A Quiet Passion (2016) A Film by Terence Davies

"The first and most conspicuous sign of A Quiet Passion's historical specificity is the supreme headiness and eloquence of its dialogue, which comes at a rapid clip and with almost wall-to-wall frequency. More than a mere place of residence and relaxation, the Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts—the actual preserved site of which was provided to Davies for the film's few exteriors—serves as an arena for around-the-clock banter on such matters as the nature and limits of Christian piety, the literature and art of the day, local gossip, and general discourses around the question of how to lead a dignified life. Recorded with such heightened clarity as to almost sound dubbed, these dense conversations have a distancing quality comparable to that of Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, but the linguistic information moves too swiftly to allow time for comedic upshot. Instead, the discussions generally begin as nourishing meetings of the mind, transform into indignant sparring sessions, and resolve as apologetic declarations of mutual respect—each a microcosmic demonstration of Davies's refined feel for human drama."

Full review continues at Slant Magazine.

Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1974) A Film by Tony Palmer

"Like [D.A.] Pennebaker, [Tony] Palmer shoots in 16mm in anonymous green rooms and regal concert halls but plays looser with his aesthetic (mixing monochrome and color stock) and allows himself more fanciful editorial digressions. A live performance of 'Sisters of Mercy,' for instance, intercuts Cohen's on-stage act with both contemporaneous footage of him on tour and various flashback snippets of the singer reading and writing poetry, while a radiant rendition of 'So Long, Marianne' intermingles impressionistic home movies of Cohen as a young boy. In a more dubious example, Palmer sources graphic clips of suffering in Vietnam during the war to complement Cohen's musings on the political utility of his music—an intrusion which effectively sullies the suggestive vagueness of his lyrics on these subjects."

Full review here.

Figures in a Landscape (1970) A Film by Joseph Losey

"Figures in a Landscape is composed entirely of such small-scale strategic warfare, and Losey graciously perceives no crisis of entertainment value. Why bother injecting dramatic banalities when the visual dynamics of the story already produce their own tension? Political and geographical contexts go scrupulously unexplored, the identity of the oppressor is never clarified (all we see of the pilots are portions of their backs in over-the-shoulder shots framing their front window's panoramic ground view), and the backstories of Shaw's barking alpha and McDowell's trembling beta are only vaguely and incrementally doled out. What remains is something at once meticulously tangible in its moment-to-moment action choreography and eerily abstract in its larger narrative design." Full review of this film's new Kino Lorber blu-ray up now at Slant.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990) A Film by Peter Greenaway

"Peter Greenaway, something of an aesthetic chameleon over his long, varied career, goes to further moment-to-moment extremes of planimetric staging and obsessive symmetry than Kubrick ever did, exaggerating the decorative artifice as a material presence in the film. In rigorously choreographed horizontal dolly movements, and with an anamorphic lens splaying the edges of the frame, Greenaway’s camera probes the layers of Albert’s hedonistic den — something of a defective Matryoshka doll that gets increasingly unflattering (a boisterous kitchen, rancid walk-in freezers, and a noirish parking lot) the more it expands from its innermost form (the luxurious dining hall). It’s unmistakably apparent that this is an artificial space even before the source of an angelic opera voice on the soundtrack is revealed as a toddler dishwasher with a freaked-out head of white hair." Continued at In Review Online. This is a piece I wrote months ago but forgot to publish to the site.

Don't Look Back (1967) A Film by D.A. Pennebaker

"In an age when Bob Dylan occasionally comes down to earth to lend gravelly gravitas to a Chrysler commercial or to half-heartedly spoof his own tactful reserve in an IBM spot, it's possible to forget that he was once the most enigmatic iconoclast in the musical world, his slippery identity impervious to both the prying inquiries of the press as well as the more innocuous curiosities of his fan base. But even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan's current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn't be privy to the things it shows us. Granted, it's precisely this intimate access that the behind-the-scenes documentary theoretically sells, but long before this particular kind of film congealed into a recognized genre, not to mention before label operations micromanaged artists to such an extent that anything approaching an “unfiltered” exchange between documentarian and celebrity was a logistical impossibility, Pennebaker was stealing private moments that the entire world was salivating for, but had no reasonable right to witnessing." Continued on at Slant Magazine, where I review the new Criterion Blu-Ray.

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.

The Duke of Burgundy (2015) A Film by Peter Strickland

"Pinastri, a scientific term given to a specific moth family, is the safe word for S&M lovers Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), but it’s no mistake that it also sounds like 'Be Nasty' when whispered in the women’s thick British accents. That’s a strategic aural misdirection, as The Duke of Burgundy ultimately builds a parallel universe where surfaces frequently mislead. It’s also an indication of the extent to which director Peter Strickland has meticulously thought through this vintage erotica throwback-cum-oneiric psycho-thriller, which shares with Strickland’s prior Berberian Sound Studio an enterprising sense of aesthetic singularity." Read on at the new In Review Online.

Starred Up (2013) A Film by David Mackenzie

"What happens...when an inmate is too erratic, too antagonistic, too compulsively violent to even be controlled within the ostensibly restrictive environment of a prison? That’s the simple premise from which Starred Up mounts its startling, horrifying portrait of a U.K. criminal detention center." Full piece at In Review Online.

DIY Dystopia

Balagan Films of Cambridge, Massachusetts represents what is currently the heroic norm in avant-garde cinema curation and exhibition: a not-for-profit operation scouring the world for distinctive aesthetic experiences while relying on crowdsourcing to scrape enough funds together to just barely survive. At Balagan’s latest program – their first after an abnormal hiatus of several months – the staff’s repeated plugging (self-consciously described by head curator Jeff Silva as “beating a dead horse”) of their soon-to-expire Kickstarter came across less as cash-happy beggary than as an unfortunate necessity, an earnest plea for assistance better to get out of the way up front and move on to what really matters: the moving images.

The films in this latest program, which was entitled “DIY Dystopia” and ran approximately an hour and a half, are associated by their shared concerns over the state of the natural world in an increasingly jeopardized industrial landscape. An additional charge of immediacy is attached to this theme when considering that all of the filmmakers involved – Douglas Urbank, Jennifer Reeves, Christina Battle, Dan Baker, and Ben Rivers – are currently based in cities; an intensely “artificial” environment, as one Balagan curator noted. (Dante’s Quartet (1987), a film by the late Stan Brakhage, was also featured in the lineup, and he too spent a great deal of his life in an urban center.) Incorporating a blend of traditional shooting, hand-painting, optical printing, found footage manipulation, and other esoteric uses of celluloid, the films not only seek unpredictable methods for representing the contemporary environmental crisis but also tie this lament into the decay of material cinema as a larger practice and as a way of seeing.

Boston local Douglas Urbank’s in-progress found footage film WWII kicked off the evening accompanied by a live score from acoustic improv trio Duck That, a hissing, squelching, howling exercise in sustained tension that eerily matched the images of dead soldiers being carted to and fro in wheelbarrows and Nazi officials gathering in chunks. In fact, the otherworldly rattle emanating from Duck That’s shadowy corner beneath the screen – blown through woodwinds, gargled through loudspeakers, and punctuated by the sounds of unidentifiable trinkets – threatened to divert the attention away from Urbank’s somewhat dryly repurposed imagery, in which the only conspicuous marks of deconstruction are animated shifting tear lines and rows of circular negative space, implemented as if to suggest the footage crumbling and splitting apart.


The next film, Jennifer Reeves’ Landfill 16 (2011), offered a far more dense and mysterious visual surface. Presumably a tattered amalgamation of direct painting/scratching and less controlled manners of celluloid handling (i.e. burying in the dirt), the resulting visual chaos alternately evokes bubbling magma, eroded rust, and scorched Earth. The film’s weather-beaten color palette – resembling that of late-period Tony Scott – mutates as frequently as the textured surface, pulsating inward and outward in a mess of scratches, blotches, and Petri dish patterns. Towards the latter half of the film, barely legible images of wildlife begin emerging beneath this layered visual noise, marking the first instance of a rather didactic gesture that repeats throughout these films: the posing of a contrast between technology/human waste and seemingly untainted nature. (Landfill 16’s ambient soundtrack, which pits together distant industrial noises and ghostly field recordings, forges the same dialectic.)

Christina Battle’s Buffalo Lifts (2004) packs similarly hypnotizing imagery into its concise three-minute running time: an extended shot of a buffalo herd moving, significantly, from right to left that is nearly overwhelmed by the calculated destruction of the film’s surface. Here, a particularly punchy metaphor is raised regarding the simultaneous degradation of the natural world and physical cinema. As the buffalo charge insistently across the frame – their mere directionality subliminally invoking degeneration – they rush towards extinction, just as the celluloid they have been captured with is combusting around them, reducing them to strokes of pure movement. The film’s silence underscores its power; no frivolous elements are needed for such a harmonious matching of form and content.


Battle is also responsible for Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road and 97th Street (2002), a work of similar brevity and potency. The film’s focal point is an image of a silhouetted oil derrick bobbing slowly in and out of the ground, but it’s by no means a very descriptive shot. Instead, the methodical motion of the drill is reduced to a graphic cadence in the frame around which the detritus of burnt, dirty film stock gathers. Through rephotographing techniques, Battle shows the image being knocked out of alignment with the projector, a sudden boundary obstruction that echoes the derrick’s disruption of the line between land and sky. As in Buffalo Lifts, neither the Earth nor celluloid can survive such exploitation of the natural world.

Dan Baker finds a lovely image for this inherent doom of nature in the face of man-made extravagance in Transaension (2006), which the filmmaker claims is about fossil fuel extraction: a human figure, burning like the sun in the bottom right corner of the frame, dwarfed by a fog of fiery abstraction, stacked up like layers of compromised geological crusts above him. It’s a fleeting image, but it’s undeniably the most resonant of the show. Baker pushes past some of the simple-minded dichotomies permeating the rest of the films to arrive at a crystallization of human resilience against its own self-destructive tendencies. The rest of the sex-minute film is spent building up a hellish miasma of red and orange blotches and spiderweb scratches suggesting cracked rock, all set to a menacing low-frequency drone; this is human progress as an inescapable nightmare, not something to be pondered or lightly questioned.

Alongside these relatively low-profile works, Balagan curators thought it fitting to conclude the program with films by Stan Brakhage and Ben Rivers, two artists already somewhat well known for their expressions of a pastoral ideal. Dante’s Quartet, a hand-painted assault structured around Dante’s four stages of afterlife, and Ah, Liberty! (2008), another of Rivers’ monochrome, cinemascope explorations of human communion with nature, provided a rather serene ending to the dystopia presented by the other films. Two Years at Sea, Rivers' first feature-length work, was one of my key discoveries in 2011 and remains one of my favorite films of the decade so far, and this short, Rivers' very first release according to IMDB, works in a similar vein. Naturally lit black-and-white images of wildlife mix with a score comprised mostly of diegetic sounds, but here Rivers brushes up against narrative and genre elements. The film's premise is simple: a seemingly pure landscape becomes host to a series of increasingly bizarre human interferences culminating in a pair of hooded toddlers beating and swatting mindlessly at the wreckage left by an earlier brush fire. These odd staged bits rest somewhere between horror and absurdism, but the overall tone lands on the lighter side largely because of Rivers' inspired use of the spacious 2:35:1 format, which creates an inherently freeing composition; even in an ostensible close-up, there's a great deal of image for the eye to explore.

It's easy to wonder whether the Brakhage short was included merely for the sake of contrasting a current, politically charged approach to handmade film with an older, more metaphysical one. Otherwise, Brakhage's short seems out of place in the context of all these self-consciously environmentally-minded works. At the very least, its existence within such a contemporary program exposes how prevalent and unavoidable this issue is in our present world; recognizing the eerie parallels between the decline of celluloid and the decline of the natural world, these filmmakers seem to have arrived at their finished material out of a sense of obvious ethical responsibility. The urgency shows. Only a measly portion of contemporary cinema bothers to creatively engage with the unignorable fate of our industrial over-reliance, and Balagan has managed to tactfully unify the noble few.

AFI Fest 2012: Saturday Nov. 3rd and Sunday Nov. 4th

(Disclaimer: These notes were scribbled in between screenings while waiting in line for other films. Only minor editing, for grammatical and factual purposes, occurred.) Thank God for the AFI Fest. I mean it as no overstatement to say that I was positively ecstatic to discover that the festival would be running during my stay in Los Angeles and that it was, without trickery or fine print, completely free. Here was an opportunity to check off the year's most anticipated festival films from Toronto, Venice, and New York, as well as the films I missed at Cannes, in one fell swoop. For perhaps the first time ever, I will have surveyed a year in film adequately enough to put forth a confident year-end list. I was quick to find out, however, that AFI Fest is not entirely different from Cannes – that is, not the silver platter I was unrealistically hoping for: films reach capacity abruptly, the packed schedule makes the head spin, and, most irritatingly, it’s still quite possible to wait in line for over an hour and, after standing awkwardly with confused victims as the time slot passes, be denied entry to a film. This was my start to the festival. Fortunately, it was a Kim Ki-Duk film, and I was already half-planning my first paragraph (the festival got off to a deeply unpleasant start with Pieta, because what else is new with KKK?...).

My schedule did finally begin with a bang, however, on Saturday afternoon with Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, the British director’s gorgeously shot and cut second feature about a meek English sound engineer named Gilderoy (Toby Jones) who arrives in Italy (in Rohmer-esque elliptical fashion, right at the beginning of the film) as a for-hire mixer on fictional director Giancarlo Santini’s (Antonio Mancino) giallo horror film, very much in the vain of Argento, Bava, etc. He’s expecting an inoffensive paid gig, but quickly discovers the work will be neither easy (he’s never worked on such a challenging or morally trying project) nor profitable (“money cannot be a motivator,” warns the absurdly dominating Santini). From there, Gilderoy phones in his work, begs for travel reimbursement, confesses to artistic differences, attempts to abandon the job only to be ominously turned down, and finally enters that familiar Lynchian zone of mushy disorientation where art, illusion, and reality clash and ultimately absorb one another (in this regard, Strickland's corresponding blending of image and sound through fluid transitions is accomplished).

The film hinges on a swap in female leads – a maneuver so often employed or hinted at by Lynch as a paradigm shift – and this gesture holds the key to understanding what Strickland is getting at. Berberian Sound Studio manages to be both a parodic celebration of the endless innovation and almost goofy conviction of Italian horror as well as a critical commentary on not only this particular genre but all works of art and cinema that, in aiming for so-called “brutal honesty,” end up merely perpetuating dominant and wrongheaded attitudes. Here, the target is misogyny, so carelessly flaunted in Santini’s dictatorial and borderline abusive direction, which eventually flurries into actual (offscreen) sexual offense. Gilderoy, an unwitting third-party, is finally affected by this workplace atmosphere too: after the actress switch, he begins speaking in Italian and his gestures grow remote and mechanical, the implication being that, in being swallowed up by this project, his identity has shifted, just as any artistic act must require complete commitment and immersion – one might say, the abandonment of one’s self – for it to work. Money cannot be a motivator, indeed.



In the next film I saw, very little could be boiled down to motivation. Nony Geffen’s microbudget feature Not in Tel Aviv seems to delight in its own senselessness, putting across radical tonal shifts and pieces of nonsensical dialogue with an unshakeable straight face. One might say this is a nihilistic film, but that would be disingenuous. Geffen has too much apparent joy for life and too much compassion for his wayward leads, even as he writes them into increasingly implausible scenarios. Essentially a series of non-sequiturs shared between an antisocial teacher (played by Geffen himself), his kidnapped student, and his high school sweetheart, the film has the dazed aimlessness of an Andrew Bujalski movie shot with an additional jolt of sensuality. Early on, I was bothered and even slightly put off by its incongruent approach – Geffen plays the murder of a mother as indie quirk – but slowly I found myself catching on to the film’s rarefied wavelength, and its misty light and soft pixilated black-and-white edges had a lot to do with it. Geffen’s photographic attention to his beautiful lead actresses (Romi Aboulafia and Yaara Pelzig are real finds) is near-Bergmanesque, allowing the film a genuine tenderness not often present in this kind of quasi-mumblecore exercise.

Unfortunately, the questions that were bouncing around in my head after the intoxicatingly weird Not in Tel Aviv – were the actresses actual friends of Geffen?; were the events depicted autobiographical?; to be blunt, what were the intentions? – would not be appeased as I had to ditch the Q&A to scurry a block down the street to catch Holy Motors again. Leos Carax’s hypnotic poem was resoundingly my favorite work from Cannes this summer, and I was hoping to relive some of the mystified joy I experienced watching it for the first time. Turns out that in many ways Holy Motors, by its very loony episodic nature, is designed to have a special effect on the virginal and the uninitiated (this chatty American crowd was having more of a ball with it than the French). That is not to say that I was not still deeply immersed in this dreamlike cocoon of a film, but that I lost a great deal of the shock and awe that accompanied my first viewing. In its place, though, came even greater contemplation, as Carax’s layers of association and abstraction only invite further peeling back. When I first saw the film in Cannes, I had to rush out before the credits rolled to stand in line for Amour, but this time I was able to sit through and caught Carax's dedication to the late Yekaterina Golubeva, the star of Pola X and the mother of the director's child. Knowing this placed in context the film's mournful attitude towards role-playing and the inevitability of life, and rendered Carax's self-aware sense of humor a particular bright spot.



It’s impossible to dismiss the technical difficulties that set the scheduled start time of the film back an hour and a half. When the film did begin, it was clear that the issues had still not been entirely resolved: in the moody, suggestive opening of Carax himself surveying his bedroom and then opening a hidden door to reveal a sleeping crowd at a cinema, the projectionists were still fiddling quite conspicuously with brightness and contrast, causing some images to blotch up indecipherably. When Carax finally cuts to daylight, an unflattering fog of green and a blowing out of the highlights was overwhelming for the first 10 minutes until finally the projectionists cleared up the matter. Oddly enough, this unpredictable happenstance helped bolster Holy Motors’ argument for celluloid; even though it’s shot in digital, it’s constantly calling attention to and mourning the intangible instability of its medium, the unsettling question of what exactly it means to be a digital recording in the first place as opposed to a concrete film strip. In fact, the film even offers some digital distortions of its own towards the end, as traveling views of nocturnal Paris crumble into incomprehensible fuzz and glitch. These shots are not unlike the unplanned problems at the beginning of the film (I’m sure some unknowing viewers suspected these were reprisals of the projection difficulties, or, conversely, that the issues at the beginning were intentional), and they contribute to the overwhelming feelings of sadness and loss that permeate the film – towards decay, larger purpose, and past selves.

Next up was Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air (French title: Après mai) the following afternoon, a coming-of-age drama set amidst the political turbulence of early 70s France when young, angry, and overeducated leftists were lashing out at a reactionary government stubbornly stuck in its ways after the May 1968 protests. For the most part, the film doesn't emphasize the detail of the political situation, instead allowing its explosive opening riot scene – wherein some of Assayas' most impressive and fluid visual choreography, feeling both hectic and precise, traces the beatings and chases through a thick fog of tear gas – to form the unsettling groundwork for the protagonists' bitterness throughout the film. Further acts of violence and vandalism ensue: Gilles (Clément Métayer), Christine (Lola Créton, gradually becoming the new Anna Karina in her puckish expressions, on-and-off sass, and unshowy ease), and Alain (Felix Armand) seem determined to see how hard they can push the buttons of their school officials before being expelled or arrested, and when they appear to have reached that breaking point after hurling a flaming bottle at a portable on school grounds, they decide to flee to Italy for a short time. This is precisely when the film reaches its peak (I could swoon in those picturesque shots of Italy much longer), and what follows descends slightly down a familiar path of free spirits, Pollock-inspired paintings, activist folk, agitprop filmmaking, hard drugs, and foggy religious epiphanies.



That Something in the Air ultimately coalesces into very little (or perhaps just something more elusive that I didn't catch on first viewing) after promising so much is disappointing given Assayas' track record of making seemingly simple films that expand outward to account for multiple layers of emotion and subtext. The film continues the fleet-footed cool and bright pastel ambiance of Summer Hours (both of which were lensed by Eric Gautier, a disciple of the late Harris Savides in his naturalistic lighting and confident camerawork) but lacks something as revelatory as that film's wise commentary on the value inscribed in objects or the irreconcilable divides between generations. It's expertly scored with period-specific rock and folk tunes, as always with Assayas, and there is also his characteristically rapt attention to tactility and sensations – to the feeling of breezy currents in open air rooms, of cigarette smoke wafting through fiery debates, and of thin surfaces of summer sweat lining the skin – but as I left the theater, I could not escape the feeling that Something in the Air was missing a sense of a larger purpose or a core idea other than nimbly handled nostalgia.

The next film more than made up for any disconnect I felt in the latter stages of Assayas' movie. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, in its perfect (terribly, terribly perfect) harmony of form and function, elicited the most physical response I've had to a film since either Antichrist or Irreversible. At a certain point towards the hour-mark of the film, I regrettably had to step out just to regain my gravitational bearings and walk off a growing nausea that was threatening to act up (if you catch my drift). Plunging the viewer into the nightmarish labor of deep sea commercial fishing via an onslaught of abstract imagery captured with an array of Go Pro cameras hooked to various parts of the sea vessel (chains, anchors, workers' helmets, even maimed fish), the film achieves a profound groundlessness that is the very poison of anyone prone to seasickness. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor's visuals have a lo-res harshness that occasionally bleeds into downright abstraction as it is, and when they couple that with an adventurous editing style that cuts invisibly from darkness to darkness so that one moment the camera is being pummeled underwater by the wake of the ship and the next it's staring into the gaping mouth of a bloody fish on deck, there's no ground zero to grasp on to. It's a hallucinatory succession of sensual image and sound, making the rare moments when the camera settles itself briefly (as in an amusing long take of a fishermen falling asleep to drab television on his break) a much needed repose.



Whatever my own personal physical objections to Leviathan, I cannot deny the groundbreaking accomplishment that it is. This is authorless, distinctly 21st century cinema; or rather, I should say that its author is the ocean, the wind, the fish and the seagulls aboard the ship – that is, all elements untouched by the human hand, but only made visible through technological advances in image capture. (To go a step further, the fact that some of the film's moments end up feeling so aesthetically sublime, such as when flocks of angelic seagulls seem to be flying in mystical awareness of the camera, implies that nature itself has an artful side.) The result is something vaguely akin to David Gatten's aleatoric scratch film series What the Water Said, but whereas Gatten's work points backwards and sideways to Brakhage, Thorston Fleisch, and Bruce McClure even as it paves new roads, Leviathan is even more unmatched in the history of seeing, even more progressive in its optimism for the limitless possibilities of the medium. It was fitting, then, that for some unknown reason the couple seated behind me brought their very young daughter to the screening. Her whispery pronouncements of awe ("look, the fish!", "where are we?", etc.), particularly impassioned during the short about herding in the northern hemisphere that preceded Leviathan (called Reindeer and directed by Eva Weber, who has a hell of an eye and whose future work I look forward to), put into further perspective the mysterious blank slate vision of this film.

(Note: My next screenings are tonight and Wednesday, not to mention any surprises I might throw in between, so expect a Part Two by Thursday.)

The Freethinker (Fritänkaren) A Film by Peter Watkins (1994)

If cinema is to survive as a democratic art form, one of its most crucial figures is the English filmmaker Peter Watkins, not because of any particular aesthetic approach to the medium but because of a distinct philosophical agenda that has inflected all of his work since he began making films in the late 50's. Watkins' outspoken critique of the mass media due to its stranglehold on widespread thought and suffocation of minority voices has inevitably pushed him to the fringes of the image-making world, where his challenging, provocative, and formally inventive works are forced to struggle for their infinitesimal audiences. The Freethinker, Watkins' belated companion piece to his 1974 stroke of genius Edvard Munch, represents perhaps the utopian ideal of his worldview, even as it often abandons Watkins' own voice and loses cinematic focus because of it. After failing to acquire funding for the project in the 80's when he first intended to make it, Watkins was able to produce the film with resources provided by a small Swedish high school, where he was to collaborate with the students for a semester-long training course out of which The Freethinker would emerge.

Watkins has always been interested in the idea of rationing out authorship and ownership in his own work, which extends to his inclusion of non-professional actors and crew members, his openness to improvisation, his penchant for giving performers the ability to comment upon the film within its diegesis, and much more, but The Freethinker goes further than many of his films in this distribution of voices. Previously untrained students acted in the film, devised scenarios for the script, and in some instances even directed scenes, heavily influencing a film that for more than four hours dances around fiction and documentary, political and personal, past and present, text and meta-text, and historical fact and poetic recreation without ever fully separating the respective threads. Watkins employs these methods to shrink the gap between both the film and the audience and the film and the conditions of its own making (i.e. life), ultimately insisting upon an active participation with the film. Keeping a film's narrative space enclosed and the process of its production secret, Watkins seems to be suggesting, is to guard against the entrance of the viewer's own consciousness, and with it, his personality, thoughts, and experiences. The Freethinker, on the other hand, as well as all of Watkins' work, lives and dies based on the extra-diegetic context (personal memories, political and social conditions) brought to the experience by the viewer.

As an extension of themes raised in Edvard Munch, The Freethinker places playwright August Strindberg (another fictionalized version of whom made his way into the previous biopic) at its center, focusing on the ways in which the pursuit of his controversial personal expression was consistently thwarted - like Munch's - by his country's manipulative political pressures. Strindberg is embodied here by Anders Mattsson, a young man whose angular features and cavernous eyes make him an ideal candidate for Watkins' probing close-ups, and who resembles, surprisingly so, the man himself, as the film's frequent cutaways to archival photographs of Strindberg demonstrate. But it's not merely a surface similarity that aligns the performer and his character; Mattsson, working for the first time as a motion-picture actor, is able to convey during the period piece sequences the tenderness and wrath competing within Strindberg, the latter of which took the fore as his career continued and his work became increasingly marginalized. The effects of Strindberg's feral nature are dumped largely on his first wife Siri Von Essen, played by Swedish biology student Lena Settervall, who also brings an unexpected depth of feeling to her role. Both actors are seen throughout the film against black backgrounds commenting with grave seriousness about their respective characters, and in Setterval's close-up, the round facial structure and melancholy default expression recalls Liv Ullman.

The Freethinker shifts between several different formal modes throughout: loose recreations of moments from Strindberg's life, re-stagings of scenes from Strindberg's plays, bizarre poetic interludes that materialize psychological states, composed interviews of the cast members, naturalistic behind-the-scenes footage featuring contemporary journalists questioning Mattsson while he's in character, roundtable conversations between Watkins, journalists, and current Swedish citizens on the state of contemporary politics and culture, and relatively straightforward episodes of documentary information-transfer (on-screen text, archival footage and stills). Watkins sequences these distinct strategies with anarchic disregard for linearity, conventionality, or much discernible structure whatsoever aside from the mostly chronological presentation of Strindberg's artistic life. Therefore, he's free to clash up footage however he sees fit, resulting in a wealth of associational effects (some subtle, some didactic) whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate the cyclical nature of historical "progress," the ways in which the failures of the past unceasingly show up in varying forms in the present. Where The Freethinker surpasses standard message-making is that it's never expressly, or exclusively, about delivering this idea but rather about the many ways this root concept can provoke a plethora of tangential ideas about media, politics, social codes, artistic license, artistic truth, etc.

While Edvard Munch derived firmly from Watkins' own directorial consciousness and thus provided powerful juxtapositions of images and sound, here the amateur and multi-disciplined production means that a great portion of the source material is bland and cinematically inert. At least half of the video footage was shot in an unglamorous sound stage that was at least three times larger than what the logistical qualifications of the shoot called for, and the remaining location material is flat and uninspired, with the actors usually reciting their lines back and forth from a locked position and the camera taking no advantage of the space it's in. Therefore the strength of the film falls largely on the shoulders of Watkins' provocative editing, his ability to assemble the material in striking and unexpected ways. It's telling of Watkins' talent, then, that The Freethinker still emerges as a challenging, intellectually restless, and often invigorating work in spite of these drawbacks.

Wuthering Heights (2011) A Film by Andrea Arnold

If there was any doubt of the emotional infantilism and redundancy of Andrea Arnold's new and fiercely independent update to the classic novel Wuthering Heights, a tune by English pop-folk act Mumford and Suns portentously titled "The Enemy" springs up on the soundtrack, interrupting the soundscape of this otherwise insistently diegetic work. The song cries, "How could you lean on a man who was falling?" a pithy summarization of the central doomed romance of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, two young lovers in a windswept farmhouse in a harsh 19th Century Yorkshire landscape. Arnold pulled a similarly heavy-handed move in her previous Fish Tank with Nas' "Life's a Bitch," a rap that not only cemented the film's incessant miserabilism but also undermined the progress hitherto made by the impoverished characters. Musical accompaniment this overt and unwarranted can't help but give the impression of a director timid about the impact of her source material and the methods used to convey the emotions and themes within. In Fish Tank, that timidness severely distracted from the strengths of the film; here, it's just a safety net, another sign that the audience should be feeling the kind of unease and desperation that they've been feeling throughout.

Fortunately, the musical coda is not the nail in the coffin of Arnold's work. This is a film loaded with too many striking aesthetic ideas and brooding atmospheres (all of which descend from Tarr, Malick, and French director Philippe Grandrieux, who uses similarly abstracted handheld shots) to be entirely hampered by its intermittent juvenilia. With its opening scene of an adult Heathcliff (James Howson) slamming himself into a concrete wall repeatedly in a drab, featureless room filmed in queasy handheld shots that translate the brutality of the act to the screen, the film announces itself as a proudly extreme diversion from the long line of previous cinematic adaptations of Emily Brontë's text. Arnold replaces dialogue, character development, and lavish attention to period decor with mud, wind, rain, and rotting animal carcasses, all of which impress upon the film a tactile relationship with nature. The weather (usually grey and threatening) and the open landscape dictates the lives of the characters in the novel, and Arnold, recognizing that as the most cinematically expressive aspect of the work, fills the film with shots of flora and fauna and painterly montages which seem to accomplish little narratively. It's tough to say whether Arnold is making any kind of statement about man's minuscule part in the natural world; instead, this fascination with the details of the setting functions to ground Heathcliff and Cathy's youthful emotional reticence in a very specific place in nature.

Arnold is so committed in her portrayal of the Yorkshire setting that nature is often called upon to fill the void left by the primitive character development. Part of the goal here is to strip the novel down to its narrative essentials, compressing the book's epic romance and its themes of obsession, outsidership, class warfare, and religious hypocrisy to an implicitly felt brew of glances and gestures. When young Heathcliff (played by 14-year-old Solomon Glave) - a wandering black kid of questionable origins (Arnold's decision to do away with Brontë's more ambiguous explanation of Heathcliff's outsider identity and go straight for a black-white dichotomy is both a brave and simplistic decision) - is taken in by the lowly Earnshaw family because Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) believes it to be "the Christee-yan thing to do," Arnold immediately conveys the family's knee-jerk intolerance of their new black brethren through the menacing stares of Mr. Earnshaw's hateful son Hindley (Lee Shaw), the family's servant Joseph (Steve Evets), the housemaid Ellen (Simone Jackson), and even young Cathy (Shannon Beer). Little is spoken, but Arnold's choice to stage the meeting of Heathcliff and the Earnshaws on a rainy night by inky, flickering firelight, as foreboding a set as any in a film of fog, dim natural light, and dark interiors, directly introduces racism as a central theme.

The second aim of Wuthering Heights is to capture the feeling of hesitantly falling in love for the first time and of hormonal charges bursting to the surface at unexpected times and in unusual ways. Fish Tank's best scene featured a dangerously seductive Michael Fassbender fondling the daughter of his character's girlfriend, and by shooting the scene through the girl's perspective, Arnold was able to catch the vivid moments of fear and excitement that characterize sexual awakenings. Here, she rigorously adopts Heathcliff's perspective for the entirety of the film, and his first intimate encounters with Cathy pop like sunshine against the murky landscapes. One scene involves the two of them riding a horse, and for an extended moment Heathcliff luxuriates in the closeness, slyly smelling her hair and glimpsing her bouncing figure. Later they wrestle around in mud, an act that's fueled by both sensuality and subtle vengeance for Cathy's earlier intolerance, especially noticeable when Heathcliff pins her wrists to the ground in a charged embrace. Arnold deftly handles these moments of emotional ambiguity with claustrophobic, intuitive camerawork (aided further by the film's unconventional 1:33:1 aspect ratio).

Trouble is, Wuthering Heights is a two-hour-plus feature film, and it never expands these thematic roots any further. Racial tensions balloon outward into obligatory n-words, and the burgeoning sexual urges between Heathcliff and Cathy fizzle over into their adult selves (Howson and a questionably cast Kaya Scodelario), who are still kowtowing around one another and making indecisive advances. Instead of exploring the contours of these difficult emotions, how they morph and stagnate over time, Arnold prefers to reduce them to symbolic gestures. Thus, the relentless images of mangled and defenseless animals are able to stand in for both Heathcliff's animalistic image to the white folk and the inevitably decaying loss of innocence in the central romance. After not one but two puppy hangings, the film becomes metaphorically burdensome and, frankly, cruel. At a certain point around a third of the way through, Wuthering Heights bottoms out, adding nothing new to its portentous cycle of anticipation and failure. When a teary-eyed Heathcliff smothers Cathy's recently deceased body with kisses in the final act, it's a punchy metaphor for the film's own belated explosion of emotion.

Barry Lyndon (1975) A Film by Stanley Kubrick

Barry Lyndon, despite its superficial appearance as a departure for the great director, is Stanley Kubrick's immaculate, thought-provoking attempt to grapple with history, nature, storytelling, philosophy, war, and the follies of man, all themes that had come to define his work up to that point and beyond. The film, concerning the rise and fall of the titular figure in eighteenth-century Europe, is sparse, detached, and staid on the surface, comprising few of the cosmetic qualities - overt stylistic brio, provocation, explosive moments - associated with Kubrick. Yet its surface only disguises its extraordinary depth, which to some extent is also nothing new for Kubrick (think of the labyrinthine coded language referencing the Apocalypse in The Shining, or the casual black humor of Dr. Strangelove in lieu of a fictional military catastrophe all too feasible), but it's perhaps more understated in its idea delivery than any of his other films. In many ways, Kubrick flatters the conventions of a respectable period piece: a well-spoken, literary third-person narration by Michael Hordern, breathtaking costumes, sweeping scope, and linear, episodic progression. But a closer look yields subtle, significant mutations to these familiar tropes, all of which drastically alter the implications of the drama.

If there's one key subtext in the film that separates it from the conventional period piece, it's Kubrick's keen awareness of the nature of the material - drawn from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray - as historical, and therefore imaginary, even deceptive. Barry Lyndon is always sensitive to the fallibility of any attempt to narrativize history, using deliberate aesthetic maneuvers to remove the audience from the spell of dramatic involvement and belief. Its meticulous recreations of paintings which are themselves staged scenes, its hyper-articulate narrator who undermines the onscreen action and effectively stomps out suspense, and its propensity to zoom back and subsume its characters into flat painterly tableaus are all methods of drawing attention to the idea of history as illusory representation, a fitting analogue to Redmond Barry, a man similarly prone to “representing” different versions of himself, none of which can be said to be the real thing. Barry (Ryan O'Neal), exemplifying what must have been a pivotal belief in the notion of class mobility in 18th century Europe, starts as an ignoble Irish farmhand lusting clumsily after his gold-digging cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) and subsequently becomes a British soldier, a Prussian soldier, a temporary surrogate husband to a lonely country widower, a wandering gambler with a rich Irish sidekick, a husband to the gorgeous and wealthy Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), a step-father to the jealous and vengeful Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali), a real father to Bryan Patrick Lyndon (David Morley), and an aging, lonely, anonymous member of the European financial elite.



All the while, the film's construction keeps the audience several steps ahead of Barry's inevitable rise-and-fall progression, making pre-ordained and inconsequential what might feel surprising and remarkable if pared down to its essential narrative movements. On the surface, Barry appears to suspend great courage in fighting a duel with the suitor of his cousin Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), fantastic bravery in participating in a head-to-head battle in an open field, supreme cunning in escaping the British Army and eventually the Prussian Army, clever forward-thinking in his victorious gambling pursuits, and impressive charm in his wooing of Lady Lyndon. However, the film incessantly pries apart the idyllic appearances of Barry's life, revealing them to often be the products of little more than ignorance, absurdity, and fraudulence, and it does so largely through two contrapuntal elements of its cinematic expression: Kubrick's images, slow, observant, clinical, deprived of internal spontaneity, always squeezing the life out of otherwise romantic scenes, and especially Hordern's narration, which can be gently sympathetic but is more often ironic, prescient, and scathing, creating a small mockery out of a man who believed himself to be of utmost fascination and prestige. Crucially, the narrator is also fixated on mortality and fate, mirroring Kubrick's largely panoramic viewpoints with his dry pronouncements that reveal an awareness of the dwarfing tendency of the vast physical world, the brutality of its treatment to single human beings in a complex network of large groups.

As such, Kubrick’s film is an acknowledgment of the power of historicizing and storytelling (Hordern engages in both) as means for putting into perspective truths broader than the scope of individual lives, and as a correlative it recognizes the power of artifice in ignoring matters of infinity, mortality, and nature. The society Barry climbs through is defined by acts of performance, ritual, and fakery, with no distinctions made between the Irish peasantry he sprouts from and the aristocratic high-class he ultimately finds himself locked in. Barry's duel with Captain Quin is revealed to be an elaborate hoax, something designed by the referees (members of Barry's extended family) to drive Barry out of the town and allow Nora and Quin's marriage to run smoothly, which ultimately succeeds in blinding Barry to his own failings. The machinations of Barry in the Prussian Army - lying, acting, faking sincerity and allegiance to the military - are normally intercepted by the effortlessly utilitarian Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Krüger) and waged against Barry in some way. The wealth earned from poker and chess on the road comes initially from cheating and only then from acquired skill and insight, and still it's a pastime bereft of social interaction and emotional connection. Kubrick is suggesting that these performances and rituals function as tools for blinding one's awareness to the cosmos, no matter how - and sometimes because of how - absurd and unproductive they are. On the other hand, stories, or retroactive perspectives, are the only way of realizing the essential insignificance of man in a larger scheme of nature.



Kubrick's harsh critique and minimization of his characters is coupled with a paradoxical sympathy, a level of genuine feeling for these misguided and mismanaged figures. A key distinction must be made: in the face of all these people suspending doubt and disbelief and convincing themselves that what they’re doing is dignified and true, Kubrick expresses regret rather than hostility. He feels sadness and pity for Barry, whose biggest shortcomings are his immodesty, his boundless materialism, and his inability to define his tangible goals for happiness and value. In an endless grasp for a vaguely shaped satisfaction, Barry cannot accurately contextualize his life even as the steps he takes to realize his desires are continually thwarted by uncaring external forces. When he's not refusing to acknowledge the troubles facing him, he's dropping the blame on someone in his close proximity, leading to a warped vision of social behavior and upward mobility that dictates the evaporation of love from his life. In his wake, he leaves people bumbling in depression, anxiety, or rage. The point of greatest sympathy here is Lady Lyndon, who Marisa Berenson plays as a melancholic ghost somehow detached from Barry's life before she even enters it, a stiffly and perfectly decorated object floating silently through the simultaneously opulent and underfurnished spaces of the Lyndon estate.

This unerring regret for the courses of action taken in Barry Lyndon's stuffy milieu extends from the individual to the collective, from the private to the public, and from the small-scale to the large-scale. Much of the film's guiding principles can be culled from its final onscreen text, wittily deemed an "epilogue": It was in the reign of George the III that the above named personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now. Kubrick's reliance upon the reverse zoom to move from intimate moments to dehumanizing master shots (often the only camera "movement" in the film, likely because it suggests a museum viewer scanning a composition on a wall) is a way of proposing this essential equality from our backwards-looking perspective, the ultimate interchangeability of these individuals within this particular moment in history, destined to be washed away with the flow of time. Thus, their frivolous concerns and rash behaviors are all the more regretful for failing to create distinctions among the pack.

Similarly, the text of the epilogue indicates that although Barry is ostensibly the center of the story, his narrative is much like those other figures that dot the beautiful horizon. Lord Bullingdon, who eventually duels with Barry after his Freudian complex fizzles out and reaches its logical conclusion, is finally likened to Barry despite his role in orchestrating his downfall, what with his outsized ambition and trivial ruses (he devises a complicated plan just to get Lady Lyndon out of her own mansion before he arrives, ironically, to take the place of the man he hates). Kubrick implies that the many acts of dueling (three are shown in the film), so petty in motivation and so devastating in execution, are no different than acts of large-scale war, which trivialize human life with the same outrageous precision. It's the ease with which the idiotic behaviors of small, insignificant individuals can come to permeate vast quantities of people that supplies the real sadness and poignancy to Barry Lyndon's tragedy.

Two Years at Sea (2011) A Film by Ben Rivers

Focusing with unflinching directness on the unbreakable bond between a human being and his environment, Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea ultimately reinstates in 86 minutes both cinema's fundamental connection with labor and its function as a tool for comprehensive, peerlessly intimate portraiture. The camera is, at its technological and epistemological core, a device used to document physical reality, with people being its ideal and most revealing subject. Rivers, a London-based experimental artist who has been creating short, vaguely anthropological visual studies since 2003, does away with narrative trappings, explanatory details, and dialogue altogether to exploit this capacity in Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length work. Expanding upon the 2006 short This Is My Land, the film concerns the life of Jake Williams, a hermit living in the middle of a forest in Scotland. According to the brief production notes, Jake held a desire to live alone in the wilderness from a very young age, and "spent two years working at sea to realize it."

The film has no interest in revealing what exactly its title means, nor is it concerned much with providing any context at all for Jake's lifestyle. None of the aforementioned background information is revealed in the film itself (although there are occasional silent cutaways to photographs seemingly depicting Jake's past life with what are perhaps family members), leaving Rivers to immerse himself and his camera in the unconventional routines and temporal rhythms of his Herzogian subject without any urge for commentary. Jake has fashioned a decrepit one-story home filled with ungainly piles of tools, papers, and paraphernalia, a structurally questionable tree-house consisting of an old caravan hoisted up across the branches of tall trees, and a ramshackle yard that doubles as a holding ground for his gathered forest supplies (mostly wood) where he sits in a beach chair to enjoy the quiet tranquility surrounding him. A great deal of his time, however, is spent away from his home on day trips up misty mountains, across tree-less fields, and into derelict ponds. He has held onto a dusty Jeep in order to entertain some of his more far-flung adventures (how he obtains the gas is a negligible question mark), but the majority of the time he simply backpacks across land, whistling as he goes.



Rivers eventually finds a loose structure out of what is ostensibly a life without obligations and restrictions, defined only by the daily need for survival. The film alternates between passages of work and rest, with the transitional moments comprised of contemplative shots of the wilderness composed with a painterly sensibility for shape, texture, and light. For such a deceptively muted, peaceful, carefree film, Jake's life is punctuated heavily by labor, by the numerous manual tasks required to sustain even the humblest of livelihoods. Thus, the film restages life itself as labor, calling attention to the presence of humans as ultimately transitory in a larger, natural order. Jake, as all humans, is essentially a guest to nature, and his work is necessitated merely by the fact that nature throws obstacles in his way (weather, unpredictable availability of resources, etc.). What I love about Two Years At Sea is how it sidesteps the impulse to either glorify the isolated lifestyle as some agrarian, primitivistic ideal or predict its character’s inevitable loneliness to make a case for the necessity of sociality (see Into the Wild), which speaks to Rivers’ anthropological curiosity. No imaginary, non-human, or anthropomorphic friends here, just a man doing what he needs to do to survive alone in the wilderness, seemingly for the comfort and exciting freedom that isolation in the natural world brings.

As Rivers fixates his camera on Jake's routines throughout the film, the man himself largely remains an enigma. There's something so casual and well-adjusted about his behavior that suggests he has long ago shaken off any doubts about his radical lifestyle. Recurring shots show him sitting or lying down doing nothing to hold his attention, but rather than implying deep thought Jake's blank facade seems to express a transcendent tabula rasa, a total elimination of typical social concerns. At the same time, however, Jake has not entirely shed worldly materiality, showcased in his propensity for throwing on bluesy background music on his gramophone (he seems to have taken a special liking to the Jew harp and the bouzouki), or in the old photographs littered across his living space, fragments of a more traditional social history. That Jake can resemble anywhere from an excited boyscout to a Winter’s Bone extra to a great philosopher in a Rembrandt (a shot of Jake reading seems designed to banish any hasty assumptions of hippie illiteracy) depending on how Rivers frames and lights him only compounds his unknowable and eccentric personality.



In a truly original move, Two Years at Sea brings the real and intimate concerns of a documentary into the parameters of the hyper-cinematic, trotting out an absurdly wide ratio (2:75:1) via cropped Super 16mm that hasn't been touched since epic 70mm productions like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). What Rivers does with the format is remarkable, lending a mythic quality to Jake and his environment even as he staunchly refuses the fussy cinematographic calculation of those Hollywood superproductions. Sometimes he will place the area of interest in the far side of the frame just because he can, leaving the rest of the frame black, whereas other times he animates every portion of the vast geography of the frame, watching as Jake takes the long hike across the composition. There's something truly sculptural - in Tarkovsky's sense - about the way Rivers carves out blocks of his subject's unique time and arranges them into striking, free-flowing images. In one instance, Jake assembles a makeshift raft out of wood and jumbo milk cartons (a comparatively bombastic moment in an otherwise quiet film) and rows it out into a pond. Right when the viewer assumes he’s headed to the other side, he stops dead in the middle of the body of water to drift carelessly - his body entirely motionless – the long distance to the other side of the panoramic frame. And once his vessel has nearly bumped against land, he turns back. It’s an achingly poetic image that possesses the sparse, smeared beauty of a Caspar David Friedrich oil painting and most succinctly and elegantly communicates Jake's firm sense of inner peace.

Further deglamorizing his bold format is Rivers' decision to leave evidence of the material wear-and-tear of his chosen medium. Throughout, the screen subtly flashes like a degraded silent film, evidence of a transfer from 16mm to 35mm that Rivers deliberately didn't refine, and blotches of dirt and dust accent the omnipresent grain. It's a fitting, and beautiful, aesthetic mirror of his subject, whose physicality and material well-being has been similarly deteriorated from continued exposure to the elements. As such, Two Years at Sea tends to feel like a lost film discovered beneath dirt, an organic object slowly dying like Jake's decrepit wilderness home and like the celluloid medium itself. In the marvelous eight-and-a-half-minute shot that quietly concludes the film, Jake drifts gradually into sleep beside a crackling fire, revealed only in a close-up that miraculously becomes less and less illuminated the more Jack slips out of consciousness. The film grain grows uglier and blotchier as the light source gradually disappears, eventually filling the screen with an indistinct mass of underexposed celluloid. Finding and watching Two Years at Sea is akin to discovering an unintentional objet d'art from this mysterious sleeping man.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) A Film by Tomas Alfredson

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy provides visual evidence of the significant distance between the impulses of literature and cinema. The tension between the two mediums tugs at every frame. There is Alfredson's conflicted relationship with the source material, John le Carré's original novel, the sense of the film paying lip service to the vertiginous strands of plot. Meanwhile, there is an intuitive feel for mood, atmosphere, mise-en-scene, and the various other elements that construct the cinematic world, elements that are somewhat jeopardized, or at least made secondary, when the film indulges a necessary urge to unspool plot. Alfredson has shown a curious propensity for downplaying exposition, for making narrative details and back-stories feel democratically unimportant. In Let the Right One In, this resulted in an intriguingly incomplete sense of the foundation for the characters' histories that effectively complimented the film's spare plot. In a story with such thickness of exposition as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, however this low-key approach to dramatic detail is quickly distancing, deliberately failing to provide a base of comprehension as the enveloping mood overwhelms the specific words, behaviors, and conflicts marking the larger narrative design.

And yet, there's so much conviction in the film's construction - its acting, cinematography, blocking, production design, costumes, etc. - that the film remains entirely riveting. Alfredson has so thoroughly sunken into the gritty, unforgiving, desaturated Cold War milieu that his film exudes a sense of being lived in, as if it's a pre-existing artifact rather than something that was built from scratch to approximate a bygone time. Smoke and dust fill the air, splashes of light poke through windows, seemingly important papers and other bric-a-brac cover nearly every square inch of table-top, and faded, garish patterned wallpapers peel slowly off walls. Through these decrepit spaces weathered men in similarly discolored sports jackets brood silently or merely pass by, their perpetual exasperation leaving a bitter taste in the air. Someone in a tight knit circle of British intelligence officials has revealed vital information to a Soviet spy who's now likely running amok with it. Not one man will budge with any revealing news, so semi-retired espionage expert George Smiley (Gary Oldman, who paradoxically never smiles throughout the film) is elected to take the place of the recently resigned Control (John Hurt), who clearly felt significant pressure from all of his somber right-hand men (Toby Jones, Mark Strong, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch).



Tinker, Tailor becomes centered on Oldman, a ruthless, uncompromising, and melancholy spy master whose hardened exterior Alfredson refuses to penetrate. Thus, the film's design - insistently paced, nearly inscrutable, and never stopping to check for audience comprehension - mirrors the rate at which and precision with which Smiley ponders his next move. A great deal of the film's major plot progressions are telegraphed not with dialogue but only with Smiley's gestures and sneaking eye movements (for the most part drooped in shadows). When the men do speak, often in long shot or peeped through telephoto lenses, they do so in espionage jargon (Operation Witchcraft comes up frequently), meaning that their political sleights of hand are obscured thickly by code words. As clues accumulate and suspicious men start to behave less and less suspiciously, one suspects the cool disorientation to be precisely Alfredson's point. It is so often in such ambiguous political affairs that the comparatively morally pure outsiders cannot pass judgment on the events because of sheer lack of insider knowledge. As a result, cruel, unfaithful, and insular men are the movers and shakers of a cycle of events that leave innocent people dead.

Alfredson tracks this cycle of events with clinical rigor; if the characters he's portraying are caught in an existential black hole with no escape (Tom Hardy's character is the best example, not known to the audience at first but quickly yanked from reclusion into the narrative), the director himself presents his material with the straightforward duty of an existential anti-hero. Rarely is his camera devoid of modest acrobatics, tracking around rooms slowly and unassumingly, gracefully shifting focus, giving visual attention to every member in a room, equally unsure of who to trust. With the help of the brilliant interior lighting by DP Hoyte Van Hoytema (definitely the cinematographer's finest moment since Let the Right One In) wherein light falls with seemingly malign intent and every lamp and overhead appears to cover only a one-foot radius (the inability to see clearly - what with the smoke and darkness - is often played into the narrative), the film's backhanded maneuvers are utterly enthralling to behold. It is quite simply the best looking film of the year, lovingly designed to recreate its setting and shot with an Ozu's eye for symmetry and indoor details. The film only grows more confusing as it presses on, but the mood of enveloping doom and sadness surrounding Oldman's compulsive workman expands. Rarely has being out of the loop felt so engaging.

Backs to the Wall: Alps and Shame

Both Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos and British director Steve McQueen have released massive international festival hits in the past few years: Dogtooth, a singularly unsettling allegorical black comedy, and Hunger, a transcendent chronicle of the IRA Prison Strike of the 1980's. With their latest films, one director has kept it low-key and local, and the other has gone American, keeping his Irish lead actor but moving to an NYC setting. The films, Alps and Shame, are both unmistakably their maker's, which is admirable for directors with only one previous feature (or in the case of Lanthimos, one obscure flop and one breakout success) to their name. Furthermore, they're also curious objects that suffer from very similar issues: they both tackle their ideas - fuzzy and vaguely complex in Alps, simple and familiar in Shame - in an oblique, non-confrontational manner, shying away from direct exploration and seeking to invite larger significance that's not warranted in the execution. But since I genuinely enjoyed their previous efforts, it's an example of sophomore slump that I greet more with interest and confusion than with frustration and hostility.

Following Dogtooth's primal scream of oddness and ambiguity, Lanthimos has decided to capitalize on the success of those traits and elevate them in Alps only a year later. Transplanting the social retardation and behavioral quirkiness of Dogtooth's suburban prison to a wider, more public and less specific milieu, Lanthimos reveals a group of eccentrics slowly and mysteriously, only exposing that which loosely connects them in an offhand bit of dialogue a third of the way through the film. It turns out that their regular meetings in a nondescript gymnasium are for an under-the-radar social service (deemed "Alps" for seemingly no reason other than to justify the title) that assists grieving individuals and families in the event of the sudden loss of a loved one by performing as that person and fully adopting their day-to-day routines. Aggeliki Papoulia, the brave actress who played the older sister in Lanthimos' prior film, is the performer we see most in Alps and the one who delivers said line of dialogue to an aging couple whose tennis-playing daughter was just killed in an accident. There's a cult-like strictness and dedication to the group that registers in Papoulia's consistent expression - which seems to suggest dread struggling to conceal itself beneath a collected exterior - and in her colleague Ariane Labed's nervous posture, a side-effect of her submission to a terrifyingly imposing dance coach played by Johnny Vekris who restricts her from graduating to pop music. Meanwhile, in episodes that are peripheral to the other narratives, members of Alps rehearse melodramatic, inscrutable dialogues to each other in clipped, uninflected tones as if amateur actors preparing for an audition, but they never break character.

The scenario is intriguingly flamboyant and fittingly bizarre, and as such it's a shame that Alps remains the mere skeleton of a film, a brilliant idea that was stillborn at the conception phase. Like Dogtooth, Alps presents a handful of motifs, metaphors, and subtexts to be sorted out, and specifically amplifies Dogtooth's concern for the influence of American media consumption on its characters. But rather than letting his ideas arise organically through the interaction of characters and environments, Lanthimos exerts a rigid conceptual grasp on every scene until the purpose of each individual shot is exhausted the instant an idea is effectively elucidated. What’s left is a series of repetitions of the same few notions, triggered with an approach to scene structure that grows increasingly coded and formulaic. Alps functions in the theoretical arena of spectatorship, aligning both the act of the griever and the movie-goer (in this film, everyone's an implicit movie-goer, reciting lines and ranking favorite actors and actresses) as false respites from death, fundamentally flawed attempts at forgetting that nonetheless ease the pain of reality. Unfortunately, there's rarely any basis of reality to assist the process of empathizing with these acts of profound selfishness. Lanthimos is too busy deflating his characters into controlled, undiscerning props (in order to warn against the mechanization of modern life that might result from projecting our emotions onto media) to examine the reactions of the married couple to their surrogate daughter, or to allow his main characters to contemplate the ethical implications of their service. As a depiction of a lopsided practice in an already lopsided world rather than a misguided venture unleashed on a convincing population, Alps neglects to confront the complexity of its themes as they relate to reality.



Because Dogtooth already took this route, it doesn't help that Lanthimos' treatment of the concept lacks the structural firmness of that film, which was a careful crescendo to a devastating final shot. Where Dogtooth's narrative assurance hinted at a conceptual assurance, Alps' insistent skirting around its major themes resembles the work of a director who is either too fuzzy on whether or not they make sense or too unsure of their legitimacy. Fittingly, the film waywardly shifts between its several mini-stories through fractured and vague cinematography, wherein only objects closest to the camera earn focus and the physical world is reduced to a smear of gray. When it's not hilarious - Lanthimos is better at making dark jokes of his characters than he is at drawing them as serious, if exaggerated, models of real human beings worth sympathizing with, which suggests a lot about his outlook on life - it's frequently dull and repetitive, evoking the feeling of a lecture that reached its climax early on and kept repeating minor variations on the same idea. What was seductive, suggestive, and horrific in Dogtooth is alienating, stiff, and preposterous in Alps, and unfortunately the film suffers from the feeling of being half-finished, its realization carrying only phantoms of the core ideas Lanthimos clearly wanted to tackle and its sense of ambiguity adrift from any semblance of cohesion.

Shame, on the other hand, is so coherent to the point of being simple-minded that McQueen's insistence upon creating an enigmatic, ambiguous atmosphere feels awkwardly disingenuous at best and utterly silly at worst. The entire film essentially advances the idea that Michael Fassbender's Brandon is a man whose seemingly high quality of living - a well-paying job, an uptown apartment with a panoramic view of the biggest city in the world, devilishly good looks - belies his emotional impotence and severe inner turmoil. Although this is the ultimate thesis, McQueen is persistent upon allowing the audience to try to tease out their own meaning by gesturing faintly in several different taboo-breaking directions - sex addiction, incest, corporate dehumanization - with ominous long takes and Duchampian blankness. When Brandon's predictably damaged vagabond sister Sissy Sullivan (Carey Mulligan with an alliterative name that sounds like a whore's psuedonym) arrives to crash at his apartment with nowhere else to go, the past's infiltration of the present metaphor is literalized by Brandon's inability to get down and dirty with NYC prostitutes and spend quality time with himself due to his sister's presence. The rampant sexual thirst so forcefully telegraphed in the film's opening montage is suffocated, the male ego is compromised, and regular, unquestioned behaviors Brandon mechanically performs (ogling women on the subway, extending his encyclopedia of internet porn) are put into perspective.

Unlike in Hunger, a work of great empathy, McQueen appears to despise his main character here, taking every opportunity to bounce light off of bar tables to demonize him. Whether subsuming him into a generically flat and sanitary office environment or scrutinizing his clumsy attempt at dating with a newly single co-worker (Nicole Beharie) whose smiley excitement swiftly degenerates throughout the course of a dinner ominously punctuated by McQueen's languorously zooming camera, Brandon encompasses the Rich, Privileged, Unappreciative Schmuck that is seemingly ubiquitous in New York (his boss, David Fisher (James Badge Dale), is another sterling example, and represents the only character McQueen dislikes more). Eyes Wide Shut and Last Tango in Paris already peered into - as rapper Nas put it - the "N.Y. State of Mind," and these types of sex-addled characters in particular, in much subtler ways, and it seems that the one new inquiry McQueen is bringing to it is his questionable implication, when Brandon attends a hellishly red gay club in a ditch effort for satisfaction, that homosexuality is the lowest form of debasement for this kind of soul-sick urban individual.



What makes Shame tougher to swallow is McQueen's reluctance to pick up the great opportunities he lays down for himself to understand his character. Crystallizing his irritating diffidence here is a sequence about halfway through the film when Sissy takes Brandon's boss back to the apartment after a night at the lounge club where she had a gig. Upon hearing the muffled noises of cheerful sex in a room nearby, it appears Brandon is destined for one of the possible courses of action: 1) confront the two of them angrily, 2) passive-aggressively masturbate in his room, or 3) call up a prostitute to assert his power in his own apartment. He does none of the above, and instead fleas the scene to go for a jog outside. Given his visceral outbursts throughout the rest of the film (screaming at Sissy, provoking jealousy out of anonymous strangers), it feels less like a natural extension of his character than a cop-out by McQueen when given a chance to thoroughly explore the inner state of his character. He favors a technically complicated and lushly photographed tracking shot that simply illuminates Brandon's anxiety and drops the troubling scenario placed before him. In numerous other instances, McQueen resorts to his stylish aesthetic flair (and he has a great deal of it) in ways that purport to visualize inner conflicts but actually just de-emphasize and abstract them. What is left is a shell of a person and a conflict, the gaps of which are filled with repeated shots of Fassbender ruffling his perpetually feathered hairdo or crying out in the rain with a scrape on his face as the predictable downfall narrative reaches its fruition.

Just as Lanthimos devises esoteric codes and ciphers for his messages, McQueen shrouds in mystery a schematic script that redundantly exposes its character's primal sickness and aversion to emotionality. Both directors have taken a prior strength and applied it forcefully to new material only to reveal the specificity and shortcomings of that strength. Lanthimos' preference for broad allegory over narrative and characterization is jeopardized when aimed at a larger ensemble and a more diffuse setting. McQueen's artful detachment made poetry out of a historical event that was chiefly about collective action and brutality, whereas the same approach is rendered empty in the face of original material that favors individual introspection. Perhaps the bright side is that there is still great promise contained in these films that ensures future improvement: the squirmy comedy and dissociative editing in Alps (the superior of the two films) and the bold visual statements and skill with actors evoked in Shame. But the films' fear of direct engagement is their fundamental undoing. Quite simply, these are portraits of people with their backs to the wall in which the directors themselves have their backs to the wall, refusing to speak on the matter.

Edvard Munch (1974) A Film by Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch so thoroughly intermingles the tenets of drama, documentary, and experimental cinema that it ultimately obliterates all three, becoming an undefinable artifact of artist autobiography, social critique, and visual poem. The film springs from the consciousness of the titular Expressionist painter with the same kind of all-encompassing grandeur of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (or more recently, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life), yet its own fragmented, vérité style is distinctly different from those works. What it does share is the sense of an interior life being sprawled out in cinematic images despite the scant and enigmatic presence of that person in the film itself. Geir Westby, a Norwegian non-actor like everyone else in Watkins' epic, plays Edvard Munch, a tortured artist born at the wrong time and in the wrong milieu, fighting to maintain his artistic license and his sanity. He brings an off-kilter, ghostly quality to the painter, barely speaking and frequently staring directly at the camera with his dark, sad eyes, much like the distorted and spiritually distressed figures in his paintings. When he's not attempting to imbue the same artistic pedantry of his subject into the very form of the film, Watkins is probing Westby from the outside in, peering into his soul like a member of Munch's bemused and hesitant audience.

More so than any other artist biography I've seen in the film medium, Edvard Munch demonstrates how the political and social upheavals of one's life inform the ultimate trajectory of one's artistic output. Watkins, a left-wing filmmaker dedicated to proving that all cinema, all stories, and all reproductions of life are inherently politically engaged, has such an intelligent grasp of the codependency of the political and the personal that not a single scene passes without a level of involvement in both. Munch grew up in the Norwegian towns of Oslo and Kristiania in the heart of a puritanical bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century, a passage of his life that comprises the first third of a nearly three-hour film that roughly, but never strictly and often sporadically, follows a linear chronology. The repressive regimes of these towns have circumvented all but the middle class, leaving the poor with no child labor laws and a decriminalized but maligned attitude towards prostitution. In concise journalistic sequences, Watkins details these social inequities and then abruptly turns his attention to Munch and his sizable family, perched uneasily in this milieu as a group of both staunch Christians and questioning souls. Munch's sympathies are pretty much finalized when his mother and sister die prematurely of tuberculosis, with his moralizing father turning only to prayer for medical treatment.



The increasingly unconventional worldviews of Munch (at least in the context of his own family) are given space to gestate at the Kristiania Bohème, a circle of rebellious artists echoed later by Munch's cooperation in a Berlin collective pioneered by August Strindberg (Alf Kare Strindberg). Lead by the outspoken Hans Jæger (Kåre Stormark), members of the Bohème dissect the moral absolutism of the Norwegian society, concepts of free love and anarchism, and the crucial role of art and expression in a functional world. For the most part, Munch is a silent onlooker at these raucous gatherings of tobacco smoke and verbal warfare, but through his artwork - the maturation of which Watkins is attentive to at every stage of the film - one can sense his growing disillusionment with strict codes of behavior and expression. A tipping point is Jæger's imprisonment following an immediately banned work of emotionally direct and politically inflammatory literature, at once a premonition of Munch's own struggles with censors and the Scandinavian intelligentsia and a catalyst for his drastic evolution from commonly accepted modes of objective naturalism in painting.

Watkins pays so much attention to forces beyond Munch's control and personal sphere that the film can hardly be limited to the straightforward biography it purports to be (and which it is wrongly held up to by art historians befuddled by the omission of the later half of Munch's career). The act of painting itself - for Munch, crude, aggressive expressions of emotional volatility and spiritual turmoil - is detailed with great precision and persistence, with Watkins' largely nervous, zooming and focus-adjusting camera taking momentary pauses to scan the textured surfaces of Munch's canvasses. The images savor the tactility of the work, recognizing (as the majority of the backward-looking Norwegian public and critical community fail to do) the pain and joy that goes into every brush stroke, every scrape. Munch's painting are mostly of his family ridden by illness and devastation, an aspect of his life Watkins is sure to stress in his repetitive inserts of traumatic moments in their household, including Munch's own near-death experience coughing up blood in his bed. These terrifying fragments of tragedy and turmoil might come across as sensationalist window-dressing had Watkins not focused on patiently establishing Munch's domestic environment early on, and ultimately their continued employment manages to express the fidgety mental sickness that sparks much of Munch's artistic inspiration.



Perhaps even more instructive in understanding Munch's angst is his brief but impassioned affair with a married woman identified as Mrs. Heiberg (Gro Fraas, channeling her inner Liv Ullmann), the failure of which is the crux of the artist's social, romantic, and existential frustration. The film's most discernible narrative thrust is the rise and fall of this short-lived relationship captured by Watkins with supreme intimacy. When it does inevitably collapse, its repercussions are felt throughout the remainder of the film in Munch's paintings and in his mind, wherein fragmented moments of sexual passion, soulful staring, and subsequent jealousy replay over and over. As if to cement the fact that Mrs. Heiberg was Munch's true missed opportunity, his fullest and most transient pleasure, Watkins concludes the film on a painterly image of the two framed against a blood red sky, a simultaneously romantic and foreboding crystallization of the affair's impact on Munch. Fittingly, most of the film's loveliest, most unforgettable images - shot, like the rest of the film, in mysteriously grainy 35 mm - comprise the two of them in various natural landscapes, dreamlike evocations of bliss that seem to rest outside time.

These moments, however, are never as cathartic as the painter hopes for them to be. Edvard Munch has the tendency to cut short its brightest pleasures, splice them into otherwise bleak passages, or overlay a disparate element (sound, image) of darkness. The film thrives off the interplay of contradictory emotions and techniques (dramatic exposition, journalistic documentation, Tarkovskian meditation), unafraid to pit them against each other within a single scene. The ongoing narration itself, largely readings from Munch's third-person-ridden diary entries provided by Watkins himself, is a constant counterpoint to the action, undercutting the traditional documentary etiquette of always informing with clarity and "truth". Much of the narration seems to eschew crucial details evident in the frame, missing the entire story, or suggest an emotion not entirely accurate to what we see of Munch onscreen. It's a perfect representation of the confused and frantic psyche of this profoundly influential artist, and also one of Watkins' subtlest applications of dialectical editing maneuvers in a body of work ravaged by critical complaints about unconventionality. Fascinatingly, given the many superficial similarities in the careers of these two artists, it's probably natural that their strengths should interact in such a way.