My friend Joe Peeler and I spent most of yesterday waiting in line outside the Grauman's Chinese for a chance to end 2011's AFI Fest with the North American premiere of Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin. We were excited about attending a high-profile premiere and anticipated the thrill of seeing and being among Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Neither Spielberg nor Jackson attended the premiere, but Jamie Bell did, and he introduced the film. I kept forgetting who Jamie Bell is, no offense Mr. Bell, when Joe would remind me I would feel bad I had forgotten. Joe and I sat in seats off to the far right and Joe thought he had child-sized 3d glasses. The movie was sometimes dazzling and my memory of it is warm; Joe and I agreed it was a nice end to the festival, although neither of us were sure what the plot had been, and discussed our slight mutual annoyance at having to follow plots. It's fair to say that I approached the film with a calculated emphasis on my youthful side and sense of wonder and curiosity and that this side of me was often rewarded with sequences of action and fun.
The movies I saw during this year's fest were Haywire, The Color Wheel, The Day He Arrives, Law of Desire, With Every Heartbeat, The Kid With a Bike, The Forgiveness of Blood, The Turin Horse, Carré Blanc, Shame, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Attenberg, and The Adventures of Tintin. Thirteen movies. I fell asleep for short periods during three; twice due to tiredness and disinterest, and once due solely to tiredness. During Attenberg I periodically wished I was sleeping, or outside, or somewhere anywhere else.
Wednesday November 9 was a spectacular day: The Turin Horse, Carré Blanc, Shame, and Beyond the Black Rainbow. Each of these films was distinct from one another and had a pronounced personality that distinguished it from most other films in general. Seeing them all together reminded me - a wonderful reminder - of the diversity and potential of cinematic art.
Beyond the Black Rainbow is an interesting film that traffics in unique sectors of our feelings and thoughts. The writer/director, Panos Cosmatos (son of Cobra director George Cosmatos), answered an audience question regarding symbolic intention in BtBB by explaining that the film doesn't have symbolic motivations and that he (Cosmatos) wrote the script in a stream-of-consciousness manner and that any symbols in the film were a product of his own unconscious. This great and honest answer helps explain the ineffable experience of watching BtBB, and also helps articulate the difference between, say, BtBB and Shame. BtBB aids us in making discoveries about parts of ourselves that do not fit tidily into narrative or character frameworks: it's all neon and synths and disorientation ('black rainbow,' wtf, right?). I perceive Shame's artistic flourishes as complimentary and integrated and tools that bring you closer to Brandon (Michael Fassbender), and I prefer this because I prefer character based cinema.
Shame would typically not be compared with Beyond the Black Rainbow, but seeing these thirteen movies together initiated a process of differentiation. On Wednesday, owing mainly to temporal juxtaposition, I observed that although BtBB is a visual (and thus visceral) film, the major difference is the range of emotions conveyed. BtBB's range is a fascinatingly abstract sector of ourselves; Shame probes the core of our being. It is my opinion that Shame could likely be appreciated, understood, and enjoyed by a person unfamiliar with film and human emotions, and that by viewing the film this hypothetical person would know something about the human experience. Before one begins to dissect the film, inspect its themes, evaluate its performances, etc, I believe Shame has already worked, on purely visual and visceral levels. Certain aesthetic qualities - composition of frame, color palette, shot selection and variety, locations, music, etc - create an experience that bores into the heart and mind of the viewer a truth that transgresses the screen. Shame is a film of emotional alchemy, and its magical quality is the art of cinema.
Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse was another Tarr film that seems difficult to compress my feelings about into words. It's like the film isn't about an emotion, the film is an emotion. I would like one film that I am involved with to have a shot as immediately and immensely engaging and affecting as The Turin Horse's first shot. This first shot is a long tracking shot of the horse pulling the cart.
Carré Blanc intermittently kicked my ass and rocked my world. Jean-Baptiste Leonetti's dystopian tale reminded me of a novella I read recently, Benoît Duteurtre's Customer Service, in that I don't fully understand every narrative decision, but understand that perhaps the intention is not understanding but questioning. Like, by altering our pov of a subject (bureaucracy, technology, modernity), and by heightening our analysis of narrative particulars with distorting dramatic technique, the artists attempt to instigate personal reflection. Carré Blanc was a dense, intelligent, abstract investigation into the way society hurts us and the way we hurt ourselves by belonging to and engaging with society. It is also a Love Conquers All movie, in a fascinating, bleak way. I enjoy formal, axis-shifting narrative exercises, and felt this was a successful one. By comparison, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg was also a formalistic experiment, but it did not grip me. Attenberg was a coming of age story, but I felt unable to sense what was coming or aging, and had a hard time registering the film's intentions. Or rather, I felt unable to register how those intentions were growing or further revealing themselves over the course of the film. Also by comparison, I feel that by examining Tintin's golden unicorn story I'm not rewarded with knowledge of myself, but feel that I am rewarded by examining Carré Blanc and even Attenberg.
Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel and Hong Sangsoo's The Day He Arrives were a great back-to-back experience. These two films deal with the loose-ends and unsortable complexities of our emotional makeup. I like how The Color Wheel was disinterested in untangling the confused emotions of its characters; it was enough for the film to admit their existence. Sangsoo continues to depict human interactions in a way that feels unique and honest and smart and funny, i.e. feels like 'being.' The Day He Arrives has flashes of great beauty and terrible sadness, sometimes in shared moments.
For the sake of tradition:
Four Star Movies
Shame
The Turin Horse
Three and a Half Star Movies
Beyond the Black Rainbow
The Day He Arrives
Three Star Movies
Law of Desire
Carré Blanc
The Adventures of Tintin
The Kid With a Bike
The Color Wheel
Two and a Half Star Movie
The Forgiveness of Blood
Two Star Movie
With Every Heartbeat
One and a Half Star Movies
Haywire
Attenberg
Disclaimer: There are many movies I'm sad I missed. I started to make a list of those movies but it was too long and made me too sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment