color me excited.

2008 Top Ten (or so)...

In the mad rush to stay on the cutting edge, we sometimes forget that cinephilia is a fulltime job. While a huge number of end-of-the-year-best lists have come down the pipe line (and here’s another), most of us tend to scrutinize the previous year in contemporary, present-tense terms. Certainly, this is understandable: as a kind of postmortem, it can be useful to see where we’ve been, where we are going, and who has emerged on the scene: those occasional figures that come out of nowhere and shock us with their originality and insight – we might call them artists. But before diving into the year in the strictly present tense, I must confess that some of the best times I had this year in a theatre - the most educational, the most entertaining and the most edifying – didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what we might call “now”. As I hope the below list will illustrate, I’m not deriding the year’s crop of current film, nor am I bemoaning some state of current affairs - I couldn’t stand to encounter yet another “not as good as 2007” list – far from it. But I think it is massively important to recognize the experiences that enrich our film knowledge and allow us to interact with, and communicate with, a kind of past-tense.

With Oscar night right around the corner, the media-industrial complex would like to have us believe that there are only 5 or 6 movies worth talking about for the next month (although there doesn’t seem to me much to discuss - certainly, they don’t offer much to think about). But 2008 brought a series of masterpieces, week in and week out, to the Gene Siskel Film Center, courtesy of Jonathan Rosenbaum and his First/Great Transition series. I can’t think of any place I would have rather been during those Wednesday nights, soaking in Scarface, The Big Sky, Shadows, Playtime, Mr. Freedom, The Rules of the Game, Sylvia Scarlett, Make Way For Tomorrow, Man’s Castle, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!, amongst two dozen others. It is an excellent reminder that not everything is available for consumption on home video (the Mizoguchi, Klein and Hawks, for starters), and that even the films that are readily available still have a power on the big screen that’s missing from even the most high tech home system. Anyone who lives in Chicago and doesn’t take full advantage of such programming is missing out.

My vote for the best dvd release of the year is Sony’s “Films of Budd Boetticher” box set. Five films, all starring Randolph Scott, all set in a dusty, barren landscape that is the American Frontier. Not one of the films clocks in at longer that 78 minutes, but the complexity and briskness of the storytelling puts the current Oscar bait White Elephants to shame. While I might complain about people watching films on dvd instead of on film, one has to admit that the sheer number of gems that are getting released has deepened our collective knowledge of film history in an age when repertory programming has all but ceased to exist. Certainly, this release will allow Boetticher’s reputation to sit along side Ford, Hawks, Walsh and Mann as one of the key masters of the Western genre.

I was also extremely excited (thanks Jake) to finally visit The Nightingale, an alternative screening venue right off of the Milwaukee Blue Line. Closely aligned with Patrick Friel’s White Lights Cinema and Gabe Klinger’s Chicago Cinema Forum, the space is a triumph of small scale, DIY inventiveness. I attended a screening of Lewis Klahr’s experimental animation, themselves a stunning example of no budget, hand crafted and deeply personal avant-garde film making. My one New Year’s resolution, and it should be easy to keep, is to attend as many programs here as possible. There’s a palpable sense of community and discovery that goes hand in hand with these almost secretive, off the beaten path screenings, and it’s always encouraging to know that one is not alone.

It’s always difficult to make a broad assumption about why one likes what they do – there’s no easy, overarching frame work that will easily encapsulate everything that’s going on in the world or why we respond to one film and not another. If some of my favorite films of the year seem esoteric, several are simply great entertainments that have fallen through the cracks. I think people largely limit what they are willing to see by blindly following publicity of one form or another, and without large advertising budgets, totally accessible and user friendly films get smothered by blockbusters or mini-majors that have some kind of dubious cultural allure attached to them. It can be a lose/lose situation for a lot of films that don’t easily fit into predetermined notions of “entertainment” or “art”, at least in the sense that “art” increasingly means “pseudo-significance”. I saw a lot of films this past year, and these are the ones that meant the most to me. I can only hope that my enthusiasm goes some ways towards highlighting the ones that got away, and, if cinephilia could be considered along the lines of always playing catch up – catching up to the past, as it where – the we’ve all got a lot of work to do. I, for one, can’t wait.

Still Life

Dong

24 City (Jia Zhangke): a banner year Zhangke fans, with the (belated) release of Still Life and several screenings of 24 City during the Chicago International Film Festival. Dong, something of a companion piece to Still Life (shot around the same time, using the same locations, although more straightforward in its documentary ambitions), is available on the just released dvd version of Still Life as an extra feature (I fear that the film’s relegation to supplemental material might insinuate that it is somehow lesser than Still Life – this is not the case at all. I would argue that the two films create a fascinating dialectical conversation about similar subject matter, and Dong is, in its own right, essential). Zhangke strikes me as a filmmaker for right now, in much the same way that Godard encapsulated the 60’s and Kiarostami the 90’s – in each case, these filmmakers were aware of what it meant/means to be part of the world in a particular moment, in all of its complexity. The shifting current of commerce has radically altered our world’s landscape, both literally and figuratively, and it is these seismic shifts and the resulting displacement of huge masses of people that fascinates Zhangke. He also intuitively understands how the past and present commingle into a tapestry, to the point that one cannot simply dismiss out right a history of communism as “bad” and a capitalistic future as “good”. We usually associate “progress” with a positive connotation, but Zangke views it with hesitancy and distance – what is progress for some is eradication for others.

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa): I’m not sure I can agree with the critical assertion that Tokyo Sonata is a huge change of pace for Kurosawa – he’s still obsessed with the apocalypse, but here he has located it deep in the heart of a typically dysfunctional family. The film’s sense of ennui and isolation hark back to the aimless youth of Bright Future, and a left turn late in the narrative threatens to turn the film into one of his horror efforts. But Kurosawa ends the film deftly, with a musical performance that leaves the film’s mysteries intact while still suggesting that there might be a glimmer of hope after all.

The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette): a relatively accessible Rivette – clocking in at just under two and a half hours, from a classic novel and replete with the period trappings so familiar to the art house – that nonetheless remains elusive and mysterious, almost opaque. Essentially a will-they or won’t-they battle of the sexes, Rivette’s snaking camera constantly shifts our point of view, usually several times within one shot. At least partially, the film is about role playing, a subject so dear to Rivette’s heart, as well as a kind of stubborn insistence on individual autonomy – neither character is prepared to surrender any part of themselves to the other. Rivette infuses the period costume drama with an ambiguous darkness missing from most post-Merchant/Ivory productions (certainly, not to be confused with The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley).

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin): a joyful movie, full of dizzying cinematic invention, about a dysfunctional family and the despair of a deceased son/brother that hangs over it. Only Desplechin could orchestrate such an endeavor, leaving this viewer bowled over by just how much life can be crammed into one film. This would make an outstanding double bill with Rachel Getting Married.

In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin): 2007 introduced me to the great Pedro Costa. I’ll remember 2008 as the year I saw my first Guerin film. A talent to be reckoned with, Guerin possesses an understanding of mood and pace keenly attuned to romantic longing. Mr. Alex Dowd has written eloquently about the film here, certainly better than I’m able to.

The Witnesses (Andre Techine): Techine continues his one man mission to chart a counter history of contemporary life and love – his is a sexually polymorphous world where there are no real distinctions between gay or straight, just human beings living in a sometimes beautiful, sometimes uncaring world.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton): the year’s most humane entertainment, pessimistic about what we have done and where we might wind up, but optimistic about what we are capable of as human beings. Those giant binocular eyes reflect back more about us than we might care to admit, but see things we desperately need to embrace.

The Pool (Chris Smith): documentarian Smith tries his hand at a fiction feature and seems to have finally arrived as a fully achieved artist. American Movie and Home Movie always struck me as deeply conflicted works, coming dangerously close to mocking their quirky subjects while trying to simultaneously celebrate their uniqueness. With The Pool, Smith lets his story unfold naturally, with an eye for letting scenes play out in real time. Far from the third-world porn of City of God and its ilk, here we get a genuine sense of what it’s like to be poor, but not miserable - preparing a bed roll to sleep on the floor, packing all of ones possessions into an impossibly tiny knapsack, washing sheets by hand and hanging them to drip dry, scrubbing a bathroom floor on your hands and knees, or hustling on the street selling plastic bags to tourists. The titular pool undergoes several transformations as free floating metaphor, first as a symbol of wealth and longed for upward mobility, then as a mysterious, portentous symbol for an undisclosed tragedy, and finally a static, unquantifiable object to watch over, as unknowable as the future.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant): Van Sant made two films this year. One of them is very good. The other is a masterpiece.

Reprise (Joachim Trier): probably the best film I’ve ever seen about being a young artist terrified of putting themselves and their work out there for the world to see (and judge). It’s also got the best use of a Joy Division song that I’ve come across. Trier gets it, plain and simple.

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme): Demme is always at his best when he allows himself to observe and linger over ordinary events, hence the perverseness of his last couple of remakes. But he’s been plugging away on documentaries at the same time, constituting a kind of parallel shadow career. It is these docs (Man From Plains, Heart of Gold, Storefront Hitchcock, The Agronomist) that reveal his real strengths and seem to have informed most of his aesthetic decisions involving Rachel Getting Married.

Frownland (Ronald Bronstein): an extreme, if logical, end point for the navel gazing “mumblecore” pseudo-movement. Amy Taubin did a pretty good job hammering the final nail into this particular coffin, with a special distaste for Joe Swanberg, in a Film Comment essay some months back. But Bronstein’s film accomplishes essentially the same thing, albeit with less eloquence and a grating sense of humor that quickly goes overboard into a mesmerizing train wreck of neurosis and alienation. The film asks us to spend a couple of hours with quite possibly the most unlikable character is recent memory (think woody Allen minus the gags and artistic pretension and ten times more annoying). As critic JR Jones has written: “Like its protagonist the film is difficult to watch, but it’s even more difficult to forget, asking us to locate the limits of our humanity.”

Bachelor Machines Part 1 (Rosalind Nashashibi): read about it here.

O’er the Land (Deborah Stratman): read about it here. I’ll add here only how excited I was that Ms. Stratman got her film accepted into Sundance - it is most likely the best film playing there this year. Here’s hoping the coming year greets her with even more success.

Gran Tarino (Clint Eastwood): a lumbering sledgehammer of a film – Eastwood isn’t much of a thinker, but he feels deeply and, at his best, demonstrates an unabashed, simple minded humanism that links him with Fuller. Indeed, this is his most Fuller-esque film, and one that seems to self consciously engage with most of Eastwood’s oeuvre as an actor, director and icon. Eastwood is, for all intents and purposes, his own history of violence, and he slyly subverts our expectations of what a man of action can be capable of. Sometimes crude, sometimes simplistic, but always infused with sincerity and an acute sense of aging – if this is, as has been rumored, Eastwood’s last film, he’s done a helluva job of putting his last will and testament on celluloid.

Sparrow (Johnnie To):

Mad Detective (Johnnie To & Ka-Fai Wai): Sparrow is director To’s lightest film; following on the heels of his epic 2 part Election series and the death obsessed, apocalyptic Exiled, I initially assumed it was slight. But there is a kind of sensual appreciation of movement and the human body that infuses the film with grace, both in concept and execution. A gang of pick pockets fall in love with the same mysterious woman, only to find out that she is using them to escape from her gangster warlord husband. Intimations of the New Wave, and Demy in particular, give the whole production a sense of playfulness, and the intricate wallet-lifting choreography threatens to erupt into a musical number at any given moment. Mad Detective begins as a kind of lark, with a ridiculous premise that presumably sprang from the mind of co-director Wai (he worked with To on Running on Karma, which, up until Sparrow, was the quirky odd-man-out in To’s oeuvre). A gifted detective solves crimes by getting inside the heads of criminals and parsing out various personalities, which To shows on screen by alternating between shots of an actor/character with shots of their alter egos (for instance, a fellow officer who has lost his suspect becomes personified, visually, by a crying child). The premise is funny enough for a while, but To ups the ante by suggesting that the detective is simply insane, and the climax of the film is less about catching the criminal and more about revealing whether or not our hero is crazy or a genius. Both films cement To’s status as a supreme master of choreographing spatial relationships, not just during slam bang action scenes, but the more mundane scenes of conversation, or just simply sitting down to dinner, that most directors flub with simplistic shot-counter shot. One gets the sense that each new film is To’s way of creating a problem for himself, some sort of challenge, and then figuring out unique ways of solving said problem. As a craftsman, any director could learn a lot from him.

Some thoughts on 2008, with an eye towards the year to come:

When all is said in done, there are quite a few reasons to believe that virtually no films where released in 2008 - at least none as important as current affairs: between the death of film criticism, a tanking economy, and perhaps the most important presidential election of (most of) our lives, it was easy to overlook the multiplex. Unless, of course, that multiplex was playing the Dark Knight, the second most popular film of all time (if one judges such things by box office gross; and lets face it, most do).

Most pertinent to myself is the ongoing debate as to the state of criticism. At the risk of boring non-specialists with the details, lets just say that a combination of crumbling print empires and their decreasing classified revenues, philistine movie executives pandering to a younger demographic with disposable income, and, by implication, an increasingly disenfranchised movie going public that would just rather stay home, has all lead to an irrevocable decline in the conversation surrounding film as art. But perhaps it’s too easy to make such broad justifications – after all, as several recent releases have shown, notwithstanding The Dark Knight factor, people seem more than willing to come out to theatres, assuming there is something worth seeing. Regardless of quality, or what this critic might think, people are turning out in droves for Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon and Gran Torino, as well as, to a lesser degree, Doubt. So we might amend the above to read something like ‘audiences don’t go to movies anymore, unless they do’, ‘the studios don’t make films for adults, except when they do’, and, with regards to critical analysis, ‘critics don’t matter, except when they do’. As we steadily approach awards season, those critics that the studios usually shun suddenly start getting their quotes plastered all over the place, the studios looking for affirmation that their product can deliver the goods to a discerning crowd (the crowd that, lets remember, doesn’t usually exist, at least before November).

So what does this all mean? Simply put, there are too many opinion pieces out there and not enough, well, criticism. After spending all year bemoaning the state of the art, we are suddenly relevant again, but instead of taking full advantage of it, we've just started repeating ourselves. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen at least four different op ed pieces on the current slate of WWII/Holocaust dramas that have been/are set for release from the studios, as well as a slew of accolades for most, if not all, of the above mentioned films. But I must admit that I am ambivalent for two reasons: one being that, as I see it, good criticism has been on the decline for a while, not just in the wake of recent job loss, and two, that the remaining old guard has easily slipped into the role of studio adjunct publicist. What else to make of the myriad number of top ten lists and critic’s association awards that have already started making the rounds? Chock full of films that most of us won’t be able to see for several weeks, if not months, they don’t serve much of a purpose beyond hyping product that already has substantial marketing in place, as well as the usual banal Oscar short listing. I, for one, don’t see much point in predicting what’s going to win awards that, beyond the uselessness of such an endeavor, doesn’t do much to critically grapple with the films in question (I might add that the above mentioned flood of Holocaust overkill pictures essays all include films not already in release (Valkyrie), and some not even set for release before the end of the year (Good, Defiance), essentially giving free publicity to films invoking a trend the various critics are supposedly bemoaning). With this in mind, I’m not particularly saddened by a few industry stool pigeons loosing their lively hood. I also hasten to add that the list just posted by Slant Magazine goes some ways toward avoiding most of the pitfalls I’ve mentioned, instead focusing on, you know, actual films.

I’m not suggesting that critics don’t actually like or care about the films they choose to place on their lists, but I am suggesting that what they have to choose from exists only within clearly delineated parameters, parameters more often than not set by studio publicity machines. As usual, Roger Ebert’s annual top ten list is a pretty clear indicator of enthusiastic, if unremarkable, middle brow taste. Barring a few legitimate American indies, like Ballast and Shotgun Stories, the presence of the usual Miramax Oscar bait prestige dominates. To reiterate, I’m not suggesting that Ebert doesn’t actually like the films that he is endorsing, only the fact that what he is promoting is so limited in scope as to be laughable (I might add that several of the legitimate independent films he lists will also be screening during his next Ebertfest, suggesting that his promoting of such films is also promoting his film festival and, by extension, himself). By way of comparison, the most recent issue of Art Forum offers several top ten films of the year lists, one by the incomparable James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto. Mr. Quandt is largely responsible for organizing the first major traveling retrospective of Robert Bresson, as well as retrospectives of Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura and OshimaNagisa, and major articles on Pedro Costa, Edward Yang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In other words, the guy is smart. But when blogger Girish Sambu posted some preliminary thoughts on Quandt’s list, he immediately invited some incredulous comments about elitism and esoteric festival pandering – the idea being, as far as I can tell, that if something is unavailable in the American market place it is not only useless to talk about it, but it is also an affront to good taste. Never mind that Quandt could teach us all a thing or two about the art of film. But his choices aren’t available as commodities (at least yet), and that offends and scares some people. (just a few days after I typed these words, the collective group of critics over at the Onion published their own top ten lists. Basically a variation on the IndieWire system, in which films get ranked on a points system, these supposedly cutting edge taste makers eschew anything and everything not scheduled to open in NY/LA by years end, despite the fact that they are, essentially, a product of the Mid West. To further cement my skepticism, several critics mention films that they saw at festivals, but only those festival films (The Wrestler, Che, Benjamin Button), that have some currency as upcoming releases. The point being, again, that most critics, whether willingly or not, limit themselves to the role of publicist. Even more insulting is their “crosstalk”, essentially a few thousands words patting themselves on the back for not seeking out more adventurous fare during 2008).

I would also direct you to a recent lambasting of NY Times critic Manohla Dargis, in an article from the Los Angles Times that is clearly designed to damn her with faint praise. Scoot on over and read it for yourself – to my mind, the fact that she has no interest in playing the publicity game is all the ammunition some people need to suggest that she just simply doesn’t like movies, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Never mind the fact that her own recently published top ten list clearly indicates not just good taste (obviously a subjective judgment on my part), but a general optimism with regards to the state of the art form. This is clearly quite a leap from the cranky curmudgeon that Patrick Goldstein paints her to be (it is equally fascinating to watch Goldstein try to simultaneously critique Dargis while attempting to not appear entirely as a studio mouthpiece, an effort in which he fails quite spectacularly).

* * *

This was, by design, to be an introduction to what would have been my top ten films of the year, an undertaking I subscribe to only in as much as it fulfills a certain pedagogic function. With that in mind, I’m instead going to hype a handful of films that I’m particularly excited to see, some already set for some kind of distribution, however limited, and some that might premiere only on dvd or never at all. At the risk of succumbing to the very thing I’ve been decrying, I can only say that virtually none of these films are going to receive a fraction of the advertising or print that accompanies the average release from TWC, Miramax, or Sony Pictures Classics.

Right off the bat, I’m happy to see that Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” hits the Music Box late next month, as well as Soderbergh’s “Che” and Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” at the Landmark. Here are some more to keep your eyes peeled for:

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) – as far as I know, the film is already set for some kind of distribution, but when it will hit our local screens is another matter entirely. I wasn’t particularly satisfied by Assayas’ last film, Boarding Gate, but he remains one of my favorite filmmakers and a major player in the international scene. This is the first, but not the last, of my most anticipated features listed by James Quandt in his top ten list.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) – perhaps cinema’s most opaque, quixotic visionary, any new film by Denis is a cause for celebration. Her film “Trouble Every Day” never saw the light of day here in Chicago, and has never been released on dvd. Her last (and best) feature, The Intruder, enjoyed one single screening at the Film Center before getting dumpoed onto a shoddy dvd by Wellspring, just before they went under. Lets hope the same fate doesn’t befall her most recent film, which is garnering effusive praise from everyone who’s seen it.

Hunger (Steve McQueen) – this played most recently at the Chicago International film Festival, after making the rounds at Cannes, Toronto and Berlin, picking up accolades as it went along. I was immensely sorry to miss the CIFF screenings, but very happy to hear that they all sold out. Apparently, there are some people out there that take critical acclaim seriously enough to try something new. No word on if the film will reach our shores: despite the virtually universal acclaim, the film failed to generate much business in limited runs in NY and LA, making its further distribution decidedly… undecided.

The Hurt Locker (Katherine Bigelow) – the director of Point Break, Near Dark and Strange Days has, by all accounts, made the toughest, and most daring, of the Iraqi War docu-dramas. As near as I can tell, everyone who sees it loves it, but the recent spate of war related commercial flops (do I need to reiterate the list?) makes it less and less likely that the film will see the light of day. It would be a shame if it went straight to dvd, as the chance to see a Bigelow film on the big screen hasn’t come around much recently.

RR & Casting a Glance (James Benning) – two recent works by a great filmmaker, and one of the few contemporary experimental directors who has managed to garner a (small but loyal) fan base. By all accounts, Chicago Filmmakers is working hard to show both of these films, although the chances of it happening in the next few months are slim. Considering how long it took his last couple of features to make it here, a few months would be mercifully short.

Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel) – after the relatively crowd pleasing Regular Lovers, Garrel has apparently drifted back into inconsequence. His previous film’s (minor) success got his new one into competition at Cannes, but it seems that no one was watching. Lets hope we get a chance to see it and decide for ourselves.

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) – it took Alonso’s last film, La Muerto, about three years to arrive at Facets Cinemateque. By all accounts, his newest feature is even better, and I, for one, would love to see it. Any distributors reading?

United Red Army (Koji Wkamatsu) – Quandt’s take: “as a first hand account of leftist infighting and auto-immolation, it readily joins Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan and Godard’s La Chinoise.” I’m sold.

Lorna’s Silence/le Silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) – advance word is that the Dardenne’s are repeating themselves and that their newest feature is somehow old hat. I’m personally of the opinion that they are modern masters, and therefore look forward to the opportunity to judge for myself. I’m also particularly distrustful of industry insiders who seem to think that they’ve got their finger on the pulse – of commerce, perhaps (or maybe not, considering the stupid decisions being constantly made), but not the film community.

Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain) – the film about a Travolta/Saturday Night Fever obsessed murderer in Pinochet’s Chile. The pop and the political collide in what is already a derisive love-it-or-hate-it proposition.

The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel) – Martel is a singular directorial voice; her only other two features, La Cienaga and The Holy Girly, reveal a unique talent keyed to the low key desperation and solitude of contemporary Argentina’s bourgeoisie that is structured by claustrophobic, geometrically severe compositions and free floating, opaque visual metaphors. The film involves a vehicular homicide and a woman who can’t remember what she may or may not have done. Sounds intriguing, no?

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) – several Welles’ scholars (a particularly touchy bunch, given the damage they’ve had to repair to his misunderstood legacy) have given the film a clean bill of health. I maintain that Linklater is our generation’s key humanist filmmaker, and any new work is not only a cause for celebration, but likely to put a smile on one’s face. Despite its (reportedly) crowd pleasing disposition, the film has yet to garner any North American distribution.

Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo) – a new film by the director of “Woman is the Future of Man” and “Woman on the Beach”? Yes, please.

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald) – from what I’ve read, the film is about zombies (but not really), that infect other people not through physical contact or bodily fluids, but through spoken words. That’s right, language itself is the infecting agent. What sounds like an ingenious micro-budget indie is picking up fans everywhere it screens, and it sounds a bit like a cross between Primer, Dawn of the Dead, and a particularly perverse reading of Lacan.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito) – full disclosure – Glabe Klinger’s Chicago Cinema Forum hosted a screening of this film just a few months ago at the Film Center, and I was unable to attend. There’s little chance of this evocative ode to past pioneers in civil liberties getting screened anywhere besides the Film Center or Chicago Filmmakers, but maybe I’ll get a second chance to catch up with this one.

Adoration (Atom Egoyan) – Egoyan’s last few films have left much to be desired, and if the review in last month’s Cinemascope is to be believed, this films is his biggest misstep yet. Still, a minor and flawed work from an interesting, and sometimes great, filmmaker is always welcome.

Two Documentaries that are changing narrative expectations:

“Most of us begin with a cliché – not always, but most of the time – and that’s fine, but you have to look at it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with the idea of discovery… Then you ask yourself, but why? It will inhibit the viewer’s imagination instead of opening it up… and so you renounce, slowly. Then one fine day… one fine day you realize that it’s better to see as little as possible. You have a sort of… reduction, only it’s not a reduction – it’s a concentration and it actually says more.”

Jean-Marie Straub, quoted in Pedro Costa’s “Where lies your hidden smile?”

Two recent films that are revitalizing/reconstituting/rethinking/recontextualizing the place of narrative in contemporary documentary film, and deserving of placement along side the pantheon – essayists like Dziga-Vertov era Godard, Marker, late period Kiarostami, Costa, Zhangke, early Weerasethakul - Deborah Stratman’s “O’er the Land” and Rosalind Nashashibi’s “Bachelor Machines Part 1”.

* * *

Beginning with a long quotation on the nature of heroism (by a Lt. Col. William Rankin - a real person, although I wasn’t sure of it until later in the film), then moving to a forest strewn with carefully placed and obviously staged smoking debris, then segueing into a group of Revolutionary War re-enactors, “O’er the Land” starts out of the gate with a series of allusions and paralleling rhymes, virtually demanding its audience to put two and two together. The artfully arranged debris, coupled with another kind of staged event, that of reenacted warfare, seems to juxtapose two kinds of audiences: a paying public that is watching another public watching a staged recreation of historical events that Stratman catches on camera. Next is a series of shots at a high school football game, and we see a tightly choreographed marching band performing, as well as cheerleaders and the players themselves (along with yet another implied audience). Stratman refuses to orient us with any kind of tangible information; there are no dates, times or places, nor do there seem to be any recurring “characters” or a single train of thought. But we have a quotation from a celebrated military man, the aftermath of some destructive event, and the uniformity of various costumed groups – the fake military garb becomes synonymous with the football jersey or cheerleading outfit, and the civilian garb takes on some of the associations of military dress. In effect, one becomes less sinister while the others become more so.

But before we can settle too comfortably into some assumptions about what the film is showing us, we continue to receive more visual information. An RV dealership comes onscreen, accompanied by voice over describing the unfettered freedom such a vehicle can provide. The voiceover is trying to sell a lifestyle on wheels, without borders, free to roam. We then cut to a US Border Patrol station, with an ominous sign warning us that the national threat level is currently “orange” (I’m a little rusty on my Homeland Security propaganda, but if memory serves, orange is relatively low). A Border Patrol truck drives around, describing the various tracks left behind from people crossing into the U.S. illegally. Certain indentures into the ground indicate who is crawling, or what kind of shoes they are wearing, or if someone is on there knees and elbows in an attempt not to leave tracks. We also see the Border Patrol guys covering up the tracks that their trucks leave, in a weird kind of symbiosis (the trackers not wanting to be tracked?). In one of the film’s few close ups, a raging river churns up dirt and mud in its powerful current, suggesting the difficulty and sheer physicality of crossing over into the U.S. It is an interesting rejoinder to the guard’s seeming nonchalance, as well as a stunning juxtaposition with the previous section’s RV dealership – apparently, a lifestyle of unfettered freedom and unlimited travel only extends to a certain few. There is a jarring cut from the raging water to a calm night sky, and as the camera holds on this picturesque composition, a voice over begins. We get a detailed description of a soldier (Rankin’s words, as it turns out - a long passage from his biography, being spoken by someone else) parachuting from a malfunctioning jet miles above the Earth’s surface. It is a harrowing account - he speaks of velocity and g-force in such a way as to make the dangers immediately palpable, and describes parachuting through a thunder storm. But it is a disembodied voice – no archival footage or photographs - just words and images of a cloudy sky. In the film’s most stunning sequence, Stratman’s camera travels to a machine gun festival. And it is exactly what it sounds like. Throngs of people line up to check out weapons, run an obstacle course, shoot at random burnt out cars and trucks, do target practice, and traverse what looks like a series of huts and shacks, shooting at everything in sight (except other people, I might add). While bulldozers and cranes clean up the destroyed objects, a voice over describes the festival as a last bastion for gun rights and constitutional freedom. There is a final, haunting epilogue to the sequence, as men with flamethrowers put on an exhibition for a rapturous audience. Echoes of Herzog’s “Lessons of Darkness” abound, as great swaths of orange engulf the screen, and burning embers float peacefully back to Earth against a tranquil night sky. It is evocative, certainly, of a kind of abstract beauty, but also apocalyptic in its destructive fulmination.

* * *

Men speak without subtitles – that we understand what they are saying is not so important as is the tone of voice, the vocal inflection that indicates conversation, orders, argument, or joking. Various men constantly look offscreen while speaking – they might be the only one in the frame, but they are not the only one in the room. There is no non-diagetic sound, and the occasional intrusion of music establishes, partially, the mood and tenor of a scene. What we have here is a contiguous sense on space, extending beyond the parameters of the filmed frame and suggesting an entire parallel world. The point seems clear: it is an acceptance of the camera’s, and the filmmaker’s, limitations, and a suggestion to the audience that we actively engage in what we are not being shown (certainly, this is Bressonian to the extreme).

This notion of accepting the limitations of technology and genre informs the narrative as well (although narrative, in this context, might be better described as fractured, minimal, or even maximal, depending on one’s personal predilection). A series of 25 scenes, complete with fade to black intermediaries and with a brief, elliptical prologue, suggests any number of possible permutations – that we are seeing only 25 possible moments out of any number of theoretical scenes, that we should read the scenes linearly, like a book, or even that the scenes have been selected at random, haphazardly. What seems most immediate is that we must reconfigure our relationship to the narrative documentary and create our own interpretation, relying on sensory impressions that rhyme, to be sure, but do not necessarily congeal. There is no thesis, and even to suggest that the film is about isolation and mechanized impersonality is to impose a personal reading, and is not supported by “facts”. Such is the radical agenda of Rosalind Nashashibi’s poetic documentary.

Much like “O’er the Land”, “Bachelor Machines Part 1” does not orient us with any contextual, factual information. The filmmaker’s website, along with an accompanying dvd booklet, gives us some specifics, that these sailors are on a cargo ship “sailing from Southern Italy to Sweden via Portugal, Britain, and Ireland.” But other than supplying a clue as to what language these men are speaking, it is arguable that such information is entirely inconsequential, even disruptive to the film’s abstract diegesis – the film ultimately stands outside of such concerns, instead offering a glimpse of another world that is simultaneously strange and familiar. The first scene following a brief prologue is a simple composition, but it does much to inform the viewer conceptually; a long metal pole with some hanging rope cuts across the frame from upper right to lower left, intersecting an image of the sun setting behind clouds. The pole remains fixed, the camera along with it, while the postcard ready image bobs and weaves with the natural movement of the ship. We are immediately oriented to the physical sensation of standing still on a moving object, and recognize that the camera is, for all intents and purposes, going to be fixed along side us. Indeed, the only images we get outside of the ship are occasional nighttime detours into large cargo holds or shots of the sea or sky as seen through windows and portholes.

Much of the film is spent prowling long, empty corridors, and visually, the symmetry of isolation recalls Kubrick or Ackerman. Several critics have commented on the “anthropomorphic” nature of some compositions, where the ship itself seems to take on a face. Onion City Festival programmer Patrick Friel mentions this in the festival’s accompanying program, and obviously others have picked up on it as well. But, for this viewer, these graph-like, symmetrical compositions come across as cold metal geometry, impersonal and imposing. At one point, while filming what looks to be an argument, a crew member stands up and slides a door closed in front of the camera. The image lingers after the shot has changed - what was once an image of people has been replaced, superimposed, obliterated, by a simple, austere flatness. If anything, the cumbersome, bulky metal textures of the ship encourages a disconnect between flesh and blood people and this environment that envelopes them. Another interpretation: this disconnection as metaphor for advanced globalization in our modern era of capitalism; the inseparability of man and machine.

* * *

I’ve grown increasingly wary of the notion of “narrative” in the last few months. As our most recent presidential election has illuminated, much of people’s decision making process was contingent upon accepting this or that narrative and rejecting the, presumably opposite or incompatible, other (David Bordwell has a fascinating entry on this subject here). But aside from buzz words, more often than not opaque and aloof themselves, these particular narratives obfuscated more than they illuminated, with both parties presenting simplification in lieu of complexity. It might seem odd then, or even counter intuitive, to present these obviously abstracted films as a rejoinder to the simplified notion of narrative that is increasingly presented to an increasingly receptive populous, weaned on serial television shows to look for a beginning, middle and end in a predetermined chunk of time; narrative closure as bite sized emotional edification. But whatever these two films lack in factual specificity, they more than compensate with the demands and rigors placed on their respective audience: the necessity to glean metaphoric and dialectical relationships in Stratman’s piece, which invites the pondering of violent incursions into land, sky and the mind; and the devastating emotional isolation of Nashashibi’s mysterious and evocative conjuring of oceanic travel as a journey into the unknown.