The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #1 - From the Pole to the Equator

[This is the beginning of an ongoing regular (weekly?) series, focusing on the rich wonders to be found in the world of experimental cinema. There's just so much fantastic stuff out there, and I'd like to track a journey of an appreciation and understanding of these gems-on-the-periphery. At times, it may just be a brief ramble, but I endeavour to commit the best kind of care and attention to these films as I can. Well, that's the plan, at the very least. As an avid fan of found footage filmmaking, I thought starting with Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi's classic would be a grand way to launch the rocket. Here we go...]

From the Pole to the Equator (Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi; Italy; 1987)

[101 mins]

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi's From the Pole to the Equator is an incredible example of filmmaking as visual archaeology. The film is solely composed of footage either shot or collected by Luca Comerio, a pioneering yet unheralded documentary filmmaker who filmed in a number of locations around the world from 1898 until the 1920's. Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi bought his archive in 1985 and began to examine, re-photograph and restructure his body of work. Comerio himself made a film in 1929 called From the Pole to the Equator, a 57-minute film in 4 parts. Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi's 98-minute long work can be seen as a remix, utilising footage from two parts of Comerio's documentary, plus out-takes from Comerio's own footage and the footage he collected from others.

The film feels like an ancient visual travelogue. Throughout the course of the film we travel from the Alps, to the South Pole, to the frontier between the Russian and Persian empires, then to Africa, India, back to Africa, and finally to various war-front locations during the first World War. The disparity of the locations almost makes it feel like a wordless precursor to Marker's essay travelogue Sans Soleil.

Each section of the travelogue is approximately ten minutes, and the entire film is set in slow motion, thus giving a sedate, glacial tone to the film. The film starts with what appears to be an iris shot of train-tracks, taken from the front of the train. The iris grows in size, as the train approaches the opening of a tunnel, and we erupt into the alpine landscape and into the film itself. This opening moment is a multilayered signifier of birth –the birth of cinema is inter-related with the development of the train, both seen as new modes of visual experience, and we have the very birth of this film itself. This contrasts greatly with moments of death viewed later in the film (the slaughter of a polar bear, men gunned down in painfully mesmerising slowed motion), and this series of scraps and fragments is imbued with a near-palpable aura of mortality.

This use of the slow motion locomotion of a train is crucial in highlighting a difference between From the Pole to the Equator and previous films that recycled early cinema. The train has been the focus of early cinema manipulations by Ernie Gehr (Eureka) and Al Razutis (Lumiere's Train (Arriving at the Station)), but whereas these films focus on the structural manipulation of film and history via the train as an iconographic exemplar of the birth of cinema, the train in Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi’s film is a ghost train which transports the viewer into an archive of further images excavated from depths of cinema history. The films of Gehr and Razutis promote clinical, objective spectatorship, at a distant from the images, whereas Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi’s film provides a sense of being transported and actively participating in the journey.

The film is mostly tinted, with each section coloured to suit its theme or mood - the blue tints used in the second section at the South Pole contrast with the more 'alpine' tints of red-brown and green in the first section. The South Pole section introduces the predominant tone throughout the film, one of conquest and colonialist domination, with images of hunters capturing and killing polar bears. The shooting and death of a polar bear is both horrific and yet eerily engaging, its death throes almost balletic, as it twirls, falls, stands and walks, and then falls again. This twin sensation of horror and engagement matches the filmmaker’s approach to Comerio's work. Repulsed by the footage of imperialist domination via hunting and shooting, both here in the South Pole and also in many later scenes in Africa, they sought to subvert this imperialist eye whilst also maintaining respect for Comerio as a fellow filmmaker capable of exquisite cinematography. Through slowing the images made (or collected) by Comerio, the filmmakers achieved this balance of respect for the image and critique of its colonialist tendencies, as the slower speed undermines the original detached and dominant point of view of the camera and forces the viewer to truly examine, analyse, and weigh the image as it steadily unveils itself. The slowed speed also gives the film a graceful and elegiac quality, as images are moved closer to stasis and thus closer to death, highlighting the perishable nature of the cinematic medium and the position of early nitrate film as a perilous cultural artefact.

 You can view this film here.

Top 10 Films for 2011 (and another list, for good measure)

Well, that was a hell of year, the one just gone. Cinema viewing and film writing was at a woeful low for the entirety of the year – sometimes life just deals you a multitude of things, both brilliant and not-so-brilliant, that kind of take over the whole show. I’m currently setting a few targets in my brain-sack, in order to help overcome the potential onslaught of life-distractions in the coming year and stay on track with some good ol’ film appreciation.

For a while I thought I had nothing under my belt to even cobble together a Top 10 for the year, but the more I tallied up my viewings the better I felt.

Here’s my little contribution to the wide world of end-of-year countdowns.

10. THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick; USA)

This film seemed to operate on two speeds concurrently – an absolute barrage of moments but presented in Malick’s familiar gliding lilting manner. If I had seen the film more than once, I’d no doubt say that the film would soar a lot higher on the list. As it happens, I saw this feeling exhausted and grumpy, meaning that the magnificence and audacity of Malick’s vision was tempered with feeling that the voice-overs, so affective in The Thin Red Line, bordered on pretentious this time around. I’m wondering what a return viewing might reveal.

9. ARCHIPELAGO (Joanna Hogg; UK)

Following up on her superb 2008 debut Unrelated, Hogg is stamping herself as one of the most intriguing new directors to emerge from the UK. A majestic hilly and lush rural environment provides the setting for a family get-together that moves from faux-conviviality to screaming and hostility. The film concentrates on the incapability of truly connecting with or understanding others via subtle micro-gestures of frustration, anger, and confusion, thus making this film a remarkable study of unspoken and suppressed emotions.

8. TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean; Romania)

More domestic breakdowns, this time between husband and wife. Muntean gives life to the usual husband-having-an-affair narrative by infusing each scene with intimacy and natural grace. And despite the husband’s duplicity, this film is remarkable for presenting the trauma of infidelity and the difficult decisions to be made with quiet, naked honesty.

7. SENNA (Asif Kapadia; UK)

This film is utterly deserving of claims made this year that this may be the best sports documentary of all-time. This is much more than just a biography of a talented racing driver’s career – the film hones in on unbridled passion for one’s vocation, national pride, spiritual commitment, a growing weariness and concern in one’s chosen passion, and an uncanny sense of predestination. First and foremost, though, this film holds a specific allure for allowing the story to unfold purely through archival footage.

6. INTO ETERNITY (Michael Madsen; Denmark)

On paper, the premise seems straight-forward – this is a documentary about Onkalo, an underground nuclear-storage facility in Finland being created from solid rock, which is required to last for 100,000 years, the period of time that this waste remains hazardous. But the film delivers so much more than this, as the accumulation of interviews from various parties begins to reveal the magnitude of complexities involved in engaging in this project. Its presentation as a document for the future errs on the side of beguiling rather than merely pretentious, and the film is often visually alluring, filled with the geometries of the nuclear storage units and crystal-white labyrinthine corridors.

5. MEEK’S CUTOFF (Kelly Reichardt; USA)

This perambulatory drift of three families lead by a hired guide often looks like the cinematic 19^th century relation to Gus van Sant’s lost-in-the-desert Gerry. Issues of trust form the emotional core of the film, but Reichardt builds on these issues by patiently elaborating long scenes of characters listening and observing the conversations of others. Eavesdropping has never been so riveting. Reichardt also reveals a love for creating beautiful asymmetrical compositions from the groupings of people against the barren landscape.

4. THE TURIN HORSE (Bela Tarr; Hungary/ France/ Germany/ Switzerland/ USA)

After the disappointing Man From London, Tarr hits the mark with his (supposedly) final work. The repetition of daily chores seems to conjure up thoughts of some kind of distant, barren, wind-afflicted ancestry to Jeanne Dielman, but the gripping focus here is on the simplicity of the struggle to survive. Tarr has the unusual ability to make bleakness vividly and strikingly compelling. And the constant howling music that the wind makes throughout the entirety of the film haunts your ears long after the final fade-out.

3. THIS IS NOT A FILM (Jafar Panahi/ Mojtaba Mirtahmasb; Iran)

Possibly the best film about what it means to create film, to be a director, to transfer words on a page into the magic of cinema. Panahi, under house arrest and not allowed to create a film, puts on the guise of an actor, and proves himself to be a natural and arresting ‘performer’. This is not simply about the heart-break of Panahi’s plight – it is a deep and engaging philosophical essay on the mechanics of filmmaking and perhaps time may reveal this as Panahi’s best film.

2. DISORDER (Huang Weikai; China)

This 58-minute documentary should nestle within the history of cinema as the ultimate anti-city-symphony. Focussing on approximately 20 separate unusual events occurring in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the film is a collaged marvel of editing as everything we see is actually amateur footage shot by various camera-people. The events reveal a city in the throes of some kind of surrealist chaos – pigs run amok through traffic, a shop filled with illegal frozen ant-eaters and bear paws is ransacked, a shirtless nutcase tries to perform his own style of tai-chi while walking through peak-hour traffic. Huang Weikai meticulously weaves all of the events together, to create an interlocking disorienting melange, portraying a city on the brink of chaos and madness.

1. LE QUATTRO VOLTE (Michelangelo Frammartino; Italy/ Germany/ Switzerland)

An incredible film that successfully does away with focussing on the social world of humans and gives equal weight to the animal, vegetable, mineral, and human realms (hence the ‘four times’ of the title). Thus, the film allows a goat, a tree, and charcoal to be considered as characters on an equal footing with an old goat-herder. Almost entirely wordless, the film breathes the rhythms of the natural world. From goat-herder to goat to tree to charcoal, we are passed through different seasons and different manifestations of continual birth and death. This is pure elemental cinema at its best, providing an extremely rich experience that provokes all the senses.

Bubbling under the Top 10; Aurora (Cristi Puiu); Post Mortem (Pablo Larrain); Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin); The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev).

---------

In terms of general film viewing, 2011 was sporadic to say the least. I barely touched base with silent film, and saw very few films from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. This was not be design, it just seems to have shaken out that way, and in hindsight it feels like my cinema diet was lacking in essential nutrients last year. I’ll need to redress this for 2012.

I seem to have spent more time delving into documentaries and experimental cinema last year, and as this was immensely rewarding, I intend to keep this up for the following year.

The range of films to choose from is awfully low compared to other years for me, but below is a selection of the best new film experiences for 2011, in alphabetical order.

Allures (Jordan Belson; USA; 1961)

A Married Couple (Allan King; Canada; 1969)
Anti-Clock (Jane Arden/ Jack Bond; UK; 1979)
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens/ Marceline Loridan; 1988; France)
At Sea (Peter Hutton: USA; 2007)
Ballast (Lance Hammer; USA; 2008)
Deux Fois (Jackie Raynal; France/ Spain; 1968)
Downs Are Feminine (Lewis Klahr; USA; 1994)
Gaea Girls (Kim Longinotto/ Jano Williams; UK; 2000)
Hotel des Invalides (Georges Franju; France; 1951)
In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa; Portugal; 2000)
Labyrint (Jan Lenica; Poland; 1963)
Local Hero (Bill Forsyth; UK; 1983)
Odd Man Out (Carol Reed; UK; 1947)
Point of Order (Emile de Antonio; USA: 1964)
Red Road (Andrea Arnold; UK; 2006)
sleep, furiously (Gideon Koppel; UK; 2009)
Unpolished (Pia Marais; Germany; 2006)
Unrelated (Joanna Hogg; UK; 2008)
Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait (Douglas Gordon/ Philippe Parreno; France; 2006)

Bringing Up Baby...

Well, I have officially entered the world of dad-ness. Little baby Maia is as cute as heck, and makes the sweetest sleep-squeaks. My whole world, since she arrived, has just been non-stop doting.

I'm already planning a future of mutual film appreciation. I'll get my baby daughter accustomed to the Disney classics, move on to some good ol' Looney Tunes animation, then get her watching Satantango. C'mon, it has moo-cows in it, she'll be fine.

“1001 MOVIES COUNTDOWN” – KILLING THE SUPPLEMENTARIES (#69 - #62)

For some reason the idea that with every edition of this bloody “1001 Movies” book there comes a whole slew of new additions and deletions from the 1001 list really pisses me off. Why? Because I’m anally retentive and I like a little bit of order and new films being added to a list that I’m trying to deplete (against my better judgment – I mean some of the crap I’ve put myself through just to say I’ve completed this goddamn list…) just feels wrong and frustrating. Any supplementary film that I’ve never seen that happens to pop up on a new edition of this book feels like an interloper messing with my nicely ordered original 1^st edition list (actually I think I’ve been working from the second edition, but the difference between the two is miniscule, so why am I even writing this?) And so, with regularity, I try to kill off these interlopers as quickly as I can, so that I can resume counting down from the ‘original list.’

But I’ve let things get a little hairy in the past couple of years, and I’ve left a few of these supplementary frustrations to niggle and annoy me whenever I feel like culling this increasingly inane obsession to zero. So, while recuperating from a shoulder operation, I’ve decided to just knock off all the supplementary films in one fell swoop. I was thinking of obtaining copies of any of the relevant supplementary editions, to read the outline for each film and ascertain their inclusion into this hallowed pantheon. But I really couldn’t be bothered to waste my time and effort being this deeply attached to my years-in-the-making project/pain-in-the-arse, and I think I’ve got some semblance of a brain in my head, so I’ll try and work out each film’s supposed importance and relevance all by my lonesome.

Hokay. Here goes. The 8^th edition has just come out this year. I’m culling back about 4 editions worth of hangers-on. Woo-haa. After seeing these suckers, I now have 61 films to go. Why am I such an anally-retentive list-obsessed nerd? Sigh.

69. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher; USA; 2008)

[included in 6^th edition only]

Had absolutely no driving desire to see this when it came out, and being forced to confront it now in order to knock it off this list, I can see why I had no compulsion to see it. There’s an incredibly powerful sense of over-arching listlessness and clinical coldness that makes watching this film utterly arduous. The chemistry between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett is non-existent. No fire, no desire, no passion. This may well be the point – hey, nothing is ever easy in a Fincher-esque world – but sometimes it really doesn’t matter, one just needs a bit of friction and fire to spark up the screen. The film ticks all the ‘cinematographically-stunning’ boxes on the odd occasion, but it’s coloured in the usual Fincherian-brown, which kind of sums up the whole experience – kind of shitty.

68. LA VIE EN ROSE (Olivier Dahan; France/ UK/ Czech Republic; 2007)

[included in 5^th – 8^th editions]

The time jumps between various parts of her life become wearying too quickly – yes, it becomes abundantly clear that we’re supposed to draw correlations between Edith Piaf’s experiences as a child/ young adult with her attitudes and actions as an adult, so big deal. Although this thumps along like a malformed creature for 140 minutes, amazingly there’s no real feeling of depth achieved here. It’s incessantly episodic structure seems to defy the apparent intention of the film to induce some form of empathy/ pity/ sorrow for Piaf, as it keeps all attachment and connection at a distance. Ultimately this is dry, dull, and tasteless, which is a shame because Piaf’s voice certainly wasn’t any of those things.

67. RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (Phillip Noyce; Australia; 2002)

[included in 5^th edition only]

Essentially this is a cat-and-mouse film. And the ‘cat’, the chief protector of Aborigines who remotely controls a hunt for three Aboriginal girls tracking their way back to their mothers, is clearly painted as the villain. Although the film is peppered with sumptuous drifting sweeps of the Australian outback, with some shots almost distantly related to Arthur and Corinne Cantrill’s landscape studies, the film ain’t about all that – it’s a “message” film, and if that’s palatable for you, then great, but if you can smell the message coming on thick and don’t appreciate being told what to smell, then this will ultimately make you want to pinch your nose.

66. FISH TANK (Andrea Arnold; UK; 2009)

[included in 7^th – 8^th editions]

How did I let this one slip through the cracks when it first came out two years ago? Sometimes it’s damn hard keeping up.

A very strong film that prowls all over the place. The camera constantly searches and follows, mimicking the lead’s exploration of her nascent sexuality through movement. It’s either on her shoulder, closely tagging her through the tight labyrinth of her small apartment, or it’s tight in front and to the side, always tracking her, keeping her close. At times there’s a frenetic speed to the teen girl’s walking pace and talking style, and it’s if the camera is doing all it can just to keep up. This swirling hectic pace, countered with moments of stillness and stasis, sum up the mood that characterises her plight – desperation and stagnancy. The desire to break free from shackles. There’s an intense intimacy generated by this roving cinematography, which gives us a number of awkward close-ups (a look of confusion and shock post-coitus) and ‘holy-shit’ snippets (angrily pissing on a carpet). Hard to shake, even though you really want to shake it all off by the end.

65. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (Oren Peli; USA; 2007)

[included in 7^th – 8^th editions]

It’s pretty damn obvious early in the piece that smug masculine bravado is the thing that’ll have a demon chew on your ass. So it’s plain where the whole shebang is heading, just a matter of watching to find out how. I avoided this on its initial release because a number of colleagues told me this just wasn’t worth the money to go and see. But, four years on from all the initial hoopla and hype, it’s not as crap as I was expecting. The scares and thrills are laid out well enough, just predictably so. Some incremental small mysterious nocturnal movements, leading to bigger thuds and bangs, building to a rather foregone and obvious conclusion. Nothing really grabbed me by the short-and-curlies here, although the image of the woman standing for two hours by the bed watching her partner raised the eerie stakes to above normal.

64. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino; USA/ Germany; 2009)

[included in 7^th – 8^th editions]

Intentional or not, this film is a comedy. Has to be. How many times can a film make you think “you’ve got to be kidding me?” And not in a “wow, cool” kind of way. There is no longer anything to either love or hate about Tarantino’s work – everything has been mashed up so much that it’s hard to really taste anything. I never knew smacking together chunks of cinema history could end up feeling so normal and less-than-riveting.

63. PRECIOUS (Lee Daniels; USA; 2009)

[included in 7^th edition only]

Why the hell was this included on the 7^th edition list?  This is pretty much a stock-standard abusive mother-daughter relationship thing, with the usual predictable daughter-trying-to-move-into-a-better-world stuff. Sometimes I marvel at just how boring a film can be. Considering the gravity of what the girl has endured, the film should not be allowed to stir the waters of triteness, yet it magically performs the feat of being completely underwhelming and cloying.

62. HEAD-ON (Fatih Akin; Germany/ Turkey; 2004)

[included in 5^th – 8^th editions]

A car-crash film revolving around a couple of car-crash lives being smacked together. The journey from reluctant marriage-of-convenience, to gradual friendship, then explosion of emotions is played out with a forced intimacy. We are shoved right into the world of these two incendiary characters, often jammed close into the male lead’s craggy, sweaty, dishevelled drunken face. The film reflects the temperature of passion, from being subsumed, denied, or hidden, to murmuring and simmering, to exploding full-force and grabbing you by the throat. And at the end there’s the lingering question – is the passion actually real, or is it merely an addictive fixation used to explain unexpected changes in one’s identity? Good meaty pungent stuff.

A Film is Not a Film is a Film is Not a Film. Is it? Yes, it is.

[The past month’s silence was due to forced recuperation, to let my shoulder heal. I thought I could keep using my computer with one hand, but I often kept using my recently-operated arm out of habit, causing serious aches and making the whole healing process even more damn laboured and prolonged. I’ve watched a few films while in rest-mode, and the shoulder is recovering nicely now, so I think I’m back on track.

Thought I’d start up again by talking about the most recently viewed film this past month. It’s been one hell of a stop-start year, but it’s good to be back.]

THIS IS NOT A FILM (Jafar Panahi/ Mojtaba Mirtahmasb; Iran; 2011)

What we already know about the film:

-        Panahi created this film earlier this year, with the help of his friend and documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, while under house arrest.

-        On 20 December 2010 he was handed a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on making film, writing screenplays, talking to the media, and leaving Iran. In the film we see Panahi waiting to see whether his sentence will be reduced at all.

-        The film is deemed an “effort” and fervently not a film, as a means to deftly and defiantly side-step the ban.

-        It focuses on Panahi, at home, attempting to outline the film he had started to make, but now cannot complete. He tries to map out scenes in his living room, but is repeatedly frustrated at not being to find the truth of both showing what the film could have been and also the meaning of filming this “effort” in the first place.

-        Thus, the (non)-film can be viewed as a masterclass in querying and analysing the very nature of making film, assessing the heart, the engine, the assembly, the soul, the meaning and the means of constructing film.

-        The film was smuggled out of Iran on a UBS stick tucked inside either a cake or a loaf of bread.

Some personal musings after seeing the film;

-        Panahi’s grace, determination, frustration and natural eloquence in front of the camera make this perhaps the most riveting performance I’ve seen this year. Yes, performance – this may be a non-film, but Panahi himself willingly expresses his intention to place himself as an actor within this “effort”, as acting is not a banned activity.

-        Panahi’s pedagogical lessons on making film reflect themselves in the body of the film. Panahi spends a moment reflecting on a scene in Crimson Gold, where the main character, Hossein, has to exit a jewellers shop and appears to be suffering from a sudden energy-sapping ailment. Panahi describes the surprises that can be delivered by working with amateur actors, as the actor’s instructions to appear unwell are translated into, what is for Panahi, a sublime unscriptable moment with the most unusual eye-rolling expression that he could never have asked for. It is this ‘unscriptability’ of filmmaking that Panahi finds so joyful, and he seems agitated that he is unable to achieve the same thing simply by “telling the story” of the unmade film (“If we could tell a film, then why make a film?”). Yet the expression he has on his face when he stops in mid-sentence during the telling of one scene is exactly this kind of ‘unscriptability’ that he finds compelling. For ten enthralling seconds, maybe more, Panahi face reads so many microscopic, barely noticeable emotions, as he halts, thinks, tries to continue for a few more words, stops, gets lost in thought again, struggles to find words, then finally picks out the words of disappointment he’s been looking for to describe his turmoil at not expressing what he truly wants to express. This one brief moment seems to encapsulate and embody the spirit of the entire film.

-        His daughter’s pet iguana Igi also provides unscriptable ballast for the film, providing moments of humour as it clambers over Panahi, precariously scales a bookcase, and refuses to eat its food, like a spoilt child. But Igi is not only Panahi’s comic foil but also a quiet reminder of Panahi’s own trapped state, climbing the walls inside his own apartment.

-        A small interruption from a tiny yappy dog throws another spontaneously lovely spanner of hilarity into the works, seemingly proving that the old adage that you should never work with children or animals is true.

-        The air of spontaneity may seem thick, but the ‘effort’-makers are happy to allow the film to show its constructed-ness loud and clear – the obvious example is the impression of time elapsing over one day, yet various timecodes in the film clearly show us this is not the case.

-        Panahi’s desire to continuously strip back the content of what he is filming to find the truth is thrillingly admirable. The film is perhaps not-a-film because it is also the record of many different films starting and then stopping. This repeated search to find the heart of what he is trying to express creates an intricately-layered and rich delight that could take many moons to unpick and analyse.

-        I’m glad the USB stick was safely recovered from the cake/bread. It would have been heart-breaking if it had been accidentally eaten. I once nearly ate a USB stick that I dropped in a bowl of muesli. I was tired and addled, and the stick fell out of my shirt-pocket when I was leaning across the bowl to grab the milk. It looked like a large date when I scooped it up on my spoon. I’ve been unreasonably prone to habitual and fastidious inspections of bowls of muesli ever since.

SENNA

SENNA (Asif Kapadia; UK; 2010)

I am gloriously chuffed that this film has attained the positive critical and audience-based response it has, considering it wears its grainy, shaky archival-footage completely on its sleeve. I find it fascinating that the film has been attracting the “you don’t have to like motor racing to find this film compelling” plaudits, as it helps to provide some perspective on my own thorough enjoyment of this film. Y’see, I do like motor racing, (or at least I used to – year by year I find F1 in particular to be increasingly bland), and prior to this documentary have always found the subject of Ayrton Senna’s ability and personality to be somewhat fascinating, a driver who seemed to be traversing a higher realm than any of his colleagues both on and off the racing track. So, even if this film ended up being just a simple primer on his life and death, I would have perhaps gleaned some level of appreciation of this film. But what the director has done, and what the acclaim attests to, is to not merely rest on the laurels of presenting a synopsis of an extraordinary life but to sculpt and shape a riveting story from the pre-existing recorded fragments of his life.

The key to this film is the creation of a great story through intricate and masterly editing. A wonderful narrative arc is carved purely from archival footage and the voices of interviewees, starting with the brash and rapid ascendancy of a young star happy to be successful in a sport he loves, moving to his first hurdle via an incrementally bitter rivalry, peppered with the rewards of success and a growing sense of self-assurance, and steadily moving into quiet frustration with the changes in the sport (moving more to a kind of technology that largely eschews driver talent in favour of formidably unbeatable machinery), and then pensively and melancholically into furrowed foreshadowings of his own demise. This is where Kapadia utterly excels in creating a masterful film, purely from editing – as the film progresses, and Senna suffers both the frustrations of changing technologies and the concerns regarding safety on the track, we see more and more often a pensive Senna, a man trying to rub tension and worry out of his eyes, staring into the distance, lost inside his own thoughts.

And it’s here, in these moments as well, that another key to the film’s success lies. The director often selects footage of Senna in a reflective mode, the camera closing in on his face, honing in on him and lingering upon his face, capturing us in Senna’s world of quiet emotions. With precise and well-timed guidance from the voices of interviewees, we are compelled to read Senna’s thoughts and feelings. The accumulative use of carefully selected footage creates something akin to an actor’s performance from Senna’s gestures, smiles, facial expressions, body language. Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs referred to the power of the close-up in cinema, with the ‘silent soliloquy’ of the face providing an unspoken revelation of a character’s inner state of mind. Senna exemplifies the richness evoked from deep concentration on the physiognomy of a person’s face. There is no close-up that I have recently seen that bests the silent appraisal of Senna’s face as he sits in the cockpit of his car, waiting to start what would be his final race. For a mere ten seconds we see a face that appears to register a swathe of silent emotions – sadness at the loss of a fellow driver the day before, frustration with the recent performance of his car, a melancholic half-smile showing a desperate attempt to latch on to some kind of social normalcy, and an intense pensiveness that seems to exude the impression that Senna was aware of some impending, pre-ordained tragedy.

Rain and Pain (and an interview with Dorsky)

As thick smoke-grey rainclouds descend over the city, I realise I've been watching these clouds for ten, maybe twenty minutes. Looking out the window sitting at my desk, the book in my hand thoroughly ignored as I watch these clouds drift and descend. And for some reason I feel like I'm watching a film. My own version of James Benning's Ten Skies, perhaps. Rain comes after many minutes, hard and fast, and soon the mightiest of thunderclaps makes me jolt slightly. I'm in a kind of visual-meditative reverie, and I wonder how much cinema has contributed to the desire/ ability/ werewithal to simply watch and listen for a long period of time.


*****

I was recently in the mood to watch Tsai Ming-Liang all over again, and queued up The River. Had to stop after a while, as the protagonist's mysterious neck-pain made me focus too much on my own recently-operated shoulder. It wasn't that it reminded me of my pain - it just made me aware of myself rather than being taken out of myself. Cinema does not have to be taken as a palliative, and I'm not condoning pure escapism, but sometimes the viewing experience is uncomfortably jarred if I'm reminded of my own physical self. I can recall trying to watch horror films with brutally nasty hangovers, and it is simply the worst kind of spectatorial experience on the planet. For hangovers, you need comedy - sometimes stupid lowest-common-denominator comedy is the best for a mind-dsearing hangover. Somehow laughter eases the pain - horror, especially icky body-horror, is just a reminder that your body feels like it's going through some kind of meat-grinder. And being hungover can be massively depressing, so horror ain't the best of medicines. I remember watching Night of the Living Dead by myself, totally hungover, when I was much younger and incredibly stupid. A bleak bleak experience, I can tell you.


*****

I'm still waiting for the pleasure of seeing a film by Nathaniel Dorsky, but in the interim I've found this great interview with the filmmaker. There's three segments, here's your starter for ten.


ENTREVISTA CON NATHANIEL DORSKY (I) from Revista Lumière on Vimeo.