Wednesday, September 22, 2021

TIFF Wavelengths Shorts First Drafts

Complete first drafts written for In Review Online.

Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with “Dear Chantal,” a short created as part of the “Las cartas que no fueron también son” project, an omnibus initiative by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival that commissioned eight well known filmmakers, including Deborah Stratman, Raya Martin, Lynne Sachs, Jessica Sarah Rinland, and Pereda, to make a “cinematic homage to a colleague they have never personally met.” As can be guessed, Pereda’s was the great Chantal Akerman, for whom he fashioned a curious, distinct tribute. Running an exceptionally compact five minutes, it consists solely of supposed letters written to Akerman by Pereda concerning the temporary rental to her of his sister’s two-bedroom house in Mexico City. Her responses are never heard, only intimated, as this hushed voiceover plays out over images of Pereda’s sister Catalina slowly furnishing the bare house, sweeping leaves off the skylight, and placing books and a painting within the abode, as the latter of which, an abstract swirl of light blue and deep read, becomes a focal point. With these stripped down parameters — Akerman’s replies are never heard, though they are certainly hinted at in Pereda’s letters — “Dear Chantal” emphasizes above all the underpinning emotions behind the fundamental stillness in a way both reminiscent of Akerman and starkly different: the consciously posed close-ups feel more akin to Bresson than the wide shots that typify the Belgian director’s work, although a brief still of her in Je, tu, il, elle at the beginning of the film. Amid the mundanity of water filters and converting the second bedroom into an office, Pereda mentions in passing that Catalina has had some difficulties in the past, and it’s certainly significant, and at least a little moving, that the last line and shot goes to her. The Capacity for Adequate Anger Vika Kirchenbauer effectively established herself on the international experimental scene with her short “Untitled Sequence of Gaps,” from last year, an intriguing rumination on varieties of light and how they inflect understanding of societal traditions. With “The Capacity for Adequate Anger,” that sensibility has been noticeably sharpened, pairing a distinctive set of stills with more directly personal narration. One cornerstone of her style is the narration: though she is German, Kirchenbauer narrates her films in English with a tremulous accent that inherently connotes a certain fragility and uncertainty, which strongly influences the affect of her words. Here, the words concern her upbringing and her anxieties over her art practice, perspective, and her interpersonal relationships, including with her father and grandmother. The connections that she draws are frequently startling: a throughline about AIDS connects her childhood adoration of Freddie Mercury, Magic Johnson’s temporary retirement from basketball, and a dental inspection. These musings are augmented by a wide variety of still images, including of childhood drawings, mass media photos, and posed art pictures, along with the sole, unusual source of moving images: a childhood fantasy cartoon of unknown provenance. While loosely sectioned, as signaled by a recurring ambient music cue, “The Capacity for Adequate Anger” maintains a certain flowing train of thought, which ensures a spontaneity to the subjects broached. More than a conceptual boldness, it is in Kirchenbauer’s paradoxical assuredness that the disparate elements will connect together: the title phrase is uttered twice, once in relation to the AIDS epidemic and once regarding her uneasy relationship with her father. Such a stark yet elusive phrase provides a useful, fitting summary of the fascinating elements of this ambitious work, full of information without feeling dense. Inner Outer Space Laida Lertxundi has cemented her reputation as one of the foremost active short filmmakers with films that maintain a certain relaxed California mood while suggesting a whole constellation of potential associations. With “Inner Outer Space,” that methodology is effectively made literal, as it consists of three fairly distinct shorts which together function as an elliptical, intriguing exploration of a new setting for Lertxundi: her native Basque. In truth, four parts might be a more accurate description, as the short begins with a series of miniature installations comprised of images fastened to cardboard, with one piece resembling a television screen. Afterwards, a brief, fragmentary exchange between two women takes place via subtitles, followed by them looking at a series of sills printed on paper, which briefly take life as their own cutaway shots. Without a discernible transition, the second short seems to begin, as people are led blindfolded to a secluded cliff and asked to first describe their surroundings without looking at them, and then draw the area. Following an unexpected presentation of the credits in full, the final short unfurls in one shot, as two women in swimsuits sway with their backs to the camera in front of projected images of waves. As might be gathered, the ultimate point of connection in “Inner Outer Space” lies in the processing and manifestation of mental images, and Lertxundi’s ability to evoke these connections so glancingly forms a key part of her work’s appeal. While the obvious fragmentation means that the typical fluidity of her films is somewhat muted here, a sense of unity ultimately prevails: in the warm 16mm, the skillful deployment of cut-ins, the mystery of the precise meanings of each individual section, which of course is entirely the point. “The red filter is withdrawn.” Kim Min-jung’s “The red filter is withdrawn.” draws upon a host of spirits from the past throughout its deceptively minimal construction. After a brief introduction with three strobing colored rectangles, the film settles into its main focus: various natural and man-made structures on Jeju Island in South Korea, including military bunkers and craggy caves. While the locale appears to be calm, the credits indicate a darker side: the island was inhabited by Imperial Japan, and acted as the site of the infamous April 3 Incident, in which thousands of Communist insurgents were killed in the lead-up to the Korean War. While this history would be compelling by itself, and indeed does become more apparent towards the end of the short with images of graveyards and flags, Kim grafts on another fascinating element: Hollis Frampton’s performance piece “A Lecture.” Throughout “The red filter is withdrawn.”, Kim intersperses subtitles written in both Korean and English from the lecture, which posits that the white rectangle of light that forms the essence of the projected cinema image has existed long before and will continue long after any given person’s life. Correspondingly, the film finds intriguing correspondences within these landscapes, most clearly the bright sunlight shining through large square holes in the caves. Over these images, shot in what appears to be some mix of digital and 16mm, are laid certain effects, including, yes, a red filter, which casts the verdant grass in an entirely new light. “The red filter is withdrawn.” properly ends with Frampton’s exhortation to discuss films in darkness, but Kim’s use of numerous other sources suggests a more suitably ambiguous, complex, and ongoing discourse centered on elements hidden just below the surface.

Friday, September 17, 2021

Memoria First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on a tightly woven narrative structure, upon which the more readily apparent free-floating atmosphere and extended shots are given an elegance and order. His lodestar is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, quite probably the most important director to make his debut in this century. Despite just six fully fledged feature films in twenty years, the Thai director has exerted an enormous influence on festival cinema, with his use of forested landscapes and unconventional story structures in order to create a sense of the somnambulant that ties into an interest in the supernatural and the violent past of his nation. After six years since his last film Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong has returned with Memoria, his first film outside Thailand, with professional actors, and in a foreign language, or rather two — Spanish and English. It follows Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British orchidologist living in Colombia who, while visiting Bogotá, begins to hear a mysterious, loud, thudding sound at seemingly random moments. Her interactions weave in and out of relation with this developing affliction, including with her temporarily bedridden sister (Agnes Brekke), her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho, of Zama fame), a forensic archaeologist named Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), and Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer. In an especially hypnotic scene in a film practically filled with nothing else, he helps Jessica recreate the sound that has been haunting her, working from a movie sound effects library and shifting the echo, bass, and shape of the wave to form, in Jessica’s words, “a rumble from the core of the earth.” As might be suggested by this, Memoria focuses on a single main character to a greater degree than any of his previous films; even while Jenjira Pongpas served as the pensive anchor of four of his previous films, her presence was intertwined and mixed with various other focal points. Befitting her arthouse star status, Swinton, in easily her greatest performance in years, takes the center stage for practically every scene in at least the first half of the film. Her signature, slightly alien presence, which has admittedly run the risk of parody in recent years, is wondrously molded by Apichatpong; in the first scene, when she is awoken by the loud noise, her movement suggests a ghost, or perhaps a zombie — Jessica shares the same name as the ethereal figure of Jacques Tourneur’s iconic I Walked With a Zombie (1943). Her manner of movement, lithe but tentative, frequently blending in during the many long shots, only accentuate an acute difference in setting from the endless Thai forests: in the first half of the film, there is a new, pronounced focus on architecture and the city, shown both with teeming throngs of people and at a standstill. Working again with regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and on 35mm for the first time since Syndromes and a Century (2006), Apichatpong finds the textures in these spaces, in the unpredictable dance of light that gives further shape to the series of strange incidents peppered throughout: a popped tire that causes a pedestrian to drop to the ground, car horns that go off for no apparent reason, a hospital bench as a makeshift lock. In response, his style has shifted somewhat: there is a greater emphasis on duration, on a certain kind of pensive distance that his disciples from afar have adopted. But this is unmistakably Apichatpong, not only in his total willingness to vary his approach as the shot and scene necessitates it, but in the rich sense of character and circumstance, each scene and camera placement contributing, whether elliptically or directly, to a sense of the world that this woman is inhabiting and attempting to understand. About the second half, which is solely made up of an encounter Jessica has in the rural municipality of Pijao with a mysterious man (Elkin Díaz), the less that can be said the better. Suffice it to say that this last hour is one of the most extraordinary, focused, and sustained sequences of the past decade, a slow unfurling of personal and national pasts that intermingle and mutate, conveyed via the most entrancing of means. It all comes back to the sound: not only that indescribable slam, but also the snatches of music, the vaguely unsettling ambiance. If one of the principal pleasures of a hammock is how it can sway in the wind, then Apichatpong understands how to capture the essence of that entrancing motion.

Monday, September 13, 2021

El Gran Movimiento First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Bolivian filmmaker Kiro Russo made his feature debut with the intriguing, loosely structured Dark Skull in 2016, which centered on the inhabitants of the rural town of Huanuni, including Elder (Julio César Ticona), a young ne’er-do-well who begins working in the local mine and struggles with the harsh work and his alcoholism, and was conceived as something of a hybrid film, taking place mostly in the dark depths of the countryside and mine. His new film, El Gran Movimiento, begins almost literally where his previous one left off: the miners, after rumblings in the prior film of displacement, have undertaken a seven-day voyage on foot to La Baz, the de facto Bolivian government, in order to agitate for their jobs. After a startling moment in which César Ticona appears to give an interview as himself, including a reference onscreen to him being the lead actor of Dark Skull, he assumes the role of Elder once more. As the film unfolds, he and two other companions end up staying in the city and attempt to find work in the city, while he grows more and more sick from some mysterious combination of heat, elevation, exhaustion, and other ambiguous, potentially historical or mythological sources. Such a description provides a good baseline for El Gran Movimiento, but it feels woefully inadequate to capture the currents that swirl through the film. While Dark Skull was limited in some way by the scale necessitated by the small-town setting and adopted a spare approach to structure and narrative aside from the miners and their relatives, Russo consciously expands his focus to encompass the inhabitants of practically the entire capitol. Alongside Elder’s tale of misfortune, he also includes a thread that eventually becomes practically as consequential to the film’s purposes: an older local man named Max (Max Bautista Uchasara), a shambolic figure who appears to live in the caves and hills around La Paz but who frequently ventures into the city, having established an easy rapport with the women running the open-air market stands. He also may or may not have healing powers, possibly connected to the motif of a white dog, a symbol that appears with increasing frequency in the second half of the film as Elder’s situation worsens. Russo implicitly draws these parallels between young and old, outsider and local, in order to structure his wider gaze, which at first manifests itself in brief little interactions that stretch outside of the world previously established in his last film — a large group watching a professional wrestling match on an outdoor screen, a group of market women laughing at Elder’s ineptitude, and, most significantly, an old woman who takes in Elder as her godson even though they never appear to have met. All this is conveyed under the same watchful camera eye that typified his previous film, though while Dark Skull preferred a fascinating sense of gliding camera movement, somewhat uncommon in the arthouse veins that Russo is mining, here the camera very slowly zooms forward in the bulk of the shots, first established in a lengthy pre-title card sequence that gazes at different buildings and elements within La Paz. Gradually, as El Gran Movimiento proceeds down its trajectory of bodily decay, the ruptures in the carefully drawn aesthetic become ever more frequent and unexpected, culminating in a furiously and rhythmically edited sequence that appears to mix footage from both films, along with a flurry of faces and streets. It is in this moment that the great movement is revealed: this is a thoroughly idiosyncratic and elliptical approach to the city symphony, one rooted in character and in which the spirit of the city — and, thanks to the presence of Elder and his compatriots, the country — is vividly evoked through the highs and lows of living.