New Robert Todd Films

(Note: Many of Todd's films – including some of those discussed in this piece – are available in full or excerpted form on his treasure chest of a Vimeo profile, but I have only written about the films I saw in the theatrical setting. It goes without saying that this is the ideal venue for this kind of work.)

The otherworldly meditations on the everyday produced by Boston-based filmmaker/professor Robert Todd are some of the most underappreciated visions in contemporary experimental cinema. Living in the same niche as the much wider seen work of Nathaniel Dorsky, Todd’s films have consistently targeted an alternative way of seeing the world, privileging abstraction over concrete representation to turn mundane spaces into alien landscapes of light, color, and texture. However, despite the way his work brushes against the unknown in its willful transformation of perceived reality, it also maintains a sensuous connection to earthbound pleasures; though he’s lived and worked in a major urban center for decades – a quotidian reality that would lead another filmmaker to concoct something like Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits – his films are notable for their tranquil evocations of nature, of animals, of children playing, etc.

For the majority of his career, much of this material has been captured within and around Boston. Todd’s past year’s worth of work, however (which recently screened at the Paramount Theater), finds his camera discovering the latent alcoves of cinematic beauty in locales as diverse as Canada and Portugal. All shot on 16mm and presented silent or with ambient soundscapes, the six works presented (part of an alarmingly prolific total of 14 in 2012) expand upon Todd’s sophisticated idea of the lyrical film, not only widening the depths of mood already achieved in his oeuvre but also introducing new landscapes, textures, and perspectives.

The program opened with a somewhat comfortingly familiar slide into the Todd world: Summer Light: Tuesday, a silent, sunny ode to his Jamaica Plain residence that Todd himself described aptly as “the way my mind works.” The film is the fifth and final piece in a series of works focusing on different qualities of light in the summer, and here the focus is on even mid-afternoon rays obstructed by layers of foliage. Todd's richly textured images of plant life, unidentifiable surfaces, and the rare, fragmented hint of humanity are marked by strong contrasts between sun-bleached portions of the frame and regions shrouded in thick darkness. Long lensing renders much of the images as washes of color and light punctuated by one particularly detailed focal point, such as the skin of a leaf or the surface of a chain-link fence. The fluidity of these images in conversation with one another becomes especially impressive when taking into account that they were edited in camera on a single 100-foot roll of 16mm; analog dissolves and subtle superimpositions abound, speaking to Todd's prophetic feel for tempo, visual architecture, and exposure.

If Summer Light: Tuesday seems to exist within Todd’s artistic/mental comfort zone, the next films suggest the filmmaker attempting to chart less familiar modes of representation. Construct is shot at an emu farm in one of Todd’s favorite formats: high-contrast black-and-white stock, which casts the photographed reality under a particularly chalky chiaroscuro, rendering it strange and unearthly. The science-fiction undercurrent of Todd’s work detected by one commenter in a post-screening Q&A is a sentiment that likely arose from this film in particular. Given the way Todd’s close-ups, canted angles, and distinctive film stock transform the emus into an amorphous mass of silver fur and twig-like limbs, mistaking the film for extraterrestrial footage is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Likewise, every earthly object has been transformed into an abstraction; a sheet blowing in the wind becomes something else entirely, and the source of one cotton-like surface dappled with light is impossible to discern. On the soundtrack are what presumably were once diegetic recordings at the farm, but they're distorted and looped beyond recognition so that what's left is a murky drone augmenting the already ominous mood developed by the imagery.

Emus return in Sunderlight, this time in color but looking no less menacing. If there's one key difference between Construct and Sunderlight besides the shift to monochrome to color, it's the overarching tone. While Construct is eerily meditative, Sunderlight is the closest thing to an imposing horror film in Todd's body of work, an impression largely aroused by a haunting, sustained ambient score of clipped diegetic noises, long bell-like tones, and ghostly, operatic vocal bits. The bizarre presence of the emus is crucial too; these slender, jittery creatures stare at several points directly into the camera, and the only thing separating them from the viewer is a measly wire fence that Todd's camera pays a great deal of attention to. It's possible to read a certain environmentalist warning into the film (could Todd be making a statement about the dangerous human habit of forcefully containing nature?), but as with all of these pieces such narrative or thematic analyses come up short. What's really achieved here is the approximation of a completely foreign perspective. Brakhage's lofty aim to use the camera as a child's eye is fully realized by Todd; Sunderlight presents an environment so profoundly fragmented that every shot feels like an unsettling discovery through some primitive consciousness.

The same impulse towards extracting a sense of uncertainty or danger out of ordinary places is inherent in Passage, though it’s re-contextualized to fit a more geographically and thematically diverse film. Erecting dichotomies such as nature vs. civilization, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and comfort vs. foreignness, Todd’s camera spans a nondescript forest, Portuguese ruins, and tall, mathematically ordered buildings to present a meditation on visual forms that echo across organic and man-made phenomena. As is often the case, Todd uses an aesthetic framework to link his images together; in this case, it’s the visual incorporation of dark doors and windows framing the world beyond it, implemented as portals to the various locations in which he films (the idea of passageways, both organic and synthetic, was established by Todd with his 2011 film Portcullis). Within this framework, nature possesses a serene quality (typical in Todd’s work and another of several things that aligns him with Brakhage) while buildings and foreign landscapes are to be regarded with additional caution and consideration.

Mosaic de Porto continues the arms-length fascination with Portugal introduced by Passage. In both films, footage taken in the country is clearer, crisper, and more evenly lit than the type of amorphous, intimate imagery in Todd's domestic work, but despite that superficial clarity the Portuguese material feels distant and unknown, the activities captured capable of overwhelming Todd's usual command of the frame. Mosaic de Porto offers a flurry of afternoon impressions in a well-populated area, shifting from a significant human element (children running around in grassy fields and families gathered for picnics) to images of the landscape and architectural creations. Rather than bending the physical world to his own painterly aspirations, Todd's presence is closer to that of a fly on the wall, collecting bits and pieces of what's happening around him, attempting to adhere to his impulse towards contemplative abstraction but consistently being thwarted by the level of exuberance and newness in his vicinity. As such, in spite of its brevity Mosaic de Porto nonetheless bursts with life, showcasing a looser but no less potent side of Todd's artistic sensibility.

The evening concluded with one of Todd’s throwaway joke films – a mash-up of close-ups of Elijah Wood from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that’s allegedly a homage/update to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – but even this seemingly tossed-off experiment is in line with Todd’s sensibility, sharing parallels with his lyrical work in the way it takes a familiar object (a daily environment, a pop culture item) and distorts it to create an unfamiliar space of contemplation. By isolating the emphatically emotional close-ups of Wood, the actor's face becomes a landscape of reflection, simultaneously encouraging and frustrating a narrative reading. Todd, noticing certain patterns within Wood's expressions that fall loosely into the categories of wonder and intense agony, slowly sculpts the arrangement of the shots to extract a bizarre maternal narrative in which the smiley Wood seems to birth a devilish doppelgänger who is repulsed by his creator. There were plenty of laughs scattered throughout the theater during this clever repurposing act, but they were balanced by the sense that Todd’s aims were just as eye-opening and worthwhile as in his more decidedly serious work. In the process of watching these films, one witnesses the physical world radically re-imagined in a way that that unveils the beauty, complexity, and strangeness previously hidden in plain sight.

Screening Notes #18

The Day He Arrives (2011): I don't feel comfortable writing at length about Hong Sang-soo's work yet, due both to my limited exposure to his films and also to the fact that I sense a strong understanding of his worldview can only adequately be gained after seeing a large chunk of his movies, if not his entire body of work. As of now, there's an entire code of language and a warped way of seeing things that I can only grasp superficially. That said, I have been thinking a lot about The Day He Arrives in the context of the monologue given by Richard Linklater at the start of Slacker: the existence(s) of Hong's characters splinter off into multiple possible directions – all of which are visualized in identically drab fashion (a surface homogeneity that probably accounts for the spatiotemporal confusion) – based off casual misunderstandings and fanciful mental projections. In other words, the introspective rumination that occurs during conversation is concretized into separate chapters of the narrative, an approach that becomes doubly fascinating through Hong's refusal to actually consistently depict an inner life.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937): The final half hour of this movie is perfect. Never before and never since, to my understanding at least, has the love of an elderly couple been conveyed with such compassion, purity of vision, and such a wonderful lack of condescension. Beulah Bondi's bashful glance at the camera in a NYC ballroom as she's about to kiss her longtime husband (played by Victor Moore) on what is potentially their final night together crystallizes the pointed balancing act of pathos and irreverence that characterizes Leo McCarey's approach. Unfortunately, I'm not as keen as others on the rest of the film, a scenario in which the couple's self-involved urban children are forced to reckon with their parents' newfound homelessness that occasionally veers into a preachy territory that is quite atypical of McCarey's work. The director's greatest sensitivity is saved for Bondi's self-proclaimed "favorite son" George (Thomas Mitchell), but beyond this portrayal the film offers far too many instances where the message of a scene is all too clear.

Keyhole (2011): Cinema needs a little space carved out for a filmmaker Guy Maddin who excavates beyond-obscure crevices of film history and repurposes them to his own end, in the process revealing how these utterly forgotten moving-image strands are part of a cinephiliac subconscious that continues to inflect the alternative mainstream and the avant-garde. Take Keyhole, a film that has a palpably musty stench of unimaginative detective miniseries only watched by those on the late-shift in some ice-cold Canadian suburb in 1941, yet also seems to echo the mood of early David Lynch and the Freudian narrative logic of Un Chien Andalou. Maddin understands the eternal magnetism of cinematic images and stories more than almost any filmmaker working today, the way they unspool wildly in our brains, losing specificity and everything but sensory impact – this idea was practically the thesis of My Winnipeg. If that film rendered this truth direct and visible, Keyhole returns to Maddin's habit of coding it impulsively into the DNA of a film; like Brand Upon the Brain, the film often feels like little more than an attempt to tell an absurd noirish tale through Maddin's fogged vision. What emerges is simultaneously wholly original and vaguely, mysteriously familiar.

Unstoppable (2010): Disclaimer: I've been slow to catch up with Tony Scott's work after his recent suicide-cum-critical-reappraisal, so my thoughts on these films are anything but fleshed out. My exposure to his body of work is pretty scattered; I saw Man on Fire, Domino, and True Romance when I was much younger and haven't felt the urge to revisit them, whereas the only thing preventing me from tackling his alleged magnum opus Deja Vu is a feeling that in order to get the most out of it I need to bone up on the earlier stuff – classic auteurist assumptions, really. As for Unstoppable, I'd only caught bits and pieces of it on television before finally watching it start to finish recently, and the responses I fleetingly assumed during those earlier fragments collected into something of a stance this time around on this alternately admirable and frustrating thriller: the movie's interesting aspects – its kinetically gorgeous visuals, its barrage of narrative perspectives, its geographic specificity, its vivid sense of being on the precipice of life and death – are routinely complicated by surface-oriented stupidity. For instance, there is the film's socioeconomic stereotyping, wherein each class archetype is addressed through its own blunt symbology (the Hooter's girls are treated to prurient booty shots, the mustachioed, bar-dwelling railway employee is signaled by clichéd country music, the Soulless Corporate Head spends the entire movie in an anonymous grey urban suite), or the flagrantly unsubtle methods of aligning the spectator's responses to the central crisis with those of the third-party onlookers. Still, there's a lot going on here that bears repeat consideration, something I'll hopefully get to after further examination of Scott's cinema.


Faust (1926): Out of a classic German legend consisting of angels, devils, mystical pacts that compromise souls, and other sensational details, F.W. Murnau fashioned a down-to-earth romance that is just as much about humankind as a more decidedly unremarkable film like Sunrise. Funneling the narrative into a flawed romance between the hasty but good-hearted protagonist (Gösta Ekman) and a beautiful commoner (Camilla Horn), casting the Catholic orthodoxy as a morally bankrupt evil, and privileging images of small communities, simple acts of kindness, and humbling forces of nature over the sensational hysteria of the plot are just a small sampling of the ways in which Murnau bends this ancient parable to his desired ends. That said, Faust is still rousing spectacle as far as the twenties are concerned; Murnau renders the iconic and the mythic as eloquently as the human and the mundane, most memorably in a stunning special-effects shot of a larger-than-life demon shadow engulfing a wintry German town and in a final stratospheric battle between the Angel and the Devil. Unfortunately, the otherwise functional theatrical setting in which I witnessed the film (live electronic keyboard score, big screen, respectful audience) was hampered by the irreconcilable flaw in the fact that the movie was presented on a DVD with conspicuous interlacing.

China Gate (1957): Following an ostensibly documentarian but patently ridiculous opening informational montage on Communist and French intervention in Vietnam with a moody ballad of the titular song crooned by Nat "King" Cole set against elaborately production-designed war wreckage is about as sturdy a method as any for wiping away any semblance of narrative authenticity and authority on the Vietnam War, and director Sam Fuller continues to apply irreverent and often times tasteless elements to a strife-torn backdrop throughout China Gate. For much of the film's middle section, the Vietnamese jungle is nearly mistaken for a steamy bathhouse, with petty narratives of lust, betrayal, and selfishness strewn around. Big Statements are kept to a minimum here, but the film's overblown assumptions (that every Communist is a crude womanizer, mindlessly lethal, and essentially synonymous with Stalin, that all children are innocent and pure, etc.) still supply laughs, and it becomes difficult to disentangle the film's perceived racial tolerance and such broad generalizations. Fuller's always good for impressions of brawny stylistic heft though; every gunshot fired rings deadly, momentarily trivializing the plot's goofiness. And one would be hard-pressed to find a more expressive airplane/helicopter getaway sequence than the muted, pared-down, harrowing one that concludes this film.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943): Revisiting this on a 16mm print confirmed what a genius piece of filmmaking it is, and furthermore how ahead of its time it was aesthetically, narratively, and politically. Deren's subtle and hypnotic modulation between slow-motion and real-time anticipates Tarkovsky, her rabbit-hole narrative – complete with recurring objects and motifs – is a clear template for Lynch, and her approach to the image of femininity espouses a critique of Hollywood objectification that has inflected a number of socially-conscious filmmakers too great to accurately summarize in a sentence. What really stuck with me this time around was the film's entrancing score, a buzzing, clamoring drone prophetic of Toru Takemitsu's work for Hiroshi Teshigahara and also reminiscent of ritualistic tribal music, speaking to an enduring interest in the topic that eventually led Deren to the villages of Haiti.

Go! Go! Go! (1962-64): A frenetic single-frame diary of Maria Menken's daily NYC commute to her desk job and throughout the city that achieves levels of whimsy, poignancy, and darkness that go well beyond mere observation. This is a film seemingly comprised of impulsive gestures with the camera that nonetheless captures impressions of urban truth: bodies moving rapidly to and fro, boats docking and setting off in a harbor photographed in such a way that they resemble toy ships being manipulated by a child, people relaxing on a beachfront surrounded by looming buildings, and humorous asides distilling and poking fun at constructions of gender norms, such as an amusing bit at a muscle show. Menken's in-camera editing unfolds with joyful abandon, passing over large swaths of time to get at key aspects of the modern city. Looked at this way, Go! Go! Go! suggests the mechanics of mental recollection, the strange feeling of cycling through a day's, week's, or month's worth of events in one's head.

Geography of the Body (1946): If Menken herself is absent from Go! Go! Go!, she's very much present, albeit heavily segmented and abstracted, in her husband Willard Maas' film Geography of the Body, which, superficially speaking, takes her body (and an unidentified male's) as its subjects. Visualizing the "mysterious caverns" referenced by surrealist narrator-poet George Barker on the soundtrack(a text related in Barker's droll British accent, suggestive of a particularly flamboyant Kubrickian monologue), Maas shoots these figures in tight close-ups, focusing on neglected portions of the human body, discovering textured landscapes among the flesh. His takes are relatively long, allowing the eye to search for context among what are decidedly decontextualized images. Often times the shots are fairly legible (it's hard to mistake an ear or a hairline for anything but), though Maas also trains his camera on pulsating muscles, obtuse angles, and murky black holes that are very difficult to get a coherent grasp of. An avant-garde hit in its day for obvious reasons, Geography of the Body is the notable for the way it continues to inspire powerful dislocation in the face of such a seemingly intimate subject as the human body.

Outside Satan (2011) A Film by Bruno Dumont

Viewed under proper circumstances – 35mm projection, expansive 2:35:1 aspect ratio unhindered by cropping, hushed theater without booming action movie screening next door; in a word, a devotional setting – Bruno Dumont's Outside Satan bears down on you. Alternating between statuesque close-ups of faces against skies and rapturous deep-focus views of the rural dunes of Nowhere, France, the film essentially presents a series of richly detailed landscapes to meditate upon, but this desire for contemplation is complicated throughout by a vaguely sinister energy. At any given moment, nature seems capable of assuming either a rejuvenating or actively violent role; so too does the screen itself, its physicality occasionally threatening to burst outward at the viewer. Of the many contemporary practitioners of so-called "slow cinema" (a trend that's too diffuse and noncommittal to be called a genre), Dumont is one of the least likely to allow for spontaneity. With his subtly micromanaged mise-en-scène, he summons a compositional intensity that lends minuscule gestures – a whistle through fingers, a dog's bark, a sudden bodily movement – an unsettling charge. Outside Satan takes full advantage of this latent unpredictability, thus finding a stylistic match for its willfully impenetrable protagonist.

Both Outside Satan and Dumont's preceding film, Hadewijch, deal with modern figures of intense religious devotion (overt in the latter, implied in the former) driven to acts of destructiveness. In this case, Dumont centers his attention on a stoic, misshapen drifter (David Dewaele) who behaves as some kind of vessel for the alternately satanic and saintly energy flows of a dreary seaside village. Under his wing is a punkish girl with a pixie cut (Alexandra Lemâtre) who lends him bread daily (the first of the film's several Christian allusions to emerge) and follows him as he roams the windy outskirts of the town. Occasionally, they face the vast landscape before them and kneel down into prayer position. They barely speak, and when they do it's a banal collection of curt sentences suggesting the barest skeleton of a relationship marked by suppressed emotions, unremarked-upon individual traumas, and co-dependency. Early on, there is an indication of the peculiar philosophical space that binds them together: the girl follows the man to the back of a rusty shed, they wait with a rifle for a man to emerge from a barn nearby, Dewaele shoots him, and the two of them stand there motionless, solemnly directing their gazes towards the ground, flickering no visible signs of either emotional guilt or a desire to flee the scene.



The casting of Dewaele and Lemâtre, two of the most inherently expressive faces I've witnessed in some time, is essential to the power of these blank slate moments. Dewaele is a strange, intimidatingly unattractive man, like a street rat manifested as a human. His face – framed by a combed mop of wiry dirty blonde hair and punctuated by an uneven unibrow, patchy facial hair, a tight-lipped scowl, and the occasional scar or cut that suggestively comes and goes – rarely interrupts its default expression: a hard-to-read concoction of smug indifference, gentle humility, and barely veiled bloodlust. This face belongs to a stiff, awkward body adorned with wrongly fitting clothes that sometimes create the illusion that bones are jutting out from beneath his skin in random places. Beside him is Lemâtre, her features softer and more recognizably human, her physiognomy more reptilian than rodent-like, and her squinted eyes hinting at years of personal turmoil only obliquely thrown into relief by the thinly outlined narrative detail regarding her apparently abusive father, cryptically identified as the victim of the aforementioned rifle shot.

The cutthroat moral logic guiding this act (the father pays for his wrongs) continues to mark some of the behavior of Dewaele's character. It is not long before he commits another murder, this time bludgeoning the head of a man who has continually made unsuccessful romantic and erotic advances at Lemâtre's character. Later, he has a simultaneously sexual and violent encounter with a female passerby that ostensibly ends with some kind of metaphysical death and rebirth. What links these three victims is a sense of impurity or wrongdoing: physical abuse in the first instance, tactlessness and emotional disregard in the second, and flippant self-prostitution in the last. Dumont is, on the one hand, presenting a character defined by his communion with both the natural world and a higher power who appears to have some sort of agenda to rid the village of any violating behavior. But at the same time, this man is prone to mistakes (he kills a deer when trying to shoot a bird), to perceived discontinuities between thought and action (he enjoys sex with the passerby before punishing her), and to radical shifts in alleged intent to the point that he appears to be shifting at will between binaries of good and evil, self-interest and selflessness, omniscient control and chance.



Put in grander, flashier terms – and the terms popularly bandied about by those trying to make sense of this aggressively provocative work – the man vacillates between Christ and the Devil. But it may be less accurate to say he shifts between these two poles than it is to say he embodies something of both at all times. Brief appearances of iPod headphones and beer cans tell us Outside Satan (otherwise decidedly agrarian) is set in the modern world, which may lead one to believe Dumont is crafting a parable about the place of consuming religious faith in an increasingly anti-spiritual environment. If so, the question that emerges pertains not to whether Dumont condemns or praises the spiritual pursuit (it's fairly clear that it's not so simple), but to the extent to which Dewaele's character's actions are his own or if they are somehow dictated by the movements of the community he exists within. One of the film's pivotal narrative developments involves the possessed young daughter of a widow. The woman routinely invites the man over to her home to monitor her daughter's physical and mental state, and one day he lunges on top of her and bellows into her foaming mouth (an action he will later perform on the female passerby). Upon leaving, the mother graciously thanks him for supposedly saving her daughter.

There are negative repercussions to this shocking quasi-pedophiliac exorcism, though, not in spite of but possibly because of the fact that it's perceived by the woman as a virtuous act (Dumont's approach to the scene, of course, is characteristically aloof). Shortly thereafter, Lemâtre's character dies enigmatically (and, it turns out, temporarily) when she creeps into a rustling darkness in a small forested patch. If the previous moment flirted with The Exorcist, this scene takes even further an undertone of pulpy horror that the film knowingly plays with throughout. Dumont's formidable command of screen space, editing tempo, and atmospheric soundscapes is such that every shot feels as if it's on the precipice of a dangerous outburst that never arrives. Here, the simple cutting rhythm between Lemâtre's apprehensive expression as she moves slowly forward and a static medium shot of a dark alcove in the woods – coupled with the eerie silence following a soft cracking in the darkness – creates unbearable tension. As with so many of the film's suggestive build-ups, however, Dumont dodges the payoff in favor of a classic Bressonian ellipsis that places the emphasis on the result of the act rather than the act: an unassuming fade to black, followed by a tight, abstracted close-up of Lemâtre's lower legs, dirtied by leaves and mud. By never definitively assigning a guilty party to her death (cops do point the finger at an auxiliary character who may or may not be of significance, but one gets the sense that justice has not been served), the film leaves open the possibility that the culprit may not be human at all. Have the cosmos somehow conspired against Dewaele's character, rewarding his "good deed" with a competing tilt of the moral universe?

Outside Satan doesn't have a plot so much as a succession of these mysterious red herrings. In fact, there's an entirely separate narrative thread involving a group of cops investigating the string of criminal incidents that's so opaque it barely even registers as anything more than a collection of wide shots of men in uniform getting in and out of cars, asking witnesses unheard questions, and emerging from crime scenes (strangely, they seem oblivious to the coincidence that Dewaele is always roaming on the periphery). Such is the effect of Dumont's ascetic approach here, which leaves a not-uncomplicated narrative bubbling beneath a sedate surface of spacious, inscrutable images and nondescript ambient sounds. But this sense of calm is only a mask for much darker, more unstable undercurrents, all of which momentarily erupt to the surface when the vast landscape incomprehensibly sets aflame in the final third of the movie, a large-scale metaphor whose extinguishment soon after it arrives is further proof of the prophetic shape-shifting of Dewaele's character. This is a man with destructive and rejuvenating powers, and the scariest quality about him is the suspicion – sustained for the film's entirety – that he's not the one responsible for how he uses them.

Beau Travail (1999) A Film by Claire Denis

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

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



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

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



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

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

Innocence (2004) A Film by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

If Catherine Breillat has emerged somewhat recently as the preeminent cinematic chronicler of the woozy transition from pre-pubescent girlhood to sexually matured femininity, it's important to recognize the achievement of French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic in the same ballpark less than a decade earlier with her striking first (and to date, only) feature Innocence. Sharing, and ultimately putting to shame, her spouse Gaspar Noé's penchant for oblique storytelling and enveloping symbology, Hadzihalilovic relates a simple, streamlined tale about young girls housed in a bare-bones boarding school whose lives are dictated by a small group of female headmasters and the rituals they impart on their students. This seemingly mundane setup – which seems to have spawned narrative, thematic, and, in the case of the latter, aesthetic resemblances in both Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go and Giorgos Lanthimos' 2010 film Dogtooth – is rich with allegorical implications. Hadzihalilovic's core approach here is to strip everything of context, leaving behind actions and images of tantalizing multivalence that never skimp on immediate emotional impact.

Innocence opens with block credits slightly quivering with the names of the entire cast and crew, an old-fashioned technique that is the first hint of the film's affected timelessness. Sandwiched amongst them are brief cutaways to uncertain imagery, the first of which is a tight overhead shot of a wooden coffin seemingly being carried through a space (the shifting light on the surface of the device being the only indication of movement). By the time the credits are finished, the frame fills with an abstracted liquid splashing insistently against the screen (a liquid that is revealed at the end of the film to be jetting out from a water fountain). Suddenly the camera finds itself beneath unsettled water, the mounting, muffled drone on the soundtrack (first mistaken for the rumblings of a distant train – which, the film ultimately proves, is no less apt) in turn revealing itself to be an approximation of underwater hearing. Bubbles bound upward, resembling sperm cells swimming towards fertilization. Suddenly, we emerge from the water, born atop the placid surface of a pond in the middle of a forest on a sunny day.



Anyone familiar with Noé's filmmaking should know that he can't get enough birth and death metaphors, and that impulse clearly seems to have rubbed off on Hadzihalilovic. But whereas Noé's deployment of them is often hasty and overwrought, Hadzihalilovic's takes on a greater subtlety both in terms of representation and thematic implication. The coffin is revealed to be a container carrying the latest newcomer (perhaps suggestively named Iris (Zoé Auclair) given the word's other meanings as the optical and photographic apparatuses that let in light) to the wooded all-girls boarding school where almost the entire film is set. Thus, her entrance into the campus is a form of birth cloaked in an instrument of death. These two competing existential poles are entangled as if to suggest that the innocence and spark of life that young girls take with them into their years of maturation is doomed to be extinguished, partially if not wholly, by the rules, restrictions, and unnatural ideals of the society they're entering. And if there's one thing that's blatantly clear about the film on a metaphysical level, it's that Hadzihalilovic intends to some degree for this boarding school to be a microcosm of a larger world.

In Hadzihalilovic's assured hand, that microcosm is a bright, pastoral landscape marked by a dark, dishonest core beneath the surface. In the disquieting quiet of nature, pre-pubescent ballerinas clad in spotless white uniforms and hair ribbons color-coded to indicate age and maturation splash around in the pond nearby and frolic in the lawns with streamers and hula hoops. They attend class – ballet, environmental science – in the same imposing 19th century mansion in which they sleep and eat. Two teachers – elegant Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard) and crippled Mademoiselle Edith (Hélène de Fougerolles) – appear to be their only stable superiors, while geriatric female servants haunt the edges of the frame (perhaps an omen of what's to come for these stunted girls). The boarding school operates according to an economy of obedience, a value Eva explicitly nods to with one bit of dialogue: "the root of all happiness is obedience," she tells the antsy Alice (Lea Bridarolli) after ballet one afternoon, her tone a mixture of soothing and warning. The more these girls obey their headmasters, the more likely it is for them to either be escorted from the school early by ambiguous "Heads" or to graduate without complication into the outside world upon proper maturation.



Proper maturation. Never is this particular term bandied about by the teachers at the boarding school (they prefer not to speak directly of the future), but it's implicitly the narrative axis upon which Innocence pivots. The question, of course, is what constitutes this implied maturation, whether or not it's legitimate, and finally how the rubric of judgment imposed by the school aligns or doesn't align with that of our own world. Plot-wise, the film focuses on three different girls at different stages of their development: the aforementioned Iris is the focus of the film's first third, the rebellious Alice of its second, and the final third looks at Iris' first friend and guide Bianca (Bérangère Haubruge), who is essentially a model student – kind, unquestioning, tall, lanky, pretty. It may be significant that Iris, who endeavors to learn the school rules with great eagerness, is the only Asian amongst a horde of pasty French girls, though probably no more significant than the fact that Alice, marked by goofy pigtails and dark circles under her eyes, is the first to climb over the walls to freedom, or that one physically fit specimen catches the most attention from the "Heads" and is allowed to prematurely leave the grounds. What emerges is a portrait of a school breeding girls towards a standardized sort of perfection that has everything to do with surfaces and nothing to do with adequate emotional, social, or sexual complexity (in this light, it's telling that the class most focused on in the film is ballet, a pursuit of purely aesthetic ends).

The school's oversights are at their most damning when it comes to sexuality, seeing as the guiding principles of the education have to do with appearances despite never actually addressing the capabilities of the human body. Motifs and images charged with sexuality are sprinkled throughout the film: a close-up of a snake sliding over a loose thong on the ground, the prevalent birth-related iconography (water bubbles, insects sprouting from their eggs), and, in the final scene of the film when the recently-released Bianca sees her (and the film's) first boy on the other side of a water fountain, the vertical spraying not-so-subtly evokes ejaculation. The suggestion is that sex is everywhere, in nature as well as in man-made creations, so the school's unwillingness to directly address it becomes a way of shielding these girls from very relevant facts of life. One of the film's most powerful images is a fleeting shot of Bianca's upper thigh as she slides her hand up it and beneath her skirt, a moment which Hadzihalilovic excises before the hinted payoff. So ignorant under forced circumstances are these girls that any evolved behavior such as this comes across like an out-of-body experience.



Unlike Never Let Me Go, which strove to find a clever euphemism for nearly every social, emotional, and sexual development to the point where the story erected a unique vernacular, or Dogtooth, which defamiliarized and codified conventional human expression so thoroughly that it looked almost fundamentally alien, Innocence unfolds according to relatively authentic behavioral and linguistic rhythms. But while the movie's dramaturgy fits into a realist mode, its filmmaking is sensual, dreamlike, and poetic. Hadzihalilovic's camera is often steady and observant, but not in a coldly anthropological manner. Instead, it interacts with the dramatic subtexts in sneaky ways, frequently pushing the girls to the fringes of the frame or arranging them in off-kilter compositions that portray their bodies as mere streaks of color, shape, and movement against the landscapes (the frequent cutting off of heads seems a strong influence to Lanthimos). This visual style creates a sense of doom and fatalism, as if the girls' environment – as well as the camera's gaze – is rendering them obsolete.

All of these sensations suffuse the film's denouement with a potent ambiguity. What appears on the surface to be an uplifting narrative progression – Bianca finally graduates from the school and enters the real world – is complicated by the feeling that whatever awaits her on the other end of her harrowing train ride is likely to be only a bigger, more impersonal version of the boarding school. It's a feeling that weighs over Innocence's final sequence, marking everything from the previously saintly Mademoiselle Eva's sudden lighting of a cigarette (the girls, apparently, are not the only ones whose psyches are affected by the school) to Bianca's loaded expression of anxiety on the train, the occasional underground light washing over her pale face. On top of all this, there is an echo of the first image of the film: men carrying another wooden coffin through what resembles the dark, dingy tunnel from Tarkovsky's Stalker. The obvious suggestion is that the same cycle of exploitative dumbing-down witnessed throughout the film is bound to be enacted on another unsuspecting young girl. Innocence presents in all its chilling contradictions the tough truths of raising a modern female, a reality that all in the film are infected by and from which no one seems capable of escaping.

Beowulf (Zemeckis, 2007) and the Fleeting Riches of Motion Capture

At the risk of sounding deliberately contrarian, I'll admit that I've always found myself perversely intrigued, even thrilled, by Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture work. It's to my own surprise, seeing as I'm not particularly a fan of modern video games (the look of which generally serves as the most ideal reference point for motion capture technology) and I'm more or less indifferent to the ancient folk-tales Zemeckis has chosen to adapt with the approach. Nonetheless, The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol have to be the two strangest-feeling yuletide films in the history of cinema, committed as they are to radically re-thinking the worlds expressed in their respective texts. (They're also, given the oft-discussed "coldness" of the mo-cap look, rather unfitting for the emotional warmth of the holiday season.) I was first turned on to the films after reading Matt Zoller Seitz' fantastic Slant piece that loosely connected Zemeckis to Wes Anderson, both of whom share similarly visionary, from-the-ground-up filmmaking approaches.

Having now witnessed Zemeckis' resounding return to Earth in the form of 2012's live-action Flight, I had the impulse to check out Beowulf, the only mo-cap experiment I'd yet to see. The limits of the technique are, I suspect, fairly obvious off the bat: any sincere approach to human drama comes across stilted and awkward. (Zemeckis succumbs to this tendency far too often in Beowulf despite the unsentimental source material he's working with – though, it should be said, much less than in his other two mo-cap movies, wherein tear-jerking shorthand and message-heavy overtones routinely get in the way of spectacle.) On the flip side, scenes that figure humans in as mere pawns in a vast landscape of spectacle and don't limit the technology's capacities to 2D visual grammar (i.e. close-ups, static shots, etc.) often become sui generis exercises in the destruction of conventional screen space. As Seitz so eloquently argued, "Zemeckis digs motion-captured imagery not in spite of its unreality but because of it." I suspect he's after a certain surface that's unachievable with a live-action setup, a feeling of weightlessness that incorporates the "camera" not as a physical object defined by rational boundaries of perspective but as an omniscient observer that can be anywhere at a given moment and see anything/everything. All of this, in the ideal circumstances, should bolster spectacle, rendering it more sensory and all-encompassing.

These strengths are in evidence in what I would argue is Beowulf's best scene without contest (and a scene that comes surprisingly close to my 11th grade mind's fanciful imagining of it). It's the monster Grendel's (Crispin Glover) first raid of the mead hall, an utter massacre of the licentious and vulnerable Danes who are soon to be rescued by the swaggering warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone). Zemeckis opens the scene with a slow dolly towards the entrance of the mead hall, where the door is perched open, leading to a panorama of the dark, wintry landscape of Scandinavia. Suddenly, with a swiftness and force that would be difficult to capture with an image of a real actor, Beowulf drops into frame, loudly announcing his presence in the room, and only seconds later, leaps through the air to plant his oversized, slimy foot down on the camera.

Screening Notes #17

Promised Land (2012): Aside from the occasional blanketed reminder of Bela Tarr influence (a slow tracking shot around the back of a head during a dialogue scene; a dolly move ostensibly tracking an old man's journey onto his porch that slides behind a dark, featureless wall to glimpse his figure through an old curtain) and the interest in the lackadaisical rhythms of small towns, there's little resemblance between this new, unambitious Gus Van Sant and the old Gus Van Sant who was one of the treasures of American independent cinema. Whereas Van Sant's formal daring could once transform narrative downtime into enthralling pieces of cinematic meditation, here the conventionally sedate surface of the film becomes especially banal when the narrative lurches into stasis. Promised Land carefully establishes a conflict pregnant with tough moral questions in its first act: Matt Damon is an earnest businessman seeking to enact a potentially environmentally disastrous cause on a farming community for the sole purpose of collective profit; John Krasinski is a corrupt environmentalist/businessman hoping to sabotage Damon's ambitions with communitarian spirit and horror stories about the previous side-effects of corporate dishonesty. It's as good a narrative setup as any, but the film grows limp and mopey two-thirds of the way through and never really recovers.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012): Little more than a parade of references to my generation's slew of iconic video games (N64 iconography features prominently), Wreck-It Ralph is nonetheless still mildly enjoyable. The pleasure of spotting nods – and at some points even reliving the experiences of playing certain games (as in the Mario Kart-heavy finale) – usually outweighs the displeasure of sitting through such a clunky and generic narrative, which is rapidly paced in all the parts it needs to take its time and vice-versa, and which is only compounded by the cognitive dissonance of listening to gross-out humor specialists John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman voicing pandering kiddie roles. In the end, however, it's the unimaginative story that finally threatens to consign the film to the overflowing tar pit of contemporary animation mediocrity.

Epizootics! (Music Video, 2012): The music video for the ten-minute "single" from Scott Walker's Bish Bosch is a beautiful thing: eerie, inspired, and funny in equal measure. Hyper-slow-motion shots in rich monochrome seem indebted to Lars Von Trier's new baroque, painterly mode (Antichrist and Melancholia), but divorced from narrative concerns, these images work on a purely formalistic level. The compositions – static but with slowly shifting cores of movement (a luau dancer seducing the camera with ritualistic gestures, a black couple doing the jitterbug on a Marienbad-esque patio, a figure awakening in the middle of a field) – create palpable tensions with the dissonant, rhythmic intensity of "Epizootics!" that resolve once the song reaches Walker's characteristically meditative moments. At one point, we see, in color, a daddy longlegs walking across a bellybutton, glimpsed through the paper-thin focus of a macro lens. Another image, this one recurring, shows flower pedals falling through the sky and onto a pair a shiny white shoes, later sprinkling all around a woman's face. This unpredictable evocation of people lounging around in nature, coexisting with bugs and plant-life, manages to be just as strange and expressive as Walker's music. Watch it here.

2 Days in New York (2012): My few experiences with Julie Delpy are fond ones. The French-American actress has a warm, Earthy presence, not to mention an unmistakable tactility (she has the most pronounced breathing and mouth sounds in cinema), that makes the entrance into whatever film world she inhabits a smooth and welcome one. It's no surprise that she's the real virtue of 2 Days in New York, a light, proudly imperfect neurotic comedy directed by Delpy herself after its companion piece 2 Days in Paris, both of which focus on Marion (again, Delpy), her oddly convincing American boyfriends, and their respective run-ins with Marion's crazy French family. Delpy's as unapologetically narcissistic as Woody Allen in her sacrificing of all narrative and thematic concerns to a cinematic self-therapy session, but unfortunately she's not nearly as funny as Allen, and her particular way of poking fun at social mannerisms has the tendency to descend into reductiveness (the French are impolite and un-self-aware, middle-aged urban couples are really gullible, educated writer types are skeptical liberals, etc.) and, as a result, actually decrease the potential for great comedy to organically emerge. Still, she's a lively presence onscreen, and it's hard to stop watching her.



Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012): If this manages to take home a Best Picture from the Academy after miraculously getting a nomination, then maybe cinema (hell, maybe even society) is dead. No, I kid. But seriously, the praise for Benh Zeitlin's rancid Beasts of the Southern Wild has perplexed me more than anything in 2012, and it's depressed me about the state of film culture more than any of the nonsensical anti-Hollywood/anti-CGI/anti-digital sentiments in the "Death of Cinema" screeds that have been widely published. Zeitlin (a white liberal from NY, it must be said, who was well off enough to make this his debut feature) crafts a deplorable trivialization of Hurricane Katrina that is marked by a queasy balance between exaggeratedly aestheticizing the decay of poverty (tactile close-ups of bubbling hobo broth and muddy livestock are emphasized over the people) and ignorantly championing the self-sufficiency of the poor, flimsy souls in the film that masquerade as three-dimensional characters. But beyond the shallow and offensive politics, Beasts is stupefyingly lazy filmmaking. Montages replace scene-building, unintelligible group dynamics overshadow character development, fraudulent lifts from the Malick playbook completely miss the point, and dunderheaded metaphors (those goddamned overused "beasts") thinly cloak real, painful trauma. And then there's the offense to top it all off: Zeitlin's faux-realist camerawork, a hodgepodge of focus "mistakes" and calculatedly jerky handheld, seemingly intended to lend a veneer of emotional truth to the whole thing.

Damsels in Distress (2011): The verbal dexterity of Whit Stillman's work creates a surface texture that is all too rare in contemporary cinema, more in line with 30's and 40's screwball sensibilities than any particular development in modern comedy. For at least half its runtime, the complexity of the wordiness in Damsels in Distress is enough to keep it lively and fresh; for much of its second half, however, the film shows a watering down of the distinctive Stillman flavor, a gentle turn towards the tropes and plot mechanics of generic indiedom. (Beyond the new-girl-on-campus conceit, there are individual scenes, ensemble formulas, and a cloying bells-inflected score that feel as though they could have been pulled from any quirky college comedy of the past decade.) Still, with Stillman crafting such delicious dialogue and with the infectiously watchable Greta Gerwig front and center, the film never becomes dull, even approaching at times the characteristically Stillman-esque push-pull between a sympathy towards the characters and a cool critique of their shallowness. It's just that it hews too closely to the director's previous takes on overeducated and sheltered youth to really stand apart in his body of work.

On Spec (2012): From the ever-intriguing Mubi.com critic David Phelps comes this fascinating 22-minute piece of homespun avant-garde cinema, a seemingly free-form collage of slapdash aesthetic ideas, narrative approaches, and shooting formats. Shot within the confines of Phelps' Brooklyn apartment, with one brief sojourn to the roof of the building, the film gathers artifacts and impressions out of what seems like a compact chunk of time and mixes them, distorts them, and fragments them with reckless abandon. Ostensibly naturalistic, on-the-fly moments of Phelps and his roommates shooting the shit are contrasted by fleeting instances of time rendered abstract through harsh pixelation and unreal colors, a disjunctive pairing complicated further by the playful shifting between digital shooting devices (laptop vision, cellphone cameras, DSLR's (?)) and film stock. This dense visual surface is paired with a soundtrack that has a life of its own, splintering around the speakers in crushed bits of noise and occasionally falling off into silence. The impression of an avid thinker arbitrarily putting a slew of critical theories into practice via images and sound is inescapable, but for me it doesn't hurt that I'm also fascinated by the array of ontological issues that On Spec raises, and furthermore, the film becomes especially relevant in the context of Phelps' critical writing, which similarly features an abiding interest in reality and its relationship to the moving image as it enters the 21st century.