The Voice of the Moon (1990) A Film by Federico Fellini

"Somewhere deep in the foggy Italian countryside, in an abandoned barn in the middle of the night, Michael Jackson's 'The Way You Make Me Feel' booms over a sound system for the dancing pleasure of a mob of leather-clad Gen X-ers. On the evidence of The Voice of the Moon, this was an aging Federico Fellini's vision of a world under the spell of globalized pop music and youth culture, where the new and the hip is a pervasive bug filling every crevice left by the old and the archaic. When this endearingly absurdist illusion manifests itself around the three-quarter mark of the film, however, it's a sense of euphoria, not cynicism, that prevails."

Full review of Fellini's swan song, now out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, continues at Slant.

Contesting History – The Films of Oliver Stone

"Regarded as a politically radical firebrand nearly as often as he’s discussed for his filmmaking, Oliver Stone is one of the monolithic voices of contemporary Hollywood—a figure about whom opinion tends to be divided starkly between derision and adulation, with little room for ambivalence in between. As a veteran of the Vietnam War whose Bronze Star and Purple Heart belie a profound disillusionment with his experience there, Stone has spent a considerable chunk of his directorial career depicting the events of the 1960s and 70s, paying particular attention to the ways in which the era’s tensions and contradictions act as barometers for more enduring problems in American politics. His overarching thesis as a filmmaker—that passive faith in one’s nation leaves one blind to the fact that the interconnected forces of government and national media construct digestible narratives for their citizenry in ways that protect their own interests—doubles as a call to action, which therefore brands Stone as an activist working within the entertainment business, a perch from which he wields a rare influence."

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting a small survey of Oliver Stone's political filmmaking this fall. They generously asked me to contribute the introduction and, with the exception of the blurb on Snowden, all of the program notes for the series, which can be viewed here.

I Am Keiko (1997) A Film by Sion Sono

"I Am Keiko is a film caught within the dimensions of its maker’s head, composed of and consumed by the limits of that brain’s capacity for thought. This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment, and a twofold statement at that. Sion Sono may have directed I Am Keiko but Keiko herself, a 22-year-old waitress grieving from the recent loss of her father to cancer, is positioned within the film’s fictional framework as the sole author of its images and structure, with the film we’re watching ostensibly a celluloid diary transmitted to us as we’re witnessing it. Keiko plainly addresses the parameters of her film in voiceover: in exactly one hour and one minute’s time—she dictates to us as we contemplate the ticking of a statically framed clock—we will finish watching a series of recordings from her daily life, over which she will exercise total freedom with regard to the content and means of expression."

Review continues at In Review Online, which is currently holding a Sion Sono retrospective.

Van Gogh (1991) A Film by Maurice Pialat

"In 1956's Lust for Life, Vincente Minnelli captured Vincent van Gogh's antisocial mania and his harum-scarum dealings with the mainstream art world. With 1990's Vincent & Theo, Robert Altman fixed his attention on the swirl of meretricious forces surrounding the doomed artist, and in typical Altmanesque fashion, the ways in which the talons of commerce make fools of those with integrity. French filmmaker Maurice Pialat evidently found both approaches too dramatic. His own fictionalized account of the Dutchman's waning days, 1991's frankly titled Van Gogh, leeches late-19th-century France of sensationalism, barely treating it different than he would one of the drab modern locales of his contemporary dramas. In doing so, van Gogh's neuroses and shortcomings end up looking much like those of Pialat's standard anti-hero, a man driven to let his worst self gradually overshadow his best."

Full review here.

David Zucker

"Zucker's best instincts are those that seek to throw a wrench into every single received convention we expect from genre movies, to call attention to their workings not in a way that provokes thought, but in a manner that hijacks the audience's attention. And these interruptions to conventional narrative flow come so frequently, tumbling atop one another in gleeful excess, that the individual jokes don't have to be funny, per se. The unmitigated commitment to joke overload is a joke in itself." There are some new Naked Gun blu-rays on the market, which is a good enough excuse for me to write about the comedic-idiotic mind of David Zucker. The piece continues at The House Next Door.

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.

Vincent and Theo (1990) A Film by Robert Altman

"Known for scene-scanning telephoto shots that seek to dissolve the traditional limitations of the frame, Robert Altman might have seemed a counterintuitive filmmaker to take on a film about painting, which must always work within a static canvas. But Van Gogh, of course, is no ordinary painter. As portrayed by Tim Roth in the placid historical snapshot Vincent & Theo, Van Gogh's fatal frustration was his inability, despite a career-long knack for pictorially implying movement and spatial vibration, to get beyond the tyranny of the frame. If there's a generous streak within Altman's mournful, fatalistic period piece, it's in granting Van Gogh the pictorial totality that he never discovered as an artist." Continued over at Slant Magazine is a full review of a new Olive Films' Blu-Ray of Altman's 1990 film.

A Summer's Tale (1996) A Film by Eric Rohmer

"[Rohmer's] unaffected style recalls what Bazin once said of Erich von Stroheim’s direction: 'Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and ugliness,' only in Rohmer’s case one must substitute 'comedy and tragedy.' The Cahiers veteran, a spry 76 when A Summer’s Tale was released, only moves his camera when his characters move, eliminating all expressivity to stare calmly and directly at his romantically entangled youngsters. But that’s not to say that his visual decisions lack variety." Read on at Kicking the Canon, the new offshoot of In Review Online.

A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins...

As subjects, roiling water surfaces and bokeh are fairly played out in lyrical/personal/diaristic 16mm Bolex filmmaking. That Timoleon Wilkins manages something like a fresh take on them says a great deal about the level of his sensitivity. Among other things, Los Caudales (2005) features dozens of seagull’s-eye view close-ups of lapping water on high-contrast black-and-white reversal stock, the resultant image a defamiliarizing dance of bright white dots and squiggles on a jet-black surface. Parts of Quartet (In Camera) (2009) study permutations of light photographed through telephoto lenses, and instead of an anarchic sprawl of light blobs, Wilkins achieves something closer to the balletic choreography of Len Lye’s films, albeit in a far more muted and unpredictable register. It bears mentioning that this is only a fragment of the material Wilkins finds fit to turn his camera toward.

Educated under the tutelage of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado and far from quiet about his admiration for and familiarity with filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner, Wilkins sits pretty squarely in the romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema, the strand of underground filmmaking that valorizes the cameraman as a soloist with a unique ability to imprint his or her own subjectivity on the camera eye. Up to a point, Wilkins benefits from the acknowledgment of such ancestry. For one, it’s part of what brought him to Boston in the first place, Dorsky being the relatively fashionable commodity that he is, at least in the bone-dry marketplace of contemporary experimental cinema. (Rob Todd’s continuing obscurity, on the other hand, needs to be corrected.)



Still, Wilkins’ work creates distinct impressions. The most conspicuous of these is tied to his status as a lifelong citizen of the West (Colorado, Mexico, and Los Angeles are the touch points I’m aware of), the landscapes of which inflect his films to a significant degree. If Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits, sublime as they can be, are quintessential expressions of the cramped geography of the East Coast, Wilkins’ films achieve something similarly archetypal with regards to the openness of the West. Big skies, sacred-seeming cloud formations, vast plains, elongated highways, wandering cattle, and vast beaches are all subject to scrutiny. Land merges into sky, thunderstorms erupt (or are merely implied to erupt through inspired aperture futzing), and Wilkins’ camera follows telephone lines along the highway as if to celebrate the freedom of movement afforded by the landscape. In my own experiences out West, such ample space means feeling liberated from staying too long in one place; movement becomes a texture of life.

Made between 1998 and 2010, Lake of the Spirits, Los Caudales, The Crossing, Quarter, and, especially, Drifter—all of which were shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s recent tribute to Wilkins—evoke this restlessness. Four of them are silent, yet the dynamism of their montage and the diversity of their images generates a tone more exploratory than contemplative. Intermittent flashes of bright light (or perhaps merely blank leader, it’s hard to tell) act as optical refreshment as well as ways to transition between rushes of abstraction (bokeh, light leaks, water surfaces, objects photographed and/or processed in such a way that they become unidentifiable) and sections of documentary-like observation (flowers, landscapes, sparingly used human faces). In posing these two representational extremes side by side, Wilkins is constantly seeking their points of intersection, the moments where the banal turns into something magical. Edited largely in-camera—that is, conceived as a linear flow of images in conjunction with the filming stage—these films are therefore documents of Wilkins’ thought processes while shooting them—the flickering of his consciousness, if you will. And they are unbelievably beautiful.

Breakdown (1997) A Film by Jonathan Mostow

The scant exposition bestowed by Jonathan Mostow's ruthless all-action action-thriller Breakdown comes in a brief dialogue scene between hero Jeffrey Taylor (Kurt Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) in the first ten minutes. Quasi-bourgie travelers from Beantown on a pilgrimage to start a new life out west, the couple offhandedly reveals the relative financial hole they're in, perhaps partly created by the shining red Jeep they're using to power through an imposing southwestern America. While eagerly escaping this void of dust, rock, and cement, Jeff's new engine is tripped by a mysterious gas station passerby, which ultimately causes the titular breakdown and traps him and his wife in the squalid emptiness they're seeking to outrun. Beautifully economical, this setup establishes everything the viewer needs to know in order to go along with the escalating paranoia of the subsequent plot: these are clearly privileged white people in a bind navigating an unknown desert where threat is perceived from every possible direction.

When a dubiously benevolent trucker arrives as if by divine intervention and offers to take Amy to a nearby diner to call for automotive assistance, Jeff's frightened interiority starts to be reflected by an actively malicious environment. He get his car back in order shortly after he sacrifices Amy to this perfectly reasonable sign of relief, but when he tracks down the diner to retrieve his wife she's not there. No one is aware of her ever setting foot on the premises, nor are they remotely concerned about her disappearance. On the surface, the premise is reminiscent of that which kicks off The Vanishing (1988), a darkly existential gut punch from French director George Sluizer that was inexplicably remade with American stars and for "American" audiences by Sluizer himself five years later. But where Sluizer's admirably hopeless original struck a deeply nihilistic tone, revealing the world as essentially cruel and its mysteries unsolvable, Mostow's film is pitched at a more absurd register, the machinations of its wronged-man plot indistinguishably perched between actual peril and the workings of a delusional imagination. It's significant that the villain here is not a single warped mind but rather the entire town, a mustachioed and mob-like mass seemingly conspiring to drain Jeff of his remaining finances and brutalize his life partner.



In exchange for the $90,000 Jeff purports to have left in his bank account, the exceptionally nasty men (the amoral head honcho of which is played with chilling solemnity by J.T. Walsh) who kidnap Amy offer the empty promise of her survival. That the assumed financial reward is so measly in the larger scope of movie theft ($90,000 is hardly the sort of amount that would completely rebuild the dust-caked town) only augments the sense that Jeff's victimhood is subjective rather than circumstantial, the pervasive evil of the world around him a manifestation of his anxieties more than a tangible force. At the same time, the achievement of the film is in making those anxieties ferociously tangible. Mostow's project is not to ridicule or punish Jeff for his endangerment, but rather to cling intimately to his perspective as he pursues the rehabilitation of order in his now lopsided universe—as such, Breakdown is one of Hollywood's most skillful exercises in empathetic engagement. Great portions of the film, particularly in the second act when Jeff's confusion is at its peak, are shot at wide angles and in deep focus, visualizing the floating fear of 360 degree threat. By the film's third act, the alignment of the audience with Jeff is absolute; we share his nervous perspective in voyeuristic telephoto shots, culminating in a garage peeping scene in which the camera is literally placed on a different level than the villains, with Jeff observing their transgressions from a loft above.

The resolution to this inner battle writ large is of the demon-conquering variety in which Hollywood cinema is bound to trade (in this case, The Vanishing's nihilism would spoil the very ideology of self-growth upon which the narrative machine is founded). But give credit to Mostow for rendering this nightmare of personal collapse, however temporary, with such vivid, scraping intensity. The film's most acute lasting impression is of sparks flying and sweaty faces coiled in nerve-popping adrenaline. Furthermore, Spielberg's Duel (1971) is an apparent precedent, but rarely since Two Lane Blacktop (also 1971) have automobiles had such a decidedly weighty presence, here made deadly through their constant high-speed entangling. It's also worth applauding the way in which the audience is finally left hanging (almost literally) after a near-death experience at the precipice of a bridge. Mostow's bow-tying is curt and efficient, hardly cathartic: Jeff and Amy's final embrace is only dwelled upon for seconds before the camera lurches upward to survey the wreckage beneath, the swells of a minor-key orchestra reaching their crescendo. Miles of road still lie ahead.

Intensifying the Affect: Peter Tscherkassky’s Virtuosic Repurposing Acts

(Note: The following is the last paper I ever wrote at Emerson College, an essay for my History of Experimental and Avant-Garde seminar.)

Looking for a world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization.
                -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What is Phenomenology?"

Substitute “world” with “film” and one has a fairly instructive credo for digesting the work of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky (1958 - present). Since his first short film in 1981, Tscherkassky has sought increasingly imaginative ways of transcending conventional pictorial representation in cinema, producing radical aesthetic experiences that intentionally gesture towards visual coherence before completely unsettling any sense of spectatorial stability. Provocatively touted as “the most important and most internationally celebrated contemporary avant-garde filmmaker,” (Möller) much of his work has been the subject of psychoanalytic and philosophical analysis, but the films explored in this essay – Motion Picture (1984), L'Arrivée (1997/98), Outer Space (1999), Dream Work (2001), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) – suggest a desire to move beyond constricting modes of thought towards a new iteration of what Germaine Dulac deemed Cinéma pur; that is, a cinema with expressive qualities divorced from those of the other art forms based on “the power of the image alone” (34). Even as these films toy with structural framing devices, historically and theoretically loaded found footage material, and broader trends in the history of Austrian avant-garde cinema, their continual focus on material vulnerability reflects a larger interest in the fragility of various frameworks of thinking.

For the greater part of Tscherkassky’s career, this pursuit of pure cinema, absolute film, or immersive abstraction – whichever you prefer – has been tied to the photographic dark room. Starting with Motion Picture, Tscherkassky has been devoutly tied to celluloid film stock (both 16mm and 35mm) and hand processing (developing his film using his own chemicals and his own special methods). Integrating dark room manipulation of found footage stock into each of his works, not to mention producing his films entirely in this way for over a decade, Tscherkassky scratches, smudges, distorts, reprints, rephotographs, and multiplies his source material, in the process often abandoning any trace of the traditional point-and-shoot recording process that marks the vast majority of film production. Much of this work is accomplished with an optical printer, a device that allows one to scrutinize and maneuver individual film frames. Other times, Tscherkassky’s manipulation is entirely hands-on, in which case the effects seen in the finished films are produced through direct physical contact (abrasive or controlled) with the celluloid.

An Evening with Sami van Ingen

On the surface, the three films shown by the Balagan screening series on Monday, April 1st in Cambridge, Massachusetts to celebrate the work of Finnish artist Sami van Ingen – Texas Scramble (1996), Deep Six (2007), and Fokus (2004) – don’t seem to come from the same filmmaker. “We wanted to show some of the different sides of Sami’s work,” explained programmer Mariya Nikiforova when probed about the diversity of the screening. Her simple answer hinted at even further realms of variation within van Ingen’s twenty years’ worth of work unexplored by this particular program. Indeed, these three films alone embody lyrical, diaristic, self-reflexive, deconstructive, anthropological, personal documentary, and structuralist impulses.

Texas Scramble, the first film in the program, is the most conspicuous outlier of the three. The film opens with an onscreen text taken from Buddhist verse that proves the poetic guiding logic for van Ingen’s otherwise seemingly free-associative structure: “what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday/our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow/our life is the creation of our mind.” The quote hints at motifs of circularity, renewal, repetition, and memory, and van Ingen proceeds to build these ideas into the film’s fluid form, which behaves according to visual echoes, rhythmic matches (both sonic and pictorial), and subtle loops. Over the course of 21 minutes, a diegetic memory starts to set in. Camera movements, shadows, and reflections seem haunted by previous parallels, mirroring human memory and the phenomenon of déjà vu.

The psychological curiosity and frenetic movement (always suggesting the presence of a human behind the camera) of Texas Scramble is worlds apart from the naked formalism and clever self-reflexivity of Deep Six. Cannibalizing a sequence featuring a logging truck barreling down an empty highway in Sidney J. Furie’s 1998 action thriller The Rage, van Ingen displays an almost fetishistic interest in movement and speed for its own sake. The footage quickly sheds any trace of narrative baggage as van Ingen shifts the CinemaScope image out of alignment to reveal dark frame lines, approximating the effect of an old television set skipping out of proper calibration. Playfully, van Ingen uses a spacious format touted as the most complete viewing experience only to violently disrupt any sense of unabated immersion in the spectacle. In the end, this formal breakdown is tied to the fate of the truck, whose piles of timber come crashing out of the truck bed on a particularly narrow turn.



Fokus, the final film in the program as well as van Ingen’s most widely shown work, shares with Deep Six an interest in obsessively teasing out latent moods and ideas in previously existing material. In this case, van Ingen recycles fifty-year-old color footage taken by his grandmother at her wedding ceremony in India. Van Ingen was not yet born when these images were shot, but he did spend his youth in Southern India due to his father’s heritage, and as such the film represents an effort to parse deeper into his ancestral history and cultural inheritance. Using an optical printer, van Ingen enlarges and slows these images to put them under intense scrutiny. Sometimes this results in discoveries that could only be made under such careful viewing circumstances: wedding rituals and processions start to take on a level of absurdity, while hierarchies of power within the ceremony are pulled into sharp, unsettling focus. Other times, van Ingen defamiliarizes – if not completely obscures – these images beyond recognition so that they crumble into a mass of earthy, colorful film grain spreading like lava across the screen. Van Ingen’s rising-and-falling low-frequency drones further encourage the contemplative atmosphere.

It’s obvious that van Ingen’s an eclectic filmmaker capable of working expressively with a number of experimental approaches. Balagan’s recent program likely only scratches the surface of an oeuvre that hopefully contains further variations on the disparate textures, structures, and meditations presented here. Fokus and Deep Six share obvious technical affinities, but that is to say nothing of their differing thematic impulses (one being a formal exercise in spectacle and the projection apparatus and the other being an excursion into familial history) or the fact that they do little to shed light on a film as mysteriously intimate as Texas Scramble. Thanks to Balagan, at least we can get a glimpse of this Finnish talent’s cluster of interests.

The Deathmaker

I've written a piece for Mubi.com on the 1995 German film The Deathmaker, which dives into the extensive single-room interrogation of Fritz Haarmann, the serial killer first dramatized in 1931 by Fritz Lang with M. The film's directed by Romuald Karmakar, a filmmaker that too few cinephiles are familiar with. Head on over to The Notebook to hear about why I find this spatially limited film so damn compelling.

Beau Travail (1999) A Film by Claire Denis

After Holy Motors, it's hard to imagine a cinematic scenario where Denis Lavant would not upstage anyone and anything around him. It's to his credit, then, that even in Claire Denis' Beau Travail, a film that ultimately treats him as more of a texture than a character, he commands the mise-en-scène with every gesture, every subdued expression, every dart of the eyes. His is an invertebrate sort of body capable of contorting to the every desire of his director, yet Denis mostly restrains his expression, reducing his limber figure to sharp, controlled movements. That is, until Lavant's acrobatic explosion in the final shot of the film, dancing to Corona's bouncy 90's hit "Rhythm of the Night" on an empty, dingy dance floor.

The transition between these two kinesthetic representations of Lavant's character syncs up with the larger thematic progressions of the film (what exactly to make of Lavant's dancing, however, remains unsolved, aside from the fact that he's a fabulous dancer and it's a terrific punctuation mark on the film). For the majority of Beau Travail, Lavant, playing a downbeat and solitary man named Galoup, is recalling his time as the officer of a French Foreign Legion outpost in East Africa, a time in his life marked by a mixture of pride, self-worth, and inner turmoil. In its last ten minutes, however, the film shows Galoup back in France after being dispatched on account of treason, a section that embodies what are potentially the only present-tense moments in the film (though with Denis, past, present, and future are always porous and somewhat negligible entities). This dynamic between a sense of community in a foreign land and a sense of outsidership in a native country, as well as between comforting routine and intimidating freedom, hangs over the film as heavily as the dust and sweat that cover its every surface.



There's a narrative deeply embedded within Beau Travail – inspired, no less, by Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd – but Denis obscures it in such a way that its vibrations are felt rather than telegraphed. It's utterly simple and goes something like this: Galoup remembers how a charismatic young recruit named Sentain (Denis regular Grégoire Colin) aroused jealousy in him and came between his love and respect for Commander Bruno Forestier (other Denis regular Michel Subor). This tension ultimately drove both Galoup and Sentain away from the Legion, compromising a tight-knit group of male expats. What Denis does with this mythical template is distill it down to remembered fragments that are then strung together according to the disorderly logic and speed of the subconscious. Of course, our brains don't file memories into clean-cut narratives, nor do they pinpoint the moments of time normally construed as character development. Therefore, the film resembles a murky mirage of images and sounds whose overarching shape is only decipherable in retrospect.

This is the essence of Denis's cinema, and, it could be argued, one of the modes of expression completely unique to the medium. Beau Travail's construction is fluid and organic; there are no cues, dramatic or aesthetic, that suggest what shot will come next (what else could explain a hard, unexpected cut from the shadowy outlines of club dancers to the elegant swimming body of Sentain, or from a wide shot of Lavant's stiff silhouette in front of the African desert at dusk to a sweeping pan going against the slow, turquoise ripple of the Indian Ocean, moments that arrive with no traditional cinematic "preparation"). The audience is suspended in a state of submission, privy to the movements of a consciousness that is not its own. Yet at the same time, Galoup is an intimate guide, the most permanent source of connection within the film. His wistful inner monologue crops up now and then as voiceover and Denis's camera (also known as the great cinematographer Agnes Varda's camera) stays close by his side, taking in the totality of his body from its frame to its pulsating veins, and in one haunting instance he even stares directly at it. The result is a great form of seduction, a thrill of living vicariously through a character without grasping his logic (it's also, to varying degrees, the thrill of watching Tarkovsky's Mirror or Watkins' Edvard Munch).



In a film about a military camp based in a colonial setting surrounded by women and children (Denis – or should I say Galoup? – captures with eloquence the curious gazes of African onlookers only peripherally considered by the legionnaires), the effect of this cinematic approach is to sidestep outright polemics while also offering a glimpse into the existential cost of such a political scenario. Denis codes the theme of colonialism into the Legion itself, with Galoup – a character defined by frustration, yearning, and misremembering – representing a concentration of the contradictory group ethos in the role of the leader. There are also visual hints throughout the film to the insularity and fragility of this community: long, flattened shots of the men seen through a telephoto lens that makes them appear as if they'll disintegrate in the desert haze, recurring images of them in and under water, as stripped of clothing as they are of their defenses, and camera angles that arrange them in geometric patterns against the ground, divorced from an outside context. When Galoup is finally cut off from the group, he merely moves from one imagined sense of belonging to another, larger one: the nation of France itself, at this point something of a foreign country to the migrant commander.

Denis is a director who deeply understands the psychological functions of these processes of political and geographical assimilation and re-integration, and Beau Travail reflects this complexity with style and economy. Indeed, Galoup's knee-jerk disdain for Sentain when he enters the group is a built-in emotion whose associations with colonialism and foreigner/native dynamics in general are hard to ignore. Denis never drives such points home though, instead letting them arise slowly from the surface of the film. The result is a remarkably rich viewing experience that is embedded with more sophisticated ideas, evocative images, and mysterious juxtapositions in 90 minutes than many directors accomplish in their entire careers.

Out of Sight (1998) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

The characters in Steven Soderbergh’s films are often defined by a particular moral code and the extent to which they’re willing to bend or break it. Out of Sight, a brisk, stylish popcorn movie that belongs to the more commercial half of Soderbergh's directing persona but is just as distinctive as the rest of the his output, offers a poignant expression of this theme in the shape of an illicit romance between Jack Foley (George Clooney), a charming bank robber, and Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), the US Marshal on his tail. Inherent in the premise are romantic comedy as well as crime thriller undertones, and Soderbergh plays each out to its logical extreme without ever making the film fit squarely in one genre. A master of tone, he is instead able to infuse the breezy two hours with an unrelenting sense of tossed-off cool, lending a feeling of detachment that is both comic and haunting. The result is a work that points ahead to Soderbergh's star-studded Ocean trilogy even as it attains a dramatic gravity never quite reached by that slick franchise.

In fact, the Ocean movies may have never occurred had Soderbergh not detected and exploited the oozing charisma of George Clooney, which provides the fuel that runs Out of Sight and ultimately so many of the actor's subsequent films. (This is not to say Clooney hadn't already proven his chops in film and television (I haven't comprehensively surveyed the actor's pre-'98 career), but that Out of Sight was ostensibly the first major motion picture to place so much stock in his low-key magnetism.) As Jack, Clooney is compulsively watchable; confident, quick-witted, level-headed, and forever armed with flirtatious banter or silencing one-liners, he's able to make even a death threat in the midst of a bank robbery sound comforting and easygoing. It's obvious that a man this affable couldn't find himself stuck in jail for too long, though he does get arrested early on after an impulsive inner-city robbery that the film eventually cycles its way back around to in its fractured chronology. Prison is treated throughout Out of Sight as an entirely non-threatening limbo zone for the criminals Jack surrounds himself with, an inevitability that comes and goes in an almost arbitrary fashion. It's a trope that is in keeping with Soderbergh's forward-moving outlook on life, his propensity to underplay external circumstances in favor of internal stakes.

This is a tendency that speaks directly to Out of Sight. Soderbergh cares less about the physical markers of one's worldview than he does about how worldview shapes a way of personally relating to the world (at one point in Magic Mike, Channing Tatum dumbfoundedly blurts "I am not what I do," which is about as close to a direct summary of the director's outlook as he'll allow). A perfect example: Soderbergh stages Jack and Karen's first meeting in the claustrophobic trunk of a getaway car where Jack has temporarily kidnapped Karen after escaping from prison, about as enclosed and separated a space as possible from the outer world. In this tight, awkward physical scenario, Jack and Karen have only their words, their thoughts, and their body language to rely on – they can't even see each other's faces. Accordingly, there's a strange, hushed intimacy to the voices in this scene as the two drift from the obvious topic at hand to small-talk concerning movies and love stories. Even though Karen pulls a gun on Jack once the car has stopped and the trunk has opened (back in the outside world, social roles are reclaimed), it's obvious that there's romantic chemistry during this smooth ride of darkness, and after it the film becomes increasingly focused on their ill-fated attempts to revisit that indescribable feeling while upholding professional differences.



The truth is, however, that love can't realistically be acted upon for such diametrically opposed figures, so the few overt love scenes in Out of Sight feel like dreams more than concrete occurrences, making the final irresolvability of Jack and Karen's romance that much more tragic. The film is seductively old-fashioned in its approach to cinematic romance, presenting love as an ideal escape from the constricting boundaries of life. In a key sequence, one of Soderbergh's finest in two-and-a-half decades as a director, Jack visits Karen at a lounge and woos her with his soothing verbal play before the two retreat to a hotel room to make love. Shot in warm tones in front of snowy Detroit panoramas reduced to luscious blobs of blue and white, the entire scene is lovely, but it's elevated to something haunting and mysterious by the somnambulant rhythm of Soderbergh's cutting and the actors' movements. Here, Jack and Karen seem to move differently and speak differently than they do under the professional circumstances of the rest of the film, with flirtation bubbling out of every gesture. Soderbergh takes his time to show the two in any sort of contextualizing shot, instead remaining fixed on their faces and their bodies glowing against the moody nightscape. This lack of context – it is unclear both when and where exactly the scene takes place in the frame of the narrative – only bolsters the sense of love as an escape, something pure and possibly unreachable within the lives led by these characters.

Fortunately, the situations surrounding Jack and Karen's central romance are compelling in their own right, and provide an understanding of why the two leads are bound by their respective lifestyles. Subplots are sprinkled throughout Out of Sight – a mansion robbery aided by cohorts Maurice (Don Cheadle), Buddy (Ving Rhames), and Glenn (Steve Zahn), a snapshot of Karen's relationship with her father (Dennis Farina), compulsory flashbacks to various prison activities shot in harsh sunlight – but because of Soderbergh's light touch they never descend into heavy exposition, and the same stylishness brought to the love scenes is spread across the rest of the film. Nonetheless, this is still a film built confidently on the nuanced chemistry of its two would-be lovers. Clooney set a high standard of charm here that's arguably never been exceeded, and Lopez, who has has not been involved in such strong material since, has never been more naturally alluring. Their final scene together on either side of a cop car divide is a crystallization of the submerged infatuation simmering out of the rest of the film, a bittersweet, wordless goodbye that's tinged with all the unspoken longing of the preceding two hours.

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.

Safe (1995) A Film by Todd Haynes

At the core of Todd Haynes' Safe is the idea that the human body is a cage housing fragile, valuable material, and that it's constantly threatened by the harsh and jagged environment around it. When that cage and its components becomes vulnerable for any number of reasons, it stands no chance against the elements. This is precisely the process of disintegration that Haynes documents in his second feature, and it reinforces every aesthetic decision that is made in the first half of the film: the uncomfortably intimate mic'ing technique, wherein tiny microphones seem to rest within the shirts of performers and capture every fidget, swallow, or scratch in precise clarity; the distant, geometric framing that reinforces the endangerment of the individual in the context of larger spaces; the nearly ubiquitous offscreen presence of terror-mongering radio broadcasts; and perhaps even the repeat appearances of sweet, luxury foods like cake and milk, the frequent consumption of which can be undesirable for the digestive system. Haynes makes the audience especially sensitive to even the most innocuous external stimuli (in one shot even a bedroom chair glows with malign purpose), as well as to the internal bodily functions that deal with these forces. It's all a way of framing the supposed "environmental illness" of his main character, the bored, vacant San Fernando Valley housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore).

It doesn't take long to discern the absurdity of this alleged "environmental illness" and begin to identify the metaphorical territory Haynes is working within. But in Safe, it's far easier to realize that Haynes is aiming for metaphor than it is to pinpoint the exact nature of those hidden resonances. Carol wears white throughout a good portion of Safe's first half, one of the first and most salient tip-offs to her hypersensitivity to the outside world and consuming desire for sterility. Also, when asked how she's doing by an equally uninspired suburban housewife or by her skeptical husband Greg (Xander Berkeley), Carol always responds with a timid, clearly half-hearted "well...good," indicating that she's deeply troubled. Haynes applies some of the standard tropes of the horror genre and its repeated emphasis on the clueless female protagonist - consistently having Carol walk her way into uncomfortable scenarios, composing reaction shots that suggest something garish out of frame only to reveal simple domestic items, stranding characters in huge rooms where anything could lurk in the shadows - so that he can undermine them at every turn, forcing the audience to position Carol's rattling psyche as a direct result of her boring, stifling milieu.



As an openly gay filmmaker, Haynes has been exploring these kinds of victimized figures throughout his fascinating career, and in this homosexual context, Safe becomes a charged allegory for the self-perpetuating anxieties of being forced by societal standards to live the "normal" life, a subservient dynamic that the film insists ends only in misery and isolation. The film is structured on the surface as an enlightenment narrative and on the subtextual level as a maddening descent into obscurity, away from any semblance of civilization or happiness. As Carol becomes increasingly vulnerable in her bright, slick domestic environment (displayed in the kind of Sirkian vibrancy that Haynes would expand upon in Far from Heaven), she in turn seeks any method of medical assistance that can ease her discomfort, shortness of breath, and spontaneous vomiting. When conventional doctors fail to see any indicators of sickness and her husband's attitude shifts precariously from revolt to irritation to sympathy (Berkeley's performance is a quietly virtuoso one), Carol's search becomes progressively extreme until it's clear that what she is really seeking is a full-blown escape from her suburban life. As a result, she finds herself attracted to an informercial for a New-Agey self-help clinic set in the middle of the desert called Wrenwood, which boasts to have found the simple cure for the types of "environmental illnesses" plaguing people like Carol.

At Wrenwood, Carol appears to have found a refuge where she is given space and treated with affection by likeminded peers. The head of the clinic, the seemingly benign and respectful Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), speaks in calming, inspiring tones about his own healing process from the contaminating factors of reality, referring specifically to pollutants but more broadly to social structures, politics, and media. His teaching and nursing at Wrenwood is decidedly laissez-faire, and he encourages his patients to take the same approach to their own acts of personal rejuvenation; at one point, he even states proudly that he has finally ceased reading the newspaper, a blunt declaration of insularity delivered like a presidential keynote address. Haynes' detached, probing camera, however - always distant and wolf-like, glimpsing all the nuances and details that Carol misses - gradually unravels Dunning's thin facade, revealing him to be little more than a nihilistic hippie and a shameless opportunist. One shot in the second-half of this tantalizingly bifurcated film - shortly after Carol has been relocated from an airy cabin with porch-like screen windows to a circular metal cage resembling both an outer-space vessel and a womb (both offer striking potential interpretations) - catches a view of Dunning's modern mansion sitting atop the peak of the valley Wrenwood is nestled in. One senses that Dunning has built his home there not for convenience or pleasure, but merely to reinforce a messiah-like image of himself to his clients.



Carol never seems to realize this though, and the film becomes increasingly unsettling as she warms up to Wrenwood, eventually appearing to be at relative peace with herself in this stale, limiting community. Whether or not her husband buys into the mumbo-jumbo about a full healing and return to ordinary domesticity supplies the film with potent ambiguity; Berkeley and Moore's scenes together at Wrenwood possess a morbid awkwardness, as if he is slowly realizing his complicity in the act of gradually burying his own wife alive. In the second-to-last scene of the film, Carol, at the encouragement of Dunning, gives a birthday speech to her environmentally ill peers about how good she feels at the clinic and how much she believes she has improved since leaving her San Fernando Valley existence. In the pale desert cafeteria and under Dunning's vaguely ominous scrutiny, it's staged as a personal breakthrough, but Haynes' stiff mise-en-scène still renders it cold and lifeless, perhaps even more disengaged than at an earlier at-home-mom get-together in the film's first half, where at least there was color and non-diegetic sound to spice up the atmosphere. Any epiphany here is mired by the indistinct rhetoric of Dunning, by his shallow understanding that to retreat entirely from society and relevance is to find yourself. Even Carol herself makes an unintentional effort to prove him wrong in an enigmatic final-act moment when an implied love interest (James LeGros) prompts her to finally proclaim self-love in front of her small, dingy mirror. Perhaps people are necessary after all.

Safe is a scathing critique of the false promises and damaging hidden side effects of supposed "cures" for "abnormalities," which Haynes might identify personally as AIDS. It's not hard to draw a line from Dunning's preachy spiritualist to a clueless conservative posing the idea that homosexuality is a disease that can be cured through self-reflection. But its greatest strength is that it is also many other things: a metaphor for political manipulation and the widespread dumbing-down of civilians, a plea for the equal rights of women in a masculinized society, a cautionary tale about the necessity of exercising freedom in your own life choices, an argument for active engagement in the world, particularly in those things that are readily available to you such as family and community, and a chilling dissection of both the numbing plainness and the ubiquitous hazards in the modern world. Despite his many peaks, Haynes has not made a film this viscerally affecting since.

Metropolitan (1990) A Film by Whit Stillman

One could imagine even Luis Buñuel, the famously scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, warming up to Whit Stillman's wry, patient debut Metropolitan, a film with an unapologetically affectionate perspective on the upper-class. At the very least, Buñuel, who, coincidentally, is one target of the relentless verbal gamesmanship in Stillman's film, would have hesitantly applauded the American director's confident simplification of space and time, a strategy Buñuel himself tried in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Metropolitan unfolds in the confines of a few ritzy Manhattan apartments (which, with their rich color schemes and baroque furnishings, all look roughly the same) and in a vague portal of time coined "not so long ago" in title screens. Though the setting is specific - it's the Christmas season and a group of vacationing prep school students are getting together to attend gala debutante balls - the film luxuriates in a generic sense of "pastness", and its anachronism is matched by arch performances that have little concern for conversational realism. This is a film that is very much satisfied with its own insular world, with seeming to exist entirely outside the concerns of society.

Stillman uses this detached, formal approach for comedic ends, and it's fitting because the characters inhabiting this milieu are just as self-involved, just as oblivious to "normal" life. The group of friends refer to themselves as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, named after Dylan Hundley's character, a dainty, stuck-up girl who often appears the most charmingly naïve in the group. Always beside her is Jane Clark (Allison Parisi), her slightly huskier, more self-aware mirror. Of course, in the company of girls like these, there needs to be a third wing, which is occupied by Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina), a timid Jane Austen fangirl with the kind of vaguely tomboyish look that characterizes French New Wave starlets. Naturally, the group's most shamelessly articulate, geeky member, Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols) - also the character who dubs the group a part of the supposed U.H.B., or urban haute bourgeoisie - harbors a mostly unspoken crush on her that is disrupted by the arrival of a slightly less affluent Upper West Side outsider named Tom Townsend (Edward Clements). (Much of the audience's awareness of class hierarchies is telegraphed through dialogue about specific sections of the city.) Charlie adopts a knee-jerk distaste of Tom's ways, which he finds unusually conniving and ideologically problematic (he proclaims a devotion to the socialist theories of Charles Fourier and neglects reading books in favor of literary criticism), while the nihilist blowhard of the bunch, Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman), predictably is attracted to Tom's unconventional ideas.

These twentysomethings pursue upward mobility to prevent what they interpret as the foreseeable demise of the U.H.B, but their pursuit is vague and passive, defined by endless stasis and conversation rather than forward activity. What Stillman does show of the dances they attend is brief and fragmentary, emphasizing the idea that whatever they do outside the spacious mahogany rooms where they convene late at night to chat is peripheral and insignificant to them. Instead, love, politics, art, literature, philosophy, and college stories are discussed with the kind of righteous confidence and verve that suggests it's always a put-on, and when Audrey falls for Tom's freckly innocence and proudly contrarian tendencies, the drama that enters their closed circle is enough to confirm there will never be a dull moment. The communication here is controlled, fast, and clever, bringing to mind the fierce comedies of Preston Sturges rather than a twee ensemble piece like The Breakfast Club. Sturges' films were all about structure and pacing, always sacrificing character development in service of the twisty, complicated verbal joke.



Metropolitan, too, relies on its seemingly effortless but totally disciplined pacing. Stillman's work is defined by the leisurely tempo of its plot trajectories (in spite of the speed of the dialogue) and by its sense of casually and almost imperceptibly integrating central narrative threads. What's so impressive about Metropolitan - especially in light of its status as a debut - is the way these plot kernels build up exclusively through conversation scenes rather than through some of the comparatively expressive visual storytelling of The Last Days of Disco, for instance. The effect is akin to listening in to different parts of a room at a party, gradually picking up details that form a larger picture. As such, Audrey's affection for Tom is first sensed, then gleaned, then hinted at, then addressed in part, then addressed in full, as is Charlie's jealousy, Nick's boredom, Jane's backstabbery, and Sally's immaturity. Because Stillman's characters speak so much, it has the effect of either making the majority of their statements unconvincing or perhaps not fully thought out. And naturally, it makes the moments when characters do not speak all the more suggestive and powerful, such as when Audrey slumps quietly as the group plays a dangerous game designed to spill deep truths, or in a throwaway moment in the third act when Nick leaves the group and turns around in the subway station to wave a bittersweet goodbye.

Instances like these make Metropolitan, in addition to being a sharp, funny film, an unexpectedly moving one too. This is not only a film about how unemployed, post-collegiate friends function in an upper-class milieu, but also how their social class figures into their every behavior and thought, so much so that it produces a kind of lament for their perceived demise. Melancholy weighs over the film even during the lightest stretches of comic verbiage, and it's the product of nothing less than a universal fear of the future. I already mentioned Farina’s resemblance to French New Wave actresses, and the film’s carefree but apprehensive mood is emblematic of that kinship as well. Stillman even has Tom pull a plastic cap gun in his final "rescue" of Audrey at the Cape Cod beach house of notorious jerk Rick Von Sloneker - a moment that echoes Godard's early "girl and a gun" cinema as well as some of the hokey romanticism of Truffaut. It underlines a playful whimsy that runs subtly throughout the entire film, a charming amateurishness that gives additional gravity to the genuinely felt performances of characters who, regardless of their abundant and adult resources, have yet to free themselves from adolescence.

David Gatten's Secret History of the Dividing Line

In a cinematic culture where words, whether onscreen or via narration, are commonly ghettoized as paltry emotional shorthand and "visual storytelling" is trumpeted as the pinnacle of the art form, David Gatten's films present an urgent retort. Having relished, dissected, and contemplated the printed word for almost twenty years now - and he plans to continue to do so for the rest of his career - Gatten has rediscovered the mysterious allure of typographic language in a specifically temporal context distinct from literature. The crux of this fascination is Secret History of the Dividing: A True Account in Nine Parts, a series of films initiated by Gatten in 1999 and prospectively set to conclude in 2028. Thus far, four films, all silent and black-and-white and ranging from 18 to 37 minutes, have been completed: Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, The Enjoyment of Reading, Secret History of the Dividing Line, and The Great Art of Knowing. Together these films represent an astonishing, mysterious body of work with a distinctive approach to visual grammar, a shifting set of complex themes, and a loose, fragmentary narrative.

The inspiration for Gatten's series is a mesmerizing melodrama circling around the history of the settling of the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina in the early days of Colonial North America. William Byrd II, a government official from Virginia, is the focus of Gatten's historical curiosity. In a forgotten fragment of history, Byrd was one of the pivotal journeymen responsible for finalizing the colonial border, and subsequently wrote two volumes about the experience (one titled The History of the Dividing Line and another more suggestively deemed Secret History of the Line). These two pieces of literature were the seeds of an entire library established by Byrd of writings on the social, economic, and political landscape of 18th century America. However, this sizable repository of personalized knowledge, considered by Gatten to be in many ways the inauguration of American intellectual identity, was gradually eclipsed by a generation of more conventional libraries and has become, like its founder, a mere blip in the timeline of history.



Taking the lead of the supposed "secret history" that Byrd penned which was swiftly obfuscated, Gatten similarly mines the non-sequiturs, loose ends, and unglamorous areas of history. What results is a sprawling interrogation of the notion of historical accuracy, raising the question of what gets into history books to be taught to new generations and why. Part 1 of the series, Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002) - which was actually the third film released, adhering to Gatten's strange, achronological ordering - wastes no time elucidating these themes, opening with a single jagged scratch running frantically through the center of the frame as various dates flash by beside it. It's immediately clear that the scratch represents the border drawn between Virginia and North Carolina, but it becomes several other things in the process: a wavering timeline, a manifestation of the divide between what we know and what we can't know, between reality and fiction, and between life and death. The thematic import of this line weighs on the rest of the series, as Gatten is not so much nodding to the tidiness of the line as he is questioning how accurate it can be when dealing with the mysteries of time and existence. A subplot in Byrd's story is a spooky tale of William's daughter Evelyn, a woman with romantic hardships that plagued the final years of her life, and whose ghost has allegedly been spotted several times roaming around the state border. Gatten wonders whether a narrative such as this, seemingly only the stuff of folk tale, is any less vital, any less instrumental in the progress of history than, say, the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

The onscreen time allotted to each historical date running along the timeline of the scratch varies drastically. Some dates run only a few frames, appearing as indecipherable flashes of text that mirror the relative insignificance of single moments in such a vast stretch of time. Others, such as the date of the inauguration of Spiritualism in the Americas, or the birth of William Byrd II, show up legibly for a few seconds. Gatten is foregrounding those seemingly trivial aspects of history that are of importance to his project, and neglecting some of the more universally talked-about and written-about cornerstones of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In doing so, he provides subtle hints towards the thematic and narrative preoccupations that the series continues to explore in fragments. That these are merely hints and not full aesthetic discourses seems essential to Gatten, because the Secret History of the Dividing Line series traces the way a narrative and a work of art is pieced together over time, just as the ideas and stories being explored were nurtured throughout the course of decades and centuries. Further issuing this point, Secret History of the Dividing Line, the film, follows this opening timeline sequence with an extended progression of images of amorphous, gravelly textures, chiaroscuro concoctions smearing half the screen and evoking a primordial soup. It's a gesture that bluntly denies any further intellectual engagement, insisting upon a sensual relationship to the celluloid instead.



The Great Art of Knowing (2004), Gatten's second and most poetic film in the series, extends upon the project's relationship to the act of searching through history and excavating details. Here, Gatten's camera scours a library, revealing old, dusty books illuminated only by a tickle of sunshine sneaking through trees outside. Not only do these luscious close-ups revel in the ancient artifacts of preserved but ultimately defunct knowledge, they also savor the very idea of material aging, bringing dust, wrinkled paper, and archaic cursive writing into detailed view. One can practically smell the organic odor emanating from the old paper. These shots are all about the beauty of the handiwork involved in printing these books, and equally about a lament for the decline of the library or the archive and the loss of printed literature as a primary mode of research. To contrast the printed word, Gatten also reveals excerpts from some of Byrd's writings in onscreen text, begging the same question Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy raised so eloquently last year: is a copy of an original inherently any less authentic or moving?

Gatten juxtaposes his library imagery with the occasional burst of abstraction, like a wispy shot of refracted light or a microscopic view of shrubbery, all of which establishes the undercurrent of micro vs. macro running through the film and more gently through the entire series. The Great Art of Knowing explores both minutiae - the relaxed daily schedule jotted down by Byrd in his journals, the texture of old books, the play of natural light on objects - and grand imagery, such as a black-and-white lithograph of a Renaissance-era creation painting, or a glimpse of Byrd's full name and government rank etched majestically beneath a dramatic logo. The film is posing the comparatively mundane next to the decidedly iconic and searching for the dissonances, or lack thereof, between the two. One can also sense Gatten's interest in spirituality growing in stature; throughout the series, myth, religion, and ghost stories show up offhandedly as ways of glimpsing into the past with greater clarity, or, perhaps for Byrd, living life to the fullest. Philosophical concepts appear as jumping off points for examining and sifting through the vast landscape of history.



The first two films produced in the series - technically part three and four in Gatten's order - are Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999) and The Enjoyment of Reading (2001). The former takes its name from writer Joseph Moxon's 18th century volume on the use of the newly invented printing press, which initiated a widespread proliferation of knowledge that was hitherto unheard of. It's fitting that Gatten would have started production of the series with this film, because like Moxon, it marks an attempt to assess and comment upon the current function and significance of written knowledge. Naturally, the film, as well as its follow-up, is filled with optically printed text, almost at the neglect of any conventionally filmed images, but the ways in which Gatten uses text become intensely and distinctly cinematic. In The Enjoyment of Reading, letters, enlarged and small, zip by on the screen in all different directions (Gatten rarely adheres to left-to-right movement, the standard method of visually depicting historical progress), transforming into pure abstraction. It's simultaneously a clever joke on the title (none of the text is actually legible), a representation of the chaotic progress of many different types of knowledge across history, and a gentle critique of the modern propensity towards speed, which so often reduces disciplined written work to mere visual noise. In Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, sentences appear on screen slowly and legibly, but their meanings are obscured by nonsensical grammar, forcing the audience to admire the texture of the printed word instead.

This dynamic between admiration of the printing process and argument for the necessity of reading is only one of the many balancing acts on display in Secret History of the Dividing Line, which also negotiates the tricky terrain between progress and stasis, preservation and obsolescence, fiction and non-fiction, cinema and some kind of post-cinema, and life and death. Gatten has embarked upon a body of work that is perpetually shifting and expanding upon its core ideas, and that utilizes a narrative backbone that is broad and intriguing enough to warrant continued attention. Given the web of ideas, methods, and characters Gatten has yet to explore, there is practically a guarantee that future works will avoid redundancy. With its overwhelming accumulation of details and symmetries, the series requires and rewards the kind of devoted, solitary attention with which it was lovingly created.

TIE: A Selection of Shorts

TIE, the International Experimental Cinema Exposition, is a traveling program of experimental films curated by Christopher May that seeks to bring to light the impoverished image of contemporary experimental cinema to a broader filmgoing public. What's more, May is working hard to revive the nearly extinct ghetto of 16mm exhibition, a medium that has become less and less attractive to the profiteers of international cinema curation. TIE's latest program, which recently made a pit stop in Boston, is a collection of short films by mostly American filmmakers ranging from 5-22 minutes that loosely explore the notion of travel and aim to transcend conventional anthropological approaches. Further affinities between the six films reveal themselves throughout the program - the idea of the outsider, the trajectory through a space, certain visual and editorial rhythms - that speak to May's sharpness as a curator.

The program began with Diane Kitchen's Penfield Road, the oldest film of the bunch from 1998. It's a playful meditation on travel, specifically contrasting the ideas of vacation and of merely occupying a place. Kitchen uses postcard pictures rather than here own footage and accumulates a bizarre editing rhythm by alternating back and forth between two images several times before introducing a new image to alternate with the second in the first pair. This somewhat unsettling pictorial rhythm, akin to a line of dominoes reversing their inevitable momentum every other piece, is set to rough, fuzzy ragtime that skips as if spinning on a bad record player. Kitchen's clearly suspending a sense of irony when she shows uninhabited nature alongside dolled-up middle-aged women peering out at the world from an observation tower, but the effect is less often funny and more often stuck between bluntly didactic and curiously thought-provoking. Whether one thinks of these small and iconic figures in the postcards as exploiting the beauty of the natural world or respecting their small roles within it, Kitchen is at least attempting to make the viewer consider the way we inhabit the physical world.

In Death Throes #1, filmmaker Tony Balko goes way beyond Kitchen's rapid photomontage to achieve pure frenzy, an assault of images that paradoxically achieve a mood of relaxation, of quietly taking in the stillness of nature. The effect is not unlike some of Stan Brakhage's shorts that use fast bursts of images to reach for something warm and ephemeral, such as Cat's Cradle or Mothlight. Balko assembles hundreds of fragmented shots of Northern California mountain regions, combining rocks, leaves, dirt, insects, trees, sky, and mountaintops to gradually form a cumulative mental picture of the landscape. Usually the same piece of scenery, no matter how undramatic, will be shown several times in a row from slightly different angles, perhaps some blurred and some not, offering multiple ways of looking at the same thing before the image quickly recedes into the rapid movement of the film and reveals something else. The editing is relentless but often strikingly beautiful, such as when Balko creates an extended stretch of shots that form their own miniature progression. And despite the seeming chaos, one could similarly apply an overarching narrative to the entire short; the images, abstracted from the utter speed and momentum, appear to tell the internal, emotional tale of a sunny hiking trip.

If Balko's objective is to aggressively interrogate the objective to locate the subjective, Chilean filmmaker Jeannette Muñoz' Villatalla takes a more reserved stance on objectivity and aspires to suggest nothing more than the physical world before her camera. Muñoz' film is split into two parts - one in color with field recordings and the other in black and white with no audio - that observe the daily happenings in a remote mountain village in Liguria. So drastic is Muñoz' shift that the project feels like two separate films, the first of which is superior in mood and discipline. It is there that her compositions are at their best, fragmenting the space visually while uniting the village through the quiet, spacious field recordings. In the second chunk of the 22 minute running time, the camera observes a sun-bleached forest where a farmer collects various sticks for an unspecified task. Muñoz' attention to the rhythms of the man's work wavers, making it a somewhat incomplete study of labor and solitude. Instead, her focus drifts to a seemingly endless succession of indifferently-framed shots of forest undergrowth. Still, however unfocused, there's a real sense of an outsider's compassion for her new and humbling surroundings.

The highlight of the showcase was Jonathon Schwartz' Between Gold, which possesses a measure of thematic complexity to coincide with its casual and nuanced observation of an exotic country. The film grew out of Schwartz' brief stay in Istanbul, where he brought along a Bolex and indiscriminately filmed people and places, and it concerns itself with the docking grounds on either sides of the Bosphorus Strait, which mark a divide between Europe and Asia as well a distinct separation of the Turkish areas of Anatolia and Rumelia. Being an economic center, the Strait sees great amounts of back-and-forth migration. Schwartz focuses on this unceasing movement while keeping his images unobtrusive, languid, and ruminative. As much as people are traversing from one space to another, there is also stasis between transportation, and it is during this layover that Schwartz finds his most evocative images of quiet, lonely figures, partly dehumanized in the midst of the ongoing cultural exchange (is Schwartz' insistent non-diegetic soundtrack of dogs barking a suggestion of the ultimate debasement inherent in all this monotony?) yet elevated by the camera's gaze. The finest example of this act of individualization is the film's centerpiece, a long and repetitive passage focusing on a young woman's face, back-lit by the sun, as she rides the ferry from one continent to another. Few films in the program allowed such transcendent moments of introspection, and Between Gold was the humanistic triumph because of it.