 Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures We know quite well the analogue that compares the state in which we watch films to the state in which we dream in sleep. Cinema = Dream, the formula goes, and for those who haven’t acquired the labyrinthine art of lucid dreaming, cinema makes a convenient substitute. Both inspire in us the belief that lucidity is an imperative, and the evanescent web of dreams in particular invokes our struggle with the subterranean cognitive faculties of total recall. A dream barely retained at daybreak or upon waking can often be vague, mesmeric beyond recall, prophetic without explanation; sometimes a photograph of a face half-remembered or words spoken in mute on the blank pages of an unopened book. Cinema, on the other hand, is something like a dream completely remembered and thoroughly digested: characters, dialogue, setting, and story compacted into a swift narrative in marked contrast to the infinitesimal cadences of real time. If the proof of the synthesis of the dream-life and real time is the meta-dream of the cinematic, then Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film of grandiose mechanics and mnemonic architectures, introduces cinema itself as a powerful allegory for the possibility of shared dreaming.
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Hua Yang De Nian Hua is an archival short film composed by Wong Kar Wai. You can find it on the Criterion release of In the Mood for Love or posted in various internet fora. It’s a lovely assemblage of clips from old nitrate films, inspiring more of the nostalgia one can already derive from the lush retro imagery and old radio broadcasts that compose the backdrop of Wong’s films. Wong’s work is the product of a multiplied nostalgia: the Chinese language title for In the Mood for Love derives from an old Chinese song from the 1940s; his late 90s depictions of 1960s Hong Kong display his own wistful daydreams of a time ago, and his films consistently center on lonely characters thinking of another, simpler time – pining for home. I am a regular & devoted passenger of such train rides to the past, and so it was with great joy that I discovered a trove of 1930s Chinese silent movies on ye blessed ol Internet Archive.
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If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. Since 2007, the World Cinema Foundation has been involved in the restoration of a select handful of films for special screening at the Cannes International Film Festival. The 2008 edition of the series saw the restoration of Kim Ki-young‘s The Housemaid (하녀/Hanyeo, 1960), a landmark in Korean cinema. The Korean Film Archive, which was largely responsible for initiating and completing the restoration of The Housemaid, has gone ahead and restored 4 other films by Kim Ki-young in a special DVD boxset, the Kim Ki-Young Collection.
Kim’s comeback as a major auteur of world cinema began in earnest in 1996 when the Tokyo International Film Festival screened 5 of his films for the first time in many years. Retrospectives at the Busan International Film Festival in 1997 and at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 followed suit. When Berlin invited Kim to attend the retrospective, the director was already utilizing his newfound fame to prepare for a new film which would serve as the culmination of a career criminally under-appreciated for decades. Sadly that film never materialized, since Kim and his wife Kim Yu-bong (his long-standing supporter and producer of almost all of his films) died in a fire at their home before they could ever board the plane to Berlin. Fortunately for the world, Kim’s legacy lives on in the efforts of joint ventures like the World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive.
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It is impossible to conclude even a minute comprehension of Pedro Costa’s cinema without addressing the formidable influence which the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had on Costa’s recent constructions, and particularly on the structuring of his masterpiece, Colossal Youth. The French film-making duo — whose works are identified under the combined authorship of “Straub-Huillet” — is responsible for some of the most stringent, challenging films in the history of cinema. Indeed, the “difficulties” that are sometimes ascribed to Pedro Costa’s work, and especially the frustration, discomfort, or even “monumental boredom” experienced by some in watching challenging films like In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, are very nearly the same difficulties which have been attributed to Straub-Huillet’s films. Jean-Marie Straub, a combative and loquacious Alsatian (and a professedly Marxist thinker), first came on the scene as a colleague and friend of the Nouvelle Vague directors — Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, et al — who did not himself make a film until 1963, some years after the Nouvelle Vague had made its mark. Straub by then had already met Danièle Huillet when they were film students at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris in 1954. Their partnership — intimate and professional — would last until Huillet’s death in 2006 (notably, the year of the release of Costa’s Colossal Youth, in itself a testament to the Straub-Huillet oeuvre and to the radical solutions the duo proffered to forestall the “death of cinema” Rossellini had once declared).
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“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears”
– Heraclitus
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. The film sits somewhere between the fragmented meta-cinema of Almodovar and the dread inducing shadow pulses of early Polanski, with a structure premised on a Beethoven sonata . Campanella, working from a taut politically motivated novel penned by Eduardo Sacheri, along with the support of three highly nuanced performances from his lead actors Soledad Villamil (Irene), Ricardo Darin (Benjamin) and Guillermo Francella (Sandoval), has crafted a finely tuned and wholly engrossing layered work of film-art.
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The standing paradox of the camera-eye — of the frame which it creates and through which we inquire and learn of a spectacle — is that it permits freedom to gestate in a contained space. By ‘freedom’ I refer to that unmistakable sensation of plurality which the cinematographic spectacle invokes. The spectres of Cézanne (to borrow Derrida‘s treatment of Marx) have marched a long way in initiating the break in the cinematographer’s art, the rupture where such an event — the seeping through of freedom into the prison of the frame — could take place. From the perspective of film history, the first (or most visible) indication that Cézanne’s work on the limitations of the canvas would continue and spill over into kinema occurs in the filmography of Robert Bresson. Bresson is to the cinematographic arts what Cézanne represents to the fine arts: the breaking with tradition through an increased minimalism of means. Both artists had begun their careers steeped in the knowledge of classical standards, had questioned and blown up what those standards meant, and had pushed the realm of their respective art into passageways that urged asceticism and clarity in place of vapid ornamentation.
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A couple nights ago I dropped by my new favorite Los Angeles cinema, the historic and tragic Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, now completely reimagined by the oh so excellent curatorial group Cinefamily. As part of a series on animation for grown-ups, Cinefamily hosted a special screening and presentation on the origins of Nick Jr.’s strangely brilliant pre-school kids program, Yo Gabba Gabba.
Gabba is the brainchild of a couple skate-punk musicians (Christian Jacobs of the Aquabats and Scott Schultz of Majestic) who as new fathers found themselves quite disappointed with the limited creativity of children’s programming on television. That disappointment spawned wonder and fortunately, they found a dude as charismatic and as Easy Reader cool as DJ Lance Rock (another musician, Lance Robertson) to host the show. Gabba has become something of a phenomenon, gripping audiences from all age brackets, not just its two-year-old target market, and constantly pushing the envelope of how creative and musically inspired a kids show for the pre-linguistic can be. Now moving into its third season, Gabba is just getting more and more bizarrely fascinating.
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While attending the 11th Annual Jeonju International Film Festival (which concluded this past Friday, on May 7th), I came into late contact with the cinema of Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa’s name has been bandied about by diligent, discerning cineastes since the beginning of the decade as the arrival of a visionary filmmaker whose cinema demands the strictest attention to its atomic motions and a similar participation in its latent unfolding. The recent 4-disc box set release by Criterion of Costa’s three major works, Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), was enough to solidify Costa’s growing status as a master filmmaker in the international scene. Costa’s work has been often described as “severe and…uncompromisingly difficult,” and though I expected the worst, I came away from his films overwhelmed with a heightened sense of the mythos that lies at the heart of the actual and the real — the transcendent reality which is already contained in the concrete. The cinema of Pedro Costa is indeed “colossal,” and though its progression has been a labor of glacial speed, its achievements are as far reaching as the giant steps of those who’ve practiced the unacknowledged art of vigilant forbearance.
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But certainly for the present age, which refers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,. . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. – Feurbach (via Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle)
I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower. — Banksy
Yes, Banksy has once again invoked the gawking hearts of the Internet–all sorts of media sources — and maybe even real people. The mischievous and still publicly anonymous vandal, known for his slyly playful and politically-minded graffiti (like painting on the West Bank barrier), learned an important lesson from his many years of painting on private property: art gathers as much meaning from its context as its content. It might not seem like much of a radical thought, but by taking environmental context seriously Banksy has been able to make art more of an event than a cultural artifact. Some of Banksy’s most memorable performance stunts find him placing things in unlikely places: his own work among the masters or inside a Paris Hilton album, a painted elephant in the middle of his debut gallery opening or a Guantanamo Bay prisoner doll near a Disneyland ride. Banksy’s new project, the supposed documentary on street art Exit Through the Gift Shop, plays all these tricks and more.
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It’s somewhat surprising that we’ve cultivated a genre of art, most often in film, referred to in the most casual speak as ‘so horrible it’s great’. Birdemic: Shock and Terror – the debut work of amateur filmmaker and day-time San Jose software salesman James Nguyen — is the newest cult craze to flood the midnight screenings. The film is currently spreading all over the country, quickly becoming today’s newest exploitation epidemic. Enthusiastic and often intoxicated crowds hoot and holler at Nguyen’s ingenuous effort to create a “romantic thriller”; pauses in conversation last too long, the story shifts in fragmented directions, and of course, birds fall from the sky and bomb stuff.
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The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
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