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.

AN IMAGE FROM FAROCKI

AN IMAGE (Harun Farocki; Germany; 1983)

“This film, An Image, is part of a series I've been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I'm making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that's being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both.” (Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988)

The ‘thing’ being filmed is a photo shoot for Playboy magazine, and this 25-minute film reveals the boredom, labour, tedium, and painstaking obsessive detail that goes into this supposedly glamorous and erotic scenario. The first few scenes literally build the framework, showing the construction, painting, and design of the set. It’s only five minutes that we see the model for this first time, and it takes another 3 minutes of film-time after that before the first photo is taken. This photo is then thoroughly dissected by the chief photographer and other senior staff, before we return to the set, spending minutes on the director trying to get the model to lie in the perfect position. He obsesses about her hand – through his lens, it looks ‘spastic’. The staff talk about having to retouch the photos to get the best effect. Everyone leaves the set, and the final few shots show the set being taken apart.

Farocki’s quote refers to not wanting to find the ‘in-between’ of critiquing the subject and promoting the subject, but instead to go ‘beyond both.’ Thus, he wants to transcend both criticism and advocacy. Does he manage to do this? Maybe he does, if we consider his film from this perspective; everything we see is just work. The film is no longer a dissection of a Playboy shoot, or a paean to this vocation, but a briefly detailed examination of the work that takes place in this world. We see the work of being a set designer, a make-up artist, a photographer, a model. There’s no glamour, but there’s also no condemnation. It’s just work – plain, tedious repetitive work.

But. Let’s go back to the original idea of not wanting to critique nor advocate. Although he wishes to do neither, in terms of how the film can be interpreted/ approached/ absorbed, isn’t it more likely that the film is going be viewed as a critique, and far less likely that it will be seen as an ‘advertisement’?

Quick Rocket-fire Reviews (playing catch-up on 2010, part one of possible recurring story)

I'm currently in cinema catch-up mode, although this is beginning to feel like a constant state of being. Still, this past week or so has been a decent attempt at getting back into the race, having viewed three 2010 flicks, The Black Swan, Inside Job, and Exit Through The Gift Shop. Quick rocket-fire reviews at the ready!

THE BLACK SWAN (Darren Aronofsky; USA; 2010)

I am at a total loss as to how this film has garnered the critical attention it has. This is, as has no doubt been stated before, some kind of mutated distant relative to Powell & Pressburger's 1948 classic The Red Shoes, and the story of a tortured fragile female performer going mad through utter immersion into a role feels overdone and hackneyed. Sure, its visually compelling, with the fracturing of Natalie Portman's psyche yielding occasionally disquieting and eerie moments, but this is essentially a bit of a perv-fest. My partner kinda hit it on the head after we saw the film together.

I asked her what she thought, and she replied “well, you can tell it was written and directed by men.” And with that idea in the head, one can't help but start to make up the conversations going on during the creation of this film. 'Hey, let's get Natalie to masturbate.' 'Hey, let's get her to have some full-on hot lesbo rumpy-pumpy with Mila Kunis.' Give. Me. A. Break.

INSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson; USA; 2010)

You can trust a name like Charles Ferguson. It sounds so avuncular. Or professorial. A name clothed in a tweed jacket. With elbow patches.

And trust this film I did, because it takes away the 'documentarian-as-personality' effect that Michael Moore eventually bored us to tears with, and leaves us with a chaptered narrative that deftly spells out just what the fuck the global financial crisis (or the GFC, for all the cool abbreviationists out there) was all about. Evokes the kind of “bloody hell!”, “well I never”, and “grrrr” responses that were evoked by other white-collar dirty-rotten-scoundrel docos, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Corporation. There's only one slight hurdle with this kind of film though – it's so super-densely packed with information that it's easy to leave the theatre with your head on fire, trying to remember all the pieces of the story. Still, only a minor hurdle, that head-on-fire sensation.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy; UK; USA; 2010)

It's kind of boring to dwell on whether the film is a hoax or whether it's 'real', and I'm presuming that this line of enquiry has already been speculated to death. Watching the slow exchange of roles, as film-maker becomes street artist and street artist becomes filmmaker, is both remarkable and hilarious. Watching the arc of transformation of the obsessive amateur filmmaker Thierry Guetta is both wince-inducing AND jaw-dropping in the same moment. If Thierry Guetta/ Mr Brainwash is the real deal, then seeing him unintentionally out-prank the arch-prankster Banksy himself has to be the funniest thing I've seen in ages.

Ultimately the film is most interesting for its active interrogation of authorship, the recording of memory, and the intense and almost tragic desire to never forget. But sometimes it's so important to forget. Just like I've forgotten that film I just saw, what was it again, The Black Pigeon? The Slack Swan? Aronofsky Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest?

RAYMOND DEPARDON

 

Earlier this year I watched the third part of Raymond Depardon's Profils Paysans series, La Vie Moderne. Having read about this film in Film Comment's report on Cannes in 2008, I was very eager to see this documentary. I loved the meandering style Depardon employed in this film, travelling from one farm to the next in rural France, interviewing farmers that he has grown to know very well over the course of his project (the first Profils Paysans was released in 2001, and Depardon had been filming his subjects for a number of years prior to it's release). The film starts with the camera as a car, travelling gently through a narrow winding road, to approach his first interviewee, and this slow drive through the countryside is a recurring motif throughout the film, marking a visual map that connects all of the farmers Depardon visits, and conducting the pace of the film, languid and slightly melancholic.(It also provides a kind of visual-twin to Kiarostami's many 'view-from-a-vehicle' shots). The film is pervaded with the feeling that the livelihood of the farmers is becoming increasingly more difficult, that the traditional profession of farming is dying and there are no younger heirs to continue the tradition. This is often revealed not through the simple and gentle conversations that Depardon conducts with his farmers, but through their silences, the moments where they look into the distance, reflecting, pondering.

I had the fortune of viewing four more films by Depardon recently (well four feature-length films, and one short ten-minute film, Quoi de Neuf au Garet?, to be precise). Due to prior commitments, I missed the first of the Profils Paysans,(L'Approche), plus Depardon's Direct Cinema-influenced documentary of the 1974 presidential campaign of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 1974, Une partie de campagne. As is always the case when missing rare opportunities to see films not readily available on DVD, etc, I was somewhat downhearted at missing them, and they have been added to the ever-growing pile of 'maybe-someday-our-paths-might-cross' films. (There could be a whole future post on films missed and am waiting to see again).

But seeing the rest of the films made up for what I missed out on. Watching the second chapter of Profils Paysans, entitled Le Quotidien, after having seen the third, allowed me to see how the themes that permeated La vie moderne were already fully in place. (I've just realised that when I get to see L'Approche, I will have seen this trilogy backwards. I wonder if all trilogies should be viewed backwards, just to see what new flavours can be evoked?) Mortality, both of the traditional farming industry and of the farmers themselves, is at the heart of Le Quotidien, with the film starting with the funeral of one the farmers profiled in the first chapter. Yet, it's too easy to focus on the melancholy of the possible death of this way of life, and the impending demise of these elderly farmers, as the film also evokes a sense of determined survival. Spartan, functional, timeless living spaces, the fleshy maps of history on farmers' faces, and the panoramic vistas of French hillsides, all make for a visually delightful film. It's in these alluring shots that Depardon's vocation as a photographer comes to the fore – you can feel the energy of a shot being composed, as if at any moment the movement will stop and we are left with a snapshot frozen in time.

Les Annees Declic is an intriguing autobiography, with Depardon talking about his childhood and development as a photographer. He does this by having a camera directed upon his face, viewing photographs that mark a chronology of his life and experiences, and another camera directed upon the photos. The film simply cuts between him staring down and talking about his life, and the photos that trigger these memories. Shot in black and white, it feels unusual and yet oddly warm to see the director become the subject, staring quietly, for example, at a photo of his parents, lost in his own thoughts. Similar to the Profils Paysans, loneliness pervades the film, with Depardon reminiscing about lost friends and deceased family, but again the idea of survival comes up, with Depardon revealing to the camera at the end that art, images, photography, and film sustain him, that this is his family. The intensity with which Depardon wishes to say this is remarkable – the last photo is discussed, and Depardon appears to wrap up his autobiography. He then yells to someone off-camera to stop, and not to cut the film. He then delivers his final statement, revealing how his mother has died during the filming, and how the concept of family is maintained via photography, and who knows where it will take him tomorrow, the next day, etc. He delivers this with such passion, that the drop of clear saliva that hangs on his lip becomes an embodied coda to represent his fervour for images.

Depardon's two films on the exigencies of criminal law, The 10^th District Court: Moments of Trial and Delits Flagrants, are perhaps the most compelling of all his films. The style and mood are a little different – they both feel a lot like a Wiseman film, the camera quietly observing moments in court (the first film), and all the moments that lead up to the actual trial in court (the second film). Delits Flagrants makes you wonder what will happen next to these people who are interviewed by lawyers, magistrates, court officials – will their refusal to admit to any wrongdoing make them come unstuck in court?Will they go to jail, Will they get off with a fine? You want to know what happens next, but the 'next' never comes, there's never any trial on display in this film, just continual build-up with no release. Depardon keeps layering more and more interviews, one after the other, as if to highlight the ceaseless nature of crime and prosecution. It's fascinating to watch one prolonged and significant segment of the film, viewing several interviews with a woman who has been arrested for stealing a vehicle, and seeing her go from initially admitting that she stole the car, to steadily concocting cover stories as she realises how serious her situation might become. Drug-fuelled bravado and bluster is incrementally eroded over the course of three interviews covering ten minutes, to show a fragile desparate not to go to prison. Moments of Trial is almost entirely set in court, and almost always in close-up, often simply cutting from a close-up of the magistrate to a close-up of the accused, with intermittent shots of lawyers, either prosecuting or defending. What is fascinating to watch here is the art of performance and improvisation, either from the person accused, often for minor offences, or from the lawyers. Those on trial become consummate storytellers, and the lawyers prosecuting or defending deliver their piece with all the gravitas of a orator, even though both accused and lawyers seem comical in the improvised speeches they deliver.

From seeing these films together, Depardon has leapt from 'unknown' to 'respected' in an instant. The fact that his films appear to be difficult to obtain makes the chase to view more of his films all the more compelling.

Here's a interview with Depardon in Artforum, from 2001, and here's a later interview in 2005 in Cinema Scope. Depardon is apparently at work on a new film, hopefully ready by next year.