adrian-193 Reviews

Six Feet Under (2001–2005)

Six Feet and a Foot, Under

[9/10 · 18 January 2007]

I must have been six feet under myself, to have avoided this show for so long. Either I wasn't listening or I just didn't get it. After watching the pilot last night (Series one, episode one), I sunk into the couch and played the rest of the first disc's episodes straight through. I wouldn't normally go out on a limb and post on a show this early into watching it, but its beginning really seems to set up an emotional logic that will serve the director's purposes for the show's duration that I'm going to climb out there and see what comes to mind.

In spite of its title, and its gimmick, the show is not about death. Yes, each episode kicks off when somebody kicks off (the big one; aka bites the dust, meets his maker, buys the farm up in the sky), but these are just dead people, not people who die. Since we're given their death at the beginning of an episode, we're not emotionally invested in what's happened to them. Instead, we'll become emotionally invested in what happens to the family as the death creates consequences requiring the family members' attention.

So it's not really about death, it's about an afterlife. In fact the family's been given a second chance by the death of their father (I'm not spoiling anything here). His death is a gift, sacrifice perhaps so that in his absence, members of the family might consider their own lives seriously for the first time. Each of the family members is eccentric in his or her own right. This tells us we're watching HBO. Characters, for being eccentric, will each have a greater range of action and reaction for the reason that they're quirky. But in many other respects, the show is conservative.

Though surrounded by death, the father's death gives the family a second shot at being a family. The first family was built on death, literally on the repression that bound a family to support a father's funereal existence. To individual family members, the family house was a funeral home. They were each living out a death sentence of sorts, whether by maintaining secrets, keeping the closet door locked, by lying about affairs, by struggling against conformity and family obligation while trying to be different.. In other words, the usual family dynamics!

If what it took was for the father to die in order for this particular family home to confront its deathly service, then so be it, but it's a TV show. What makes this second life interesting is that we're given a family of idiosyncratic individuals. They're going to repair and remake the family on their own terms. Isn't this the blueprint of the socially conservative, or hopeful indie? That conventional social organization won't get us there; but individualism will. And individualism can rescue dying social institutions after all. We'll each have to make our own choices, but if we're true to ourselves and honest with each other, it can be done. The recent hit "Little Miss Sunshine" followed the same line: a VW bus, quirky in its own right with a clutch gone bad and failing horn, propels a family barely contained across hundreds of miles of imminent disaster to support the hopeless but lovable dream of its youngest family spirit.

The genre is optimistic, probably as unrealistic as any other family drama, but at least optimistic. Not to mention just hilarious. So looking forward to the rest!

Clean, Shaven (1993)

The Sound and the Fury

[7/10 · 11 January 2007]

This is a small indie by Lodge Kerrigan made in 94. Kerrigan's recent film Keane was astonishing (as was Damian Lewis). Like Keane, this film features a genuinely real and captivating performance by an actor playing a schizophrenic. The film's movement is fragmentary, roped together by a soundtrack that reveals the voices we might suppose are echoing within our character's unbound mind. His actions are confusing to him, and make us increasingly reluctant to watch, as watching makes us complicit with what he does, which is bad.

The use of sound in this film practically makes it worth watching in its own right, pun intended. In the critic's video essay that accompanies the Criterion release of this film, which is pitched to grad level film students (and that's not a complaint), Michael Atkinson remarks that the director uses "objective" sound, not "subjective" sound. It's true that the sounds that fill the film's soundtrack are given us from the external world, often through the protagonist's car radio and sometimes simply through the ether. But I'd disagree with Atkinson. I don't think this is just use of objective sound to a parallel the film's fragmented and "subject-less" subject and narrative. Yes, it's a different use of sound, but it's a complication of subjective sound, not a departure from it. After all we hear the soundtrack, and therefore we can't but believe that the subject hears them.

The use of sound here is interesting, I think, because the protagonist is not hearing them but producing them. We're given the sounds as he hears them, but they echo and resound within his schizophrenic mind, as they are the schizophrenic's world. Voices unattributed, perhaps real, perhaps recollected, but certainly not sounds that anchor the schizophrenic to reality. Rather, sounds that divorce him from the world, catching him as abruptly as an unexpected blow to the head. Short, sharp, shocks that knock about and bring into consciousness commands, put-downs, and other forms of verbal punishment that trouble us for their detachment. We don't know who's saying them. Which means we don't know why they are being said, which means (as Atkinson notes), we don't know what to think of them.

Where Atkinson hangs these sounds on a reel of film though, my sense is that they should be hung on memory, which is not a reel of film, is certainly subjective, if not multiply subjective, and is not objective in the slightest for the simple reason that memories can't be. Our schizophrenic protagonist's relation to sound is that he's caught in a compulsive listening, but cannot hear. The coup in Kerrigan's sonic genius, I think, is that in memory is the protagonist's pain, and it's a pain he suffers, often, without making the slightest of sound. But for the one that we hear.

L.I.E. (2001)

LIE down

[9/10 · 31 December 2006]

This is one of those films that must be hard to fund -- films like the Woodsman, The Magdalene Sisters, War Zone (by Tim Roth) or Monster -- but which, when made, distributed, and seen, recoups any expense and undresses any doubt. The problem with films like this is that they involve inappropriate undressing, be it by pedophiles, institutions, families, or serial killers. The appeal of the genre is in some ways the unthinkable, unacceptable, the distasteful and the unwatchable. It's that last part, the unwatchable, that creates tension, serving as a kind of off-screen reference that anchors the film's story and becomes its power for not being seen.

(Herzog's Grizzly Man reveled in this, for it was a film about a guy who was eaten, along with his girlfriend, by the very Grizzlies he believed himself to be protecting, and everybody knew it. That was the whole catch: to know something that is not going to be shown, to be compelled by it, and to rent and watch this film knowing that it's a long set up to a final act we will not be allowed to see. Can it be that a film such as that prepares us for something horrible? Do we become complicit with it then, as consumers of that preparation?)

Complicitness. This film shows us what happens. It is simple in its presentation, and for that complicates its subject matter. Because it does not plant a stake in the ground and draw clear, distinct and straightforward lines between right and wrong. Those are the films that are hard to fund. But better to watch. For they complicate their concepts, distribute perspectives and motivations, and sometimes even put the viewer harm's way.

Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog eats his subject

[8/10 · 31 December 2006]

I'm a fan of Werner Herzog, enough of one to have hunted down a copy of Werner Herzog eats his shoe, back in the day when it was available only as VHS. And I think it's great that he's experiencing a resurgence of interest and relevance (so little of the New German cinema has) and that he's exposing a new audience to his particular and unique personal pursuit of the "perfect image." But there was something unsettling in Grizzly Man, besides the obvious morbidity that ran as a subtext under the film like the soundtrack we all knew we wanted to hear (but shouldn't, because, as the director appeals to Timothy Treadwell's e-girlfriend, 'You must never hear zis,' in a sequence that is the only time we see the director, as if by appearing on screen to validate the horribleness of what's on the videotape, the last reel of Timmy's life, left running while he and his girlfriend are mauled to death, he thinks he demonstrates compassion? Werner have you lost your humanity for a concept of it? And you complain that Timmy's tapes show his girlfriend only twice -- and you show yourself only once? I don't want to jump too far to this conclusion Werner but I think the distance is not far: you betray your fascination by having chosen that moment to appear on camera, and it is precisely the moment you chose to appear that shows that for you the image you seek is detached from human experience, for the image is a concept, and while it may reflect, philosophically, on the human experience, you will remove yourself from society to get it.) Werner's agenda throughout the film seems to be to pull apart Tim Treadwell (as if he hadn't already been pulled apart by bears...) and it's not clear whether or not this is a result of Herzog's encounter with Tim's tapes, due to his fascination with the man's ending, or whether Herzog has an argument with Treadwell's naive and childish love of the animal/ human kingdom. The kid mistakenly embraced the wild, thinking he belonged to it, simply because he couldn't fake it any more in the society of man. But Herzog takes this out on the subject of the film. His compassionate appearance as witness to the taped "murder" (to Herzog, bears can be murderers -- and he accuses Treadwell of projecting?) is false -- it's a cheap attempt to take the subject's side, and it neither goes far enough to establish his sincerity nor far enough to establish his presence as an essayist, not a documentarian. Herzog's instincts as an image maker are among the best in the industry. But his exploitation of subject matter, a criticism wagered many times at his ability to create human tragedy among his actors and crew, is on screen in Grizzly Man, and left me queasy as I'm sure it has done many. This film ought to be refiled. Perhaps under "fictional biography" (next to the movie they'll be making of Frey's Million Little Pieces). Herzog has an agenda, as a filmmaker, and as a documentarian. Does Oprah have a film club?

Vera Drake (2004)

Veracity in Vera Drake

[8/10 · 31 December 2006]

Watched Mike Leigh's "Vera Drake" w/ Imelda Staunton in it the other night. Possibly his best (though don't we all like Naked)? Imelda's performance and Leigh's tight close ups reminded me of the Passion of Joan of Arc, and something Gilles Deleuze had to say about the face in film.

He suggests that in film, the face is used to capture two kinds of affect, or rather that the face has two affective modes: one is expressive (and angry face, hurt face, a face expressing the individual's feelings); the other is impressive/reflective (when the face is used in a reaction shot to reflect back to us what's happening in the scene).

Imelda's face goes through these transformations during the film, and at the one pivotal moment that is the crux of the story, that show her face literally wiped clean of its expressive charm and captured by external forces. Brilliant.

For a filmmaker to see the potential in an actor to do that -- and to hang the film on that. It's as if he gives us the story, which is one of Imelda's personal perseverance and choice set against societal codes, in one slow, dawning realization. Her performance was incredible.

The Child (2005)

The Dardenne brothers do it again: L'Infant

[8/10 · 31 December 2006]

In L'Infant, a young couple struggles to keep it together when a newborn enters the picture. Shot, as were the brothers' previous films "Promesse" and "Rosetta" in a French city lost somewhere in the industrial past but home nonetheless to important family and social tradition, the film's genius can easily be overlooked and mistaken for the banal and trivial detail of a realist's take on daily life. A bicycle is ridden, stairs are climbed, a scooter takes a corner, a beer served. Or does or protagonist ride a bike, does he climb the same flight of apartment stairs, again and again, does he bank a scooter into the same street as if it's a street he knows as well as any other he's been confined to, a beer is served or a beer is requested and the bartender pours our customer another round.... French author of the Nouvelle Roman, Robbes-Grillet, created an art form perhaps similar to that of the Dardenne brothers. The films of Cinema Verite and Italian Neorealism were also attempts to approximate the Real while remaining within fiction. "As if" film-making. But the Dardenne brothers have a take of their own though. It involves the affect and scene upon which the film has been made. L'Infant was inspired by the sight of a young mother who frequently took her baby on walks near the filming of "The Son." The film-makers and crew noticed this woman, and in particular the troubled and abrupt manner in which she pushed the baby carriage in front of her. This scene, repeated every day, took on significance with each repetition, as if the repeating of it deepened its meaning while making it more obscure at the same time. The brothers decided to turn this into a film. And so the it is that the kinds of impressions life makes on the these sibling film makers are the kinds of expressions on which their films are constructed. Stairs are not climbed, nor does a protagonist repeatedly climb the same stairs. Rather, the climbing of stairs is repeated. The drinking of beer. The riding of scooter through streets known. The Dardenne brothers had their actors do these things over and over so that they themselves would do them as if they lived in this town, under these circumstances, in this reality. Directing their actors to be present to the context, social and material, spatial and temporal, in color and in temperature, in their own physical experience, strikes me as a masterly approach not just to film making, or to acting, but to narration also. For the actors are now able to narrate the story in gesture, their actions becoming the indicative material of the film's narrative instead of story elements, plot points, and so on. And we from that we get an emotional reality, instead of a narrative reality, or the reality of event, action, situation. Emotional reality -- that is the reality of affect, the movement of feeling, mood, the intensity, pressure, the breaking point, anticipation, the muteness and explosiveness, of human experience. I don't know if these guys are alone in this particular technique. As a viewer I find it incredibly powerful.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Paul Thomas Anderson, artist of the visual tone metaphor

[8/10 · 31 December 2006]

Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love opens with his signature move: juxtaposition. Adam Sandler, handling a nice Nissan coffee mug in the early morning light on a backstreet in LA, watches as a speeding car comes carooming towards him, flips, flips again, and skids offscreen. And then in place of what ought to follow (continuity with the car accident), a cab appears, stops, and deposits an electric organ. It's the instrument with which he will learn the harmonies of love, and it arrives on the heels of trauma.

The scene, strictly visually, is reminiscent of Jane Campion's piano on the beach, or of Herzog's record player aboard the steamer headed up the Amazon in Fitzcarraldo. There is music going on here. It's no secret that Punch Drunk Love is a tone poem. What draws me to PTA's visual ear is his interest in translation. He knows that sound reaches the heart before the image (it is the first sense that comes to mind, in the womb, as we hear our mothers' heartbeat). He knows we have the uncanny ability to name the composer behind a riff played in the style of a modern rock artist but performed by a harmonica trio (as in Magnolia). He knows the operatic line (the group song sung by each of Magnolia's ensemble cast) against harmonic backgrounds (each of Magnolia's cast is struggling with the same song, the same hurt, and together they are a story in the same key). As did Paul Klee, who attempted to paint music by rendering an operatic line over color fields. The two Pauls have much in common. Perhaps, like Nabokov, they are synesthetic? Either way, PTA's style is "affective" and his songlines, like those of the Aborigines, are maps to (emotional) territory.

He was right in his choice of Sandler, whose performance is a musical score in itself. And Emily Watson can do no wrong (she's one of our finest, a face of infinite depth). The two play awkward music, but in their search for the key to their love, they strike notes and find resonating harmonies. The key to their love is the key in which they play, the chord, the chord that binds. If I were to hazard a guess at PTA's idea, it would be that he knows that in sound you can add and combine, but not obscure or remove. Sound is the medium most suitable to the dance that is the love of a couple. Emotions together, adding to one another, always responding to one another, always and immediately aware of a note off-key. Music is the fragile, fleeting, signature of human relationships. We can get lost in the perfection of image, the celebrity of the gaze, but we don't close the gap until we play together.

There are ways to read PTA. But the best way to read him is to listen.

Café Lumière (2003)

Cafe Lumiere, and trains passing in daylight

[7/10 · 31 December 2006]

This little film has all the treatment and feel of a low-budget indie production, but it's actually directed by well known Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou, commissioned by Japan for the 100th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu birthday. And it's a perfect homage to Ozu, "more Japanese" than a Japanese film could have been (notes one commentator).

Partway through this film I noticed something strange about the relations between actors. I don't think there's a single reaction shot in this film. Certainly no use of the shot-reaction shot technique that's conventionally used by film makers to get across how actors feel about each other.

Shot: actor's attention directed to another actor. Reverse shot: other actor's face gives away the relationship between the two.

The shot/reverse shot technique seems to work so well, I think, not so much because it's hard to put two actors on the screen at the same time, but because we (audience) relate uniquely to the face and emotion of a single face, and it's that--the film's relationship to its audience through the camera, which places the audience in relation to actors on the screen, that motivates an emotional response in the viewer that's always different with one face on screen than with two or more.

Cafe Lumiere contains no shot/reverse shot sequences. In fact the actors don't make eye contact. And this decision, conscious or not, creates a film in which its characters are always in a scene. Even when they are alone together in the smallest of bookstores, we are given a scene and not a relationship.

The camera's still disposition to scenes, urban and interior, captures a landscape of objects and places through which the trapped love of our two lead characters journey in pursuit of a way to connect. Their affections for each other play like muted horns amidst a jingle of train station announcements and contemporary piano movements, there but not together. They are like two passengers, at times on parallel trains (and this is the film's crucial scene), traveling in the same direction but separated by the window panes (pains) through which they direct their looks in a longing to collapse the space between the tracks, able to make the journey, but not together.

Beneath the film's unfocused care and tenderness is the story of Yoko's adoption, her pregnancy, and her decision to repeat her own past by bringing up the child without a father. And her friend's (non-lover's) silent yearning, "at the edge," as he puts it in one scene, pictured in a rendering of his own (yes the actor actually made that drawing) as a lonely fetus (perhaps crying, he notes) in an eyeball surrounded by trains and tracks, alluding of course to suicide, preoccupied with a passion for recording trains and their sounds in order to capture evidence (he notes, and does he mean, of his death, should he join his trains on the tracks?)...

This is a great little film about hesitation and the desire to overcome it, a film that leaves open the possibility of redemption and which attaches it to the younger generation, who in their innocence and freedom might stand a better chance than the bound generation that brought them into the world to begin with.

Three Colors: Red (1994)

Three Colors Red: Subspense in Kieslowski

[8/10 · 31 December 2006]

I love this film. I don't know how many times I've seen it, and I still love it.

When you've seen enough Kieslowski, you know that the seemingly random meetings and connections between people reveal a filmmaker obsessed with his art, craft, and in particular, with his precision. It's been said that his montage, or editing techniques, could reveal plot elements more quickly than almost anybody else. In Red, we see a woman's boyfriend purchase a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros. We see Valentin in the bowling alley. And after watching her bowl, the camera tracks left to reveal a broken beer glass and crumpled pack of cigarettes. Instantaneously we know that he has broken up with his girlfriend. (It's a bit more obvious than it might seem here, of course!)

In his use of the camera as a way of revealing the story to the audience, then, Kieslowski is not unlike Hitchcock, who also revealed information to his audiences behind his characters' backs (we see Jimmy Stewart's neighbor leave the apartment in Rear Window, while Jimmy is momentarily looking the other way). What Hitchcock did, in this way, was create thrillers in which the audience has to decode the crime's logic. As Hitchcock used to say, he never made Whodunnit films. We know who dun it sometimes at the very beginning. His films involve a logical third, and where the filmic third (camera, actor being the usual relationship) is the audience, the logical third is the person for whom the crime was committed. His films are built around this question, not the question of who did the crime. For whom was the crime committed.

Kieslowski is a reverse Hitchcock. Rather than find out what will happen, we find out what has happened. Kieslowski plants repeating places, camera angles, objects, intersections in his films so that as a film progresses, we realize that indeed we have seen this before, and they were already connected... The connection was latent, as if destined, and "suspense" is the time we wait for this revelation to unfold, rather than for an action to resolve the initial crime—the convention of suspense films. Might we say "subspense?" Logically, Kieslowski also works in triads, or thirds. But this time, the benefactor (for whom was it done) is unintended. The logic is meant to be one of serendipity, chance, magic, luck... For every chance encounter between two people, there is a third person who will benefit.

A force of goodwill, or love, operates in Kieslowski's universe. A samaritan's helping hand (the old women so often seen recycling bottles; the Jesus is your witness who appears in each of the decalogues... there is a witness, your acts will be seen, we are not alone, your actions are not all in your power). We could say that Kieslowski makes "gift films," not crime films; and that his domain is "subspents" because the currency of love spent by his actors subsists and benefits a third... The gift is an additive logic, and when two exchange, a third is created.

Stalker (1979)

Poetic vision

[10/10 · 31 December 2006]

One of the finest films made, and my favorite Tarkovsky. Eastern European and Russian films in particular are simply differently crafted. Tarkovsky produces images of laden beauty and poetic vision. The film is a quasi- religious sojourn into the "Zone," where dreams may be realized for the patient few. But as with all Tarkovsky films, the theme here is a conceptual and philsophical dialogue among differing positions, in this case a spiritual guide, a writer, and a scientist. Tarkovsky makes you think, though, through his images. Here they achieve exquisite slowness, time squeezed as if from a stone to create an atmosphere of sublime expectation. I can't overstate the artistic achievement this film represents. It's simply a must-see.

Do yourself the favor and watch it. I've shown it to many friends and never have they been disappointed.

The Third Man (1949)

The Third Man and the Logical Third

[10/10 · 31 December 2006]

The film's title, The Third Man, announces that it's about triangulation. Shot in brilliant film noir black and white, and set on location in the ruined post-war city of Vienna, the film explores and unfolds mediated relations and on several levels. Most obviously are the interpersonal relations between the film's main characters a woman's (Alida Valli, played by Anna Schmidt) two incomplete paramours, specifically: one actual but absent Harry Lime (Orson Welles), the other a present but only potential lover, Rollo Martins (Joseph Cotten). But the film also explores the indirect and shady economic relations of the black market, and the equally gray morality that seems a necessary means of coping with relations steered from the straight and narrow. Any one of these three themes could make a movie. But the Third Man's brilliance is in its success at playing out its themes using each mode of cinematic expression (story, image, sound). Much of the film is shot with dutch angles (an angled camera, which puts the frame askew). Rollo Martins, a straight up American visiting old friend Harry LIme (whom we don't find till the end of the film), is framed straight up and down. But as he begins to encounter an underground economy (and the film's conclusion is indeed shot in the city's drainage system) of barter, favors, bribes and corruption, the frame tilts. Scenes shot in alley ways also tell of perilous and shadowy pastimes and night times. Scenes featuring our heroine frame her, literally, in windows and doors (though she's not the only one who's framed). The moral choices our hero faces can only bend if he is to find his friend or get the girl (it's not clear which it will be, but by convention he oughtn't get either until he makes the right choice, that is to say, morally right--the right kind of choice according to the film). While Valli refuses to compromise her principles, even at the risk of deportation to the Russian sector (she's Czech), Martins makes trades to keep her in Vienna. And Martins, rather than allow Valli contact with Lime (her lover presumed dead), keeps them apart in order to save her for himself. What Martins tells her, and Lime, is never clearly, nor completely true. The world of film noir is a world in which choices are hazy and relations, being alliances, are subject to change. But our lead actors survive temptations to uphold the genre conventions. It's not till the 50's that heroes, sheriffs, cops, and detectives become morally ambiguous (or ambivalent: Eastwood was not a Wayne). The shift takes interesting shape in gangster films with themes of betrayal. Gangster films began as cops-and-robbers films, in which the contrast of moral choices was portrayed in the high contrast of black and white. But the gang, and a mafia in particular, is a family. The crime of family betrayal (whether to the cops, or to another gang) replaces the black and white of moral distinctions to become the source of tension in films like the Godfather, Casino, and Donnie Brasco. The Third Man's theme of triangulation is where the psychology of indirect relations really comes into the limelight. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze observes that the logic of Alfred Hitchcock's suspense is not the whodunit of a crime, but its "for whom was it done." He reveals plot points to the camera (and thus the audience) that are concealed from the film's characters. In fact the audience sometimes knows who has committed the crime from the very beginning; what's not known is the characters' relations to the crime, or its perpetrators, and this unsettles their relations to one another. Their relations are then developed according to the film's logical puzzle (as opposed to their emotional or real relations to one another). In the Third Man the position of third is not fixed but circulates. All relations are not equal, and in the Third Man, Martins, Lime, and Valli must choose their relationships to one another on the basis of muddled events, a shadowy underworld's downward gravitational pull, obfuscating facts and the incomplete observations of witnesses--honest and dishonest alike. Direct relations have difficulty flourishing in a world of indirect and convenient allegiances. But the romantic story-line requires the directness of communication (affection expects honesty and sincerity). If Martins' courtship of Valli is to succeed, he must leave his triangulations and draw a straight and direct line to her. As the film nears its incredible showdown--a standout moment in film-making on its own--the audience knows Martins is facing an almost impossible choice as a friend (to LIme) and lover (not yet but hoping to become for Valli). He must reveal the truth about Lime to the police if he wants Valli to see him. But he must take his action without the supporting angles of a triangle (angled shots of a dutch camera = the geometry of triangles?). It's a decision he can only take alone. And this is how it plays out. He takes the gun in his own hands and without the cover of the police in the waterways with him, confronts Lime for his immorality. He pulls the trigger, his act resounding with an echo against concrete tunnel walls, and in the back lit white of a dark passage way, Martins, now looking much a Western hero, walks his straight line back to the world above. We do not know if he gets the girl. The film begins with Martins noticing Valli, who is walking a straight line directly down the center of a straight road. He meets her again on the same road, after the same burial (this time it is Lime's body in the ground, put to rest where he belongs), and she doesn't look his way. The audience, however, knows that he is now on the same path, and that his choices have made him a candidate, at least, for a position in a romantic partnership.

Japan (2002)

Carlos Reygadas' Japon: immanent cinema?

[7/10 · 31 December 2006]

Carlos Reygadas' film Japon is a breathtaking work of image making, rich with scenes that unfold in unbroken time, story untold, and symbolic gestures and references left un- authoritatively open to interpretation. It's a cinema of the immanent that accomplishes transcendence: in Deleuze's terms, transcendental empiricism. Reygadas uses image and sound with a strong degree of influence from Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson, Kiarostami, Ozu, Rosselini, and though he's not mentioned among Reygadas' favorite filmmakers in the DVD interview, Hungary's Bela Tarr. Actors are non-professional, the script is loose and, and scenes are allowed to run (in the manner of Bela Tarr and Tarkovsky) for as long as they take, or for as long as they remain interesting. His camera use suggests his presence as the film's director, an eye wandering through the lens for an image that may have little to do with the action in front of the camera. Actors are captured for their authenticity and reality (verité), and their lack of professionalism only serves the film's "higher" motives. While this would seem to be a highly religious film, or symbolic at least, Reygadas denies having such intentions. The Madonna, Jesus Christ, miraculous events, the sacred and profane, come together in a Russian Mexico bound by the use of music familiar to Tarkovsky fans: Arvo Part's Cantus to Benjamin Britten. The film even begins with a child, a tree, and the Cantus that closes Tarkovsky's film The Sacrifice (which also ends with the child and the tree). It seems the film is a sequel to the sacrifice. And in fact our lead character (a Mexican Siddhartha, questing with cane, or Bela Tarr's Irimias from Sátántangó?) is struggling to end his life, while allowing himself to be saved by a Madonna-like Mexican villager whose faith is nonetheless redeemed in a genuine human sympathy. (Tarkovsky, on the other hand, often chooses the miraculous.) SheÁ is the Samaritan, a story referred to by the film's final road-side conclusion (I'll not give anything away). As Reygadas claims, life is in the little things. Though he clearly means that life is greater than the little things (the "ten thousand things:" a Taoist concept for the biggest number, for everything, the World). A transcendental empiricism, Spinozist film-making, affect-image through the shot. You will live in this film.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies: Can human bodies take up heavenly relations?

[10/10 · 30 December 2006]

"The first is Hamlet's great formula, 'The time is out of joint.' Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement. We move from one labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple, inexorable as Borges says, 'the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant.' Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the Critique of Pure Reason." Gilles Deleuze, Preface "On four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy", Kant's Critical Philosophy, vii. And might not the last sentence of this first paragraph in Deleuze's brilliant and brief study of Kant, be a statement about film?

"Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the first great achievement of film..."

Ever since film began to un-spool its own version of time at 24 frames per second, synthesizing it through simple optical illusion and the narrative innovations of montage (editing), film-makers have enjoyed the magic of imaginary time. And on occasion, a film- maker arrives who has an entirely different sense of time, a different breath, a gait out of step with the rhythms of time common to the moving picture. Bela Tarr is one of those film-makers. And while he is often compared with the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky (also a time-maker), Bela Tarr's temporalities are material, where Tarkovsky's are often symbolic and visual. Asked once why the scene of villagers marching towards the town square in Werckmeister Harmonies lasted as long as it did, the director answered, simply, "that's how long it took to get there." As simple as this is for an answer, there is something else at work in Tarr's camera work. Werckmeister Harmonies, at over 2 hours, contains only 39 shots. It took the director a day to edit together. But the effect of storytelling in so few shots is not just a reduction to the straightforward and direct capture of time. He is, I think, making film think with the body; and it is the body which, set in motion, resides in time. Werckmeister Harmonies opens with a shot of town drunks in a bar enacting the orbits of the planets. A lone bulb hangs from the ceiling as the men spin and tumble slowly about the room, their bodies taking up heavenly relations. And this is what they do throughout the rest of the film: bodies move and are moved, they plod along empty roads by night; they gather in tedious crowds; they assemble for a march on the town square; they pillage a hospital; they walk adjacent to one another (there is a two minute tracking shot for which the director laid down over 300m of rail). And as the villagers in Werckmeister Harmonies are set in motion, so too is the viewer. Tarr makes the viewer think his film, and live its time, with him. I have watched as friends adjust their seats during many a shot, their own physicality coming under the spell of Tarr's temporality. Can bodies think? Can minds think without bodies? Can we have social relations as heavenly as the relations among the heavenly bodies? Tarr's opening shot, in which we found the drunks losing themselves to vertiginal rotations, culminates with an eclipse. Tarr shows us an eclipse, an eclipse in the heavens, staged by village drunks. Light, obscured, is not darkness, as time, out of joint, is not motion.