My Favorite Albums of 2010

As with any list, I can hardly claim this to be all-encompassing, as it focuses primarily on the genres of most interest to me (alternative/indie rock, folk, minimalist, ambient). I've also included a handful of 2009 albums, and in one instance, a selection from 2008, making this less a definitive year-end music list than a personal collection of various albums that made an impact on me throughout the year. Without further ado, here's the list.


1. The Walkmen - Lisbon

The Walkmen return with their breeziest, most stripped-down album yet. Hamilton’s voice is at its most relaxed and triumphant, and the songwriting is simple and timeless. It seems that the more the band strips away from their already spare sound, the more resonant their music becomes. Standouts like "Blue as Your Blood", "Juveniles", "Woe is Me", and "While I Shovel the Snow" demonstrate impeccable craftsmanship even as they downsize with the most basic ingredients of rock'n'roll (guitar, bass, drums, organ). No other album this year grew so intensely in my affections; I’ve listened to it over 50 times. It’s a shame that The Walkmen are so consistently ignored by music outlets, presumably just because they don’t pander to fleeting trends.


2. Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt

Another example of a sadly neglected album with huge, iconic power in spite of its modest ingredients (a guitar and a voice, for the most part). Kristian Mattson’s folk songs have the gift of being universal, like the best of Bob Dylan and Dock Boggs, and intensely singular, marked by Mattson’s expressive growl and virtuosic finger-picking.


3. Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People

I don’t care much about how this is formally called an “EP”. Aside from the gargantuan length, it’s more complete and varied than most conventional full-lengths. The title track is an incredible marathon with about as many hooks as you could hope for in a great pop song, and an equal number of avant-garde orchestrations. It’s infectious music, alternating from the big and bold to the deliciously intimate (“Owl and the Tanager”), and it’s a greater joy than Sufjan’s other release this year, The Age of Adz.


4. DM Stith - Heavy Ghost (2009)

There’s two voices of D.M Stith on Heavy Ghost: an eerily intimate, nakedly produced one that suggests someone whispering in your ear and a ghostly, propulsive one that swerves around in the background. They are constantly competing in his elaborate songs, which range from hobbling folk waltzes (“Pity Dance”) to darkly beautiful piano numbers (“Braid of Voices”). How I missed this in 2009 is a mystery to me.


5. Dr. Dog - Shame Shame

Such a consistent rock band. There’s nothing extraordinarily inventive here; just a collection of contagious pop songs. It’s also the band’s most high-fidelity album, which gives new clarity to their nuanced textures.


6. David Sylvian - Manafon (2009)

I love how Sylvian’s bellowing, expressive voice is laid bare by the intensely minimalist contributions of his collaborators. Manafon quickly settles into a Zen-like state with its first slow-burner (“Small Metal Gods”) and never ceases. Sylvian’s elaborate and enigmatic stories are supplied shape and emotional support by the hushed static, the unexpected violin swells, and the various acoustic clicks and pops across the album.


7. Jonsi - Go

There’s not much contemporary pop rock that sounds quite like Jonsi. Even though his first solo album incorporates orchestrations by ubiquitous indie composer Nico Muhly, the youthful, energized sound is unlike anything the two have ever done. The dynamic range of this record – from euphoria bursts like “Boy Lilikoi” to loose epics like “Grow Till Tall” – is astounding. What’s more, it was the most overwhelming concert experience I had this year.


8. Sam Amidon - I See the Sign

Sam Amidon’s previous album All is Well is undoubtedly one of the greatest folk records of the decade, so it’s perhaps inevitable that I See the Sign had tough ground to follow. To his credit, Amidon doesn’t try to rehash the same method. Instead of the elegant simplicity of All is Well’s chord structures and instrumentation, the Connecticut native excavates more discordant experimental sounds and unexpected time signatures, lending unique auras to the ageless Appalachian folk songs he reinterprets. If there has ever been an opener that more pointedly announces a different direction than the bizarre murder shuffle of “How Come That Blood”, then I’m not aware of it. I See the Sign, albeit in its own distinct way, is almost as affecting and lovely as its predecessor, and that’s no small feat.


9. The National - High Violet

High Violet is bigger, bolder, and less pensive than 2007’s excellent Boxer, but it worms its way into your brain with a similarly lasting impact. Aside from the colossal misstep that is “Terrible Love”, the veteran Brooklyn quintet spare none of their melancholy beauty, and Matt Berninger’s sardonically pained lyrics are at their most enigmatic.


10. She and Him - Volume Two

I’m clearly a big fan of music that sounds timeless, that refuses to get swept up in current trends and resists short-term interest. As such, the second album from She (Zooey Deschanel) and Him (M. Ward) doesn’t leap at you. The songs mostly sound like something you’ve ever heard before (and in many instances they are, given the duo’s propensity for covers), but they have instant, timeworn appeal, and they are filled to the brim with subtle instrumentation and clever production ideas courtesy of Ward. Moreover, Deschanel’s voice has really matured, capable of sounding as rich as Patsy Cline but still retaining a child-like self-awareness with all those “hmms”, hiccups, and giggles.


11. The Caretaker - Persistent Repetition of Phrases (2008)

Ghosts of 1920’s ballroom music obscured by the thick crackle and pop of static. These are ambient dreamscapes to get lost in for hours, a kind of impressionistic music that summons up the best and most mysterious of mental pictures.


12. Amiina - Puzzle

Amiina’s first album since 2007’s Kurr fortunately keeps their signature sound intact, but they’ve added some decidedly modern flourishes to their primarily organic instrumentation. The brooding opening track, “Asinn”, doused in anticipation, utilizes electronic beats that gradually swell into a clashing acoustic kit. This is all married perfectly to their typical base of bells, violins, accordions, and other various acoustic gadgets. The overall effect recalls Icelandic natives Mum, but Amiina retains their own distinctive lullabies.


13. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

The persistent thematic ambition of Arcade Fire is what separates them from most big indie acts. Even if The Suburbs suffers occasionally from being overlong, generic, and redundant, the standout tracks (“Ready to Start”, “Rococo”, “We Used to Wait”), which dutifully capture suburban angst and nostalgia, keep things interesting. And something tells me we have to savor what might be their last engaging effort before an impending sellout.


14. Norberto Lobo - Pata Lenta (2009)

Norberto Lobo is a Portuguese acoustic virtuoso who spends his time on both six and twelve string guitars, never ceasing to amaze with the sheer technical brilliance on display. Pata Lenta showcases Lobo as a writer of dazzling instrumental pieces that take unexpected left turns and a pure avant-gardist, using the acoustic in unconventional ways to create haunting atonal textures.


15. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

I’m still skeptical of how comfortably Sufjan’s tender voice sits atop these bombastic electronic symphonies, but The Age of Adz has definitely grown on me in recent listens. One has to respect his ambition and his desire to challenge himself artistically. I tend to vacillate between thinking the album needs more moments of quiet repose (“Now That I’m Older” being the one soaring exception) and realizing it may not be necessary given the amount of delicate folk songs he’s already treated us to in his career. In a word, this is the most problematic great album I have on here.


16. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is thick with dread and otherworldly force, conjuring up a variety of different musical styles in the process from screaming prog-rock to quiet blues to Lynchian noise. Sometimes it’s not as cohesive or tight as one would hope, which has supposedly been a spot of continuous trouble for frontman Michael Gira, but it holds on with a wealth of creative ideas and a general atmosphere of anxiety and gloom.


17. Timber Timbre - S/T (2009)

This Canadian blues act is fascinatingly minimalist on their self-titled third album, restraining their delivery to guitar, organ, piano, and subdued drums. It’s as if each instrument has been performed as quietly and infrequently as possible so that only the beating of a tom or the wheeze of a sustained organ punctuates the silence. Taylor Kirk’s eccentric voice helps articulate the emotions only hinted at by the music.


18. Of Montreal - False Priest

Kevin Barnes embraces the funkiest R&B side of his musical personality, unafraid to look goofy or regressive even as he invigorates ridiculous retro flourishes like call-and-response vocals and beefy 80’s synths. False Priest is a more enjoyable album than 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, which covered similar ground, and it features the band’s most anthemic tune in a long time (“Sex Karma”). Also, one senses Barnes frequently voicing deep-seated and resolutely serious opinions from beneath all the silliness, a notion that is made explicit in the final agnostic screed of “You Do Mutilate?”.


19. First Aid Kit - The Big Black and Blue” (2009)

When these two Swedish sisters can fully shake off their obvious Fleet Foxes idolatry, I think they’re capable of records they can call their own. They’ve got the shtick down pat though, and there are certainly glimpses of greatness on their first LP.


20. The Black Keys - Brothers

I much prefer their raw early records, but The Black Keys have certainly embraced their growing rock-star status in admirably exciting ways, introducing new sounds to their bluesy foundation and higher fidelity production. Individually, the songs on Brothers are as full of attitude as anything they’ve ever done, but as a whole, the album stumbles with too many mid-tempo grooves, making the long running time really feel excessive. But they did release the most entertaining music videos of the year.

(Numbers 21-28 refer to albums I have only recently begun listening to and am therefore incapable of providing an appropriate encapsulation. Given more time though, I'm sure they'd make the list.)

21. Mount Eerie - Wind’s Poem (2009)
22. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
23. Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights
24. Dirty Projectors + Bjork - Mount Wittenberg Orca
25. Hildur Gudnadottir – Without Sinking (2009)
26. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me
27. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
28. Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

Also worth noting: my own band, Old Abram Brown, released our second album this year. It's called Restless Ghosts, and it's available for purchase here.

Tron Legacy (2010) A Film by Joseph Kosinski

Tron Legacy picks up where the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer left off, one-upping that film's sheer embrace of visual chaos and virtual worlds. Rarely does an event movie like this rely so heavily, and almost exclusively, on the rudimentary pleasures of light and movement, or in its essence, cinema. Director Joseph Kosinski trades the Wachowskis' bubble-gum abstractions for the simpler color scheme exercised by Stephen Lisberger in the 1982 original, only here, it's less primitive Windows and more ultra-high-def futuristic bombast, nothing short of gratuitous eye candy. The film is ultimately a black screen from which luminous whites, blues, and oranges emerge, darting wildly across the frame or just glowing in one spot comfortably, like the endless buzzing fluorescents one sees in a Lynch film. If commercial cinema has seemingly acknowledged its own intellectual vapidity in recent years and indulged gleefully in spectacle (the Transformers franchise being the keystone), Tron Legacy takes this notion to its logical extreme, flirting with visual anarchy even as its stupefying and stupid narrative sits stubbornly on the side of rigid formula.

There's at least two great scenes in the film, and the rest has a constant vibration to it, a sense of titillating movement that doesn't claim to have an end result. Kosinski, working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda and a cumbersomely large computer effects team, indulges in near-constant camera movement, giving endlessly labyrinthine form to even the most banal of sequences, and when he's just serving up a static close-up, an array of lights or a cloud of mist still animates the background. At its best, as in the two "light cycle" battles in which zippy neon motorbikes spray lethal streams of light at opponents in a digital arena, this visual stimulation approaches Brakhagian heights, almost reaching full-fledged abstraction before gesturing back to give narrative shape to the action. Truth is, the story here is a negligible distraction (so I'm not even going to be redundant and rehash the story specs that you can surely find elsewhere if you'd like), not the fatal flaw that defines this as a "bad movie". Viewers unfamiliar with the original will be left in the dark when some of the headier computer world jargon enters the picture, and the sudden emergence of the titular figure in the second light battle is particularly underwhelming if only for the seeming irrelevance of it. If anything, the narrative nuances (if you can call them that) are unwelcome injections into what really seems to aspire to something more simple-minded: a spectacular immersion into a computer-world fantasy.

With thudding references to 2001 (the glowing white headquarters with the out-of-place Victorian furniture), Star Wars (the stormtroopers and a character conflict bearing some similarities to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker), Lord of the Rings (Jeff Bridges does his best Gandalf impression in the climactic battle sequence on a narrow bridge (no pun intended)), and The Big Lebowski ("radical man!"), it's clear that there's very little intertextual ground the film doesn't want to peripherally cover, which makes it a whole lot more fun than this year's other video-game movie, Inception. What's more, it offers obligatory shots of Daft Punk, who provide the film's pulsing soundtrack, and a cameo by Michael Sheen that channels David Bowie in utterly ridiculous fashion. A friend of mine observed how it's less a movie than a document of how computer technology has advanced in recent years, and I think that's a pretty apt description. And if that means commercial cinema is destined to self-actualize as masturbatory technological exhibitionism, then it's a simultaneously disconcerting and exhilarating prospect. With its shameless self-referentiality and revelry of cutting-edge visuals, Tron Legacy certainly continues a step in a direction; what exactly that direction is, we don't know yet. What else, other than a confirmation of the still-surviving casual racism of Disney and the privilege to ogle at another mechanically attractive babe in a pressure suit, can you ask for?

The Anchorage (2009) A Film by Anders Edstrom and C.W. Winter

C.W. Winter and Anders Edstrom's The Anchorage began as just a lichen documentary. The two friends - a Californian filmmaker and a Swedish photographer - set out to an island in the Stockholm Archipalego in Sweden where Edstrom's mother lives and began filming. Then, at some point in the process, Edstrom's mother told them a story about a time on the island when she felt discomforted by the arrival of a hunter, who scoped his prey unusually close to her home. Immediately, Winter and Edstrom knew they had something. The lichen documentary was ditched, and they worked off of these bare ingredients to construct what would become The Anchorage, a lovely, quietly unsettling work that still feels somewhat like a documentary, the subject of which the film seems to constantly be in search of. It's indistinct and ragged, loose enough to let itself be guided by the rhythms of nature yet still peculiarly towed down to an unmistakable, rigid structure. Edstrom's mother Ulla, who is the film's human center, wakes up at the crack of dawn each morning to take a quick, nude dip in the arctic bath of the Baltic Sea, and Winter and Edstrom show this ritual three times throughout the film at equal intervals, scrutinizing with their long, unblinking camera not only the blink-and-you'll-miss-it swim but also the moments of preparation and drying off before and after. The film acquires a rich quotidian cadence due to these uniform episodes that is not unlike that of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, which encourages a heightening of attention to minutiae, to subtle shifts in routine.

In between these morning swims, Winter and Edstrom fill their film up with Ulla's daily activities, like walking through her heavily wooded backyard, gutting fish, or motor-boating into the nearby village to obtain supplies. In the first third of the film, she is visited by her daughter and a family friend, offering a rare glimpse of companionship for Ulla. But Winter and Edstrom play down the human story anyway, or, perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they don't play anything up. The minimal dialogue is homogenized with the surroundings, just about as loud (or as quiet) as the sounds of a crackling fire in the yard, or the birds chirping in the distance. They're gone before you know it, and Ulla is left to return to her quiet domesticity, carefully arranging her provisions to support herself in the most modest way possible (one recalls Bergman's retreat to Faro Island in his final years, where he surrounded himself with only the most fundamental units of importance to his life). Her only connection to the outside world is her tiny radio, which delivers arbitrary news stories as she walks in and out of the various rooms of her small cabin. She's a woman of profound independence and dignity, and ultimately this stuff is extraneous to her.

Winter and Edstrom capture it all with deliberately unfussy compositions and grainy, wondrously textured 16 mm film stock, giving it the patina not so much of a home movie but of a vintage travelogue. This isn't amateur filmmaking; it's purposely restrained and unspectacular in an attempt to wring beauty out of the whole rather than out of individual blocks. I was reminded of the seemingly perfunctory, folksy cinematography of Lisandro Alonso, who deglamorizes his images to give them a palpable weight that is often missing from the pretty pictures of postcard cinema. Various sequences in The Anchorage have this same kind of tactile presence: a shot down the narrow hallway of Ulla's home with a cabinet in focus in the foreground and Ulla moving around freely in the blurred background (Winter and Edstrom don't indulge the rack focus, because the action isn't as important as the space); a repeated image of the window in Ulla's bedroom with the shades strewn casually; a sustained observation of Ulla's fish-gutting routine on the windy docks, giving ample time to understanding the process.



The Anchorage has an equally nuanced sonic patience. Winter, who recorded the rich ambient sounds, prizes the raw, unadulterated glory of field recording, letting certain woodsy sounds accumulate in the distance while the ostensible "action" of the scene is not prioritized in the mix. It's hardly a cinematic tactic; it's more about giving the feeling of being there, no matter how "uninteresting" that might be from an aural standpoint. In one instance, Winter and Edstrom emphasize this sonic realism by cutting abruptly to a shot of Ulla chainsawing through a long tree branch. It's piercingly loud and abrasive, but that's because the sound of a chainsaw is just that: piercingly loud and abrasive.

Given that the film is so intimately fascinated with stasis, routine, and other manners of non-movement, its sudden wind storm, which arrives three quarters of the way through the film and could be obliquely described as a kind of tonal climax, lends a particularly powerful sense of vastness and unpredictable force. For the first time, Winter and Edstrom pull away from the micro to reveal a stunning panorama of the forest, its numerous trees being violently tossed around in the winds. Here, the otherwise irrational logic of nature seems to dramatically align with Ulla's apprehension in the presence of the hunter. For an element that is allegedly the catalyst for the production of the film, Winter and Edstrom curiously downplay the actual vision of the neon-suited hunter, preferring instead to let him drift by for a split-second outside of Ulla's window. Then, in another quasi-Akerman touch, they yield the film's one and only close-up, a shot of Ulla in the bathroom (hiding?) as the hum of the room's fan seems to augment on the soundtrack, becoming an eerie drone before the screen goes black and night falls. This is The Anchorage's strangest passage, largely because it comes so unexpectedly and lasts for such a short period of time, but its impact is chilling. By scrupulously taking away and reveling in the mundane, extra attention is called to these minor blips in the film's tone, raising the hairs on your neck and completing the authentic, immersive world these promising young filmmakers capture.

Black Swan (2010) A Film by Darren Aronofsky

There's a throwaway gag about halfway through Black Swan in which a random creep in a trench coat hysterically "flirts" with a mopey, insecure Natalie Portman on a deserted subway car (smacking together and licking his lips, rubbing his junk). Director Darren Aronofsky covers the action in simple shot-reverse-shot setup, letting the absurdity play without interruption. It's a rare and welcome moment in the film for the way it digresses from Aronofsky's straitjacket design, his unrelenting control over the thematic direction of the film. Amidst all the airless grand guignol and ramshackle purpose, there's this glimpse of humble spectacle. It doesn't forward Portman's character progression, it doesn't have anything to do with ballet, and it doesn't even require any cinematographic hijinks to convey.

Of course I'm being a little facetious, but this is about as close as I got to pure pleasure from watching Aronofsky's latest film, which is otherwise a punishing yarn with little originality and a quantum leap backwards for him artistically. There was not a thought in my mind that after the positive evolutions of The Fountain (still his most thoughtful, sublime film) and The Wrestler (perhaps his most "mature") Aronofsky would regress to the manipulative excesses of Requiem for a Dream, calling back his old shock horror and whirlwind climax routine to alternately tedious and rousing effect. To be sure, Black Swan is definitely better than that film, with not quite as heavy a deterministic undertow, but within Aronofsky's often limited scope, that's not saying much. For all its surface discrepancies, Black Swan tells about the same story and makes the same statement as The Wrestler: Nina Sayers (Portman), a virtuosic but emotionally weak and vulnerable ballerina, is cast as the coveted Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and as she is forced to mine the complicated depths of the role, we learn that in order to succeed in one's art, one must be utterly consumed by it. The artist must flirt with death, and in this mechanically ambiguous case, maybe even meet it.

If Aronofsky is recycling the structure right down to specifics, he's not doing the same with form. Where The Wrestler lounged in social realism, Black Swan is decidedly expressionistic and over-the-top, externalizing everything from Nina's subjective vantage point into the mise-en-scène - her fears, obsessions, and paranoiac projections, shoveled into the frame like the first snow of the season. When Nina returns from a night of peer-pressured partying and stumbles into her apartment, Aronofsky establishes the scene with a nakedly symbolic shot of a kaleidoscopic mirror that fragments Nina into various bits and pieces, clearly representing the fracturing of her usual self. The meaning is blunt, and one gets the sense that Nina and her equally uptight mother would not own such an ostentatious mirror; it's there for Aronofsky's sake alone. This manifestation of interior states grows tiring, especially when it is repetitively reduced to jolting shock cuts of bloody doppelgängers in the third act, who morph their way into Nina's overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), her rival Lily (Mila Kunis), and a crazy has-been ballerina (Winona Ryder) who once had a flame with the ballet director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). The "gotcha!" nature of all this reality/fantasy flip-flopping is cheap and fraudulent, indebted as it is to countless predecessors like Polanski (specifically Repulsion), Argento, and even Lynch (who Aronofsky seems to have extracted from not only with an aggressive lesbian scene that recalls Mulholland Drive, but also in his use of wide-angle close-ups that flatten and deglamorize their subjects much like in INLAND EMPIRE, but in a more transparent and less affecting manner). Black Swan's tricks largely seem to not be its own, and when Nina cathartically kills a "dark side" of herself before blowing away the audience in her final dramatic metamorphosis, it becomes doubly evident.



The human objects of Black Swan are given one role to play, one emotional register through which to direct their behavior towards Nina (this being a film in which everything comes at Portman); the director is the sexist prick who awakens feelings of self-inflicted sexual repression in Nina, Lily is the overtly sensual ballerina who possesses the skills Nina blatantly needs to have the full package as a dancer, and the mother is the overzealous caretaker with a history of her own faded glory. This heightened level of design is entirely the point given that the film is a mechanism of Nina's subjectivity, but it falls apart when there's little base of psychological or emotional depth to begin with in Nina. There has already been lofty praise for Portman's performance, and it would be disingenuous to call it off-base. In the limiting manner in which it is written, it's a tough, durable, and sometimes heartbreaking embodiment, but it is certainly not dynamic or varied, lacking the layers of emotionality that Mickey Rourke brought to his role in The Wrestler. As good as Portman is expressing naiveté, despondency, and personal imprisonment, the script ultimately makes her just that, a bundle of whimpers and half-convinced utterances.

I don't mean to suggest that there's a total lack of virtue in Black Swan. The purely experiential aspects of dancing, for instance, which can be enjoyed for reasons exclusive to the story, are conveyed adeptly by Aronofsky's swooping camera, rarely coming to a halt when privileged to the wondrous swirling motion of bodies. In one particularly exhilarating touch, the camera adopts Nina's viewpoint as she pirouettes for Thomas, creating a blur of motion before pausing momentarily on his domineering gaze. Also, just as with wrestling, Aronofsky captures the abject and less obvious body horror of ballet dancing, lingering on nail-biting close-ups of outstretched toes, pulsing back muscles, and stiffened calves, until of course he hammers the point home with recurring shots of these same body parts replete with various scrapes and sores. Unfortunately, when the film's fleeting pleasures reveal themselves quickly as oppressive narrative devices, the pleasure's sucked away. If there's one lesson Aronofsky needs to learn again as a filmmaker, it's what two of his co-stars didactically repeat to Nina throughout the film: "just live a little".

White Material (2009) A Film by Claire Denis

In recent years, Claire Denis has made an unexpected jump from the abstract, open-ended story collages of The Intruder and Trouble Every Day to something more prosaic and definable, with results both safer and equally accomplished. The interaction between Denis' bold, loose-limbed formal elements and the more straightforward narratives she has embraced makes for an interesting hybrid, certainly for 2008's 35 Shots of Rum, a gentle Ozu homage, and perhaps even more so with her latest film White Material. This time she has ventured away from the sedate and fleeting pleasures of her previous film and revived the strain of implicit bloodlust so delicately hinted at in much of her cinema, yet the story structure remains comfortable. A somnambulistic and radiant French plantation owner named Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) clings to the promise of her coffee beans even as a potent threat of indigenous violence swarms around her uncharted plot of African land. On all sides, a civil war obliterates her fences (both literally and figuratively), and the misshapen nature of them is scrutinized by Denis as if fences are ever anything more than superficial indicators of differentiation between people and ways of life in her work.

This indistinct political situation - a war between a violent native militia and a scattered group of rebels, as well as, to no lesser impact, a troupe of armed and dangerous kids - is merely given a cursory examination. Denis allows only the basics of this conflict to organically work themselves out in the viewer's consciousness because it is, of course, a fictional construct, but also because Maria is so hopelessly unaware of specifics. Early on, in one of the film's most memorable scenes, she stalls while taking a spin on her motorcycle before being called out by a helicopter of French troops who insist that she evacuate the country, where it has become especially dangerous in the no-man's land of Café Vial. Maria just stands there stubbornly and confidently in the middle of the dirt road until, as if punishing her for not taking a hint, the helicopter swoops closer to the ground, clouding her with dust. The elimination of perspective as the dust explodes into the foreground of the shot visually encapsulates Maria's arrogant and self-defeating vantage point, her inability to register the escalating tension around her, and it's particularly jarring when placed aside the beautiful, liberating images that came before it of Maria happily riding her clunky motorcycle around her plantation (not unlike the final moments with The Wild Woman in The Intruder). Immediately, Denis establishes how purity and sensuality can exist right beside corruption and ugliness, a dialectic that could be the ideal description of the film's complex treatment of Africa.

Clearly, part of White Material's thrust is the deconstruction of European colonialist attitudes, the feeling of simultaneous equality and superiority that frames Huppert's character. Though it goes without saying that the film is criticizing this mindset through its relentless responses of terror to Maria's acts of hypocrisy, Denis is never quite so single-minded. Within Huppert's remarkable performance, there are dynamic displays of perseverance, tenderness, and intelligence to go along with her more glaring moments of smugness and exploitation, guaranteeing, if not outright sympathy, then at least no easy antagonizing. When Maria loses her familiar plantation workers and heads into town to collect more, the objectification and manipulation that she flexes is perhaps inexcusable, but later, Denis reveals her seemingly at peace with the son of her black ex-husband, going out of her way to pick him up from school, or generating a tentative but mutual relationship with "The Boxer" (Isaach de Bankolé), a washed-up, wounded rebel hiding out at her plantation and often cited on the radio broadcast that variably plays throughout the film. These instances portray Maria as a kinder and more accepting individual than she may initially seem, someone who simply wants to maintain the land she believes she owns legally and monetarily and will go to great lengths to do so. Cinema audiences want to be able to root for this kind of persevering figure - especially when, in her soft sun dresses and sandals, she looks like such an alien with no fighting chance - but Denis orchestrates a more complicated scenario, one without a clear-cut voice of moral authority.



This is further shrouded by the supporting players in the immediate and extended Vial family. To some degree, White Material functions as an opaque family drama driven by oft-suggested tensions among members, such as the feelings of disappointment, inadequacy, and estrangement surrounding Maria and her good-for-nothing son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) (even if this relationship triggers Huppert's warmest offhand smile), the suspicion and loaded distrust between Maria and her other ex-husband André (Christopher Lambert), who negotiates a behind-the-scenes deal to sell the plantation, or the enigmatic force of Maria's father-in-law and proprietor Henri (Michel Subor), a native of Africa who is more or less lounging around mysteriously whenever onscreen. Connections are challenged after a pivotal scene when Manuel is stripped and toyed with by a pair of spear-and-machete-wielding children in an open field just within the Vial's boundaries, inspiring sudden and inexplicable Travis Bickle-isms in Manuel. Notably, he raids Henri's dwelling before disappearing as a newly anointed vigilante/rebel, donning Henri's purple robe as a displacement of his unspoken patriarchal power. This chilling scene forms the emotional undercurrent for the film's ambiguous final dramatic cataclysm, an outbreak of violence that justifies the numerous recurring shots of unused weapons throughout.

Denis is typically subtle in her visual storytelling here, and it comes as no surprise that the "white material" of the title, which is defined by the natives quite simply as the products of the white colonists, comes to outline the characters and themes. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has penned an essential visual essay about the particular objects that fill in for the psychological penetration that Denis deliberately eschews; it's a collection of observations I only passingly picked up on when I watched it that confirms the offhand visual sophistication Denis offers in even her most comparatively direct narratives. It's thrilling to experience the ways in which she loads this potentially didactic political critique with nuance and competing emotions, peppering her storytelling with various gaps (less expansive and inscrutable than in previous work) to encourage imaginative participation with the film. White Material's an oppressive, breathtaking, and predictably complex experience, up there with the heights of Denis' work.

Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010)

"How about a rain check?"
"Well, let's just stick to dinner."

Leslie Nielsen was hardly just that guy in the "dumb movies," as he's so often been pegged. Yeah, his comedy was dumb, but he did dumb better than most, not least because his screen persona was so relentlessly devoted to appearing oblivious to the dumb that occurred around him. Nielsen could hold a straight face better than almost any comedian of his generation, staring blankly at the object of interest while the world in his periphery went to dust. There are few faces in film comedy more iconic to me than Nielsen's. He was as deadpan as Keaton, as unexpectedly capable of dynamic facial expressions as Allen, and as physical as Chaplin. No other actor brought such joy to my youth, and could sustain such a ridiculous posture in the process.

Enter the Void (2009) A Film by Gaspar Noé

Enter the Void is exactly the film Gaspar Noé needed to make to lift himself from the tar-heap of extreme provocation and misanthropy he had burrowed into with his first two features I Stand Alone and Irreversible. It was quite clear that he could not ride this train for too long before being written off completely as a one-note technical wizard, even if the particular world he settled into was utterly unmatched in cinema. Granted, it's not that Enter the Void doesn't luxuriate in a familiar air of dread and nausea, but rather that it does so in ways that are not purely exhibitionist. For the first time, Noé's gross-out, freak-out sensibility feels inextricably bound to the story he's telling, to the genuine emotions he's trying to get across. In other words, the film's unsavory images (which, to be sure, are fewer and farther between than in past work) more often than not grow organically from within the film instead of being injected in for Noé's own perverse, punishing aspirations.

What's more, for all his stunning technical adeptness in the past, he has really outdone himself here with the story of an American drug-dealer named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) who is shot by police in a drug set-up near his high-rise Tokyo apartment. After this narrative instigator, which comes twenty minutes into the film, Noé depicts Oscar's transcendent post-mortal state by letting his camera literally embody his omniscient spirit floating over Tokyo, slipping in and out of night clubs, apartments, and shadowy alleyways, privy to anything and everything. This first-person perspective, both cosmic and immediate, is what dominates the film, manifesting itself as a "blinking", flesh-and-blood presence in the pre-death "prologue" and eventually dropping in on Oscar's murky flashbacks in shots behind his head that are presumably the visions of his lingering, out-of-body consciousness. It's an unbelievable spectacle of perspective that Noé enables, disorienting and intimate in its impact, and indicative not only of the mysteriousness of the great beyond but also of the spatial and perspectival turbulence that is tied to the drug experience, specifically the powerful hallucinogenics Oscar sells and uses. In fact, drugs and death are being consciously linked throughout the film, not in some didactic, finger-pointing, or premonitory manner, but in a way that locates the otherworldly capacities inherent in both. If that makes it sound like Enter the Void is exalting the obviously dangerous, illegal practice of drug use, well, it is. To some extent. But it's not some prolonged pro-drug ad; Noé's careful to highlight the importance of not enslaving oneself to substances.

None of this should have come as a surprise. It was clear enough from interviews with Noé and trailers that this was going to be at least partly a "drug movie". This nebulous genre, if there even is one, should plunge the viewer into a cinematic approximation of the sensations of taking drugs and, hopefully, say something worth saying about it in the process. As such, Enter the Void is one of the most potent, convincing evocations of the drug experience that I've ever witnessed; it captures the ecstasy, the debilitation, and the paranoia of it with startling firsthand immediacy. (Disclaimer: I don't take drugs, but this experience made me feel like I did.) At face value, the film's tripped-out, 2001-lite visions - lugubrious gyrations of color and movement courtesy of a gargantuan visual effects department, complete with sexualized tendrils swaying about - veer close to the territory of 1990's Windows screen-savers, but they take on a hypnotic power in context largely because Noé is so skillful in getting the audience to believe they are Oscar. Every sudden swoop of the camera feels attributable to a nervous twitch or a paranoid delusion transmitted from Oscar's subconscious, and Brown's clipped, in-your-face internal monologues ("This is the good stuff," "I'm not a junkie," "Wake up") have the unguarded awkwardness of a mental voice.



Following Oscar's encounter with DMT, a hallucinogenic tryptamine existing in the brain but only released during birth, dreaming, near-death experiences, and various other naturally occurring altered states, he is called by his friend Victor (Olly Alexander) who requests he meet him at a club called The Void to sell him some drugs. Noé covers the moment of the phone call to the moment of Oscar's death in one marathon shot spanning the time it takes for Oscar and his drug buddy Alex (Cyril Roy) to descend a never-ending fire escape and meander through the bustling streets of late-night Tokyo, where an escalating tension develops in spite of the casual realism of the sequence. What struck me in retrospect was how little I was aware of and thinking about the technical bravura (all the potential "invisible cuts" aside) as it occurred, because as much as the elaborate, cumbersome nature of the shot is what makes it so incredible, it doesn't call attention to itself. Cutting would seem disingenuous here, and would spoil both the sustained first-person technique and the verisimilitude of the scene. Furthermore, one might call the whole film one long continuous "shot", bound as it is to a complete chronological document of Oscar's state of being, and Noé is constantly discovering ways to fluidly traverse the varying modes Oscar settles into, be it voyeuristic spirit or sentimental occupant of his own memories.

The former, and that which comprises most of Enter the Void's lengthy running time, employs the most groundbreaking stylistic device in a film peppered by various groundbreaking stylistic devices. To communicate Oscar's free-floating, out-of-body state, Noé takes the hyper-literal, Christopher Nolan-esque route and has his camera actually float above the drama underneath, flying across the entirety of Japan's expansive club scene to eventually pause on an individual room where details of interest, both to the narrative and to Oscar's subconscious, are revealed. Where Noé differs from Nolan - whose Inception actually shares much of the exposition-heavy tendencies of Enter the Void (its long-winded establishing of rules is reminiscent of the pat summarization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in Noé's film, which suspiciously mirrors the narrative blueprint) - is in the fact that his blunt visual excess has real substantive weight to it, eventually taking on a poetry of its own that is exclusive to its function as a narrative crutch. There's a pulsating rhythm to these God's-eye-view angles that is endlessly satisfying (and in some cases, willfully disorienting), especially when Noé and cinematographer Benoît Debie indulge in optical tricks like alternating the wideness of the lens mid-shot so that it becomes a kind of drunken expansion of viewpoint, moving from close-up to panorama in order to dwarf characters in their emotional desolation, or when they find endless black orifices (a bullet wound, a drain-hole, a vagina) to enter and emerge from in another space.



It should be clear from reading this how little I care about the ostensible narrative of Enter the Void, and by extension, how negligible it is to enjoying and experiencing the film. I'm not sure if Noé would agree that his narrative is simply an excuse for large-scale immersion in visual and sonic experimentation, because it seems he's unexpectedly genuine and sincere with the human story that keeps Enter the Void's wheels turning, but there's no doubting that it takes a backseat to the phenomenological qualities of the film. Like in Irreversible, the drama is shred-thin and not always very believable or nuanced; Oscar is plagued by a backstory of exile from his parents, who died in a car crash that he miraculously escaped from alive, and from his beloved sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who has recently reunited with him in Tokyo, quickly becoming seduced by the flashy allure of the city as a maelstrom of drugs, alcohol, partying, and sexual soliciting. Visually, the flashbacks that underscore this traumatizing history are often extraordinarily affecting, but whenever the character's open their mouths, they articulate melodramatic pacts that are designed in such an airtight manner, meant to draw attention to the breaking of these pacts that Oscar's death brings. Oscar and Linda's relationship is never particularly convincing as a three-dimensional familial affection. Noé pays the most attention to their offhand incestuousness, which seems to at least partly fill the void in Oscar's life for a nurturing mother and also continues a very frank Freudian preoccupation throughout the film.

The nexus of Oscar's nostalgic pain, or the scene of his parents' death, is repeated numerous times as the film mounts the various levels of its emotional anguish. If the vision of a massive bus pile-driving a small sedan in a highway tunnel is shocking and devastating the first time, one would expect its power to diminish in ensuing representations, but this is hardly the case. Noé manages to re-insert the scene in instances that feel predictable and yet register a heightened sense of emotional vulnerability and alarm in the audience. It's as if the audience is made one with Oscar's consciousness and post-consciousness, privy to his fractured traumas and aware of the escalating patterns of associations he makes. Moreover, Noé repeats specific scenes, such as his death, from the behind-the-head perspective, as if to examine them from every possible angle. Narratively, there's no justification for all this redundancy, and one might make a case for the film only needing to be, say, 30 minutes to really "do its job", but by mulling over scenes, recycling motifs, and trumpeting seemingly inconsequential details, Noé excavates Oscar's entire being. And the film is nothing if not a totalizing immersion into the mind and body of one person. Noé may not be a dramatist, but the base of bare emotions he works off of here is perhaps the ideal complement to this experiential approach. Enter the Void pushes cinema to its breaking point, wiping away all notions of conventional narrative to become pure experience.