The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) A Film by David Fincher

At this point, the material that spawned Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel, a Swedish film adaptation, and now Hollywood pulp-whiz David Fincher's version has been beaten to death, sucked of any element of surprise or intrigue that might have initially accompanied its narrative contrivances. So unusual it is that the shallowest, murkiest, most uninspiring story gets the repeat treatment, the full media makeover. I should pose from the outset that I'm not too crazy about Niels Arden Oplev's original film, a grungy and exposition-laden bore that revels in confused sexual politics, and judging by that disinterest I can't be too sure I'd find much to love in the book either. So it's fascinating, and quite indicative of old-fashioned auteurist theory, that Fincher, despite his inability to replenish narrative excitement, is largely able to transcend the questionable concerns of the prior versions and make the material sing in a distinctly Fincherian manner. Yet at the same time, it's bizarre and slightly disappointing that Fincher has chosen to direct The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at this stage of his career, right when one suspected he was exiting serial killer territory with The Social Network. The result is a work that feels like it's dislocating internally from a simultaneous maturation and regression.

Perhaps more than any other contemporary mainstream filmmaker, Fincher’s latest films reflect the zeitgeist in a very direct, uncritical manner. Extending the material's understated digital vs. analog subtext much further, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo often appears to be exclusively about modern methods of rapid information retrieval and transfer, with its convoluted thriller premise a mere vehicle through which to observe these manners in contrast to old-fashioned (and in this film, old-fashioned might just mean yesterday) modes of investigation. The dichotomy is rather bluntly manifested in the film's two central characters, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Blomkvist is the midlife everyman stuck in the mud of print journalism tactics such as interviewing and paper filing, meanwhile fumbling around with the technology of the modern world, while Salander is the no-nonsense techno-geek seasoned in Apple products and Google who can wrangle double the information Blomkvist can dig up in a week in a matter of seconds (the overt diametrical relationship, when played for belly laughs, is one of the film's subtlest strengths.) The film moves at a breathless rate, plotting the investigatory chasm between Blomkvist and Salander as it grows increasingly pronounced.



Fincher's particular manner of plotting, however, is unlike many other director's. He's not concerned with repeatedly taking stock in the emotional and psychological progression of his characters. Instead, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo files information like the laptops it regularly pays visual attention to; that is, with mechanical precision and organization. Blomkvist's habitual search for cellphone signal functions primarily as a logical step in his communication process, a cumulative time-waster, and only secondarily as an indication of the man's archaic, clumsy character, his tendency to always be one step behind the gadgets he uses. Salander's systematic grabbing of a Coca-Cola before she sits down to crunch keys is emphasized as the constant initial step in her research routine, not necessarily as a thirst quencher or as a beverage that she has taken a liking to. And finally, here's the key idea: Blomkvist and Salander's relationship is seen first as a working relationship, a meeting of two minds to solve a case, and only then as a relationship between two human beings with unique emotions. Indeed, Fincher seems to be positing that stopping for just one moment to analyze, to ask why, is to be disingenuous to the nature of our contemporary global network, where information moves fast and pausing means falling behind or losing comprehension.

The film is propulsive for this very reason. Fincher's habit of cutting scenes before they have "ended," of showing a great deal of specific details but leaving out more salient narrative chunks, ensures that the viewer must keep up to maintain a grasp of the narrative's progress. As a mystery thriller, the film operates unconventionally; the eventual solution to the disappearance of blonde bombshell Harriet Vanger (Moa Garpendal) from her family's island estate and to the rapist and murderer dwelling within that cosmetically safe family environment is unsurprising and ultimately insignificant, as the investigative processes shown are so detailed that nothing registers as a shock. Craig and Mara inhabit their roles so thoroughly - Craig a casually probing, effortlessly easy-going guy with the conservative stylishness of a J. Crew model and Mara a slinky, bold, jolty specimen - that there is little need to question who they are, or what they might do in any given situation. Fincher's characters are defined here by a sense of being lived-in, of not feeling an urge to change for anyone or anything, which makes the analogy of them as pieces of hardware performing automatic functions all the more irresistible. His stylistic methods follow suit; much like a computer, his compositions find the symmetry and order in the messiness of the world, and when the camera moves, it moves smoothly and slickly, eschewing evidence of a human touch.



There are casualties, too, to this fast, coded, information-transfer approach to storytelling. That the film finds its emotional riches only in its final minute (more on this shortly) is both a brilliant tactic and a disservice to what comes before. The script's aversion to getting close to its characters even as they get closer to one another inevitably produces types rather than people, which becomes an issue when Fincher approaches socio-cultural diagnosis. Salander's real complexity as a character is in her concealed vulnerability, in the emotional restrictions she imposes on herself to deny her own desires. Because she spends so much of the film practicing this social abstinence, she veers dangerously close - with her fingerless gloves and lanky physique - to a clichéd computer hacker, as well as to an affirmation of the audience's preconceived notions of what a garbed-in-black goth chick is: cold, insular, violent, and armed with a nasty tongue. Neither does her grotesque manipulation at the hands of her lawyer-cum-guardian Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen) and subsequent revenge go beyond shallow wish-fulfillment, despite Fincher's best efforts to keep the scenes direct and unglamorous. Not to mention Stellan Skarsgård's sick freak is everything Hollywood wants a sick freak to be: smarmy, chubby, clammy, initially welcoming (Skarsgård treats Craig to fine wine when he first meets him) and then sinister, and resolutely Aryan (that is, Nazi). Thus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's macabre scenarios have a regressive core to them that Fincher's uncritical approach fails to crack.

But then again, even in the context of Fincher's characteristically sly ways, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marks the first of his films where the complicated plot is this much of a ruse (that doesn't grant its missteps freedom, but it does downplay their importance). One might call these current Fincher films melancholy cyber romances, relatively sad films about how the endless build-up of information and connections in the modern world - specifically of a digital, programmed nature - paradoxically shields people from one another. Fincher's addition of the book's final scene (which Oplev curiously left out), wherein Salander buys a leather jacket of sentimental value for Blomkvist but throws it out upon seeing him romantically entangled with his previous assistant, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), is so powerful precisely because affect is avoided throughout the rest of the film, and its inclusion seems entirely designed to capitalize on this void. At this point, in this moment of downtime from the case, it's too late, just as Mark Zuckerberg's moment of downtime from the ceaseless growth of his international web phenomenon allows him to indulge a belated instance of reaching out towards his lost love. In a cinematic universe where the private is this public, these characters either do not realize their emotional connections or are unwilling to acknowledge them for fear of falling behind in a digital race. Salander knows that if she breaks the calculated facade she has built up and falls for Blomkvist because she will leave herself vulnerable to pain. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo concludes with a sharp feeling of sadness and loss entirely because a character has decided to make a sudden change in their external presentation, and, in effect, has become faulty data.

Barry Lyndon (1975) A Film by Stanley Kubrick

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

2011 Round-Up

It's ironic given the increasing efficiency of international media transportation via means both cyber and televisual that I found myself so frustrated in 2011 by the dearth of films available to my eyes. As countless tantalizing year-end lists have suggested, it's not an issue of quality but of access. Now, I can't entirely take the blame off myself (as I've still avoided jumping on the Fandor and Netflix trains), but there is still a sense that the major cinephiliac distributors have dropped the ball on what are clearly the most intriguing auteur statements of our time: Film Socialisme, The Turin Horse, This is Not A Film, Mysteries of Lisbon, etc. (Does any film fan not want to see these?) What's more, I live in a major city, not a tiny rural pinprick on a map. Even the stellar efforts of the Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Brattle Theater, and ArtsEmerson couldn't account for the relative "obscurities" of contemporary cinema that litter every festival round-up (for an idea, of what I'm talking about, see my heap of unseen films at the bottom of this post). Thus, while I could have done a slightly better job of keeping up with the here-and-now, I am ultimately left without having seen enough this year to warrant a comprehensive, honest list.

The other issue with 2011 was that of what I did see, the films I was disappointed by or indifferent to massively outweighed the real gems. Highly anticipated fare like Alps, Drive, Melancholia, and Shame fell flat for me, while others possessing admirable thematic ambition and depth like Hugo and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy just nearly failed to attain the special spark emblematic of truly great cinema. Fortunately, there was always both the near and distant past to turn to, and as a result I stumbled upon some of 2010's best works (see my revised list here towards the bottom of said post - and yes, that includes Uncle Boonmee, Le Quattro Volte, Meek's Cutoff, and Certified Copy, which, because they were released to the world in 2010, are 2010 films in my mind), many of the finest works of transnational Asian cinemas of the past decade thanks to superb scholar and professor Shujen Wang, and a random assortment of other goldmines from the history of the medium. There's a ranked list of this hodgepodge (excluding the 2010 stuff) at the bottom of this post as well, and you can be sure it's more rewarding than any makeshift 2011 list I could have scraped up. All of that said, I did find myself loving a small, coveted handful of films - or sometimes just parts of films - from this year, which are paid tribute to below in a selection of my favorite moments (scenes, shots, etc.) from 2011.

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Father Goes On Vacation in The Tree of Life
It's tough to pick a single moment from a film that is this overflowing with rich, evocative snippets and that is in fact defined by its fragmentary, episodic qualities. But I don't usually cry, and this particular scene was able to crack my calculated, detached critical stance and break the tears loose from my enraptured eyes. Marked by an absence (Brad Pitt has gone on a business vacation, leaving the kids alone to tease the playful Jessica Chastain), the scene paradoxically feels uplifting and whole, not to mention it rings piercingly true. It's rare that cinema is able to manage such remarkable nostalgic ecstasy as this, somehow feeling - despite its very specific context - like a moment stripped from the home video of any American Family in the past century. It's also the loveliest musical cue (Francis Couperin's lilting piano piece "Les Barricades Mistérieuses," as recorded by Angela Hewett) in what is the definitive cinematic event of the year no matter how you slice it.


Jake Williams Floats Across a Pond in Two Years at Sea
Here's what I wrote about it: "In one instance, Jake assembles a makeshift raft out of wood and jumbo milk cartons (a comparatively bombastic moment in an otherwise quiet film) and rows it out into a pond. Right when the viewer assumes he’s headed to the other side, he stops dead in the middle of the body of water to drift carelessly - his body entirely motionless – the long distance to the other side of the panoramic frame. And once his vessel has nearly bumped against land, he turns back. It’s an achingly poetic image that possesses the sparse, smeared beauty of a Caspar David Friedrich oil painting and most succinctly and elegantly communicates Jake's firm sense of inner peace."


Three Teenage Girls Visit The Home of the Recently Deceased in Putty Hill
An emotionally multifaceted scene from the most poignant and original indie feature of the year. From my review: "A brief episode where some of the wandering teenage girls visit Cory's empty house at night is a dark, foreboding vision that allows (Matthew) Porterfield to flirt with the aesthetic staples of low-budget horror: darkness, shadow, long takes, compositional tension. Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't entertain its subtle sensationalist gestures, keeping the scene to its bare essence. In doing so, Porterfield is able to bookend the film with a chilling re-visitation to Cory's house and vitally preserve the unique social experiment that is the film's backbone: the sense of individuals becoming personally affected by events to the point where fiction vs. non-fiction no longer matters."


An Ominous Invisible Transition in Martha Marcy May Marlene
Martha Marcy May Marlene is all smoke and mirrors, an elaborate maze built to unsettle foundations of reality, rationality, sanity, and especially time. Much of its powerful effect is nestled into its scene transitions, in the way one shot cuts across time and space to another while retaining an eerie sense of spatial and temporal coherence. This technique is at its most hauntingly effective during the middle of the film when Elizabeth Olsen's eponymous character leaps off her brother-in-law's motorboat only to land somewhere in the past in a dark quarry. Director Sean Durkin suddenly elevates the soundtrack's muffled rumbling and his camera tilts up to reveal naked legs dangling in a vulnerable and suggestive composition.


Restaging Méliès in Hugo
I recently saw Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which I was introduced to the theories of brilliant psychoanalyst Martin S. Bergmann. In the film, Bergmann utters a profound kernel: "so, love contains in it a contradiction, the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past." He was referring specifically to human love, but nonetheless one can imagine it applied with alarming accuracy to Martin Scorsese's bombastic 3D tributes to the early handmade spectacles of his beloved George Méliès. When Scorsese gets his able paws on Méliès' proto-science-fiction content in a few delightful scenes during Hugo's mid-film history lecture, it bursts into new, three-dimensional life, taking it far from its scrappy analog origins.


Bruegel's Toddler Son Rips An Armpit Fart in The Mill and the Cross
Throughout The Mill and the Cross, Lech Majewski repeats a number of painterly wide shots, one of which is this perspective of the cramped wooden bedroom containing Pieter Bruegel's children. At one point, when a few of the kids are roughhousing around their dozing siblings, one of them unleashes a perfunctory armpit fart, proving that the crude joke knows no historical bounds. The sudden intrusion of the lowbrow in an otherwise cerebral, spiritual cinematic experience was truly unexpected and devilishly hilarious, forcing me to yelp in my seat. Fortunately, the theater was nearly empty.


The Ending of Contagion
While not many people dug Contagion, even fewer could stand by its ending, which is claimed to be "on-the-nose" and "formulaic." That I really enjoyed both the film and its ending makes me some kind of impoverished contrarian. But I still don't think any mainstream Hollywood filmmaker put together a more elegant, precise sequence of image (sterile, rapidly cut, succinctly narrativized footage of Gwyneth Paltrow carelessly extracting the first case of a mysterious worldwide plague) and sound (Cliff Martinez's eerie, throbbing whine) than Soderbergh this year (that includes you, Fincher, but not by much). The polemic, too, is necessary and timely.


Rooney Mara Steals Her Bag Back in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Just saw this and haven't written about it yet, but I will say that for me it was a vast improvement over the original film. Fincher's exacting formalism reaches its apex in a scene towards the beginning of the film when Lisbeth Salander's (Rooney Mara) leather bag is stolen in a subway station by a man passing in the opposite direction. Salander's reclaiming of the bag and simultaneous take-down of her opponent is clever and effortless, an approach mirrored by Fincher's mise-en-scene. When mapping out the scene's action, it certainly wouldn't appear to be a simple shoot, but Fincher makes it seem easy, while also refusing to make it feel like punctuation. An exhilarating 30 seconds or so.


Owen Wilson's Wide-Eyed Tour of 1920's Paris in Midnight in Paris
In spite of my lukewarm reaction to it upon first viewing, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris has stayed on my mind for much of the year, its honeyed depiction of the French city and varied historical humor gaining retrospective charm and power. The outburst of its best qualities - dry mockery of its own narrative gimmickry, pitch-perfect casting of revolutionary artistic and literary figures, Owen Wilson's stubborn and childlike Woody surrogate - comes during Gil Pender's inaugural adventure into 1920's Paris. Allen shoots the whole tour so as to literalize his protagonist's glorified vision of the past, and Wilson seems to have his pupils dilated and his mouth agape for the scene's entirety.


Charlotte Gainsbourg's Son Builds a Star-Gazing Tool that Incites Chaos in Melancholia
As much as I want to resist Melancholia and its cosmic cynicism outright, I struggle to deny Von Trier's vice grip on my consciousness, which was wielded aggressively in the following two moments: 1) Charlotte Gainsbourg holds up her son's homemade astronomical device only to observe the titular planet growing perilously in size, and 2) the subsequent apocalypse, after layers and layers of insanity, wherein Gainsbourg, Kirsten Dunst, and Cameron Spurr stare at each other in grotesque expressions of desperation, fear, indifference, hope, and concern. They're such exasperated moments of uncontrollable emotion that they're impossible to forget.


The Opening Shot of The Turin Horse
I heard it was on YouTube, and I couldn't help myself despite the poor viewing conditions. It's truly bravura filmmaking, announcing what surely must be a majestic piece of work.


The Smoke, The Light, The Wallpaper, and The Compartments in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
There's nothing specific to remember about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Alfredson is too democratic in his distribution of significance, and beyond that, the film's more about an accumulation of detail than it is about any one detail. Its evocation of a closed-off world of espionage jargon and bureaucratic indifference is in the particular elements that make up the mise-en-scene, all organized to amass a hazy atmosphere that defies comprehension. Just look at the shot above; how better to visualize Alfredson's idea of intellectual, social, and political compartmentalization?


The Opening Scene of Drive
A controlled getaway driver and his leather gloves, blobs of neon city lights dancing in the background, long stretches of dark road illuminated only by headlights in LA's featureless metropolitan area: these are the very best things about Drive, and they're all on display in its first scene. If the rest of the film conveyed as much stylistic assurance, abstract beauty, and quiet tension as this, Refn's confused pastiche might have had some weight of its own.

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Top 25 Previously Released Films I Saw For The First Time in 2011:

1. In Vanda’s Room (Costa, Portugal, 2000)
2. Three Times (Hou, Taiwan, 2005)
3. Edvard Munch (Watkins, UK, 1974)
4. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, USA, 1971)
5. State of Dogs (Brosens & Turmunkh, Belgium/Mongolia, 1998)
6. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, France, 1967)
7. Happy Together (Wong, Japan, 1997)
8. Mouchette (Bresson, France, 1967)
9. The Thin Red Line (Malick, USA, 1998)
10. In the City of Sylvia (Guerin, Spain/France, 2009)
11. Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman, USA, 1971)
12. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, USA, 1955)
13. The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, Russia, 1986)
14. The Holy Girl (Martel, Argentina, 2004)
15. Cyclo (Tran, Vietnam/France, 1995)
16. Summer Hours (Assayas, France, 2008)
17. My Winnipeg (Maddin, Canada, 2007)
18. Cat's Cradle (Brakhage, USA, 1959)
19. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, USA, 1959)
20. Hadewijch (Dumont, France, 2009)
21. Café Lumiere (Hou, Taiwan, 2003)
22. Tung (Baillie, USA, 1966)
23. The Big Chill (Kasdan, USA, 1983)
24. Almanac of Fall (Tarr, Hungary, 1984)
25. Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky, Mexico, 1989)


2011 Films Topping My Must-See List:

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Mysteries of Lisbon, Take Shelter, The Kid with a Bike, A Separation, Margaret, This Is Not a Film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tuesday, After Christmas, A Dangerous Method, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Carnage, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Extraordinary Stories, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Sleeping Beauty, Le Havre, House of Tolerance, The Descendants, Life Without Principle, Century of Birthing, Poetry

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Best Films of 2011 (An Ongoing Project)

1. The Turin Horse
2. The Tree of Life
3. Two Years at Sea
4. Nostalgia for the Light
5. The Loneliest Planet
6. Putty Hill
7. The Color Wheel
8. Film Socialisme
9. Sleeping Beauty
10. Whores’ Glory
11. Martha Marcy May Marlene
12. Hugo
13. The Mill and the Cross
14. Contagion
15. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
16. Midnight in Paris
17. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
18. Melancholia
19. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
20. Wuthering Heights

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

In the pivotal scene of Manoel de Oliveira's meditative, clear-eyed The Strange Case of Angelica, a curious detail emerges. A rural village's only photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is hired to snap a posthumous photo of the recently deceased Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) in her family's posh, aristocratic hill-top hotel. Much of the photographic act is revealed in the same long shot. At first properly exposed (and indeed relatively dim), the image's highlights are blown out when Isaac requests a new, brighter bulb as a replacement in the overhead lamp hanging above Angelica's festooned corpse. The details in the lamp's cover are suddenly rendered indistinguishable, and parts of Isaac's face become a wash of white. Oliveira, the oldest working filmmaker at 103 years of age, surely possesses the chops to guard against such a "blemish," but he elects not to. In doing so, he problematizes the very nature of image production, calling attention to the materiality of the medium. It's only the first step in an elegant, compact metaphor for cinema itself, for what compels its making and what encourages our spectatorship.

Sure enough, this subtle manipulation of light is only of peripheral importance in the scene; rarely in The Strange Case of Angelica are there not multiple layers of meaning operating at once. More bluntly, the scene's purpose is to incite the conflict weighing on Isaac's psyche throughout the film. Upon peering in his camera's viewfinder, Angelica's eyes open and she bears a wide grin, shocking the already unsettled photographer. It's the beginning of a private pact between the ghostly Angelica and the weary, probing Isaac, which ultimately takes the two of them floating high above the village at night as Méliès-like specters, their bodies seemingly eternally embraced before Isaac is thrust abrasively out of the realm of dreams. Ayala, who enacted a familiar dance of unintentional playfulness and seduction in the similarly backward-and-forward-thinking In the City of Sylvia, taunts Isaac in both his waking and sleeping states, coming alive in his printed photographs and arriving as a glowing black-and-white phantom on his balcony. Often times it is to the unawares of Isaac, who, like a wide-eyed schoolboy, finds his lover disappearing every time he turns around sensing her presence. He is trying to capture that which is not there, that which is an illusion.

Of course, such is the apparatus of filmmaking, wherein celluloid presents images of a lost moment, forever consigned only to the physical medium. (Fittingly, Oliveira lingers on "empty" frames for some time after narrative action within those frames has ceased, quietly combating pictorial transience, the dominant mode in the modern world.) The film invokes a clear sense of Isaac's lineage: a dreamer, a poet, a thinker, a romantic, an introvert, an outcast, a cultural connoisseur, a revolutionary - in effect, a surrogate of the early film director. As such, he is prone to the two fundamental cinematic impulses: that of George Méliès, the grasp for the fantastical and unobservable, and the Lumière brothers, the realist urge. Alongside his compulsion towards Angelica, Isaac is indescribably drawn to taking photos of laborers in the hills, obsessively depicting their pickaxes pummeling into the Earth. Later, he begins following the gyrating gears of a tractor sifting through dirt, snapping as many shots as possible. Glancing over these and other images draped across a string beside his balcony, the suggestion comes gently to the fore: he has created movement.



Oliveira, on the other hand, humbly rejects camera movement for the vast majority of the film, preferring to keep his camera - like the Lumière's - a stationary observer. There is supreme formal precision to the film, a fixed understanding of the behavioral patterns within a single rectangular room that is reflected in nearly symmetrical compositions that allow space for multiple planes of action to occur in one shot. The Strange Case of Angelica, however, is not exactly a "room film" in the same way that a Roy Andersson or an Akerman is a room film; Oliveira has constructed a fully realized, hermetically sealed fable world with a firm sense of built-in rhythms and patterns. The film's repetitive skyline cutaways have a storybook quality to them, containing the action within a single community and also reinforcing a temporal linearity. It's fitting that the film concludes on the shot of a woman closing up the boards on a window until the screen goes black, an image that is instantly reminiscent of Satantango. Like Tarr, Oliveira is interested in maintaining a communal narrative and entertaining the many digressions it brings, and when that narrative reaches a conclusion there's no more space for it to live beyond the cinema. Allowing it to exist would mean suggesting a continuity in the cinematic space Oliveira has built, which runs counter to his intentions. Instead, he finds this world, drops in on it in the middle of the night and leaves with it faded to black, preserving its memory.

The Strange Case of Angelica is an argument for the timelessness of images, for the fact that pictures, particularly moving ones, can reflect an immortality that causes the mortal to pine in hopelessness. There are gentle, multifaceted dichotomies at the center of the film - mortality and immortality, life and death, realism and surrealism, past and present - that Oliveira wisely navigates, finally coming to the conclusion that they are irresolvable, that there is no ideal course of action, only an endless tug-of-war between two respective poles. In an act of pure selfishness that is the sum of all those ruminative stares off camera and into the Great Beyond, Isaac eventually implodes with consuming desire for Angelica and commits some unfussy form of suicide, running to the hillside and collapsing before a procession of chanting children. Back in his room under the detached care of a village doctor, Isaac finally succumbs to death in one of Oliveira's most elaborately choreographed, yet entirely modest, long takes. His concerned landlady enters the room, sighing in quiet despair and acknowledging the inevitability. Her sigh is quite like that of the filmmaker, who at such an old age presents with utter clarity a simultaneous fear and embrace of the void, which of course is entangled (as with all great directors) with an awareness of the enduring power of love.

My Favorite Albums of 2011

2011 proved to be the year of the solo musician. Eight of my top ten picks are solo artists, as well as fourteen of my top twenty overall. Granted, several of these musicians simply release music under their own name but work with a band, but the statistic is still striking. In keeping with that trend, I found myself liking less and less of this year's rock offerings and discovering more rewards in the broad realms of folk and ambient. Interestingly, the year's overarching cinematic themes of nostalgia, memory, and history (Hugo, The Tree of Life, The Artist, Midnight in Paris, etc.) are also mirrored in the musical offerings, whether reflected in their cyclical structure and forms (Josh T. Pearson, The Caretaker, Tim Hecker) or in their lyrical content (Matana Roberts, PJ Harvey, Iron & Wine). It's funny, because there is always talk of the year at hand being "wretched" or "worst than last year," and in some ways these albums - in an echo of Woody Allen's Golden Age fallacy lesson - seem to argue against that path of thinking. Below is a comprehensive list of the best music I heard this year.

1. Josh T Pearson: Last of the Country Gentlemen


Too often when describing folk music catch phrases like “emotional honesty” and “raw power” are tossed around hastily, as if the mere presence of an acoustic guitar guarantees a special pact between singer and listener. So rarely are we greeted with real, tough, unguarded honesty, the kind that’s unsupported by lush arrangements and miniature, consistent relief, and that’s exactly what Josh T. Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen accomplishes. The album is spine-tinglingly personal, a venture so deep into the bearded Texas believer’s head-space that it’s uncomfortable and off-putting at first. But repeated listens marry indelibly to the subconscious. Guitar motifs recur and scrape at the memory, creating a flowing document that shifts organically from climactic swells of violin and voice to barely audible whispers. Perhaps it’s because parts of Pearson’s lyrical content mirrors my own emotional trajectory this year, but ultimately there’s nothing more moving and cathartic as this.

2. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse


In a positive review of Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse, Pitchfork critic Mike Powell wrote that the 45 year-old Austin-based musician has “nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011.” Horseshit. Callahan’s particular brand of Americana – simultaneously dry, intimate, sardonic, casual, poetic, merciless, jagged, warm – is unparalleled in the 2011 musical landscape. The aforementioned stream of adjectives may represent a bundle of contradictions, but Callahan’s music thrives in tension with itself, the more the disparate elements converse with each other. Single “America!” is a lethargic pulse of gargled guitar distortion beneath Callahan’s witty celebration/indictment/elegy of/to his home country, “Free’s” is eccentric swing jazz laced with flutes and a bouncy bass line that questions the nature of freedom, and “One Fine Morning” is a soft acoustic waltz that fittingly sounds like waking up in the morning but is obliquely about leaving society, people, potentially even life itself. A mere seven songs possess more lyrical complexity and unexpected, seemingly improvisational musical energy than other singer/songwriter record this year. If that’s not adding to the general conversation, I don’t know what is.

3. Tim Hecker: Ravedeath 1972 / Dropped Pianos


Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 is the most complete, immersive statement in the ambient genre since Jonsi and Alex’s 2009 album Riceboy Sleeps. It’s dense, riveting sound, stemming from cathedral organ and guitar recordings but transforming into something else entirely through the layering and processing of post-production. The organ can sound anywhere from grinding and oppressive to somber and elusive, slipping through the cracks of the surrounding textures and hovering behind snatches of piano melody. Ravedeath, 1972 is the desperate, unintelligible cry of laborers dehumanized amidst a brooding industrial landscape, eerily reminiscent of both 1984 and Damnation. Only recently did I discover Hecker’s subsequent record, Dropped Pianos, released only eight months after Ravedeath, and it’s almost equally fantastic, if lighter in tone and sparser in execution. Together the albums form one of the most impressive bodies of work in 2011.

4. Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place


This is a holy listening experience, as close to church as I get. It’s in the way Barwick’s voice pricks against the ceiling of her register in “Keep Up the Good Work”, the way that elongated, ethereal falsetto becomes inextricable from whatever instrument is creating the supplementary ambience (especially in “White Flag”), and the way layers gradually creep up in the mix. There’s no posing here, just a powerful wielding of the human voice without the weight of lyrics, supported lightly by the occasional bass movement or detached piano melody. Capable of recalling Hildegard Von Bingen, tribal chants, and children’s choirs all at once, this is timelessly soothing music that is somehow also distinctly contemporary. We can only hope this doesn’t get consigned to a pseudo-enlightening moment in the next Danny Boyle film.

5. Radiohead: The King of Limbs


If Radiohead doesn’t provide some earth-shattering sonic evolution these days (as they have done so many times before), there’s widespread skepticism, even backlash. But I see The King of Limbs as a remarkable refinement of their talent, a paring down and purifying, that seems to suggest a conscious denial of the radical leaps they’re expected to take. I’m tempted to declare this an even more cohesive, free-flowing album than In Rainbows despite the fact that it doesn’t approach some of that record’s grandiose high points. These tracks are compulsively groovy, favoring headlong immersion in rhythm (and in subtle changes in rhythm) over dramatic songwriting maneuvers. Yorke’s plaintive voice and Greenwood’s spare, sneaky contributions float gloriously over the album’s busy, frantic percussion. Pastoral field recordings compete for attention with the colorful digital atmosphere. For all the internal tension here, King of Limbs winds up sounding remarkably unified.

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

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

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



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

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