(It took forever to get this post finished. I was worried 2013 would finish before I got this 2012 wrap-up done. Hastily written at any spare moment, I’m just happy that this little list actually exists, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Also, yay to me for breaking a 5-month freeze on this blog by actually posting something. Is the blog officially unfrozen? I’d like to say yes, but I’ve made loads of promises that have not come to fruition in the past, so let’s say for now it’s still thawing.)
If 2011 saw a distinct drop in the number of films viewed, then in 2012 this pace dropped to a near standstill. What else could be expected with bringing up a new baby, undergoing a complete vocational about-face, and taking on full-time study as well as full-time work? I’m happy I got the occasional dollop of sleep last year, let alone the chance to watch a few films here and there.
There’s an intense complexity woven within this film’s
fabric that is belied by the simplicity of an unrequited love story. Dream
interpretation, story-telling, and re-living memories are recurring motifs that
elide the two-part structure of the film. While initially feeling rigid and
clinically precise, the film slips and melts with graceful sensuality. And, at
its beating heart, the film aches for cinema’s own history, yearning for its
own paradise lost.
8. STUDENT (Darezhan Omirbayev; Kazakhstan)
Omirbayev should be far more well-known than he is. This
somewhat faithful rendering of Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment sets the story in modern-day Kazakhstan as a means to
critique the soul-less modernisation of his country. Although Bresson appears
to be an obvious influence, the close-ups, gestures and quiet pace accumulate
to form Omirbayev’s own signature which reflects the friction between the old
socialist version of Kazakhstan and the new capitalist version. While the film
may be bleak and unemotional, it is also extremely elegant and precise. It also
has the simplest yet quietly haunting dream sequence I’ve seen in a long time.
Embedding his ‘Maddin-esque’ style deep within the noir genre possibly makes for Maddin’s
most accessible work yet. However, ‘accessible’ and ‘Maddin’ don’t exactly live
on the same street, and this ties genre conventions in knots from the outset.
Ostensibly the film focuses on a gangster boss and his mob returning to his
family home to hole up for a while, in hiding from the police. However, the
home is haunted, not just with yelling ghosts, but with memories, and boss
appears to be committed to nothing other than working out how to remember his
past through navigating not just the labyrinth of the house but the layers of
memory that still live and breathe within its walls. Here, there does not
appear to be mere life and death, or the living and the ghost traces of the
dead, but instead a multitude of blurred varieties of mortality. Mundane
objects take on a powerful resonance, as placement and movement trigger memory.
The protagonist’s own being seems to ultimately be infused with the house, and
the film projects not just a poetics of memory but also a poetics of space.
Grant Gee’s film is an attempt to mirror W.G. Sebald’s
‘unclassifiable’ book The Rings Of Saturn,
ostensibly a travelogue of the writer’s walk through Suffolk but also a meander
through his thoughts on European history, literature, and culture. To do this,
the film becomes almost book-like, with grainy images of many places along the
route taken by Sebald indexed with a page number. The film thus becomes a
travelogue of a travelogue, making a map of the book as much as mapping the
places described within the book. The layered quality of Sebald’s work is
emulated through an accretion of overlapping layers to the images – shots of quiet
and lonely landscapes are inlaid with text, fading images of interviewees,
pages from the book itself. And, at last, someone has the sense to score an
entire film with music by The Caretaker – the ghostly sounds of records from
yesteryear seem to perfectly match the spectral grainy tone of the film.
This is a deceptive documentary that transcends a mere portrait
of the Russian art collective Voina. Gryazev apparently infiltrated the group
and recorded their exploits in 2010. These exploits and actions at first appear
to be utterly childish – organised shop-lifting and turning over cars make the
group appear to be less of an art collective and more a bunch of immature
pranksters using the ‘art’ tag to justify larking about. Constant bickering
between the leaders, Oleg Vorotnikov and his partner Natalia Sokol, doesn’t
help this initial impression. However, slowly the film reveals the group’s
plans and plots to be far more cohesive than it first appears, and it leads to
an organised action that has serious consequences for the group. As the film
progresses, and the group are targeted for criminal conduct, a deep complexity arises
in relating to these protagonists. On the one hand, having warmed to over the
course of the film, it is easy to feel concerned, perhaps even outraged, at
their plight. On the other hand, there is an ever-increasing concern that the
leaders are putting their politics and art before being a cohesive family. Their
18-month old son is a strong focus of the film, and may possibly even be the
motive behind its title, questioning the ‘tomorrow’ of this boy’s future. Although
the leaders are depicted as loving parents, the exposure of this child to their
antics is questionable (especially at the climax of the film, where the boy is
present at a Voina-instigated riot, and potentially exposed to physical harm). The
incremental movement of this film from its first impressions to deeply conflicted
and unsettled feelings towards Voina make for an unusually powerful film that
stays with you long after it is over.
There is not a single superfluous moment in this film.
Petzold has sculpted a lean, poised, and simmering work that is capable of
exercising powerful contradictions. East Germany in the 1980’s is visually presented
as bleak, cold, and clinical, but also replete with visual warmth, colour and softness.
The eponymous protagonist vacillates from aloof to abrasive to cordial to
vulnerable and then back again. Within an economically spare visual framework
and script, Petzold has performed some kind of magic to engineer a constant
push-and-pull of emotional attachment, while steadily tightening the tension to
near vice-like proportions.
3. THE LONELIEST
PLANET (Julia Loktev; USA/ Germany)
The most devastating split second on film in 2012. This
blink-and-you-miss-it decision ruptures the supposed harmony between an engaged
couple travelling through the Caucasus Mountains, but what makes the film so powerful
is through showing this rupture via wordless treks, haunted expressions, and floundering
gestures of rapprochement and mitigation. Loktev opts for having the characters
thoughts and emotions locked deep inside their heads, withdrawing them to the
loneliest place from each other but also allowing the viewer to make a deeper ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God’
connection. Because of this very spartan approach, this film is possibly the
most tragic portrait of relationship to hit the screen in a long, long time.
From out of nowhere, Carax pulls out his best and wildest
film ever. This is a love poem to cinema’s own history, a vehicle for Denis
Lavant’s powers of performative commitment and self-transformation, and a spectral
journey through the streets of Paris all rolled into one. But there’s more, so
much more. The act of performing takes on an incrementally elegiac tone, with
Lavant getting wearier with each appointment. Is it the weight of expectation
from an unseen audience, the same audience watching a film (or watching us?) at
the beginning of this wild ride? You almost wonder if Lavant’s Mr. Oscar is
always aware that we are watching
him, that we demand these
appointments be kept. Carax seems to portray cinema itself as loaded down with
this heavy weight of demands and desires, and has attempted to craft a
magnificent vehicle to try and shuck off the weight and fly to freedom.
Rey’s full-length experimental masterpiece operates on totally different plane than any other film of 2012. Composed of 9 reels that can be played in any random order, it exists in a perpetual present, its trajectory never a foregone conclusion. This freedom seems to give the film a mesmeric quality. Rey’s work is an interpretation of a book he has never read (Gunther Anders’ 1936 novel The Molussian Catacomb), in a language he does not understand (German). Grainy and colour-drained footage of ploughed fields, sparse hills, highways, and industrial buildings are wedded with fragments from Anders’ book, but the spoken text is drizzled sporadically over the images, allowing for a hypnotic change in the way the landscape is viewed. The footage, derived from ‘our’ world, eerily becomes another world, the fictional city of Molussia. The novel’s dystopian city of the future is woven into our ‘now’, rendering time, history and verisimilitude as arbitrary concerns. This blending of contemporary Europe into fictional Molussia is almost hallucinatory, a vertiginous magic trick born from celluloidal grain and pockmarks. Truly spellbinding.
