time of the wolf (some screenshots)

Trying to get back into the habit of capturing screenshots as part of my viewing practice. These are from Michael Haneke's piece of post-apocalyptic European grimness, Time of the Wolf:

yi yi (a one and a two) by edward yang

the trailer

what people thought

"My first impressions of Yi Yi were general ones, of visual beauty, narrative complexity, and quietude. Since I was familiar with Yang’s previous work, the complexity, and particularly the beauty, came as no surprise. Few modern filmmakers use the frame so precisely, with such a firm grasp of all its expressive properties—light and color but also scale, proportion, distance, containment, concealment. Among its many other qualities, Yang’s is a cinema of luminosity, his painterly eye dedicated to getting the exact tone of city life." (Kent Jones, at the Criterion site)

"The late Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s poignant wedding-day drama A One and a Two … understands better than any film I can think of the ideal relationship between the camera angle, the subject, the shot’s duration, the shot before, the shot after, and the emotion of the scene." (Nick Jones, at Sight and Sound)

"This is view of contemporary urban life as plausible and comprehensive as any cinema has to offer, its elements of soap opera and melodrama integrated as skillfully as its sense of the interconnectedness of things.” (Tony Rayns, also at Sight and Sound)

what I thought

what's next

Yi Yi's emphasis on family life and physical malady (specifically the difficulty of caring for a relative in a coma) has led my Film Club collaborator Tiffanny E. to choose The Safety of Objects (2001) for our next film. Stay tuned.

brand upon the brain, by guy maddin

So it's been a while since I've updated the Too Many Projects Film Club blog. We'd convened a little less frequently than normal because of a couple of busy months, but it looks like we might be getting back to some sort of a regular schedule right about now.

We left off back in April [!] with Johnny Got His Gun, a film which dwells on the horror of a young person's radical facial disfigurement. We followed that up with my pick, Eyes Without A Face, a surprisingly ghoulish French film from 1960, which centers around a psychotic doctor's disquieting attempts to repair his daughter's own facial disfigurement. Here's the trailer, which gives some sense of the film's creepiness:

The imagery of that trailer is pretty much all sinister labs, diabolical parents, and vulnerable young people, which leads quite neatly to our newest pick, Guy Maddin's marvelously unhinged Brand Upon the Brain (2006).

Like Eyes and Johnny, Brand Upon the Brain is obsessed with the beauty of the young. Brand, in particular, is interested in the particular androgynous beauty of adolescents:

This concern fits well with Maddin's career-long fascination with the "look and feel" of early film. Here he seems especially interested in recreating the capacity of the silent cinema to evoke a nearly otherworldly glamour. (Watching this film, I was reminded of filmmaker Maya Deren's remarks that early film stars constitute "a mythology of gods of the first magnitude whose mere presence lent to the most undistinguished events a divine grandeur and intensity.")

It's not unusual, of course, for a film to be enamored with the appearance of the young: we can see this everywhere from (say) Larry Clark's Kids to, I don't know, National Lampoon's Van Wilder. What makes Brand a little more interesting (and less prurient) is that it seems especially interested in making its viewer inhabit the subjectivity of the young, specifically this kid here, who is our protagonist:

The movie's greatest merit is perhaps located in the way it ends up being a spot-on recreation of the confused fever dream that is existence on the cusp of puberty: a welter of strange adventures, intense infatuations, and erotic pleasure / confusion made all the more bewildering by the fleshy horror involved in the actual realities of carnality.

Of course, to a sensitive child, everything that is disturbing about carnality is most literally embodied in the form of any given adult, and so it follows that the adults on display in the film should be appropriately monstrous, a mix of repressive attitudes, undecodable rituals, and grotesque physicality:

It doesn't give too much away to say that since youth is, by its very nature, fleeting, that the pleasures of youth to be found in the film are also presented as fleeting (see also: Krapp's Last Tape, Film Club XXXV). It comes as no surprise, then, that every single adult character in the film is to some degree concerned with recapturing their youth, eventually driven to the extreme of consuming the young, both metaphorically and/or literally (!). Great stuff; thanks to Tiffanny for her pick.

We followed up by pursuing the idea of androgyny, and just yesterday we watched Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). I hope to have a write-up of it ready soon...

the diving bell and the butterfly, by julian schnabel

So here's this week's Film Club pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Netflix summarizes it thusly:

"In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby's autobiography, which he dictated by blinking."

That should maybe have a spoiler warning on it, since these two sentences encapsulate the central narrative arc of the film, from beginning to end. (The movie fleshes out its run-time with some stuff about Bauby's relationship with his wife, mistress, father, children, and friends, but the dictation of the book is the strongest through-line, and the one granted the most classical resolution.)

So, even if you only know that much, you essentially know the entire story. And then Netflix's summary goes on, revealing the film's theme and overall tenor: something about it being a "poignant film about the strength of the human spirit." This doesn't really constitute an additional spoiler because "the strength of the human spirit" is a cliche, and if we're going to be watching a film about a paralyzed guy who writes a memoir by blinking, the only way it's not going to be about the strength of the human spirit is if it's made by the Kids in the Hall.

None of this is to call out the poor Netflix synopsis-writers; I'm sure they have more serious things to worry about. It's to make the point that this film faces a real dilemma at the outset. We know how the story ends, and we know that the central thematic motif of that story is, well, "shopworn" is putting it kindly. So the challenge becomes: how can you take a film that in synopsis sounds like a Lifetime TV movie and pitch it to an art-house audience—an audience that (at least theoretically) is supposed to be more adventurous in its narrative and thematic tastes?

Well, the film's French, which probably helps.

But to find a more serious answer, we have to turn to an appreciation of the film's craft. Having been trained as a fiction-writer, I often approach films from the perspective of analyzing what works and what doesn't in the film's narrative. But the director of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, is trained as a painter, and so a more appropriate method might be to try to appreciate the film's "painterly" qualities. In this regard, the film is not a series of stale cliches, but rather a smashing success, especially in its opening scenes, which masterfully manipulate focal depth, color, and light:

There's something else that Schnabel does from a craft perspective, and it involves an exceptionally canny control over the usage of point-of-view, at least for the first third of the film. Bear with me for a minute while I explicate...

After his stroke, protagonist Bauby suffers from something they refer to in the film as "locked-in syndrome." Schnabel perceives a relationship between locked-in syndrome and cinematic spectation: like Bauby, we, the film's viewers, can perceive things, but are prohibited from interacting with them. To cement this relationship, Schnabel chooses to present the majority of the early portion of the film in first-person POV shots.

This sort of extended use of the first-person POV has been experimented with in the past rather dubiously— see: Lady in the Lake (1942) —but that was a film which promised to put you "in the action," which feels awkward in a passive medium like the cinema (it works great in an interactive medium like video games, though not when those video games are translated back into first-person film experiments). Schnabel's film, in effect, promises the opposite: it puts you in "the inaction," which works surprisingly well (perhaps most viscerally in a striking, memorable sequence in which Bauby has his right eye sewn shut to prevent infection).

Schnabel cheats a little, breaking from a strictly naturalistic POV by using effects like jump cuts (which could arguably be said to have a rough analogue in the way our vision works, but it'd be a stretch), and by bringing people so unnaturally close that they'd practically have to be bumping noses with Bauby. This is maybe plausible when it's his wife:

...but a bit less believable when it's his doctor:

These deviations have their effect, though: they contribute to an overall sense of disorientation and invasive presence, both of which help to get the viewer into Bauby's head (and body) better than a strict adherence to first-person POV might have done on its own.

Eventually, the film quietly begins to move us out of the subjective POV and into an objective, third-person POV. We start getting shots like this:

...which increase in both frequency and duration throughout the first third of the film. As a viewer, attuning yourself to your consciousness' flow into and out of Bauby's body is an odd experience: it is as though you are some kind of restless spirit. Adding to this are the moves into and out of memories (via flashbacks) and into and out of Bauby's imagination (via fantasy sequences)—it's safe to say that the film strives to get its audience to be aware of itself as a living perceptual apparatus, which is a damn sight more interesting than getting its audience to be aware of the "strength of the human spirit." It's also a generous approach to filmmaking, one that—at its (unsustained) best—invites comparison to avant-garde work which goes further with drawing attention to the audience's status as perceptual agents (Stan Brakhage's work is the best example I can summon to mind).

Schnabel shouldn't be faulted for not making an avant-garde film, though, especially when he's able to use his manipulation of POV for such striking narrative effects. One notable effect is that Schnabel navigates us through over a third of the film before we ever get to see what our protagonist looks like, in the present—this is something that most films, of course, provide within the first few minutes. By the point where we finally get an unobstructed view of his face we've already become familiar with him as a lively, handsome man in flashbacks and fantasies, and seeing him with the distorted features of the stroke victim comes as a vivid shock, even if you're expecting it. At this moment—which essentially constitutes the "turning point" that most films put at the end of their first act—the film chooses to move us suddenly outside the consciousness of Bauby himself, and abruptly into the consciousness of someone who knows him from before and is experiencing the shock of seeing him transformed. (It fits, not least because the middle third of the film is largely occupied with the changing relationship between Bauby and his network of loved ones.)

So. As a story, not that compelling, but it's a finely-wrought piece of cinematic art. This might lead to an interesting follow-up question—something about the decision to transform someone else's suffering / disability into a beautiful aesthetic object?—but let's hold off on that until next week, when we look at a very different portrayal of disability, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

diary of the dead, by george romero

So, this week, Film Club watched George Romero's new zombie picture, Diary of the Dead, as a way of continuing our investigation of representations of the contemporary hyper-mediated landscape.

This film represents a break in continuity for Romero: whereas his previous four Dead films (Night, Dawn, Day and Land) follow one another chronologically, Diary chooses instead to go back to the day when zombie activity first breaks out (what we could call "Z-Day," to borrow a term from Romero homage Shaun of the Dead).

Z-Day is a conceit invented by Romero in 1968 and has not visited by him again since then, and his return to it may represent something of an attempt to rethink the story for a contemporary audience. For starters, Diary represents a sustained attempt to realistically represent how a zombie attack would look through the lens of contemporary televised crisis reportage: we repeatedly see footage that conjures up memories of the LA riots / Columbine / 9-11 / Katrina, etc.:

It's worth noting, however, that this isn't really a new concern for Romero: even in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, radio and television reportage is central to the way the story unfolds, and even back then Romero pretty much nailed how, in a crisis, people tend to huddle around the protective glow of anything that emits information. Diary recognizes, however, that the palette of these technologies has expanded pretty dramatically over the past forty years:

...and it expends a goodly amount of its run-time trying to consider how people (especially young people) might make use of the Internet to respond in a Z-Day type situation. (One wonders whether he was aware of last year's Internet event in which hundreds of bloggers made posts about the global zombie uprising.)

Ultimately, though, Romero is less interested in blogs and more interested in the Internet's capacity for widespread digital video distribution. Indeed, the film itself is primarily conceived of as a film-within-the-film (a documentary called The Death of Death), and a chunk of the film's narrative propulsion (although less than is ultimately possible) comes from our protagonist's desire to record more footage for the film.

In some ways, this decision to make the protagonist a young filmmaker invites a reading of the film as autobiographical, although Romero traditionally feels a deep pessimism about all human endeavor, and that includes here the impulse of "bloggers, hackers, [and] kids," to grow their own media. An incomplete version of the protagonist's film, once uploaded, gets 72,000 hits in eight minutes, which helps him to argue that the film is "saving lives," but one gets the feeling that Romero himself isn't convinced. "The more voices there are," says the film's narrator, "the more spin there is. The truth gets that much harder to find. In the end, it's all just noise."

These reflections upon media are pretty obviously the film's reason for existence: although the normal emotional touch-points of the zombie film (killing your friend who has become a zombie, etc.) are dutifully included, they are dispensed with in an almost perfunctory fashion. And ultimately, this year's earlier Cloverfield may be a better investigation of the intersection of monster apocalypse plus man-on-the-street video—Cloverfield's dialogue is far more naturalistic, and features less overt hand-wringing about the nature of mediation. Nevertheless, this still feels like something of a return to form for Romero: he still has considerable skill at imagining the way our contemporary infrastructure might slide into collapse, something Land, a film with no small whiff of science fiction about it, got away from a bit.

Next week we're sticking with horror and spectation, which means we're going to have to pay a pilgrimage to Horror and Spectation Ground Zero: 1960's bit of snuff nastiness, Peeping Tom.

krapp's last tape, by atom egoyan | LOL by joe swanberg

[Some of the later pictures in this post are marginally NSFW, scroll with caution.]

Over the past few weeks Film Club has watched two films that deal with the relationship between human beings and their technologies of communication, recording, and archiving.

First up was Atom Egoyan's memorable adaptation of Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's meditation on old age. (It's available on the third disc of the Beckett on Film set.)

In this play, the main character, Krapp, spends his days in a dwelling which (at least in this particular production of the play) is crammed to the gills with journals, notes, and files.

He's an old man, and he appears to be going at least partially mad from extended isolation. There are no other characters in the play (or the film), it's just Krapp and us.

As it turns out, Krapp has been something of an obsessive self-documenter for much of his life, and he has spent many years keeping a sort of audio journal. The central dramatic event of the film is simply Krapp selecting a spool of audiotape out of his archive and listening back through it.

If you've ever kept a journal (or audio journal, or blog), and then revisited it years later, you know that this is not an activity that comes without its fair share of emotional risk. It has the capacity to summon up fond memories, yes, but it also has the capacity to summon up regrets, remorse, feelings of loss, irrational contempt towards one's younger self, etc. In short, it can be the stuff of drama. John Hurt does a fantastic job embodying the complexities and subtleties of Krapp's reactions:

The play's most clever conceit is its doubling of this entire dramatic mechanism: the tape that Krapp selects to listen to is one from his late-thirties, but the tape was made on an evening when Krapp had engaged in the activity of listening to an even earlier tape, one from his mid-twenties. Krapp at thirty-nine listens to himself at twenty-five and thinks "God, listen to that arrogant, self-important, foolish young man. Look at the mistakes he was making, and he didn't even know it." Krapp at sixty-nine listens to himself at thirty-nine and thinks the same thing. One gets the sense that there's never a point in life at which one can speak in a way that one's future, hopefully wiser self will respect.

So, in Beckett's universe, the pleasures of one's life—being grounded in the present—tend to deliquesce, whereas one's regrets and remorse—being grounded in the past—tend to persist. Therefore, there can be no comfort in the archive: attempting to experience a pleasure via its documentation only helps to remind us of its loss. This is the stuff of real terror.

* * *

To get the idea of our follow-up, LOL, you could almost think of it as "Li'l Krapps." Where Krapp is about an old man looking back on recordings of his life and lamenting what an arrogant, self-important, foolish young man he once was, and the mistakes he once made, then LOL is about a group of arrogant, self-important, foolish young men, making recordings of their life and making mistakes, but still young enough not to have had the experience of looking back on this with regret.

The other big difference between LOL (made in 2006) and Krapp (originally written in 1959), of course, is the increased ubiquity of recording, archiving, and communications technology. I'm a little surprised that Facebook people seem to dislike this film quite as much as they do (it's only pulling in a pretty low 2 1/2 stars at Flixter's "Movies" application), for it seems like it's made by and for them. (The weak characterization of the female characters might have something to do with it, I guess.) But still, I'm pleased to see a film that acknowledges the existence of a behavior as contemporary as taking a picture of one's own haircut with a cell phone:

And I'm always pleased when people in movies use actual browsers instead of some phony movie-world browser:

As you might have guessed from that preceding screenshot, one concern that LOL shares with Krapp's Last Tape is the mediation of pleasure, although in LOL this is specifically located around the erotic electronic image, either pornography located on the Internet:

...or the amateur image transmitted between members of a relationship as an expression of erotic connection:

...or even the (ever-growing) areas where these two categories become indistinguishable from one another:

Whether this sort of image-transmission constitutes interpersonal connection is one of the more genuine areas of concern in this film. As for whether the surplus mass of electronic documentation we generate these days will, forty years down the road, constitute something we can paw through to generate the kind of reflections that characterize Krapp's Last Tape remains to be seen.

Despite the fact that I'm now in MA, and my Film Club collaborator Skunkcabbage remains in Chicago, we're going to try to keep the Film Club going. Our next film will stick with this "mediation" theme, although see how it gets interpreted by the world of horror: we'll be moving on to George Romero's latest, Diary of the Dead (2008).

spirited away, by hayao miyazaki

So, sadly, we had to give up on Funeral Parade of Roses... my eBay purchase never made it here, and after a month and a half of waiting I eventually needed to request a refund, and Film Club had to pick up where we left off, which was with Ghost In The Shell way back in early May.

Co-founder Skunkcabbage decided to move us onwards down the anime path, suggesting we take a look at Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001).

This was maybe my fourth time seeing Spirited Away, and I really think it's a great movie for children (in addition to being just a great movie in the more general, all-around sense). I thought a lot about why this might be, and eventually realized that the movie is all about ontological instability.

Ontological instability is a fancy description of a condition wherein the fundamental existence of things is mutable, in flux, or otherwise suspect. As adults, we like to pretend that our worlds and our identities are fundamentally stable: that things have a kind of permanence that can be existentially "banked on." Children, however, don't have the luxury of being able to assume that the world is in any way stable, for the obvious reason that the early years of a child's life are spent undergoing Cronenbergian levels of intense developmental changes, taking in massive amounts of new information, and trying to decode the rules imposed upon you by adults, rules which doubtlessly appear to be capricious and incomprehensible. Spirited Away, then, like its most obvious influence, Alice In Wonderland, is essentially a parable about trying to negotiate your way through a fluctuating world while at the mercy of these assorted complications.

The story begins with our protagonist, Chihiro, moving to a new town (a familiar instance of the kinds of radical change that parents commonly visit upon their children). You can pretty much see at a glance how enthused Chihiro is about this idea:

Before long, they've made a wrong turn, and they come upon a strange complex of seemingly abandoned buildings. No one can quite determine what their purpose is, and their mystery further unsettles Chihiro, although her parents respond essentially blithely to it (Chihiro's father, operating in a typically adult male mode, attempts to establish ontological stability by declaring (wrongly) that the buildings must be part of a theme park abandoned in a 1990s economic crisis).

This setting will prove to be one site of radical instability or flux in the film, which ends up being effectively illustrated by the motif of water. As they first explore it, there's no water present: there is, in fact, a dry riverbed running through the middle of it.

But then at nightfall there's a river there:

And then two days later it's actually become an entire ocean:

It's not merely the world that's mutable and impermanent, however, but Chihiro's own identity as well. Not long after the world has begun its shift, Chihiro threatens to fade out into pure nothingness (one possible terminal point of ontological instability):

Eventually she finds a way to keep her form, but that's not the last time the film casts her status as an individual into doubt. She negotiates the world well enough to eventually encounter its ruler, Yubaba (it's worth mentioning, as a sidenote, that Yubaba—all jewels, makeup, cigarettes, and unpredictable rage—is pretty much a walking incarnation of the things that children find mysterious / grotesque about old people):

She agrees to put Chihiro to work, and in doing so, she alters one of the key markers of Chihiro's ontological permanence. Specifically, she changes Chihiro's name, literally lifting the kanji from the page:

Chihiro's not the only character who suffers from radical instability: did I mention that her parents are turned into pigs?

There are other examples as well, probably most notably the character of Haco, who may or may not be her ally (and who at various points in the film may be a boy, a dragon, or a river). It all adds up to a memorable evocation of the often traumatic (but occasionally pleasurable) experience of attempting to negotiate an unstable world from an unstable subject position. Again I'm reminded of Alice in Wonderland, which leads me to the announcement of next week's pick: the semi-animated 1988 Alice adaptation created by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Stay tuned!

the pleasures of objects and spaces: aline bonetto

[This entry is not part of Film Club proper but is part of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon, which begins today and runs through May 25th. Please consider joining us with your own post on the topic.]

Production designer Aline Bonetto's collaboration with French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet began in 1991, when she worked as a set decorator on Delicatessen (still one of my all-time favorite movies). She returned as his set decorator in 1995 for City of Lost Children, and moved on to become his official production designer in 2001, with Amelie.

Amelie would present a challenge for any production designer, given that, at its core, it is a movie about the pleasures of objects and spaces. Even beyond this: the film repeatedly posits that your relationship to objects and spaces is, in fact, a central determinant of your character. And so the responsibility falls on the production designer to produce objects and spaces that can convincingly yield pleasure and reveal character.

It is to Ms. Bonetto's enormous credit that the film pulls this off: the spaces in the film are crammed with interesting things which delight the eye and help to establish mood and flavor. The costumes are great, too.

Screenshots can say this better than I can:

One more to go, this weekend.