As fabulous as it should be and not a jot more or less, Steven Soderbergh’s Beyond the Candelabra is a showbiz biopic about, in no particular order, gender, sex, power, professionalism, performance, denial, disavowal, spectatorship, and the closet. Adapted from Scott Thorson’s tell-all book about his affair with Liberace, the Vegas nightclub star known only by his surname, the movie marries the stringent style and purposeful intelligence of its director/cinematographer/editor with the world of a performer defined by his excess. The result is irresistibly entertaining. Not to beat a hard-working horse long ago put to pasture, but Beyond the Candelabra is everything Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There was not. On the other hand, it’s tidier but less heart-wrenching than Haynes’s glam-rock musical Velvet Goldmine. Which is to say that Haynes’s depiction of performance as drag—both on and off the stage, and regardless of the performers’ sexual preferences—was somewhere in Soderbergh’s mind.

Like Velvet Goldmine did 15 years ago, Beyond the Candelabra premieres in Competition at Cannes on May 21, and, at the halfway point, the 2013 festival needs its dazzle and drive. Based on my experience of a preview DVD, the bigger the screen the better for this made-for-HBO movie, which American subscribers get to see on May 26, just hours after the prizes are announced in the Grand Théâtre Lumière. If the jury process here weren’t so political, I’d bet on Matt Damon for Best Actor.

All movies about couples privilege one half of the duo above the other. Here it’s Scott (Damon) who gets the first close-up and the last, and it is his point of view that dominates the narrative. A hunky, Californian, gay kid with a surfer’s dirty-blond bob, Scott is pimped to Liberace (Michael Douglas) whose current live-in boyfriend is on his way out. Scott gets a preview of his own inevitable exit even before his romance with the bewigged, bejeweled, piano-tinkling idol of millions of blue-haired, middle-aged women begins, but it’s only human to believe that one is special, an exception to the routine course of an affair. Especially when someone extremely famous tells you that he wants “to be everything to you: father, brother, lover, best friend.” Liberace—“Call me Lee”—is lavish when in love, and Scott is too smitten and too dumb to get certain things in writing (like the deed to an apartment of his own).

Soderbergh charts the course of this relationship—the ecstatic sex, the plateau of intimacy, the melodramatic fall from grace—with wit, economy, and a dose of irony a la Douglas Sirk. The camera plan is simple: graceful long dolly shots, locked-down close-ups for tête-à-têtes, and a bit of handheld jiggling when Scott loses it to booze, diet pills, and coke. The editing is pointed and often hilarious, as in the outrageously abrupt cut to Scott enthusiastically fucking Lee up the ass, poppers and all.

Which gets me to the meat of the matter. To a certain degree, it is a stunt to have two presumed heterosexual stars guided by a presumed heterosexual director in the depiction of a gay sexual relationship involving Liberace, one of show business’s most flagrant queens, and his protégé Scott, who quickly learns to love his white satin chauffeur’s uniform and rhinestone g-string. Yes, there was Brokeback Mountain, which by comparison barely whispered its forbidden desire. In Beyond the Candelabra, two major stars play gay all the way and have a conspicuously good time doing it. And in fact, there is nothing as liberating for actors as flaunting behaviors that they have suppressed all their lives in order to present themselves to the world as properly straight or properly upper-middle-class, or just plain proper. Damon and Douglas take the risk of jumping into the hot tub together. After the first 10 minutes, they vanish as actors, leaving on screen simply Scott and Lee, who, if not for the closet, might have made a marriage as good and bad as that of anyone else.

P.S. I just saw Beyond the Candelabra on the big screen, and size does maximize the pleasure. But if you’re watching on TV, pump up the volume. It may be a Fifties melodrama done Seventies-style, but the sound design is up to the minute, and it’s great.

After a desultory first 24 hours, it took a speedy walk down the Croisette to Espace Miramar—home of Critics Week, the festival’s all-too-easily overlooked independent sidebar—to catch the festival’s first truly good film: Salvo, the debut crime drama from Sicilian filmmakers Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. A sharply chiseled intelligence is on display from the first, wordless scene, which shows hit man Salvo (Saleh Bakri) in bed as his air conditioner conks out during a brutal Palermo summer heat wave. The cutting is precise, rhythmic, furtive; there’s the suggestion of something imminent—perhaps the bad day that is to come as Salvo’s alarm clock rings, only to be followed by a power outage.

Immediately after making its mark, Grassadonia and Piazza’s film takes off running. Sooner than we can gauge, Salvo is suddenly on the job and in a world of hurt. All too aware that his car is being pursued, he and his gangster colleague get the jump on his pursuers, and the directorial duo stage a stunning shootout in which the wide-screen camera doggedly stays by Salvo’s side, jarring yet fluid, turbulent yet thoroughly in control. Salvo, it becomes abundantly clear, is a man who won’t give up, managing to track down the crime boss who put the hit on him.

This is mere prelude to what constitutes the film’s heart—a string of extended sequences, the first of which is so astonishingly elongated that it seems suspended in time. When Salvo enters the boss’s home to make the kill, he unexpectedly encounters the man’s blind sister, Rita (Sara Serraiocco). Grassadonia and Piazza have been fixated on Salvo’s point of view by this point, but something surprising happens: they transfer their visual obsession to Rita, who instinctively tries to steer clear of whatever this intruder has in store.

The filmmakers’ grasp of on- and off-screen space and sound is part of what makes Salvo an incisive piece of cinema and lends its distinct texture, and this quality is at work in two different dimensions. When Salvo attacks the boss, the camera remains trained on Rita, whose sense of hearing is heightened by her virtual lack of sight. Sound takes over, delivering the kind of vivid and violent pictures to the viewer’s mind that would have benefited Amat Escalante in the blunt and unimaginative torture sequence served up in his disappointing Cannes Competition drama, Heli. Later, sound again rules when Rita is held prisoner by Salvo, who turns out to have no clear idea what to do with her. (His own boss, a man of the old Sicilian school, simply wants her snuffed out.)

Off-screen space also works not just in any given moment of the movie’s most intense scenes, but across longer stretches of time. Salvo’s prisoner begins to see again; the confined Rita finds herself anew, almost reborn as a woman, and the two of them come to a well-earned rapprochement that far surpasses the cheesy norms of B crime movies. While this is going on, another drama—unseen, off screen—has been unfolding with the boss, who realizes that Salvo isn’t coming to work anymore. The dramatic shock that flows out of that story back onto the main on-screen drama may be the movie’s most sublime gambit, one that at first may even seem to be a mistake, or a misstep. Salvo embraces crime genre tropes and then stretches them into a new shape, so that old devices look and feel new. It reminds us that the confinement of genre, not unlike Rita’s own constrained circumstances, can have unexpectedly fresh results. 

Kim Ki-duk is a director infatuated, if not obsessed, with the dynamics of human relationships under extreme circumstances. Their boundaries, dimensions, progressions, and compromises (or lack thereof) compose the many fragmented wholes in his work. 3-Iron (04) contrasts the prison of abusive married life with the weightless, open possibilities of two lovers joined by a common muteness. The Bow (05) concerns a 60-year-old male and a mute teenage girl juggling their multiple connections: as kidnapper/kidnapped, mentor/mentee, and sexual partners. Kim's stories and settings are told with a crisp, serene steadiness; his latest, Pieta, invokes a style as gritty and unstable as the story lying within—all in the name of the Lord.

Though the title and poster (a re-imagining of Michelangelo's statue of the same name) tease at a religious allegory, Pieta is far from your average scripture. With no room for hackneyed preaching or politics, the film's convoluted faith system is wrapped in a coarse, verité-style street drama, in which the modern city is a contemporary Golgotha, and sacrifice and persecution render ancient times and the present day indistinguishable. Characters find redemption through punishment, and seek truth through manipulation and mutilation.

Kim prefers his characters to speak more through deed than word; Pieta is led forth by Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), a loan shark. He is the scourge of debtors (“the bastard was born evil,” one victim claims), humiliating industrial workers in front of their wives and mothers. His daily routine—cripple the debtors, kill livestock, eat livestock, masturbate, repeat—reveals no family life to speak of. It's almost as though by breaking the spirits of the workers' families, Kang-do is cruelly redirecting his own pain over lost kin against others.

That is, until a mysterious woman named Mi-sun (Jo Min-su) shows up claiming to be his mother. Following Kang-do home, she barges into his house to clean up the place, then falls to her knees, begging mercy from a man with none to give. As in Kim's previous films, a corrosive spiritual journey involving the pair commences. Mi-sun begins as a verbal punching bag for Kang-do, and becomes his sexual partner, companion, caretaker, mother, manipulator, and enemy, in rapid succession. Similarly, Kang-do transforms from ruthless mangler to man-child to vigilante in the same span of time.

As their relationship develops and Kang-do grows weary of his duty of stripping money from the impoverished, the film questions the importance of money and the finality of death, not unlike many religious allegories. But the film is less a parable than a harrowing character study, harshly examining two broken souls blossoming, only to be made lame once again. The ecumenical belief is that in death, the soul exits the body, but Kang-do has already forfeited his. A sense of emptiness pervades Lee's embodiment of a man who's simply given up. Mi-sun meanwhile is presented in a way meant to confound the audience. Is she to be trusted? Are we meant to look past her sweetness? The ultimate, perverse revelation of her true identity comes as little surprise, but it shows the extent of Kim's interest in the lengths to which people will go to please others and redeem themselves.

Pieta succeeds in repulsing and enlightening viewers simultaneously, even if its views on self-sacrifice and redemption are cynical. Kim depicts violence and sexuality with frankness; they are physical manifestations of fear and desperation rather than an opportunity for exploitation. Like Scorsese's explorations of Catholic guilt, Pieta evenly juxtaposes these manifestations with the eternal struggle of the spiritual experience. Kim Ki-duk takes enormous (though not Mel Gibson–sized) risks in applying such ferocity to sacred themes, as he asserts that the path to righteousness is beset with land mines. 

There was something for everyone at the Tribeca Film Festival. Just witness the two most memorable star turns: on the one hand, Clint Eastwood, charming and thoughtful, interviewed on stage by Darren Aronofsky; on the other, Lil Bub, the tiny cat with the huge eyes and protruding tongue, who attended Tribeca in the arms of her person, Mike “The Dude” Bridavsky, a hunky Midwestern sound engineer. Lil Bub and Bridavsky star in Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner’s Lil Bub & Friendz, which won the festival’s online competition. The fact that it was streamed for 10 days didn’t stop people, who wanted to see Lil Bub live on stage, from packing the four theatrical screenings. I think that much of the pleasure in viewing all things Lil Bub has to do with Bridovsky’s nurturing relationship with the vulnerable creature who wouldn’t have survived without his constant attention. They are inseparable, which doesn’t mean that the cat didn’t relish her photo op with Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro.

Lil Bub & Friendz

Has this critic lost her mind? Not exactly. After all, even the chill Steven Soderbergh mentioned, in his much-quoted address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, that he didn’t want to risk being shot for running his mouth because “I love my cats.” Which is to say that the reasons the TFF, now 12 years old, has become a New York institution—with a 95 percent attendance at screenings and panels this year—has to do with seductions other than the greatness of the films in the lineup. Of the 30-odd movies I saw (89 features were screened), there are only two that might show up on my end-of-the-year top 10, and one of them, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, is opening in theaters next week. The other, Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is a New York movie as surprising and inventive in showing us the city through the eyes of a runaway boy as Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive must have seemed to audiences in 1953. The winner of a Special Jury Mention, it deserved better.

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

As Engel did 60 years ago, Fleischner uses the latest advances in portable motion-picture technology to capture a real, highly populated heterogeneous location—the NYC subway system—thus seamlessly mixing documentary and fiction. Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a high-functioning autistic 13-year-old living in Rockaway Beach with his undocumented family, follows a magical image of a dragon onto the El and gets lost for more than a week in the subways. Almost no one pays him notice, but he sees with the eyes of a poet, and increasingly out of necessity, a pragmatist. Fleischner deftly weaves together two parallel storylines—Ricky’s odyssey and the determined efforts of his mother (Andrea Suarez) to find him. The leading actors, including the Mexican star Tenoch Huerta Mejía, are marvelous, as are the people who ride the subways, some of them caught unaware on camera only for seconds, some performing in short scripted scenes. Hurricane Sandy struck during production and Fleischner allowed this “Act of God” (as it would be referenced in contract law) to carry the movie in slightly unexpected directions. In its depiction of fragility and resilience, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors rings true from beginning to end without a trace of sentimentality.

The Rocket

The same cannot be said for Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket, which took the Award for Best Narrative Feature, the Audience Award, and a prize for best acting, won by its young Laotian star, first-timer Sitthiphon Disamoe. Bertolt Brecht would have been able to put a framework around Mordaunt’s liberal colonialist narrative to reveal its mendacity. Determined to prove to his father that he is the bearer of good luck rather than misfortune, a pre-adolescent boy wins a local rocket-building competition—and prize money sufficient to build his impoverished, displaced family a house—by harvesting gunpowder from the unexploded bombs and land mines that still litter the lush countryside of Laos. Lucky indeed! Over-produced and shamelessly manipulative, The Rocket employs a cringe-inducing score that cues every desired audience response, including unalloyed uplift at the end. Earlier this year, the movie won Best First Feature in Berlin, proving that Americans are not unique in their willingness to be led around by the nose.

Hide Your Smiling Faces

A far more talented movie, Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces depicts two brothers (ages perhaps 11 and 13) hanging out with their dog and their friends, exploring the deep woods and turgid waters around their house, in some unnamed place in rural America. It’s an ordinary summer that will put knots in the stomachs of overprotective parents. There are dangers everywhere—in guns left lying about, in an angry neighbor who has it in for the boys’ dog, in the predatory creatures that inhabit the wilderness (in an early sequence, the brothers watch a snake slowly swallowing a small animal), in the decaying bodies of cats, dogs, and wildlife that the boys poke and prod and carry about. Every sequence could be the prologue of a horror flick minus the spooky music and other overt signals of the genre. The boys’ fascination with violence and death is all the more horrifying for being perfectly normal. Then one of the group dies in circumstances that are never explained to anyone’s satisfaction, bringing the older brother’s potential suicidal impulses into the open. Potential is the crucial word here. Hide Your Smiling Faces is remarkable for the dread it keeps at a slow simmer from the first shot to the last.

Six Acts

Lest you think Tribeca was exclusively a boys club, two strong films both by male directors depicted the dangers of growing up female from the unsparing perspectives of young women with the decks stacked against them. In Israeli filmmaker Jonathan Gurfinkel’s psychologically complicated Six Acts, a teenage girl hooks up with a popular classmate she has a crush on. He has no use for her but takes advantage of the situation by offering her to his friends. When she reluctantly complies in an attempt to impress her crush with her cool and how far she’ll go for him, the guys exploit the situation and she becomes an object of contempt. It sounds like a cautionary tale from the Fifties, but Gurfinkel deftly demonstrates how institutionalized misogyny is as virulent as it ever was.

Byzantium

Old-fashioned, that is 19th-century, misogyny pushes a mother (Gemma Arterton) and then her daughter (Saoirse Ronan) to save themselves and each other by becoming vampires in Neil Jordan’s affecting, delirious Byzantium (opening June 28). Arterton and Ronan’s characters have the determination and brio of true heroines. The latter satisfies her need for blood through assisted suicides, the former with serial killings of male meanies and narcissists that no one will miss. Jordan’s passionate belief in stories within stories and in the reality of fantasy overcomes a few clunky moments, and he gives a feminist twist to an ancient and ever popular folktale genre. Good to the last bite, Byzantium is far more resonant and subtle than his 1994 blockbuster, Interview with the Vampire.

Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic

Tribeca showed a flood of terrific documentaries, many of them soon to show on a cable station or in a theater near you. Among the most notable, Benny and Joshua Safdie’s Lenny Cooke, which follows the titular high-school basketball prodigy, who in 2001 was ranked above his peers Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James, but lacking their confidence and emotional resilience, allowed himself to be badly represented and never played a day in the NBA. Cooke was at the screenings, and if he goes out on the circuit with the movie, audiences are in for something special. Another riveting portrait, Marina Zenovich’s Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic (slated for Showtime on May 31) chronicles the rise and fall of the genius performer and radical political activist (one of the few entertainers to totally merge art and politics in every word and move), who years before his death literally burned out on drugs and booze. The movie is packed with articulate people who knew Pryor well, but the clips of the Man himself will leave you weeping for more.

The Kill Team

The Best Documentary Feature winner, Dan Krauss’s focused, understated The Kill Team follows the trial of a U.S. soldier who in 2010 was court-martialed for not blowing the whistle hard enough against his platoon leader and a couple of other “bad apples” when they killed Afghan civilians for sport. Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn employs existing footage to reexamine the notorious 1985 seemingly police-authorized firebombing that took the lives of members of the African-American cult-like collective MOVE, as well as destroying 65 adjacent homes in a black working-class neighborhood where MOVE had been unwelcome from the day they arrived.

Teenage

The Kill Team and Let the Fire Burn are tough, fairly argued movies that, like most of the documentaries in Tribeca, fall within nonfiction conventions. Matt Wolf’s Teenage, adapted from Jon Savage’s monumental Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945 is, formally, more adventurous. Wolf combines existing clips with expert forged portraits of emblematic adolescents. The footage of Oswald Mosley, the future head of the British fascist movement, cavorting with friends in Pre-Raphaelite drag, like denizens of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, is extraordinary, as is its polar opposite—color home movies of the Hamburg Swing Kids, the German teenagers who were executed for their political opposition to Hitler. The movie is loaded with such treasures, all of them lovingly examined and edited. The problem is that Savage’s book needs a series to fulfill the expectations it raises, and Wolf’s cinematic refinement is at odds with the hormonally driven chaos of adolescence.

This Exquisite Forest

Tribeca’s determination to be on the Transmedia cutting edge yielded the translucent blue and silver Bombay Sapphire Lounge where the gin flowed freely as festival participants networked and hooked up and new-media devotees explored five attractive installations, of which the most interesting were Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk’s This Exquisite Forest, a Web-based collective animation inspired by the Surrealists’ “Exquisite Corpse” drawings and poems, and A Journal of Insomnia, a restless dead-of-night distraction I’ve already bookmarked on my laptop.   

Jacques Rozier is often conspicuously absent from tributes to the French New Wave. Even though his debut Adieu Philippine (released in 1962) was considered a landmark film of the emerging movement, championed by Godard and Truffaut and featured on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma’s special edition on La Nouvelle Vague, its commercial failure set the course for Rozier’s subsequent career in cinema. It would be 10 years until his next features, Du côté d’Orouët (73) and The Castaways of Turtle Island (76). Again, his films were received exuberantly by critics, with many hailing Rozier as the realist successor to Renoir and Vigo, but these too flopped, instigating another decade-long hiatus for the director.

He returned in 1985 with Maine-Océan, his penultimate film to date. Widely regarded as Rozier’s best work, it was one of the 30 films the late German critic Frieda Grafe listed among her favorites in Steadycam magazine. The Arsenal cinematheque in Berlin is currently screening all 30 titles, and the turnout for Maine-Océan was impressive (all the more so considering it was shown at 9pm on a Friday), testifying to the importance of a director whose entire oeuvre remains virtually unavailable outside of France.

Like all of Rozier’s films, Maine-Océan’s plot is little more than a premise by which to explore the social realities of the protagonists. A series of arbitrary incidents bring a group of disparate characters—two train-ticket inspectors, a sailor, an upper-crust lawyer, a Brazilian samba dancer and her Mexican impresario—to the Île d’Yeu, off the coast of western France. The film initially pits the characters against one another, defining each by their social status and using their reciprocal prejudices to set off a chain of comical vignettes that culminate in their arrival on the island. Once there, pacified by the sea air, good food, samba music, and, most importantly, plenty of wine, they set their hostilities aside for the night and come together in a cheerful Bacchanalia before the sobering dawn returns them to the mainland and to their everyday routines.

Rozier’s love for his characters is palpable, and in his treatment of social issues his affinity to Renoir, whom he has called the greatest French director, is apparent. Although Maine-Océan highlights the disparities generated and/or sustained by class hierarchies, immigration, and globalization, the film has no villains. Rozier’s critique, while markedly on the Left, is never vitriolic nor patronizing. Failed communication lies at the root of all these problems and this provides the film’s central theme, brilliantly illustrated through a dexterous use of language. Like a miniature Tower of Babel, Maine-Océan’s characters all speak in different tongues: the inspectors and lawyer speak the French of their respective classes, the sailor spews an impenetrable vernacular not unlike Popeye, and the dancer and impresario speak Portuguese and Spanish. Each character’s social standing is thus delineated and the film derives a lot of its humor from emphasizing the absurdity and arbitrariness of these separations.

This is exemplified in one of the film’s funniest scenes, in which the lawyer represents the sailor in court. The sailor, Petitgas (whose name is a humorous play on petit gars, French for “little guy”), is wrongly accused of assaulting a businessman and in his defense the lawyer goes on a long tangent about the inequality of language, the inability of the less educated to defend themselves, and the dangers of prejudice. Her soporific and preposterously fluffy speech stupefies the judge into giving Petitgas a pass in exchange for an apology, which he then bungles through one of his furious, profanity-laden outbursts. By playing with the literal and figurative versatility of language, this scene provides a biting critique of social inequity and the justice system, and while the dialogue is very funny, Rozier’s humor is always marked by striking empathy and never elicits laughs at the expense of the characters themselves.

Rozier’s restraint from outspoken moral judgment led critics to accuse his cinema of disengagement and to label his “holiday films” as inconsequential. It is true that Rozier’s first four films all take their characters on a seaside vacation. These holidays, however, could almost be regarded as situations in the Debordian sense, albeit solely in their emancipatory dimension and devoid of the original’s revolutionary intent. In Maine-Océan, as with its predecessors, an egalitarian space of solidarity is created as social barriers are temporarily knocked down, allowing the characters—and us—to embrace life’s unadulterated pleasures. Each one of these holidays is brought to a close as the characters depart from the seaside at the end of the films and normality is reinstated. The unexpected and overwhelming sense of melancholy that takes over as the idyll disintegrates foregrounds the films’ issues, making an unequivocal and deeply felt comment about the human condition and, not less significantly, about cinema.

In reviewing Adieu Philippine, Truffaut encapsulated Rozier’s style by describing “something of genius in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality that confers sufficient importance on them to fascinate us . . . [A]ll of it is filmed with intelligence, love, and enormous scrupulosity and delicacy.” That his realism was free of sensationalism, intellectualism, or overt stylistic flourishes at a time when the radicalism of his peers was so in vogue certainly accounts for a large part of Rozier’s commercial tribulations. Nevertheless, watching his films today, one discovers an extremely keen filmmaker with an assured technique and distinct personal style, able to distill the poetic from the banal and create human portraits as touching as they are convincing—an auteur in the truest sense of the term for whom a thorough reappraisal is long overdue.

In May 1968, Olivier Assayas was 13, just old enough to watch people a few years older than him take to the streets. When his generation came of age in the early Seventies, it accepted political radicalism as if it were an older sibling’s hand-me-down—which, in some sense, it was. “As early as the fall of ’68,” Assayas tells David Thompson in the March-April issue of FILM COMMENT, “leftists were already trying to restructure things and organize for the next revolution that was obviously coming up very soon . . . May ’68 was a failure, but the next one would come out right!”

Those who arrived later on the scene wore their siblings' convictions proudly, but they didn’t always seem to fit: for all the solemn secret meetings, pamphlets, and tentative stabs at revolutionary action, the ideals themselves, cut off from the point in time that had inspired and nurtured them, were getting murkier. In his new film Après Mai (retitled Something in the Air for its U.S. release), Assayas places us “after May” in more ways than one: we’re looking back at a generation for which May ’68 was already a vague memory, something to be re-created, though no one quite knew how.

That might be why Something in the Air, as Richard Brody put it in his New Yorker blog The Front Row, “has as much revolutionary substance and form as a gala dinner.” For Brody, Assayas’s lack of attention to the particular ideologies that shaped his youth is symptomatic of the director’s broader complacency regarding his own personal history:

[Assayas] films as if he has easy and untroubled access to the past, to history, to experience—there’s nothing wrenched about the film, no jagged edges, no sense of struggle with his own memory, with his conscience, with the changing times—which is precisely what gives the movie its vague, nonspecific air. It advances in the habitual, providing illustrations of the sorts of things that he and his friends did, without ever conveying the existential pressure of something that actually happened, in a single moment, in a specific and physical way, with a distinctive and unshakeable emotion. 

Andrew Tracy admits in Cinema Scope that “Assayas’ clipped, elliptical briskness keeps his young devils (probably) at a remove that, this time, is more pictorial than dramatic; they’re objects to be regarded rather than scattered, imperfect, overflowing beings.” And yet for Tracy, Assayas’s deliberate, meticulous shallowness is as much a virtue as a flaw: it mitigates the “almost inescapably teleological imperative of all autobiographical fiction,” placing the emphasis instead on a series of “curious yet disinterested observation[s] of people in the moment.”

Those people include Assayas’s alter ego Gilles (Clément Métayer) and his two love interests: bohemian, self-destructive Laure (Carole Combes) and committed Marxist Christine (Lola Créton, the star of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye First Love)—the latter perhaps the young radical with the firmest foundation for her revolutionary ideals. Gilles himself participates in his share of rioting, vandalism, and property destruction, but he’s just as interested in representing the moment as he is in changing it: he starts the film an aspiring painter, ends it as an aspiring filmmaker, and spends the time between in a state of semi-detached flux. “Even [as] he’s churning out posters and leaflets,” Adam Nayman writes on Reverse Shot, “his painter’s eye is as much on the eye-catching graphics as the ideas they’re supposed to visually declaim, because Gilles is less an artist-revolutionary than an artist who is also a revolutionary.” He frets about letting his youth slip by, and at times it seems as if the film’s hazy, glowing, nostalgia-soaked visual style is not only a function of Assayas’s current distance from his past but also a representation of how Gilles sees his present.

If Something in the Air never conveys, in Brody’s words, “the existential pressure of something that actually happened, in a single moment, in a specific and physical way,” perhaps that’s because it is, at least in part, a reflection on what it means to live in a mode of “curious yet disinterested observation”—to live a life free of existential pressure, a life in which one is always just a little bit detached from the moment. A pictorial life, a vague life, an impersonal life, a life in which the world appears as something intensely beautiful but distinctly smoothed out, with few of Brody’s longed-for jagged edges. A life that goes by like a movie, viewed rather than lived, in which any moment of past time can be called back up and replayed with ease, but is never acted upon and never changed.  

Something in the Air is often suffused with this sense of nostalgia for the present, but it just as often consists of what David Ehrlich at Film.com calls “flashbulb moments,” images that could only have been captured from a distance: “A white summer dress, a girl fitting into the crook of [Gilles’s] arm just so as she slept, another telling him not to watch as she walks out of his life, Assayas then allowing Gilles to do so via a crane shot that makes the memory relevant again by seeing it from an impossible remove.” Ehrlich equates Gilles’s detachment from his own present with a more universal feature of adolescence: the distance between the self and the world, and the search on the part of the self to find some corner of the world in which to act:

Through Gilles, Assayas personifies the sublime embarrassment of self-discovery, pitting the “me-ness” of the human experience against the independence of our infatuations, how much we wanted them to be ours forever, and how comfortable they seemed to be with the idea of existing on their own—how it all inevitably lead to that moment when you began to participate in your own life rather than just glomming on to the most beautiful ideas you could reach.

If Something in the Air is a complacent film, then Assayas’s is an especially restless sort of complacency: that of a detached observer wavering on the edge of action, or of a young man wavering on the edge of the world. Which might, more often than not, be the same thing.

In one of the more unfortunate segments of The Story of Film (in the second-to-last episode, “The 1990s: The First Days of Digital - Reality Losing Its Realness in America and Australia”), Mark Cousins rhapsodizes about Baz Luhrmann’s oeuvre for nearly 15 minutes. The prolonged interview and cooing voiceover that champions Australia as a formally inventive masterpiece seems out of place in a documentary that glosses over (or completely skips) the careers of so many more prolific directors, and also because it so blandly presents one of the 21st century’s greatest purveyors of straight camp. The man who used the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a pop music/cancan dance medley demands something crasser than a history lesson built out of lies through omission.

Sadly, it’s the more restrained version of Luhrmann that directed The Great Gatsby. There is no frame-fucking, no hyperactive repetition of small gestures, no grotesque too-close close-ups; instead, the film is simply a parade of setpieces that exhibit little of the director's characteristic energy and inventiveness. (In a post–Lady Gaga/Nicki Minaj world where every female performer from Katy Perry to Karen O dyes their hair purple, dons glittery leotards, and uses more wirework during a “live” set than House of Flying Daggers, it takes more effort—or just different drag—to be visible, let alone memorable.) Worse still, it’s a largely faithful adaptation whose alterations amount to naught, such as the jejune framing device of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), languishing in a sanatorium for alcoholism, turning his time in West Egg into a novel as means of therapy. While this may provide a neat excuse to preserve the more elegant moments of the novel’s narration at length (unlike Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation), it breaks up the story’s structure and certainly doesn’t deepen the audience’s understanding of Nick. (And, criminally, there is no Zelda Fitzgerald facsimile.) The ending is also unnecessarily tweaked: Mr. Gatz never gets to glumly reveal to Nick details of his son Jim's rigorous transformation.

Aside from the parties and Jazz Age excesses of giant cars, silk shirts, mansions, and speakeasies (accompanied by some cringe-inducing jazz dubstep), the two visual motifs from the book that Luhrmann has no problem running into the ground are the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg and the green light on Tom and Daisy’s dock. However, the ways in which they are repeated (as well as the bits of Nick’s narration chosen to accompany them) reduce each to “the eyes of god” and “desire” respectively; any further meaning is swept away with an elaborate (yet somehow lackluster) CGI crane shot. These trite synecdoches, along with the inclusion of nearly every line of dialogue, contribute to the bloated two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The economy of Fitzgerald’s storytelling is exchanged for something far less remarkable.

The one inventive decision—and something that indicates Luhrmann has some remaining savvy—was casting Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim. Excising all the instances of Wolfsheim as a baldly anti-Semitic, moneygrubbing stereotype, he appears only once, at the lunchtime speakeasy scene (in which Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy to tea), speaking perfect English and dressed in a neatly tailored suit. Even for those unfamiliar with Bachchan’s persona, the actor manages to loom large (and unproblematically) throughout the rest of the film as Wolfsheim—not unlike Leonardo DiCaprio does as Gatsby, speaking only off screen up until the moment he finally introduces himself to Nick, as fireworks explode behind him and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” climaxes. (This also reveals a failure in the marketing campaign, for the film unfolds as if who plays Gatsby is meant to be a surprise—yet another moment that was meant to pop but is instead merely predictable.) DiCaprio’s offbeat, drawling pronunciations of “old sport” are perfect, as is his chemistry with Carey Mulligan’s Daisy. Even Joel Edgerton, sort of channeling Kim Novak as he angrily talks through his teeth, proves to be a perfectly brutish Tom Buchanan. But they are all toiling away in the wrong movie. Though it is quite possible that the neutered feel of Luhrmann’s Gatsby is entirely due to studio meddling, the finished product isn’t enjoyable, either as campy fun or a serious attempt at dismantling the American dream.

The subject of our new issue’s Hot Property (May/June 2013) is Let the Fire Burn, a riveting documentary centered on the deadly 1985 clash over the radical Philadelphia group MOVE. Director Jason Osder conducted several interviews on and off camera but opted to use found footage exclusively. That was shortly before another acclaimed found-footage-based work, The Black Power Mixtape, appeared at Sundance in 2011. FILM COMMENT spoke with Osder during the Tribeca Film Festival about his feature-length debut, and the challenges (and rewards) of resurrecting forgotten history.

Let the Fire Burn

How did you choose this material?

I had just finished film school and moved to D.C. the same year as a film school buddy, John Aldrich, who is associate producer on the film. We were talking documentary ideas, and I said, this thing from my childhood always bothered me and maybe has potential for a film. I read Michael Boyette’s book “Let It Burn!” (the quotation marks are part of the title) very early on, and then it was a matter of figuring out if there’s material, the things you need for a film.

That was a long time ago, and being able to use the archival material held us up. I shot interviews and did other research and treatments and applied for grants. It wasn’t till I joined the faculty in 2007 at George Washington University, and I had these new legs under me: a letterhead, a legal team, money, and access to equipment and time to do creative work, and a creative community. It’s what a university is really designed for. It’s something that really needed institutional support.

There’s a range of footage: new stories, the city hearings, the deposition of the child from MOVE. What were the rights issues exactly?

It is such a complicated one. I don’t even know how to get into it. Part of where it gets crazy is that the material was part of a [city] commission. Who owned it? What’s the commission? Well, they’re a thing a city made. Who do you talk to? It was the university that was the key to unlocking the door—the combination of a letterhead and a lawyer. I recently saw a panel basically saying that really complicated issues scare off a lot of filmmakers—and they should not be afraid of it. They don’t have to be and they’re often not. But this one was never going to be easy.

The line I like is “the past in the present tense.” I credit the editor with a lot of the decision to do it this way. Creative things happen when you change one aspect. The radical thing is just to use the archival footage, and anything short of that is not that. Once you’re doing it, you just have to follow the rules.

How did you begin organizing the material?

There are a lot of documentaries that need story. This is not one of them. We started by making scenes. You know there’s going to be a bomb-drop scene [when the Philadelphia police drop a bomb on the MOVE headquarters with a helicopter]. So we started cutting that scene. The first part of the film was harder, but... Someone asked at a panel at Tribeca about the stress of not knowing what’s going to happen—I said that’s why you make historical documentaries! You know what’s going to happen. It’s a story that’s been with me for 10 years.

Having now made the film, what did you take away from the story?

I think what the story poses most compellingly, in the film that we made, is the question, how did the unthinkable come to happen? That’s just unthinkable: the police could drop a bomb, and let the fire burn, and there were children in the house. The film does present a partial answer, which is that when we look upon fellow human beings, and instead of seeing a person you see a sign in front of their eyes—you see a category, race—that’s how it starts. MOVE would say what they did to them was an attempt at genocide, and I think they have a point. That’s what makes it so interesting—they’re unique. What did Christians look like at day one?

You’ve said you remember the events from when you were a kid growing up in Philadelphia. What was your reaction, or your parents?

I was scared—I wasn’t like, Police brutality! It was, Ahhhh! Kids dying, burning to death! I don’t remember [my parents’ reaction], I remember more talking about it with my friends at the time. I remember when Reagan got shot—I remember playacting that. It made sense... there’s a cogency to some of what they’re saying, it’s a real thing.

Whom did you interview, when the film was still going to have interviews?

On camera we shot about five interviews total. I never wanted to do a mosaic. I never wanted to talk to everyone who might have something to say. For a long time, my model was One Day in September. I interviewed Michael Ward [aka Birdie Africa, a child survivor of the MOVE clash] as an adult, and thought, that’s the exclusive, that makes the film. We talked to a lot of people off camera, people on the commission.

Part of what’s fascinating is that all of this happened relatively recently.

People would see the teasers, or maybe I just pitched it to them, and they saw the images of the fire and thought, that was back in the Sixties, right? Honest to God, they seemed most surprised that 1985 was nearly 30 years ago. This trajectory—that 1985 was 30 years ago—that’s what really knocked people out of their shoes. Like, I just woke up.

I don’t know how much of it is in the film, but I always thought partly for me it was about how current events become history—or not, or fail to. I’m comfortable, I’m on the side of complexity, I do think people should know, I think it’s part of American history. Or, it’s not part of American history and it ought to be. The kids I teach [at George Washington] were born in the Nineties. They pretty much know what Waco was, they had no idea about this, and why?

Waco is maybe the closest of this kind of event that people might know.

Waco and Ruby Ridge was federal government. That’s out in the boonies—this is Philadelphia, how can people not know about it? I think it was a very strange time, mediawise. There are very few examples of news going live and staying live like this. Nowadays, Lindsay Lohan is at court and it’s live. OJ was the big moment like that. That’s part of what makes this so interesting. People have the context for the news, but it’s just a news report until [the TV news reporters] start ducking bullets. And then it’s nothing you’ve seen in your life. You realize the commentator is scared or shocked.

The found footage of the hearings is just as dramatic in a different way—people speaking their mind.

I give a lot of credit to Nels [Bangerter, the editor]. She recognized the dramatic potential in that material. Everything you want to do with talking heads—you want to move the story forward or provide context—you can do it all. But no one ever goes unquestioned. Instead of letting all the air go out, you build tension another way. It’s very tightly packed. I love docs, but more shit happens in my documentary than many other documentaries.

How have audiences responded to the film?

I’m really happy with the audiences. In a lot of ways it’s getting the response that I wanted, but the tone is markedly different. I thought people would want to argue with each other. They just kind of want to talk—they’re more contemplative. People seem very sensitized and maybe a bit traumatized from seeing the film. Toward the end of a screening, someone got onto their soapbox. “I see the oppressed and the oppressors...” And he didn’t get shouted down, he just trickled off. There was no energy in the room for him.

One of the best reactions I’ve gotten was two drunk college-age girls who came up after a screening. One of them poked me in the chest and—I’m paraphrasing here—she said: “I saw your film, I can’t fucking believe that happened, and no one fucking knows that happened, and I called my mother to tell her.” It actually works, it’s gratifying.

Danish director Susanne Bier and writing partner Anders Thomas Jensen have made successful careers as purveyors of melodrama, collaborating on the critically acclaimed Brothers, After the Wedding, and In a Better World.  Their work pays homage to the excesses of silent era Hollywood, with an unfettered employ of coincidence, destiny, Manichean dichotomies, and frustration with the modern world. If Bier’s preceding films sometimes ended with body counts as high as the Bard's darker plays, then her latest film can accurately be described as a Shakespearean comedy. 

Love Is All You Need features a great deal of verbal sparring, screwball antics, and round robin romantic couplings leading up to the main calamitous event, a wedding in Italy. The film introduces us to young lovers Astrid and Patrick as they begin readying Patrick’s family’s run-down coastal Italian villa to host their nuptuals. A montage of humorous renovation blunders, interspersed with much kissing and general gooey-eyedness, ensues before returning to cold, bleak Denmark where we meet Philip (Pierce Brosnan) and Ida (Trine Dyrholm). Philip is a widower who runs a large corporation that sells fruits and vegetables (we hear Philip snipe over the phone to an employee “I want total focus on radishes!”), and Ida is a quietly sad but perpetually sunny hairdresser who wears a wig, as she has just completed her final round of chemotherapy.  While Philip is aggravated at work (particularly at the needling of his incorrigible sister-in-law, the shrewish Benedikte) and isolated as a perpetual stranger in a strange land, Ida returns home from therapy to find her husband in the thralls of illicit passion with a much younger woman. Both Ida and Philip are separately at the end of their respective ropes, but their two stories will collide, when, in the proper melodramatic tradition of coincidence, Ida backs her car into Philip’s as they are both in a rush to get to the airport—to Italy—where each of their children is getting married—to each other.

The second act of the film brings all of the characters together in the now beautifully restored villa settled picturesquely between the Mediterranean and the family’s old lemon grove.  The luxurious visuals of sunsets and sparkling water soothe characters and viewers alike into a temporary calm before the conflict that is fated to escalate whenever characters with skeleton-filled closets are placed together in one house.  Ida and Philip bicker and tease before not-so-slowly warming to each other, while tensions rise around them: Ida’s husband brings his new girlfriend to the wedding, Benedikte attempts to seduce Philip, and Astrid worries that Patrick is not sexually attracted to her (though he spends increasing amounts of time in the company of one of the Italian men helping with the renovation). The events leading up to the wedding are disastrous (perhaps as a nod to Bier’s After the Wedding, in which the melodramatic excess abounds after the nuptials rather than before), but the audience need not worry whether everything will work out for the best in the end.

This is certainly not a spoiler—Love Is All You Need embraces convention.  In the hands of a lesser director or writer this rom com might be dismissed as fluff, but helmed by Bier and Jensen, the film is self-aware enough to avoid the hokey-ness associated with the genre. Buffeted by languorous Italian vistas and the emotional depth of the characters, the film falls more into the Nancy Meyers camp of rom com, in which relatable late-in-life romances are played out against sumptuous settings.  Pierce Brosnan’s Philip is a more vulnerable and damaged character than the actor typically plays, and Trine Dyrholm as Ida (who also appears in Bier’s In a Better World) strikes the perfect balance between doe-eyed optimist and shrewd observer of human nature.  The two have an easy chemistry, adding to the impression that is a generally easy film to watch and enjoy.

Those familiar with Bier might criticize Love Is All You Need as slight or minor as compared to her previous work; perhaps it is. But this film is merely another side of the same melodramatic coin that comprises her oeuvre. Where films like Open Hearts are shot with Dogme 95 aesthetics, focused on sacrifice, choice, and tragedy—typical of the “almost” and “too late” nature of (melo)dramatic irony—her latest film is stylistically expressive and focused more on the “what if” than the “if only.” It’s a film about vulnerability and hope, with a pervasive visual and narrative motif of lemons, begging the characters and viewers to make some lemonade. And for the most part we do, forgiving or perhaps accepting the conventions of the genre because the appeal of the film does not lie in the predictable ending, but in the pleasure of getting there.

With its plot centering on the casualties of divorce—namely, a seven-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of her parents’ custody battle—Henry James’ 1897 novel What Maisie Knew lends itself particularly well to the contemporary. Following in a long line of predominantly period-faithful Jamesian pictures, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's adaptation commendably preserves the book’s child perspective even if it doesn’t quite match the characteristically dark shades of the author’s moral fare.

Opening with the bickering of Susana (Julianne Moore) and Beale (Steve Coogan), we watch as Maisie (Onata Aprile) can’t help but overhear from her perch at the kitchen counter. Seemingly unfazed, the sound of the doorbell prompts her to dash up and down the stairs with the weightlessness of a wood sprite to retrieve money for the pizza delivery guy her parents are too pre-occupied to deal with.

In keeping with the upper-class milieu of James’ novels, the filmic family inhabits a high-ceilinged SoHo apartment that abounds in the trappings of childhood. Surrounded by toys, figurines, endless art supplies and whimsical costumes, Maisie has everything a little girl could ever want or need, but the camera’s emphasis on this colorful array of objects makes it clear that they are not enough. Her self-centered and neglectful parents both have jobs that frequently take them on the road—Susana is an aging rock star and Beale a successful art dealer—leaving Maisie primarily under the care of her devoted and fetching young nanny, Margot (Joanna Vanderham).

When a separation agreement is finally reached, joint custody infinitely complicates family matters. Beale marries the nanny, and Susana—in an effort to match the stability Maisie’s father seems to be providing—quickly elopes with a lanky young bartender named Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard). Maisie is left at the mercy of grown-ups who all claim to know what’s best as she struggles to understand the shifting roles of an increasing number of itinerant adults in her life.

“Everything had something behind it” James writes early on in the novel, “life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors.” The image translates well onscreen: the majority of the film is spent observing Maisie observe. Curiously peering through railings, across hallways, and over countertops, she witnesses her parents’ fights and flirtations, gleaning what she can about the complexities and shortcomings of adult relationships—and of the adults themselves.

Her mother and father are equally unreliable, either late or altogether absent from school pick-ups and scheduled hand-offs, leaving Maisie alone or reliant on the kindness of strangers. Wide-eyed but not maudlin, the girl is remarkably stoic. Never kicking, screaming, or even crying audibly, she embodies the kind of unconditional love only a child can possess, wholeheartedly embracing whoever should come to retrieve her.

As Maisie, the young Aprile sets the film’s tone of restraint, which is unfortunately undermined by the frequently saccharine score and one too many slow motion sequences.  Despite Julianne Moore’s not quite believable rock-star character thread, both she and Coogan deliver solid performances that effectively walks the line between drama and black humor.

Skarsgard and Vanderham are charming and convincing as the flaxen-haired guardians who prove to be much more adept at child rearing than Maisie’s biological parents. The simple moments of childhood bliss they facilitate—a day at the park, a game of monopoly, horseplay on the Highline—seem to alleviate the cumulative effect of parental neglect. Where in the novel the divorce and its aftermath places a tombstone on Maisie’s childhood, the film offers a utopian vision of an alternative family that seems to discount the old saying that you can’t choose your parents. 

Kazakh director Emir Baigazin’s feature debut Harmony Lessons takes place in a rural school beset by an organized gang of bullies led by the brutal Bolat. Aslan, a glum outsider with a penchant for torturing roaches, strikes up a friendship with a new student, with surprising effects on the school’s authoritarian microcosm. FILM COMMENT spoke with the 29-year-old Baigazin at the Tribeca Film Festival about bullying, reading up on the Sex Pistols, and the film’s stringent cinematography (which won the film a Silver Bear at Berlin).

I hope that the school in the movie does not come from personal experience, but in any case, the bond between Aslan and the transfer student from the city makes me wonder: are you a city kid, or from the country?

I’m a mixture, because I was born in the village, and then we moved into a bigger settlement, which wasn’t even the central settlement—it was a kind of district settlement. I lived there until I was 16 years old. Then we moved into Aktyubinsk, which is a big town but still a provincial town in Kazakhstan. And then I moved into the capital, Almaty. Many of my friends in Almaty did not know about where I lived before. They were surprised: even living in those very, very deep provincial areas I knew who the Sex Pistols were. It doesn’t depend on where you’re born.

It’s easier now with the Internet.

In 1994, there wasn’t a lot of Internet. We had a lot of different newspapers, covering the whole cultural world. People from our regions read a lot. These were newspapers during the wave of new democracy and glasnost, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So even if they didn’t have technology, they still had some access to information.

Is the organized bullying depicted in the film a common phenomenon, or has it been intensified for the film?

I would say that the situation exists in poor regions more. When I was growing up and going to school, the same age as the characters in the movie, we had it even in our school. It coincided with the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Crime was very, very severe.

Darezhan Omirbaev and other Kazakh filmmakers have brought some attention to the country’s cinema. When you were starting out making films, did you draw inspiration from them or more from foreign directors?

You can see a lot of movies now in Kazakhstan, and on the Internet you can download and see whatever you want. I respect and know a lot of big names in cinema, but I get my inspiration more from the fine arts—from paintings rather than any directors in particular.

Which ones?

When we worked on Harmony Lessons, I talked with my cinematographer about the paintings of Edvard Munch. And we basically were looking at Edvard Munch’s paintings and listening to Bach’s music. So that served as our inspiration mostly.

I didn’t immediately think of Edvard Munch, or at least what many people associate with Munch, in terms of lighting and color.

When I make comparisons to Munch, I mean that my movie and the paintings of Munch have more air—they are not so populated. Take for example Bosch or Bruegel, where we can see a lot of little details. The lines in Munch’s paintings are usually more continuous, and in my movie you can see they are more continuous, rather than saturated with details.

How did you find Aslan?

We found him on the very first day of casting. When the characters are all settled in my mind already, cooked well [so to speak], it’s easier to find an actor because I know what I’m looking for. They are very brave boys, the people in the movie. They know these situations. The boy who plays Aslan has had a really hard life: he’s an orphan, he grew up on the streets, and he lived through some brutal things.

Was it difficult for him or the others to be acting out these grim scenarios?

The initiative of making the scenes of torture and violence so realistic came from the actors. They didn’t want it to look like fake fights, or something staged. And they actually offered to go further. If it’s brutal, then it’s brutal.

Where did you get the idea of Aslan torturing roaches in that elaborate way?

I don’t remember, I think I got this from the concentration of working. There is an expression in Russian language like “roaches in your head,” bugs in your head.

What does that mean? Crazy?

It means like we all have these little parasites in our thoughts. But I realized that connection much later. The initial idea of the roaches was that Aslan is always fighting off [illness], and the roaches are transmitters of bacteria. So he fights with them. And the biggest roach is Bolat.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

For every film we argue over and write articles about, there are legions of moving images we often ignore: industrial films, commercials, educational series, sound tests, news clips, travel diaries, amateur short films. Of all these, the home movie comes especially close to the intentions of cinema’s earliest founders, treating the camera not as a storytelling device or a magic wand, but a means of faithfully documenting life in motion, preserving the moment for posterity, and giving memory some analogue in the physical world.

Home movies in the pre-YouTube era came hand-stitched out of dates, places and proper names, often known only to the people who made and watched them. They were memorials to moments, inextricably attached to the specific, unrepeatable circumstances that created them, and very few aspired to timeless, universal appeal. They could be historical documents, family albums, ways of getting in touch with the past or staying in touch with it, chances for grown-up viewers to watch themselves take their first steps again and again, but they made no pretense to being art, in the narrowest sense of the word. Their aesthetic merit was incidental: their beauty was the beauty of their subject, their meaning the sum of the facts of the moment they recorded.

Some of the earliest home movies, as we now understand the term—domestic documents focused primarily on the daily details of family life, shot by amateurs on small, portable cameras—were made by a man named Archie Stewart, from Newburgh, New York. Spanning from the 1920s to the ’90s, they document decades of family vacations, birthday parties, Christmas celebrations, reading lessons, dance and piano recitals. Staged portraits of dignified grownups and grinning kids share space with scenes acted out by subjects indifferent to, though never unaware of, the camera’s presence. There is something morbid about watching Stewart’s home movies today, sweet and folksy as they are; their unguarded intimacy, the way they invite us so fully into their maker’s present, only reminds us how thin the link is between his present and our own. For his part, Stewart likely would have been baffled to see strangers watching his footage in the comfort of our living rooms—but the way he addresses so many of his voiceovers at an absent “you” suggests he might also have been pleased.

Yet Stewart’s films also suggest that, even at this early stage, the home-movie maker was never content with playing the part of the impartial spectator. “Here’s the old gang getting the Christmas tree ready for Santa Claus,” Stewart tells us in his reedy, affectionate voice. “I’m rather interested to see how this picture will come out. I’ve changed the lens from the lens which came on the camera to the Taylor-Cooke lens.” As the kids fiddle with ornaments, their dad chatters excitedly about pan-chromatic film and photoflood lamps. The playful lens-swapping and careful camera setups were the stirrings of a desire that later home-movie makers would adopt in full force: to render the moment as it was experienced firsthand, through the filmmaker’s own eyes. The present, Stewart knew, was more than a series of events to be listed off ; it was a vast network of sensations, textures, associations, scents, colors, epiphanies brief and prolonged. To record the present faithfully would require a fresh visual language, one that corresponded to the way that individuals absorb the world in the heat of the moment. By equal parts accident and necessity, the amateur cameraman had become a poet.

Thus the home movie and the art film became unlikely partners, and their two competing goals—to document the present as it happened, and to re-construct an alternate present according to the filmmaker’s own specifications—merged into a third: to self-consciously aestheticize life in the moment. In the diary films of Jonas Mekas, a hero of New York film culture whose latest feature Out-Takes From the Life of a Happy Man has a run at Anthology Film Archives, this tendency found what might be its fullest possible expression. Each of Mekas’s films speaks in a slightly different register—from the ebullient to the subdued, the urban to the pastoral, the manic to the wistful—but taken together, they seem like fragments of a 90-year-long film inseparable from the director’s life.

The subject of Mekas’s visuals are the way light reflects on city streets in summer and on snow, the way children run through Central Park, and the way water laps on Mediterranean rocks; birds in flight, fellow luminaries of downtown film culture at work and at play, dogs and cats at war. There is little ostensible premeditation to Mekas’s shooting style, but the films’ frequent superimpositions, their associative editing and meticulous sound design, and the way they flutter breathlessly from image to image suggest a conscious attempt to replicate how we take in the moment, processing a half-dozen details at once, flitting from sensation to sensation.

Ever since the mid-Fifties, when Mekas switched on his first Bolex in the streets of New York, the association between the home movie and the art film has become easier to confirm and harder to define. In the Seventies, Ed Pincus used the home movie to sketch self-portraits that were candid, complex, and frequently unflattering: in Diaries we find bucolic scenes of family life and idealistic peeks at the then-current counterculture side-by-side with tear-stained marital spats and shots of Pincus climbing in bed with a succession of lovers. The form may at times resemble a home movie, but the film plays like an especially unsparing autobiography—one that doubles, willfully or not, as a psychological study of a generation. Thirty years later, Terence Malick would ground his extended meditation on the origins of the cosmos, the problem of suffering, and the invention of grace in a re-creation of a Texas adolescence that owed as much to Mekas and Stewart as it did to the filmmaker’s own boyhood memories. (The same year that saw the release of The Tree of Life saw the invention of Instagram.)

Post Tenebras Lux

Carlos Reygadas’s new feature Post Tenebras Lux is a home movie in fits and spurts: a portrait of an upper-class Mexican family starring Reygadas’s own children and shot in the director’s own home, packed with scenes of family outings, frolicking children, and pet dogs. There, for the most part, the similarities end. Both lead roles are filled by professional actors. The film’s final third tells a story of class conflict, violence, and guilt. Exteriors are shot with lenses that distort the outer edges of the frame, literally blurring the already-fuzzy line between the home movie’s desire to record the plain, clear facts of the moment and its equally strong desire to pass those facts through the tinted, half-opaque filter of its maker’s sight.

There are other tip-offs that we’re no longer in Archie Stewart territory: the unannounced leaps forward in time, the recurring presence of an animated devil, and the couple’s mid-film trip to a European sex sauna where overweight, middle-aged men stare emptily into space. But even as these scenes declare the film’s status as the product of a meticulous and pre-ordained design (none of the home movie’s pointing and shooting here!), they also deflate that design with well-timed cutaways and deadpan, barely perceptible winks.

But the film’s beating heart is in the kids’ unrehearsed bedtime babble; in the sound of water flowing, branches snapping, and reeds folding; in marital spats small and large; in the texture of a hardwood floor or a dog’s fur; in the sight of two wedding-ring-bound hands fumbling for each other on an empty passenger seat. All of Reygadas’s attention-grabbing formal devices feel foreign next to these moments of unaffected, natural beauty—and yet they’re the same devices that, like Mekas’s rapid-fire edits, encourage us to invest ourselves in the moment, to feel vicariously whatever Reygadas felt in the space between action and cut.

Post Tenebras Lux suggests that the home-movie maker can only fulfill his ambitions by appealing to strategies outside the home movie tradition, maybe even hostile to it. But for a possible reconciliation between the two traditions, look no further than the film’s stunning opening scene: Reygadas’s young daughter wanders a massive, waterlogged field as day fades into a stormy night. It’s a bravura technical performance, complete with long, graceful camera whirls, first-person POV shots, and that ubiquitous blurring on the edges of the frame. All this formal trickery comes in service of the haphazard, zigzag movements of animals and kids—as if that meticulous creative type behind the camera was willing to toss his artistic designs aside for a few minutes and submit, like any good home-moviemaker, to his daughter’s whims.

Late in Post Tenebras Lux, husband and wife send the kids to bed and spend a moment alone, he laid up injured in bed, she sitting at the piano playing a gorgeously off-key rendition of Neil Young’s “It’s a Dream.” The song ends, she covers up the piano, and he, pulling her close, describes in detail a moment from his early childhood. Is the whole of Post Tenebras Lux like that vividly recalled memory, a fragment of time past made to feel at once close and unrepeatable? Or is it all, per Neil Young, a dream fading away? Are the devil and the sex sauna meant to challenge the home movie’s connection to reality altogether, to hint that the family outings, the marital squabbles, and the kids at play are, once projected onto the screen, no more real than the wildest figments of Reygadas’s prodigious imagination?

Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man

In her FILM COMMENT review of Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man, Amy Taubin describes an apropos scene: “[Mekas] remembers as a 5-year-old sitting on his father’s bed at night and telling him ‘in detail’ everything that he did, everything he saw and heard during the day. It was, he says, as if he was singing the day.” Mekas’s films have often seemed torn between a child’s desire to fully invest in the present and a grown-up’s knowledge that the present is something fleeting and unrecoverable. Out-Takes is the first of Mekas’s diaries I’ve seen to make that tension explicit: from time to time, the film’s grainy, luminous 16mm-to-video footage gives way to digitally shot scenes of Mekas staying up late at night in the editing room assembling the film that we’re watching, playing and re-playing fragments of his distant past. One might expect that, seen from up to 50 years’ remove, Mekas’s “out-takes” would start to seem to the director like dreams, or at least memories. Taubin writes:

This film, Mekas explains [in voiceover], is not about his memories. The memories are gone. The images are all there is. They alone are ‘real.’ …The images are not substitutes for the lost paradise of Mekas’s childhood in Lithuania. The images dance together on the screen as things of beauty in themselves. Nothing matters except their movement, the movement of the camera that finds them, and the movement of our eyes joining the dance. 

All of which hints at Mekas's desire to return to a different lost paradise: that of the home movie, the film that keeps no beauty for itself but assigns it all to its subject, the film whose director, to the extent that he or she exercises any control over the proceedings, does so to bring the subject a little closer, to make the past a little more present, a little more real. Perhaps to live in and among such movies has been the secret of the nonagenarian filmmaker’s enduring happiness. Still, there is a deep sadness that runs through Out-Takes, though Mekas would probably be loath to admit it. The more real the past seems on film, the more painful it can be to revisit.

A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think it might be the nicest terminal in the country, although if you want to see some good airports, you’ve got to go to a major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia. They’re amazing airports. They’re incredible and quiet. You’re not being assaulted by all this music. I don’t know when it was decided we all need a soundtrack everywhere we go. I was just in the bathroom upstairs and there was a soundtrack accompanying me at the urinal, I don’t understand. So I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra $60 to get the extra leg room, so I’m trying to get comfortable and we make altitude. And there’s a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff. I’m curious to see what he’s going to watch—he’s a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences—he’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.

I get this wave of—not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering—but I had this sense of, am I going insane? Or is the world going insane—or both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s generational and I’m getting old, I’m in the back nine professionally. And maybe my 22-year-old daughter doesn’t feel this way at all. I should ask her. But then I think, no: Something is going on—something that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age you cannot keep a secret.

The Sopranos

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum. Again, I thought maybe that’s my generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask my daughter. But then I remember somebody did this experiment where if you’re in a car and you’re going more than 20 miles an hour it becomes impossible to distinguish individual features on a human being’s face. I thought that’s another good analogy for this sensation. It’s a very weird experiment for someone to come up with.

So that was my Jet Blue flight. But the circular thinking didn’t really stop and I got my hands on a book by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time.” That’s the hum I’m talking about. And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think it’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on movies. How they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform.

But before we talk about movies we should talk about art in general, if that’s possible. Given all the incredible suffering in the world I wonder, what is art for, really? If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t prevent genocide, then, really, what is it for? Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained—except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the resources spent on all the pieces of entertainment? What about the carbon footprint of getting me here? Then I think, why are you even thinking that way and worrying about how many miles per gallon my car gets, when we have NASCAR, and monster truck pulls on TV? So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being—literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.

Ocean’s Thirteen

Art is also about problem solving, and it’s obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with problem solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. All the ideas are on the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.

Now we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of cinema. First of all, is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I’d say "Fuck yeah!" The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.

So, that means you can take a perfectly solid, successful, and acclaimed movie and it may not qualify as cinema. It also means you can take a piece of cinema and it may not qualify as a movie, and it may actually be an unwatchable piece of shit. But as long as you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view, then cinema is never going to disappear completely. Because it’s not about money, it’s about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic. I love all this new technology, it’s great. It’s smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a really good-looking movie for not a lot of money, and when people start to get weepy about celluloid, I think of this quote by Orson Welles when somebody was talking to him about new technology, which he tended to embrace, and he said: “I don’t want to wait on the tool, I want the tool to wait for me,” which I thought was a good way to put it. But the problem is that cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience. The reasons for this, in my opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount of fear and a lack of vision, and a lack of leadership, you’ve got a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.

Now, of course, it’s very subjective; there are going to be exceptions to everything I’m going to say, and I’m just saying that so no one thinks I’m talking about them. I want to be clear: The idea of cinema as I’m defining it is not on the radar in the studios. This is not a conversation anybody’s having; it’s not a word you would ever want to use in a meeting. Speaking of meetings, the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldn’t presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and that’s kind of what you feel like when you’re in these meetings. You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are, and that’s one reason that cinema, as I’m defining it, is shrinking.

Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad.

Contagion

Speaking of ambiguity, we had a test screening of Contagion once and a guy in the focus group stood up and he said, “I really hate the Jude Law character. I don’t know if he’s a hero or an asshole.” And I thought, well, here we go. There’s another thing, a process known as running the numbers, and for a filmmaker this is kind of the equivalent of a doctor showing you a chest x-ray and saying there’s a shadow on it. It’s a kind of fungible algorithm that’s used when they want say no without, really, saying no. I could tell you a really good story of how I got pushed off a movie because of the way the numbers ran, but if I did, I’d probably get shot in the street, and I really like my cats.

So then there’s the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. That’s where you start. Now you add another 30 for overseas. Now you’ve got to remember, the exhibitors pay half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you need to gross 120. So you don’t even know what your movie is yet, and you’re already looking at 120. That ended up being part of the reason why the Liberace movie didn’t happen at a studio. We only needed $5 million from a domestic partner, but when you add the cost of putting a movie out, now you’ve got to gross $75 million to get that 35 back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too “special” to gross $70 million. So the obstacle here isn’t just that special subject matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out. There have been some attempts to analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesn’t really reveal any kind of linear predictive behavior, it’s still mysterious the process whereby people decide if they’re either going to go to a movie or not go to a movie. Sometimes you don’t even know how you reach them. Like on Magic Mike for instance, the movie opened to $38 million, and the tracking said we were going to open to 19. So the tracking was 100% wrong. It’s really nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but it’s hard not to sit there and go how did we miss that? If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that much?

I know one person who works in marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestly budgeted film that had some sort of brand identity and some A-list talent attached, she suggested, “Look, why don’t we not do any tracking at all, and just spend 15 and we’ll just put it out.” They wouldn’t do it. They were afraid it would fail, when they fail doing the other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to work. The other thing that mystifies me is that you would think, in terms of spending, if you have one of these big franchise sequels that you would say, oh, we don’t have to spend as much money because is there anyone in the galaxy that doesn’t know Iron Man’s opening on Friday? So you would think, oh, we can stop carpet-bombing with TV commercials. It’s exactly the opposite. They spend more. They spend more. Their attitude is: you know, it’s a sequel, and it’s the third one, and we really want to make sure people really want to go. We want to make sure that opening night number is big so there’s the perception of the movie is that it’s a huge success. There’s that, and if you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out.

Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle of eight other posters, and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument.

Side Effects

You know, we had a trailer for Side Effects that we did in London and the filmmaking team really, really liked it. But the problem was that it was not testing well, and it was really not testing as well as this domestic trailer that we had. The point spread was so significant that I really couldn’t justify trying to jam this thing down distributor’s throats, so we had to abandon it. Now look, not all testing is bad. Sometimes you have to, especially on a comedy. There’s nothing like 400 people who are not your friends to tell you when something’s wrong. I just don’t think you can use it as the last word on a movie’s playability, or its quality. Magic Mike tested poorly. Really poorly. And fortunately Warner Brothers just ignored the test scores, and stuck with their plan to open the movie wide during the summer.

But let’s go back to Side Effects for a second. This is a movie that didn’t perform as well as any of us wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It can’t be the campaign because all the materials that we had, the trailers, the posters, the TV spots, all that stuff tested well above average. February 8th, maybe it was the date, was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after the Oscar nominations are announced, and this year there was an atypically large bump to all the films that got nominated, so that was a factor. Then there was a storm in the Northeast, which is sort of our core audience. Nemo came in, so God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism. Was it the concept? There was a very active decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller and kind of disconnect it from this larger social issue of everybody taking pills. Did that make the movie seem more commercial, or did it make it seem more generic? We don’t know. What about the cast? Four attractive white people… this is usually not an obstacle. The exit polls were very good, the reviews were good. How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We don’t. Because everybody’s already moved on to the next movie they have to release.

Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. If you give a certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one of the buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food 40% of the time, and one of the buttons when you touch it dispenses food 60% percent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly figures out never to touch the 40% button ever again. So when a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, they’re actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races. I think if I were going to run a studio I’d just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I would call Shane Carruth, or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and I’d bring them in and go, okay, what do you want to do? What are the things you’re interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I’d go: okay, look, I’m going to let you make three movies over five years, I’m going to give you this much money in production costs, I’m going to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.

Magic Mike

Now, that only works if you are very, very good at identifying talent. Real talent, the kind of talent that sustains. And you can’t be judging strictly on commercial performance, or hype, or hipness, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect someone running a multi-billion dollar business to be able to identify talent. I get it, it’s the studio, you need all kinds of movies. You need comedies, you need horror films, you need action films, you need animated films, I get it. But the point is, can’t some of these be cinema also? This is kind of what we tried to do with Section 8 is we tried to bring interesting filmmakers into the studio system and protect them. But unfortunately the only way a studio is going to allow that kind of freedom to a young filmmaker is if the budgets are low. And unfortunately the most profitable movies for the studios are going to be the big movies, the home runs. They don’t look at the singles or the doubles as being worth the money or the man hours. Psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie that costs 100, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs 10. I know what you’re thinking: If it costs 10 you’re going to be in profit sooner. Maybe not. Here’s why: OK. $10 million movie, 60 million to promote it, that’s 70, so you’ve got to gross 140 to get out. Now you’ve got $100 million movie, you’re going spend 60 to promote it. You’ve got to get 320 to get out. How many $10 million movies make 140 million dollars? Not many. How many $100 million movies make 320? A pretty good number, and there’s this sort of domino effect that happens too. Bigger home video sales, bigger TV sales, so you can see the forces that are sort of draining in one direction in the business. So, here’s a thought… maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe I’m a clown. Maybe the audiences are happy, and the studio is happy, and look at this from Variety:

“Shrinking release slates that focus on tentpoles and the emergence of a new normal in the home vid market has allowed the largest media congloms to boost the financial performance of their movie divisions, according to Nomura Equity research analyst Michael Nathanson.”

So, according to Mr. Nathanson, the studios are successfully cutting costs, the decline in home videos have plateaued, and the international box office, which used to be 50% of revenue is now 70%. With one exception in that all the stock prices of all the companies that own these studios are up. It would appear that all these companies are flush. So maybe nothing’s wrong, and I’ve got to tell you, this is the only arena in history in which trickle-down economics actually works, because when a studio is flush, they spend more money to make more money, because their stock price is all about market share. And you know, there’s no other business that’s this big, that’s actually this financially transparent. You have a situation here in which there is an objective economic value given to an asset. It’s not like that derivatives mortgage bullshit that just brought the world to its knees, you can’t say a movie made more money than it actually made, and internally, you can’t say that you didn’t spend what you spent on it. It’s contractual that you have to make these numbers available.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of waste. I think there are too many layers of executives, I don’t know why you should be having a lot of phone calls with people that can’t actually make decisions. They’ll violate their own rules on a whim, while they make you adhere to them. They get simple things wrong sometimes, like remakes. I mean, why are you always remaking the famous movies? Why aren’t you looking back into your catalog and finding some sort of programmer that was made 50 years ago that has a really good idea in it, that if you put some fresh talent on it, it could be really great. Of course, in order to do that you need to have someone at the studio that actually knows those movies. Even if you don’t have that person you could hire one. The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it’s a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it’s the third-biggest export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes.

Schizopolis

I’ve stopped being embarrassed about being in the film business, I really have. I’m not spending my days trying to make a weapon that kills people more efficiently. It’s an interesting business. But again, taking the 30,000 foot view, maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong so much, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure anymore. Maybe everything is just fine. But… Admissions—this is the number of bodies that go through the turnstile—10 years ago: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. That’s a 10 and a half percent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows, not even Nate Silver. Probably a combination of things. Ticket prices, maybe, a lot of competition for eyeballs. There’s a lot of good TV out there. Theft is a big problem. I know this is a really controversial subject, but for people who think everything on the Internet should just be totally free all I can say is, good luck. When you try to have a life and raise a family living off something you create…

There’s a great quote from Steve Jobs:

“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: it’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character.”

I agree with him. I think that what people go to the movies for has changed since 9/11. I still think the country is in some form of PTSD about that event, and that we haven’t really healed in any sort of complete way, and that people are, as a result, looking more toward escapist entertainment. And look, I get it. There’s a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad. People are working longer hours for less money these days, and maybe when they get in a movie, they want a break. I get it.

But let’s sex this up with some more numbers. In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.

When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience I thought was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseball—but with another thrown baseball. That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing. I can tell: it’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.

Maybe the ideas I had don’t work, and the only way they’ll find out is that someone’s got to give me half a billion dollars, to see if it’ll work. That seems like a lot of money, but actually in point of fact there are a couple movies coming down the pike that represent, in terms of their budgets and their marketing campaigns, individually, a half a billion dollars. Just one movie. Just give me one of these big movies. No? Kickstarter!

Memento

I don’t want to bring this to a conclusion on a down note. A few years back, I got a call from an agent and he said, “Will you come see this film? It’s a small, independent film a client made. It’s been making the festival circuit and it’s getting a really good response but no distributor will pick it up, and I really want you to take a look at it and tell me what you think.” The film was called Memento. So the lights come up and I think: it’s over. It’s over. Nobody will buy this film? This is just insane. The movie business is over. It was really upsetting. Well, fortunately, the people who financed the movie loved the movie so much that they formed their own distribution company and put the movie out and made $25 million. So whenever I despair I think, okay, somebody out there somewhere, while we’re sitting right here, somebody out there somewhere is making something cool that we’re going to love, and that keeps me going. The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re pitching—it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imagine—but as you’re sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say: "You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope."

Thank you.

Mud is grounded in that awkward moment of youth where you begin testing out things you’ve seen adults do on TV—swearing, kissing, saving the day by following your heart—and quickly discover that the world doesn’t work quite that easily. And, with the exception of certain aspects of its denouement, the film, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, avoids the clichés and easy answers that most coming-of-age stories peddle and instead shows the abundance of humor, frustration, and sadness that is part and parcel of this tender age.

The film opens with Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) sneaking off to a tiny island where a modest cabin cruiser hangs on the top branches of a tree after a flood, every other word of their terse, posturing exchanges a “shit,” “damn,” or “fuck.” This quintessentially surreal—or surruralist—image of the boat leads into the central mystery of the film: Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a leathery, leisurely man, lives in the boat, and is trying to survive in the wilderness long enough rendezvous his sweetheart, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).

Mud’s twisty grin, the pistol tucked into his waistband, and his drawling charm are irresistible to the boys who ordinarily spend their free time helping relatives with their fishing business and hanging out in parking lots, watching cute girls from a safe distance. Ellis, the older boy, falls hardest and most unswervingly for Mud, especially when his parents’ marriage begins to fall apart. Instead of eating dinner around the table like a family, he eats beanie weenies out of the can with Mud round the fire and listens to stories of Juniper’s mythic love. For Ellis, and Neckbone, women are both the cause of, and solution for, all of life’s problems.

But when Ellis and Neckbone encounter a bruised, daisy duke-wearing Juniper at the Piggly Wiggly, they begin to understand the situation differently: Mud murdered her abusive ex, which is why he’s been hiding on the river, and now the dead man’s family has bounty hunters after him to exact vengeance. Staying true to their youthful (and aspirationally manly) ideals, the boys extend their support far beyond delivering canned goods and collect large swaths of scrap metal and tar to make the boat in the tree seaworthy. As Ellis continues to gather more information about the people in Mud’s life—Juniper, a grumpy neighbor who once served as Mud’s guardian, and even the men who are after him—he learns that every adult is just as complicated as he is. They’re no longer simply lumbering jerks who only punish or instruct; they are real people who have loved something at least once, and have lost something many more times.

This effortless way in which the mystery’s various components are tied to the realities of growing up is undoubtedly the film’s greatest strength. These multifaceted characters genuinely develop, and the regionally specific dialogue rings true. The film’s moral complexities are writ in small details, as when a group of burly bounty hunters briefly “take a knee” in a hotel room to pray for Mud’s death, at the insistence of their employer. Nichols visually encapsulates small town life perfectly: seeing the world from the back of a pickup truck, crawling down the town’s main drag; or speeding up a river, trees on either side, blue skies overpowering the small figures below. These are kids that get 10 bucks for their allowance and permission to use their uncle’s old dirt bike, not iPods for Christmas.

The absence of the likes of Ellis and Neckbone from recent independent film troublingly underlines the limitations of distributors who seem to feel as though they intimately understand what does and does not interest audiences, indie or mainstream. In its energy and nuance, Mud seems like the kind of film Hollywood would’ve made in the Seventies, and would’ve continued to do if not for the advent of market-conscious filmmaking. Though it wouldn’t be playing in Dumas or Stuttgart, Arkansas (where it was filmed), if it hadn’t been filmed there, the fact that Mud exists—and is so endearing—bodes well for Southern-based productions, and the medium itself.

Co-written by his wife, Veronika Franz, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love—the first of his Paradise trilogy—follows Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), a 50-year-old Austrian single hausfrau who travels to a Kenyan beachside resort to escape her frustrating, sexless existence and sullen teenage daughter. There, Teresa is excited to learn from a friend (Inge Maux) the ins and outs of scoring what the out-of-shape women cannot get at home: sex, and a measure of companionship, with young men. The interactions between “Beach Boys,” as the young Kenyans call themselves, and their “Sugar Mamas,” the middle-aged, white clients, begin with the men peddling trinkets on the beach and flattering the women. Teresa falls hard for Munga (played by real-life Beach Boy Peter Kazungu), who gladly, even gently, serves as her bedmate and around-town companion. As she realizes the full extent of her power as a European with a bit of money, and her own inability to truly interest sexually the young men she beds, she becomes desperate and vicious.

The film opens with a disorienting scene: a group of mentally challenged people driving bumper cars around in circles—an image that is as much an injunction not to laugh as a provocation to do so. The ambivalent emotions on which the scene plays—pity, amusement, and uncertainty about the proper reaction to have—belie Paradise: Love’s larger preoccupations with the ethics of watching. The film entertains, titillates, disgusts, and confuses the viewer, who in turn becomes increasingly aware of him or herself as a spectator. A concluding striptease act during which the women ogle, molest, and mock in racial terms a Kenyan sex worker whose naked body is as much exposed to the roving camera as to the ululating women’s gazes and groping, drives home the point of spectatorial complicity. Watching Paradise: Love is a visceral, Schadenfreude-tinged experience that produces belly laughs and queasiness alike—sometimes in tandem.

Having been the subject of Laurent Cantet’s Heading South (05), female sex tourism in movies is not without precedent. Margarete Tiesel is not Charlotte Rampling though. The camera resolutely lingers on Teresa’s bulbous, pasty-white, nude body (which is certainly unlike the typical leading lady’s) rubbing up against the strapping naked Beach Boys. Seidl’s apparent forswearing of any significant supplemental lighting results in frank, sometimes harshly rendered sex scenes that are difficult to shake, and even slightly traumatic.

Paradise: Love contrasts rigidly formal fixed-camera establishing shots of Teresa in Austria with handheld camerawork showing her at the resort, depicting the frenzy of urban Kenya as much as Teresa’s state of mind. (The static compositions’ absolute symmetry is unnatural, almost absurd; the shots sometimes resemble unwitting parodies of a Thomas Struth photograph.) At times, the formalism is consonant with the narrative content, other times considerably less so. For example, a shot contrasting the white beachgoers sunbathing on the resort side of the beach with the shirtless Beach Boys standing upright on the other side, waiting still as statues, works as a visual pun: black and white people literally inhabit two very different if inextricable worlds in Kenya. Other ultra-symmetrical shots seem unmotivated, just rigid and banal. And some, like one scene’s arranging of the Austrian women on beach chairs in order from trimmest to plumpest, feel like playful directorial asides.

Seidl’s embrace of improvisation and his strategy of casting professional actors alongside nonprofessionals (here, the Beach Boys) give the film a cinéma vérité quality that sometimes prevents immersion in the story and at others lends it a fabular quality. Attentive audiences will notice the (clearly improvising) actors throwing more than a few furtive glances toward the camera, ostensibly looking for instructions from the director. Seidl’s brand of reality in Paradise: Love—inflected as it is by his predilection for long takes and vérité practices—be it surreal, naturalistic, or something else, is appealingly revolting. How—or whether—the film functions as an indictment of spectatorship, tourism as colonialism, and/or the degree to which globalization allows those forces to metastasize is for each viewer to decide.

Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man

Completed a few months before Jonas Mekas’s 90th birthday, Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man is both the latest installment in the series of some two dozen “film diaries” that Mekas has made since the late 1960s, and a new beginning. In other words, more of the same and radically different. Having watched it four times, I also think it is Mekas’s most essential film, although if right now, I were to look at the earlier, grander masterpieces of the film genre that Mekas made his own through 60 years of invention and perseverance—for instance, Walden (69) or Lost Lost Lost (76)—I might modify that last statement. How does one chose between the great films of a master—and why bother?

True to its title, Out-Takes is literally composed of material omitted from previous films, some of it for obvious reasons now rendered pointless by the fresh context Mekas creates for these overexposed (light-ravished) soft-focused (ephemeral) fragments of beauty. The majority of the images are centered in family life, many inside the loft where Mekas and his wife Hollis Melton raised two children, entertained friends, nurtured plants and cats, and where Mekas edited his movies late at night in a small dark room, all the better to see his sun-dappled footage on a tiny viewfinder. This new movie is framed and punctuated by digital footage of Mekas at work on shiny, red rewind table, the hard edge of the video a contrast to the 16mm film he retrieved from the proverbial cutting room floor. Glory be to 16mm—already a signifier of a vanished world.

There are also images of family, friends, animals, birds, flowers, trees, grass in Mekas’s beloved Central Park (his Walden), at the beach, and in bucolic places around the globe. Does this sound familiar? It both is and isn’t. Out-Takes is both lighter and more intense than the great films that preceded it. They were epic poems with Mekas as Ulysses, recording the journey that took him far from his homeland. Out-Takes is a lyric poem, closer in spirit and form to Mekas’s own poetry. The film is an ode to creatures and objects in motion. The flight of a white gull, right to left across the water is as rapturous an image as ever committed to celluloid.

Walden

Just when I began to try to pin down the reasons that this film is unique among Mekas’s works, he offered an explanation in voiceover. Like all of Mekas’s films, this one has an audio track composed of his ruminations spoken into a tape recorder as he edits, concrete sounds, and music (Auguste Varkalis’s impressionistic piano improvisations are the perfect counterpoint to the images). This film, Mekas explains, is not about his memories. The memories are gone. The images are all there is. They alone are “real.”

It is as if the burden of the past and of signification had to be lifted for this movie to emerge. The images are not substitutes for the lost paradise of Mekas’s childhood in Lithuania. The images dance together on the screen as things of beauty in themselves. Nothing matters except their movement, the movement of the camera that finds them, and the movement of our eyes joining the dance. And yet, as Mekas explains toward the end, it all begins in the distant past. He remembers as a 5-year-old sitting on his father’s bed at night and telling him “in detail” everything that he did, everything he saw and heard during the day. It was, he says, as if he was singing the day—that’s how intensely he felt his experiences and the words that described them. Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man is precisely such a song—a homecoming and a leap into the future.

(Full disclosure: I have known Jonas Mekas for 50 years. I appear briefly in many of his films including this one. He recommended me for my first journalism job, and therefore, I owe my life as a writer, for better or worse, to him. That hasn’t prevented me from occasionally writing negatively about his work.)

Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man plays at Anthology Film Archives through May 2.

A friend once maintained that Michael Bay would be an excellent, and equally successful, porn director. Mind you, this wasn’t meant as an insult; after all, Bay’s quite adept at visually lingering on a single bead of sweat, and his films are full of swaggering low angles and extreme close-ups of intense facial expressions. Try watching Bad Boys II again and take a drink every time a woman’s bare ass is visible. You will be wasted before the first hour concludes.

My friend’s humorous but nonetheless apt idea recurred constantly during Pain & Gain, especially during a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, under the burning Miami sun, flexes while chugging a refreshing cola. He sweats charismatically, much to the delight of an elderly priest watching, who is subsequently assaulted for his voyeurism. The scene seems aimed to elicit screams of pleasure and manly nods of admiration. The late Roger Ebert called this “macho porn.”

Bay has been carving his own brand of macho porn for years, and Pain & Gain is the latest slice. It’s a another incarnation of Michael Bay Male-Fantasy Camp: a rag-tag band of brothers (red-blooded Americans), positioned as fearless role models for impressionable young men. These are serious dudes with the brawn and recklessness to tear the bad guys (usually non-Americans) apart. Whether oil drillers-turned-astronauts (Armageddon), fighter pilots (Pearl Harbor), or smart-mouthed cops with spectacular disregard for personal property (Bad Boys I and II), Bay wants you to salute these brave young American men—and in the case of Transformers, alien robot American cars—who proudly serve their country.

In Pain & Gain, however, there’s a twist. The three central protagonists (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Anthony Mackie), like their Bay predecessors, have outrageously expensive taste, a hard-on for America, and a real appetite for destruction. This time they’re also juiceheads who want the American dream in the worst way imaginable. How do they plan on getting it? By kidnapping, torturing, and ripping off a rich half-Columbian schlemiel (Tony Shalhoub), who’s a patron at their hard-body-stricken gym. Woo!

The means by which they achieve their goals are absurd, but not absurd enough to be untrue. In case you forgot the title card at the beginning, or the countless subtitles tirelessly reminding the audience, “this is a true story.” And indeed it is: even though Bay filmed it to look like last week, the events took place in 1994 and ’95, and were the subject of some immensely entertaining coverage by Miami New Times journalist Pete Collins, which are the inspiration for the film. What really happened was as outrageous as this film—including the well-endowed strippers, the failed Halloween-costume-clad kidnapping attempt, and the fact that the victim managed to stay alive after countless opportunities to be murdered. I do have a hard time believing that the torture took place in a warehouse full of rubber dildos and female blow-up dolls. Whether it was the input of screenwriting team Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (You Kill Me; Chronicles of Narnia; Thor) or some outside influence, nobody knows. It’s an R-rated Michael Bay movie, the sex toys were gonna be thrown in there somehow.

Bay’s decision to team up with Markus and McFeely is a smart one. The blending of genres (the buddy movie and heist film are turned on their heads) and the obvious odes to Scarface, Boogie Nights and True Romance (everything starting out so right before going so wrong) feel inspired, and moments of comedy lurk beneath the lurid surface, particularly in the lead performances and co-star Rebel Wilson as Mackie's doctor-turned-wife. But at the halfway point, when everything does turn out wrong, the laughs are less at the absurdity of the situation and more at the dimwits running the show. Suddenly, Pain & Gain stops being darkly funny and becomes just plain dark.

Pain & Gain is a contemporary exploitation film; it was made for $25 million, which is cheap by Michael Bay standards. Rather than take its true crime caper inspiration seriously, it pawns off its real-life players as dumb action figures and has little respect for the victims involved either. Because the “true story” is chock full of materialism, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, misogyny, etc., it allows Bay to exploit these tendencies that run rampant throughout most of his films, to the point of exhaustion, all while making sure there’s plenty of homophobia to justify the male camaraderie. If he were trying to make a statement on how these cultural ills are a greedy man's downfall, that would be one thing. But since there are still Taco Bell endorsements, needlessly graphic dick-enlargement jokes and super-slo-mos of long saliva trails to be had, the depravity becomes the spectacle.

“Some truths take their time,” says the eponymous fundamentalist, Changez, in Mira Nair’s new film. A financial whiz kid turned professor, Changez leaves New York for his native Pakistan after a series of personal and professional revelations in the wake of 9/11. His words, however, don’t hold true for the film itself, which, despite gestures toward narrative suspense, remains upfront about its political message.

Those familiar with Nair’s work will notice a raft of similarities between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and her 2006 film The Namesake. Both track the personal journeys of young men trapped between two cultures: the Southeast Asian traditions of their parents and the American Dream that they seek so earnestly.  For both there is much anguish in being trapped in this limbo—the alienation of trying to “act white” and the guilt of abandoning their roots—but there is never a doubt for the audience that some reconciliation of identity will be reached. This is perhaps enough to achieve closure in The Namesake, but with The Reluctant Fundamentalist Nair attempts to take on the political as well as the personal, and the result is not entirely successful.

The film opens in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2011 amidst some covert activity that culminates in the kidnapping of an American professor, all shot frenetically in the style of a political thriller with quick cuts, canted angles, blurred vision, and blaring score. But The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not really a political thriller despite the American/Pakistani culture class and looming threat of violence. The narrative is surprisingly straightforward and without twists, loyal to its best-seller roots (the script is adapted by Mohsin Hamid from his 2007 novel ). 

Instead, the rest of the movie essentially illustrates a conversation in a Lahore tea shop that takes place between two men: Bobby, a bedraggled expat journalist played somewhat lazily by Liev Schreiber, and Riz Ahmed’s Changez, also a professor. It is clear the Bobby is also an American spy, suspecting Changez of involvement in the kidnapping, but all of that can wait while Changez tells Bobby the story of how he went from upwardly mobile immigrant to his current role as an alleged “militant scholar.”

A series of flashbacks to Changez’s time in America show him enjoying college life at Princeton and moving on to a job at an elite financial analysis firm in New York, where he is taken under the wing of Jim Cross, a Gordon Gekko figure played with adequate sleaze and contained rage by Kiefer Sutherland. Changez climbs the ladder at the firm and enjoys the halcyon days of New York “before the fall.” As Nair constantly reminds us, Changez is living the American Dream, even starting a romance with the niece of one of his superiors. Played rather perfunctorily by the oddly cast Kate Hudson, Erica is a prominent installation artist in the clichéd depiction of the Nineties downtown art scene and happens to have a childhood sweetheart who recently died in a tragic accident. All the too-good-to-be-true-ness and the melodramatic cues contribute to the viewer’s knowledge that something very bad is going to happen.

The film’s tone changes with the events of 9/11, which turns Changez’s beloved New York into a hostile environment in which post-trauma anxiety spreads like a virus, and in which Changez becomes a victim of racial profiling and day-to-day hostility. Things fall apart at work and in his relationship with Erica as Changez begins to question his own personal, national, and political identity, and the film winds back to the “present” at the tea shop in Lahore for the denouement of the story of the kidnapped professor, which may or may not implicate Changez.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is enjoyable as a melodrama, thanks to the compelling emotional fodder of identity crisis and its setting within pre/post 9/11 New York. The perpetually relevant context acknowledges how American film and filmgoers still harbor a need to understand the trauma of the recent past and the new world it created.  Both New York and Lahore are shot with an appealing vibrancy, and set to a propulsive score that blends Pakistani and Western music with atonal electronic flourishes. It all looks and sounds very bright.

But the sensorial pleasures of the film are not quite enough to make up for the fact that every scene is too heavy with the weight of Changez’s internal struggle—every moment, every line of dialogue even, reminding us that Changez is trapped between two worlds, and sooner or later will have to make a choice between them. The film seems to dance around the idea of being really critical of America—of analogizing American “exceptionalism” with Islamic fundamentalism—and instead resolves itself with an ending more befitting of a beauty pageant contestant’s speech.

One of the few things keeping this film from devolving completely into overwrought emotional chaos and cultural cliché is Ahmed’s bedrock performance as Changez. He appears in nearly every shot, maintaining throughout the film the necessary energy, authenticity, and acute expressiveness necessary to play the character on whom the entire film depends. But even his presence can’t mitigate the reliance on more than one deus ex machina and for the superficial treatment of complex themes, which the film harnesses for melodramatic ends while avoiding taking a political stance. Much like its main character, The Reluctant Fundamentalist grapples for a viable identity and ends up unsatisfied.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

A decade may have passed, but Reverse Shot co-founders and editors Jeff Reichert and Michael Koresky vividly remember the birthday celebration at Dallas BBQ (complete with giant blue cocktails) that gave birth to the online film journal. Tired of endless talk of the “death of film,” Reverse Shot’s editors aimed to show a way forward, or rather, how filmmakers themselves are already showing the way. The first edition—a humble magazine-cum-newsletter held together with a single staple and paid for out-of-pocket by Reichert, Koresky, Neal Block, and Erik Syngle—was distributed at key New York film venues like BAM, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the late, great video emporium Mondo Kim’s.

The Museum of the Moving Image marked the journal’s 10-year anniversary recently with the series “The Life of Film: Celebrating a Decade of Reverse Shot.” As part of the program, current and former Reverse Shot writers joined chief curator David Schwartz and FILM COMMENT’s own Kent Jones to discuss the state of film and film criticism. The panel capped four days of screenings, guest-curated by Reichert and Koresky, that included a preview of To the Wonder as well as revivals of The Headless Woman, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and Primer.

Those early print editions of Reverse Shot emulated a classical magazine structure, with a set of critical essays and reviews of new releases and DVDs, but the journal has since established its own protean form. Published quarterly, the issues are based on "symposiums," which center on filmmakers or themes that reflect current events or are hitched to particular approaches to film, such as close readings of the use of color. Its 30-plus contributors have gone from being new voices in the New York film criticism scene to part of established film culture. (Koresky, for example, worked as assistant editor at FILM COMMENT and is now staff writer for the Criterion Collection.)

The Headless Woman

Reading Reverse Shot can be akin to perusing a writer’s cherished, unabashedly enthusiastic essay that she labored on until she was certain she’d made a personal breakthrough. The journal’s particular brand of cinephilia is obsessive but inclusive; it does not contain citations like fellow film journals Rouge or La Furia Umana, and words like “intertextuality” and “heteroglossia” are not thrown around. The quality of the writing is not only top-notch, thanks to an unusually thorough editorial process, but Reverse Shot’s writers manage to share their love for the medium as much as they display their taste and knowledge.

A key goal has been to make Reverse Shot accessible to a relatively wide audience. For the “Takes” series of issues, contributors were asked to write a complete essay on a single shot, color, cut, or instance of sound design; each article breaks down these elements of filmmaking in a way someone who hasn’t been to film school can appreciate. One senses that Reverse Shot would be just as happy having a thoughtful newbie stumble onto the site as a kindred spirit pumping her fist in agreement with a writer’s take on the lighting in Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies.

Past symposiums have focused on American elections on film (near the onset of the second Iraq War) and New Queer Cinema (around the time of Proposition 8, in an issue called “RS Prop 24”). Reichert describes these symposiums as “bringing the films, some of which are old, some new, into dialogue with what is happening around us.” They also afford the opportunity for writers to bring to bear singular perspectives: “It’s important for us to stop, take stock and really reflect on our own personal relationship to individual films. In daily criticism, you don’t need to have the ‘I’ in things, but for what we do, I think it can be valuable.” Auteurs that have received a spotlight include Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Tsai Ming-liang, and Steven Spielberg, the last of whom has been given the treatment in two separate issues. (Koresky hopes one day to turn the latter into a Reverse Shot monograph.)

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate

Part of the journal’s mission is to pinpoint “the ‘now’ in contemporary cinema,” which includes what Koresky calls “middlebrow films.” The resulting eclectic selection of films introduces a loyal readership to previously undiscovered directors. The “East Meets West” issue from 2004, which presented eleven essays comparing a single film from East Asia with an American film, is an early example of this attempt to be both comprehensive and expansive. Koresky put Spielberg’s The Terminal up against Jia Zhang-ke’s The World: “Spielberg’s vision may be refreshingly optimistic, but it is also depressingly reductive; Jia’s portrait feels genuinely connected, yet it’s also surpassingly grim.”

For the same issue, Reichert wrote about Hong Sang-soo’s On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate and Garden State. He begins the essay with an insight that exemplifies the independent-minded analysis that has continued at Reverse Shot: “The face of new South Korean cinema looks a lot like the face of American Independent cinema of the mid-to-late Nineties, given that [Chan-wook] Park’s [Oldboy] draws so much of its power from the mixture of high-concept aesthetics and lowbrow generic appropriations that we’ve been bombarded with since Tarantino.” Ultimately, Reichert asks if directors like Park, Hong, and Lee Chang-dong are “nothing more than film lovers’ alternate-universe box-office champions.” He concludes by provocatively asking: “Who’s creating their relevance—them, or us?”

In another symposium, “On Demand,” contributors were asked to assess how their feelings have changed regarding a certain film they’ve often rewatched. Reichert wrote about Return of the Jedi, his favorite childhood film, and his reappraisal is rigorous, self-reflexive, and heartfelt—that is, very Reverse Shot. In her essay for the most recent Spielberg symposium, Farihah Zaman takes an enlightening and provocative look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (84). She frames what she sees as in many ways a racist and sexist romp as an early ode to Bollywood. Zaman also recalls “how strange it was watch[ing] a film that so consistently and fundamentally stereotypes South Asian culture with a bunch of my fellow Desis” as a child. Bringing her childhood experience back to the present, Zaman notes that India, not Indy, got the last laugh, when Spielberg signed a multi-billion dollar deal with a Mumbai-based film group after his 2008 break with Paramount.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Reverse Shot has also pushed into video through a series of interviews with directors and actors called “The Talkies,” hosted by critic Eric Hynes. (Reichert, a filmmaker himself with two documentaries under his belt, in addition to a career in distribution and marketing, directed and edited the shorts.) Instead of the sit-down interviews usually allotted to press, Reverse Shot would try to get an hour with each subject, often taking them to non-traditional, even cheekily chosen locations. When Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives came out, they spoke with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul deep within Central Park, “in a place that looked almost like the jungle.” For another interview, Hynes took turns shooting foam arrows with actor Michael Fassbender, an accomplished archer. The playful scenario (literally) disarmed Fassbender, who opened up about his childhood and his time working as a bartender. For Fast Food Nation, the team brought director Richard Linklater to a butcher, only to discover that the dedicated vegetarian was less than pleased with the choice of venue.

What keeps Reverse Shot’s writers in the game, as much as any hope of others reading their work, is the journal's palpable sense of community and cinephilia. The relationships that have emerged from Reverse Shot, many of them long-standing, clearly contribute to the publication’s vitality. At the Sunday panel, Hynes explained why Reverse Shot is such a special place for both writers and movie-lovers: “Writing for them I can go deep and long . . . while maintaining my voice. Back when I started writing for Reverse Shot, there was nothing like it, which I still think is the case.” An opinionated bunch, the panelists nodded in unison.

1. “Washington says she’s a killer”

So declares the CIA Station Head in Pakistan about a new arrival in 2003, a “CIA targeter and subject-matter expert,” Maya (Jessica Chastain). Maya is young and delicate-looking, with flowing red hair that is only seen when she pulls off the hood she wears during the brutal interrogation of a “detainee” in the film’s first scene (Chastain’s features have often been described as pre-Raphaelite). The drive of Zero Dark Thirty is to play for a while on this slightly unnerving contrast: that such a woman should have the steel and determination to pursue the hunt for Osama bin Laden more ruthlessly than her male colleagues, until the dispatch of a team of Navy SEALs in 2011 to the hideout she has done most to locate. “You’re going to kill him for me,” she tells the SEALs.

To be sure, Maya’s initiation into this dirty war, when she arrives “just off the plane from Washington,” in her “best suit” for her first interrogation in the filthy room where the detainee is manacled to the ceiling prior to being waterboarded, requires some adjustment. She may be dismayed by the brutality, but when she and the CIA’s head interrogator, Daniel (Jason Clarke), leave after the first fruitless questioning, it’s she who says they should go right back in, and declines to watch what follows on a monitor. She gingerly takes part in the waterboarding, but when the detainee, Ammar (Reda Kateb), gasps out one denial, she comments: “That’s not credible.”

Is it part of the horror of these scenes—nobody protests at the torture, but just allowing it to sit there on screen is more horrifying—that this apparently gentle creature is made a party to it? But Maya does adjust, and afterward the film will show her spending days—implicitly, years—hunched at her computer watching videos of similar interrogations for the clues that will lead to the al-Qaeda go-between who will lead to bin Laden. Kathryn Bigelow has said she was surprised when research revealed that so many female operatives proved obstinately dedicated in the hunt for bin Laden, and that one in particular was so central (who in another account of the raid has been named as “Jen,” and who may even have been a male agent).

But Maya isn’t just the protagonist of a “deadlier than the male” political thriller. Or to put it another way, although the point seems to be that she’s a woman who can act like a man, and become a killer, her role throughout is screened through “the female.” She exists in a female context, which the film treats as part of this war (if that’s what the “war on terror” is), and which reveals what the meaning of Zero Dark Thirty might be if it’s not just a gung-ho celebration of military adventure—a fairly general wrongheaded assessment that stems from a wrongheaded take on the torture scenes.

The context begins with what might be called notations. The film opens with a medley of voices against a dark screen, phone calls from people trapped in the World Trade Center and American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11—a medley that gradually resolves into the voices of two women: one, terrified, inside the Center, the other an emergency worker on the phone trying to be reassuring before she subsides into helplessness. (The direct cut from this to the torture scenes doesn’t mean, as some have said, that the latter is being justified by the former.) The film’s climax, the attack on bin Laden’s hideout, includes more anonymous women, wives of the al-Qaeda men, and one of them is shot.

In the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, after the first interrogation of Ammar, Maya is shown to her cubicle and desk. This she gives a quick, automatic dust. Then she joins a conference with other CIA staff trying to find the trail to bin Laden; and soon she is disagreeing with the only other woman on the team, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle). Their relationship will change, but it is here that the published version of Mark Boal’s script notes “And so the rivalry begins.”

They must be rivals, evidently, to establish themselves in an otherwise all-male world. But something darker is intimated in the scene that follows when Daniel and Maya resume the interrogation of Ammar. Here humiliation is used in a way that involves Maya more intimately in the torture than through physical brutality alone. As they enter the room, she recoils from the smell (“Dude, you shit your pants,” Daniel tells Ammar). But when his questioning again gets nowhere, he rips down Ammar’s pants—“You don’t mind if my female colleague sees your junk, do you?”—and leaves the two together.

There are two other points, two scenes at which Maya’s look is directed. After bin Laden’s hideout is located in Abbottabad, and the SEALs wait to launch their attack, they are shown relaxing, playing horseshoes, while Maya stands to one side, watching them through dark glasses. A number of reviews took this as the clinching moment of gung-ho military adventure—Maya has finally become one of the boys. But it depends on how you interpret her look.

It might be admiring—Boal’s script grants the SEALs “the grace of young guys in their prime.” But on first meeting the SEALs, Maya dismisses “your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit.” And as the helicopters take off for the raid, several shots isolate her as a seemingly abandoned figure, buffeted by clouds of dust. She has directed the killers, but she can’t be in at the kill. Except when they return, Maya is taken to lay eyes on the corpse they have in a body bag: only she, apparently, can confirm that it is Osama bin Laden. From the naked man to the armored men to the dead man: a thesis on the female gaze could well begin with this film.

2. Home Is the Hunter

And if Maya does become one of the boys, she asserts it quite dramatically—if ironically—earlier in the film. At CIA headquarters in Langley, all the surveillance material and evidence of bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad house is assembled at a conference of senior officers and the agency’s director (James Gandolfini). Maya is told to sit not at the main table but in a row of chairs along the back wall. But when she corrects an estimate of the house’s location, and the director asks who she is, she replies: “I’m the motherfucker that found this place.”

Ammar’s interrogator Daniel has now migrated to being one of the anonymous CIA suits in the room. Before leaving Pakistan, he told Maya, “I’ve just seen too many guys naked”—if exposing Ammar was a test of Maya as well as a humiliation of the detainee, it’s one that Daniel no longer wants to undergo (Maya refuses his offer to join him in Washington as his “number two”). After another conference, Maya is eating alone in the Langley cafeteria when the director plops into the seat in front of her, to her evident discomfort. He learns that she was recruited for the CIA out of high school, and has done nothing but look for bin Laden. He also asks: “How is the food down here?”—a nice addition to the notations of hierarchy (of gender, of who sits where). But the line isn’t in Boal’s published script—was it improvised?

Maya’s dedication to her work, her loneliness, is amplified when her frosty relationship in Pakistan with Jessica warms sufficiently for a social meeting in the Islamabad Marriott—just before it is blown up. Jessica asks if Maya is “hooked up” with one of their team, but draws a blank to all personal questions: “So no boyfriend. Do you have any friends at all?” Based on these negative issues, Maya is inevitably a somewhat remote, even abstract figure. But about halfway through the film, that is all about to change—with a dramatic wrench, in fact—as Maya’s dedication to finding Osama bin Laden takes on another quality: the charge of personal revenge, and even of religious crusade.

Jessica becomes the motivating figure here, when she sets up a meeting with an apparent mole within al-Qaeda. The meeting turns out to be a trap and Jessica and her team are massacred by a suicide bomber. Maya’s response is her first declaration of a personal intent behind her dedicated detective work: “I’m going to smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” Later, when she is told there are no resources for tracking the courier, Abu Ahmed, who she believes will lead them to bin Laden, she declares: “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

When the detective work becomes a quest for revenge and the revenge becomes a sanctified mission, then it also becomes a quest for recuperation—an attempt to replace what was lost, a loss which has left behind a void and made of the revenger something of an empty, voided soul. Here Zero Dark Thirty could be compared to revenge Westerns, specifically those where the hero has lost a wife or family. And where the wife is dead—and thus never seen—before the film even begins, in Seven Men from Now or The Bravados, or is barely glimpsed before being killed, in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the main business of the film becomes to replace her, to fill the void.

The revenge motive withers away. The disposal of the “seven men” in Budd Boetticher’s film becomes rather incidental, and the four men ruthlessly hunted by Gregory Peck in The Bravados turn out not to be guilty of the crime. The last of the four, with a wife and child, is something of a mirror image of the hero, and can turn the quest back on him: “I have no reason to kill you. Why do you hunt me?” Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) re-creates not just a wife but a community, by rescuing it from a Western ghost town, and turns away from his final act of revenge. But for Maya, who at the end seems more emptied than fulfilled by her quest, what is gained in revenging friends we’ve been told she didn’t have? Jessica’s loss alone has a further suggestive element: apart from being a CIA agent, the report of her death says, she was also “a mother of three.”

The sense of emptiness may be because Maya and her motivation remain somewhat abstract to the end. But there’s also the problem that, in the female context, the terms of the male Western scenario can’t be worked through in the same way. Which ultimately leaves Maya placeless. After identifying bin Laden’s corpse, she is airlifted out, alone, in a giant cargo plane, and the pilot asks: “Where do you want to go?” The hero of any of the Westerns named above would have no trouble answering “Home.” But the end of Maya’s story is silence.

3. In the Belly of the Beast

One complicating—and abstracting—aspect of Maya’s quest for revenge is that it’s not just personal. She is also acting out of a national need. This pre-Raphaelite avenging angel is born out of the darkness of those desperate voices on 9/11. Therefore she may never have any home beyond the cavernous belly of the C-17 cargo plane—the belly of war itself. Is this because war is endless, or because war maintained as a cycle of revenge is both endless and—as revenge Westerns tell us—fruitless? Politicians attest that the “war on terror” might be a millennial affair. Maya does win one battle, however. The C-17 pilot tells her she must be pretty important because she has the whole plane to herself, so “You can sit wherever you want.” That settles the hierarchical shuffle of who-sits-where.

Out of the belly of a transport aircraft at the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film, The Hurt Locker (08), Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) returns to Baghdad. A quick cut transfers him from army fatigues to the special armor he wears as an IED disposal expert—the only home he’s happy in. This is a grunt’s-eye view of the chaos of war, with no larger statements about its conduct, necessity, or the hellishness of war in general. Such statements, perhaps, can only proceed from the settled issues of a “just war.” Modern wars produce films that are just about doing the job in a context of absurdity or madness. One scene in The Hurt Locker—a colonel congratulates James on a particularly tricky job, asks how many devices he’s defused, and when James is vague, makes him produce a number (873)—might have come from Full Metal Jacket.

Stylistically, the two films also have something in common. The Hurt Locker, shot on Super-16 with multiple cameras, constructs its sequence of bomb-defusing scenes as a hurt locker for the audience as well, with a blizzard of point-of-view shots, quick shaky pans, zooms into faces, and sudden disorienting extreme close-ups. Amy Taubin has called this a “structuralist war movie”; visually, it might also be called a cubist one. Zero Dark Thirty often has the same unsettled, jumpy, on-the-ground approach. But it doesn’t box the viewer into the jigsaw of POV shots, the sense of threat on all sides. The busy look here could represent what another female agent—a slightly younger, less hardened version of Maya—calls the “white noise” of information since 9/11, out of which she has finally extracted the real identity of the courier Abu Ahmed.

His name first comes up during the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainee Ammar, which has brought the film some of its harshest criticism for suggesting that torture produced useful information. The film tries to slide around this by having Ammar tricked into revealing the name subsequent to the brutal questioning; Bigelow and Boal have inadvertently created the problem by insisting that torture had to be shown as part of the “detainee program.” But Maya rejects the name as incomplete—Abu Ahmed is a familiarity, meaning “father of Ahmed.” It’s a kunya, which can also be a nom de guerre, a war name. Is the same true—another mirror image—of “Maya”? 

A few years before he succumbed to throat cancer in April of 2012, Levon Helm proudly exclaimed to filmmaker Jacob Hatley: “I ain’t in it for my health!” If he were, he would have sang in a church choir instead of touring with Bob Dylan, drumming and singing for years in The Band, and capping it all off with a drug-fueled performance for Scorsese in The Last Waltz. While many of his contemporaries (and two of his Band-mates, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko) never made it into their golden years, Helm toned it down but kept going, playing music, puffing on joints, and telling stories up until his death at the age of 71.

Ain't in It for My Health, Hatley’s portrait of Helm, is intimate and unsentimental, clearly the result of an earned trust between the filmmaker and his subject. Hatley slept on the floor of Levon’s barn in Woodstock for months at a time over the course of two years, and his perspective in the film is more guest-at-the-kitchen-table than fly on the wall. He rarely ingratiates himself or crosses the line with leading questions, choosing instead to sit back and observe Levon for what he is, an innately talented entertainer and an immensely likeable guy.

Shuffling around in his bathrobe, frail and often hoarse, Helm remains an energetic musician and performer. He can still drive a tight donut on his tractor, but he also declines an invitation to perform an encore at a big concert when he knows he’s beat. The documentary complements his personality well, without frills or wordy digressions. Who cares about a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys when as Levon says, it’s all bullshit “engineered by the suits”? Biographer Barney Hoskyns gives us a concise overview of The Band, letting us know that Levon was the only American (and Southerner) in a country rock band full of Canadians. This wasn’t the only Canuck-country group at the time (think of the Allman Brothers’ beef with Neil Young over his song “Southern Man”), but it certainly sheds some light on Helm’s irritation with his Band-mate Robbie Robertson for not sharing his songwriting credits—and in turn, Helm is shut out from collecting lucrative publishing royalties for songs that thrived on his distinctive input.

It’s fortunate that Hatley provides this information as a side note only, focusing instead on Levon’s anecdotes about dosing the brown acid at Woodstock, the danger of deadly platypuses, ringing hogs and playing under the porch as a kid, and the fundraising concerts held in Levon’s barn for his mounting bills, aptly labeled the “Midnight Rambles.” Now that he’s gone, Ain’t in It for My Health is the most revelatory and honest documentation of Helm’s last years that anyone could ask for. Speaking over the phone in his own Southern drawl, director Jacob Hatley answered a few questions about the making of the film, which is playing for a week at Cinema Village in New York on the first anniversary of Helm’s death.

Tell me about your crew. This is a very simple film. It looks as if there were only two or three of you?

Yeah. And they’re all guys (and girls) I went to film school with. Emily Topper shot the film, Phil Davis was the associate producer and did the sound, and then we had Mary [Posatko], who was our producer and was there a lot. And that was it. This was not a film that was made on a schedule. It was not a film that had shooting days necessarily. That was never the case. We just tried to be around as much as possible. Emily would hold the camera on her shoulder, and I would hold the camera, even when we weren’t filming so that when people saw us we always had a camera and they would forget about the fact that we were shooting a film.

Were you using a small camera?

Well, it was a video camera, but this was before the DSLRs had even come out...

You can tell that whoever is holding the camera is a part of the group, a part of the house there. But it’s nice that you don’t really butt in and ask questions. Were there instances where you felt like you had to hold back?

No. I mean, Errol Morris is one thing—he’s amazing. It doesn’t get any better than that guy. But for the most part, we all consider ourselves narrative filmmakers. What’s interesting to me are scenes, documentaries that have scenes. You have a scene with three people that starts off in one direction and ends up going in another. I don’t know why documentaries are so dogmatic. They bear this burden of having to be educational, or there’s something academic about it. I think the best documentaries are the ones that work like narrative films, and things just happen that you could never script in a million years, like in the Maysles Brothers’ films. But to answer your question, there were things that I knew we had to address in this film and that I wanted to ask and sometimes I did ask—sometimes it worked and most of the time it didn’t. It just became kind of stilted and forced. The trick was to kind of steer the conversations in the right direction.

Were you the one who asked Levon if he was surprised when Richard Manuel died?

Yep, that’s me!

He took it in stride. Obviously you were part of the conversation there. And it just worked, I think.

Yeah, that was just me, Levon, and Larry. I was holding the camera, had a mike on top of the camera and it was just the three of us. He’s talking to me, and I’m trying to look into his eyes while trying to make sure the frame is right! [Laughs.]

He does look at the camera a couple of times...

He’s looking at me! But it seems like he’s looking at the camera, so it’s great.

I like how you record things as they happen, and because of that, there’s a focus on his singing as he goes to the doctor, loses his voice, and then gets it back. Some of his other talents like acting and drumming aren’t really addressed. Personally I would have enjoyed a little discussion of his drumming, but I’m glad you didn’t force it.

Yeah, well, how many times can you hear someone interviewed say “Levon Helm is a great drummer.” It’s like, we know he’s great, just watch him play.

The part of the film where Levon and Larry Campbell work on that unfinished Hank Williams song is interesting. It’s significant that you show their writing process, given the conflict between Robbie Robertson and Levon over who received songwriting credits for The Band...

[Laughs.] You picked up on that! Well, that’s very nice to hear. I think it’s the emotional core of the movie. That footage is the element of the film I’m most proud of, and I feel like it speaks for itself.

It looks as if Larry Campbell does write the lyrics for the most part—and whoever writes the lyrics is often technically considered the songwriter—but when it comes time to write the music Levon just rolls it out. He’s obviously writing the song too. They write the song together and you get a peek into the process, and then you can maybe imagine what happened before...

I know, I know. That’s a great point and I agree completely.

Can you talk a little about Larry Campbell? He’s an integral character in the film.

Well, I don’t know what to say about Larry other than the movie isn’t possible without him. In a way he’s like Sancho Panza. When we started work on the film a lot of people were very protective of Levon from the beginning. We had to win over a lot of people and it took a while to earn their trust. But when we met Larry he just completely believed in us from the first day. So during many of those conversations, Larry was just there. I think Larry understood what kind of film we were making. I can’t say anything bad about him. He’s a saint, a perfect human being and he’s a brilliant musician. I love him.

The other person I wanted to ask you about is Rick Danko’s widow, Elizabeth Grafton. She’s the only other subject in the film, the only other person who’s given a (brief) backstory. Did you pick her, or did she reveal herself to be interesting enough that you wanted to dig deeper into her story?

The latter, for sure. We did shoot a few other interviews, just because we’d been sitting around for so long and I wanted something to do. Somebody would come by and we’d interview them. I mean, we interviewed Garth [Hudson, the singular and highly entertaining organ player for The Band], and we just didn’t use it. But Elizabeth came by and immediately she was so frank. You know, this is not a puff piece, and I liked the way that she spoke and there wasn’t any kind of sentimentality to her.

My thinking was here’s the flip side of the rock 'n’ roll coin. You go from riding in these jet airplanes, and then this is what happens when rock stars do not die young. When Levon’s singing a song about it, we intercut to her because this could very easily have been Levon. If he didn’t get his voice back, didn’t have anyone come to help him, who knows.

Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay

About midway through Molly Bernstein’s Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, the eponymous magician-historian describes the art of sleight of hand as “the artifice of the gambler.” Later on, his friend David Mamet comments on the similarities between illusionism and dramaturgy in their capacity to manipulate audiences. It’s only fitting that a documentary about Jay, who now more than ever resembles cinema’s great trickster Orson Welles, would function as a reminder of the link between movies and magic. Truth and trickery have from the beginning been bedrock elements of film, less opposite facets than complementary ones: “Méliès was interested in the ordinary of the extraordinary, and the Lumière Brothers in the extraordinary of the ordinary,” Jean-Luc Godard was fond of saying, bridging the distance between the medium’s contrasting pioneers.

Hugo

Indeed, Méliès himself was at the center of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo as a sort of faded cinematic conjurer, a forgotten wizard reduced to toy vendor when the realism of the Great War dimmed the wonder of his bag of tricks. Described by Charles Chaplin as an “alchemist of light,” Méliès was a professional magician who saw the embryonic silver screen of the new century primarily as a continuation and enhancement of stage enchantment. Many of his early shorts unfold as perennial carnival attractions like disappearing acts or escape-proof cabinets, but with an added delight taken in even the simplest filmic inventions. The theatrical proscenium remains, yet the stunts presented before it—a man vanishing into a box or pulling out his own head, a musician multiplying himself into an entire orchestra—give the sense of a mischievous artist using the camera to stretch the stage this way and that before his audiences’ eyes.

Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler

The notion of the magician’s manipulation of the audience (“Now you see it, now you don’t”) took on diabolical intimations as cinema began to increasingly reflect the world’s darkening moods. In Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (22), the titular villain is a protean underworld kingpin whose malicious arsenal borrows many an item from the magician’s cabinet. At one point, Mabuse disguises himself as a mentalist and, using mass hypnosis, has a roomful of spectators hallucinating visions that literally step off the stage. Another filmmaker fascinated by the sideshow milieu, Tod Browning is no less self-referential in The Show (27), perhaps the most explicit of his allegories of film as a carny’s art. John Gilbert stars as a Hungarian lothario whose “Palace of Illusions” frames the melodrama as a series of ominously changing camera views, culminating in a mock-severed head being served as the curtain comes down. More and more, the question is posed: What if the illusionist is a fiend?

The Magician

Fast-forward three decades, and Ingmar Bergman offers another query: What if the illusionist is a disturbed director? In The Magician (58), Bergman stand-in Max Von Sydow stars as a mute traveling conjurer whose tricks (levitation, mesmerism, vision-projecting lanterns) are simultaneously his tools of creation and a smokescreen for his deep anxiety. Divided by the Swedish director’s conflicting impulses—a desire to construct a densely deceptive mise en scène that’s matched only by the desire to tear it down—the film is a dark comedy where the line between artist and fraud is a thin one indeed. It’s scarcely surprising that this figure—so in control of his technique, so hapless with his emotions—has repeatedly turned up to comic effect in the oeuvre of Bergman worshipper Woody Allen, ranging from the boy performer in Stardust Memories to the pompous charlatan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion to the wizened showman in Scoop.

Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Incidentally, Scoop is one of three 2006 films dealing with magicians. The others, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, both posit their protagonists’ sleight of hand as misleading spectacles and as metaphors for slippery cinematic storytelling. For the screen’s great magic show, however, we must turn back to Orson Welles, still one of the medium’s most complex and beguiling sorcerers. Magic acts were just one side of this gargantuan virtuoso's talents, yet they occupied his mind from Citizen Kane onwards, their legacy detectable in everything from the depth-of-field compositions that revealed a distorted world in his own image, which wavered from Shakespearean luminary to smarmy talk show guest. In that sense, his signature work may be F for Fake (75), in which shards of sarcastic documentary and philosophical rumination are flashed like so many rabbits pulled out of a hat. In this labyrinth, Welles presents the audience with the real “magic of the movies,” not a hoary cliché of facile marvel but a multifaceted blur of obfuscation and revelation.

French writer-director François Ozon invades the sanctity of the home with frisky, acerbic stories that lay bare the fragile nature of domestic tranquility. His early narrative film See the Sea (97) sets a sociopathic backpacker loose in the house of a young mother. Under the Sand (00) offers a glimpse of a woman unable to cope with loss, her life stalled by a ghost that haunts her mind, and her apartment. In Swimming Pool (03), the sedate charm of a vacation cottage is rocked by the arrival of a nubile blond oozing vivacious promiscuity. With his latest film, In the House, adapted from the play The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, Ozon identifies the intruders as outsiders, artists even: Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a malcontented teen with literary ambition to burn, and his mentor, Germain (Fabrice Luchini), a sardonic middle-aged high school lit teacher.

It’s the dawn of a new school term, but the cynical, snooty Germain cannot muster the slightest enthusiasm for the year ahead, despairing over the inane, barely literate writing of his students to his cultured wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). But when Germain reads a provocative essay brimming with originality, his posture of contempt cracks. Written by Claude, it details how the quiet teen finagled his way into the home of his dopey classmate Rapha Artole (Bastien Ughetto). The essay then takes aim at this normal family, dismissing Rapha Artole Senior (Denis Ménochet) as a vulgar galoot, and objectifying Rapha’s comely yet passive mother Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), who exudes “the singular scent of a middle-class woman.” The childless Germain decides to train Claude in the art of writing, and the eager pupil’s imagination blooms as he insinuates himself deeper into the simple yet loving Artole family. Inspired after all these years, Germain eagerly anticipates each new installment of his young protégé’s story, which the film presents in flashback form with a wistful, crisp voiceover by Umhauer. As the stakes of the game escalate, teacher and student remain blind to the growing risks.

Ozon films are often pushed ahead by their dialogue, and with In the House he offers up some of his sharpest tête-à-têtes. Jeanne and Germain’s casual banter recalls the brainy urbanity of Annie Hall—one of many nods to Woody Allen—and conveys all we need know about their relationship: “Worst class I’ve had in my life,” Germain grumbles while looking over student papers. “You say that every year,” Jeanne responds without a trace of sympathy. Despite the couple's air of intellectual superiority, both are tainted by hypocrisy: Jeanne is proud to exhibit deviant art (naked life-size dolls with female anatomy and the heads of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, paired with a swastika of kinked phalluses, in a show on “the dictatorship of sex”), but objects to Claude’s aesthetic explorations along the boundaries of social propriety; Germain, meanwhile, scorns the people around him while he insists that Claude respect the characters in his stories.

As 16-year-old Claude, Umhauer incarnates a boy of cool reserve, fiery resolve, and a dash of menace. Miserable, he wants to infiltrate the Artole home and enter its warm embrace, but once there, his urge is to destroy the family and escape with its treasure. With a boyish grin that curls easily into a smirk, Umhauer gives off the vibe that wily plots are brewing within. At other times, he’s just a gangly teenager, as when he awkwardly kisses a romantic interest.

François Ozon is a reliably mischievous director, and he’s up to many of his old tricks in his latest feature. But he also puts a new spin on things, allowing the nuclear family to emerge intact and mostly unscathed while turning the knives on those, like himself, who deal in imagination and the dangers of storytelling. In the House satirizes the process of aesthetic creation and the damage it can inflict on the artist and those around him. Still, Ozon’s sympathy remains with these outcasts, as he affirms the mystique that fiction imparts on the quotidian. He may feign sympathy for the middle-class family, but one senses that underneath it all, like Claude and Germain, Ozon still struggles to transcend his contempt for normality.

We expect professional critics, whenever they discuss a given film, to prove why it makes sense to talk about this movie as opposed to any other. Often the work is done for the critics ahead of time, by the programmers, producers, and archivists who bring new films to theaters and resurrect older ones from obscurity. In any case, there’s a burden to explain why a long-neglected film has something to say about the way we live today, why, for lack of a better word, it is relevant.

But on the lively user reviews section of IMDb, the vast online movie database celebrated by Vivian Sobchack in the March-April issue of FILM COMMENT, every film is relevant to someone. There is something beautiful about the fact that you could post a lukewarm review of the 2007 Kevin Costner serial-killer drama Mr. Brooks six years down the road without ever being asked why—and something still more beautiful about the fact that you wouldn’t be alone.

“Way back in 2008-ish my boss told me about Mr. Brooks,” writes thesar-2 from the United States. “To this day, I still want to thank him.” Other commentators were less satisfied: “if you enjoy The Sharper Image catalog, reality TV and torturing small animals,” responds NightOwl0, “than this is the movie for you.” Some see the film in light of wider-ranging cultural trends: Matt from the U.S. calls it “a nice alternative to the torture flick du jour . . . an assault to the mind, not the eyes.” Others peddle narrower pet theories: QBSNIDERLOES from Florida considers it an elaborate metaphor for the Iraq war.

“Whatever the individual reviews lack in particulars,” writes Sobchack, “they gain in the aggregate.” She’s suggesting not that we make use of the reviewers as a single representative voice, but that we appreciate the diversity of their backgrounds and the often contentious interplay between comments: “It is not only their quantity that is meaningful but also their geographical spread (sometimes charting the trajectory of the film’s release), their chronology (a lot of posts suggest by their time stamps that their writers might have camped out to get into the first screenings), their revelations of viewer attitudes and tastes, and above all, their rare consensus and vigorous debates.”

IMDb’s critics might say that the user comments are for the most part long on opinions and short on arguments—and they’d be right. (One reviewer closes an especially brutal review of Mr. Brooks by assuring us that “what I’m telling you is true.”) Critical debates, they might continue, require more than passion and conviction; they demand reasons, theses, claims and counter-claims. But there is another sort of dialogue to which those critics are often blind—based on categorical oppositions, naked personal preference, the clash of reactionary dismissal with reactionary support, and the topping of loud voices with louder ones—that perhaps more accurately mirrors the way film is actually discussed, debated, and dealt with on a large scale.

In a day and age of review aggregate sites, IMDb continues to endorse the value of the intractable opinion and the irresolvable standoff. And to remind us that every film—from Mr. Brooks to Over the Hedge (“Cute farce about creatures on the perimeter of the suburban dream”) to the 1929 early-talkie revue Happy Days (for which one guerrilla scholar tells the life story of a single chorus member mislabeled in the site’s cast list) to the 2008 made-for-TV-movie Cyclops (“It's really unimaginable that we can produce things so bad when you consider that there are humans who have not even eaten anything”)—is capable of provoking a standoff of its own.

Terence Nance’s debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, is a poetic, kinetic, and self-reflexive rumination on unrequited love. The film, which opens next Friday, muses over—and over and over—Nance’s real-life relationship with the enigmatic Namik (played by Namik Winter). She’s the one that got away, or, perhaps, the one he never quite had. As if matters of the heart proved too complex to tackle in one medium, Oversimplification bursts with animation of almost every kind, from sketches to moving collages to wooden figurines and Claymation. Its nucleus is a short Nance made back in 2006 as a first-year film student, entitled How Would You Feel?, whose titular question echoes throughout the feature as a kind of shamanic repetition.

The anxieties the filmmaker displays on screen as the barely fictionalized version of himself dissipate completely in person. Ultra-chill and self-aware in an interview with FILM COMMENT, Nance offered poignant thoughts on art and love that only deepen the appeal of this sensuous and sensitive feature.

Despite being so personal and subjective, your film captures a universal human experience that at times hits almost too close to home. Was this your intention?

It was definitely my intention. Initially, the short film How Would You Feel? was phrased in the second person, to speak to the poetry of the banal and make my experience directly ubiquitous. I wanted the audience to experience the film in a participatory way as opposed to a voyeuristic way, which is the way I feel people experience most movies: “That’s a world I don’t know, and I’m a voyeur looking onto it.” This movie very directly tells the audience: “This is you, and this is what you are.”

The film briefly addresses the distinction between being alone and feeling lonely. Do you think that loneliness is a byproduct of living in New York?

I couldn’t have [made the film without the city], but it isn’t as much about loneliness as it is about the corruptibility of connection. That may be something that’s very New York, but I don’t know. At the time, I had nights where I was alone, but if I’m completely honest with myself, I wasn’t alone, really, I wasn’t lonely. I just wanted something of Namik that wasn’t possible. The film is about how our relationship, and other relationships, can come at a point and exist in an environment that can’t nurture them.

The relationship between you and Namik is predicated on looks or glances rather than words. Do you think there is validity in looking as a form of mutual communication?

Oh, no. I don’t think that ever works, but I think that it’s useful for interesting movies. We act within the confines of our capabilities, and a look or a letter was within my capabilities at the time. Some people can use words better than others. That wasn’t really my skill set, so I didn’t act in that way. But I think that’s why the world is beautiful, because everybody communicates differently and everybody approaches interaction differently.

Your film beautifully mimics the subconscious musings of a mind (and heart) as it somewhat masochistically sifts through the pieces of a relationship. Did your filmmaking and editing flow in a stream-of-consciousness way, or did you have a master plan in mind to achieve this effect?

It’s very difficult for me to map how it came out the way that it did and what decisions created what results, because it happened over such a long period of time. I was working in a stream-of-consciousness way. It was definitely improvisational: “What should I do here, what should I do there,” not considering a master plan, or script, or outline, or anything. But at the same time, at certain stages I had master concepts—at least I thought I did—but what the film ended up being has nothing to do with them.

How did you keep from going crazy in the editing room?

Weirdly, it was always very organized. And it even feels very organized to me, watching it now. It’s very meticulously crafted; I wanted to make something complex that reflected a complex relationship. I wasn’t pursuing chaos later, it was there, inherent. The organization is chaos, in a weird way.

The use of mixed media and voiceover gives the film the feel of a journal that has come to life. Did you derive your images from a journal you were keeping at the time, or was the animation added after the fact?

I don’t [keep a journal] in the traditional sense. I mean, I’ve kept journals at times in my life, but I hadn’t kept one for a while when I started the movie. I write impulsively—I’ll write a song, or a long idea, or some prose, but I don’t write about my life. I do draw in a book, and at the time I was drawing more regularly. A lot of those drawings did translate into some of the images that you see on screen.

What was the impetus behind the specific animation mediums, the wooden figures for example?

I wanted the animation to be a hodgepodge of different styles to give specificity to the experiences and emotions that each section is articulating. So for instance, the piece where the hand is bleeding is drawn in this kind of messy, children’s-storybook way because to me it’s articulating a very infantile emotional experience. As for the wooden puppets, they depict something that really happened, or that at least emotionally feel like they really happened, so I wanted to get close to how a body, a real physical thing, would experience it. Overall, choosing images and styles was kind of spontaneous.

You mentioned in a Q&A after a screening in New Directors / New Films last year that the animation process was a sweatshop for you and a factory for everyone else. Can you describe the animation process a little further?

I did most of the concept art myself, and I had some interns and there were animators working in different parts of the world on different pieces and sections. I say it was a sweatshop because I was working all day, every day, especially on the compositing and editing of the animation and the concept art and the layout frames. But, you know, because of the no-money/no-budget situation, the extent to which I could get another animator to work was like once a week, or I would hear from them once a month. So I had to be there all the time to put everything together and keep the whole system working. It was super intense. Next time I’ll do it with some money hopefully.

You’ve specifically cited Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human and the blues more generally as artistic influences. Are there any other artists or art forms that have significantly influenced your work?

A lot of novelists. Toni Morrison, definitely, Louise Erdrich. Just the way they articulate love, the melodrama of love, in the novel form, and the esoteric elements of it. It’s something in that spirit which influenced me to go all out with the flowery-ness of some parts of the film.

I was also really influenced by Roald Dahl and the way he tells stories, and also Charlie Kaufman. His movies have a continuity of tone in the voice telling the story, they’re all kind of autobiographical and from this anxiety-ridden but emotional place—an American place, you know what I mean? Just digesting those movies and loving those movies, like Eternal Sunshine, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and listening to the way they turn phrases to be funny.

I saw 8 1/2 at some point while I was making the film. I can’t claim reference to it after the fact. It must have been in the ether. If [Marcello Mastroianni] was in my movie, it would have been almost the same thing. He’s making a movie within a movie about his relationships. And August Wilson, he’s a big influence on me and how he uses the blues.

What do you do when not making films?

I play basketball. I don’t really do anything else. I kind of eat, live, and breathe music and film.

With the first example on record dating back to 1919, the omnibus film has been around almost as long as cinema itself. And it makes perfect sense that from the start this format was employed regularly, and most enjoyably, in works of horror and the unexpected. Like the stories of O. Henry and Roald Dahl, these anthologies offer little slivers of nightmares, and their twists are elementary. They sometimes even serve to reveal (multiple) reflections of the fears of an era… The selections below are not necessarily my picks for the best—or delightfully worst—of each decade, but rather tantalizing titles that are harder to come by than the usual suspects. Only two (Destiny and Doomsday Book) are currently available on DVD, yet, with a little patience, all can be found within the VOD universe.

1910s

Eerie Tales Richard Oswald, Germany, 1919 (YouTube, in 10 parts; picture quality: surprisingly good)

Less than five years ago this silent film was considered lost, and it presently remains unobtainable in any format, so having to watch it in bits and pieces with an imperfect soundtrack is only a minor irritant. Even in today’s I-must-have-it-now world, there are still cases where beggars can’t be choosers, and even interrupted, this one feels like a real find. (And thanks to the YouTube uploader for graciously translating the film’s German title cards.)

The first-known anthology film is quite clever, especially when taking into account that nearly a century ago certain cinematic gimmicks were in fact innovations. (Yes, even the best of us can lose sight of this…) In the introductory scenes, which of course also act as the film’s connective tissue, two guys and a girl (Reinhold Schünzel, the forever-amazing Conrad Veidt, and Anita Berber, who died at 29 in ’29 before she could make any talkies) step out of their portraits (Death, Devil, and Strumpet, respectively) that hang on the walls of a rare bookshop. The freed rascals rifle through pages and relate some sinister stories—with each of the three actors taking on roles in all of them. The first sees a man fall for a woman who’s being stalked by her abusive ex-husband. But after an innocent night spent in separate hotel rooms, surprising things come to light (237 may be all the rage, but if this film was better known 117 could also be a room number worth seeking out—or avoiding).

In the second story, a roll of the dice decides which of two friends will woo the girl they both fancy. The sore loser ends up killing the winner, only to be tortured by images of his victim, most particularly of his hand, the last of his body parts to succumb to death. The third story is perhaps what is the first of many cinematic tellings of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” to come, and the fourth of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club”—both good adaptations of short tales that need no synopsizing. The final story, written by the director, is about the bored wife of a Baron who is much too excited by a visiting knight. When they are left alone, and the wooing begins, a series of supernatural occurrences are set in motion. Eerie Tales may not be a classic of silent cinema, but that’s quite likely only because too few people have actually seen it.

1920s

Destiny Fritz Lang, Germany, 1921 (Amazon; free for prime members or $2.99 rental; don’t pay, the quality is the same: okay)

This is an unusual film of its type because it’s not until 30 minutes in that it even becomes apparent stories within a story are about to unfold. The silent, which is set “some time and some place” opens on two small-town lovebirds (Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen) who unluckily stumble upon Death, and—surprise, your time’s up!—the smitten guy is whisked away. Distraught yet determined that love is stronger than death, the woman tracks Death down. He offers her the chance to get her fiancé back by keeping lit just one of the flickering flames, which represent the souls of three doomed saps, whose sorry tales he relates. Each is ambitious and worldly—set in Persia, Venice, and China, but none are as engaging as the main story that links them, which is another reason why this movie is so unusual: wraparound segments often provide nothing but filler. Destiny is most certainly worth checking out because Bernhard Goetzke just might be the coolest-looking Death in screen history (the iconic Seventh Seal’s Bengt Ekerot included)—and because what film by Lang isn’t?

1930s

This is the one decade I struck out on. The only Thirties-made anthology film that I’m aware of is The Living Dead (32), a talkie remake of Eerie Tales by the same director, but I can’t find it anywhere! The search continues for this one… Interestingly, sections of it were reportedly incorporated into 1943’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, an omnibus solely made up of old footage from previously produced films, but that film is known to be lost—and questioned by some to even ever have existed. A later film of the same title—which despite sharing a prophesizing storyteller with the same name are otherwise unrelated—is my choice for the Sixties…

1940s

Flesh and Fantasy Julien Duvivier, U.S., 1943 (YouTube; quality: very good)

Duvivier followed up his frothy 1942 Tales of Manhattan with another star-studded anthology film, though one with a more fantastical edge. Robert Benchley, smoking and joking, serves as a narrator, and as in Eerie Tales, physical books provide the stories’ sources. First we are told a moody Mardi Gras–set tale of an “ugly”—well, movie-star ugly anyway—woman (Betty Field), who is given a chance to be “beautiful” in a mask for one night and to attract the attention of her secret crush (Robert Cummings), who previously looked right through her. Next up, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” starring Edward G. Robinson as a man whose fortune-teller foresees love, marriage, but also murder. He decides to take it upon himself to get the killing part out of the way, though he should know better than to play with one’s own fate.

The Benchley wraparound is the film’s weak link but luckily a smooth crossover from the second and third stories don’t require his assistance. So as the middle tale is winding down we are introduced to Charles Boyer’s The Great Gaspar, “The Drunken Gentleman of the Tight Rope,” whose tension-filled act consists of him stumbling into the spotlight with champagne bottle in hand, then teetering across the high wire. He dreams of a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) whose earrings distract him, causing him to take a tumble… Shortly thereafter, he meets her on a cruise ship, realizes that she is in fact the woman of his dreams in more ways than one, and then has to face his fears of his nightmare becoming reality. This visually inventive film crackles throughout, but, as is often the case, the best is saved for last.

1950s

Three Cases of Murder Wendy Toye, David Eady & George More O’Ferrall, U.K., 1955 (Hulu Plus; quality: sharp)

Here is one of the exceptions: a multi-story film where first is best. The lead-off in a trio of deathly tales—introduced by the dapper Eamonn Andrews—about an artist finishing his masterpiece posthumously, using sinister means of course, is simply stunning, a genuinely chilling little piece of terror perfection. The second story is also quite nifty. It centers on two longtime friends, roommates, and business partners—one shy, the other a superstud. While his pal’s away on business, the one less lucky in love meets and falls for a beautiful woman. It even seems mutual, but when the charmer, who is also a drunken oaf prone to blackouts, arrives home, her attentions quickly shift. The friendship falls to shambles and the girl turns up dead—have his ladykilling ways turned quite literal?

The concluding segment, based on a Somerset Maugham story, stars Orson Welles—trying to do English, I think—as the awesomely monikered Lord Mountdrago, a Secretary for Foreign Affairs described as “brilliant but insufferable.” When he pisses off the wrong politician, revenge—and madness—ensue as the Lord’s dreams are invaded. (This description makes it sound much more exciting than it actually is. Sadly, this one’s a bit of a clunker.) But for the first story alone, it’s unimaginable that this film is so hard to come by.

1960s

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors Freddie Francis, U.K., 1965 (Netflix and Amazon, free for Prime members; quality: decent, a bit streaky in places)

Extremely silly but undeniably fun, this has long been one of my guilty pleasures. Eccentric fortune-teller Dr. Schreck (Peter Cushing), aka “Dr. Terror,” employs a deck of Tarot cards (his “house of horrors”) to tell the fortunes of five men who share his train compartment one fateful night. Their varying tales of impending doom cover many of the horror basics, including lycanthropy, vampirism, killer vegetation, voodoo, and the disembodied hand. In addition to Cushing, the powerhouse cast also includes Roy Castle, Donald Sutherland, Michael Gough, and, most amusingly, Christopher Lee, who plays a pompous art critic to perfection. Rumor has it there is a DVD and Blu-ray forthcoming from Olive Films!

1970s

Encounter with the Unknown Harry Thomason, U.S., 1973 (Internet Archive and YouTube; quality: passable)

Three mystical tales based on actual events—aka urban legends—make up this half-daft curio. The first sees three obnoxious frat boys play a prank on a dorky classmate that goes fatally wrong. At his funeral the boy’s mother puts a curse on her son’s killers—involving some mumbo jumbo about heptagons (a word that one of the dimwits has to look up!) and the phrase “One by land, two by sky…,” which is absurdly repeated at least seven times over the course of the film. Guess the general vicinities of their demise… Next up is a small Mississippi farm boy who discovers a mysterious hole in the ground that emits smoke and sounds of wailing and moaning. Could this be why his dog didn’t return home? Dad attempts to find out, but his sanity might just never make it back above ground. And finally, a man encounters a disoriented girl on a bridge one foggy night… He offers to give her a lift home and hears of her past—ah, what forbidden love will drive us to do! There’s some truly atrocious acting and dialogue throughout, as well as much scene recycling, complete with an endless and wholly unnecessary closing recap. But because the familiar voice of Rod Serling provides most of the narration—there’s no wraparound story to be found—these sins are slightly easier to overlook.

1980s

The Monster Club Roy Ward Baker, U.K., 1981 (YouTube; DVD OOP and currently unavailable for rent on Netflix; quality: very good)

While Dr. Terror’s was the first and arguably best of the Amicus portmanteau films, this one was the last and possibly cheesiest. All you really need to know is that Vincent Price, as the vampire Erasmus, acts as the film’s guide. When we first meet him he’s hungrily snacking on John Carradine, who as it turns out is playing Erasmus’s favorite horror writer (a somewhat fictionalized version of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, whose stories provide the basis for the segments contained here). Erasmus takes him to his favorite haunt, the titular Monster Club (and, really, who wouldn’t want to hang out there?), to provide him with some fresh material in payment for sampling his delicious blood. The joint, still indicative of the thriving new-wave club scene of the late Seventies, is one hopping place! Monsters of all types drink, dance, and even watch pole-dancers strip to the bone.

Way too much screen time is dedicated to on-stage musical performances; the remainder is spent on three somewhat snoozy monster tales. We are introduced to a shadmock (part vampire, part werewolf), another full-breed vampire (and a vampire hunter played by Donald Pleasance), and a horde of flesh-eating hoogoos (human-ghoul hybrids). Fun transmutations aside, there’s just not enough Price on show, though what we do get is quite satisfying—he even boogies down a little! 

1990s

Tales from the Hood Rusty Cundieff, U.S., 1995 (Netflix; quality: very good, though not widescreen; DVD OOP and currently unavailable for rent)

I recently revisited this film for the first time since its release and have to say, it looks better than ever. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s violent, it’s nasty, it’s socially relevant and of course racially driven—it’s the reason I got on this anthology kick in the first place. Produced by Spike Lee during a wave of gang culture in the mainstream, this one should be a lesson to others in that there isn’t a weak spot in the entire freak show. When three punk-ass losers arrive at a funeral home to secure some quick drugs they instead get an earful of horrific tales from the flamboyantly demented mortician (Clarence Williams III), with the dead bodies in residence providing the source material.

Corpse number one: a rookie cop who turns a blind eye to his fellow policemen’s murderous brutality is driven to the bottle and slight madness by guilt. But then, from beyond the grave, the black politician he sees killed asks for his payback assistance… The identity of corpse number two is obscured till the story’s end, but the plot goes that a teacher (played by the director) becomes concerned with a new student who’s regularly covered in bruises that he insists come from a terrible monster. He goes to the boy’s house one night and discovers just what that monster is…

Story number three is triggered by the interference of a creepy doll that falls to the floor. It is just one of the “Negro dolls,” holding the spirits of murdered slaves, responsible for haunting an awful politician and ex-KKK member, gamely played by a sleazy-haired and spray-tanned Corbin Bernsen, in his prized plantation house. (Sorry, Quentin Tarantino, I haven’t braved your latest film—I wanted to walk out on the trailer alone—but I’d take this slave-revenge tale over yours any day.) Corpse number four: Crazy K, a cold-blooded gang killer, who is caught after a bloody shootout and sent for rehabilitation—Clockwork Orange–style—and perhaps even redemption. But he’s a hopeless cause... Tales from the Hood has spawned some unbelievable monstrosities like 2006’s Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror and 2012’s Barrio Tales. Accept no imitations.

2000s

Terror Tract aka House on Terror Tract Lance W. Dreesen & Clint Hutchison, U.S., 2000 (YouTube; quality: pretty good)

The 2000s: not exactly the most thrilling decade for horror anthologies. I waded through a lot of truly unwatchable crap before finding some worth celebrating. From the first seconds it was obvious this was a keeper: the film opens with a worm eaten by a bird killed by a cat, who is in turn crushed by a car then mauled by a dog. Welcome to Terror Tract and let the carnage begin… It features John Ritter (!) as an obnoxious and desperate real-estate agent who takes two newlyweds on a tour of potential dream homes. (The real-estate downturn of the 1990s was just starting to abate the year this film came out…) But each has a twisted little backstory.

House number one boasts the lewdest: a guy catches his wife cheating with a neighbor and devises a plan to dispose of them that even his own death will not deter him from carrying out. In the backyard tree of house number two, a little girl finds a monkey—yet bafflingly, the dilemma isn’t why the hell there’s a random monkey on the loose wearing a cute red bellboy outfit, but whether the daughter can keep him as a house pet. Little Bobo seems the perfect playmate for the child, but her father’s not buying it—and sure enough, the evil critter begins wreaking havoc on the family. Good fun turns somber for the concluding segment in which a young man claims to have psychic connections to a serial killer known as the Granny Killer, a raging lunatic who dismembers his victims while wearing an old-lady mask. Finally, some genuine scares!

2010s

Doomsday Book Yim Pil-sung & Kim Ji-woon, S. Korea, 2012 (Netflix, iTunes, Google Play, Sony Entertainment Network, etc.)

Not wasting any time on a wraparound, this film unfolds as three separate stories that perfectly capture our current age of fear and apocalyptic anticipations. The first and third are directed by Yim Pil-sung, and the centerpiece by the quite dazzling Kim Ji-woon, who proves that in addition to extreme violence and explosive action he can also do meditative equally impressively. The opener depicts a frightening chain of pollution, whose resulting bad meat turns Korean BBQ customers into zombies. (Highlight: an unsettling transition from revolting-looking grilling beef to a tongue darting into another’s mouth.) Not two days after watching this film someone suggested that we eat Korean BBQ—I said not a chance!

Doomsday’s middle segment is a beautifully told, highly disturbing story of an AI-inhabited future and one robot in particular that has enraged its makers by becoming enlightened. The film concludes with an oddball comic tale in which a family is forced to move into their fallout shelter for 10 years after a fast-moving meteor hits the planet. Ridiculously, it turns out that a giant eight ball, something generally known for predicting the fate of the future, may be the cause of the destruction. More fathomable, it’s suggested that a child could order the end of the world online. A depressing thought, though the story does end on a somewhat hopeful note. Perhaps, after all, there will be a next generation of anthology films to come…

More than any other American sporting pastime, baseball is built on tension and anticipation. A pitcher’s careful windup, the long arc of a fly ball falling somewhere between the stands and the warning track, a ground ball spinning along the dirt towards the outfield—every action is reflexive, over before the pitcher’s back leg finds ground again. A great baseball movie captures the sight and sound of the ballpark, like that rubber band that slowly stretches and snaps in one direction to the other. Win or loss. Out or safe. 42 is no exception. The film is clearly in love with the game, caressing every windup and subsequent thock of the bat with brilliant saturation and roaring crowds. We are treated—and eventually subjected to—a whole host of slow-motion pans that find tranquility on the diamond even while chaos reigns outside.

Director Brian Helgeland’s struggle, however, comes in balancing the intricacies of a baseball game with a very uncomplicated chronicle of barrier-breaker Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman). We follow Robinson’s rapid ascension through the minor leagues and into the bigs through a series of encounters with alternately enlightened and bigoted ballplayers, managers and fans. America’s postwar racism seems to fall along geographic lines—most (not all!) people south of Brooklyn have serious bones to pick with Robinson’s inclusion, and the Dodgers slowly form a protective shell around their star rookie. The boyish affection of his teammates and the guttural clucks and coos of Brooklyn GM Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) keep Robinson’s head up, as Rickey offers gentle reminders of the masses that have taken him as their hero.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers feel the need to keep reminding us, and the Dodgers’ trips across America are littered with awestruck young black youth, mouths perpetually agape at the sight of Jack Robinson. Then again, 42’s personality comes from the willingness to indulge its audience with both these syrupy moments and the honky-tonk cultural kitsch of 1950’s America. The games are peppered with old-timey commentary from Red Barber (John C. McGinley)—“Robinson’s dancing around first like a cat with a hot foot”—and inserts of fedoras in the crowd. Robinson’s wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) settles into the comfortable role of doting housewife: unquestionably supportive, doe-eyed, and submissive, brought to tears by the abuse suffered by her husband.

That all said, as a fond gesture to a country coming out of the dark ages, 42 is a good-hearted attempt at Robinson’s story regardless of the historical realities it chose to gloss over. Uncomplicated by twists, the film comes to its rest, safe in the certainty that Robinson’s struggle paved the way towards change.

The angels' share is the percentage of a cask of whiskey lost to evaporation during its years of maturation, and a fitting title for Ken Loach’s 23rd theatrical feature: a lovely if slight comedy that moves like a breath, always threatening to dissolve into thin air but somehow continuing to demand our attention. With this shaggy-dog tale of four petty Glaswegian criminals and their improbably successful scheme to steal the world’s most valuable whiskey, Loach turns naïveté into a sort of moral philosophy.

Loach does not ignore the vices of lower-class urban life, but for the most part he attributes them either to causes outside the individual’s control (family feuds, blood ties, environmental pressures) or to faceless thugs without enough personality to truly earn our blame. His heroes are victims of environment and circumstance, but essentially good; they are kind, likeable, and, perhaps as a result, a little empty inside. They saunter through fields in backwards kilts, steal compulsively, make scatological cracks, and generally goof off. Though Loach might occasionally poke fun at their ignorance (one of them hasn’t heard of the Mona Lisa), he also gives them a sort of dignity, and, more importantly, clears their slates.

Hence the gradual tonal shift from The Angels' Share’s first half, with its beatings, threats, and abuse, to the film’s jollier second half, complete with sunny resolution. There is the odd flicker of tenderness before then, like the way Robbie, the film’s central figure, holds his son for the first time as if he’s afraid the newborn might shatter at a touch. But as the film’s heroes move from the grimy streets of Glasgow to the wide-open Scottish Highlands, the acts of violence and invective peter out completely—as if all along they had been external to the individuals who suffered and at times perpetuated them. The movie brightens, opens up, and to some degree, evaporates.

It’s a pleasant and gentle evaporation, the kind you feel in the closing minutes of a pop song when excitement has given way to comfort, but not yet to boredom. Late in the film an earlier scene comes to mind in which Robbie is forced to confront a young man he once thrashed half to death during a coke binge, or another in which he threatens to put out the eye of a potential assailant and fears for a second that he’s actually going to do it. It’s fair to ask whether any trace of that old inner struggle remains, and if Loach’s heroes still carry some baggage with them other than knapsacks and stolen spirits. Robbie’s complete transformation may feel a little too satisfying, but to Loach’s credit, it never feels false.

Loach’s camera is intimate but never intrusive; it gives us just enough distance from its subjects for comfort, and not much more. That’s also the function of the film’s humor, which is laced with just enough mockery (much of it directed at the pretensions of upper-class whiskey connoisseurship) to keep us at a safe distance, but which handles its targets with such evident care, respect, and even admiration that we rarely feel guilty over chuckling. The joke often seems to be that, for these experts, a sip of whiskey has the same gravity that Robbie might bring to visiting his infant son in the hospital at the risk of incurring yet another savage beating from his gangland enemies. The connoisseur comes off as somewhat ridiculous in the comparison; his pleasures are more modest than he could ever dream. What saves him is that they are also more valuable than many of Robbie’s peers could ever dream: they see his self-importance, but they fail to see that his lighter commitments and quieter joys might still have some weight. There is a place for modest pleasures.  

Viola

Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro cobbled together prizes from past festival wins to fund Viola, his recent film about a pirated music delivery service in Buenos Aires, based on a single scene about lovers’ intrigue from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Piñeiro (whose next film is about 19th-century Argentinian writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) shot Viola in 11 days in 2011. He spoke with FILM COMMENT during New Directors / New Films about working with friends, the pleasures and perils of the text, his special Korean connection, and his plan for broadening Argentina’s offerings in cinema from abroad.

Why did you choose Twelfth Night as the basis for Viola?

I started with Shakespeare’s comedies and the first character to catch my attention was Rosalind [the basis of his previous film, Rosalinda, from 2011] and the other was Viola. I only chose one scene from the play and it’s a scene that works fine today without having to cut anything. There are no strange references to kingdoms, for instance. The rhythm of the scene was attractive to me because it felt contemporary; it spoke to me the most of all the scenes in Twelfth Night. I felt that I’d found the roles for these actresses. For Viola, the actress was María Villar, and for Rosalinda it was Augustina Muñoz.

And these actresses are your friends?

I am friends in one way or another with many of the actors, whether I see them once a week or once every so often. But María and Augustina I am very close with.

Is it a challenge sometimes, working with friends?

Yes, of course. With an actor whom you are only paying, you can just tell them to “do this and do that,” but with friends, you play off one another’s feelings and that is richer and more complicated. And then also, when a film has success, there is the question of giving credit and to whom and how much, etc. Or if I’m doing the poster and a photographer takes a picture of one of THE actresses, I would not ask a paid actress for her permission to use it on the poster, but of a friend I do ask. It complicates things, and I prefer working this way.

What do you do when you’re not making films?

I teach at the university [in Buenos Aires] and also I give private lectures about film to a group of ladies who feed me lots of sandwiches. I show them films like Bringing up Baby and A Woman Is a Woman. They didn’t like that last one at first, by the way. They thought the DVD player was broken. It’s incredible that nowadays a film from the early Sixties that had ruptures in sound—it still shocks! It still works!

You play with sound in Viola too. You’ve put in ringing cellphones and a kind of buzzer.

Yeah, I do. I think that rhythm is important in cinema, and that sound helps to give a film rhythm. In my film They All Lie [09], I play with sound the most out of all my films. There, like Viola, I wanted to be specific in creating an atmosphere. As much attention as I gave to framing, I wanted to give to sound, to ask, “How can I make this more dense, more complex?”

With the telephone ringing, I like that you can put it in wherever. I don’t ask the actresses to think about the phone ringing, or tell them, “act as if.” I like to profit from what happens unplanned. The idea of the world as being something beyond what is seen is what I’m looking to express. I think besides editing, sound design can be a very economical way of communicating that idea. As I work in close-ups, especially in Viola, the larger world must be communicated somehow. Just as I say how I’m interested in how a Shakespeare voice hits someone’s face, I’m also interested in a telephone’s ring, how it hits.

The camera stays close to the actors’ faces, as in Rosalinda, but the image seems softer somehow. What did you do to achieve that quality?

It has to do with Fernando [Lockett], the DP, knowing how to work with the light. The lens was an 85mm, I think, a long lens, which gives you this softness. The camera assistant, with this setup, has to constantly be arranging focus, going in, going out. This gives a little movement to the image, too, which was more static in Rosalinda. There, we used another type of lens, a shorter lens. Most of Viola was shot using these lights, like Christmas lights. Fernando really knew how to move and sculpt the lights. So it looks almost like there was a filter. I was looking forward to having this closeness, and the technology—which we did not have on Rosalinda—allowed that.

In Rosalinda, I wanted it to be a little more like in Howard Hawks’s films, where a wider lens shows more of the action. It’s not a wide-angle lens that we used, but it was wider than what we used for Viola, where I wanted to really insist on the faces. For Rosalinda, I let the Shakespeare text introduce all the complexity, but not so for Viola.

Is he the same DP from your other films?

Yes, it’s the same sound people, the same image people, and almost always the same editor. The sound people know that I like direct sound, that they need to have two booms. So we speak in a kind of code. The same goes for the cinematographer.

Rosalinda and Viola are characterized by the theme of repetition, most explicitly because their narratives are comprised of rehearsals, Viola especially. What about repetition, about looping, appeals to you?

I think that one film calls for the next one. For Viola, I was doing another Shakespeare, female comedy. When you’re working with the same topic in a new film, I think you have to provoke differences. I wanted to work with the idea of repetition as rehearsal. The idea of mantra and loop came to me, too, because I like this idea of the text being more powerful than people.

More powerful than people?

Yes. Like, in Rosalinda, sometimes I had this feeling that when the text was over, the people in the film would cease to exist. This fantastical idea—you know, the power of narrative to influence what it literally, realistically could not. This gave me another idea for a film in which the characters would be conscious that they were characters from a book and then in the final scene of the final act, they would disappear. In Viola, I took only one scene, and made them conscious of being actors rehearsing a scene, but I wanted it to be like even if they made a mistake, the actors rehearsing the play—Viola’s characters, in other words—would continue on. I thought about how if one actress makes a mistake with the Shakespeare text, she then traps the other one inside the text and thus they must go back and do it again. It has this consciousness of being inside the scene, of working inside the text itself not only as a narrative. There is realism and the actors are conscious of acting. It’s not Pirandello!

You’ve spoken of the text having a physical presence in your film. Was it Rohmer who said that words are something one can film, just like a mountain? 

Yes, and I like that quote. I hate when categories are established. When people say, “That is so cinematic,” I think “What the fuck does that mean?” What is cinematographical? It’s not any one thing. Does it mean that there’s movement? It’s stupid. The quote from Rohmer gives a lot of freedom, that you can film a mountain and put it against a sound, a face. I also like this idea of fiction that works with the documentation of an object rather than with narrative convention:  to shoot a fiction film, and to be interested in what’s real about that. No, not what’s real, actually, but what it provokes. I’m not so interested in the borders between reality and fiction. I like fiction, I like actors. For the last 10 years, everyone has been talking about using non-actors. But I like professional actors or a certain kind of professional actor. I like making a fiction that is not trying to mimic reality, but that is trying to provoke a reaction by setting things against or with one another.

For me, a Rohmer film, it’s a confrontation of objects out of [which] some meaning will come. It’s like chemistry. He also talks about chemistry and combinatory processes. It’s all energizing somehow, what he says. Rohmer gave me courage to explore these kinds of ideas.

Would you talk about subtitles? For Viola you knew you were making a movie that people would watch with subtitles, is that fair to say?

I really had a hard time with Rosalinda and subtitles because it’s so complex what they say. There are so many words. It was like a ping pong game of dialogue. That she’s a girl dressed like a man pretending to be the girl she actually is, is great to watch, to act out, but reading the words on screen is not the same thing. It was easier with Viola, which has something more like a series of monologues. Still, there are too many words. At one point, I thought I should do like Godard in Film Socialisme, and only put nouns in the subtitles or something like that. I have not yet come up with a way of totally fixing the situation. There is always some loss by the time the viewer is reading the subtitles. Also, because Viola has so much repetition, and the viewer understands that, and they’ve already read the subtitles, I thought about just cutting out some sections of subtitles. Thus, the formal idea would take over and all people, Spanish-speakers and not, would be watching the same thing, the things, the faces that really interest me. But then I decided not to fool around with the subtitles like that.

You’ve referred to yourself as an Argentinian-Korean filmmaker because of your relationship with the Jeonju International Film Festival. Did they help fund Viola?

Jeonju gave me some money as an award for another film, and I used it for postproduction and for helping to give some money to the actors. What I win, I redistribute, so the actors and I have a kind of cooperative structure, I guess. I must be responsible about this and fill the envelopes! [Laughs] Jeonju accepted my first feature, The Stolen Man [07], and I won a prize, which was very useful for making They All Lie and for paying people. Then they commissioned me to make a film, which turned into Rosalinda. Then I won a work-in-progress award for Viola. They have given me much more money than my own country. It’s kind of crazy.

With other wins, I’ve bargained for different services than those that I’d won. You have to trade to make it work. For example, They All Lie won an award of film cans which I then sold in order to fund Viola. Viola is kind of a Frankenstein in a sense. It was funded with winnings from all these different places and then the rehearsals were conducted first as part of a play I directed. You learn lessons from cinema. It’s kind of like Orson Welles and Macbeth. [Laughs]

At a recent Flaherty Seminar showing of your films, you mentioned some of the difficulties of distribution within Latin America. Could you talk about that?

The problem in Argentina is that it’s very centralized and it all goes through Buenos Aires. There’s not many places you can show your film if it’s not all done in the official way. But I work in the parallel system. There is no need to make and pay for copies of my films to show on 35mm film. But there’s one or two places that I can show my films. One is the MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art. Their idea is that there’s no need to show a film at two in the afternoon because no one will go there. Instead, they show a film four times per week only during prime weekend hours when people can go. Then, your film can stay there for a whole month, and if things go well, it can stay for three months. So the audience is developed in another way than what’s usually done in Argentina, where it plays for one week all over the city at different times, and then suddenly it’s over. I think MALBA’s way builds your audience better and allows more people to come see your films. The other system is just an old one that doesn’t adjust to new developments in film technology and production. It’s like making sausages. 

Last year, Argentinian magazines and some based in New York asked me to send them my list of top ten films for the time I was in New York. The lists were pretty different. On my Argentinian list, there were like five French films! [Laughs] And on the New York list, there were just two. I realized that the only alternative to the American films in Argentina are these French films. There’s Claire Denis, which is awesome, but then we have all these other, industrial French films. You don’t have the good German or Spanish films in Argentina. Or Chilean films! There were five good ones from Chile that year, and none of them showed in Argentina. They’re right across from us, over a little mountain, but we don’t get to see them. I mean, people are premiering at Cannes with a USB drive. People under house arrest are showing at Cannes. I don’t know if it’s because of taxes or fees or the industry dynamics or what, but we don’t get Chilean films in Argentina.

I would like to do something to fix this. BAFICI [Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival] is a huge festival, and thanks to it many of us have been able to show our films. If there is an audience for international independent films there, then there will be one if we show them in Argentina outside of BAFICI. It’s very bizarre that we don’t get Spanish films, Mexican films, Columbian films. We don’t have a little place downtown showing these films like we should. In Mexico, they do! There’s a place called Cine Tonalá, and there are Argentinian films screened there. I may be a little green, but I think we can do it, too, in Argentina. In New York, you can learn from Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, Union Docs. I’d like to do something like this in Argentina, even though I’m not much of an entrepreneur. It’s nice to try to force something into being.