Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) A Film by Peter Greenaway

"The history of artists working away from their homeland is rich with tales of creative flowerings: wide-eyed Paul Gauguin dispatching to Tahiti and expanding his palette, wacked-out Salvador Dalí descending on Paris to find a melting pot of artistic cross-pollination, globetrotting Orson Welles sticking it to American financiers by creating some of his most daring work in new lands, and Andrei Tarkovsky transcending both his nostalgia for his motherland and a rapidly deteriorating body with a series of deeply personal art films. Somewhere adjacent to this history is the curious case of Sergei Eisenstein's sojourn in Mexico, which serves as the subject of Eisenstein in Guanajuato." Continued at Slant Magazine.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015) A Film by Daniel Alfredson

"Before long, Heineken and an anonymous piece of human bait have been holed away in windowless, soundproof rooms, at which point the movie stops dead in its tracks—though, to put it more accurately, the undisciplined chop job that is the central kidnapping sequence does little to build momentum in the first place. Without committing to any particular narrative focus, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken devolves into something like an interminable newscast of the actual events, intercutting perfunctorily between the clumsily scheming captors, their confused loved ones back home, and the increasingly delirious prisoners." Reviewed here.

Two Days, One Night (2014) A Film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

"Bringing Sandra closer to the camera during her moments of emotional self-awareness (be it anguish or ecstasy) or letting her drift further away in bouts of dazed dissociation (such as when her depression gets so bad she seems to fall asleep inside herself) are methods that help establish something close to a one-to-one empathetic relationship between camera and subject. It’s all fitting because the Dardennes are less interested in the politics and economics of their chosen scenario than they are in surveying the full spectrum of Sandra’s social existence, a spectrum that gradually starts to form a picture not of the specific assembly-line factory where she works, but rather civilization at large and all its familiar peculiarities and inconsistencies." Continue reading here.

State of Dogs (1998) A Film by Peter Brosens and Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh

The delicacy of human memory outweighs the unknowable depths of postmortem enlightenment in Belgian filmmaker Peter Brosens and Mongolian director Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh's State of Dogs, a mesmerizing documentary/fiction hybrid that raises countless questions about existence and faith, government regulation and community, reality and folklore, history and spirituality, and most of all, life and death. A co-production spanning almost half a dozen countries, the film nonetheless feels so organic to the Mongolian experience that it couldn't have been made by an outsider. Brosens made the film as the third entry in his Mongolia Trilogy (along with Poets of Mongolia and City of the Steppes), which launched a career marked by an immersion into foreign cultures as well as an engagement with a process that is increasingly rare in film production worldwide: co-direction. Here, Brosens works with Turmunkh, a Mongolian native who must have brought a level of familiarity with the various traditions and circumstances shown in the film that rubbed off on Brosens. It's difficult to say whose credit belongs where, but whatever the case their contributions have fused into a major statement, a simultaneously tactile and mystical experience that moves gracefully with the contours of the forbidding Mongolian desert.

Is is there, in this arid wasteland of sandy hills, snowy plains, and scattered ghettos, that Brosens and Turmunkh probe the wandering spirit of a stray dog named Basaar who is killed early on by a hunter hired by the government to extinguish diseased canines roaming the city of Ulan Bator. The atrocity of the dog murders is not shied away from by the filmmakers, who create a remarkably disturbing sequence set to foreboding Arabian music that is as much of a confrontational call to action as it is an inciting incident for the story of Basaar. Electing to not advance to human life right away, the dog prefers to let his soul venture from its rotting corpse on the side of a desert road to reminisce on the few charms of his past life via an unassuming narrator (Banzar Damchaa). The scenario itself, built from the Mongolian belief that the dog is the final life form before human reincarnation, is ripe for sentimentalization on paper, but Brosens and Turmunkh approach it with a loose, surreal touch, digressing from the central premise constantly to become absorbed in the life experiences, individuals, and Mongolian rituals Basaar remembers from his days of homelessness, desperation, and danger. Among these anecdotes include the life of a recently pregnant young woman from the city who once treated Basaar with kindness (and whose child, the film suggests, will be Basaar's reincarnated form), an old nomad who owned Basaar for a short period of time along with cattle, his experiences rummaging for food amongst indifferent passersby, and his observation of various rituals within the wandering Mongolian groups (music, wrestling, the spreading of myth).

Movement - of Basaar's spirit, of trains across endless panoramas, of traditional customs passing on to modernity - becomes the crux of the film. Brosens and Turmunkh reflect it in their fluid integration of visual motifs that recur throughout, such as shots from the window of a moving vehicle and static compositions of various herds (people, cattle, dogs) moving from one side of the frame to another. Within this framework, the lack of movement becomes equally substantial; a landscape, vast and unchanging, passes through the camera's lens as if to represent a static force amidst all the movement, and thousands of dead canines are scattered across the desert and the sides of village roads, acting both as mementos for an old way of life and shocking reminders of collective guilt. Without ever becoming preachy or melodramatic, State of Dogs possesses a mournful lament towards these markers of the past, tying intimately into its concern for the sociocultural effects of globalization. Basaar's eventual rebirth, depicted in a striking sequence of intercutting, is a byproduct of drastic shifts in social and political customs. He will be born into an entirely different milieu by a woman particularly young for child labor, and it's difficult not to acknowledge the unsettling parallels Brosens and Turmunkh lightly draw between the tumultuous life of a wandering dog like Basaar and the upbringing of the modern child, especially in a context as rough and unforgiving as that of Ulan Bator.




There is a vibrant mysticism running throughout the film, but it never overwhelms Brosens and Turmunkh's intimate visualization of the physical, observable world. While State of Dogs' associative arrangement may at times seem sporadic and unmotivated, the filmmakers have a deft way of evoking the coexistence of the mythic and the mundane. Seemingly non-diegetic audio bleeds into from one shot to its subsequent shot and proves to be springing from a tangible source, and myths spoken by real Mongols find faint echoes in the shot compositions and cutting patterns. Brosens and Turmunkh appear to be suspending disbelief cinematically, using the film medium as a way to entertain supernatural possibilities such as the obliteration of time and space and the presence of spirits and myths, while doing so in a way that doesn't lose grip of authentic, lived reality. Their deepest plunges into the supernatural come in the final act of the film, when townspeople rave about the narrative behind an upcoming solar eclipse: the dragon Rah will swallow the sun and leave Earth in a total freeze of darkness. After suspensefully documenting the existential panic of the citizens, the ensuing eclipse acquires great life-or-death tension. When it passes by without harm, the sense I get is not that there is no Rah, but that the hysterical drum-banging and chanting of the townsfolk scared him away.

Brosens and Turmunkh's final montage, set to a typically haunting musical score by Charo Calvo, contains a poetic power that would be embarrassed by words. Suffice to say, the inclusion of an otherworldly contortionist suggests that they have succeeded in taking a full and justified leap into the unexplainable abstractions of life, coming full circle on a complete rejection of established rules of rationality, space, and even physics (seriously, this woman bends). What at first sounded like nihilistic verbal mush out of the mouth of an impassioned poet in the opening shot of the film now resembles principles to live by. The 180 degree turnaround from skepticism to belief that the filmmakers' inspire brings to mind L'Eclisse, in which Antonioni used a similarly jarring stylistic effect to communicate the irrelevance of the supposed story (Vitti and Delon's relationship, in this case Basaar's memories) and what was ultimately the central purpose (the spiritual void of modern romantic pursuits, the necessity of faith in the modern world). Incidentally, Brosens and Turmunkh's predilection for dwarfing individuals against vast expanses of dusty desert and dilapidated modern architecture through the use of the wide shot mirrors Antonioni's similar technique. They're in good company, and they've earned it. State of Dogs is a sad and eye-opening work that, in celebrating the tenacity of one dog's memory, is able to allegorize the passing traditions and practices of an entire nation.

Jeanne Dielman: Redefining Mulvey and Hill

(This is an essay I wrote for my Media Criticism and Theory class. Forgive the dryness.)

One of the most intriguing and telling facets of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - a radical 1976 Belgian film that aggressively challenged prior notions of shot duration and narrative rhythm - is that it was conceived by a twenty-five year old with virtually no classical filmmaking training. Incidentally, it is this very naiveté in the face of the camera, this utter indifference to standard practice, that lead Chantal Akerman to so thoroughly discover her own unique aesthetic, one that, rather than appearing amateurish in the context of proper film grammar, looked fresh and revolutionary. At the time of its release, the canons of film theory had largely addressed the primarily visible regions of film history – Hollywood as well as, to a lesser extent, the collective contributions of international cinemas – and in doing so, attempted to grapple with trends, formulas, and ideological frameworks that guided the majority of work. What’s striking though about Akerman’s film is how actively it seems to run counter to the central ideas in numerous major essays on cinematic convention. With its simultaneously straightforward and ambiguous narrative, its rigorous immersion in time and space, and its destabilizing lack of closure and character psychology, Jeanne Dielman updates and redefines pre-conceived standards for cinematic narrative and realism.

Two essays, in particular, illustrate the extent to which Akerman’s work goes against the grain of popular thought: John Hill’s “Narrative and Realism” and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Both pieces formulate their discussions principally in relation to the critic’s dominant native cinema. For Hill, it is both the British social problem film and the films of the British new wave, and for Mulvey, it is the Hollywood industry. The essays stress the notion that mainstream cinema has established an array of intrinsic mechanisms to elicit audience interest and pleasure, mechanisms that Jeanne Dielman either conspicuously withdraws or subtly transforms.

The long-standing classic realism that Hill finds “dated” and “melodramatic”, and which is couched in “habitual versions of dramatic reality”, is far from the kind of direct observational realism Akerman engages with. The film is the documentation of 48 hours in the life of the titular character, a widowed, stay-at-home mother, covering in depth her various domestic routines and only consciously excising her sleep. Taking place over the course of an elapsed 201 minutes, it is often a marvel how the film manages to communicate a persistence of real time even in spite of its obviously considerable extractions. If the “distinctive characteristic of realism resides in the ambition to, in some way or other, approximate reality”, Jeanne Dielman tackles this credo with extreme determination, perhaps coming closer to reproducing reality than to approximating it. Akerman probes her subject by completely surrendering to her daily mannerisms, letting her tasks play out in their entirety and only cutting when she leaves a room. Of course, by its very nature, film can never really be a carbon copy of reality, but Jeanne Dielman’s maximum detachment and sense of letting behaviors play out as they would in the real world at least brings it significantly closer than the watered-down examples Hill describes.



Furthermore, Hill explains what he sees to be an inherent pattern in narrative form of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and a new equilibrium that Jeanne Dielman does not adamantly abide by. “Implicit in the structure of the narrative, its movement from one equilibrium to another, its relations of cause and effect,” he claims, “is a requirement for change.” Normally, it is a force such as a crime that shifts the narrative from its initial state of equilibrium, in which case an investigation would propel the new equilibrium. Akerman tinkers with this seasoned formula by not supplying the second equilibrium and only risking disequilibrium in the final scene, when Jeanne carries out a shocking act of violence against her regular John (her daytime prostitution as a means of economic sustainability is one of the film’s fascinating motifs). The result is a permanent state of anxiety and inconclusiveness extended past the film’s ending. Though Akerman appropriates the change said to be a necessary narrative ingredient by Hill, as Jeanne’s familiarized routine gradually and dramatically disrupts, she undermines it by refusing to resolve the tension, instead compounding it with an even greater act of dysfunction.

This denial of narrative strategy is also built into the underlying ideology of the film. Long praised as a milestone work in feminist cinema for its unimpeded focus on the unspectacular ebbs and flows of a woman’s home life, Jeanne Dielman manages to also deflate Mulvey’s position that built into the very fabric of mainstream narratives, there are unconscious ideologies such as a heterosexual division of labor that categorizes the male as the active force and the female as the passive one. Instead of making a male character catapult the film out of its initial stasis, Akerman lets the vagaries of the minimalist narrative rest solely on Jeanne’s shoulders. The male dominance that Mulvey discusses partly exists through Jeanne’s monetary reliance on them, but it is shattered as the film progresses and her dissatisfaction with her lack of self-reliance appears to augment. This culminates with her final murder of the John, accomplished with the kind of dispassion and precision that would suggest she’s aware of Mulvey’s stance. The murder is figurative before it’s literal; no longer does she have to be vulnerable to the scheduled routines of the exploitative, omnipresent male. She has defeated the threat of masculine oppression, and in doing so, alters the misogynistic bent of the typical film narrative.

Mulvey suggests further that the male protagonist often acts as an audience surrogate, and his voyeuristic tendencies towards his female counterpart mirror an intensified male gaze in the audience. But Jeanne is hardly the erotically charged exhibitionist spectacle that Mulvey asserts. The audience does not gain “control and possession of the woman within the film’s diegesis.” As if to emphasize this, Akerman remains outside the room during her daily sex act, fixing her camera on the de-eroticized image of the door and denying fetishistic entry. Curiously, the film intensifies the gaze in a different way. By placing its central character front and center in every frame carrying out the niceties of a stay-at-home mother, it doesn’t so much elicit a pleasuring of the erogenous zones as it does a reawakening of the long-dormant sensations of the Oedipal complex. Immersing the viewer in the uncannily familiar matriarchal rhythms, Akerman promotes a sense of nostalgia and warmth in the viewer, a sense of being susceptible to the behaviors of the female rather than in control of them.



In acknowledging the possibility for the avant-garde to subvert the traditional methods they observe, Mulvey and Hill seem to hint at the particular techniques of Jeanne Dielman. “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” This could be interpreted as Akerman’s formal thesis, and by giving her camera the autonomy to simply record the action over extended stretches of time, she removes the possibility of manipulating the content of the narrative. Her “invention of new forms” works to “undermine habitual versions of dramatic reality and thus communicate new, and more fundamental, underlying realities.” The minutiae of quotidian life, glimpsed in its totality, from the painstaking preparation of meals to the folding of clean bed sheets, comprise a world not often seen in the cinema, and especially not in mainstream work.

By boiling her narrative down to the singular focus of one woman’s routinized existence, Chantal Akerman extinguished all matters of cinematic convention from Jeanne Dielman. She suppressed the traditional standard for greater narrative trajectory as identified by John Hill in “Narrative and Realism” and reversed the standardized processes of audience perception highlighted by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Jeanne Dielman possesses its own kind of narrative ambiguity that extends past its conclusion rather than prematurely leveling out, and it doubles as an acknowledgment of the potential for an active female within a film’s power dynamic. The result is a revolutionary exercise that convincingly puts into question the conventional, popular ways in which films are produced and consumed.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) A Film by Chantal Akerman

First client, dinner, lessons, leisure, bedtime, morning, breakfast, cleanup, errands, dinner prep, lunch, coffee break, second client, potatoes, dinner, leisure, bedtime, morning, breakfast, cleanup, errands, dinner prep, the wait, chores, the wait part 2, lunch, errands, third client, rest.

These are the chapter titles to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles. Jeanne Dielman refers to the central character (Delphine Seyrig), an orderly housewife working as a prostitute on the side in her own apartment. The second half refers specifically to the location of her domestic space. The nondescript chapter titles comprise the entire action of the story, a documentation of three days - Tuesday through Thursday - in the life of Jeanne, who lives with her bookworm son Sylvain.

It's a film about the tactility of real spaces. The yellow tiled walls in Jeanne's kitchen, where she spends the bulk of her time. The black and white tiles on the floor and the small breakfast table in the middle of it, with two always perfectly positioned white chairs on either side. The bland, patterned gray wallpaper. A perpetually pulsing neon light that diffuses through the window shades in the living room. Muted, retro yellow sofas beside the dinner table. Short, claustrophobic hallways acting as the epicenter in a maze of domestic ennui. Long, familiar streets lined with shops. Plain white cars. And Jeanne's clothes: blank cardigans, turquoise nightgowns, beige button-ups.

It's about the possibility for cinema to construct its own space and time, seemingly congruent with real time yet only existing in three hours. We wonder, watching all of the extended, static takes of real-life chores, where the remaining fifty or so hours went. Akerman toys with invisible ellipses; suddenly, Jeanne is changed into new clothes, or once she's done doing the dishes, she is downtown running errands. Such quiet transitions feel continuous and natural, the filler time in between deliberately left hanging. Rarely does a film feel so in sync with our own lives. Rarely does a film convey through every moment the presence of an outside world beyond the frame, where other people are going about their schedules.



Although superficially simple, Jeanne Dielman subtly provokes questions. Why does Jeanne feel compelled to keep everything so consistently tidy, when it is only her and her son living in the apartment? Why does she turn the lights out every time she leaves a room, a way of further compartmentalizing her already boxy space? Why does she not ask Sylvain about his school day when he comes home and eats dinner, but instead simply recites a boring letter she receives from her sister in Canada? Where do the two go in the night after dinner, an enigmatic action that seems almost obligatory, for they go even when it's especially late? Why does Jeanne keep the money she earns through sex right in the pot on the dinner table? Is it to hide the most secretive aspect of her life in the most obvious, overlooked centerpiece? Why does she house a fellow tenant's baby boy for only five minutes everyday? Why is she complacent with her monotonous life?

The biggest question of all is elicited by one of the most shocking conclusions in film history. Her unexpectedly violent act comes without warning. It comes right after we are finally let into her bedroom during the sex act, after previously being kept outside the door twice, left only to watch the monetary transaction at the door. Following it, Akerman watches for approximately seven minutes as Jeanne sits motionless at the dinner table. She sits in a room with the lights out for the first time in the film, besides when she goes to sleep. Her expression changes in the subtlest way possible. The final face she makes is one of inconspicuous bliss. Has she finally transcended the mundanity of her routine? Did she see herself in the man, caught in a loathsome routine by visiting her every Thursday at the same time? Was the murder an act of male antagonism, forged by the unexplained loss of her husband, or is the act equally unexplainable, driven by a supernatural impulse?



Jeanne Dielman is also a film about routine, about the rhythms of modern life. Jeanne's behavioral quirks often times seem unnecessarily obsessive, but at the same time, what she is doing is wholly indispensable. Sylvain needs to be fed. She needs to eat too. Their clothes need to be clean. The dishes need to be clean. Maybe the beds don't need to be made constantly, but for Jeanne's sanity, maybe they do. Yet simultaneously, the film is about the disruption of routine. During the second day, Jeanne's demeanor begins changing. She drops a utensil that was just cleaned. She overcooks the potatoes. She forgets to turn on the radio at the usual time. Such minor details are extremely dramatic and noticeable given the precision with which these acts were previously carried out. Her change in behavior, though subdued, is frightening.

To be missing the fact that Jeanne Dielman is primarily about film form though is to be missing the point entirely. Akerman explores the limits of what can be conveyed with one static camera angle, a frontal, symmetrical view of the proceedings. She eschews all typical cinematographic techniques that should accompany a film narrative, such as the close-up, the reverse shot, and the point-of-view. She tries to see how basic a story structure can be while still providing tantalizing forward momentum. Her formal rhythm is astounding: the audience begins to expect that there will be three doorbell rings throughout the day, and knows who will be behind the door for each. We also anticipate the coming of a title card, announcing the end of the given day. The effectiveness of this repetition brings to mind Bela Tarr's Satantango, a similarly marathon-like work.

After seeing Jeanne Dielman, I knew a conventional review would not be appropriate. I needed to somehow convey the rapidity with which thoughts ran through my head while watching it. Although it takes patience, it is a powerful, unique experience. It is also a disturbingly applicable one that holds a mirror up to our own lives. Most potently, it shows how a person's life becomes so invested with repetition and routine, yet time still moves forward. And how much of a tragedy that is.