DVD Discoveries

Here’s a post for the friends who often ask me to write a list of things they should watch on DVD. These are some of the films that struck me to the core in the last year or so, regardless of their release date.

Polytéchnique (Denis Villeneuve, Canada, 2009)

It’s hard to like a movie about the Montreal Massacre, and even more difficult to discuss the details, so all I will say is this: Polytéchnique is one of the few truly great Canadian films, and the most powerful cinematic experience I’ve had in ages. I found the sheer beauty of the mise-en-scene problematic, provocative, and ultimately transcendent.

Scanners (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1980)

Speaking of great Canadian films, I think it’s fair to suggest that Scanners hasn’t aged well. The performances are compromised by execrable ADR (dialogue replacement), so much so that it might be difficult for contemporary audiences to parse the rich rewards at hand.  But I’m always in awe of a storyteller who cooks up a high-concept science fiction conceit that can be achieved without much of a budget. Most of the “action” scenes are just closeups of people’s quivering heads paired with intense sound effects… Add a bit of blood and things really start to pop.

In a Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1978)

I never realized that Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a remake… When Erwin (Volker Spengler) confesses his love for his male boss, his feelings are met with a flippant dismissal: “Too bad you’re not a girl.” The thwarted lover interprets the comment literally; Erwin returns to Berlin after a lengthy vacation transformed into Elvira, the heroine of this tragic tale. Will the object of her affection accept her gender transition? Fassbinder made the film in the wake of a lover’s suicide and all of his agony is up there on the screen. Few films dare to plunge so deeply into the painful emotions at the heart of gender confusion. PETA WARNING: There is one scene with extremely graphic, slow motion documentary footage of cattle in a slaughterhouse. I had to pause it and take a break, but it was worth seeing through to the bitter end.

Agora (Alejandro Amenábar, 2009)

Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, brilliant female scholar and astronomer of Antiquity. She studies the night sky, safe within the confines of Alexandria’s great library, until her iconoclastic passion for science is threatened by the rise of religious (Christian) fundamentalism. Alejandro deserves many more kudos than he received for tackling cerebral and religious subject matter on such a grand scale. Imagine: a “swords and sandals” epic more concerned with the classroom than the battlefield. Agora is an uncommon and underrated gem.

Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell, Sweden, 2008)

It’s a true story: in early 20^th century Sweden a working-class girl won a “Contessa” camera in a lottery. When the man who bought the ticket for her suggested the camera belonged to him, she insisted that he marry her for it. All through the decades of their troubled marriage the camera was always there, the symbol of their indissoluble bond. In Everlasting Moments director Jan Troell, who acts as his own cinematographer and camera operator, chronicles family life across the decades with muted light and painterly compositions that stir my deepest emotional connections to the photographic medium. It’s a hymn for image-makers everywhere, a poem of dedicated vision and unconditional love.

Also worth your time: The Red Riding Trilogy, Ozu’s Late Spring, McCaber and Mrs. Miller.

Review: La Pointe Courte (Agnès Varda, 1954)

Lifelong residents of southern France take great pains to explain the vast, existential difference between themselves and Parisians. Southerners consider themselves warm, jovial and open; a stark contrast with urbanites from the north, whom they consider to be cold, rude and arrogant. There is a kernel of truth in these characterizations, as Agnès Varda illuminates in her first feature film, 1954′s La Pointe Courte.

The story is set in the coastal Mediterranean town of Sète, where a man born in the impoverished fishing neighbourhood known as la pointe courte returns with his Parisian wife on vacation after a 12 year absence. The couple are preoccupied by a marital crisis. Only a few minutes after stepping off the train the wife announces her desire for a separation. They spend the whole vacation taking meandering walks along the beach as they discuss their relationship dynamics.

Meanwhile, all around them, the life of the locals rolls along at its usual pace. A young man seeks to date a pretty girl, contending with her strict father. A woman with eight children loses one to fever. The fishermen are besieged by local health authorities, who continually fine and arrest them for harvesting bacteria-tainted shellfish. They take little notice of the aloof urban couple in their midst, except when one woman remarks that “they talk too much to be happy.”

Varda emphasizes the gulf between these two worlds by employing opposing shooting styles and performance techniques. The husband and wife, both professional actors, deliver their lines with the blank alienation of a Brechtian play. Their walks carry them through highly composed, restrictive camera angles. All spontaneity is eliminated, creating a vacuum of formalism. In these sections of the film we witness Varda breaking ground for the foundation of the Nouvelle Vague and European Cinema in general:

(Top: La Pointe Courte, 1955. Bottom: Persona, 1966. Via Leffaurpo.)

The locals, however, are all non-professional actors recreating personal anecdotes from their own lives (Varda shares her screenwriting credit with them) shot in an unvarnished documentary style. Here Varda demonstrates the first blush of her career-long obsession with–and aptitude for–capturing authentic portraits of salt-of-the-earth French citizens. With La pointe courte (1054), Daguerréotypes (1976), Sans toit ni loi (1985), and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Varda has assembled an encyclopedia of the French national character in its many guises.

In a Criterion DVD interview the filmmaker suggests that she intended her two disparate directing styles to highlight the separation between the public life and the private life. But watching the film, as it took me back to fond memories of a year I spent in nearby Montpellier, I couldn’t help but read it as an essay on the cultural distinctions of social geography in France.

The film finds an interesting companion piece in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet (winner of the César for best French film in 2008). The Secret of the Grain, as it is known in English, was also filmed in Sète. It’s about French citizens who also face off against health authorities and municipal bureaucracy over access to the city’s waterways. The difference, half a century later, is that the struggling working class is now Arab, perhaps calling into question just how warm and open the South really is.

(Agnès Varda)

Inception: Less talk, more lanterns please

*No real plot spoilers in here, but you should see Inception before reading about it.

With Inception audiences get to taste the fruit of Hollywood’s rarest labour: an intelligent, ambitious A-list director working with his own original spec script, from the pinnacle of his access to money and resources.

In the wake of achieving a box office wet dream, Christopher Nolan was positioned to test the fickle faith of Warner Bros. with something fresh. Really, we should only be thankful that Nolan chose to gamble his ascendancy on a true dream project. We get to witness big-budget indulgence doled out with taste by a cool, elegant hand. We get a ceiling laced with a hundred lanterns where one would suffice. We get location shooting in Paris, Tangiers, and the Canadian Rockies, beefed up with top notch studio work in LA and London. Architecture porn abounds.

(Baron Haussmann is long overdue for an oscar.)

But all of this wealth is mere window dressing for the central style conceit of Inception: its exposition. You see, Christopher Nolan also has suspense and a fist-sized dollop of momentum mixed into his palette. But sustaining tension in the free-for-all of a dream state is nearly impossible, so Nolan’s solution is to construct byzantine, arbitrary rules around his fictional brand of shared-dreaming in order to lure as many viewers as possible through a plot-maze with invented consequences. The exposition creates narrative traction in the dream space, so that the suspense and action register with weight and dramatic impact.

But, like the resilient thought virus Leo seeks to incept, exposition takes hold and grows in the film like a parasite. It overwhelms the dream set pieces. The film ends up being more about head-games than dreams. It’s a waltz between Nolan and his audience. He pushes us backward through clever explanations as quickly as possible, spinning around plot holes that only exist in the film’s dream within a dream a within dream logic because of rules that were introduced earlier in the infinite regress of exposition. Nolan’s screenplay is constantly distracting us from the ample pleasures of his mise-en-scene with a tiresome insistance that it has a patch for every plot hole we might think of next.

The evasion and, I think, the failure of the film is that it sets up this logic pursuit game with the audience only to block our  chance to make meaning via several proposed exits. Critically, it declines to elaborate on the central science fiction conceit of the story: the very device that makes it all possible. Nolan emphasizes exposition, but witholds the satisfaction of a full explanation of his core premise. It’s just a tease, a maze, a dream.

So the trouble is, I spent the whole thing speculating about the plausability of the premise, because the film frequently reminded me to question it. Consequently I never suspended my disbelief. I never accepted the central premise of the story. I never achieved a sensory state that reminded me of dreaming (except for that one moment when the first dream collapsed.) I was too focused on explanations. I recognized my assigned role in Nolan’s experiment, and the final shot arrived with a foregone thud.

For me this confluence of budget, talent and visual carte blanche comes out bittersweet. It’s fabulous, but suffers by missing an opportunity to go with the flow and luxuriate in the known pleasures and paradoxes of dreaming, free from real world explanations.

Presented with a once-in-a-moviegoing-liftime view of Haussman’s boulevards convoluting into an Escheresque infinity, all the blather about dream timezones felt like clutter. I wish Inception allowed us more time to relish the vistas of of its blank-cheque dream, rather than prodding us through a hyper-accelerated mind maze.

I definitely like The Dark Knight more.

The Anachronism @ 60k

Since it’s online release in April, my short film The Anachronism has been viewed by 60,000 viewers in 100 countries around the world. Even without subtitles, the film has inspired blog posts in a number of languages, including Japanese, Russian, Polish, French and German. Which blows my mind! Thanks for all the love, intertron.

Here are some choice reactions from the (english-language) blogosphere:

“A Beautiful Steampunk Vision comes to life” - QUIET EARTH

“The Anachronism is more than worth the 15 minutes you need to set aside to watch it.” - GIZMODO

“We want to live in this Robot Squid Submarine” - IO9 (Also check out the I09 gallery of stills from The Anachronism.)

“As haunting as it is beautiful.” - THE DAILY GUMBOOT

“Very wonderfully designed.” - MAKING THE MOVIE

“The latest full-blooded Scientific Romance in a long line. That it stars children leads one to implicate it favourably with other children’s films of emotional, philosophical and aesthetic heft, such as The Adventures of Mark Twain and the works of Karel Zeman and Hayao Miyazaki.” -VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRE

“The only thing wrong with it is that it isn’t longer. … I’ll just give you one warning: this is a filmmaker who, unlike many others, knows how to let a mystery rest undisturbed. Yes, the film leaves you curious as heck, but in the end, I think that’s a much better place to be than stuck with an ultimately disappointing/implausible overexplanation that drains the film of its atmosphere. So I’m torn. I’m love to see this expanded into a full-length feature film. …and yet I think it’s perfect as it is. Let’s hope that either way, we see a lot more from Long.” -BIOEPHEMERA

“A well told little tale, with a surprisingly sinister ending. What it really comes down to is this: mechanical squid. Like you’re going to pass that by.” - COILHOUSE

Review: The Gleaners & I

(Des Glaneuses, Jean-Francois Millet, 1857)

It happens all the time with amateur videos: the operator forgets to stop shooting, lets the camera fall to her side as she turns away, and she ends up capturing endless minutes of shaky, unusable footage. Usually these moments are fodder for the oblivion of the editing room floor, but in Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000) Agnès Varda cuts such accidental footage into a jazz montage, commenting on the way her lens cap appears to dance. In another scene she records her own face as she fiddles with the cheesy digital effects on the consumer-grade camcorder used to shoot the documentary. Is there any other high-caliber auteur who gets away with these kinds of lo-fi antics?

Of course, Varda keeps these moments in because their presence cuts to the heart of her elusive thesis: the abandoned-yet-redeemable potential of everything that we discard, throw away, cast aside. Image media. Food. People.

Her investigation begins with historical paintings of Gleaners, groups of French peasant women who scoured for scraps in the fields after harvest time in centuries past. With the charming free-association of gallic rhetoric, Varda links this forgotten métier with her own role as a documentary filmmaker, a gleaner of images.

From there she sets out on a meandering journey across France, cataloguing a host of scavengers from all walks of life. She chases her unstructured cinematic conceit with gusto, relishing whimsical tangents and happy accidents; in a used furniture warehouse she discovers an amateur painting that suits the theme of the film, so she buys it, loads it into the car and heads back out onto the highway, moving along to the next random discovery. In another sequence she stalks a Parisian man whom she notices scavenging in market stalls for scraps after-hours. Following this thread, she discovers that the man volunteers in the basements of ghetto housing projects outside of Paris, teaching French to Senegalese immigrants.

As she bounces around, connecting unlikely dots and drawing loose associations between passing moments, a patchwork of political, economic, artistic and social issues emerge that speak to the vital ongoing role of supposedly extinct “gleaners” in French society. Varda’s stroke of genius is that the haphazard quality of her filming technique mirrors and reinforces her subject matter in a way that becomes unexpectedly moving, even profound. In the very last shot of the documentary (I won’t spoil it with a description here) she presents a fleeting moment that brings her quest full circle, unifying her scattershot mosaic of ideas and images into a singular poetic resonance that touches on the sublime. From a pile of scraps and useless footage Varda creates a small masterpiece.

Review: The Secret of Kells

Few of the 2010 Oscar nominations emerged from deeper in left field than the nod for Best Animated Feature to The Secret of Kells, an independent Irish/French coproduction that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in January 2009. When I stumbled across a copy at a friend’s place in December I found myself enchanted, but surprised that I had never heard of the film. I only realized that it was a recent release when the title turned up on the nominations list last week. Here’s to hoping that director Tomm Moore and company now have the leverage to achieve a higher level of media exposure in North America. The film deserves the recent boost in attention.

This highly stylized animated story centres on Brendan, an apprentice text illuminator living in 8th Century Ireland. It is a time of transition from Paganism to Christianity, when the fear of Viking raids dominates daily existence. The film presents a speculative history behind the creation of the real-life Book of Kells, a masterpiece of illuminated Christian text.

Moore takes his aesthetic cues from his source material, rendering his world in extreme 2D relief. This approach is stunningly beautiful. The look of the animation feels fresh and contemporary, while also evoking the ancient visual textures and atmosphere of its subject matter. Restricting the depth in the compositions frees the animators from any concern for realism, allowing them to interpret environments and action as living celtic scrollwork.  We see not the forest, but the cultural conceptions of the forest in that era. Moore pushes this engagement with stylized representation to significant thematic impact, achieving sequences of kinetic conflict that depict the philosophical tensions of the mediaeval age in purely visual terms, as in the clip below:

The script seems oddly structured in places. I’m torn between celebrating the unconventional pacing or chalking it up to uneven writing. Perhaps the narrative flow does stumble a little towards the end, much like in the other near-great animated film that Kells likely wrestled its Oscar nomination away from: Ponyo.