In Vanda's Room (No Quarto da Vanda) A Film by Pedro Costa (2000)

Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room is a remarkable, all-encompassing portrait of the Fontainhas ghetto of Lisbon and the people who live there, a stunningly intimate and compassionate panorama of a truly grim way of life. In its epic length and patient observation, the film accumulates an extraordinary power by its conclusion, a realization of the unmistakable humanity that can exist even as everything turns to devastation and degradation. At the center of this portrait is Vanda Duarte, an angular, slightly androgynous woman who spends her days selling lettuce and cabbage to the Fontainhas inhabitants and free-basing heroine with her sister Zita in the confines of her claustrophobic and filthy bedroom. Hers is a dour, self-destructive lifestyle, yet one not without its degree of perseverance, dedication, and dignity; Costa's impressive achievement here is to flip any pre-conceived notions of lowly drug addicts, to assert their essential humanity rather than belittle them for their reckless choices or suggest that they are disposable. In fact, through his persistent camera, Costa is able to uncover these same positive qualities in a variety of characters who cohabit the same concrete dungeon as Vanda while also discovering the vital concept of community that survives in this scenario.

The film now exists as a memorial for this strangely self-contained slum, because throughout In Vanda's Room it is being steadily demolished, resulting in the eviction and subsequent displacement of these already displaced immigrant souls (an experience Costa would tackle directly in his next film, Colossal Youth). While the rest of the world becomes transient and individualized and the New Europe furthers its diffusion of geographical and cultural identity, the people in Fontainhas cling to an established code, perhaps the only sense of consistency and stability they've known in their lives. The first post-credit shot of the film watches as Vanda's lifelong friend, the recently evicted Nhurro, bathes in buckets of hot water in a dank and shadowy room. As he finishes, steam rolls off his entire body to create an image of spectral and otherworldly effervescence, and it's as if Costa is immediately establishing the ghostly quality of these people, the fact that they are so vividly on the brink of total extinction. Periodically the film will pull back from the human component of the film for a reminder of the mechanical demolition of the neighborhood. Long static shots reveal trucks crushing the cement foundations, and at one point, a couple of steel office buildings are glimpsed in the background of the debris, presumably the impetus for this drastic act of modernization. As a result, a sense of encroachment and time running out is always palpable in the film, always something that quite literally weighs heavily on the inhabitants as the sounds of destruction dominate the soundtrack.

Subtly, Costa is raising a correlation between this mindless form of destruction as political and economic "progress" and the more personal form of self-destructive drug abuse witnessed in the characters, in its own perverse way a route to satisfaction and fulfillment. Both are careless and reprehensible, but in Costa's sublimely sympathetic vision the addicts seem almost justifiable in comparison to such an abstract political affair that would blindly annihilate an entire community of human beings for the supposed betterment of the greater good. In Vanda's Room, then, is not as laissez-faire as its cinema vérité trappings might lead it to seem, but rather works as an understated indictment of these wrongheaded government attitudes. As such, its finest and most potent argument is its peerless investigation of the private spaces behind the concrete walls where individuals - aside from consuming copious quantities of hard drugs - are harboring their own loves, desires, suspicions, and ideas. In a word, being human. In one scene, Vanda shows a group of friends and family a decrepit, utterly unsellable antique wooden ship that she plans to exchange in town for a modest wage and is met with skepticism and mockery. In another scene, an addict named Pango perseveres in mustering up a wardrobe out of scattered pieces of wood from old appliances that are lying around his dismal two-room apartment. And later, in the film's most moving scene, an older man named Pedro offers a bouquet of roses to Vanda after she compulsively outlines the schedule for taking the respiratory treatment she just supplied him with (Vanda coughs incessantly in the film, and every time she does it's as if her lung is flipping inside out). Each instance offers a small glimmer of camaraderie, resourcefulness, or kindness that powerfully articulates the vitality of these people better than any artificial dramatization of such a moment could.



Arguably it's Costa's severe technological transition that allowed for such piercing moments of authenticity (although I'd contend that nearly the same level of verisimilitude was already omnipresent in his comparatively bombastic Ossos, a work which utilized the traditional modes of production: a crew, lights, film, even some actors). In Vanda's Room was born out of Costa, a single DV camera, and a sound recorder, and the results are surprisingly high-fidelity if not frequently evocative and distinctive expressions of the digital medium. Costa has a painterly eye for texture and light and the way the two interact that is not unlike that of Tarkovsky, evident in the film's many lowly lit interiors where the deadpan expressions of people are offset by the grimy, clay-like shine of the walls and tables. Visually, the film is at its most stunning at these moments, and when the illumination is reduced at several points to the glow of one or two candles - as it is during one grueling midnight session of heroine usage - the contrast between light and dark is accentuated even further, taking on a metaphorical dimension to suggest the increasing loss of light and hope from these people's lives. Working in a similar fashion is Costa's dense soundtrack, a never-ending chaotic drone of destruction, children playing, rats squeaking, and people, like Vanda, chattering away in their superficially short and irritable tones, which is always offscreen as if to represent both the unbreakable togetherness of this community as well as the constant distance of those inside to the outside world.

The overwhelming sadness of In Vanda's Room is that these tiny shreds of human connection and satisfaction - even if they are centered around drugs - are soon to be extinguished and complicated by the eventual erasure of the neighborhood. In a conversation between Vanda and Nhurro in which the two of them discuss the prospect of whether their lives are predestined or chosen (Vanda is admirably always the source of assurance and nourishment in such scenes), it becomes clear that they have known each other since they were young, that they have struggled with the same issues for quite some time. The same is certainly the case for most of the people in the film, and the identical situation out of which they are forced to suck it up and start a new life is one that would be unspeakable in a less impoverished area of society. This shortsighted tendency to overlook the lower class is the real tragedy of In Vanda's Room, and it's one that Costa delicately and persuasively implicates the audience in through his calmly riveting filmmaking.

The Silence (Tystnaden) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1963)

Context has such an integral, inborn relationship to narrative that when it's stripped away, as it is largely in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence, the effect is shocking and unsettling. One of Bergman's most abstract films, The Silence is an outgrowth from no foundation, a tree without roots that springs towards the sky regardless with no base of logic to understand its tangled paths. Alienated sisters Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) await an ineffable something in the cab of a train along with Anna's young boy Johan (Jörgen Lindström), coming from nowhere in particular as stated by the film and headed to wherever the train takes them. This is not a train as a train, that practical engine for getting people and materials to and fro, but rather a train as the purest cinematic cipher of meaning. It's a nakedly psychological construct, a symbol of instability and transition, and throughout The Silence Bergman continues to fearlessly employ these abstract and ungrounded representations, beckoning more aggressively than ever for an active engagement from the viewer. The lopsided family moves from one marker of limbo to another, from a train to an iconically strange hotel somewhere in war-stricken Europe, and in doing so they set in motion Bergman's mysterious parable of miscommunication and eroticism.

The Silence doesn't have a narrative form so much as an obscure musical pattern, which at a concise 92 minutes feels like a winding slow-burn towards a pensive climax. Bergman maps out the separate journeys of the three characters in this foreign land of "Tivoli", a fictional town where the inhabitants speak an inscrutable language and go about their daily activities with mechanical precision. It's logical to assume that the journey of each character is meant to intersect in some way, at least metaphorically, but Bergman keeps them self-contained, providing no recognizable motif with which to connect them. Instead, they're arranged in counterpoint to one another in an almost free-associative manner. Johan scours the opulent halls of the hotel throughout the film with curiosity and playfulness, finding himself fooling around with a troupe of dwarfs who perform at a local cabaret and appear to be the only other occupants in the hotel. Meanwhile, sexually promiscuous Anna shows up at the same cabaret desperate for physical contact only to sit in a booth beside a couple making uninhibited love in the corner. All this time Ester, whose unspecified illness instigated the family's detour in the town, kills time alone in the hotel room masturbating, smoking cigarettes, listening to Bach, and having convulsions that occur at erratic intervals.

When the three of them share the same space, there's a tension and jealousy in the room that Bergman captures with spare brilliance. In fact, right from the beautifully evocative opening sequence on the train, Bergman highlights the unrest that radiates through the sibling relationship for the rest of the film. Out of utter silence and ennui, Ester begins coughing and struggling for air, at which point Anna ushers Johan out of the cab to tend to her sister alone. The assistance she offers is masked somewhat by Bergman's restricting perspective, a medium shot of Johan looking through the door as Anna moves about in the foreground. Immediately, Johan is established as the point of sympathy, a nexus of hope and optimism continually challenged by the combative relationship of the sisters. Upon returning to the cab, the atmosphere is chilly and uncomfortable, and the feeling of not being privy to key information clearly overwhelms him. The ensuing sexual rivalry between Ester and Anna - wherein Anna uses the sensual embrace of her own body and an openness to meaningless sexual encounters to taunt Ester's contrasting revulsion of sex - seems to have such a tacitly powerful impact on Johan that Bergman makes sure to visualize it before it even formally begins: a series of tanks drive by outside the train window, their outstretched cannons thrusting forward like an onslaught of phallic imagery.



These kinds of startling associations - between war and sex, violence and sexuality - spring up repeatedly throughout The Silence. Wandering the hallways, Johan wields a plastic cap gun tucked into his pants that he jokingly pretends to fire at a man on a ladder fixing a lightbulb just before admiring a provocative Rubens painting adorning the hotel wall. Later, Anna has carnal sex with a soldier temporarily lodging in town who doesn't even understand Anna's heated admissions about her sister due to the language barrier. In fact, the presences of war and sexuality, almost the only thematic presences in the film, weigh so heavily on The Silence that it's impossible not to think of them as informing one another. As such, the image of a hulking tank trudging through the dark streets glimpsed by Ester through the window seems to be a direct result of all the sexually charged bickering between her and Anna, a visual representation of the hostility and destructiveness of their relationship. Similarly, the shot of an emaciated horse strapped to a heavy load (perhaps of war supplies) suggests the baggage attached to the youthful, innocent Johan, the only main character here who seeks lasting gratification from this alien vacation. He even sparks up an odd and wordless camaraderie with the elderly hotel waiter who tends to Ester's illness, witnessing the man's unsettling presentation of childhood photographs, most of which consist of him standing beside a tall white coffin that he points to giddily.

Naturally, what all this sex and violence spirals towards is death, that omnipresent concern of Bergman, but here death is not predicated upon God's presence or absence. God is totally out of the picture in The Silence, which is clear enough from the title and the mere fact that the film is the final installment in Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy. Ester's eventual death, only hinted at by the ending of the film when Anna and Johan leave her alone in the hotel, is solely a product of her confining and unearthly form of love, her inability to actually communicate with other humans in a nurturing manner, not by a refusal on God's part to soothe her crisis. This exorcism of religious inquiry from Bergman's artistic search is a vital step in his career, a move that results in one of his bleakest, most nihilistic films but doesn't prevent him from staring with utter conviction into the human soul and its curious way of forming frictions that result in war and interpersonal conflict. The Silence is a mysteriously compelling poem built from a minimal scenario whose symbolical resonances never fully conquer the film's existence as believable, intensely acted drama.

Almanac of Fall (1984) A Film by Bela Tarr

Just before Bela Tarr finally settled on the characteristic black-and-white, long-take formalism that he's become widely respected for in his later work, he made Almanac of Fall, a jarring transitional piece that attempts to suddenly marry the freewheeling social realism of his early career to a sophisticated and rigorous visual style. It's a social drama perched uneasily between down-to-earth sympathy and the more cosmic observation of films like Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, and as a result it's never fully satisfying as narrative or as allegory. When placed within the context of Tarr's artistic progression, however, it's a compelling work, flirting as it does with all of the cinematic staples the director would eventually fully embrace. Set entirely in an old apartment that feels at once cramped and labyrinthine, the film navigates the conniving power struggles of an aging woman (Hédi Temessy), her greedy and immoral son, his former teacher (Pál Hetényi), a housemaid who tends to the woman's health (Erika Bodnár), and her discontented partner (Tarr regular Miklós Székely B.). Tarr sticks rigidly to the simplicity of this scenario, never leaving the apartment and mostly unveiling the drama through long two-character exchanges. For the modesty alone, not to mention the implicit challenge of keeping things lively and interesting in such a limiting set-up, Almanac of Fall is an admirable exercise.

The flip side of the coin is that as much as Tarr's ingenuity in framing the central drama is praiseworthy, the content frequently cannot hold its own. Despite the ubiquity of dialogue and character, the film is oddly one of Tarr's least propulsive, searching desperately for quite a while to find some semblance of narrative momentum in the lives of these downtrodden and unhappy individuals. Eventually that kick does arrive when the maid sleeps with the teacher who is boarding at the apartment in the event of severe economic hardship, a mostly offscreen sexual encounter that slowly unleashes bitterness and jealousy in her partner, distrust from her client, and heightened sexual desire from the woman's son. Before this point, however, the film is frustratingly stagnant, reducible to a series of one-sided conversations in which one character muses about anything from his or her existential crises to simple day-to-day money issues. This is a very specific milieu of post-Communist Hungary that Tarr is zeroing in on here, the same context he would go on to symbolically deconstruct later in his career, and as such we get an up-close-and-personal understanding of the tepid and confused social atmosphere. The early dialogues often go unanswered by the listening party, a suggestion that the struggles of an individual in this climate cannot be solved or soothed by anyone else. Everyone is on their own, fighting their own battles, be it economic, political, social, or sexual.

To express this unrest, Tarr uses a garish color palette of hot reds and murky bluish-greens. Dictated less, as far as I can tell, by specific symbolical purposes and more by a general air of heightened emotion, these colors emanate from room to room with seemingly no domestic logic; a splash of green will glow in a backroom as if an obscure scientific experiment is going on while a face in the foreground is smacked by an orange light that seems to be shooting from the floor. At several points, the black boots of the teacher appear malicious as they trudge through the living room of chiaroscuro red and black. (Already, it's clear that Tarr is establishing a potent shorthand for black boots and pitch-black pea coats, a wardrobe pulled from noir that nonetheless has its own distinct flavor in Tarr's oeuvre.) Other times, the light is less harsh, almost as soft as the colors in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, particularly in an early scene of rare camaraderie between the woman and her nurse where the two laugh and discuss the nurse's romantic endeavors. Still, Tarr's continued use of lurid, unreal shades manages to extract the buried sense of anger that Temessy is able to so thinly veil towards the nurse until later in the film.



In fact, the film's best scenes are marked by these exchanges where an emotional subtext boils beneath the mostly calm dispositions of the two characters speaking. When the nurse's partner shaves the face of the teacher - whose sexual behavior with the nurse he is only vaguely aware of - Tarr's camera slowly circles the two, capturing the illicit bloodlust of the scene, the fact that he could dig right into the teacher's face at any time. Furthermore, Tarr's uncomfortably intimate sound design lays bare all the quiet breathing, grunting, and scraping, which uncovers an implicitly homoerotic tension as well. Yet later, Tarr's clever mise-en-scene can't fully justify the more one-dimensional realization of the bitter emotional undercurrent between the two: a startling shot from beneath a glass (or plastic?) floor watching as the nurse's partner violently beats the teacher into it. It's a moment that's more exciting for the unexpected way Tarr shoots it than for the actual act of violence onscreen. More effective are the instances when the outbursts explode to the fore after long and tense discussions, such as the one between the woman's son and the teacher in which the son interrogates the teacher about the presence of his mother's valuable piece of jewelry in the interest of selling it and running away with the nurse, eventually holding a broken glass up to his neck in ugly greed. The whole affair turns into a game of violent and scheming one-upmanship, with each of the characters pulling their own selfish pranks to achieve money or sex.

If Bergman's heated chamber dramas were marked by their firm establishment of a single space to highlight the insanity of monotony, then Tarr's is notable for its stubborn refusal to make the stage remotely recognizable from one moment to the next. The old woman's apartment is seemingly medium-sized and traditionally laid-out, but Tarr's searching camera makes it so that every room feels new, some serpentine diversion from the central plot of the house. Much of the scenes are shot in roving telephoto from behind indistinct foreground objects, focusing on the haggard faces yet never losing sight of the larger space in which they speak. One can sense Tarr beginning to distance himself from his characters until finally deciding to settle on an almost cosmic perspective in later films; one such clue comes early on when mother and son argue and the camera slithers back and forth from behind an indoor gate, occasionally sliding behind total blackness in a way that recalls the opening scene of voyeurism in The Man From London. Still, the ultimate sensibility of Almanac of Fall is not nearly as complex or open as those later masterworks. A final scene of atonal celebration in which all the characters' frustrations with each other seem to have been extinguished cements the bleak message Tarr is conveying; set to a pop song whose thesis is the inevitability of fate, the suggestion is that these people will remain deadlocked in mutual tension no matter how hard they try to break free from their dour situation, as if only an outside force can pave the way to happiness and stability. As Tarr's career continued, that force would become abstracted and untrustworthy, and his desperate search for the dignity of individuals would become increasingly nuanced and hopeful.

The Record Club #3: Sam Amidon "All is Well"

Two months ago, Ed Howard initiated The Record Club, a monthly series where bloggers gather together to discuss an album chosen by a host writer. In May, it was The Heart of the Congos over at Ed’s blog Only the Cinema, a seminal reggae album by the virtuosic vocal group The Congos, and the latest discussion was Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me at Kevin Olson’s blog Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. The idea is that in a world of such scatterbrained engagement with media, this communitarian approach to music consumption offers an arena for people to talk about a single album at the same time with a shared experience. Also, it’s an open group, so anyone can join and promotion of the series is encouraged all over the web.

I’m going to be hosting the third discussion on Monday, July 25th, and my selection is Sam Amidon’s lovely 2007 album All is Well. It's the month of American Independence, so I figured how better to celebrate that than with an album of traditional Appalachian folk songs? But this can be deceiving; these are not the covers you'd expect. I see this as one of the most compelling contemporary folk records because of the way it simultaneously pays homage to an ageless tradition of American folk music (it’s a set of ten “covers”, though that term could hardly be applied looser) and engages with a far more modern sensibility, which is something I’ll get into more when the discussion kicks off later in July. There's a lot to fall in love with, and as such, I expect there's also a lot to find problems with. It's an album that I hope will prompt some exciting conversation around the themes of originality vs. mimicry, storytelling, and the folk genre itself.

Feel free to post the banner below on the sidebars of your own blogs to encourage the widespread promotion of this and future discussions!

A Short Leave of Absence

Unfortunately, I won't be in the film state of mind until after July 10th because I'll be on a tour through the Midwest with my band Old Abram Brown until then. As a result, there won't be any posts here for a while, with the one exception being my announcement of my pick for the July installment of the Inexhaustible Documents Record Club, which has already seen an entry at Only the Cinema for The Congos The Heart of the Congos (check out my side banner for this month's upcoming discussion). So I'll see you all in July!

(P.S. If you can guess what film the above image is from, you'll have infinite blogger street-cred.)

Super 8 (2011) A Film by J.J. Abrams

So inundated by the influence of Steven Spielberg is J.J. Abrams' Super 8 that it even winds up bearing its imitator's strengths and weaknesses. Chief among them: Spielberg was always better at developing a conflict than he was at resolving it, and here Abrams displays finesse in slowly characterizing his central cast of suburbanites but is incapable of bringing those characterizations full circle with the same degree of subtlety and complexity. Instead, the buried grief, insecurity, and guilt shared between two widowed fathers - Deputy Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler) and the boozing lowlife Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) - as well as the other social tensions, both natural and imposed, existing in this small Ohio town in the late 1970's, are lazily allegorized by an abstract monster terrorizing the town, who coincidentally relieves all their pressures when he leaves Earth in the final a-ha moment. Yet curiously, Super 8 is one of the rare films to actually not be weighed down by its ultra-transparent idolatry and fetishism, in this case of monster movies, small-town coming-of-age dramas, and of course, the Spielberg hits of yesteryear. This is a film so earnestly smitten with its coursework that it organically incorporates it into its DNA.

One needs to look no further than the film's first act, which is the kind of riveting, economical set-up a summer blockbuster should have. When we first see the Deputy's son Joe (Joel Courtney), he's sitting alone at a swing set in the middle of winter caressing a necklace passed down from his recently deceased mother. At first he's just seen from afar, and it is only when Louis shows up at the house, presumably to deliver some sort of news to Joe's father about his mother, that Abrams cuts in to alternate between tight shots of Joe's inquisitive glances and Louis' deliberate avoidance of eye contact. Without using a single word, the scene establishes both Joe's consuming sadness and the tension between his family and Mr. Dainard that eventually sends a knife through the blossoming friendship and potential romance of Joe and Louis' daughter Alice (Elle Fanning). There's an evocative despair in Abrams' initial establishing shot despite the tired cliche of transporting the weight of sadness and loss through lovingly shot close-ups of a piece of jewelry, and his willingness to sell the scene's emotional undercurrents through visuals alone goes a long way. Shortly thereafter, there's a moment when Joe comes home and witnesses his father fighting back tears in the bathroom for a split second. Once again, nothing is spoken besides his father's curt "I'll be out in a minute". Abrams offers visual shorthand in these scenes that is able to cut right to the heart of the drama without being too reductive or archetypal, and it also gets across the idea that Joe is the one living these scenes, that they're filtered through his naive perspective.

Incidentally, perspective winds up playing a critical role in the narrative, as it just so happens that the lurid movie scenarios that Joe and his friends love and incorporate into their own amateur Super 8 productions start to crop up around them. The movies quickly overlap with reality, and the film convincingly portrays the playfully skewed worldview of a youth culture weened on gaudy George A. Romero movies. Joe's pudgy friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) is in the middle of production on his magnum opus (a daft and histrionic zombie short that plays in its entirety over the credits) and he regularly turns to Joe for his unmatched skill as a makeup artist and model-builder. The whole crew heads out late at night in Louis' car, stolen by Alice, to shoot a departure scene between husband and wife at a train station. Alice is afraid of getting caught by her father, so she initially expresses hostility towards Joe, but when Joe applies her makeup a spark ignites between them whilst the banter of amateur filmmakers animates the background (one little bucktoothed Michael Bay (Ryan Lee) keeps arguing for the addition of explosives to the scene). The sudden arrival of a real train some few hundred yards down the track sets Charles in a directorial frenzy, giddy over the opportunity for "production value", and as such the crew shoddily throws together the set to miraculously start shooting as the train roars past the station. During the scene, however, Joe spots a stray pickup truck kicking up dust as it flies towards the train coming from the opposite direction.



The ensuing collision sets in motion a violent and prolonged explosion, which, with its flailing of shrapnel and series of fiery clouds, would have satisfied our little Michael Bay had the crew been prepared to film it while running away. It's a shockingly effective piece of spectacle and a superb inciting incident, visceral and unexpected in its impact, a bold contrast to all the quiet drama leading up to it. So frightening, even, that when Joe and Charles spot the story on the news the next day and refer to it as looking like "a disaster movie", it offers a sharp realization on the boys' part of the cinema's sheer exploitation of real, palpable terror. Abrams never quite digs deeply into this tentative ethical subtext, but it's there nonetheless, if only for a moment suggesting that these boys' seemingly innocent adoration for explosive spectacle and their preoccupation with themes of murder and gore (even in the goofy context of zombies) comes from a true and scary place. That the kids uncover a string of mysterious details in the smoky remains of the collision - a box of weird metal cubes that seem to serve no practical purpose, loud rumblings from an invisible force behind one of the train cabs, and their high school science teacher armed and bloodied in the driver's seat of the pickup truck - only augments their feeling of getting in way over their heads.

It also lays the groundwork for the film's somewhat emptily intricate foundational subplot, a backstory of government conspiracy and extraterrestrial interventionism that collides somewhat awkwardly with the central character drama. Abrams runs himself into a corner by finally revealing the source of all those loud rumblings in the debris, a hideous alien-monster that forces him to dish out the unnecessarily complicated exposition detailing why the thing's on Earth and why the police and the Air Force are going to such great lengths to manipulate the townsfolk (even staging an outer-city wildfire to evacuate the entire suburb). Not only does it introduce a level of specificity to the plot mechanics that is rather unsatisfying, it also, as is typical of this kind of reveal, takes the piss out of the monster whom Abrams began by showing, in characteristic Lost fashion, solely through its effect on the environment. Had the monster remained an abstraction, as it did in Spielberg's War of the Worlds (a primary influence here), it would have better represented the feelings of the confused townsfolk, the idea that the monster was merely a symbol of both government conspiracy and tensions between characters. But the truth is that Abrams didn't go that route, and the inevitable reveal of the monster is as much an accessible studio move as it is an aesthetic decision, because it's clear that Abrams likes the wild intercutting and information overload of his high-adrenaline third act, to which I simply wonder what might have been.

Yet even as Super 8 starts to veer off the rails of believability, there's a propulsive energy to its filmmaking that keeps it thrilling. Abrams seems to have absorbed Spielberg's stylistic as well as narrative chops here, evidenced by his gifted ability to build a scene, to establish a sense of space and suspense. His camera, of the Mizoguchi school of thought, is in perpetual motion, performing pirouettes around the characters and often times just punctuating a faint gesture or facial expression with a swooping crane shot to capture the kinetic energy that has erupted in the town. This is filmmaking with a capital F, the kind that overstates every emotion onscreen through its technique to the point of achieving a paradoxical intimacy, a sense of being privy to anything and everything these characters feel and think. Even the film's ubiquitous lens flares, now a continuing source of mild criticism towards the director, are inscribed with purpose: for a film about the wonder and glee of making not just any old movies, but films, it's constantly drawing attention to its own nature as a film as well as its position as a throwback to the heyday of Spielberg or Romero, where these kinds of flourishes were often technical blemishes rather than choices. It's perhaps that honesty and genuineness towards the sense of time and place and inspiration, more than anything else, that makes Super 8 not just a flimsy attempt to recreate a bygone era but actually a work that moves freely and comfortably within that era.

The Tree of Life (2011) A Film by Terrence Malick

A week or so ago I witnessed a sixteen-wheeler truck careen off the side of the highway into the woods. Now that I've got your attention, let me take you to the beginning of this. I was on the road late at night returning from NYC. For quite some time through the murky and lifeless interstates of Connecticut the only sign of life my friends and I were able to glimpse was one truck, huge and imposing, barreling down the road just as it probably had through countless other states that very same day. Trucks are always, admittedly, something of a fright for a driver in a comparatively measly minivan, but in this instance we hadn't thought much of it because it was a reasonable distance away. Suddenly, we heard a loud bang. A second later, I saw the truck sifting up a large cloud of debris as it skid towards the median, hobbled across the (thankfully empty) other side of the road, and nosedived into the trees. The whole encounter was but a flash in my mind just after it happened, a moment of such surreal devastation and mayhem that the concrete details escape me - something out of a movie, come to think of it. Even now, it's perhaps even more abstracted, a mere wisp of physical trauma that we were fortunately able to avoid. My immediate reaction was that I had just confronted the concept of mortality, the idea that chaos can ensue and it's totally inscrutable, that the larger forces of nature are just utterly indifferent to the lives of individuals. The driver was gonzo, I assumed.

The following morning, after calling the police department for the second time in 24 hours (the first time being of much greater immediacy), we discovered that the driver had only suffered "minor injuries". There were suspicions of a blown tire - a freak accident that surely seems exponentially more likely in the context of an all-day truck service - but the details had yet to be parsed out. Ultimately, we were more concerned with whether or not this man had survived. By the end of it all (although of course there's never really an "end" to such a thing), I had to ask myself: was I somehow relieved to know he was alive, or was that initial assumption of The End so devastating that it overpowered the belated realization of survival? I'm still wrestling with that question, but secondary to the topic of life or death is another inquiry the experience offered. This lumbering truck, basically a killing machine anywhere over 10 mph, somehow crossed an entire highway without killing one person, not even the driver. At the risk of devolving to some simplistic live-life-to-the-fullest mode or some vague Monotheistic justification, I must admit the encounter at least was able to propose a sizable chunk of optimism amidst all the shock and despair, an openness to some unknowable form of supernatural chance. For lack of a better word, that might be called "grace". Actually, grace might be exactly the right word. If nature is the force that caused the tire to pop, grace was perhaps that which dictated the absence of travelers on the opposite side of the highway, or the unlikely survival of the man who is probably now so scarred, yet also humbly elevated, by the experience.

I gesture towards discursive association because I think that's what Terrence Malick encourages, or at least that's what The Tree of Life manages to summon to the surface. Because, as it happens, nature and grace are the two axioms around which his latest feature outspokenly revolves. At first seemingly embodied by a stern autocratic father (Brad Pitt) and his loving, judiciously playful wife (Jessica Chastain, who explicitly mutters this theory in one voice-over) in their home in Waco, Texas in the 1950's but eventually more appropriately reflected by the two films that are nestled inside one, The Tree of Life attempts to view these two energies as being the essence of life on Earth, the primal matter that guides both human and inhuman behavior. It's not a black-and-white dialectic, Malick insists, but rather one where each is constantly informing the other, playing a subconscious role in decision-making and instinctive action. It's also not, contrary to the concerns of naysayers, some finality that Malick is imposing on the universe. Like the baseballs that Pitt and Chastain's three sons toss up into the sky and watch return at one point, Malick is merely throwing a potential hypothesis into the ether as an impetus for a film, testing it and watching it evolve through his collaborative, spontaneous filmmaking practice. The Tree of Life has no meaning other than what the viewer brings to it, since Malick is chiefly interested not in espousing great philosophies but in asking the kind of big, unanswerable questions that flickered in my consciousness after the sixteen-wheeler bit the dust.



If I was told a year ago that I would be able to see on the big screen and within the same week a piece of shiny garbage (the latest Pirates of the Caribbean flick) and a work of such ingenuity and purpose that it singlehandedly argues for the survival of a questionably dead medium, I might not have believed it. That it has happened is both a confirmation that the idea of cinema as a platform for serious exploration of the world is still alive and kicking, and a testament to the sheer variety in our cultural sphere. Coincidentally, the variety of culture and the seemingly limitless capacity for human experience, as well as the ways in which these facets of knowledge are shielded as a result of our upbringing, is something Malick is interested in more than ever in The Tree of Life. One of the film's several (perhaps even infinite) narratives maps out the gradual realizations of life's complexity in Pitt and Chastain's three sons, particularly in Jack O'Brien (Hunter McCracken), who is given the most screen time and grows up to become Sean Penn's confused, contemplative architect. Malick traces his progression from a newborn baby to a moody delinquent, peering in along the way on the moments of heightened confusion and introspection that contribute to an increasingly realized sense of self and understanding of the world. At one point, Jack wanders around his neighborhood alone when he is suddenly drawn to the sound of a married couple screaming at each other and witnesses through the dining room windows from afar what is practically the mirror image of his own family. Later, when the O'Briens head into the Waco town center, Jack and his younger brother R.L. (Laramie Eppler) mock a stumbling drunk before having their childishness turned against them when a crippled man produces a similar gait. Jack's sense of individuality and privilege are challenged, and it's just the beginning of a slow unfurling of details that force him to accept, as all Malick characters do, that he is merely a small spec in the universe.

Malick has always gone to great lengths to visualize this idea of human smallness precisely by emphasizing natural vastness, and that tendency is taken to its logical extreme in The Tree of Life's early montage of the birth of the universe and the beginnings of time on Earth, a digressive episode that spans some twenty to thirty minutes of the film's run-time (it's the least he could do for such a calamitous event that took billions of years). From an amorphous balloon of orange light in the center of the screen begins a series of Brakhage-like gyrations of color that culminate in a representation of the creation of the solar system that slowly morphs from abstraction to recognizable forms. Within this are certain blobs that resemble inner body fluids, perhaps an attempt to link the macro processes of the Big Bang to the micro processes of human birth. After a meteor strikes Earth, Malick drops in to observe the primordial stew of liquids and solids on the planet's surface that eventually produce oceans and landscapes. The images created in this sequence - advised by special effects legend Douglas Trumbull, referenced from NASA, and shot using either 65 mm or the massive IMAX format - are impossibly high-fidelity, giving the whole sequence the uncanny sense of actually floating over this universal phenomenon rather than just witnessing cinematic images of it. It's a bracing, almost paradoxically uncomfortable effect, because it's as if a few times Malick is more smitten with taking the audience's breath away as in a Discovery Channel doc than providing a truly cinematic montage.



This segues into the first stirrings of life on Earth, a sequence involving dinosaurs that has quickly become the tipping point for viewers eager to accuse Malick of pretentiousness, hypocrisy, or plain ridiculousness. Having seen it once, none of these accusations really seem fair given the brief modesty of the scenes, and any claims of silliness are surely attributable to the fact that Jurassic Park already exists in our collective consciousness in such a way that any cinematic stab at dinosaurs is either going to live up to it or pale in comparison. However, I will admit to feeling a small pang of bewilderment at Malick's head-scratching decision to employ such transparent CGI. Given his affinity for all things natural, not to mention his career-long thematic acknowledgment of the folly of human ambition, the dinosaurs come across as something of a sharp left turn in his alleged sensibility. Granted, other than miniatures (which would have forced him to work independently of his beloved natural landscapes), there's no other way to whip up remotely convincing portrayals of these creatures, and one particular interaction between a prancing raptor and a wounded little one washed up on the shore makes an argument for the indispensability of the scene in the film's thematic framework. The raptor hovers its foot over the smaller dino's skull on the rocks, flirting with killing it before inexplicably pulling away. More on this later.

The entire segment is perhaps The Tree of Life's weakest addition, never quite gelling organically with the flow of the rest of the film, but at the same time its presence bolsters the discursive philosophical inquiry that Malick is attempting. Because, it seems, aside from one symmetrical composition of a planetary eclipse that bluntly recalls the film that it has been most commonly compared to (2001), Malick's latest cine-essay is actually closer in spirit to Tarkovsky's sublime The Mirror than Kubrick's detached, cerebral science-fiction (as if acknowledging the affinity, Malick even has Chastain in a fleeting scene of levitation somewhere in the film's majestic flow of images). The Tree of Life, to me, seems essentially emotional rather than intellectual, a symphony of uneven personal memories and dreams whose illogic cannot be justified by rational argument but only by the elusive nature of sensation. Like Tarkovsky, Malick suspends his central characters in what is very likely a recreation of his own biography (though we can never quite be sure), with Jack as the presumable director surrogate (something his architectural career as an adult might substantiate). Also like Tarkovsky, Malick alternates without warning between different points of view, different subjectivities, including what is perhaps a Godlike vantage point. Once the film settles into its central timeline - that is, the upbringing of Jack and his brothers in their 1950's suburban home - one can never be sure who the film is being dreamt up by, if the depicted events are indeed real, and if that factor of authenticity even matters. Several critics have suggested that it is Sean Penn's character who envisions the entire narrative in his mind as he experiences a mid-life crisis, but that seems too reductive and easy an encapsulation, and doesn't account for all of the drastic temporal and perspectival shifts that Malick includes.



Malick's greatest achievement here is his dreamy recreation of childhood, which is by no means a standard or objective expression but a deeply intuitive one that manages to capture something primal about the actual experience of growing up. If suspicions of autobiography are correct, and I have no doubt they are, this is a disarmingly personal, even confessional historical surgery, a parsing through of all the shameful moments of sin, sexual desire, and immaturity that any self-respecting person tries desperately to repress. Here, Malick has laid these tricky and conflicting emotions bare through his open and intimate style, an onslaught of tactile low-angle steadicam shots that imitate the vantage point of a young child. When Jack is born (another achingly poetic sequence that Malick shows, characteristically, through the act of swimming), his first impressions of Earth are displayed via a collage of fragmentary images: Chastain's angelic face, wiggling fingers reflected in a mirror, an old man's face (a neighbor?) blown-up in grotesque close-up, among many others. Malick is attempting to replicate those initial sensations of the world that are so difficult to grasp in retrospect, as if locked away in a special chest for fear of diluting them amongst the more cogent understandings of physicality that rapidly develop in infants. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's liquid steadicam shots increase in duration as Jack ages, suggesting the world's inscrutable fragments gradually forming wholes. In one atypically unbroken shot, the camera observes with ecstatic discovery as the toddler Jack stares at his baby brother in awe.

Various subtextual layers begin to pile up over the central drama as Jack and his brothers age. Freudian complexes develop as Jack tacitly wishes death upon his tough-loving father and bathes his mother in an aura of spiritual candor, once envisioning her in a glass coffin in the middle of the woods covered in flowers, an image that feels plucked from an ancient fairy tale. Other sequences offer a metafictional undercurrent: infatuation with a fellow schoolgirl blooms within Jack and he follows her from a distance through his neighborhood, a simple, vaguely predatory desire that recalls, down to specific compositions, Malick's debut Badlands; Jack and his friends' chaotic rampage of anger and naivete, sending frogs into the sky in rockets and breaking windows with rocks, starts to obliquely resemble juvenile delinquency films like The 400 Blows; a tall carnie appears in the dark attic during one of R.L.'s nightmares looks like the giant in Twin Peaks; and Malick's visual analysis of a present-day Houston (the first time in his career he's attempted contemporary life), with his camera searching for natural shapes in mechanical architectural figures, somehow evokes Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

For all this implicit citation - nothing new to Malick who experimented with a dense tapestry of American historical documents in The New World - The Tree of Life remains staunchly singular, taking the formal sensibilities of his two previous films to an even more extreme level of abstraction and impressionism. More than ever, Malick is drawing loosely on the theories of Soviet montage to at once obey their tenets yet also break free from them to create a distinct cinematic language. No filmmaker, to my mind, has ever combined the use of a steadicam and handheld to such magical effect, with countless jump cuts, sudden reversals of perspective, and drastic movements. Spatial laws existing within traditional filmmaking have been shattered, as Malick seems to care nothing for the 180 degree rule that governs at least 95% of cinematic conversation scenes, the careful shielding off of certain background elements that allow most films to avoid showing crew members or equipment, or the notion of repetitive frameworks for shooting certain spaces to maintain a degree of familiarity and comprehension. Here, the camera is liable to travel anywhere and everywhere in a certain location and does, seeking to map out new understandings of the physical spaces (one potential reason why the O'Brien household never feels like the exact same house in any given scene). Malick's style is looking to discover something ineffable, a unique emotion or sensation, and one needs to look no further, for instance, than a lovely sequence when father leaves for a trip and the kids chase their mother around the house, playfully terrorizing her with a salamander, to witness the heartbreaking beauty his technique is able to dredge up.



So it stands to question what the film's philosophical content really is (and after only one viewing, I see that as an inherent positive). Earlier, I harped upon nature and grace, two forces the film keeps bringing to mind. It's as if, broadly speaking, Malick is setting up two individual films - one being the birth of the universe and one being the O'Brien family history - that loosely represent these two notions, the former nature and the latter grace, and searching for the areas where contradictions arise, where the existential cliff notes overlap. To return to the dinosaur scene, when the raptor appears to show mercy towards the weaker herbivore and refrains from crushing his skull, the initial sense is that the raptor suddenly showed grace. But then the question becomes whether or not that seemingly graceful act of nonviolence might have been part of the creature's nature. Likewise, Brad Pitt's domineering father figure is at first equated with nature, which is to say that nature is equated with both severity and violence. I don't think that's what Malick intends to say; rather, when Pitt's physical domination of his wife during an argument fizzles out and becomes something of a loving embrace, it mirrors the dinosaur's similar detour from violence and offers the solution that it is ultimately nature that contains a regenerative element - that is, what begins with violence and severity naturally makes way for grace and love. The discovery, then, is that nature and grace are by no means mutually exclusive, but indeed that they churn within everything that occurs on Earth.

Of all the feature-length explorations of Why We're Here that I've seen, The Tree of Life, despite its cosmic visions and the enormity of its timeline, is one of the least bloated and self-satisfied, and also one of the most intimate. This is because Malick has not settled on anything. Like all of his work, his latest is an endlessly searching, probing document, an artifact that offers up plentiful interpretive paths to the viewer who is willing to play along. What to make of one of the final sequences (which is not, as is falsely reported elsewhere, the final sequence), for instance, when Sean Penn revisits the film's entire ensemble on a barren sandbar, throwing temporal reality to the wind (another moment that recalls Lynch, among other things, this time the celebratory coda of INLAND EMPIRE)? It seems an immaterial zone of spiritual rest, a place situated somewhere between heaven, the subconscious, and the apocalypse, and perhaps comprising all of them. This, as well as many other of The Tree of Life's sometimes baffling diversions, isn't in itself profound, but it offers a tantalizing avenue towards profundity. The film is gorgeous, provocative, and willfully messy, and as its final image of a modern-day bridge suggests - composed in such a way that it conjures up memories of the final shot of The New World - it's always reaching for new ways to understand the world.